Mila 18 - Leon Uris

The alarm bell sounded five short rings to indicate a “friend” was coming up. Rodel, the Communist, entered. For an instant everyone looked eagerly with a flickering of hope beyond hope that some miracle had happened. Rodel shook his head. “They can give us four armed men, no more. They can’t even really spare that.”

Tolek droned the names of writers, doctors, actors, journalists, and Zionists who had been taken to the Umschlagplatz in the last few days. He went on and on, moaning a death march.

“Be quiet,” Andrei said.

But he droned on. The last of the rabbis—one saved by the Catholic Church as some sort of relic of a past civilization, the other was in their cellar. The rest, dead. “Dead, all dead,” Tolek said. “Farm gone ... farm gone ... everyone is dead.”

“Shut up,” Andrei repeated.

Ana Grinspan, an unwavering symbol of strength, a figure of daring, collapsed and cried hysterically. There was no one in the room who could comfort her.

“Say something, Alex,” Simon Eden pleaded.

But Alex said nothing these days.

“Dead ... all dead. Nishtdoo, keiner, keiner nishtdoo.”

“Stop your goddamned crying!” Andrei screamed.

Ervin licked his dry lips. Tears wet his thick glasses, so that the people before him were blurred images. Within five days he had lost his wife Susan and his mother. He had tried gallantly to carry on for Alexander Brandel after the children were rounded up. “Simon ... Andrei ... Comrade Rodel ... I ... have taken all the notes and volumes of the Good Fellowship Club and hidden them in milk cans and steel boxes. I had occasion to speak to your committees today. They are in full accord with me that if this last try for help was unsuccessful we should burn the ghetto and commit mass suicide.”

“You have no right to hold meetings behind my back,” Simon said without conviction.

“We had no times for rules of procedure,” Ervin said.

“Who among us hasn’t thought of suicide?” Ana cried.

And then silence. There were no arguments.

“As a Labor Zionist ... as a Labor Zionist,” Simon mumbled. He brushed the hair back from his eyes. “As a Jew and Labor Zionist,” he floundered and fumbled. Oh God, he thought, death would be so sweet, so very sweet. “As commander of Joint Forces, I cannot and will not give an order for a suicide pact. But if this is the wish of everyone, then I will resign my command and also abide by the decision.”

Andrei stared up at his comrade. Simon had been a soldier. Simon had been a strong man. Simon had been a leader. His innards were shot. The fine features of his dark face sagged with the loss of will.

Wolf Brandel, the youngest commander in the ghetto, walked slowly toward the door. “I will not obey that order,” he said. “My girl and I are going to live, and if we’re captured we are going to make them pay. If they want me,” Wolf cried, “let them come in and try to get me!”

He slammed the door behind him.

“Well,” Andrei whispered, “one of us is left with enough strength to want to live.”

Tolek fell on his knees. “Oh God! God! God! Please help us! What have we done? What have we done?”

No one looked at the other. Their faces fell into their hands. All through the night they sat wordless until the dawn broke them with weariness and they dropped off into snatches of nightmare-filled sleep.

And then, as suddenly as it began, the Big Action ended. On September 16, 1942, there were no more deportations or “kettles.”

The Warsaw ghetto, the largest human stockyard in man’s history, once held nearly six hundred thousand people. That number was decimated by starvation, disease, executions, deportation to slave labor, and finally assembly-line murder in Treblinka. When the Big Action ended, less than fifty thousand remained.

Chapter Thirteen

HORST VON EPP CUT the classic conception of the ramrod German baron as he stood framed before the tall window of Chris’s flat, transfixed by the first snowfall of the winter, and the strains of a Chopin record.

Chris came in from the outside, slapping the cold from his bones. He nodded to Horst, denoting he was pleased at the unexpected visit.

“Hope you don’t mind my breaking in and helping myself to the whisky?” Horst said, fixing a scotch for Chris.

“Why should I mind? There’s nothing in this apartment your friends haven’t examined twenty times.”

The Chopin record came to the end. “I like Chopin. All those blockheads play is Wagner. A tribute to Hitler in absentia. Isn’t there something enormously enchanting about the first snow?”

Chris threw open the drapes to the alcove bedroom, tugged off his shoes and wet socks. He fished around under the bed for his slippers.

“O the snow, the beautiful snow,

Filling the sky and the earth below,

Over the housetops, over the street,

Over the heads of the people you meet,

Dancing,

Flirting,

Skimming along,

Beautiful snow, it can do nothing wrong.”

“Ye gods, Chris, that’s horrible.”

“James Whittaker Watson, 1824-90. My recitation for the second-grade graduation. My mother didn’t come to the graduation. I never forgot snow, beautiful snow.”

Horst handed him a tall drink. They clinked glasses.

“Fröhliche Weihnachten —Christmas cheer,” he said. “I’ll be a sad bastard. Christmas. I forgot all about it.” “I toast those poor misled Aryans laying on their wet bellies in snow, beautiful snow on the eastern front for the glory of the Fatherland,” Horst said.

“Amen. Well, how does it feel to get clobbered?”

“We are going to lose at Stalingrad, aren’t we, Chris?”

“It’s going to be a catastrophe, Baron. Your Chief of Staff should have read Napoleon’s memoirs and taken a lesson of what mother winter does to trespassers.”

“I had it about a week ago. The sudden realization Germany is going to lose the war. It is making a mess out of all the Christmas parties. Everyone is so damned glum. Stalingrad, El Alamein, the landings in North Africa. But you know what really confounds me is those Americans. Guadalcanal. Now there’s a romantic name. Everyone underestimates Americans. Why?”

“The mistaking of gentleness as weakness is like underestimating a Russian winter.”

“Next year,” Horst said, “Berlin is going to be bombed. What a pity. Oh dear, how they are going to pay us back. Well, Christmas cheer.”

Horst set down his drink and again became enchanted with the falling snow. “Chris,” he said, looking outside, “a report has just been published by the Polish government in exile in London. A hasty White Paper detailing alleged extermination camps operating in Poland. Heard about it?”

“Something or other.”

“Tell me,” Horst said, “how did you smuggle it out of Poland?”

Chris made only a nominal attempt to cover his deed. “What makes you think it was me?”

“My male vanity. When a beautiful piece of tail, Victoria Landowski from Lemberg, turns out not to be a piece of tail and not even Victoria Landowski, my masculinity was offended.”

“Find the woman. They are behind all sinister plots.”

“The trouble was, I couldn’t find the woman. My friend Christopher de Monti had become deliciously decadent, a quivering alcoholic mass of sponge. Then Victoria Landowski enters and Christopher undergoes a magic transformation. He returns to being—what do you call it?—a clean-cut All-American boy. I began to add this sudden spiritual resurrection. It was not difficult to figure the rest of it.”

“By God, Horst, you’re downright clairvoyant. Well, does Gestapo Chief Sauer put his dogs on me, feed me a quart of castor oil, or use testicle crushers to make me talk?”