The thought did not appeal to Wolf.
Andrei looked the boy over. Eighteen. Tall, strong. Smart—smart as a whip. The shyness was a decoy. Wolf Brandel had mastered his studies as a brilliant scholar. Ideals. Wonderful. So many people without them, these days. Taking the hard road to satisfy an inner desire to do right. A good soldier in any army.
“Come on, let’s take a walk, son.”
They walked down Leszno Street past the Convert’s Church and the huge new complex of houses forming a factory to make and repair German army uniforms. “A Franz Koenig Enterprise,” the big sign said. Koenig also had part ownership of the woodwork factory in the little ghetto and of the huge Brushmaker’s complex at the extreme northern end. Dr. Koenig had become a millionaire.
They waited on the corner until a red and yellow streetcar came along and hopped on the back of it. Its sides and tops showed large Stars of David. The Ghetto lines were operated by the Big Seven.
At Smocza and Gensia, Andrei got off. Wolf walked alongside him until they reached the wall that ran down the middle of Okopowa Street. He was filled with the adventure of it all. They walked up the street to the middle of the block. Over the wall was the Jewish cemetery. This was a neighborhood for a lot of smuggling. People could hide in the cemetery with black-market goods. In this area the wall was heavily guarded. Andrei stopped at the old abandoned Workman’s Theater. Before the war it had been one of the showplaces of the vital Yiddish stage. Now the lobby had been converted into yet another soup kitchen. The rest, empty.
Down the alleyway to the stage door. Andrei looked about quickly, thrust the door open, and shoved Wolf inside. They were on the stage. It took a moment to adjust their eyes to the darkness and their noses to the musty smell. Andrei whispered to be careful of cables and obstacles. The house was ghostlike. The hard-back seats in a state of disrepair. A faded backdrop of a Polish gentry’s garden hung behind them.
Andrei listened. He could make out very dim sounds from the soup kitchen. He tiptoed to the light cage and threw a switch. Wolf was entranced. Nothing lit up. Some sort of signal, he was certain.
Above them a trap door opened. Andrei scooted up it quickly, the boy behind him. They were in a large loft. The trap closed after them.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Andrei said, “you all know our newest worker.”
Wolf’s mouth hung open in awe. There were four people present, all former Bathyrans who lived at Mila 19. Adam Blumenfeld was at a radio receiver with earphones on. “Hello, Welvel,” he greeted the boy by his nickname.
Pinchas Silver worked at a box of hand-set print. Beside the small press were copies of the underground paper, Liberty. Pinchas smiled and welcomed Wolf in. A forgery table and camera were in one corner.
The Farber sisters, Mira and Minna, were there, studying to become runners.
“Any news?”
Adam Blumenfeld took one earphone off. “I’ve got BBC. Something about American destroyers being loaned to England.”
“How about the Home Army?” Andrei asked in reference to the quickly growing Polish underground force.
“They keep changing frequencies. Unless we can get their schedule, we can only pick them up hit or miss.”
Andrei grunted. His most urgent job was to set up a solid liaison with the Home Army, but he had been unsuccessful. He turned to Wolf. “Two lessons. First, live with access to the top floor. In danger, we go to the rooftops. Second, this work is neither romantic nor exciting. It is dull and exacting.”
For the next few weeks Wolf learned to stand radio watch and work the printing press. Then Andrei made him memorize the entire Jewish Militia and know which police would “play” for bribes and how much. One by one he learned the secret rooms behind bakeries, in abandoned synagogue basements, where Simon Eden and Rodel, the Communist, and the small nucleus of the underground carried on their sub rosa business.
His prime duty: to distribute the copies of Liberty. Dump them in the market places, drop them at secret rooms, post them on conspicuous walls. As Andrei had warned, it was exacting and tedious work. The streets were more dangerous to travel each day. Piotr Warsinski’s police were pulling people in by the hundreds for the continued feeding of the slave-labor factories.
Dr. Franz Koenig took a quick trip to Berlin to be received by Himmler, personally, and brought back with him a contract for a great portion of the German army’s brushes. The Brushmaker’s complex in the north had to be tripled. When there were no people on the streets, Warsinski ordered indiscriminate raids on homes or the bulging refugee compounds for workers.
Wolf accepted his duties without protest. He envied the Farber sisters. Blond and blue-eyed, they fitted the bill as “Aryans.” Learning the paths of a runner was only a small part of the training.
They had to learn the Catholic Bible forward and backward, how to pray in Latin, how to pray with the rosary. They had to learn to go deaf to the sounds of Yiddish and German, the languages with which they had been raised, in order to “prove” they were not Jewish.
There was one more regular who worked in the loft of the Workman’s Theater, and that was Berchek, a former commercial artist. From time to time “Aryan” Kennkarten, travel papers, and even passports were obtained. These had to be doctored for use by underground members. Berchek taught Wolf the principles of forgery and allowed him to work on the simpler tasks of fixing photographs on the papers.
Andrei was terribly proud of his protégé. The boy learned quickly and responded to orders without question. In one or two tight spots while distributing Liberty, he kept himself out of trouble by quick thinking.
When Wolf went off duty he spent part of the time at home with his parents and his baby brother at Mila 19. Some of the time was with his “adopted” brother, Stephan Bronski. He taught the younger boy his Hebrew and tutored him in basic subjects and played chess and answered a thousand searching questions.
And two or three nights a week he would meet Rachael in Andrei’s flat.
Each time they met, they brought their relationship one step closer to culmination. Each time they chastised themselves and groped and damned. They wanted to try it, desperately. First Wolf, then Rachael took turns in being the stronger to resist. Each time they parted, they parted heartsick but eager for the next rendezvous.
The thought of seeing each other kept them alive. It was able to make them somewhat oblivious of the horror around them. More and more terrible things were happening. So long as there was that electric second when he ran up the final flight of steps into her arms, the rest did not matter so much.
Journal Entry
Last night the Good Fellowship Club met to discuss the latest disaster.
Yesterday morning twenty-five Reinhard Corps Nazis, under the personal direction of Sieghold Stutze, entered the ghetto at the Zelazna Gate. Their barracks are directly outside the wall, so there is little or no warning. They proceeded directly to Nowolipki 24 and surrounded the house. Fifty-three occupants—men, women, and children—were pulled out and loaded aboard two army trucks.
As they drove off, the Jewish Militia posted signs all over the building that it was “contaminated by typhus, rodents, etc. ...”
The fifty-three were taken to the Jewish cemetery. On the north wall they were forced to dig a huge ditch, undress, and stand on its edge. They were shot in the back and, after they fell into the ditches, were bayoneted.
The Militia entered the Nowolipki property and carted off every single belonging.