A dozen black uniforms passed the corner of Niska Street.
Rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat!
A flame erupted from the end of Andrei’s machine pistol. Kutler pitched forward on his face, the back of his head shot away. Four of his cohorts tumbled around him.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
Wham! Simon Eden’s pistol crackled with deadly accuracy. Wham! Wham! Wham! Shrieks, Germans toppled to the ground.
Andrei stepped into the intersection and blasted at the row of flanking guards.
A wild melee. The Nazis broke and scattered.
“Run, you sons of bitches! Run! Run! Run!”
Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!
“Run, you lousy bastards! Run! Run! Run!” Andrei screamed, spewing death into them.
A calmer Simon Eden picked his shots, sharp-shooting the stunned Germans. A hidden fire bomb came out of Tolek Alterman’s shirt and arched into an alcove filled with cowering SS. They shrieked out into the streets, trying to put out the flames devouring them.
“Scatter!” Simon commanded. “Alex! Tolek! Ana! Move, everybody! Go!”
The captives fled from the street.
“Sons of bitches!” Andrei screamed. “Sons of bitches! Die!” He tore down Zamenhof, looking for the terrified enemy. Bullets came back at him. He knelt and poured fire.
And then he was whirled around with a sudden impact that cracked his head on the side of a building. He slid to the sidewalk. On hands and knees he tried to fight to his feet, but he could not get up and it all became a blur. His face hit the sidewalk ... blood oozed from the corners of his mouth ... oblivion.
Chapter Four
“IDIOT!”
SS Oberführer Funk slapped Sturmbannführer Sieghold Stutze across the mouth. The Austrian winced, then came Stiffly to attention.
“Imbecile!” He slapped Stutze again, leaving streak marks on his cheek. Stutze stood at an even more ramrod posture.
“Swine!” Another slap.
“Herr Oberführer,” Stutze whined.
“Chased by Jews! Eleven SS men killed!” Whap! Whap!
“Herr Oberführer. We were attacked by fifty madmen!”
“Liar! Coward! Assemble your officers at the barracks immediately.”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberführer!” Stutze snapped his heels together. “Heil Hitler!”
“Get out of my sight, you worm.”
Horst watched the performance, somewhat amused. “It seems,” he said when Stutze had left, “that I detect flaws in the lofty theories of absolute obedience. Oh, I grant you that the German people are the most likely to succeed as robots, but we are still riddled with human frailties. Stutze is a coward, Schreiker a damned fool, Koenig a thief, and myself—well, I’d rather not go into that.”
Funk didn’t hear a word. He was too immersed in his own sudden dilemma. “Has the world gone entirely mad?” he said. “First Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated by Czech bandits, and now—this.”
“Yes, dear Reinhard. We shall all miss his noble soul,” Horst said.
Funk kept talking aloud to himself. “Ach! Himmler will have a wild tantrum when he learns about this.” He lit a cigarette and pressed his fingertips together in a rapid motion, noticing the nails needed trimming and cleaning. Better get it done. Dirt annoyed him. “Tomorrow I personally will direct operations to begin the liquidation of the ghetto.”
“Do you think that’s wise, Alfred?”
“What?”
“To go into the ghetto tomorrow.”
Funk took it as an immediate affront to his courage. He was no Stutze!
Before he could answer the challenge Horst held up his hand. “Just a moment. Today the Jews have burst another one of our pet theories like a bubble. They have discovered that we are not supermen at all. Hit a German with a bullet and he will drop dead like any other man. This delicious taste of blood after three years of torment will obviously spur them into greater efforts.”
“I have no time for your nonsense today,” Funk cracked back with the full cruelty revealed in his eyes. He was incensed with the very idea that the sub-human rabble could present an obstacle, but he did not wish to argue, for Horst had a needle under his skin and was prodding him.
“Do you have any idea of the Jewish strength?” Horst asked.
“What difference does that make!”
“A good general should know the weight of the enemy forces.”
“Enemy forces, indeed! Since when do we recognize Jews as a fighting force?”
“I should say that as of today would be a good time.”
Funk slammed his fist on the table. Horst refused to be intimidated and obviously was not going to be slapped around like the Austrian. Funk recalled why he had hated Horst von Epp in the beginning. That attitude of knowing something Funk did not know. That ability to operate on a level of shrewdness that eluded the stern, dogmatic, rigid SS devotion. Funk smiled faintly in an attempt to play the game with Von Epp. “And what do you propose might happen if I take the Reinhard Corps into the ghetto tomorrow?”
“I don’t propose it, nor do I suggest it. I know it,” Horst said. “You will lead three hundred men into a massacre.”
“And I say they will flee and bury themselves at the sight of us. Jews won’t fight.”
“How unfortunate that you have become victimized by our own propaganda. Oh yes, I know. You have proof. We have translated our theories by acting out our superiority on helpless people. You’ll find another caliber of man left inside those walls.”
“Do you really believe that I would hesitate in the face of Jews?”
“When I was in the ministry in Berlin I spent week after week inventing and expounding the theories of Jewish cowardice, Alfred. The plain and simple fact of the matter is—we are liars.”
Funk’s entire face reacted with shock.
“I doubt if any warriors in the world were as furious in battle as the ancient Hebrews, nor did any people in man’s history fight harder for freedom. Not once, but many times, they made Rome totter. And since their dispersion, because they have not had the opportunity to fight under a Jewish flag, we have been able to isolate them into individual units and riddle them with inferiority complexes. German torment has taken these segregated masses and jelled them together as a people for the first time in two thousand years. We cannot measure their determination to acquit themselves, but we can make an educated guess that we’d better be damned careful from this point on.”
Funk sprang to his feet. “I will not listen to this anarchy. You defile the noble purposes of the Third Reich!”
“Oh, stop shouting, Alfred. I invented half the noble purposes of the Third Reich.” Horst walked to the window and drew the curtains apart. Across Krakow Boulevard and beyond the Saxony Gardens some of the ghetto roofs could be seen. “Who is left in that ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of forces within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to the Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk. We have pushed him to the wall.”
Oberführer Funk became confused. Von Epp, one of the very creators of the Aryan myth, was ripping it apart. Suddenly it became clear to him. “I have been ordered by Himmler to have the ghetto liquidated, and that is what shall be done,” he snapped.
Horst flopped his arms to his side in disgust “Simple, eh? Orders are orders.”
“Naturally.”
“Alfred, you represent that confounding German idiocy which is unable to improvise from a fixed plan. Forget that orders are orders before you perform a monumental blunder.”
“You know, Horst I really should report your conversation to Himmler. I really should. What possible blunder can I make by fulfilling orders? Say that these noble creatures do fight. So what? We shall destroy them.”