Mila 18 - Leon Uris

Funk slammed his fist on the table. Horst refused to be intimidated and obviously was not going to be slapped around like the Austrian. Funk recalled why he had hated Horst von Epp in the beginning. That attitude of knowing something Funk did not know. That ability to operate on a level of shrewdness that eluded the stern, dogmatic, rigid SS devotion. Funk smiled faintly in an attempt to play the game with Von Epp. “And what do you propose might happen if I take the Reinhard Corps into the ghetto tomorrow?”

“I don’t propose it, nor do I suggest it. I know it,” Horst said. “You will lead three hundred men into a massacre.”

“And I say they will flee and bury themselves at the sight of us. Jews won’t fight.”

“How unfortunate that you have become victimized by our own propaganda. Oh yes, I know. You have proof. We have translated our theories by acting out our superiority on helpless people. You’ll find another caliber of man left inside those walls.”

“Do you really believe that I would hesitate in the face of Jews?”

“When I was in the ministry in Berlin I spent week after week inventing and expounding the theories of Jewish cowardice, Alfred. The plain and simple fact of the matter is—we are liars.”

Funk’s entire face reacted with shock.

“I doubt if any warriors in the world were as furious in battle as the ancient Hebrews, nor did any people in man’s history fight harder for freedom. Not once, but many times, they made Rome totter. And since their dispersion, because they have not had the opportunity to fight under a Jewish flag, we have been able to isolate them into individual units and riddle them with inferiority complexes. German torment has taken these segregated masses and jelled them together as a people for the first time in two thousand years. We cannot measure their determination to acquit themselves, but we can make an educated guess that we’d better be damned careful from this point on.”

Funk sprang to his feet. “I will not listen to this anarchy. You defile the noble purposes of the Third Reich!”

“Oh, stop shouting, Alfred. I invented half the noble purposes of the Third Reich.” Horst walked to the window and drew the curtains apart. Across Krakow Boulevard and beyond the Saxony Gardens some of the ghetto roofs could be seen. “Who is left in that ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of forces within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to the Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk. We have pushed him to the wall.”

Oberführer Funk became confused. Von Epp, one of the very creators of the Aryan myth, was ripping it apart. Suddenly it became clear to him. “I have been ordered by Himmler to have the ghetto liquidated, and that is what shall be done,” he snapped.

Horst flopped his arms to his side in disgust “Simple, eh? Orders are orders.”

“Naturally.”

“Alfred, you represent that confounding German idiocy which is unable to improvise from a fixed plan. Forget that orders are orders before you perform a monumental blunder.”

“You know, Horst I really should report your conversation to Himmler. I really should. What possible blunder can I make by fulfilling orders? Say that these noble creatures do fight. So what? We shall destroy them.”

“For a decade we have been preaching a gospel of Jewish cowardice. It is Nazi dogma. What happens if the Reinhard Corps is wiped out tomorrow in the ghetto? How shall we explain it to the world? Shall we say that Jews fight, after all? How would we look to those whom we have impressed as supermen to be forced even to admit that Jews were standing up against us?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Funk admitted.

“Suppose this defiance in the ghetto lasts a week ... ten days ...”

“Impossible.”

“But suppose it does. It could ignite rebellions all over Poland. ‘See,’ the Poles would say, ‘the Germans have lied to us. Let us take a crack at them too.’ Perhaps the Czechs and the Greeks may like to have a crack at superman hides. You invite insurrection.”

Funk sank to the seat, completely confused now. “Hitler will be out of his mind with rage,” he mumbled.

“Get back to Berlin immediately,” Horst said. “We must put across to them that this liquidation can be completed only if it can be carried out with no further armed conflict. We could invite a dangerous precedent, otherwise. As for this unfortunate incident today, I will say that it was a band of Communists or bandits. You know, minimize it with the usual stories. Then we proceed carefully. We outwit them. We use cunning to lure them out.”

“Very well,” Funk agreed, “very well.”

Andrei’s eyes fluttered open. He was in a bunker cell somewhere. Someone hovered over him. It was Simon.

“My gun!”

“It’s under the cot. No ammunition left mind you, but the gun is there.”

Andrei closed his eyes. He tried to separate the blur of events that all ran together. He remembered seeing Kutler fall in the street parts of the agony in the rafters, snatches of things that might have been dreams or might have happened. Simon fed him a drink of water. Half of it spurted out of his mouth, unable to penetrate the thick dry caking lining his throat. He sipped again.

“What happened?”

“We put on quite a brother act. We make a colorful pair.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Scattered in a half dozen bunkers.”

“Did Alex get away?”

“He’s in the cell across the passage.”

“My sister?”

“At the Franciskanska bunker with the children.”

“Chris ... Wolf ...”

“They are safe.”

Andrei forced himself up on his elbows. He ached all over. He pushed himself to a sitting position on the edge of the cot and was stricken with a spell of dizziness. He lowered his head between his legs to let blood circulate.

Simon moved a small crude table beside the cot and placed a bowl of gruel on it with a hunk of stale bread. It was the first food Andrei had eaten in nearly five days. His stomach growled and his hand trembled as he sloshed the bread in the bowl to soften it. The food was taken slowly, carefully.

“Where am I? At your bunker?”

“Yes.”

“How did I get here?”

“I scraped you off the sidewalk. You fell short in your one-man effort to annihilate the entire German garrison, but not too bad, eleven SS killed, two Ukrainians. You’re the rage of the ghetto.”

Andrei felt his pain-racked body. “Did I get hit?”

“Grazed. The doctor said that normally it wouldn’t have stopped you from playing soccer an hour later, but combined with hunger, exhaustion, and a few other discomforts, you fainted.”

“Fainted? What a ridiculous thing to do. Only women faint.” He mopped the bread around in the bowl more rapidly, cleaned the dish, and licked his fingers. Simon was acting strangely, he thought. His voice rang with bitterness and he was avoiding Andrei’s eyes. Simon never did that. He could win most of his arguments by his penetrating look alone.

“One of our people didn’t make it,” Simon said. He set a familiar notebook on the cot beside Andrei. Andrei recognized it as a volume of the Good Fellowship Club’s study. Simon laid a pair of thick-lensed glasses on top of the book.

“Ervin?”

“Yes. Stray bullet. He lived long enough to tell me where he had hidden this volume. It was the one he was working on. We went to the Mila 19 bunker immediately to find it. Rest of the bunker is destroyed, but we were able to find many hidden things. We salvaged all the arms stores.”