Mila 18 - Leon Uris

She and Andrei looked at each other and passed thoughts without words. Both of them had the same instantaneous impulse. Send Stephan. No one would blame them or accuse them of favoritism. The boy had more than earned his right to freedom. But Deborah and Andrei were trapped by the very things with which they had infused Stephan. How do you tell your son that dignity and honor are things for other people to die for?

Thoughts which never became words.

Andrei patted his sister’s cheek and handed her a flashlight.

“Will Chris be leaving soon?”

“Any day,” Andrei answered.

She plunged into the tunnel, inching along with the dim light poking ahead of her through the narrow dirt walls beneath the dead ghetto above. The last twenty yards were on hands and knees.

The Fighter on watch at Muranowska 24 pulled her through the trap door and helped her to her feet. She caught her breath and wiped the perspiration from her cheeks and stretched her back.

“Is there water here?”

He pointed to the storage basins. It was a ghetto and it was war, but Deborah was a woman about to go to her lover and she was going to make herself desirable. She washed the streaks of dirt from her face and brushed her hair and fixed it the way Chris liked it and was extravagant with a drop of a gram of perfume that Gaby had sent in with Andrei. Then she ascended the stairs to find him.

When Chris had first returned to her Deborah was riddled with a feeling of sordidness. She was ashamed she could desire Chris in such a place. Their trysts were in cellars and attics, cold straw, oppressive heat, in hidden tunnels or on floors. In the torn-up bunker at Mila 19, next to rushing sewer waters. Bodies sweaty or shivering and pimpled with cold.

She was ashamed of the sensuous pleasures. The shame never faded, but neither did her desire for those pleasures.

Deborah pushed open the attic door.

Chris watched the lights of Warsaw blink on one by one as darkness swept the city. She slipped beside him quietly and watched them too.

“A zloty for your thoughts,” she said.

“My thoughts? They aren’t worth a zloty, even with today’s inflation.”

“Then a kiss for your thoughts?”

Chris smiled a smile that was not a smile. “I’ve been thinking of man, God, and the universe—all those damned things no one ever really understands.”

“That is worth a kiss,” she said.

Chris could not be appeased. “Today, in a bunker at Mila 18, Christopher de Monti of Swiss News listened to two men arguing philosophy over a minute point to which each adamantly clung. They clung to their points, although it will never make a bit of difference. It will never affect the price of tea in China. Alexander Brandel argues for Rabbi Solomon to make a statement in support of Joint Forces as a morale factor for the survivors of the ghetto. Rabbi Solomon quotes the Torah, Midrash, and Mishna opinions that an act of vengeance is a form of suicide which is roundly forbidden. So there you have it, Deborah. Two men in a hole in the ground debating a question that is going to be solved for them anyhow. Frankly, man, God, and the universe give me a large pain.”

“My, you are in a mood. Here I get all prettied up to make myself alluring and I cannot even seduce a kiss from you.”

“Sex should never get in the way of man, God, and the universe. I think right now I’d give up sex forever for a cigarette and a good belt of scotch.”

Chris walked away from the window, patting his pockets for cigarettes that were not there. “Why the hell doesn’t Andrei bring in a few packs of cigarettes from Gabriela?”

“Some of us have been living this way for quite a few years now,” Deborah answered sharply.

Chris sagged to the cot and mumbled that he was sorry.

“What’s really bothering you, Chris?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Perhaps we’d better talk about it.”

“I don’t want to.” He shook his head slowly. “I just don’t want to.” They were at a dead end. In a few days Gabriela would find a route for him to take out of the country. Deborah would be left behind. There was no way for her to leave the children or Rachael or Stephan. There was no way for her to take them. He had to go and she had to stay. Simple and absolute.

“I never felt sorry for those poor bastards I preyed upon for my bread and butter. The generals, the admirals, the heads of state. The great doers. Many of them looked upon themselves as pawns of fate. Not me. I said to myself: They deserve everything they get. They really crave this destiny bit. They beg for martyrdom. So, now I feel sorry for them. Look at me, Christopher de Monti, the great white hope of the battered tribes of Israel. I am the voice beyond death which must not be stilled.”

“None of us has a choice, Chris. Be grateful you may be able to walk in the sun again.”

“Without you ... Deborah ... All I want is to come home at the end of a day to you. I’m not made of the sterner stuff of Andrei and Alex and Rabbi Solomon.”

“You’ll find it when the time comes.”

“I cannot reconcile myself to what I have given you, Deborah. Torment. Love in the catacombs. I can’t make peace with it.”

“Chris, listen to me. When I die—”

“Stop it!”

“When I die, Chris, dying will be very painful. I will want to live because I have known what ecstasy is. If we had never met, there would be no regrets. How lonely and empty it would be never to know giving and receiving love and, yes, all the pain it brings.”

Deborah knelt beside him. He lifted her face in his hands and smiled. “And on flows the Vistula,” he said.

“For these moments we can make it stand still. You and I have the magic power to transcend the flowing river and the guns and the cries. Right now love ... they are all far away ... far away.”

Chapter Eleven

ALFRED FUNK LOOKED DOWN at a blown-up map of the ghetto and rubbed his hands together with childlike glee and anticipation. He lifted a magnifying glass and moved it about, stopping at the displacement of troops, armor, and artillery marked with various colored pins. He changed a pair of pins indicating high-powered searchlight batteries.

He was honored that Berlin was forgiving enough to give him the chance to vindicate himself. This time there would not be failure.

His plan was simple. Every seven meters around the wall he would alternate a “foreign racial watchman” with a Polish Blue policeman. An SS officer would patrol each section of two hundred meters behind the Ukrainians to make certain their weapons could not be purchased by the Jews. The circle of soldiers around the ghetto wall would make a breakthrough impossible and reduce the possibility of a single man sneaking through.

The city engineers as well as army engineers advised him against blowing up the sewers. The huge Kanal pipes could cave in parts of the city as well as wreck the drainage to the Vistula. Instead, every manhole leading out of the ghetto would be under watch. Accordions of barbed wire would be dropped down the manholes. This would not impede the flow of sewage but would trap the Jews trying to escape through the sewers. Poison-gas smoke candles would be used both in the sewers and the bunkers inside the ghetto.

With all exits blocked, Funk would then move in the Reinhard Corps, Wehrmacht, and Waffen SS with armored pools held in readiness. Most of the forty thousand Jews were in the factory compounds. He would nip these off quickly and get them on the way to Treblinka.

The magnifying glass stopped at a bank of searchlight positions pinned on the map on the Aryan side near Muranowski Place. Master stroke, Funk complimented himself on the night lights. By working two shifts of troops day and night, the Jews would not have a chance to rest or alternate their positions. Once the factory workers were gone, he’d move in the dogs and special sound detectors to flush out the bunkers with dynamite, flame throwers, or poison gas.