Mila 18 - Leon Uris

“I realize that becoming a son of the commandment is just a token of manhood. A lot of people told me how sorry they were that I couldn’t have my bar mitzvah in peacetime when the Great Tlomatskie Synagogue would have been almost full and relatives would have come from all of Poland and there would have been a large celebration and presents. I thought a lot about all that, but I am really glad to have my bar mitzvah in a place like this room, because in places like this the Jewish faith has been kept alive during other times of oppression. I think, too, it is a special privilege to have your bar mitzvah in bad times. Anyone can live like a Jew when things go well, but to take an oath to be a Jew today is really important. We know that God needs real Jews to protect His laws. Well ... we have survived everyone who has tried to destroy us before because we have kept this kind of faith. Our God will not let us down. I am very proud to be a Jew and I will try hard to uphold my responsibilities.”

Rabbi Solomon held the tallis on Stephan’s head and chanted the closing priestly blessing. The room pressed forward to converge on the boy and congratulate him with hearty “Mozeltoffs.” Paul Bronski left the place quickly and quietly.

“I guess you are satisfied now,” Paul snapped at Deborah. “You’ve put on your little circus. You’ve won your battle. You’ve showed me up as a damned fool in front of the whole ghetto.”

Deborah tried to contain herself. His eyes were filled with that half-wild look again.

“Grinding salt into my wounds,” he continued. “Making me look ridiculous.”

“Stephan did not have a bar mitzvah as a vendetta against you.”

“Like hell.”

“Paul, let’s go to sleep,” she pleaded.

“Sleep?” He laughed sardonically. “Who sleeps?”

He tried to light a cigarette, but his hand trembled so violently that he was able to accomplish it only with her steadying hand. “Well, Deborah, now that our son is properly a Jew and you have won your crusade for his holy purification for my sins—”

“Stop it!”

“—now perhaps we can discuss a family matter. We are still a family, you know.”

“If you speak like a civilized person.”

His outburst was done now. He calmed himself. “You’ve got to give up working at the orphanage and Rachael has to stop giving concerts. As for Stephan, he spends entirely too much time on the streets.”

She merely narrowed her eyes at his pronouncement.

“We must reappraise all our friends. A continued association with Brandel, Rosenblum, and Susan could become dangerous. Every one is aware of their past affiliations and no one is sure they are not part of this underground.”

“Now you just stop where you are, Paul—”

“Let me finish, dammit, let me finish! I can’t guarantee your immunity because of the likes of your goddamned brother and his agitators. They’ve pulled in the entire family of one of our board members and are holding them all at Pawiak Prison as a warning for us to break up this underground.”

All that was left of a desire for honor seemed to drain out of him in that instant. His skin was a horrible gray. “We have decided—”

“What?”

“We have decided that our families have to come to work inside the Civil Authority building and never be out of our sight.”

“Oh, my God, it’s come to this.” Deborah held her hand over her eyes for only a few tears. “All through this,” she whispered, “I have waited patiently for ... Paul, at first I tried so very, very hard to make myself believe that what you were doing was really the right thing. But each day as you degrade yourself lower and lower you have ceased to be a human being.”

“How dare you!”

“Good God, Paul! Didn’t you hear your son today? Can’t the courage of a little boy touch you, move you?”

“I won’t listen!”

“You will listen, Paul Bronski! You will listen!”

He knelt before her desperately and grabbed her arm and shook it. “We can talk aesthetics until hell freezes, but what I am saying to you is reality.”

The tears fell down her cheeks. “Reality? My poor man, you are the one who has been hiding from reality. I’m going to tell you what reality is. Your daughter is sleeping with Wolf Brandel, and I sent her to him because her marriage would endanger her father’s precious position as a collaborator.”

“That son of a bitch—”

“Good! At least you have the decency to show anger. But he is a fine young man and I thank God she is able to find a few moments of happiness in this hell. Shall I tell you more reality? I am working on manufacturing bombs in the cellar of the orphanage, and your son Stephan is delivering the underground newspaper.”

Paul Bronski stood up and grunted like a confused, dying animal.

“Do you know why, Paul? He came to me and pleaded—‘Momma, I’m going to be thirteen. ... Momma, someone in our family has to be a man.’ ”

Paul crumpled into a chair and sobbed. She stood over the groveling, shaking cur, and the disdain ebbed into a terrible weariness. “I only did it for you,” he wept, “only for you.”

“I’m tired, Paul. ... I’m all done in.” Suddenly, without plan, the words found their way through her. “I have a chance to leave the ghetto with the children.”

He looked up at her, blinking. “De Monti ... De Monti.”

She nodded.

“You’d do this to me?”

“I have made my atonements. I have paid, repaid a thousand, thousand times, and I swear I don’t know if I was ever wrong even in the beginning. But if I was, I have been punished by you. I promise you, Chris will never touch me. All I want is to find a hole someplace to crawl into where I can’t hear starving children cry. Maybe a patch of grass ... that’s all I want ... just ... a patch of grass.”

Paul slid to the floor on his knees and doubled up before her feet. “Please don’t leave me,” he wept, “please don’t leave me ... please don’t leave me ...”

Chapter Five

Spring of 1942.

THE AWESOME WINTER WAS done, but the smell of death lingered. The little ghetto on the south was all but shrunken. Polish families inched back in as the Jewish decimation increased. All that remained in the south were a few streets of Jews, the woodwork factory, and Wild Areas. The big ghetto became more crammed than ever.

With the reinforcement of the Waffen SS guard, the ghetto fell into a grip of fear worse than any it had experienced. The smug Elite Corps with their lightning streaks on black uniforms entered Warsaw fresh from their jobs as Kommandos in the Special Action massacres on the eastern front Placed under Sieghold Stutze, they were wild, drinking louts, turned into savages by the sight of the blood of their victims. They filled the barracks at 101 Leszno Street just beyond the ghetto wall, opposite Koenig’s uniform factory.

A second set of guards arrived. Latvians and Lithuanians wearing uniforms of Nazi Auxiliaries with insignia of skull and crossbones on their epaulets. These peasants from the Baltics had carried out their share of the eastern massacres with relish.

A third force came in from Globocnik’s headquarters in Lublin. Ukrainians. Their men’s choir, sober or drunk, sang with such harmony they were dubbed the Nightingales. The Litts, Latts, and Nightingales took the red brick building eater-corner to the SS barracks.

Each night the sounds of drunken revelry heightened the fear.

SS General Alfred Funk, courier of the verbal messages on “Jewish problems,” arrived in Warsaw as a harbinger of doom. Fresh from conferences with Heydrich, Himmler, and Hitler in Berlin, he arrived with Adolf Eichmann, Gestapo 4B, Jewish affairs.