by David Safier
I listened for a moment and then decided to risk it. The man seemed to be alone. I leaped out, holding my gun. If I wasn’t wrong, there would still be one or two bullets left.
I was standing in front of an SS soldier. He jumped and dropped his cigarette.
I was startled, too. I knew this man.
It was the officer who had saved me from the fat pig in the guardhouse. The German who could speak some Polish and had more or less resembled a human being.
It was the first time that I had ever stood facing an SS man like this. One who was in my power. I had to make use of it. To try to understand.
“Why?” I asked him.
He was confused.
“Why … what?”
“Why are you doing this to us?”
He thought about it.
“Your life doesn’t depend on your answer.”
I wanted him to tell the truth and not just say something to save his skin.
He nodded. He understood now.
“Do you want to know why I am here, or why my superiors are doing this?”
“Both.”
“Himmler and the others are mad.”
“And you?”
“I wish I could say the same.” He laughed bitterly.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I wanted a better life for myself and my family.”
“They are better off if you slaughter people here?”
“Rubbish!” he snapped. He seemed to have forgotten for a moment that I was pointing a gun at him. Then he remembered and got more factual. “I’ve got a good position in the SS, money—”
“So you murder for money,” I interrupted.
“That was not the plan. I didn’t look that far ahead. Who could have imagined anything like this?”
“Hitler never mentioned that he hated the Jews?” I asked sarcastically.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “My family doesn’t have a better life. Hamburg is being bombed, and I’ll return home with my wife and daughter emotional wrecks. If they are still alive.”
Part of me hoped they weren’t.
“And,” he continued carefully, “if you let me live.”
“Why should I?”
“I saved you from Scharper. You should have seen what he did to the other girls.”
“The ones you didn’t save.”
“I don’t have all that much room to act. I can’t save hundreds of Jews.”
“There’s always a choice.”
“You think so because you’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Thanks to you.”
“As head of a family, I stand to lose a lot.”
The longer I let him speak, the more human he seemed and the more I detested him.
“If you kill me, my family will lose the father, the husband—”
“Shut up!” I snapped, and pointed my gun at his head.
The officer stopped talking. He tried to look calm. But his hands were shaking.
“Turn around.”
He did as I had ordered. He was shaking all over now.
“Bitte,” he pleaded in German.
“I said: Shut up!”
He began to cry.
I wanted him to stop.
He cried even more.
And I struck him with the handle of my gun as hard as I could.
The officer fell to the ground. The back of his head was bleeding; he couldn’t move but he moaned. He wasn’t unconscious yet.
So I struck him again. And again. Until I’d knocked him out.
I let him live. Not because he had saved me from a worse fate in the guardhouse. Or because I felt sorry for him. Or his family. I let him live because the sound of a shot would have alerted his comrades.
71
When I got back to Miła 18, the building had been destroyed.
Dead, they’re all dead, I thought, but I forced myself not to give up quite yet. I’d learned this much. As long as I didn’t find any bodies or signs that they had all been driven to the trains by the SS, there was still hope.
Desperate, I searched for one of the five entrances beneath the rubble, found a hole at last, crawled through, and was overjoyed to find the others still alive. The fire hadn’t reached the bunkers, and the SS hadn’t found them.
The mood in the chambers didn’t match my joy, though. It was like being in an oven; everyone was wearing nothing more than underwear, and Asher was the only one who managed to muster any kind of humor. “I always wanted to have a sauna down here,” he said.
My comrades became even more despondent when they heard that the Polish firemen had betrayed us.
“Now we can only hope that Amos finds a way through the sewers,” Mordechai sighed.
Avi, whose leg had become infected and who was feverish, rubbed his red beard and said, “Others have tried and failed. Shit happens!”
So far, no fighter had managed to get through the sewers. Two had even been killed when soldiers had heard them and thrown hand grenades at them through a drain.
“Amos,” Mordechai tried to sound assured, “will find canal workers to show us the way.”
“If he is still alive,” Avi groaned.
“Don’t say that!” I snapped.
I twisted my wedding ring nervously. It meant as much to me now as Rebecca’s marble did to her.
Why hadn’t Amos and I simply stayed on the Polish side and tried to remain alive? But I knew the answer. Because we couldn’t desert our comrades.
“I’m sorry,” Avi said. “Of course Amos is still alive.”
“It’s okay,” I answered, and slipped away to the chamber called Auschwitz. I took off my trousers, blouse, and shoes, and inspected my swollen ankle. It would have been good to be able to cool it, but water was too precious. I lay down and tried to not think about Amos, tried to ignore the pain. Instead, I wanted to travel to Hannah. But before I could set foot on Mirror Island, we heard the sound of footsteps above us.
Immediately, everyone in the bunker was silent. Most of us actually held our breath. Some people started to mumble prayers softly. Fighters grabbed their weapons.
Then the hammering started.
They were using heavy tools to try to drill through the debris. Did the Germans know that we were here? Or were they searching at random? For a horrible second, I imagined that they had captured Amos and tortured him until he had betrayed our hiding place. Ending his life in guilt. Dust trickled down on us.
After an eternity of fear, the hammering stopped.
Had they discovered us?
More and more people were praying, more and more quietly.
The footsteps moved away.
You could see that a few civilians wanted to cheer. We fighters were relieved, too, but now we knew for certain that our time had almost run out. We had hardly any ammunition left, practically no food, and it was almost impossible to find anything to eat in the ruins of the destroyed ghetto.
Even Daniel had lost his courage. He crawled over to me and said, “You were right.”
“What?”
“You said we’ll never survive.”
Daniel looked over at Rebecca. She was staring at her blue and white marble again, as if there was a whole world hidden inside. It was a miracle that this little girl was still alive.
Daniel whispered, “Korczak would start getting her ready, telling her that there is another, better world to come…”
That was what the old man had done with his play on the day when the Germans had come to fetch the children.
“… but I’m not Korczak,” Daniel said sadly.
“Only Korczak is Korczak,” I said kindly.
“I wanted to be like him all my life. And how have I ended up?”
“Daniel!”
He looked miserable.
“I’m not even that,” I said.
Daniel didn’t know what I meant.
“You have achieved so much more than me!”
He looked surprised.
He had made the miracle of her survival happen.
His answer was to kiss me gently on the cheek.
I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say.
Instead Daniel said, “Don’t listen to Avi. Amos will be back.”
And for that I kissed him on the cheek, too.
We were standing in the snow and looking down on the clouds that circled the mountain like a snugly fitting ring. About fifty meters above us the mirrors of the palace reflected the light of the sun.
The crew of the Longear was tired. Not as tired as the fighters in the bunker at Miła 18, but tired enough.
Captain Carrot swore, “These blasted mountains! I know why I chose to be a seaman.”
“You’re a seaman because you won this tub gambling,” the werewolf reminded him.
“Ah yes, I should gamble more.”
“Our whole life is a gamble.”
“In that case, we are the best gamblers in the world.”
Hannah wasn’t part of that conversation. She was smiling at Ben Redhead. The real Ben was dead. The real Hannah was, too. But because I couldn’t bear the thought of death and because Amos wasn’t with me, I surrounded myself with phantoms less and less like the real people they thought they were.
I didn’t want to die by myself.
I was all alone in my corner of Auschwitz. I got up, hobbled over to Daniel and Rebecca, and asked, “Can I join you?”
The little girl rolled her marble over to me. I picked it up carefully, as if it were the most valuable treasure. Which it was. It was incredible that it was still in one piece after all this time. It lay snug in the palm of my hand, and I could suddenly feel that there was more to the world than death.
Daniel pointed at the marble and smiled at me. “That’s an invitation,” he said.
I gave the marble back to Rebecca, cuddled up to the two of them, and felt less alone.
72
The next morning the hammering started up again. The Germans had discovered the bunker. How? Dogs? Traitors? Listening devices? It didn’t really matter.
All the fighters pulled their guns. Civilians started to cry. Some even screamed with fear. Shmuel Asher ran around telling everyone to be quiet. But people like Izak the weasel wouldn’t shut up. “They’ve come to get us! They’ve come to get us!”
“There’s still time for a miracle,” his boss insisted.
The Germans had not only turned him into a proud Jew, he even believed in miracles!
The hammering stopped.
Silence.
Waiting.
Fear.
“I’m one of you,” we heard the voice of a Jewish collaborator. He was standing on the mountain of rubble above our bunker. “You can trust me! The Germans will send you to work. But if you don’t surrender, they will kill you.”
Mordechai signaled to Pola, a fighter who had once wanted to be a ballet dancer, to go to one of the entrances. Pola knew exactly what she had to do. She ran to a hole, moved away some rubble, and shot.
That was our answer.
Pola moved away from the entrance, as it was perfectly clear what would happen next. The Germans threw a hand grenade into the bunker through the hole. The explosion scared everybody, but no one was hurt.
The Germans continued digging with their heavy tools. The traitor pig called again, “Surrender! Surrender! I swear to God nothing will happen to you!” No one believed a word he said.
“What’s that?” Izak asked suddenly.
I didn’t know what the weasel meant at first.
“What is it?” he asked again, sounding hysterical.
Then I smelled it, too.
The smell wasn’t very strong at first.
But it grew stronger.
And we all realized what it was.
“Gas!” someone shouted.
“Out of here. Get out!” Asher ordered his men.
“I thought you were going to stay here till the end,” Avi called weakly from his sick bed.
“We will die here; outside there is still the tiniest chance we might survive!” Asher replied, and left the bunker along with about one hundred coughing and choking civilians.
The Germans didn’t shoot them. They were destined for the gas chambers.
The fighters and some civilians stayed in the bunker that was rapidly turning into a gas chamber of its own. Daniel and little Rebecca stayed, too.
There were about one hundred people left.
“What are we going to do?” Pola asked.
“We’ll shoot ourselves,” Avi answered.
“What?” I said. I couldn’t believe what he was saying, and Pola looked shocked. “Are you crazy?”
“We’ll do it like the people at Masada. They won’t get us alive.”
“They mustn’t take us alive,” Pola agreed, “but we should die fighting! I say, let’s go out shooting and be killed fighting!”
Avi retorted, “They are blocking all the entrances. We can’t sneak out and attack without being seen. We can just go out one by one through the guarded entrances. You’d have one shot and then be shot. And we don’t have enough ammunition to fight. Only enough to kill ourselves.”
“We should still try,” Pola said.
I didn’t like either option. Although I realized that the end I had been expecting all these months had finally come, I didn’t want to die. Neither fighting, nor by killing myself, and certainly not by being gassed. Amos wasn’t with me.
Mordechai didn’t approve, either. “We shouldn’t choose to die as long as there is still a chance…”
“But that’s one in a million!” Avi cried. As far as I could tell by looking at them, about half the fighters approved of his plan while the rest supported Pola’s suggestion to die in a hail of bullets.
“It is better than nothing,” Mordechai said decidedly. “As long as there’s any possibility of fighting, we will not go to our deaths. Not either way.”
“But what about the gas…?” Avi and Pola asked at the same time.
More and more was pouring into the bunker. Our eyes were streaming with tears.
“Water can weaken the effect,” Mordechai said. “We’ll soak cloths with water and hold them in front of our mouths.”
He did this himself, dipping a bit of cloth into a murky puddle. And I followed his example. Some of the others did, too.
With the cloth over his face, Mordechai told several fighters to try to find an unguarded way out, although he knew there wouldn’t be one.
Avi sat up and climbed out of his bed. He headed into the Mauthausen chamber, pulling his leg after him. We heard a shot.
Other fighters followed suit.
A pale, beautiful fighter named Sharon handed out the last of the cyanide capsules to some of the children. They all swallowed them. Their little bodies shuddered and jerked, then life left them. It was less torturous than death by gas.
Sharon approached Daniel and Rebecca.
She was a beautiful angel of death.
Daniel hesitated to take the capsule for the little girl. Finally he did so and was about to give it to her …
“No!” I cried.
He did what I said. Gave the capsule back to Sharon and she passed it on to a mother and child. Then she took her gun and shot herself. Seven times! Until she was finally dead.
I ran to Daniel and Rebecca and gave them both wet cloths. I sat down by them. We huddled together. If I couldn’t die with Amos, then at least with them.
The gas slowly filled all the chambers of the bunker. More and more fighters took their lives. Others like Pola went out shooting and were shot by the enemy. It was hard to imagine that they actually hit anyone before they were killed.
Daniel grabbed my hand.
I tried to travel to the 777 islands for the very last time, but I couldn’t concentrate. There was practically no air left. With all the gas, I was coug
hing so much I couldn’t manage to picture Hannah climbing up the stony mountain path on her way to the Palace of Mirrors.
All I could see was Hannah in the pool of blood.
I held on to Daniel’s hand as tightly as I could.
United in death.
Then someone shouted, “There’s a way out!”
I didn’t understand at first.
“There’s a way out!”
A skinny fighter was standing in front of me. Someone I’d never really noticed before. I didn’t even know his name. He was one of the fighters Mordechai had sent off to look for a way out. I could hardly breathe because of the gas and assumed he must be mad. There couldn’t be any more exits. But I let go of Daniel’s hand nonetheless—he was almost unconscious—and got up.
“We can get out! We can get out!” the fighter shouted.
Mad or not, there was nothing to lose by following him. I bent down to Daniel and started to shake him.
He didn’t open his eyes.
“Daniel!” I gasped.
He still wouldn’t wake up.
I looked around for the skinny fighter. I couldn’t risk losing sight of him, as I had no idea where the supposed exit was—if it existed at all and the comrade wasn’t simply mad.
The skinny fighter told as many people as possible about his discovery, but he was too late. Nearly everyone was dead. They had killed themselves, or gone out shooting and been shot by the Germans, or they had already choked to death. Just a few of us, like Daniel and Rebecca and me who were holding the damp cloths over our mouths, were still breathing. Daniel only just.
“Wake up,” I screamed, and nearly threw up coughing.
No reaction.
I slapped him, once, twice.
At last he opened his eyes. I dragged him to his feet. And Rebecca, too. Then I looked for the skinny fighter. He had assembled a group of people and led us to a back corner of the bunker. There was a hole the Germans hadn’t discovered. We removed the rubble, crawled through, and hid amid the debris and ashes. Fourteen people. Dressed in underwear. The last survivors of 18 Miła Street.