The Promised Land (All My Love, Detrick Series) (All My Love Detrick Book 3)

by Roberta Kagan

  “We know where you live. We’ll find you. And if you don’t come through . . . well, like I said, we’ll find you.”

  Konrad shivered. Just how much did they know about the places he went and the things he did? The favela? Did they know about the favela? Did they know about his having sexual relations with other men? Would they ever reveal that? The thought sent a pang of fear up his spine. Maybe they were just toying with him, and they already knew how to find the others, because if they were following him that would lead them right to the other Nazis. Or maybe they were just faking; maybe they didn’t know where he was living. Konrad was afraid to ask any questions, he couldn’t wait to leave, to run out of this terrible place; to escape from the feelings of weakness that were squeezing his heart. Maybe, just maybe, they knew where all of the Nazis were and they just wanted Konrad to betray his loyalty to the party, to show how pathetic he was. There were so many different possibilities, but no answers.

  “Get out of here you snail, you can go now. If we find out that this plan has been compromised in any way, you can consider yourself a dead man. So don’t try anything foolish. Understand, Nazi boy?”

  “Yes,” Konrad panted.

  “Go.”

  Konrad ran out the door of the building. Once outside he leaned against the brick wall trying to catch his breath. He liked Blau, but he had no choice; it was Blau or him. A stream of urine ran down the leg of his pants, pooling on the sidewalk. Konrad hated himself for what he must do.

  Chapter 65

  Sunday morning came and the sun burned in the sky like a golden fire. Katja bathed and then put on her prettiest dress. It was white with a pattern of red roses gathered to accent her tiny waist. Even though her hair had natural curls, she’d set it in pin curls the night before to make them even more defined. She took two tortoiseshell hair combs that her mother had given her as a gift and pulled her hair back on each side securing it with the combs. Then she looked in the mirror and applied a light coat of red lipstick, which she then put into her handbag. Satisfied with her appearance, she brewed a pot of coffee and waited for Elan to arrive.

  He was on time, one o’clock exactly.

  “You look wonderful,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I am, in fact.” Katja had been so excited that she’d forgotten to eat breakfast.

  “Good. I have a great place for lunch.”

  Elan opened the car door and helped Katja inside. Then they rode up the coast. The sea met the sky like a bed of sapphires against a softly waving blanket of blue topaz. Rising up behind the water were golden mountains as strong and as old as the holy land itself. Elan reached for Katja’s hand and gently squeezed it.

  “Our home is a beautiful place.”

  “It is,” she said.

  They stopped at a small café right on the water. The host sat them at a table outside with a large red and white umbrella and matching tablecloth.

  “Do you know what you would like?” Elan asked, after Katja had a few minutes to look at the menu.

  She shrugged. “You’ve been here before?”

  ‘Yes, would you like me to order?” he asked.

  “I would,” she said. Katja liked it when Elan took charge.

  They ate salad made from large chunks of ruby red tomatoes and crisp cucumbers that tasted as fresh and cool as the breeze off the water. Then they had falafel and hummus rolled in pita bread. Elan ordered so much food that Katja felt as if she would burst.

  “I can’t possibly eat another bite.”

  He laughed. “You hardly ate at all.”

  “But I did.”

  He laughed again. His appetite was hearty.

  When they finished, Elan opened the car door and Katja slid back into the passenger seat. As he went around to hop in on the driver’s side, she quickly reapplied her lipstick. It was so strange for her to be this concerned about her appearance.

  Elan turned on the radio and he sang along with the American tunes that Katja had heard the other night. She loved the rhythm.

  “I wish I could take you to see some of these singers when they play live,” he said.

  “Do they come to Israel?”

  “I don’t know, but I am going to keep my eyes open. And if they do, then we’ll go.”

  She smiled at him. He had an easy baritone voice, with lots of beat. She’d never slept with a man, but Elan ignited a desire inside of her that made her think of things she’d never tried.

  “We’re here,” Elan said, pulling the car up to a building in the middle of the desert. “It’s a kibbutz.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “So, why are we here?”

  “You’ll see,” he said, getting out of the car. He opened her door and reached for her hand. “Come…let me show you something.”

  Katja walked beside him, the heels of her shoes sinking into the earth. He helped her up a hill and they entered the white stone building.

  “Elan!” a male voice called out. “Shalom.”

  “Shalom,” Elan answered. “I brought a friend.”

  “I can see that, and a pretty one.”

  Elan laughed. “That she is. This is Katja. She shares your last name.”

  “Zuckerman?”

  “Yes, I am Katja Zuckerman,” Katja said.

  “This is Yitzhak Zuckerman, any relation?” Elan asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Katja said. “But, shalom, it’s nice to meet you.”

  “Follow me; I’d like you to meet my wife,” Yitzhak said.

  They walked through a long hall and out the back door.

  “Zivia,” Yitzhak called. “Elan’s here and he has brought with him a friend.”

  A woman, prematurely aged but still beautiful—with wavy dark hair sprinkled with threads as silver as the leaves of the olive trees—came walking over. Her eyes were gently mapped with spiderweb lines and when she focused her gaze on Katja it felt as if Zivia could see into her soul.

  “This is my wife, Zivia,” Yitzhak said. “This is Elan’s friend, Katja.”

  “Shalom.”

  “Shalom and welcome to our humble home,” Zivia said, tilting her head.

  Just then an attractive man came over and hugged Elan. “Shalom, my brother,” he said.

  “Katja, this is Tuvia. Watch out for him, he’s a flirt.”

  Tuvia laughed. “Shalom, Katja. Welcome.”

  “Shalom,” she said.

  “Let me get you something to eat,” Zivia said.

  “We just ate, but thank you,” Elan answered.

  “But you must eat. Come, at least you’ll have some fruit. I insist,” Yitzhak said.

  They followed him into the kitchen.

  Katja felt the immediate welcome of a warm embrace from Elan’s friends.

  They all sat down at a handmade wooden table while behind them a big fan circulated the air. In a few minutes, Zivia brought out a platter of oranges, persimmons, and bananas, all ripe, fresh, and appealing.

  “I brought Katja here because I wanted you to tell her your stories. It’s important to me that she understands why I feel I must stay in the army and defend this country, even if I ever take a wife,” Elan said.

  Katja shot him a glance. A wife?

  “Our stories.” Yitzhak nodded his head and sighed. He knew that he must keep telling the world what had happened so that it was never forgotten. “Hmm . . . all right. Katja would you like to hear a story?”

  She smiled. “Of course.” She had no idea what Elan had in mind, but she could see him out of the corner of her eye and his face was grave and serious.

  “Then I am going to tell you,” Yitzhak said.

  “You know what this place, this kibbutz, is called?” Yitzhak spread his arms, indicating the land that they were on.

  She shook her head.

  “This is the Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters. You know what the Warsaw Ghetto was?”

  “No,” Katja said.

  “Whe
n the Nazis came and took us from our homes, they put us all in a ghetto. My wife, Zivia, Tuvia, and I were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.”

  Katja sat glued to his every word.

  “Let me start at the beginning. So, the Gestapo would come to the house of a Jew and force everyone to leave. Then the Nazis would steal everything that the Jews had in their house. But more importantly, they sent the Jews to ghettos. These were small areas enclosed by walls and barbed wire. The three of us, Zivia, Tuvia, and I, met in the ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. It was a terrible place, dirty, full of disease with no way to escape . . . but the worst part about it was the “quotas.” What are quotas you ask?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Well, you see, the Nazis had plans for us. Plans we knew nothing about. We only knew that every day, the trains were loaded with people. The Judenrats, these were Jews who worked with the Nazis, had to make lists of the names of people who they chose to send on the trains. Every day they had to meet a quota. The Judenrats were bastards who were willing to sell out their own people to save themselves. They were dangerous; we had to watch out for them. In many ways, they were worse than the Nazis.

  Anyway, so back to the story . . . These people, the ones that were chosen to be sent on the trains, they were being sent to extermination camps. At first, we didn’t know. But later, we did. You know what is an extermination camp?”

  Katja had heard a little about the camps from the survivors. They didn’t like to talk about it very much. “I know a little.”

  “Well, the Nazis had decided that we Jews had no right to live. So they were going to annihilate our entire race. In fact, they were very systematic about it.”

  She had heard bits and pieces. Katja nodded her head.

  “They built camps, concentration camps. Some of the camps were work camps and some were strictly death camps. Now, not that you couldn’t die in a work camp, because even if you were valuable to the Nazis they might kill you anyway, but if you had a skill that they needed, you had a better chance of surviving. We, in the ghetto, still didn’t know about these camps yet.” He shrugged, throwing his hands up.

  “Anyway, so, every day the box cars were loaded, so full that the people had to stand crushed together without air, food, or water. In the summer, I was told it was so hot that all the babies would die well before the trains arrived at the camp. All of us in the Ghetto were seeing these trains, but still we didn’t know where they were going until escapees from the camps came to tell us. At first, we didn’t believe them. We didn’t want to believe them. They said that there were mass executions in gas chambers; hundreds of people killed at a time, then the bodies burned in crematoriums right in the camps. This news terrified us, but at the same time, it empowered us. We knew we were doomed, whether we were chosen to go on the train that day or the next, we would all eventually be killed. Having this knowledge helped us make a decision.

  “We had secret meetings, meetings we had to keep from the Judenrats. But a lot of people joined; at one of these meetings, we all decided that if we were to die, then we were going to die fighting. We had to make a plan; Yes? So, we all met in an apartment in one of the buildings. We discussed how we would kill as many Nazis as possible before they did us all in. But how? Where and how could we get guns? When should we rebel?

  “Passover was coming and most of us were trying to make plans for a small celebration, but when we understood that the Nazis were planning to kill all the Jews, we decided to put our holiday plans on hold. Instead, we chose Passover as the date of our uprising. We learned that the Nazis were going to liquidate the ghetto, send in their troops, and take all of us to camps where we would surely die.

  “As fate would have it, they planned to do this on the eve of Hitler’s birthday, April 19, 1943. Ahh . . . we knew this was the perfect day for a fight. We decided to give Hitler a real surprise, a birthday present he would never forget. There were seven hundred and fifty of us. We would be going against a well-trained, well-armed troop of at least twice as many Germans,” Yitzhak said.

  “Now, for me, this was a hard thing to do, not because I was afraid to die, but because for the first time in my life, I had found love and I was afraid for the life of the woman I loved. I didn’t want to see her hurt; I couldn’t bear the thought of her suffering. Zivia was all I had; she had become my whole world. If I it became necessary or had been possible, I would have died to save her from our bleak future in the ghetto or the camps. But, of course, this was not an option. In the Warsaw Ghetto, my life was worth less than the trash in the streets, so I had no bargaining power. I talked to Zivia after the meeting, I held her hands, and I looked into her eyes. I told her of my fears; I told her that I was powerless to save her. I cried. I could do nothing else. So, I cried. She held me. She was and is a strong woman, my Zivia.

  “Then she insisted that we had to fight. ‘If we don’t go down fighting, she said, than the Nazis will have won.’ I knew that there was no other option so I nodded in agreement and said a quiet prayer to God in hopes that Zivia would not be killed. I didn’t sleep well that night or the nights that followed. But we, all of us Jews, began to prepare for what was to be the biggest uprising against Hitler that the Nazis had ever known.

  “We started to buy guns and ammunition on the black market, most of them from the Polish underground; they hated the Nazis almost as much as we did. We stored the guns and ammunition. In order to make the Nazi guards think there were more of us than there really were, we decided to set up shooting posts all over the ghetto. Many of these posts were to be manned by just one person, a man or a woman, but because the gunfire would come from all over the place, the sons of bitches would think there were lots of us, yes? It was our plan.

  “Everything was set to go. We dug underground escape routes that led into the forest. We were prepared to leave the ghetto or die trying. Either way, we would not go into the train cars willingly.

  “On the day that the fighting began, the soldiers came strutting through the ghetto, clicking their heels. I can still see them, so proud and arrogant; Hitler’s superior race at work. I remember turning to Zivia and taking her hand, kissing her palm, then kissing her lips gently, cherishing the moment and holding her close to me. I said, and I can still remember the words ‘Zivia, I love you, and if we are to die today, then I pray that God will let us die together.’

  “She held me close. When I finally let go, I saw that her face was wet with tears. I kissed those tears one by one. Still, I can taste the salt on my tongue. You see, we did not know if we would be alive the next day. My biggest fear was that I would survive and she would not. And I was so afraid, because life without her would have been unbearable.

  We made it through the first day. You should have seen the faces on those Nazis when they were walking through the ghetto as they always did, unaware, unafraid, and then the shooting began. At first they just stood there, they couldn’t believe we were fighting back. Then, you know what they did, they ran . . .” He laughed. “They ran.” He laughed again. “You should have seen the cowards in their uniforms, running down the street.”

  He slammed his fist on the table. “It was such a gratifying sight to see. But they came back and the fighting escalated. We fought with everything we had; men, women, and even children fought side by side. We fought so hard that they couldn’t beat us. In fact, Hitler called out his army. Would you believe it? He needed his army to fight against a small group of starving, poorly-armed Jews. He set them on us, but still we continued, with homemade bombs, with whatever ammunition we had gathered. We rained down on them like the fires of hell. For a month we held them off. It was a tremendous victory. There were dead Nazis in the streets.

  “But then they bombed the synagogue. The blast and the fire lit up the sky like it was the end of the world, the buildings shook from the blast. The Nazis took torches and ran through the streets, starting fires that sent black smoke swirling through the tiny apartments where we huddled. Our ammunitio
n was almost gone. We knew we were close to being finished. So . . . with one last ditch effort we blasted them with all we had. Then, those of us who could get out, escaped through the underground tunnel into the forest. The smoke from the fires was so thick that you could not see in front of you. I remember I grabbed Zivia’s hand and we ran coughing and choking, our faces blackened with smoke, through the underground tunnel. Zivia fell and I lifted her into my arms and carried her the rest of the way. I don’t know how we made it out. There was no air to breathe.

  “Once we entered the forest, I coughed and vomited. Zivia was not conscious so I continued to carry her. It seemed as if I ran for hours, but I cannot tell you how long it was before I finally stopped, falling over into the cool grass, hidden by the trees of the forest. For a few minutes, we both lay there. I thought she was dead. I didn’t want to know if she was. I wanted to believe that she was alive. I prayed, I cried. And then suddenly, from out of nowhere, the hand of God reached down and blessed us, and Zivia began gasping for air. I held her in my arms and patted her back until she vomited black mucus. Then Zivia began to laugh between coughing, and I, too, began to laugh. We kissed, mixing the sweat and ash on our faces. Both of us were filled with joy. We were alive, and with the help of God, we were together.”

  “For the next two years, Zivia and I joined with a group of partisans living off the fat of the land. It was there that we found my dear friend, Tuvia again. We were so happy to see that he, too, had survived. We all stole what food we could find from local farms, fished in streams when we could, ate lots of raw potatoes, but most of all we kept moving. The winters were hard, but we made it, and when the war was over Zivia and I wanted no part of Europe any more. It had been our dream to come to Palestine, and so once Palestine became Israel, we came here, to our homeland, and built this kibbutz in honor of the uprising and to remember those who died in the battle.”

  Katja could not speak. The story had moved her to tears. She looked over at Zivia who was smiling at her.

  “I know it’s a sad story,” Zivia said, “But it is a happy one, too. We are here, here in Israel. Home at last. And, we are the lucky ones. We didn’t end up in the camps like lots of others did.”