Good God.
I raced towards the living room window as the sky above the river lit up in a juddering orange flash. The city was under attack. I’d lived through the bombing of Vilno; this was no aerial assault. Where were the roaring planes, the air-raid sirens? These explosions were coming from the streets, the very heart of the city.
About twenty minutes after the last blast, my neighbours began venturing out of their apartments and gathering on the streets below my window. I changed out of my uniform and went to join them. The first few Christmas revellers had returned from the Old Town, stumbling over the bridges.
Dazed and dusted, the survivors brought wild stories of cafes and bars reduced to rubble. A husband and wife had been enjoying a concert at the theatre when an explosion rocked the street outside. Everywhere they looked, German soldiers’ corpses were being loaded onto ambulances. For the first time since the invasion, the city was plunged into confusion, but this time, it was the Germans on the back foot. The streets were full of frantic Nazis dashing in all directions, trying to find out what had happened, while police cars and fire trucks screamed from scene to scene. It seemed that half the city was on fire.
A crawling flotilla of loudspeaker trucks came next over the bridges, announcing a curfew. We returned to our apartments, to windowside vigils and silent radios. Either the bombers had hit the transmitters, or the Germans had taken themselves off air.
At 11.50pm, my telephone rang.
Gusta Davison, I was sure of it. Her final coded message wasn’t an address, it was a warning. X = 10.00pm, the first wave of bombs.
‘Hello?’
‘Harry, I’ve been ringing for ages. Thank God you’re safe.’
‘Who is this?’
‘Julian Schermer. I thought you might be caught up in all this.’
‘I was out on Traguta, until the curfew. What’s happening?’
‘Jewish terrorists. They’ve blown up cafes and bars, God knows what else. Bridges, boats, you name it.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘The bastards will be utterly crushed, mark my words. You do realise what this means?’
‘Sir?’
‘There’s no way I can leave town in the middle of this shit-storm.’
‘Oh. The funeral.’
‘We wouldn’t have got through to Lublin anyway, they took out the main signal box. I’ve shut down all buses, trams and trains.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
This was it. Gusta Tova Draenger had answered my prayers. With a valid reason not to attend the funeral – and they didn’t get any more valid than the bombing of the seat of the Generalgouvernment - I would be free of Harry Mohnke’s cursed family for good.
‘I’m afraid I won’t be leaving Pomorska for days,’ Scherer said. ‘But it doesn’t mean you can’t go by yourself. Why don’t you take my driver?’
‘To Dahme? It’s a thousand miles by car.’
‘Get a couple more hours sleep, leave bright and early and you’ll make it in plenty of time.’
‘It’s a very considerate offer.’
‘What time shall I tell Kahlert, four, five?’
‘I can’t go back to bed with this going on.’
There was a lot of shouting in the background, then Scherer broke off to add his own bark.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, a minute later. ‘Do you mean you’re ready to leave now then?’
‘If you’re not leaving, sir, neither am I.’
‘Otto’s not my father, Harry.’
‘And I know what he’d tell me, if he could: when you’re under attack, son, stand and fight your corner. How can I run when we’re being blown to pieces in the streets?’
‘We can manage without you for the day.’
‘Aunt Kath can cope without me. Right here is where I can do the most good. Wherever they are, this Jewish menace can be traced back to the Ghetto. With my knowledge of informants, there’s nobody better placed to root it out. The first twenty-four hours will be vital. If I’m stuck in Dahme, I won’t be able to do a thing. God forbid, if there are more attacks, I won’t even be able to get back.’
‘That thought had crossed my mind,’ Scherer said. ‘There’s Plaszow, too, of course. Kommandant Mueller’s lost men at the Gipsy Club. When you didn’t answer the phone, that where I thought you were you were.’ He paused. ‘You know, it’s amazing how much you sound like him.’
‘Who?’
‘Your father. Quite uncanny.’
‘Who did we lose sir, at the Gipsy Club?’
‘Knaup, Leopold, Thiele and Sefas. That we know of. And that’s just one café.’
‘God damn it. I should be at Plaszow.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Knaup and Sefas were Blockfuhrers. We’re going to be short-handed. What if the prisoners have bombs too? They might be planning a break out.’
Evidently Scherer hadn’t thought of this.
‘I’ll have Kahlert pick you up,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous to be out by yourself.’
‘Thank-you, sir. Could you contact Kath Becker on my behalf?’
‘Of course. I shall send a cable from Elsa and myself in the morning.’
‘Thank-you.’
‘They’ll pay for this, son. By the time I’m through with them, they’ll be begging for the gas chambers.’
Separated from the Old Town by seven miles and as many hilltops, Plaszow wasn’t troubled by the explosions that shook the windows of Podgorze. At midnight I found the camp at rest, the prisoners’ barracks dark and quiet. My own guess was that Szei Dreiblatt had no idea that his handiwork had been put to such spectacular use. The youths I’d seen him training two days ago had probably escaped back to the Ghetto that night to make more bombs; Dreiblatt’s work was done.
The only noise I could hear now was coming from the guards’ kitchen, where an emergency meeting was taking place. I entered the room and squeezed in at the corner of one of the packed tables.
‘Thought you had a pass for the holidays,’ Kruger whispered on my right, shifting his chair to accommodate mine. Nobody knew about my father’s funeral. I’d told Kommander Mueller I didn’t want a fuss.
‘No trains running,’ I said. ‘It’s bedlam out there.’
The mood in the room had already passed from shock to anger. Revenge was on the cards, an eye for an eye. If four Germans had died in the attack, each barrack should lose four Jews. The men were currently arguing whether their psychotic Kommandant would stop screaming into his telephone long enough to authorise reprisals, or whether they should seize the moment and act unilaterally, out of loyalty to their fallen comrades. A vote was being taken round the tables. It seemed close, a ‘Yes’ for every ‘No’, but I was worried. The crowd scented blood.
‘I say we wait,’ I said, when my turn came. ‘Right now, our Jews don’t know what’s happened. Why wake them up and give them a chance to gloat? So we shoot four dead. It won’t begin to wipe the grins off their faces. We’d need to liquidate four hundred to even come close.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Fricke said opposite. ‘Where do I start?’
But his bluster failed to convince. In the end, the guards were split fifty-fifty and decided to await further instructions. Kommandant. Mueller scared the Germans almost as much as he did the Jews.
In the aftermath of the attack, more detailed reports began to circulate. Eight of Gusta Davison’s Akiva Youth units had broken loose from the Ghetto at lunchtime on the 22nd, joined by members of the Jewish Fighting Organisation and partisans from the Communist People’s Army, comprising forty fighters in total. Signs of an upsurge in underground activity were first noted shortly afterwards : small cells of resistance fighters spent the afternoon hanging protest flags in Matejko Square, on Batory Street and, most audaciously, from the great bridges of Pilsudski and Debinicki, two men suspended above the Vistula on harness and rope. But the authorities’ were too busy preparing for Christmas to pay much attention, as Gusta had hoped. Last
minute gift shopping, veritable feasts to be carted home after work, office parties to head back out for. The resistance had the run of the city.
As dusk descended on the teeming Old Market Square, groups of wan youths left flowers in a shrine for Adam Mickiewicz, the National Poet whose statue was torn down by the invaders. Bundles of leaflets blew like confetti in the surrounding streets, exhorting Poles to rise up against their oppressors.
At 10pm, fighters approached the Café Cyganeria on Szpitalna Street, a popular meeting place for the SS and Gestapo. Three Jews ran into the loud, smoke-filled room, opened fire with pistols, lobbed home-made grenades across the tables and fled. Eleven Germans died, and many more were wounded. Two similar attacks were launched simultaneously, at the Esplanada and Zakopianka, an Officer’ Club. It wasn’t just cafes and bars. Railroad stations were sabotaged, military garages blown up and soldiers assassinated. Two coast-guard boats were sunk on the Vistula. A major assault on the Sztuka Theatre was supposed to have been the crowning glory, with its capacity crowd of Nazi sitting ducks. But a last minute change to the bill brought a bigger Polish audience than expected. Frustrated, the bombers aborted, venting their frustration on a startled posse of Gestapo agents outside the lobby, and eventually seizing their weapons. While the attacks were underway, another cell started compounding the chaos by phoning in dozens of hoax calls to the emergency services. It must have seemed to Julian Scherer that half the city was on fire.
The next morning, the transfer of prisoners from the Ghetto was halted in an attempt to contain the insurrection. But, thanks to me, news had already spread to the barracks. I’d spent the rest of the night on patrol, pushing notes under doors, detailing what I knew. I lingered long enough to see a candle flicker to life and hear an excited gasp, ‘The Gipsy Club’s been blown up!’ or ‘Good job Shimon and Syzmek!’. The effect on the prisoners’ morale the next day was profound. Old men were revitalised in a way that put Tadeus Pankiewicz’s hair-dye to shame. Instead of trudging through the mud, prisoners bounced with a spring in their stride, hailing each other with hugs and embraces. It didn’t take long for a new work-song to pass from detail to detail, sung to the jaunty tune of Horst Wessel:
We Jews, we’re not dead yet!
God is watching over us! God is watching over us!
Hitler will end up hanging upside down.
Good health to him and cholera, too!
We’ll slice him into little pieces!
When the camp authorities prohibited the verse, the prisoners started humming. This infuriated the guards even more, it sounded like the prisoners were humming the Nazi Party’s anthem. Even Kommandant Mueller couldn’t ban that.
In the end, he didn’t need to. Jewish jubilation was short-lived. December 22nd was meant to herald a new era of resistance. Instead it turned out to be the swan-song. Gusta’s young fighters, barely out of their teens, made one crucial tactical mistake, agreeing to rendezvous at a single safe-house after the attacks instead of dispersing throughout the city.
It didn’t help that two of the members moonlit as Gestapo informers. Julek Appel and Nathan Weismann were able to get word to their paymasters; German soldiers were lying in wait outside 24 Skawinska Street before the fighters arrived. A fierce battle broke out in the streets of Kazimierz, lasting several hours. By dawn on the 23rd, half a dozen more Germans had been injured. But three-quarters of the resistance were either dead or in Gestapo custody.
When news of this defeat was broadcast throughout Plaszow at lunch, all humming stopped.
After putting in a twenty-hour shift, I was summoned to Kommandant Mueller’s office, where it was explained that I’d be escorted back to the city, ‘to rest’.
Even for a friend of Scherer’s, such indulgence was unheard of at Plaszow, the guards being worked almost as mercilessly as the prisoners. Naturally, I feared the worst: somebody had seen me delivering messages to the barracks. But there was nothing to be done at such short notice; my escort was waiting outside. We left immediately. I hardly need say the twenty-minute ride was the single-most terrifying experience of my life. But when the driver failed to deliver me to the basement at Pomorska HQ and stopped instead at my corner of Tragutta and Dabrowskiego, I stumbled out, drunk with relief.
No Gestapo agents lurked inside the lobby; my apartment was exactly as I’d left it.
I took a long, hot bath and slowly realised what had happened. Mueller didn’t let on, but the order to relieve must have come from Julian Scherer himself. Otto Mohnke was being buried in the morning. If Harry couldn’t be at his father’s service, at least he could observe the day at home, in peace.
The next morning, December 24th, I rose bright and early. Avoiding Jozefinska, I entered the Ghetto via the Zgody Square gate and sought a private audience with the pharmacist. As usual, Pankiewicz knew enough to put my mind at ease. The betrayal of Skawinska Street was a set-back, but not fatal. The Undergound was still active. Survivors had regrouped outside the confines of Cracow, withdrawing into the forests to construct bunkers and hiding places. Pankiewicz wouldn’t divulge names or specific locations, and I didn’t blame him. Three-quarters of the command structure were still intact (Gusta, Marek and Dolek Libeskind), and needed to be preserved at all costs.
I returned to the apartment to chronicle the attacks that had brought the city to an extraordinary – if brief - stand-still. As I was writing, a worry-worm began to twist in my stomach, and it took a few pages to realise why. There’d been a lot of noise that morning as the city regained its equilibrium after the attacks, but I’d been able to write through it. The wealthy Aryans of Podgorze were bundling their families into automobiles, leaving the city for country cottages and the traditional Christmas Eve. Nothing, not even armed insurrection, came between a Pole and his fried carp and beetroot supper.
Hungry at the thought, I boiled an egg for breakfast. As I mopped my yolk with a slice of buttered toast, my knife started vibrating on the table-top. From beyond the window came the low lumbering rumble of heavy-duty vehicles, as if my neighbours were escaping en masse in a fleet of omnibuses. Empty plate in hand, I made my way over to the glass. As I looked out, the plate slipped through my fingers and broke on the floorboards.
Tragutta was filling with a convoy of German army trucks.
The first one stopped a hundred metres away on Dabrowskiego, and four more came to a halt behind it. SS Soldiers jumped down and spread out across the street, setting up a series of security cordons, a tight dragnet with my apartment block dead centre.
I jumped across the room, grabbed my ledger, thrust it into the safe, slammed the door, set the lock and hooked the Caravaggio back into place. Running out to the corridor, I stopped at the railing, peered down through the four flights of concentric rectangles to the coffin-shaped patch of light on the lobby floor.
No echoing march of boots, no bobbing throng of helmets.
Where had they got to?
A minute ago the SS were right outside the front door.
Back at my living room window, I watched the last of the soldiers run past my building towards the corner of Kacik Street, where a batalion of machine-gunners were setting up along the pavement, aiming their sights on the balcony above the entrance of a three-story apartment block, the one sandstone building sandwiched between a row of dark red-bricks. It was this otherwise non-descript doorway that the last of the SS squadron now filed through, flooding into the lobby. Back on the pavement opposite, I saw Amon Goethe and Wilhelm Kunde behind the machine-gunners, the latter holding an ear-phone to the side of his head and berating the radio-signaller crouched at his side.
Then, on Kunde’s order, the gunners opened fire. MG42 rounds decimated the balcony’s iron railings and glass shattered in a crystallised cascade. After a short blast, the guns fell silent. The building seemed to exhale, releasing a cloud of dust and smoke through the ragged remains of the window frame. But the respite was illusory: the end of the first onslaught signalled the commencement of a sec
ond attack, pincer-style. The squadron stormed the apartment from the inside and once again the window lit up with gunfire. A series of distinct pops went off off between the blitzkrieg as the inhabitants attempted to fight back, but such a one side battle could only end one-way, and did. After several minutes of silence, the SS squadron leader appeared on the balcony and gestured to Goethe and Kunde. Two targets, both dead.
I learned later that the men were Idek Tenenbaum and Dolek Liebeskind. Their safe-house on the edge of the Ghetto, less than two hundred metres from my own and I’d never known. It was the Command Post for the 22nd December attacks. In addition to their bodies, the SS brought out the duplicating machine used to print the leaflets distributed in the Old Market Square, and a cache of arms, money and uniforms used that night.
Two German soldiers were killed in the shoot-out, and four more wounded. The distinct pops I heard were not the sound of the Jewish Resistance fighting back, but taking their own lives. First Dolek shot Idek, then turned the pistol on himself.
55
In the aftermath of the Cyganeria crack-down, I was so paranoid about my ledgers that I decided not to write another word. If the Gestapo ever found my books, they could shut down the whole of the Underground in a day. The books were bound with a tatty piece of string, but they might as well have been gift-wrapped. Even taking a volume out the safe to glance through was enough to give me a heart attack. Part of me wanted to drop the whole lot in the sink, douse them with gasoline and watch them go up in smoke. At least that way no harm would come.
But I couldn’t. Writing had become a compulsion for me. I didn’t know how to stop. Like an addict, I feared that one day I’d break down and reach for the ink-pot. If I couldn’t trust myself, I would have to physically remove the temptation. And the books weren’t going anywhere. So I made another pledge: I would not return to Traguta Street until the war was over.
***
The swift elimination of Commander Dolek Liebeskind on Christmas Eve 1942 was considered a victory for Julian Scherer, who took the unprecedented step of cabling Adolf Hitler on December 25th to announce the uprising had been quashed. It is not known how this telegram was received, for that same morning Hitler received grim news from Stalingrad. German troops were encircled and outnumbered by the Red Army, in temperatures of -25 degrees. Hitler sent the following telegram to General Friedrich von Paulus: ‘You should enter the New Year with the unshakeable confidence that I and the whole German Wehrmacht will do everything in our power to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad’. Neither is it known if General Paulus was aware of the attacks in Cracow. If so, we may speculate that the Führer’s words provided little comfort. The German Wehrmacht hadn’t been able to defend the jewel of the Generalegouvernment, never mind the wilds of Southern Russia.
I Am Juden Page 47