“Without leaders!” Andrei snapped.
“Do you forget that this country was trampled and its leaders killed? Do you dare say Alexander Brandel is not a leader? And Dave Zemba? Do you think Emanuel Goldman was not a leader? Are you ashamed of the courage of Wolf Brandel? Andrei, Alex hears nothing and sees nothing but the cry of hungry children. His only dogma is to put food into their bellies. And damn you, he has fought a hell of a war in his own way.”
Andrei shoved out of the chair. “Thanks for the lecture.”
Simon grabbed his arm. “Hear me out for one more minute.”
Andrei pulled his arm free. Simon was not begging or pleading. He had too much respect to slough Simon off.
“Go on.”
“You have begged to die stupidly, irrationally, unheard, in vain. No underground army will form until the people want one. We’re coming to the end of 1941, and in 1942 the people will want an army. They hear about the massacres in the east and they see the death rate climb to a hundred a day in the ghetto and they are not so afraid of reprisal any more and not so certain that Brandel has the answer for survival. Andrei, every idea, every man’s thinking is good or bad because it comes at the correct time. It was not the correct time for a fighting force before. Now it is becoming the correct time. People are thinking about it more. They are talking about it. They are starting to plot. To think in terms of guns.”
Andrei slipped back into the chair. Simon hovered over him, burning his arguments home with intensity.
“So much has been lost,” Andrei whispered. “So much to do.”
“Recontact Roman.”
“That bastard.”
“Never mind your personal feelings. Press him for arms.”
“Hell, you’re crazy, Simon. It’s too late. The Home Army will give us nothing but evasions. Piotr Warsinski has a gang of ghouls, and the Gestapo has a thousand informers. Our contacts on the Aryan side are flimsy. There is no real unity. We have no source for arms.”
“Did you ask for victory or the right to fight?”
“Are you with me now, Simon? Are you really with me?”
Simon dug into his pocket and pulled out a fat wad of bills. Hundred-zloty notes. “Buy guns,” he said.
From the moment that Gabriela heard the lightness in his steps, she knew that something wonderful had happened. He flung open the door, his face beaming, and he threw the money on the table and picked her up and whirled her around and around.
For the first time since the war Andrei seemed at peace. There was much to do and his own people would be battling him all the way, but by God, they were thinking his way. They knew, in some degree, that they had to find means to defend themselves.
Too little ... too late ... it did not seem to matter.
Chapter Twenty-nine
CHRIS PARKED HIS CAR opposite the ghetto gate facing the Square of the Iron Gates. An unshaven Polish Blue policeman picked his teeth with his little fingernail as he examined Chris’s pass and waved the barrier up.
A few steps inside the wall Chris was challenged by a pair of huskies in long gray coats and mirror-polished boots of the Jewish Militia.
Chris oriented himself quickly. He knew from Rosy where Deborah was most likely to be. His best chance to see her alone would be at the orphanage on Niska Street. The ghetto was filled with spies and informers, yet he felt that Horst von Epp was both too clever and sophisticated to use the crude tactics of having him tailed. Horst had Chris boxed in, anyhow. If he were to force his luck, the German risked scaring his prey to cover.
Chris walked along the wall beyond which the “Polish corridor” split the big and little ghettos. The streets were sticky with unswept dirt, and the pungent odors of filth filled his nostrils.
He approached the bridge which ran over the “Polish corridor” to the big ghetto. He stopped. There! On the foot of the bridge steps. The corpse of an emaciated woman. Enormous ghastly circles formed on the skin pulled taut by protruding bones. Chris backed away. He had seen corpses on the eastern front by the thousands—he remembered the massacre—but ... here ... dead of starvation. It was different. Foot traffic moved around the dead woman with no one paying the least attention.
Chris edged up the steps to the top of the bridge. He was imprisoned in barbed wire. He looked down into the “Polish corridor.” He had stood down there on the street so many times, looking up to where he now stood, hoping for a look at Deborah. He had been caught down there and beaten. He continued quickly over the bridge and down the steps into the big ghetto.
High barbed-wire walls surrounding Dr. Franz Koenig’s uniform factory greeted him. Slow movement on the other side of the wire by half-starved slave laborers. Brisk, arrogant movement along the guard posts by the Jewish Militia.
Each step now made him catch a vignette of squalor, of pain. Each step churned his queasy belly close to a vomit. A lice-riddled ragged remnant of what had once been a human being lay in front of him.
The mosaic of misery, the montage of horror became blurred. He was walking on a small square.
“Armbands! Buy armbands!”
“Books for sale. Twenty zlotys a dozen.” Spinoza for a penny, Talmud for a dime. A lifetime collection of wisdom. Buy it in gross lots for kindling ... keep my family alive one more day.
“Mattress for sale! Guaranteed lice-free!”
Two children blocked Chris’s way. Warped, inhuman. “Mister, a zloty!” one whined. The second, a smaller brother or sister too weak to cry for food. Only the lips trembled.
“Do you want a lady’s company? Nice virgin girl from a good Hassidic family. Only a hundred zlotys.”
“My son’s violin. Imported from Austria before the war ... Please, a beautiful instrument.”
“Mister, how much for my wedding ring? Solid gold.”
A long line of scraggly, ragged humanity getting a dole of watery broth at a soup kitchen. The line pressed forward, stepping wearily over a corpse of one who had died en route to the soup.
An old man collapses in the gutter with hunger. No one looks.
A child sits propped up against a wall, covered with sores and lice bites and burning with fever, moaning pitifully. No one looks.
Loudspeakers boom. “Achtung! All Jews in Group Fourteen will report tomorrow to the Jewish Civil Authority at 0800 promptly for deportation for volunteer labor. Failure to report for volunteer labor is punishable by death.”
The “kings” from the Big Seven with flour and meat and vegetables make their barters quietly, in whispers against the walls, in the alcoves, in the courtyards.
A Nazi sergeant from Sieghold Stutze’s Reinhard Corps stands in the middle of Zamenhof Street. Bike rikshas, the basic mode of transportation, swirl around him. Each riksha comes to a halt before the “master” and doffs his cap and bows.
Clang! Clang! The bulging red and yellow streetcar with the big Star of David on its front and sides.
“Achtung! Jews, listen! Green ration stamps are hereby ruled invalid.”
Another corpse ... another ... another.
Billboards filled with directives, BY ORDER OF THE JEWISH CIVIL AUTHORITY the building at Gensia 33 is declared contaminated.
Walls hold torn corners of posters and publications of the underground press ripped down by the Jewish Militia.
The Jewish Militia. Fat and brutal, beating a herd of hapless girls with their clubs as they push them north to their destination in the Brushmaker’s factory.
Chris doubled over in the seat before the desk in Susan Geller’s office at the orphanage. His face was chalky, his stomach churning, ready to rebel at one more sight, one more smell.