In these days the lines of deportees were not so orderly as in the beginning. Bribe money flashed all over the Umschlagplatz. When there was no money, the deportees offered the guards watches, rings, furs—anything—to buy their way back into the ghetto for another day, another hour. And each day the marches to the trains were halted dozens of times by frantic bursts for freedom which only intensified the brutality of the guards.
And each day when the trains pulled out at three o’clock there were leftovers in the square. These prisoners were taken to the top floor of the selection building, to be first in line for deportation the next day. Each night the Ukrainian guards stripped the prisoners, searching for valuables. Women were taken to the lower floors of the building and raped.
On the twelfth day of the Big Action, the Bathyran Council met and demanded from Alex that he stay out of the Umschlagplatz. Tolek and Ana pleaded that a whim of Kutler or Stutze would cancel their deal and threaten his own life. Alex would have none of it, not even their orders nor, finally, their threats to restrain him. For so many years he had battled to breathe life into the dying. He could not hold back the flood, but he was frantic to salvage the product of a great culture.
And on the next day he milled in the courtyard of the Umschlagplatz, as usual.
“Alex! Come quickly. Rabbi Solomon has passed from the selection center. They’re taking him to the cemetery for execution.”
Alex raced over the square, stumbling, gasping, into the building, down the corridor, past the guard, into Kutler’s office. The captain was more than halfway through his first bottle of schnapps and it was not yet noon. Alexander completely lost his composure.
“The Rabbi Solomon!” he cried.
“Don’t push your luck, Jew boy,” Kutler blurted.
Alex panicked.
“A hundred dollars!”
“Hundred?” He began to laugh. “Hundred for that old Jew carcass? God damn. The price for old Jews is good today. He’s all yours, Jew boy.”
As Alex sighed and reeled out, Kutler reared back and laughed until the tears came to his eyes.
In the middle of the night Sylvia Brandel tiptoed down to Alexander’s office. Mila 19 was asleep except for the guards. Earlier in the day she had tried to go to him, but his door was locked. He refused to answer her calls. She did not know whether to be angry or hurt or to try to approach him with sympathy or to leave him alone. It was indeed strange behavior for Alex. She rattled on the doorknob and knocked again. He opened it and walked away from her.
Sylvia stared at his back, trying to adjust to the awesome experience, for Alexander was not like other men. He had always been a strong stone lighthouse for people to look up to find light and shelter. In twenty years of marriage she could not remember him floundering or crying for help. At first she was troubled that he did not seem to need the compassion that other men needed, but she learned to revere him and to five to serve him. Alex lived in his own world, a strange mixture of ideals and ideas, and he functioned with inexhaustible reservoirs of patience and courage. It was frightening to see him derailed.
“How is Rabbi Solomon?” he asked.
“We have a cot set up for him in the Good Fellowship room in the cellar. Ervin will stay with him tonight. Alex, will you eat something? There is some soup left in the kitchen.”
“I’m not hungry,” he whispered.
“It’s almost three o’clock. Please come up to bed.”
He flopped at his desk, and his face dropped into his hands in utter defeat.
“Alex, I have never questioned your decisions, but I beg you—don’t go to the Umschlagplatz again. There is a limit to what I can stand too.”
Tears welled in the corners of his eyes and rolled to nothing halfway down his cheek.
“No man can continue as you have without breaking up.”
“I’ve failed,” he whispered, “I’ve failed.”
“You’re a human being, Alex. You’ve given your life to other people. I can’t stand to see you let yourself be destroyed.”
“I’ve failed,” he mumbled, “I’ve failed.”
“Alex, for God’s sake!”
“I lost my head today. I’ll lose it again.”
“You’re tired ... so tired.”
“No. It’s just ... that I knew today ... everything I’ve stood for ... everything I’ve tried to do has been wrong.”
“Oh no, darling.”
“My way? Keep one more body alive for one more day. All my cunning to save a single man, and now thousands flood to their deaths and there is nothing I can do ... nothing.”
Sylvia gripped him awkwardly. “I won’t hear you berate yourself after all you have done.”
“Done?” He laughed. “What have I done, Sylvia? Trade with swindlers and Nazis? Use trickery and cunning? Done?” He took her hands and he was again gentle Alex. “They are going to destroy our entire culture. How can I preserve a few voices to show the world who we were and what we have given them? Who will be left?”
He walked away from her. “We don’t speak of it here in Mila 19, but Andrei and I have had little to say to each other since the war. Do you know why? When the Germans came here he wanted to take our people to the woods to fight. I stopped him. I took the guns and the bullets from him. My way—I had to have my way.”
“Alex, please!”
“Wrong! I am wrong and I’ve always been wrong! Not my journal or Rabbi Solomon’s prayers will deliver us. Only Andrei’s guns, and it is too late and I did this to him.”
Like the catacombs of Rome, an underground city was clawed beneath the ghetto of Warsaw. Every person capable of working joined in a frantic race to build hiding places.
Fifty thousand trap doors, fifty thousand secret entrances led to false rooms in sub-floors, closets, behind bookcases, in attics. In the stores and bakeries they hid in unfired ovens, under counters. They made hiding places by removing the stuffing in couches, under tubs, in garbage dumps.
They lived a second away from their escape hatches. Walking in the streets became a memory. Communication was by rooftop. Behind loose tiles, stoves, toilets, pictures, lay entrances to secret rooms.
Cellars were good to hide in, for they could hold larger stores of food and their entrances were easily concealed, but attics had the advantage of the best escape routes.
The epitome of ingenuity did not deter the Big Action from bagging their quotas for the deportations. The cry of children, the keen noses of trained dogs, the spying of informers continued to flush more and more secret places. Guards in the streets watched guards upstairs break every window in a house, for unbroken windows revealed the presence of a hidden room.
At Mila 19 and at Leszno 92, Andrei and Simon took attic rooms where an alarm bell would send them to the rooftops, where the guards were not so anxious to follow.
The entrance through the packing crates to the secret rooms in the basement of Mila 19 was abandoned as not safe enough, and a false water closet was constructed on the main floor. By removing a loose floor bolt the lavatory swung away, revealing a hole in the wall large enough for a man to crawl through. A ladder led to the new parts of the basement dug out since the Big Action and holding a dozen people Alex had snatched from the Umschlagplatz as well as the archives and arsenal rooms. An exit tunnel was dug to tie into the large drainage pipe which led many meters beyond Mila 19. The underground complex spread until it was halted by the main line of the pipe which ran directly down the middle of Mila Street. The sound of rushing sewage was constantly heard.
At the end of the third week in August the Big Action suddenly ground to a halt. The roundups stopped.
Chapter Ten
MAX KLEPERMAN HAD NOT only one of the few Jewish telephones in the ghetto, he had two, the second a direct line to Dr. Franz Koenig, with whom a vast amount of business was transacted. The license to buy and sell gold, agent real estate, smuggle, inform were exclusive rights granted the Big Seven.