Mila 18 - Leon Uris

A knock on the door.

“Enter.”

An eager young Waffen SS officer from Trawniki entered, snapped his heels together, unable to contain his joy. “Heil Hitler!” Untersturmführer Manfred Plank crackled.

“Heil Hitler.” Funk grunted.

“Herr Oberführer! We are certain we have located another entrance to the main Jew bunker!”

“Ja?”

“Jawohl!”

Funk showed the man the map. The young officer snapped off his cap and tucked it under his left arm, and his right forefinger shot out and pointed to the location of Nalewki 39. “Here we have discovered a drainage pipe.

It runs in this direction ... so. Along with the tunnel on Muranowski Place and the tunnel on Kupiecka Street, it converges on the same location ... here ...”

“Mila 18.”

“We may also have found the location in Mila 18 itself. A large removable oven on the first floor of the building which still stands is extremely suspicious. We did not wish to take action until we received your personal orders.”

Funk rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Four possible entrances. Good.”

In a few moments Oberführer Alfred Funk emboldened his troops by another of his personal appearances in the ghetto. Surrounded by two squads of sub-machine-gun-bearing Nazi guards, he marched alongside the exuberant Untersturmführer Plank until they came to a place which had once been a building, now a rubble heap. Manfred Plank showed where the drainage pipe had been uncovered.

“We sent a man twenty meters deep into it. It becomes a tunnel at that point and turns sharply toward Mila 18.”

Funk looked at his watch. Two and a half hours of daylight left.

A staff car at the Przebieg Gate whisked him across town to Shucha Street and Gestapo House. Gunther Sauer was in a foul mood. His dog Fritzie had developed a cataract and was going blind. Moreover, his wife wrote complaining letters about the shortages of butter and meat developing at home.

Now Funk. These SS people were impossible. Himmler’s saving grace was his love for animals. Poor Himmler couldn’t bear to see a hurt dog. It was confided to him at one of the gassings at Treblinka that he had attended with Himmler. Himmler despised Goring, who was cruel to animals.

Sauer gave Fritzie an affectionate pat on the head and looked up to Alfred Funk in his grandfatherly way.

“I want to see the three Jews from the bunker. The Moritz Katz man and the others.”

“So?”

“We have located three entrances to their precious bunker. Faced with these facts, perhaps they will talk.”

Sauer reached in the drawer and gave the dog a tidbit. “Can’t see them,” he said.

“And why not?”

“They’re dead. Tried to break them down. Turned them over to the dogs last night. There, Fritzie ... good boy ... good boy.”

“Simon, come quickly.”

He pushed down the dark corridor. Alex opened the curtain to Rabbi Solomon’s cell. The last doctor left in the ghetto knelt over the old man’s prostrate body. The rabbi presented little more than a weightless bag of bones. His eyes were opened like a defiant Elijah doing combat with the wicked priests of Jezebel. His bony fingers clutched Torah scrolls.

Simon lifted his body and placed it on the cot and closed Rabbi Solomon’s eyes, and he looked inquiringly at the doctor.

“Don’t ask me why he died. Old age, lack of air ... grief ... who knows?”

“Last night he told me he would die today,” Alex said.

“And what did he say?” Simon snapped. “To fight tyrants is to honor God?”

“No ... in fact, he said he wished he were like King David with a young wench to warm his bed.”

Simon spun around and into the corridor. “Fighters up!” he called. “We’re moving up for an attack!”

“Fighters up!”

“Fighters up!”

A hideous shriek came from the arsenal in the Chelmno room simultaneously with an explosion of the stored munitions.

Jules Schlosberg’s body was hurled into the corridor.

“Germans!”

Simon plunged over the bodies of confused, frantic civilians into the turn of the corridor. The bunker was in a dark panic. He smashed his way into the Belzec room, where half of the Fighters were housed. A blinding light probed through the secret entrance from the tunnel up to Kupiecka Street.

“Germans!”

“Juden ’raus!” a voice commanded from the other end of the tunnel.

Simon dived over the corridor to the Auschwitz room. Another light penetrated from the tunnel at Muranowski Place.

Mass screaming and wailing and praying and crushing broke loose among the scrambling, aimless ants who battered forth from the tunnels. Simon and the Fighters used pistols and clubs on them to force them back and into silence. He was crushed against a wall. A dozen broke out in the Auschwitz room up the tunnel.

“We surrender,” they cried.

Rat-a-tat! The German machine gun blasted them down.

Simon kicked his way clear and drove into the Majdanek room, where a dozen of his Fighters already blocked the room to keep the children from getting trampled.

Simon handed his flashlight to Deborah and pulled the bricks away which led into the sewer. He poked his head through and flashed the light up and down. There were no Germans, but billows of poison gas floated in from both directions.

With Alex and a dozen Fighters forming a chain across the Kanal to Mila 19, Simon and Deborah passed the children out of the room one by one to the old bunker across the Kanal. Some of them were swept up by the rushing sewer waters. Others doubled over, gagged and blinded, as the cloud of gas enveloped them.

Outside Majdanek, frantic people tried to batter past the bayonets of the Fighters to get to the dubious safety of the death-filled sewers.

“Hold your breath, children. Duck under the water! Keep your eyes closed!”

German machine gunners at the head of the entrances shot down the panicked civilians, and then poison gas and lashes of fire from flame throwers ate up what little oxygen was left in Mila 18 and the bunker became a huge gas chamber filled with a screaming, frantic doomed mass.

Chapter Twenty-one

CHRIS AND ANDREI FROZE for the rest of the day in the second floor of a gutted structure from which they could watch the Germans methodically move over the area inch by inch, dragging the dregs of humanity from beneath the ground. The Germans were finding bunkers quickly now. Thirst-maddened people who had to live in silence for days on end broke.

Often at dusk there was a respite as the Germans pulled their forces off the streets and out of the ghetto to give it a working over with artillery, picking out for target practice the diminishing numbers of skeletons of buildings.

Andrei used this lull to make the final lunge for the Franciskanska bunker. Andrei always looked forward to seeing Wolf, for there was always an air of frivolity, jokes, songs, poems.

Not this night.

When Chris and Andrei arrived, Wolf and Rachael and Ana were sprawled glassy-eyed on the floor of the big room. Andrei looked around. There were only twenty-odd Fighters present. Everyone seemed only half conscious. There was no greeting for them. There had been no guard at the bunker entrance.

Wolf’s head hung between bunched-up knees, and Rachael lay on the floor beside him, her face in his lap. Ana looked up for an instant and half recognized Andrei and sagged again.

“What happened?” Andrei demanded.

No one answered.

Andrei turned to Ana. He didn’t like looking at her these days. All the tall fine hard round woman that had once been Ana was gone. She was wasted.

“Ana! What happened!”

Ana sniffled and mumbled incoherently.