by David Safier
“We’ve only got five pistols and one hand grenade. The other hand grenades we got from Breul’s group are no use,” Esther said.
“I’m definitely going,” Amos said, reacting fastest to the fact that there was no point in sending people out unarmed.
“Me too,” Mordechai said. He wasn’t a leader who would let people die without him. He would lead them, even on a heroic suicide mission.
Michal raised his hand. Miriam, too.
“Don’t…,” Michal asked her, but Miriam answered, “I go where my husband goes.”
There was just one gun left. So only one more person from our group would be able to go. Esther was the logical choice. She was our leader. It was so obvious that she didn’t need to say she would be the fifth person, she just asked, “So what is the plan?”
For a second I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to join the fight, no matter how it would appear. I would stay alive for a few more hours, a few days.
But the next moment I felt ashamed for feeling like that. In front of the others. And remembering everyone who had died. Why did I hang on to my ghostly existence? Just to fantasize about talking rabbits, Mirror Men, and Hannah each night?
This would have been an opportunity to do something meaningful for once, to give my life and death—and Hannah’s—some kind of purpose. But I was too much of a coward to volunteer as quickly as Amos, Miriam, and Michal. And so they would go off to fight together with Mordechai and Esther.
But then Mordechai said, “You have to stay, Esther.”
“But…,” she wanted to protest.
“This group will continue and needs its leader,” he interrupted her with so much authority, Esther couldn’t disagree. He obviously assumed that everyone who came with him was going to die. Before Mordechai could ask again who else would join him, I put up my hand.
40
The five of us went out into the cold. Each of us was hiding a pistol in their coat or sweater, and Amos had insisted that he be given the one functioning hand grenade.
I carried my gun in the inside pocket of my heavy coat. The cold metal pressed against my left breast through my sweater and blouse. I would pull it out with my right hand and then start shooting.
We walked down a couple of streets and met a group of about a hundred Jews being led to the Umschlagplatz by SS soldiers. The faces of the sentenced people were blank; any hope they may have had of survival had gone ages ago. They bowed to the fate the Germans had in store for them.
We joined the crowd with our hands up so that the SS would think we were just more Jews surrendering. The soldiers signaled to us to get in line and join the march to death. I stared at the ground. I didn’t want to see the faces of the men who I would shoot at in just a few minutes’ time, and I didn’t want to look at the men who were going to kill me.
As planned, we split up in the crowd. Mordechai was at the front, Amos more in the middle of the procession, with me a few meters away from him. Michal and Miriam were farther back.
We walked through the cold together, all doomed to die. I didn’t feel weighed down, as I had that other time when I had marched toward the Umschlagplatz in the cauldron; I felt all keyed up. I was going to kill someone in a moment. And I was going to die. The blood in my temples was throbbing so hard that I feared a vessel would burst.
We walked and I watched Mordechai, waiting for his signal to attack. I tried to do this without attracting attention, but it didn’t really matter. The SS men took no notice of us. They could not imagine that there could be any threat of danger from the people they were leading to slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had been hounded to the gas chambers without defending themselves already, so why should anything be different for the last few thousand inhabitants of the ghetto?
When we reached the corner of Ziska Street and Zamenhof Street, Mordechai turned round and nodded at Amos. I held my breath. Amos dug into his coat pocket, pulled out his hand grenade in an instant, pulled the ring, and threw it at two German soldiers. Before anyone could react, before anyone even understood what was happening, the grenade exploded and tore the SS men to bits.
The blast frightened the life out of me, although I had been prepared for it, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut. When I opened them again, I saw Amos staring at the dead soldiers. He, too, needed a second to realize what he had just done. He had killed SS men!
I heard shots from Mordechai’s direction. I turned round. He was holding his gun and shooting soldiers. Two of them fell down in the snow.
The crowd dispersed. Panic-stricken people were running in every direction. I could hear shots coming from Amos’s direction now, too. The soldiers were shouting, “They’ve got guns! The fucking Jews have got guns!”
Behind me, Michal and Miriam were shooting at the SS.
And the Germans were shooting back!
“Miriam!” Michal screamed.
She didn’t answer.
I looked back. But in the crush of fleeing people, I couldn’t see Michal or Miriam. I heard more shots. And Michal screaming. The Germans had got him, too.
Both dead. Both dead. Both dead. That was all I could think. Both dead.
I looked at Mordechai again. He was walking toward three soldiers, pointing the gun at them, shooting and shooting and shooting. When his magazine was empty he threw the weapon away, bent down to a dead SS man, grabbed his pistol, and kept on shooting.
I still hadn’t taken a single shot or even pulled out my weapon. As soon as I did, I would be a target for the Germans who were desperately trying to pinpoint the attackers in the crowd.
Amos yelled.
I looked at him, panicked. He was wounded in the arm. Not dead yet! Not dead!
Now I pulled my gun. I didn’t know where to start shooting. There were desperate Jews fleeing between all the soldiers. I didn’t want to hit any of them.
I ran to the curb where the soldiers Mordechai had mowed down were lying. Their blood mixed with the snow, turning it into red and white slush. A young wounded soldier was crawling away from me. No idea if he was Latvian, German, or Ukrainian, but he had a beautiful face, like an angel, and he said something I couldn’t understand. Was he asking for help? Was it a prayer?
I pointed my gun at him. He looked up at me. Pleading. He didn’t want to die.
Why did he hope for mercy? He wouldn’t have shown me any. The swine. With his angelic face. My hand shook. I wanted to pull the trigger. I had to.
The soldier started to cry, said something in German, and then, “Marlene…”
Like Marlene Dietrich in the American films. Was that the name of his wife or girlfriend? Or of his daughter? Or was he too young to be a father? My hand shook even more. The soldier cried. I bent my finger to squeeze the trigger. Then I heard Mordechai shout, “Mira, behind you!”
I turned round. An SS man the size of a bull was aiming his gun at me, less than three meters away.
I shot at once.
The man slumped down. Lifeless in the snow.
I felt sick.
Mordechai grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled in my ear, “Run!”
We both started running. So did Amos. The two of them shot at the SS who backed off, scared. We ran down two streets, and then Mordechai shouted, “In here!”
We dashed inside and up the stairs. I couldn’t breathe, and Amos was bleeding badly. His coat sleeve was soaked in blood, but Mordechai wouldn’t let us stop. We scaled up a ladder into the attic, and from there we went through a hole into the next house. The resistance had started building escape routes between buildings. A sort of street system above the actual streets. But the attics weren’t safe to hide in. We ran back down the stairs in one of the houses, and into a secret bunker where we fell to the ground, exhausted. I threw up. Mordechai applied a tourniquet above Amos’s bleeding wound. No one said a word. We were exhausted and wound up at the same time. Then Amos started to laugh. Hysterically. Mordecai joined in. Hysterical, too. And I laughed with them, and then I c
ried. For Miriam and Michal.
We hugged one another, feeling happy and sad. Sad because we had lost comrades—friends—and happy to be alive. We had killed SS soldiers. Jews had killed Germans. Nothing would ever be the same again.
41
Esther said a few words in memory of those who had died. She did it in Mordechai’s stead. He was meeting the heads of the ŻOB in another part of the ghetto, to discuss the new developments. Today, the Germans had retreated out of the ghetto because of us! It was unbelievable.
In her address, Esther reminded us that Miriam and Michal had died for a good cause. Their deaths would be an inspiration to others, she said, and we could all be very proud of them. She really was a great speaker, saying the right things in a quiet, firm voice without a hint of pathos. She insisted that they hadn’t just died—they were fallen heroes. Although Esther didn’t say so, it meant that the rest of us who had shot at the Germans were heroes now, too.
At the end of her speech, Esther surprised us by sharing a personal memory. Once, at a summer camp, Miriam had sat beside the fire and sung a song that was so beautiful and sad all the children cried. Even the older girls like Esther who would normally have been too aloof.
I had no idea that Miriam and Esther had known each other that long. And I couldn’t imagine Esther being moved by anything. And I had never known that Miriam could sing so well. I’d never heard her sing. Not once. Here in the bunker we knew practically nothing about anyone’s previous life.
Once Esther had finished speaking, we ate supper. At least, the others did. I couldn’t eat a thing. I still felt ill. I had killed someone. It had all happened so fast that I hadn’t seen his face. In my memory, my victim—was that even the right word for someone who was trying to kill me?—was a shadowy figure. Instead, I could still see the young soldier with the angelic face clearly, begging for mercy and talking about his Marlene. The soldier’s angel face joined the shadow of the man I had actually shot, making a strange mixture of a person. The more this picture filled my mind, the worse I felt. He too kept calling, “Marlene!”
Although I didn’t want to think about it, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if the man I had killed had had a girlfriend or wife who would grieve for him, or a child who would have to grow up without a father.
I felt like being sick again.
But then I reminded myself that he didn’t give a damn about the people he was marching to the Umschlagplatz. What did he care if they’d loved anyone or not. That was the whole point: The Germans didn’t think of us as human beings. If they saw us as people, they wouldn’t be able to kill us so easily. If I was going to fight against them, I would have to stop thinking of them as people, too. Not the victims of my actions. Just beasts straight from hell. Beasts who could look like angels at times.
I went to bed earlier than usual. Today, everyone could understand that I was feeling tired. The rest of the time, it was frowned upon for a fighter to show any form of weakness. No fear or—even worse—doubt about whether what we were doing made any sense was tolerated.
Before I closed my eyes, I looked over to the corner where Michal and Miriam had slept. With Michal gone there was one person less in the world who was capable of love. And Miriam would never become a professor. How many people would she have been able to teach? How many people would she have touched with her voice? All the songs that would never be sung. All the stories Hannah would never tell. All those dreams. All that love. Gone forever.
I closed my eyes, but the tears welled up. Somehow, I managed not to start sobbing. I didn’t want the others to witness my grief and despair on this day of triumph. But I couldn’t stop the tears. I let the tears run silently down my cheeks.
Normally, I would have traveled back to the world of the 777 islands, like I did every night for comfort’s sake. But I hesitated. How would I be able to tell my sister that I had killed someone? A real person, not some fantasy creature like the ice dragon, Fafnir, who had buried Mongoose Island under a sheet of everlasting snow. We had only managed to get rid of him with the help of the fire elves.
The tubby mongooses organized a great celebration in our honor, and we danced the night away until our feet ached or, in Captain Carrot’s case, his paws.
While Hannah danced “the Mongoose” with the tubby mongoose king, she smiled and said, “We are heroes here, and yet they can’t stand us on Questionmark Island.”
“Questionmark Island?”
“Everybody there looks like one.”
“And they really hate the people on Exclamationmark Island.”
Captain Carrot, who was gallantly twirling a lady mongoose round, laughed. “Hannah did kick the tyrannical Eminent Questionare way off his mark!”
So a hero wasn’t always a hero. It depended on where you were. Mongoose Island or Questionmark Island. Hannah was a happy one here. I was a hero in the eyes of my fellow fighters, but I felt awful.
Hannah would be appalled that I had shot someone.
Or would she understand if I told her that she was dead and I was avenging her? That I was doing all this to give her life and her death some sort of meaning?
But if she found out that she was no longer alive in the real world, wouldn’t she want to stop living in my head, too? What purpose would she see in being a figment of my imagination?
No! She mustn’t find out that she was dead. Or else I’d lose her forever.
But I would never be able to lie to her. So, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t go to the world of the 777 islands. Instead, I cried myself to sleep and was haunted by nightmares. I dreamed about the moment when the young German had begged for mercy. But in my dream it wasn’t the German crawling on the ground in front of me in his SS uniform. It was my brother, Simon.
My hands shook again. I didn’t know if I should pull the trigger or not.
All at once, Simon stopped begging, pulled out a gun, and pointed it at me. If I didn’t shoot him, he would kill me. That was clear. So I pulled the trigger, and Simon slumped to the ground. Just like the SS man I had killed.
I bent down to my dead brother, and right in front of my eyes, he turned into the baby I had abandoned at the Umschlagplatz.
I screamed and screamed and screamed, and woke up with a racing heart.
I looked round the bunker in the dark—everyone was asleep. So I must only have cried out in my dream. I stared at the black earthen wall in front of me. It was an endless dark void. I had no one in all the world. Just Hannah. And she only existed in a make-believe world where I didn’t dare go. Instead, I’d just killed my brother in my dreams after not thinking about him for weeks. And a baby. And the soldier in real life. I felt like I was losing my mind.
42
It was my seventeenth birthday, but it meant nothing to me and I didn’t mention it to anyone. Four days after the shooting, the SS stopped the deportations. The fact that Jews had killed soldiers had shaken them to the core. Esther hadn’t actually called me and the other survivors heroes, but the underground newspapers did. “In the darkest hour of the Jewish people, our heroes showed immense bravery and hit back.”
Our triumph was celebrated in glowing terms. Of course no one wrote about how ill I had felt afterward, or that Michal and Miriam would never love or sing again. There wasn’t any room for things like that in a hero’s story.
During the next weeks, I began to feel more and more proud of what I had done. Not because I was proclaimed a hero, but because our resistance had started to change the ghetto somehow. If all the Jews had felt hopelessly abandoned to fate up till now, suddenly a real jolt went through the ghetto. Everyone knew that the Germans would return, but we had proved that it was possible to fight back. Many young Jews joined the ŻOB. Even those who couldn’t fight were no longer prepared to be rounded up like animals and sent to their deaths. Everywhere, people were building secret bunkers in the cellars to hide from the Germans. Anyone with the remotest understanding of architecture was highly sought after. Some bunkers
even had running water, electricity, and a telephone. A city arose beneath the city.
The German “supermen” no longer came into the ghetto, certainly not after dark. As soon as there was any kind of resistance they got scared. Cowards!
The ŻOB or “the Party” as the union of fighters was being called everywhere now—the differences between the various groups had whittled down to nothing—was controlling the ghetto. The members of the Jewish council could only report to their German masters that no matter what strings they tried to pull or how they tried to make everyone do as they said, they could no longer influence the people.
Collaborators were executed on a daily basis. The Jewish policemen and the SS were powerless to prevent this from happening. I never took part in any of those killings. I was glad about that. I was a reluctant hero who had had enough for the moment just killing one soldier. I knew that I would have to kill again when the Germans came back to clear out the ghetto for good. And I hoped I would have learned to see them solely as beasts by then, instead of people. Why couldn’t I do that yet?
Our group, like all the others, was preparing for the final battle. We practiced shooting in the cellar of our house. Or aiming rather, because we couldn’t afford to waste any of the valuable ammunition. We also learned close-combat fighting and how to fill explosives into light bulbs and bottles. It wasn’t quite the studies our parents had planned.
Our group also took in new members. And I knew one of them from before. It was Ben Redhead. All of a sudden, he was standing in our cellar beside me while I awaited my turn to practice shooting. He looked totally different from the way I had imagined him on my journeys to the 777 islands. I had only ever seen the boy once in my life, that time when he was kissing Hannah. So my memory of how he looked hadn’t been all that accurate. By now he was almost the size of a man—although he had only just turned sixteen. He had seemed uncoordinated and lanky then, but now he stood straight and tall.