The total combat force stood at five hundred sixty young men and women, mostly in their early twenties, almost entirely without military training.
Journal Entry
The call for a rebellion has fallen on deaf ears. How can the people rebel? What do they have to rebel with? What help will they receive from the outside? In a final banality of the German language, the Nazis refer to the exterminations as “dispensation of special treatment.” The desire to survive has become so intense that the people will not allow themselves to believe there is a death camp at Treblinka. The Jewish Militia and members of the Civil Authority rip down underground posters as quickly as they are put up. Kennkarten stamped for slave labor are still believed by the people to be some sort of magic key to life.
It is amazing how the people will submit themselves to a living death worse than death itself. Even the most decadent societies in past history have understood that a basic minimum must be accorded for a slave or even an animal to be able to produce a reasonable day’s work. The Germans have even made an innovation on this by turning all of Poland into one big slave-labor pool. With millions of extra laborers who cannot exist otherwise, the competition for the right to become a slave is fierce.
The slaves in Dr. Koenig’s brush and uniform factories are separated from their families, numbered, stamped, beaten at their work. They labor in abysmal conditions for sixteen to eighteen hours a day. There is almost no heat in winter or ventilation or light. They exist with no personal property or human rights. They are terrorized and starved so that the fight for food among them is a further struggle to live. Their sleeping quarters are unfit to be pigsties. Every slave of every time has dreamt of freedom, and every tyrant of every time has recognized that dream. Here the only alternative is death. The slightest defect by protest or sickness brings immediate liquidation and replacement by another who scrambles for the right to be a slave.
The Big Action enters its second week. Yesterday no volunteers showed up at the Umschlagplatz. The Militia and Nightingales surrounded Koenig’s Brushmaker’s factory and selected half the workers for deportation. Today the Civil Authority called for volunteers to fill the factory openings. It was oversubscribed! Of course this newest German ruse will not last long, but it is fantastic that the people continue to allow themselves to be tricked.
Crazy Nathan stands near the Umschlagplatz and laments and prophesies that he will be the sole survivor in Warsaw. His latest psalm:
The Germans are so good to us.
They even make a raid
To give us free vacations,
With all expenses paid.
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
On the ninth day of the Big Action, Alexander Brandel walked into the barracks of the Jewish Militia, eater-corner to the Civil Authority building at Zamenhof and Gensia streets. The police who had bullied the ghetto around for nearly two years became uneasy at the presence of Brandel. He was more disheveled than ever. His slight stature certainly posed no threat of physical harm, yet they feared him. He was one of the few untouchables. Harm to him would bring savage retribution to them. But more, they feared his calm. He asked to see Piotr Warsinski.
Warsinski, the convert, whose hatred of Jews matched the viciousness of the Reinhard Corps, also feared Alexander Brandel. The flesh on the backs of his hands were always crimson from a nervous itch. At the sight of Alex entering his office, his fingernails dug into them, turning his skin to bleeding scales.
“What do you want here?” he growled.
“I should like to go into the Umschlagplatz and I want a dozen of my nurses around the selection center.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’ll pay for the privilege.”
“Get the hell out or you’ll be taking a train ride yourself.”
That goddamned smile on Brandel’s face! That son of a bitch! What he hated more than anything was Brandel’s calm. Brandel’s refusal to argue. When he had been sub-warden at Pawiak Prison he liked to watch the prisoners cringe, broken at his feet. Then one like Brandel would show up. Unafraid. He hated unafraid bastards. Warsinski’s itch worsened and his slitty eyes watered.
This morning he had beaten a woman prisoner to death with his hands. Women pointed up his impotence, his inability to be a man even when he paraded them around naked and made them perform obscenities with male prisoners.
He dropped his hands below the desk and tore at them with his fingernails.
“What do you want?”
“To see Haupsturmführer Kutler and Sturmbannführer Stutze. There are certain people who are taken to the Umschlagplatz whom we want to buy back.”
“What are you paying with?”
“American dollars.”
“I’ll take the message to them. How much a head?”
“Six dollars.”
“Whatever deal is made, add on another dollar for the Militia.”
“Fine,” Alex said, shoving away from the desk, hiding his revulsion. What pearls of wisdom had he gathered in a lifetime of study to pierce the heart of Piotr Warsinski? Seven dollars per life. Warsinski’s cruel eyes told him that one day he would stand on a platform and watch Alex ride off to Treblinka in a cattle car.
Haupsturmführer Kutler was sloppy drunk when Warsinski reached the SS barracks. The sight of Warsinski’s bloody hands triggered a quicker guzzling. The nightmare had been particularly bad for several days as Kutler relived the massacre of Babi-Yar and woke up screaming from a dream of drowning in blood. Now his sleep was tormented by visions of little animals tearing at his flesh. Sturmbannführer Stutze tried to pull the captain to his feet. Stutze was sickened at the weak fiber of the Germans who had been Kommandos in the Action Squads. They constantly drank themselves to the DT’s and pumped their veins full of dope. Austrians such as he and Globocnik and Hitler were made of sterner stuff. When the war was won, the Austrians would dominate the weaker German species. Kutler was in no condition to talk. Stutze had him taken to his room by a pair of guards, then turned to Warsinski.
“So,” Stutze said, “he offered you six dollars a Jew head. How much did you add on for yourself?”
“Only a dollar a Jew, Herr Sturmbannführer, and much of that must be spread among my police.”
The crippled Austrian meditated. “Hummm. What is the difference? Let them buy the Jews. We’ll get them all back anyhow. Only ... Jews barter. You are a Jew, Warsinski. Barter.”
Warsinski winced at being called a Jew.
“I want ten dollars a Jew, payable at the end of every business day,” Stutze said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And, by the way, let us keep this transaction between us.”
“Yes, sir.”
At the final price of eleven dollars and fifty cents a head, Alexander Brandel and his nurses were allowed into the Umschlagplatz. In the next few days they snatched out a few writers, scientists, musicians, poets, historians, teachers, children, engineers, doctors, actors, and rabbis from among the thousands jammed into the daily train.
The ruse of taking factory workers failed because volunteers refused to take their place any more. The next cleanup was a systematic dragnet of the ghetto to bag the thousands of beggar children, Wild Ones, and homeless for deportation. Crazy Nathan was among those picked up, but Alexander Brandel purchased his life, for he was a sentimental historian and the “crazy” one had filled his journals with hundreds of poems and anecdotes.