Mila 18 - Leon Uris

“Andrei, I’m so afraid.”

“Shhh.” He petted her hair and rubbed the back of her neck and she purred and smiled weakly. “I must go into the ghetto. There are a few things in my flat. Nothing of value but sentimental. I should like Rachael and Stephan and Deborah to have them.”

He broke from her and put on his cap. “Strange ... I wanted so badly to see Stephan have his bar mitzvah. Well—no matter now.”

“Hurry back, darling. ...”

The return to the ghetto after his absence was shocking. In the few weeks he had been away the situation had collapsed with fearful speed. With winter coming on, the sight of corpses in the streets was commonplace and the smell of death, the low moan of misery, and the tautness of expectant doom cast a pall of gray in the midday sun.

Andrei shoved his hand into the mail slot in the hope that Rachael’s and Wolf’s armbands would be there. He might be able to speak to them ... say a few words ...

The flat was as he had left it. He looked about. The library. Some to Wolf, some to Stephan to read later—if there would be a later. The trinkets which once had been shined to a dazzling polish and adorned his uniform were tarnished. He threw them with his medals into a box. Stephan would want these.

The records and the player for Rachael.

What else was there? Very little. A Zionist organizer had no time for the accumulation of personal wealth. It was a shame that there were so few bits of tangible evidence of what this shabby room had meant. There had been much happiness here once.

The photograph album. The brown oval-framed pictures of Momma and Poppa. The pictures of his own bar mitzvah. Deborah would want these.

Should he see Alex? Rosy? Susan Geller? He heard Rosy and Susan were married. He really should. Hell, saying good-by is a rotten business. Just skip it. This was no bon voyage.

He sat at the table and wrote a note, which he was certain that Rachael and Wolf would receive, dividing his things and saying farewell.

He blotted and folded it.

The door creaked open and closed. Simon Eden was in the room with him.

“Bad news travels fast,” Andrei said.

“We have had a twenty-four-hour watch here. We hoped you’d come back.”

Andrei didn’t want to get into a discussion with Simon. He wanted nothing to sway his mind, throw him into turmoil, challenge his loyalty, play on his sympathy. He had made his decision.

“I’ve spent my life arguing,” Andrei said quickly. “I don’t want one now.”

Simon Eden was acquainted with the reality of Andrei’s words. Two Jews in a room will give you three opinions. His life had been an endless debate. Minute interpretations. Interpretations of interpretations. The kinds of Zionism, the variations of Judaism. Every man an eminent literary and musical critic. Every man having the personal answer to every problem. Debate ... talk, talk, talk, talk.

“I didn’t come to argue. Just to ask you what you are going to do. My people on the Aryan side tell me you made a contact with Roman. Did he give you a commission in the Home Army?”

“They don’t want anyone but tenth-generation red-blooded Polish Catholics.”

“I could have told you that. Jews in the ranks of the partisans are getting murdered for their boots and guns. And I could have told you the Home Army won’t back Jewish units. Going to make a run for it?”

“I think so.”

“Strange damn thing about us, Andrei. We are a race of individuals like none other. We are savage about our right to seek truth as individuals. We are ridiculous sometimes at the numbers of answers we have to the same problem or how we can confuse a simple issue with conversation.”

“It was the lack of unity that lost us Jerusalem in ancient times,” Andrei said. “It is the same damned thing that will destroy us here.”

Their talk was without anger. Simon was one who was always held in esteem by Andrei for his strength and for his unique ability to hold together a dozen factions of Jews engaged in ideological differences. “You say individualism is a weakness. I agree that it has been, at times. At the same time, it is also our greatest source of strength. The constant search for truth by a single man has been the key to survival.”

“Don’t trick me, Simon. I said I did not want to argue. Now you are trapping me into an argument on my right to argue.”

“Can I say that you have expected too much?”

“I? All I’ve ever wanted to do is—”

“I know damned well what you’ve wanted to do. Did it ever occur to you that we don’t have six hundred thousand Andrei Androfskis in the ghetto? They are just ordinary people clinging to a thread of life. They cling to a magic Kennkarte which allows them to work in slave labor. Some even sell their daughters’ bodies—they beg and plead—”

“Without leaders!” Andrei snapped.

“Do you forget that this country was trampled and its leaders killed? Do you dare say Alexander Brandel is not a leader? And Dave Zemba? Do you think Emanuel Goldman was not a leader? Are you ashamed of the courage of Wolf Brandel? Andrei, Alex hears nothing and sees nothing but the cry of hungry children. His only dogma is to put food into their bellies. And damn you, he has fought a hell of a war in his own way.”

Andrei shoved out of the chair. “Thanks for the lecture.”

Simon grabbed his arm. “Hear me out for one more minute.”

Andrei pulled his arm free. Simon was not begging or pleading. He had too much respect to slough Simon off.

“Go on.”

“You have begged to die stupidly, irrationally, unheard, in vain. No underground army will form until the people want one. We’re coming to the end of 1941, and in 1942 the people will want an army. They hear about the massacres in the east and they see the death rate climb to a hundred a day in the ghetto and they are not so afraid of reprisal any more and not so certain that Brandel has the answer for survival. Andrei, every idea, every man’s thinking is good or bad because it comes at the correct time. It was not the correct time for a fighting force before. Now it is becoming the correct time. People are thinking about it more. They are talking about it. They are starting to plot. To think in terms of guns.”

Andrei slipped back into the chair. Simon hovered over him, burning his arguments home with intensity.

“So much has been lost,” Andrei whispered. “So much to do.”

“Recontact Roman.”

“That bastard.”

“Never mind your personal feelings. Press him for arms.”

“Hell, you’re crazy, Simon. It’s too late. The Home Army will give us nothing but evasions. Piotr Warsinski has a gang of ghouls, and the Gestapo has a thousand informers. Our contacts on the Aryan side are flimsy. There is no real unity. We have no source for arms.”

“Did you ask for victory or the right to fight?”

“Are you with me now, Simon? Are you really with me?”

Simon dug into his pocket and pulled out a fat wad of bills. Hundred-zloty notes. “Buy guns,” he said.

From the moment that Gabriela heard the lightness in his steps, she knew that something wonderful had happened. He flung open the door, his face beaming, and he threw the money on the table and picked her up and whirled her around and around.

For the first time since the war Andrei seemed at peace. There was much to do and his own people would be battling him all the way, but by God, they were thinking his way. They knew, in some degree, that they had to find means to defend themselves.

Too little ... too late ... it did not seem to matter.

Chapter Twenty-nine

CHRIS PARKED HIS CAR opposite the ghetto gate facing the Square of the Iron Gates. An unshaven Polish Blue policeman picked his teeth with his little fingernail as he examined Chris’s pass and waved the barrier up.