Mila 18 - Leon Uris

The courtyard detail was composed of Nightingales and their Litt and Latt compatriots under the direction of a few SS men who held various Alsatian dogs at leash end.

A brick train shed and platform some two blocks in length ran to the extreme end of the courtyard. A train of forty-four cattle and freight cars stood in readiness.

As the selectees came in, their belongings were ransacked for jewelry, money, valuables of any kind. In order to make room for more people on the cars, most of the clothing they carried was confiscated.

A detail of Jews from Koenig’s labor pool carted the clothing across the street to a building which served as a warehouse. Linings of coats were ripped apart for hidden valuables. Personal mementos—family letters, pictures, keepsakes—were burned in a large oven alongside the building.

When six thousand people had been gathered, they were loaded on the trains. At three o’clock promptly each afternoon the train pulled out for an “unknown eastern destination.”

The Wild Ones who had volunteered in the first days of the Big Action had been cowed to such a state that they offered almost no resistance. But anyone who balked inside the Umschlagplatz courtyard was pounced upon immediately, mercilessly, by the guards.

Outside the courtyard, Polish Blues and Jewish Militia kept order in the lines feeding people into the selection center.

The aged, cripples, and those obviously unfit for labor were taken from the Umschlagplatz and shot by SS firing squads at the cemetery several blocks away. In this way the Germans “proved” they were taking only the healthiest people to the new labor camps.

Despite the passivity of the Orthodox community, men like Rabbi Solomon continued to wield great influence over the people. As more and more rabbis went to an unknown fate, diminishing the numbers leading the Orthodox Jews, the remaining inherited more responsibility.

On the fourth day of the Big Action the remnants of the underground had the Umschlagplatz under observation and scurried desperately around Warsaw trying to learn the destination of the trains.

Alexander Brandel visited Rabbi Solomon in an attempt to convince him to go to the Jewish Civil Authority. The old man had drawn a rigid circle binding his duties. The Civil Authority, he argued, was beyond his sphere of activity. Through Talmudic reasoning and arguments Alex weakened his stand by drawing parallels with ancient exiles. Finally the rabbi agreed to a rabbinical court and allowed Alex to plead before the five rabbis they were able to assemble.

They decided it was morally correct for Rabbi Solomon to petition the Civil Authority.

The old man was partly blind, able to see only in shadowy images. Months before, he had been forced to give up his work on the Good Fellowship notes and Brandel’s journal. He entered tine Civil Authority building at Zamenhof and Gensia streets on the arm of Stephan Bronski, his favorite student.

Paul Bronski was more nervous than usual. The sight of Stephan with the rabbi in broad daylight in a place which was a rats’ nest of informers unnerved him. Stephan was sent home. Although Solomon could not see Paul, he was able to sense the uneasiness in the man’s voice.

“Dr. Bronski, there has been much talk about these deportations. In fact, little else is spoken of.”

“That is certainly understandable.”

“We hear that there are continuations of the eastern massacres in death camps.”

“Nonsense. Can’t you see it is the same group of agitators we have had to contend with since the first day of the occupation? We have only their propaganda that there have ever been massacres in the east.”

“Has the Civil Authority ever questioned the Germans about the validity of the stories of the eastern massacres?”

Of course not. Paul clamped his teeth together. Sightless though the old man was, none of the keen edge had gone from his mind, nor had he lost the acid manner of setting verbal traps.

“My dear Rabbi Solomon, no one claims that life in the ghetto has been easy. We are the losers in a war in which we have been chosen as the scapegoat. Yet, through orderly process, the fact is that we have kept most people alive and here.”

“Then, Dr. Bronski, I assume you are ready to assure us that most of us will still be alive and here in three or four weeks?”

Paul had spoken about the deportations only to Boris Presser. His own hopes were that within a week or two the Germans would restock their labor camps and the deportations would stop.

“I am waiting for an answer, Dr. Bronski.”

Paul was afraid to take a position. Suppose he said the deportations would stop and they did not. Suppose the rumors of death camps were true and the Civil Authority had taken no stand on them. He had run out of maneuvering room. For two years and seven months he had found one more escape, and one more, and one more. This was the dead end.

“I am reasonably certain the deportations will stop as soon as the Germans decongest the ghetto. Decongestion of the ghetto will alleviate many of our problems here, and the population shifts to strengthen their labor pool closer to the eastern front will obviously satisfy the Germans.”

“Would the Civil Authority ask the Germans if your reasonable certainties are reasonable certainties with them also?”

Rabbi Solomon’s trap sprang shut. Paul wanted no more of the man. He mumbled quickly that the matter would be pursued.

Boris Presser had performed his duties as chairman of the Jewish Civil Authority almost as a nonentity. He was a quiet little man whose forte was an extraordinary ability to stay out of people’s way and to carry out his office in a mechanical manner, without emotional attachment. The murder of Emanuel Goldman, the first Civil Authority chairman in the early days of the occupation, clearly outlined the limitations of his power.

Presser dexterously avoided clandestine meetings with the underground, the social agencies, or the smugglers. He was learned at knowing nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He kept himself untainted through deftness. He was, in fact, the perfect tool in the Nazi logic which pointed up that Jews were killing each other off. When boxed in from time to time, Presser could always justify the existence of the Civil Authority. Without it, he explained, conditions would be far more severe. He made himself believe it was an instrument of survival.

When Paul Bronski confronted Boris with the ground swell of apprehension over the deportations Presser would not be talked into a meeting with the Germans. As he had done a hundred times before, he delegated Paul Bronski.

The choices? Schreiker and the Reinhard Corps were impossible to speak to. Could he move through Max Kleperman? No, the Big Seven wanted to know nothing about the deportations. Move through Brandel and David Zemba? No, it was they who brought the pressure on the Civil Authority.

Dr. Franz Koenig was his only choice.

Koenig’s new residence was a forty-room palace, the latest confiscation in his capacity as chief of confiscations. In a few short years he had become a multimillionaire.

Koenig had grown abnormally obese. His body resembled a pear and his head a puffy tomato with an obnoxious flat clipping of fuzz on top.

Power was unbecoming. After the first sweet taste of revenge and fulfillment, he came to loggerheads with the reality that he had placed himself in league with men of a bestiality he did not believe could exist among civilized people. His wonderful Germany, his land of the gifts of culture, was being run by maniacs and sadists. He remembered his very first discussion of the mass murders. Now he wondered what he had done. Yet, irresistibly, he rose higher and higher. Himmler himself received him regularly. All that Franz Koenig had known of truth and beauty was abandoned by him. A victim of fear, he had been purchased—soul, heart, and mind.