Andrei smashed his fist on the table.
Roman got up and clasped his hands behind him dramatically. “Just what do you want?”
“We haven’t the strength to mount an attack without help from outside. If you had three companies of the Home Army make simultaneous diversified strikes in the suburbs, we can push out of the ghetto.”
Roman sighed with frustration. Despite the rigors of living underground, he had lost none of the fine edge that characterized a French-bred snob. “It is impossible,” he said.
“Can you be that much of a Jew hater to watch us cooked alive?”
Roman leaned against the window sill and bit on the ivory holder with the studied gestures of one who knows he is on stage. His eyebrows raised on his high forehead. “Shall we get coldly realistic? What if I carry through your plan? Where will you go? How many will you break out?”
“As many as you can make provisions for.”
“Ah,” beamed Roman, “that is the rub. Ninety per cent of the peasants would turn in a Jew for a bottle of vodka. Ninety per cent of the city people are quite certain this war is being fought because of international Jewish bankers. Not my personal feelings, mind you, but I am in no position to carry out a program to educate the Polish people.” Roman was deadly accurate again.
“Then at least let the fighting force find its way out with the children.”
“Children? Those convents and monasteries which take Jewish children are filled to the brim. Most won’t. The few others want ten thousand zlotys a head in advance with the right to convert them to Catholicism.”
Andrei closed his eyes.
Roman warmed up to his arguments, sliding his tongue over his teeth as he paced. “I cannot allow partisan units made up of Jews. I do not command an army on discipline. The underground depends upon secrecy and loyalty. You know full well you will be betrayed just as you were betrayed when you gave us the report on extermination camps. It was sold by someone to the Gestapo.
“At least—at least give us guns and money. At least the money you’ve stolen from us.”
Roman frowned and sat at the table, lifting some papers to read to demonstrate he was too busy for further bickering. Andrei snatched them out of his hand and flung them to the floor.
“All right, Jan!” Roman snorted. “Your precious report was smuggled out of Poland by someone or other and has been published in London. Have you heard the heads of state make impassioned cries for justice? Has the world suddenly stormed to its feet in indignation? Jan Kowal, no one really gives a damn.”
Andrei pushed back from the table. “Don’t slop your Polish garbage on the rest of the world, Roman. This is the only corner of the world where extermination camps could exist. The German army doesn’t have enough divisions to guard against the people if they tried it in London or Paris or New York. Only in your goddamned Warsaw! All over this continent men and women are behaving with basic Christian decency. You are a Christian, aren’t you?”
Roman went through arrogant gestures of indulgent disgust.
“You won’t walk away from this free. They’re already starting to gas Poles at Auschwitz only because you let them get away with it with us. March into the chamber with your chin up, Roman, your turn is coming.”
Andrei stormed out.
Roman broke the shortened cigarette from the holder and squashed the tip out. He looked up at a stunned aide. “If those blasted Jews try to contact me again, I am not to be reached, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jews are so emotional. Oh well, at least we won’t have a Jewish problem when the war is over.”
Simon Eden smashed his fist into his open palm as Andrei related the meeting with Roman. The attic room fell into gloom. Tolek, Alexander Brandel, Ana, Ervin, Wolf Brandel, Simon Eden. A ghastly morbidity crushed them. It was all over. Everyone thought the same thing at the same moment. It was all over ... done.
The alarm bell sounded five short rings to indicate a “friend” was coming up. Rodel, the Communist, entered. For an instant everyone looked eagerly with a flickering of hope beyond hope that some miracle had happened. Rodel shook his head. “They can give us four armed men, no more. They can’t even really spare that.”
Tolek droned the names of writers, doctors, actors, journalists, and Zionists who had been taken to the Umschlagplatz in the last few days. He went on and on, moaning a death march.
“Be quiet,” Andrei said.
But he droned on. The last of the rabbis—one saved by the Catholic Church as some sort of relic of a past civilization, the other was in their cellar. The rest, dead. “Dead, all dead,” Tolek said. “Farm gone ... farm gone ... everyone is dead.”
“Shut up,” Andrei repeated.
Ana Grinspan, an unwavering symbol of strength, a figure of daring, collapsed and cried hysterically. There was no one in the room who could comfort her.
“Say something, Alex,” Simon Eden pleaded.
But Alex said nothing these days.
“Dead ... all dead. Nishtdoo, keiner, keiner nishtdoo.”
“Stop your goddamned crying!” Andrei screamed.
Ervin licked his dry lips. Tears wet his thick glasses, so that the people before him were blurred images. Within five days he had lost his wife Susan and his mother. He had tried gallantly to carry on for Alexander Brandel after the children were rounded up. “Simon ... Andrei ... Comrade Rodel ... I ... have taken all the notes and volumes of the Good Fellowship Club and hidden them in milk cans and steel boxes. I had occasion to speak to your committees today. They are in full accord with me that if this last try for help was unsuccessful we should burn the ghetto and commit mass suicide.”
“You have no right to hold meetings behind my back,” Simon said without conviction.
“We had no times for rules of procedure,” Ervin said.
“Who among us hasn’t thought of suicide?” Ana cried.
And then silence. There were no arguments.
“As a Labor Zionist ... as a Labor Zionist,” Simon mumbled. He brushed the hair back from his eyes. “As a Jew and Labor Zionist,” he floundered and fumbled. Oh God, he thought, death would be so sweet, so very sweet. “As commander of Joint Forces, I cannot and will not give an order for a suicide pact. But if this is the wish of everyone, then I will resign my command and also abide by the decision.”
Andrei stared up at his comrade. Simon had been a soldier. Simon had been a strong man. Simon had been a leader. His innards were shot. The fine features of his dark face sagged with the loss of will.
Wolf Brandel, the youngest commander in the ghetto, walked slowly toward the door. “I will not obey that order,” he said. “My girl and I are going to live, and if we’re captured we are going to make them pay. If they want me,” Wolf cried, “let them come in and try to get me!”
He slammed the door behind him.
“Well,” Andrei whispered, “one of us is left with enough strength to want to live.”
Tolek fell on his knees. “Oh God! God! God! Please help us! What have we done? What have we done?”
No one looked at the other. Their faces fell into their hands. All through the night they sat wordless until the dawn broke them with weariness and they dropped off into snatches of nightmare-filled sleep.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the Big Action ended. On September 16, 1942, there were no more deportations or “kettles.”
The Warsaw ghetto, the largest human stockyard in man’s history, once held nearly six hundred thousand people. That number was decimated by starvation, disease, executions, deportation to slave labor, and finally assembly-line murder in Treblinka. When the Big Action ended, less than fifty thousand remained.
Chapter Thirteen