“I won’t listen!”
“You will listen, Paul Bronski! You will listen!”
He knelt before her desperately and grabbed her arm and shook it. “We can talk aesthetics until hell freezes, but what I am saying to you is reality.”
The tears fell down her cheeks. “Reality? My poor man, you are the one who has been hiding from reality. I’m going to tell you what reality is. Your daughter is sleeping with Wolf Brandel, and I sent her to him because her marriage would endanger her father’s precious position as a collaborator.”
“That son of a bitch—”
“Good! At least you have the decency to show anger. But he is a fine young man and I thank God she is able to find a few moments of happiness in this hell. Shall I tell you more reality? I am working on manufacturing bombs in the cellar of the orphanage, and your son Stephan is delivering the underground newspaper.”
Paul Bronski stood up and grunted like a confused, dying animal.
“Do you know why, Paul? He came to me and pleaded—‘Momma, I’m going to be thirteen. ... Momma, someone in our family has to be a man.’ ”
Paul crumpled into a chair and sobbed. She stood over the groveling, shaking cur, and the disdain ebbed into a terrible weariness. “I only did it for you,” he wept, “only for you.”
“I’m tired, Paul. ... I’m all done in.” Suddenly, without plan, the words found their way through her. “I have a chance to leave the ghetto with the children.”
He looked up at her, blinking. “De Monti ... De Monti.”
She nodded.
“You’d do this to me?”
“I have made my atonements. I have paid, repaid a thousand, thousand times, and I swear I don’t know if I was ever wrong even in the beginning. But if I was, I have been punished by you. I promise you, Chris will never touch me. All I want is to find a hole someplace to crawl into where I can’t hear starving children cry. Maybe a patch of grass ... that’s all I want ... just ... a patch of grass.”
Paul slid to the floor on his knees and doubled up before her feet. “Please don’t leave me,” he wept, “please don’t leave me ... please don’t leave me ...”
Chapter Five
Spring of 1942.
THE AWESOME WINTER WAS done, but the smell of death lingered. The little ghetto on the south was all but shrunken. Polish families inched back in as the Jewish decimation increased. All that remained in the south were a few streets of Jews, the woodwork factory, and Wild Areas. The big ghetto became more crammed than ever.
With the reinforcement of the Waffen SS guard, the ghetto fell into a grip of fear worse than any it had experienced. The smug Elite Corps with their lightning streaks on black uniforms entered Warsaw fresh from their jobs as Kommandos in the Special Action massacres on the eastern front Placed under Sieghold Stutze, they were wild, drinking louts, turned into savages by the sight of the blood of their victims. They filled the barracks at 101 Leszno Street just beyond the ghetto wall, opposite Koenig’s uniform factory.
A second set of guards arrived. Latvians and Lithuanians wearing uniforms of Nazi Auxiliaries with insignia of skull and crossbones on their epaulets. These peasants from the Baltics had carried out their share of the eastern massacres with relish.
A third force came in from Globocnik’s headquarters in Lublin. Ukrainians. Their men’s choir, sober or drunk, sang with such harmony they were dubbed the Nightingales. The Litts, Latts, and Nightingales took the red brick building eater-corner to the SS barracks.
Each night the sounds of drunken revelry heightened the fear.
SS General Alfred Funk, courier of the verbal messages on “Jewish problems,” arrived in Warsaw as a harbinger of doom. Fresh from conferences with Heydrich, Himmler, and Hitler in Berlin, he arrived with Adolf Eichmann, Gestapo 4B, Jewish affairs.
The Krakow Gazette increased its build-up of the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” Around Poland, the feverish activity of building new camps brought in German experts in transportation and construction. But these new camps were different. They were neither for slave labor nor for the containment of enemies of the Reich. They were built in great secrecy in out-of-the-way locations, and their structures had odd shapes unlike any ever seen.
By midwinter Alfred Funk concluded his conferences in Warsaw and returned to SS headquarters in Lublin with further verbal instructions for Globocnik.
Early in March one of Ana Grinspan’s runners reached Warsaw with the information that an Operation Reinhard, named after Heydrich, was taking place for the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto. The ghetto occupants as well as transports of Jews from outside Poland were being sent to a camp named Majdanek on the outskirts of the city.
When Funk came back to Warsaw everyone speculated wildly on the meaning, but after the winter just past no one believed things could get worse.
Rabbi Solomon sat on the floor in another of the makeshift synagogues before his emaciated congregation, which had once been a proud group recognized in the religious circles of Poland. The few stragglers who remained represented the heart of European Jewry. Stephan Bronski, the rabbi’s favorite pupil, was near the learned one.
It was the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Ab, the day on which the greatest disasters had befallen the Jews. On Tisha B’Ab the First Temple of Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians, and centuries later, on the same day, the Second Temple fell to the Romans, starting a series of events which eventually spread the seed of Abraham to the corners of the world as damned and eternal wanderers and strangers.
On Tisha B’Ab an angry Moses had come down from Sinai and smashed the tablets of the commandments upon sight of the reveling tribes of Israel worshiping an idol. It was as though he had cast an eternal curse upon them, for this night of Tisha B’Ab the lights burned late in the offices of Gestapo House, Reinhard Corps headquarters, and the offices of Rudolph Schreiker.
Rabbi Solomon read from the “Valley of Tears” and the Holy Torah was revealed and he swayed and cried Jeremiah’s prophecies of doom.
“And the Lord shall scatter you among the nations and ye shall be left few in number.”
A mournful response followed his words.
“We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health and behold trouble! For, behold I will send serpents among you which will not be charmed and they shall bite you, saith the Lord ... the harvest is past, the summer ended and we are not saved ... for death is come up to our windows and is entered into our palaces to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets ... the carcasses of men shall fall as dung upon the open field.”
As Rabbi Solomon lamented, the overture to the most horrible catastrophe in a catastrophe-filled history was playing out.
Black Friday ushered in the Big Action.
The Nazis called in members of their networks of informers and bled them for information during the night. By dawn a swift, merciless sweep was plotted to denude the Jews of the last of their leadership.
With sirens screaming in hideous harmony to the rabbi’s prayers, the SS and their Litts, Latts, Polish Blues, Jewish Militia, and Ukrainians swept in from every gate and scoured the ghetto, smoking out the resistance people from secret rooms.
Tens of dozens were marched unceremoniously to the cemetery and shot by a firing squad of Nightingales.
Ana Grinspan, Andrei Androfski, and Tolek Alterman had the fortune to be on the Aryan side. Other Bathyrans hid in the basement of Mila 19 with Jules Schlosberg and Ervin Rosenblum amid journals of the Good Fellowship Club and homemade fire bombs. Simon Eden spent the day crossing rooftops, and Rodel, the Communist, cringed in a hidden closet.
Alexander Brandel and David Zemba were among the fortunate not on the roundup list.