Shapira had no intention of doing that. “Is De Jong still in charge?”
“Yes, among others, including myself” Sobel shot back. “I led a workers union—I ran the Jewish government in the Lodz ghetto.”
“Whatever” said Shapira in English, unmoved and annoyed by Sobel’s preening. “Send Mr. Dunie back on foot to warn De Jong” ordered Shapira, switching back to German. “You’ll come with us, and take us on whatever roads there are—we’ll figure out the rest.”
“What about my sentry post?” asked Sobel. His initial joy at the meeting had tumed into dismay, ordered around by the young and disrespectful foreign offieer.
“There won’t be any Germans coming along here for the time being” said Shapira. “Let’s go.”
No roadway crossed the ridge upon which Sobel had stood guard. Instead he demanded that the column reverse itself and then led it on a tortuous adventure over rutted back roads that were even worse than those near Treblinka. Sobel sat in the front of Yatom’s Kubelwagen while Shapira drove, trying his best to follow the man’s convoluted directions in a mix of German and Yiddish. For all Sobel’s uncertainty as to the ronte—he was from Silesia in the western Poland, not the wastes of the east—he remained sure and confident of his abilities.
Having failed to impress Shapira with his status he tried Yatom. Sobel recounted his pre-war successes and his importance to the Lodz ghetto. He declared that he was third in command of the escaped Jews, after the Dutchman De Jong and the Czech Jezek, and intimated that as a Pole, he ought to be in top dog—after all, most of the refugees were Poles, and they were in Poland.
Why asked Yatom, nearly an hour into their journey, as they drove through a tiny and nearly abandoned Polish village, was a man of such importance pulling guard duty on a lonely hill?
“Because” answered Sobel “I’m a socialist. No member of the community is above the basest duty.”
“What was your profession before you became a union leader?” asked Yatom, as the men were jostled by yet another pothole in the cratered farm track
“This and that” said Sobel unhelpfully. “I’m a Macher—I make things happen; or at least I did.”
“You were one of the leaders of the Jews in Sobibor?”
“Yes. I presided over the executions of the camp commander and guards after you left. De Jong wasn’t really up for it” as I recall.
“He wasn’t a prisoner of the camp” noted Yatom. “No” agreed Sobel. “There are differences even today between De Jong and me and the survivors of Sobibor and the refugees from the train. Wait!” yelled Sobel suddenly “turn here!”
Shapira swung the Kubelwagen to the left onto a track running between ragged beet fields. “The town is just beyond these fields and past those trees” said Sobel as they continued to bounce along. Yatom turned back to make sure the rest of the column was still in order behind him.
“What differences?” asked Shapira, suspiciously. He thought Sobel seemed a little too sure of himself. Shapira’s German was better than Yatom’s and he caught in Sobel’s words and inflections the grating rhythms of an angry man.
“I’ll explain later Lieutenant” said Sobel, making the rank sound disparaging. “We are almost there!”
They emerged through the trees into several hectares of potato plants. Across the potato fields, silhouetted against a midnight blue sky, was a small town of substantial looking houses and barns. Unusually, there was no church visible on the skyline, a sight to which the Israelis had become accustomed, no matter the size of the settlement.
“This is Biali” said Sobel with a touch of pride. “A Jewish town reclaimed.”
The three Israelis in the Kubelwagen looked at Sobel curiously, but before they could question him further they were challenged by a voice in the night, speaking Polish.
“It’s alright Chaimowitz!” cried Sobel, climbing out of the cramped Kubelwagen. “It’s me—and these are the soldiers from Sobibor, back to help us!”
Chaimowitz had sensibly called his challenge from a ditch near the road rather than standing on it. Now he emerged from his hiding place with another man, each simply armed with a Mauser rifle. The two sentries met Sobel, and approached the German-made Kubelwagen to verify that the so-called Macher was telling the truth.
Chaimowitz, who had shared a reeking the cattle car with Jezek, recognized Shapira and Feldhandler from the rescue the week before and smiled in relief. He waived the column through and went back to his ditch.
Despite the late hour dozens of people came to meet the column as it rolled into Biali. They poured out of houses and communal buildings to greet the returning soldiers, partly out of curiousity but also eager for food or other loot from the outside world. Some in the crowd were the wives and parents of Fliegel’s men, hoping to find a husband or son alive and unscathed. Half of these would be disappointed, for the Bears had suffered heavily.
As families greeted their loved ones, attended the wounded hero or mourned a loss, Yatom saw in the milky light cast by the half moon the tall frame of De Jong, hurrying from the building he now used as a makeshift headquarters. Yatom, Shapira and Feldhandler dismounted and met the De Jong in the center of the street, Sobel hurrying behind. De Jong offered Yatom his hand, and the Israeli took it gratefully, genuinely happy to see the hardy Dutchman again, and thankful that there would not be a long round of hugging.
De Jong greeted Sobel formally. “Albrecht arrived thirty minutes ago” said De Jong, gesturing toward the hill to the northeast from which Sobel’s fellow sentry descended. “What took you so long?”
“We never scouted the roads to the east, so it was difficnlt to navigate in the dark” grumbled Sobel. “It’s something we should have done.”
The Israelis noted the strained talk between the two men, but were more interested in the terrain. Looking at the hills and ridges surrounding the town, the Yatom now recognized how roundabout their road journey had been. The sentry hill was only about two kilometers distant as the crow flies, but there was no road access from that direction, where ridgelines blocked and protected the town in its valley. There were only limited vehicular approaches from east and west, making the place both hard to notice, and defensible. De Jong had chosen the refuge well.
De Jong ignored Sobel and turned back toward Yatom. “We worried for you and the boys. It seems not everybody made it back.”
“No” answered Yatom. “We lost a man too. Lieutenant ltzak Belete. He’s in the back of that truck”
“And the other death camp…?”
“Destroyed” said Yatom simply. “But it was a difficult journey back. The Germans are hard at work trying to find us. You will probably have to defend this place.”
“You will help, of course?”
“For as long as we are here we will do what we can.”
De Jong looked at Yatom dubiously, grateful that the commando had returned, but puzzled about where he intended to go. The Dutchman accepted that, for whatever reasons, the commandos had parachuted into German occupied Poland. But he knew well enough that they could not just parachute out. Yatom and his men were, after all, in the middle of Nazi occupied Eastern Europe. The commandos couldn’t exactly catch a plane or a train back to the Palestinian Mandate.
“How long will that be?” asked the Dutchman deferentially.
“Weiss nicht” said Yatom curtly, his tone suggesting the subject was closed.
“You and your men must be tired and hungry” said De Jong. “We don’t have much food, and obviously, they hoped that you brought some.” De Jong gestured at the crowd still buzzing around the trucks looking for a handout.