“A clever idea, eh Colonel?” said Kessel, pleased the the SS officer was paying close attention. “Small bullet, lots of power, high velocity. I believe that these commandos are carrying rifles that fire that round.”
“We’ve recovered bullets from the bodies of victims and empty cartridge casings at various battle sites, but no intact cartridges,” said Reder. “It’s strange—more often than not soldiers in the heat of battle will drop an intact round or two.”
“Not my soldiers,” said Kumm.
“Well then,” said Globo as if securing a debate point “these commandos and your men have something in common.”
“Kessel is your name?” asked Kumm, ignoring Globocnik.
“Jawohl, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer.”
“It would be a good idea for the ordnance corps to copy this round” said Kumm, playing the complete cartridge between his fingers. “High velocity means accuracy, and because the cartridge is small and light, soldiers can carry more ammunition.”
“My thoughts exactly!” said Kessel happily.
“And the wounds the round makes are quite devastating” added Reder, trying to get in on the fun. “If you captured their weapons, the job of the ordnance corps would be that much easier.”
“Okay, Herr General,” said Kumm agreeably, warming to the challenge. “My regiment is up against a competent enemy, armed with new weapons. What could be better?”
“Nothing,” agreed Globocnik. “Where do you want to establish your headquarters—here in Lubin, Siedice, or Belzec?”
“Here,” said Kumm to Globocnik’s annoyance. “Lubin will be midway between my battalions. My headquarters is ordinarily fully mobile so I can move to the action when the enemy is uncovered. In addition to staff and support elements, I’ll keep the regimental reconnaissance company and artillery with me too. So I’ll require a sizable and well equipped Kaserne.”
“My aide, Lieutenant Wetzel will take care of all that,” said Globocnik. “When do you expect the rest of your regiment to arrive?”
“Two to three weeks at the latest,” said Kumm. “That’s how long the enemy has to play.”
Chapter 34
Spring turned to summer as the sayeret marked a full month in Nazi occupied Poland. Feldhandler and Perchensky toiled resolutely at the capsule, such that even Mofaz became convinced that their efforts were genuine. Yet this hardly calmed him, for their difficulties suggested that the sayeret might well remain stranded.
When Feldhander was not working at the capsule. He, Hannah and a clever schoolboy called Zim fiddled with the radio captured from Samsonov. By mating that machine with an Israeli field radio, the scientist and his students managed to create a crude but effective electronic surveillance and jamming device. In the event of an attack, Zim and Hannah, who between them spoke three languages, would attempt to jam or eavesdrop on German communications.
Perchansky in her off hours found herself in the company of the burly and confident Bolander, who though a few years her junior, had become her ardent lover. They met as often as possible, in a small basement room she “rented” from a family down the street from the town hall headquarters. Her rent was a portion of her food ration, which she happily exchanged for the pleasure of and comfort of her trysts with the virile commando. It even made her long days with Feldhandler bearable.
Several other commandos had also managed to find feminine companionship, particularly among some of the more cosmopolitan ladies from Vienna and Prague, who found the fit, suntanned and tough warriors especially tempting. Yatom, hesitant to allow the dalliances at first, relented after a few days of grumbling. He only ordered them not to visit the town’s single brothel, owned by a veteran Warsaw harlot, who handled all the business herself.
When the men and women of Biali were not training or otherwise preparing the town’s defenses, they engaged in a remarkable variety of activities that within a month gave little community the appearance of actual prosperity. Schools and synagogues were reopened, as was the local theatre. Tradesmen practiced their crafts—mainly repairing what existed, but sometimes producing new goods for trade within the town, or to a much lesser extent, without. A half-dozen doctors and as many nurses opened a clinic, further staffed by volunteers, and supplied with captured medical equipment from Sobibor and Treblinka.
Yet Biali was not prosperous. The traditional scourges of war, disease and hunger, held the little town in their thrall, despite the efforts of the community leaders, the doctors and nurses. By the second week of June most of the sayeret, like much of the rest of the population, had come down with the shilshul, or as they often put it in English, the shits. Ido came equipped to deal with traumatic injuries, not diarrhea. Feldhandler had only brought a couple of packages of commercial imodium, which quickly ran out between the needs of the commandos, and the children of Biali—for whom the commandos sacrificed many doses. Similarly, there were no antibiotics, other than Ido’s basic load, and a few packages of oral doses that Feldhandler had packed away. Ido kept control these, dispensing them with particular stinginess. Yatom warned the men that venereal diseases were not covered under the limited medical plan.
Hunger made matters worse. With their rations depleted, other than a few surviving Powerbars, the sayeret was no better off than anybody else. The main foodstuffs were stored potatoes and beets from the previous year’s harvest, and a few early pickings from the nearby fields. Livestock consisted almost entirely of swine, which many of the Jews refused to eat—and many who did fell ill. Yatom encouraged his men to eat the pork, cooked very well, to supplement their meager rations. All but Mofaz and Rafi eventually did.
Sobel managed to foster a trickle of trade into Biali, using the the neighboring gentile village as a market for both Biali and the outside world. This yielded extra bread, meat and dairy products for the town, though in truth, Sobel’s effective coercion of Biali—Podlaski was the Jewish town’s real stock in trade. Jezek and Yatom disliked this, but had no choice but to tolerate it. Sobel the M acher indeed got things done.
Maintaining connections to the outside was a necessary risk. Yatom learned that the main east—west road to Biali had become little used after the massacre, and trade ran mostly through a track that intersected Biali-Podlaski. He feared that were the Germans to launch an attack, it would likely come down the little used east-west road from Lubin, called locally the Lubinstrasse, and he insisted that this avenue be mined. The risk of mining the Lubinstrasse was two-fold—that any trade down that road would be cut, or that a mine detonation might alert the Germans to partisan activity in the area. Though neither Jezek nor Sohel liked the idea, Yatom had several dozen of Sobibor’s mines sown on the road anyway. These were placed far from the town near the intersection of the Lubinstrasse with the north-south high road that ran to Chelm. A nearby forester’s track was also mined. Yatom hoped that if a German patrol hit a mine along the Lubinstrasse, they would not associate it with the isolated town, still five kilometers distant. On the other hand, if the Germans launched a major attack down the road, the mines would be critical to slowing the advance and giving Biali’s defenders time to man the town’s defenses.
Creating those defenses absorbed most of Yatom’s time and energy in the weeks following the sayeret’s arrival in Biali. With the aid of several Jewish engineers and an architect, Yatom designed and supervised the construction of Biali’s fortifications. Each day he set off with work crews, usually accompanied by De Jong and the architect, an Austrian named Natan Nudelman. Nudelman had made a career designing expensive villas, but now threw himself into the intricacies of making camouflaged fighting positions. Yatom and De Jong selected sites for dozens of small three and four man bunkers, intended to hold a single machinegun crew, or a few and submachine-gunners. The bunkers faced in all directions, towards anticipated enemy attacks, and in opposite directions in order to hit invaders from behind, and on every flank. Nudelrnan’s designs allowed the bunkers to be reasonably fortified and blend almost invisibly into the hills. Around each concentration of bunkers Yatom laid out a few more precious mines, supplemented by ad-hoc boobytraps, including many simple spiked trap holes that Yatom based on little more than what he’d seen in Vietnam War movies. The bunkers were built on all sides of the town, but concentrated to the north and west, where Yatom guessed an attack was most likely. In these areas the workers built a forward and secondary lines of bunkers, to give the defenders the chance to retreat. Around the town itself, four extra large bunkers were constructed, facing north, south, east and west, as a last defensive line.