The fifth engine and the connected chambers remained intact. The teams assigned lay scattered near the platform, where SS bullets had found them. Shapira gritted his teeth and pressed on toward the last engine, moving on through the muffled sounds of machinegun fire and grenade explosions. He hardly registered the fact that the SS had begun to shell Sandler’s positions with the battalion mortars and were laying down smoke for a deliberate assault. Around the flanks of the chamber complex, SS teams were already overlapping the surviving demolition men, threatening to cut off their escape. Shapira wiped sweat and grime from his face and tried to shake free of the clogged and congested feeling in his head. He reached the last engine and hoisted himself up onto the concrete. The fires engulfing the nearby death chambers signed Shapira’s uniform and exposed skin. Shapira found a shadowed behind of the undamaged gas chambers and keyed his radio three times, signaling Chaim and Sandler to withdraw. Shapira repeated the order and then tossed the small personal radio into one of the fires raging nearby. He followed that with his NVGs and the ceramic plates from his protective vest. He crawled back several meters toward the last engine, pausing to fire off the last rounds from his Tavor at an advancing German squad. Shapira placed his own bomb under the engine. It was especially powerful, as Roskovsky had goosed it with extra C-4. He placed the empty Tavor next to the bomb, and played out his detonation cord, crawling back into into the camp, finding cover in the space between the two chambers that the engine fed. He pressed himself fiat between the sturdy buildings and ignited the charge.
The engine blew apart, showering debris over dozens of meters, and blowing in the back wall of one of the attached chambers Though dazed by the explosion, Shapira tossed his last Israeli grenade at another approaching team of SS and followed that with a pair of German stick grenades.
Shapira crawled between the gas chambers, toward the camp, as German soldiers started to flood the no-mans land behind him, chasing after a few surviving sappers, as mortars exploded along the treeline. He was hidden by the thick smoke belching from the destroyed buildings, and the drifting fog of the German barrages. Cries of triumph told Shapira that the SS had reached Sandler’s former positions in the woods Shapira moved to the front of the platform, where he could see into the death camp. In the plaza that would have served as the final assembly area for Belzec’s intended victims, Shapira watched as German squads forced a bucket brigade of Jewish prisoners forward in a desperate attempt to douse the flaming complex. When a Jew stumbled spilling his water the frightened and agitated SS guards shot him.
The Israeli lieutenant crawled toward the front of the intact gas chamber, which was the building on his left. Shapira was still hidden in the building’s shadow and the heavy low hanging smoke. He slowly rose to his feet. Germans were thickly about the front of the complex, but safe from enemy fire, they talked among themselves, or directed their attention to the fighting in the woods, or to the reluctant Jewish firemen. Nobody noticed him. Shapira stepped to the front of the building and ran three steps to the door. It was locked from the outside with a simple bar. He removed the bar and dashed inside the chamber, just before German bullets struck the swinging door and its frame.
The door banged shut, but didn’t lock. The only locking mechanism was the bar on the outside—after all, who would voluntarily lock themselves inside a gas chamber? Shapira sat back against the chamber wall, catching his breath. The sudden movement had cleared his head, and his hearing. But while his ears worked again, he felt blinded. The room was almost pitch black. A small thick window in the door reflected a tiny morsel of light from the burining buildings outside, but not enough to illuminate the chamber. Shapira turned on his red-filter flashlight and looked around
The chamber was not particularly big, about the size of a large living room. The floor was concrete. Drains, for human blood, piss and excrements were liberally scattered about. The walls were made thick wooden planking covered with plaster. Judging by the sounds of bullets smacking off of them, they were bullet proof. At the rear of the chamber was an opening for the pipe that pumped in the deadly exhaust gas from the engine outside. Next to it was an exhaust fan and a vent to evacuate fumes. A large door to the right rear was for emptying the chamber. The only ways in and out of the chamber were the front or rear doors, but Shapira assumed both were now guarded. Absent a suicidal attack out either door, he was stuck.
Shapira assessed his equipment. He had used up or thrown away everything except the flashlight, a combat knife, his Kevlar vest, and his pistol. He pulled the Sig from its holster and charged the weapon. He had thirteen rounds in the magazine and two spares.
Shapira was about to crawl to the rear of the chamber to check the back door, just for the hell of it, when somebody pulled open the front door and tossed a stick grenade into the building. The grenade skittered along the smooth empty floor to the back of the room. Shapira dived into the left front corner of the chamber and huddled in a fetal position awaiting the explosion. German stick grenades were blast weapons without much shrapnel, but the concussion could kill, especially in an enclosed space. The blast wave struck the wall above Shapira, with much of its force dispersed through the fans and ducts in the back. Though partially deafened again, and badly shaken, Shapira was otherwise uninjured. His training kicked in, and he forced himself to turn about in the ink dark room to face what he knew was coming next—an assault.
Wan morning light and the glow of the nearby burning buildings lit the opposite wall. A second later the macabre shadow of a hunched SS man with a bayoneted rifle fell onto the floor. The doomed trooper followed his shadow into the room. From his position pressed back against the front wall Shapira raised the Sig and put two rounds into the soldier. A second man entered quickly and turned toward Shapira, but the Israeli lieutenant easily shot him down too. Shapira shot at a third man who poked his head his head forward, the bullet tearing off the top of his cranium. The German and his brains tumbled back from the entrance onto another man man who blindly emptied an MP-40 magazine into the room, missing Shapira entirely. Shapira shifted his position a meter into the room and from the darkness pumped two rounds into the MP-40 gunner, then pressed himself back against the wall. A shouting German officer pushed on the door and slammed it shut.
Shapira took a deep breath and tried to shake out the cobwebs. He removed the half-emptied magazine and replaced it with a fresh one from muscle memory—the half-magazine went into a pocket. Shapira knew that he didn’t have much time He had to decide whether to live or die.
Wirth had noticed the assault on Shapira’s chamber from the corner of his eye, as he directed one of the Jewish fire gangs towa an SS man toss a grenade and heard the explosion. Before he could stop them, a team of three riflemen, pushed on by a sergeant, rushed at the chamber. Wirth saw the flash of pistol shots reflect off the white plaster interior wall and two men disappear inside. Wirth ran toward the gas chamber as another SS man fell at the threshold. The SS sergeant fired his submachinegun wildly into the doorway, and then fell back dead. Wirth reached the chamber and slammed the heavy door shut, pushing through the big iron bold behind it, locking it in place.
Opificius, who had been standing next to Wirth, watched all this in stunned amazement. Had the cowardly camp commander really run forward—rashly and bravely—to protect his men? That didn’t seem like Wirth. Opificius pulled out his Walther PPK, and strode over to the gas chamber. He stepped unconcernedly over the two dead SS troopers sprawled at the entrance, to where Wirth leaned against the front wall of the building, breathing heavily.