by David Safier
The cash office was no more than two empty counters. The safes where the Jewish collaborators hoarded their money were obviously kept somewhere else. The bag with the guns was standing on the filthy floor, and there was a pack of cards lying beside it in the dust. The two guards had probably been playing cards—to divide up the money they thought the resistance fighters were going to pay—sitting beside the seized arms.
The carrion eater and the bearded falsetto were both astonished to see me walking through the room as if I owned the place. They were even more astounded when I said calmly, “Give me the bag!”
“Where’s the money?” Carrion eater wanted to know.
“You’re not getting any!”
For a moment they both couldn’t speak. The bearded falsetto found his voice first. “What did you say?”
“We aren’t going to give you any money,” I explained, and smiled as if I were talking to children who were a bit slow on the uptake.
Carrion eater pulled his truncheon out of his belt.
“You give me the guns and we won’t kill you,” I explained, not too quickly, but not too slowly, either, to stop him from hitting me. “The ŻOB have surrounded the bank. If I don’t get back with the bag in the next five minutes, then our people will come in and shoot you.”
They couldn’t tell if I was bluffing or not. But they were bound to have heard that the ŻOB had shot several Jewish collaborators in the past few weeks and would certainly not stop at shooting a couple of Polish policemen.
Before their doubts got out of hand, I said as confidently as I could, “So hand over the bag, then!” sounding as if I really did have power over life and death as far as they were concerned.
Instead the carrion eater ran to one of the windows and tried to look out through the boards to see if he could see anything happening outside. Of course he couldn’t see any resistance fighters. They were about as likely as a bunch of talking rabbits standing in front of the bank. I was telling a story, just like Hannah used to, only this one was going to save my life.
“I can’t see anyone,” carrion eater said to the bearded falsetto. But he didn’t dare go outside to take a look. What if everything I’d said was true and he was shot on the spot?
“Five minutes!” I said, ignoring him. “Then the bag has to be outside the door.”
I went to the door as calmly as I could. I reached for the door handle, but the carrion eater grabbed my shoulder and said, “You are staying here!”
“You’re sure you want me to stay?” I asked, and looked him straight in the eye.
“As a hostage!” he thundered, and his foul breath blew straight into my face.
“And the price for the guns plus you,” the bearded falsetto added, “is four hundred thousand zlotys!”
“Okay,” I said, freed my shoulder out of the carrion eater’s grip, and marched into the middle of the room.
“I’ll be your hostage if you want.”
They didn’t like the way I managed to stay calm.
“And you are our hostages,” I added.
Now both of them tried to look through the boarded windows, but of course they couldn’t see anything. The carrion eater turned back to me again and raised his truncheon. “If they don’t give us the money, I’ll beat your brains to mush!”
“If you kill me, you’ll definitely die,” I said, still bluffing.
The carrion eater beat his truncheon into the palm of his hand. It was supposed to look threatening, but just showed his rising panic. The bearded falsetto had broken into a cold sweat. Although I had no power over the two of them, they were afraid of me. And that meant that I did have power over them. It was the first time that anyone had ever been frightened of me.
It was brilliant.
It was the first time since Hannah’s death that I’d felt alive. In fact, I’d never felt like this before.
“Have you got kids?” I asked
How I hoped those bastards had children because then they would be even more scared of dying.
They didn’t say anything, so that must mean yes.
I put out my hand. “The bag…,” I demanded.
Neither of them showed any sign of giving it to me.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, and smiled.
The carrion eater picked up the bag and handed it to me. I walked out of the bank with the weapons. Without paying a zloty. Without being beaten by a truncheon.
The person with the least fear wins. I could see that now. Which was why the Germans had won against us.
So far.
But we weren’t afraid anymore.
We were already dead.
38
When I got back to our group in the bunker, I didn’t feel great, but I felt more useful than I had before. I had completed my first mission.
Of course, I didn’t tell Esther, Amos, or the others about what had happened to me. I didn’t want them to know how careless I had been. I just reported that I’d delivered the weapons to the other fighting group and had been given the hand grenades in return, as instructed. I stored them in a safe corner of our bunker, which the fighters had dug out in the cellar of the house weeks before. That had been the secret in the cellar that I had not been allowed to know anything about when Zacharia stabbed me in the arm.
This bunker that reeked of earth and sweat was my new home now. I shared it with ten other resistance fighters. Though you couldn’t really call us fighters. None of us had actually seen any kind of action so far. The Jewish collaborators had been executed by other groups of the ŻOB.
There wasn’t much talking in the bunker. We had all lost people we loved. What was the point of talking about it to anyone? Each of us bore his fate as best he could. Sometimes at night you’d hear someone crying in their sleep, that was all. Once it was Esther. Not even strong Esther was totally immune to all the pain.
I had woken up one night because of her crying. And had seen her in the dim bunker light twisting in her sleep. But it wasn’t my job to comfort her by putting my arms around her to bring her back from the nightmare of her dreams to the nightmare of the real world. Amos did that. He slept side by side with her every night, though not arm in arm. As far as I knew, they didn’t sleep with each other; I hadn’t even ever seen them kissing passionately. Maybe they did that sort of thing outside the bunker, somewhere else in the house. But I didn’t really think so. Esther and Amos were two people who were married to their mission. They weren’t in love with each other.
I noticed all this, but really I couldn’t have cared less. That wild kiss with Amos at the Polish market so long ago had happened to a different girl.
There was just one other couple living in our bunker. Michal and Miriam. Miriam was a delicate eighteen-year-old, and Michal was a big man, and at twenty-four, he was the oldest of us. No couple could have been more different. Michal had been a bricklayer, and he’d have been the first to admit that he wasn’t a great thinker. Curly-haired Miriam wasn’t just clever and well read, she was the only person I knew who I could imagine being a university professor of philosophy, history, medicine, or anything she liked.
Michal adored Miriam; she was his whole reason for being alive. He wasn’t out to get revenge or kill the beasts. He spent all his time thinking up nice things to do for Miriam, to cheer her up and help her to cope with the pain of having lost her parents.
Miriam on the other hand … well, she certainly did like Michal. Who wouldn’t have liked such a kindhearted simple soul? In fact she liked him even more than the rest of us. But love? She couldn’t really love him. And no wonder. Somewhere out there in the world there were men better suited to a girl like her. Miriam knew it, too, but she was with Michal all the same.
And then one night he proposed.
Michal knelt down on the bunker floor in front of all of us and held out a plain golden ring. It wasn’t something he had stolen from an empty flat before the acquisition squads had been to collect everything for the German Reich. No, the ring
had been his grandmother’s.
“Will you…,” Michal asked Miriam in a low voice. He was so excited that he got muddled up, “marry you … I mean … me?”
Miriam answered without hesitating for a single moment, “Yes!”
Michal put his strong arms around her and held her tight. The rest of us started cheering so loudly, it sounded like we’d just chased the Germans out of Poland or off the planet altogether. None of us had felt this happy for a very long time. We kept up the cheering until Miriam let Michal know that he was nearly suffocating her and he let go.
It was a genuine moment of happiness, and I would never have believed that it could happen in the bunker. But it didn’t feel quite right to me. No matter how much Michal loved Miriam, he didn’t seem destined for her as far as I was concerned.
Two days later, when the two of us were searching through empty flats for valuables the ŻOB emissaries could use to purchase weapons on the Polish black market, I couldn’t stop myself. I asked Miriam, “Why did you say yes?”
Miriam smiled, pushed one of her wild locks away from her face, and told me the simple truth about how she felt. “I haven’t got anyone. My parents are dead, and I won’t be alive for much longer. So I can spend the rest of my short life alone, or marry a man I don’t really love but who loves me. Michal is all the happiness I’m going to get, and that is so much better than none.”
I understood. But I could never be like Miriam. And I could never love anyone the way Michal loved her. Had I ever loved anyone like that? Didn’t he love Miriam more than I had ever loved Daniel?
There was only one place left where I was able to feel any kind of love. That was the world of the 777 islands.
As I lay awake that night in the bunker, with my eyes closed but unable to sleep, I thought about what had happened at the bank: If I hadn’t remembered Hannah and her stories that night, I would never have thought of telling the policemen that the bank was surrounded by resistance fighters. So, although she was dead, Hannah had actually saved my life.
Up till then, all I could see when I thought of her was the picture of her mangled body, but now I could suddenly see my little sister sitting in the pantry in the dim candlelight and remembered the last story she had told us about the 777 islands.
The Mirror King had now dispatched his helper, the terrible Sandman, to kill the Chosen One. Hannah and the crew of the Longear knew nothing of the approaching danger and were sleeping peacefully on the shores of Scarf Island, which was ruled by King Scarf I. While Ben Redhead, Hannah, and Captain Carrot snored in unison, the werewolf was on watch. The fog crept up quietly and then took on solid form. It was the sallow-faced Sandman.
The werewolf was caught by surprise. Before he had time to draw his sword, the Sandman had thrown sand in his eyes. The werewolf managed to grumble, “I’ll get you…,” but couldn’t do anything of the kind because he fell asleep still standing and keeled over on the sand.
Suddenly, I realized that Hannah had never got this far. I had simply imagined her making all this up. I was the one who was keeping the world of the 777 islands alive now.
No sooner had I understood this than I had an exciting idea. If I could imagine myself being in that world, I would be able to see my little sister again.
Of course I couldn’t just arrive on Scarf Island from out of nowhere; that wouldn’t have made a good story. So I imagined how I came across a copy of the travel guide to the 777 islands in a deserted ghetto flat. And how the one-legged bookseller appeared and tried to take it away from me. The one-legged man was accompanied by two SS men who were also trying to get hold of the book. The Germans didn’t just want to conquer our world, they wanted to rule the 777 islands, too. And probably all the other worlds as well: Alice’s world and Winnie-the-Pooh’s and Lord Peter Wimsey’s and even the world in City Lights. The beasts wouldn’t stop at anything.
Before the SS men had time to pull out their guns, I grabbed a pistol from my pocket and pointed it at the pigs. They backed away. I wanted to kill them. But I couldn’t pull the trigger, not even in my imagination.
With my gun drawn, I ordered the SS men to leave the flat. And the one-legged man spat venom and cried, “The world of 777 islands will be the end of you! The Mirror King will destroy your mind!”
I just laughed at him. “I’m going to die soon anyway,” I said, “I’m not scared of a mere reflection.”
I opened the travel guide and found the page where Scarf Island was described. Before I knew what was happening, I was sucked into the book, transported away from our world, and deposited directly on the island. I could feel the sand beneath my bare feet. The werewolf was curled up asleep beside the fire, and the Sandman was just about to stab Hannah to death with his purple dagger. I grabbed my gun and shot it into the air. The Sandman jumped out of his skin and dropped the dagger.
Hannah, Ben Redhead, and the captain all woke with a start when they heard the shot. Only the werewolf didn’t wake up because of the sleep strewn in his eyes. The Sandman stared at my pistol, and his face turned even paler. He asked in a deep melancholic voice, “What kind of magic firework is this?”
“One that will riddle you through and through if you don’t disappear.”
“Thought so.”
He took less than a second to turn back into fog and drift away out to sea.
“Mira?” Hannah asked, and rubbed her eyes. “Mira, is that really you?”
“Of course it is!” I laughed.
“I missed you so much!”
“I missed you, too!”
My darling little sister ran up to me and hugged me and hugged me and hugged me. And I hugged her back. I was so happy. I had been able to save her life here, at least.
39
On the eighteenth of January 1943, when the Germans arrived to finally liquidate us all, it was minus four degrees and the streets were covered in snow. In the early morning, Amos, Esther, and I were standing in the freezing kitchen, printing a leaflet on the printing press, which we had taken days to repair. It was a call for all the Jewish inhabitants left in the ghetto to fight to death. Actually, Esther and Amos did the printing. I tried to keep my fingers warm by rubbing them together. Suddenly, Mordechai Anielewicz stormed into the room. We were all surprised. The leader of the ŻOB never came without letting us know in advance. We noticed that his slender face was very pale this morning. He was normally unfazed by anything. In his midtwenties, he was one of the oldest members of the resistance; he organized the fighters, encouraged us, urged us on, and made us seem far greater than we really were. When he spoke, Mordechai could always convince us that we really would be able to achieve something with our old guns and give the Jews back the dignity they had lost.
Mordechai didn’t need a uniform to lead us. He wore shabby knickerbockers and a gray jacket. He simply had far more energy than the rest of us. Even more than Esther, who I looked up to because she worked so hard and dealt with her grief in her dreams.
“Why are you here?” Esther asked Mordechai.
I would never have dared to speak to him. Although he treated us all as if we were his equals, there was no way I would ever feel on a par with this man.
Esther, on the other hand, wasn’t only one of the few women who led a resistance group, she also knew Mordechai from before the war. Both of them had been members of Hashomer Hatzair then, too, and the group had gone on summer camps at lakes and even by the sea to be prepared for a life in Palestine.
Were the two of them ever a couple? I wondered. In the days before there was a resistance movement, which was all that mattered to them now, love included?
“The mass deportations have started again,” Mordechai explained at once. “The Germans have set up roadblocks already.”
This was a shock. We had heard that the SS was hunting for hidden Jews in the Polish part of the city and had assumed that they were concentrating on that, and that we still had some time left to get prepared in the ghetto.
“Anyone wi
th a work permit won’t be taken, they say. But no one believes it. Everyone is hiding.”
No one was stupid enough to believe the Germans and their promises any longer.
“The Germans are searching the houses. Anyone found will be sent to the Umschlagplatz. Anyone who puts up a fight or simply takes too long will be shot.”
“What are we going to do?” Esther asked. She understood faster than I did that Mordechai hadn’t come just to give us a report of what was happening. We were the group of fighters closest. Mordechai was planning something and wanted it to happen as soon as possible.
“Take your weapons.”
“What?” I couldn’t stop myself from saying.
Esther gave me an angry look. I shut up at once.
“We are going to join the people being led to the Umschlagplatz,” Mordechai said. “And on my command we’ll draw our weapons and start shooting.”
Amos nodded determinedly.
Esther said, “I’ll get the others.”
And I … stood paralyzed.
This was Masada.
Today I was going to die.
Kill someone.
I did my best to hide my fear, as all our group gathered round the printing press and Mordechai asked, “Who is coming with me?”
Everyone lifted their hands. Me too. This was what we had been waiting for. To fight the Germans. It was a matter of honor to be allowed to take part. I only hoped that no one noticed how much my hand was shaking.
“There’s a problem,” Esther said in a businesslike way as if she were talking about a problem with the printing press. Why was she so much more composed than I was? We both had nothing left to lose.
“What problem?” Amos asked impatiently before Mordechai could do so. Amos was yearning to go out and fight no matter what our leader’s exact plans were. Assuming he actually had any.