Mila 18 - Leon Uris

Rachael obeyed silently, fearing words would bring on a betrayal of tears. A kitchen table was shoved under the skylight. Wolf climbed on, leaped up, caught hold, and struggled through. He closed his eyes for a moment as he saw the sheer drop. The sharp heights always brought on dizziness. He lay flat on his belly and reached down into the kitchen. Rachael hoisted Stephan into Wolf’s hands. She came through last. Wolf closed the skylight and pointed to cover behind a chimney. Stephan and his sister crouched behind it and watched Wolf disappear over the top of the ghetto.

It took him an hour to negotiate the mile over the roofs, down stairs, sprinting through exposed courtyards and over intersections, diving into the cover of friendly basements.

Wolf knew instantly it was a very important meeting, for Simon Eden was there with Andrei and Tolek Alterman. Andrei and Simon had kept apart to lessen the chance of their both being captured. It was the same with the other leaders. They came together under an urgency, for the informers had unearthed dozens of hiding places on Black Friday.

Simon spoke to Wolf and Tolek. “The Germans are lying about the deportations. One of my people has been able to observe the Umschlagplatz. For six days now the same forty-four cars have come and gone. Figure it. The trains pull out every day at three o’clock. They return by eight o’clock the next morning. Seventeen hours’ travel. Eight and a half going. Eight and a half coming back. Subtract an hour’s unloading time. Subtract an hour to turn the train around. Consider today’s travel conditions.”

“Summary,” Andrei said. “It is our educated guess this train is not traveling more than seventy or eighty kilometers beyond Warsaw.”

Tolek rubbed his jaw, drew a mental picture of Warsaw’s environs. “There is no labor camp or combination of them inside this radius which can continue to take six thousand new people every day.”

“Exactly.”

“As you know,” Simon continued, “my runner system was almost shattered on Black Friday. I lost almost all my people on the Aryan side.”

Andrei handed Wolf and Tolek packets of money. “There’s a guard playing at the Tlomatskie Gate. Go out in fifteen-minute intervals at six o’clock and meet at Gabriela’s flat. She will have a railroad maintenance engineer there. He will place you in observation positions along the rail line.”

When they had gone Simon Eden asked Andrei about new arms. It was the same story. No arms. No money. No help from Roman or the Home Army. Evasions. Frustration. They had only five hundred soldiers left after Black Friday.

Andrei looked at his watch and said it was time for him to leave too.

“Must you go to Lublin?” Simon asked.

“Yes.”

“If there was a way to command you not to go ...”

“No, Simon.”

“Are you certain you can get into this camp?”

“I don’t know for certain. Ana tracked down my old company sergeant. A good soldier, that Styka. I have faith in him. He has been working on it for two weeks, Ana brought the message that he can get me in.”

“Andrei, if we lose you ...”

“What’s to lose, Simon?”

Simon flopped his big hands to his sides. “What’s to lose? I’ve been in a fog for over two years. I try to tell myself all this is untrue. It is not happening. I’m numb, but we survive on instinct.”

Andrei slapped his back.

“Well,” Simon said, “wishing you luck inside Majdanek is rather ludicrous these days. Does Gabriela know?”

“No. I promised her not to keep secrets, but I cannot bring myself to talk about this trip to Lublin. But the minute I come through the door tonight, she will no longer be fooled.”

“I envy you, Andrei, having that kind of love. Andrei, for God’s sake, get back here safely. I can’t keep going without you.”

“See you around, Simon.”

Chapter Seven

ANDREI RUBBED HIS EYES wearily and brought them to focus beyond the unwashed window. The train poked past a hamlet of thatched shanties surrounded by the rye fields of the flat Lublin Uplands. It was a long, slow trip. Late afternoon before he would reach Lublin. Good old Styka. He had come through.

Simon’s words ran through his mind: “I’ve been in a fog ... I’m numb, but we survive on instinct.” On those nights before a dangerous assignment Gabriela, too, was instinctive. She had held him all night with her eyes wide open and without a word.

Andrei allowed himself the reward of a sigh and an inner rebellion of his nerves over another close call. There had been an unexpected siding of the train and an inspection. Life and death hinged on an exchange of glances with one of the Polish police, who returned later for his bribe.

Freedom and capture had hung by a thread so many times, he could not count them any more. Every day fate or luck or a proper instinctive move was the difference between life and death. Each night at Mila 19 the Bathyrans related a series of stories of the day’s close brushes and miraculous escapes.

Andrei took a canteen from his knapsack and sipped a swallow of water and bit off a small hunk of the staling bread. It was painful to put food into his stomach, which, shrunken by the lack of food, rebelled at the sudden stretching.

The train passed a hamlet. The tracks split a large field in half where men and oxen strained against plow leashes and women bent double in stoop labor. Burly leathered men and wrinkled women in drab black rags carried on in a primitive way, almost unchanged from feudal times. Peasants puzzled Andrei. He wondered how they could go on in poverty, superstition, ignorance, with a complete lack of desire to make either their land or their lives flourish.

Andrei remembered a Bathyran meeting long ago. Tolek Alterman had returned from the colonies in Palestine and, before the national leadership, exalted the miracles of drying up swamps and irrigating the desert. A fund-raising drive to buy tractors and machinery was launched. Andrei remembered that his own reaction had been one of indifference.

Had he found the meaning too late? It aggravated him. The land of the Lublin Uplands was rich, but no one seemed to care. In the unfertile land in Palestine humans broke their backs pushing will power to the brink.

He had sat beside Alexander Brandel at the rostrum of a congress of Zionists. All of them were there in this loosely knit association of diversified ideologies, and each berated the other and beat his breast for his own approaches. When Alexander Brandel rose to speak, the hall became silent.

“I do not care if your beliefs take you along a path of religion or a path of labor or a path of activism. We are here because all our paths travel a blind course through a thick forest, seeking human dignity. Beyond the forest all our paths merge into a single great highway which ends in the barren, eroded hills of Judea. This is our singular goal. How we travel through the forest is for each man’s conscience. Where we end our journey is always the same. We all seek the same thing through different ways—an end to this long night of two thousand years of darkness and unspeakable abuses which will continue to plague us until the Star of David flies over Zion.” This was how Alexander Brandel expressed pure Zionism. It had sounded good to Andrei, but he did not believe it. In his heart he had no desire to go to Palestine. He loathed the idea of drying up swamps or the chills of malaria or of leaving his natural birthright.

Before he went into battle Andrei had told Alex, “I only want to be a Pole. Warsaw is my city, not Tel Aviv.”

And now Andrei sat on a train on the way to Lublin and wondered if he was not being punished for his lack of belief. Warsaw! He saw the smug eyes of the Home Army chief, Roman, and all the Romans and the faces of the peasants who held only hatred for him. They had let this black hole of death in Warsaw’s heart exist without a cry of protest.