“Let me ask you something, Androfski,” Moritz asked. “This here Joint Forces—you the ones who blasted the SS men at Zamenhof and Niska?”
Andrei nodded.
“You the ones who fixed up Warsinski?”
Andrei nodded again.
“You guys really mean business?”
Andrei nodded for the third time.
“Let me tell you something. You work, you live, you do your best, but you never quite get onto the idea of the way they’re kicking you around. In the last week—since the ambush—for the first time in my life I’m proud to be a Jew.”
“That’s the way we all want to go out.”
Moritz shrugged. “So, maybe I’m glad you found me first. Obviously, you realize you have me over a barrel.”
“Obviously,” Andrei agreed.
Moritz munched on another square of chocolate, somewhat relieved that his long, taut vigil was over.
“Moritz,” Andrei said, “the one thing that Joint Jewish Forces really needs is a quartermaster.”
“What’s a quartermaster?”
“Someone high class to get in supplies.”
“You mean a smuggler?”
“No. Quartermaster is a respectable position. Every army has them.”
“What’s the cut?”
“Well, a regular army—like ours—doesn’t work on cuts.”
“Oy vay! What a day this has been. All I’ve ever done is run a nice clean business.”
“Moritz, you’re too much of a gambler to ride this war out in a hole. We’ve got doctors. Sheina will get treatment You’ll have lots of interesting people here to share this bunker.”
“I bet I will. Tell me honest, Androfski. This post of quartermaster. It is important? I mean, like a Ulany colonel?”
“In our army,” Andrei said, “it’s the most important.”
Moritz sighed in resignation. “One condition. No one inquires into my past finances.”
“Done,” Andrei said.
They clasped hands, Moritz pulled a faded double deck of cards, shuffled, and began to deal. “Before you move in, one game of sixty-six.”
Chapter Seven
AN ANT LINE OF laborers in a Brushmaker’s building bent their backs, pushing large clumsy carts. The line moved in an endless circle from the lumber store to the lathe room to the assembly room.
An emaciated slave named Creamski, who had kept alive somehow for ten months, loaded the cart with finished toilet-brush handles from the lathe room. He grunted down the corridor, pushing the load at a snail’s pace.
The assembly room consisted of ten long tables, each forty feet long. Each table had a series of varied drilled holes to stuff bristles, tie the wires, and attach the handles. Fifty men worked each table.
Creamski pushed his cart to table number three; toilet brushes. A “leader” stood at the head of each table. “They are here,” Creamski whispered to the “leader.”
He pushed his cart along the table, placing several handles before each bench.
“They are here,” he whispered.
“They are here.”
The word passed down the line and over to the next table and the next—“They are here.”
“You there!” the German foreman shouted from the balcony. “Hurry up!”
Creamski moved faster, emptying the cart. He turned it about and pushed it out of the room, down the corridor, past the lathe room, and into the lumber warehouse.
While his cart was being loaded with boards he stepped into the checker’s office.
“Now!” he said to the checker. The two of them shoved the desk aside, revealing a trap door. Creamski pulled it open.
“Now!” Creamski called down into the black hole.
Wolf Brandel’s head popped out of the tunnel. He moved quickly out of the checker’s office, scrutinizing the long high stacks of lumber. “Move them out,” the beardless commander ordered. One by one, forty Jewish Fighters emerged from the underground passage. The Franciskanska bunker a few blocks away connected to the Kanal. Wolf’s company had followed the sewer to a point inside the Brushmaker’s complex and dug the tunnel into the checker’s office.
With hand signals he dispersed his force of ten women and thirty men to pre-fixed positions. They ducked behind the lumber with their weapons ready. Wolf blew a long breath and nodded for Creamski to return to the assembly room.
Creamski grunted and strained to put the loaded cart into motion. As he turned into the lathe room he gave a hand signal which could be seen by a table “leader” in the assembly room. Every eye in the room was on the “leader.” He nodded.
Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!
The feet of the inmates thumped against the floor in unison.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
They took their wooden handles and banged them on the tables, setting up a din.
“What’s going on!” shrieked the foreman through a megaphone from his balcony cage. “Stop this noise! Stop it! Do you hear!”
Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The clatter from the building swelled over the compound.
“Guards!” the foreman shouted into his alarm phone. “Guards! Building number four! Quick!”
Alarm sirens erupted all over the complex in a series of short whistles to draw the guards to assembly building number four.
The foreman locked the barred door of his office. He snatched the pistol from his desk and looked down at the five hundred pairs of maddened eyes staring up at him.
Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!
“Krebs dies! Krebs dies! Krebs dies! Krebs dies!” they chanted his name.
Ukrainians, Latvians, and Estonians poured out of the guard barracks with whips, guns, and dogs, racing for the spot of the insurrection.
Part of Wolf Brandel’s force, hidden around the outside of the building, let them pass through. There was only one entrance, through the main corridor. He watched the first of the guards pass into the assembly room from his position in the lathe room.
“Now!”
Wolf and ten of his Fighters stepped into the corridor and faced a mass of guards. The Ukrainians had trapped themselves. A pipe grenade shattered in their midst, followed by a tattoo of pistol fire.
The Ukrainians outside plunged backward for the exit, but the Jewish Fighters outside moved in to cut them off. A massacre ensued.
A half dozen guards reached the assembly room. The slaves leaped from their benches. In pent-up wrath they attacked their tormentors and their tormentors’ dogs with bare hands. Within seconds the guards and dogs were pummeled to death and their bodies smashed with spit and kicks and disembowelment and decapitation.
Benches were overturned and smashed, lathes broken up by sledge hammers.
“Krebs! Krebs! Krebs! Krebs!”
The foreman was bug-eyed, insane with fright, locked in his own prison. They were coming up the balcony after him. No way of escape!
“Krebs! Krebs! Krebs! Krebs!”
He placed the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger as the outstretched arms of the slaves reached through the cage for him.
Ana Grinspan, with a company in the central district, was the highest-ranking woman commander in the ghetto. Her company was the most integrated of the various parties and final proof that unity had been achieved. Thirty-two Fighters came from the Bathyrans, Poale Zion, Gordonia, Dror, Communists, Akiva, Hashomer Hatzair, Hechalutz, and the Bund. She even had four members from religious Zionist Mizrachi who could no longer stomach the passive attitudes of the Orthodox Agudah.
The secondary objective at Brushmaker’s was the confiscation of the fleet of five trucks. The instant Brushmaker’s was secured Wolf turned the trucks over to Ana, who put into operation a pre-set plan. Each truck had a driver, four fighters, and liberated Brushmaker’s slaves.