Mila 18 - Leon Uris

Furthermore, I beg to report

1. 1200 used German uniforms (tunics) and 600 pair of used trousers. (Some uniforms were equipped with medals.)

2. Several hundred assorted German helmets.

3. Four million zlotys (from deportees). Fourteen thousand dollars, nine thousand dollars in gold; an undetermined value in gold, rings, watches, jewelry.

I beg to report that today the principal Jew-bandit bunker was located at a place known as Mila 18 and it was summarily destroyed by gas, flame throwers, dynamite, and small-arms fire.

The ruins of the Jewish residential reservation will give us vast amounts of scrap material and used brick which can be salvaged for future building projects.

May I make mention of the valiant SS Waffen and Wehrmacht troops attached to this command whose uncommon devotion in the face of the “invisible” enemy has brought about this success. They went into the sewers, crawled into bunkers, and otherwise exposed themselves to the gunfire of the enemy. These comrades will not be forgotten.

Under separate cover I recommend the following decorations:

Iron Cross, Second Class—SS Haupsturmführer Zisenis.

Cross of War Merit, Second Class with Swords—SS Untersturmführer Manfred Plank, SS Rottenführer Joseph Blesche.

IT IS MY FIRM OPINION THAT I WILL BE ABLE TO ADVISE YOU OFFICIALLY OF THE FINAL EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN WARSAW WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.

Heil Hitler!

Signed:

SS Oberführer Alfred Funk

Certified copy:

(Jesuiter)

SS Sturmbannführer

Horst von Epp entered the room but did not speak. The two of them listened and listened and listened for nearly an hour until the gunfire in the ghetto stopped.

Five o’clock.

The moments before dawn of the second month of the uprising came. Neither Alfred Funk nor Horst von Epp dared lift the telephone. A knock.

“Enter!”

Untersturmführer Manfred Plank, showing the effects of battle, stood wild-eyed before his general. “Heil Hitler,” he said with somewhat less than his usual vigor.

“Heil Hitler,” Alfred Funk answered.

“What happened out there?” Horst von Epp asked.

It seemed as though Plank’s fine young Aryan body would collapse.

“Speak!” ordered Funk.

Plank’s lips quivered. “We were moving into our fixed position at the western end of Niska Street ...”

“Speak!”

“Like ... like ghosts, they leaped out of the ruins on us! They did not fight like human beings ...”

“Speak!” Funk screamed again at the faltering man.

“We were compelled to abandon our positions.”

“Swine!”

“Herr Oberführer!” cried Manfred Plank. “I have been decorated twice for valor on the eastern front. As a result of my fearless attitude in combat I was sent to SS Waffen training. I tell you, sir ... I tell you ... there are supernatural forces in there!”

“Get out,” Funk hissed.

He did not hear the Untersturmführer click his heels and make his squarely conceived exit.

Funk’s hands were so slippery with sweat, he could not hold his drink. He took his report promising victory and dropped it in the wastebasket after tearing it to shreds, and he looked up at Horst with dazed puzzlement.

“Even from their graves ...”

Tonight we have really lost this battle.”

On his hands and knees, his shoulders rubbing against the top of the pipe, Wolf Brandel crawled first into the sewer pipe that cut diagonally down the eastern end of the ghetto. Rachael, second in line, grabbed his ankle with one hand and followed. Tolek, next in line, took Rachael’s ankle and Chris took Tolek’s and Ana took Chris’s. The chain spread down for the twenty-three who left the bunker after sending the radio signal to the Aryan side.

Eight beeps, a pause, six more beeps. Repeat the message twice. Decoded, it meant: ‘Twenty coming through the Prosta Street manhole.”

Ten seconds after Andrei started his diversionary attack in the western ghetto, Wolf and Tolek began their perilous journey.

The lateral pipes connecting to the large ones were slightly more than a yard in diameter, and to move in them one had to crawl laboriously on hands and knees.

Silence—absolute, complete, utter silence—was commanded by the leaders.

They inched into the pitch-blackness while overhead Andrei leaped out at Manfred Plank’s SS company and threw the Germans into confusion to draw attention from the evacuees. Andrei had chosen the desperation route carefully. No one was apt to watch the smaller laterals under the ground simply because it was not believed that a human could move for long through them.

They came to Nalewki Street. Their small pipe dumped into the big Kanal. Wolf halted the line and sloshed around in the darkness, feeling the walls to find the continuation of the small pipe on the other side. Corpses floated swiftly down and hit against him and knocked his feet from beneath him and he went under in the sewer water. He got to his feet after being swept ten or twenty yards and again slogged upstream to feel for the lateral. An hour passed before his hands found it.

He recrossed the Kanal and took Rachael’s hand. Hand in hand, the chain crossed the big line and re-entered the lateral on their hands and knees.

For another agonizing hour of step by step, the chain pressed on in measured progress. Their backs were breaking, their knees raw and bloody from the dragging. The stench blinding and numbing.

The pipe ran into the Zamenhof Kanal.

Three tortured hours had passed since the beginning.

Again Wolf had to cross alone and grope around from memory.

Another hour passed.

When he had gotten the chain over the Zamenhof Kanal the lateral pipe was running high and fast. They crawled on hands and knees, ever southward, with the sewage splashing up to their chins, floating into their eyes and noses and ears and hair.

Six hours later they were under the Convert’s Church and the site of the demolished uniform factory ... now under the wall in the “Polish corridor.”

Along the chain one Fighter after the other fainted. They had to stop long enough to slap them into consciousness and drag them further. Silence could not be broken even when someone pitched flat into the sewage and drowned. The line tightened. There were twenty-two left instead of twenty-three.

Another went under and another.

After they crawled eight hours on hands and knees the pipe widened. They were able to stand bent over. The water running in this direction was only a few feet high. Wolf did not give them a chance to glory in the respite. He drove them on while the chance for making progress was good. The strong dragged the weak to their feet. Pain ... nausea ... numbness ... half sanity ... half life ... they trudged on, on, on through the bilge and filth, until in the ninth hour they had passed out of the ghetto and the “Polish corridor,” and now they looked for the main Kanal which would take them down Zelazna Street.

Somehow in the darkness they had taken a wrong turn and veered back north. Then they splashed around in aimless circles. Wolf stopped them, trying to find his bearings and the main Kanal. Without compass, light, conversation, and using only a hazy memory of a few hours’ study, he was utterly and completely lost. There was no use pushing on. Three more had fainted, including Ana. Unless he gave them rest they would all be done in. Wolf crawled back to Tolek and broke the nine-hour silence.

“Rest,” he said.

Rest ... rest ... rest ... the magic word fired back along the line.

They sat in the pipe with the sewage waters swirling around their chests and they gasped and groaned with hunger and thirst and weariness and bloody hands and knees.