by Jana Zinser
The boy smiled and nodded. “The Nazi kicked me off and put me in jail, but I escaped.”
Sloan and Mica laughed. “He really is brave,” Sloan said.
“I’m an orphaned Jew. I don’t really have a choice,” the boy said.
“You’re wrong, son. We all have choices, and you’ve chosen to live or die trying,” Sloan said. “What’s your name?”
“Noah.”
“Are you from the ghetto?” Mica asked.
Noah nodded. “Been there since I was little.”
“Since you were little?” Sloan mumbled to the small twelve-year-old boy. “You know your way around it?”
“Around it, once over it, and sometimes under it,” Noah said, smiling.
“Under it? Well, welcome to Operation Rakete,” Sloan said, his eyebrows raised, as he put out his huge hand to shake Noah’s tiny one.
At the Bockenburg Camp, Eva and her mother washed clothes in buckets. They dunked the well-worn and filthy clothes in the brackish water.
“When you were young, what did you think your life would be like?” Eva asked, as she scrubbed a bloodstain out of a pair of pants.
“I thought it would be lovely. I didn’t know people could be so cruel. I guess I should have warned you,” her mother said, as she dunked the clothes in the murky water.
Eva put her arm around her mother, and for once, her mother didn’t pull away.
The next night, all was set for Operation Rakete. Noah led Peter, wearing his shoeshine rucksack, to a patch of bushes next to the fence outside the Soblin Ghetto. He parted the bushes, revealing a hole in the ground that led under the fence.
“You really did dig a tunnel out of the ghetto,” Peter said, astonished.
“I had to do something. They took away my pole,” Noah said, smiling. “With the tunnel, I could go and get bread. No one notices a kid like me gone. They can’t even tell me apart from the others.”
“Why did you go back?”
“Got nowhere else to go,” Noah said. “I’ll go first, then you throw me the rucksack, but I’m not a good catcher.”
“It has an explosive device in it,” Peter said, rolling his eyes. “Try to be a good catcher today, okay? ‘Leave no room for failure.’ My father used to say that,” he said, remembering better days.
“He didn’t know me,” Noah said. The brave little boy looked worried, but he was prepared to do his best to survive another day.
Peter eyed the tunnel hole. “Are you sure I’m going to fit in there?”
Noah shrugged. “We’ll soon see.”
“Wait. You don’t know?”
“Hey, it was Sloan’s plan, not mine. I’m not a rebel, I’m just hungry,” Noah confessed. “Just keep moving through the tunnel. Don’t stop.” Then, he was gone into the hidden hole in the ground.
“Thanks for the advice, from a kid who couldn’t even hide in a luggage compartment!”
“I’ve learned a lot since then.” Noah’s voice was muffled, as he crawled through the tunnel, an experienced ghetto escapee.
Peter, much bigger than Noah, hesitated at the hole. He moved one way and then the other, trying to judge the right angle to avoid being wedged in an underground grave and certain death.
Noah soon popped up on the other side of the fence, moving the woodpile tied together with dried vines that covered the hole on the other side. He motioned to Peter to throw him the rucksack.
Peter hesitated. This was never going to work. He could hear the fence hum with electricity. He should never have listened to Sloan and Mica. They would be waiting for him in the truck at the park nearby, but he was about to die. What choice did he have? He was going to die sometime. It might as well be that day.
Peter gently tossed the rucksack with its small explosive device over the tall fence. Noah reached for the tumbling rucksack, caught it, and then lost his grip, bobbling it. Peter jumped down, flattening his body, covering his head with his arms, and waiting for the explosion.
Nothing happened. No explosion. He looked up. Noah grimaced and shrugged sheepishly, but held the rucksack up like a prized trophy. “Leave no room for failure!” he whispered.
It was Peter’s turn to burrow under the fence into the ghetto like a desperate rodent. He stuck his head in, wiggled his shoulders, and then disappeared into the hole. He inched his way through the short tunnel under the electric fence, contemplating how his life had led him to breaking into a Nazi ghetto where he might never get out.
He could hear the hum of the electric fence above him. When the tunnel’s darkness engulfed him, he panicked. He knew he should not be doing this, but it was too late to back out. He was committed. Noah was right, he had to keep moving.
He broke out in a sweat. He inched forward, wiggling his legs and pulling with his arms. Suddenly, his back wedged against the top of the tunnel. He tried to pull himself out of it, but he couldn’t move. He twisted his arms to scrape the dirt ceiling, but he couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t move forward or backward. He was stuck in a tunnel, under an electric fence with Nazi police guards nearby. Perfect. He felt he would die in the darkness underground, alone, already buried. Maybe he should have stayed in England. Even the Coventry farm seemed like a decent place compared to an earthen tunnel tomb.
Then he thought of Olga, the cow, and her struggle to give birth. He had not given up. He’d helped Olga by twisting the stuck calf to save its life. He would not give up now. He used every muscle and twisted his body, until he finally broke free and inched on, this time not stopping until he climbed out of the hole on the other side behind the bush.
“It’s bigger than you think, isn’t it?” Noah asked.
“No,” Peter said. He brushed off the dirt and took the rucksack from Noah. “Nice catch.” They replaced the tied-together woodpile and moved casually into the ghetto yard.
Noah led him to the main station, where the police guards gathered to smoke and complain about the disgusting people living in the ghetto. Peter nodded to Noah, as he slipped Abraham’s explosive creation out of the shoeshine pack.
Peter attached the detonator wires to the small explosive device that Abraham, the sewer scientist, had fashioned from TNT and wires hooked to the sometimes faulty connectors. He set the timer that would press against the wires on the connectors, creating friction, and making sparks that would ignite the TNT. He hooked the device under the guard station, and motioned for Noah to exit the area.
As they backed out, a guard grabbed Peter and Noah by the neck, stopping them. Noah looked up. It was Adler. Noah’s body tensed.
Adler stared at him. “I thought Dirk killed you in the woods.”
“Me? No, must have been somebody else. I’m alive,” Noah said, patting himself down to prove it. He shrugged. “We all look alike.” He looked quickly at the bomb underneath the guard station. It could go off at any moment.
Adler pointed to Peter. “He doesn’t look like one of you.”
Peter stepped forward, pulling away from Adler’s grasp. Sounding disgusted, he said, “I’m not one of them. I’m Johan. My father’s a policeman. I brought him some food.”
&
nbsp; “You that shoeshine boy?” Adler asked.
Peter nodded and patted his rucksack. “I’ll give your boots a good polish the next time I see you, for a reduced charge.”
“You need to get out of this area,” Adler said to Noah.
“I’ll take this boy back to the central area,” Peter said.
“Who’s your father?” Adler asked.
“I’ll tell him to watch this one,” Peter called, glancing over at the device underneath the guard station near the back fence.
Peter grabbed Noah’s arm and quickly marched him away without responding. He sneered at Noah. “What are you doing in the forbidden zone? Don’t you Jews know how to read?” Peter shouted. “Or are you too stupid?”
Adler smiled, but followed them for a way.
When Noah and Peter rounded the first building, Noah let out his breath. “How many minutes before it goes off?” Noah asked.
The explosives blew.
“None,” Peter said. “Run.”
Inside the compound, everyone’s attention turned to the explosion. The policemen shouted and ran from the outlying stations to investigate.
Peter and Noah ran to the guard station, now empty. Peter pulled out a long length of thin but sturdy rope with a loop on the end from his rucksack and dropped it on the ground like he had been told. Then they turned and fled.
“What happened?” Noah asked Peter.
Peter shrugged. “The connectors were loose.”
They ran behind the bush, pushed off the bundled woodpile, and crawled through the tunnel, appearing on the other side by the bushes.
“But did you see it? It worked,” Peter said, as he straightened up.
The only ones who paid any attention to Noah and Peter, as they ran, were a mother, father, and their three small boys, who watched with interest as they sprinted away. The tall gaunt mother wore a housedress that was stained and ripped under the arms. The father’s two black eyes and swollen jaw told the story of an unrelenting, but losing, scuffle with authority.
Marc, seven, wore pants that were several sizes too small. Normie, five, had the bruise of a handprint across his cheek. The youngest boy was Kramden. He was three, with light brown hair, and a smile that belied the fact that he could not remember anything besides the ghetto. He had never known a toy, or music, or a playground, and had no memories outside the fence. The red marks on the boys’ arms and necks pointed to vicious bedbug bites. They watched Peter and Noah run for the hidden exit.
The father gathered his desperate family and ran to the woodpile as he saw the boys appear on the other side of the fence. “This is the answer to our prayers,” he said to his wife.
“But we can’t make it through that hole.”
“At least they will make it,” he reasoned. She nodded, tears flooding her eyes with the realization that she would be saying goodbye to the children that it was her duty to protect. She was sending them to freedom with strangers.
“You there! Boys! Wait, please, stop. Help us, please,” the father shouted after Peter and Noah.
Peter looked at the truck waiting for them in the distance, and then at the ghetto, alive with chaos and confusion as planned. Hesitantly, Peter and Noah turned back to help the family.
They watched as the thin and pale father, tasting freedom for his family, sent his three boys through the tunnel under the fence. They easily made it. They were small enough and did not carry the fear of the dire consequences of their actions. They were just obeying their father.
As each boy appeared, Peter sent him to Noah to be hidden behind the bushes, out of sight of the policemen. The father stopped and listened, straining to hear. There was no howling hum emitted from the fence’s electricity. The explosion had temporarily taken down the power. “There’s no electricity. You must climb the fence now,” he said urgently to his wife.
“Are you sure?” she asked, suspicious of the killer fence that trapped them in the ghetto.
“Listen, it’s quiet.”
She nodded.
“The fence is down. Go. Go. Go,” the father whispered to her. “I will help you, then I will be right behind you.”
She nodded. He lifted her onto the fence, and she climbed as fast as the awkward task would allow, but she was weak from hunger and constant worry. She moved slowly, breathing heavily from exertion. She had nearly reached the top when the fence’s frightening hum suddenly returned. She looked down at her husband with the blank fear of death on her face, but nothing happened.
He nodded. “Keep going. You’re not grounded. You’ll be okay. Just jump off the fence at the top.”
She reached for the last wire. She was almost over.
A shot exploded. A bullet hit her shoulder. It knocked her off balance. She grabbed the barbed wire with her hands. She cried out in pain, but flung her leg over the top of the barbed wire fence in a last-ditch effort to get to the other side. Her dress twisted around the barbed wire, so, although she had somehow made it over, she hung trapped by her clothes.
Another bullet hit her arm. She released her grip. Her dress ripped, freeing her from the wire’s clutches, and she fell. On the way down, her legs tangled in the wire, ripping her skin. When her arms hit the ground, making a full circle circuit, she was electrocuted on the freedom side of the ghetto fence.
Peter could hear the sizzle and smell the burning flesh. Noah had told him that an occasional rabbit or a wayward cat or two often fell victim to the grilling of the fence, but he was not prepared for the gruesome electric death. The woman’s hair and skin were singed. Burn marks appeared where the electricity entered her body, and immediately her skin bubbled into blisters and turned red.
Despite the shock of his wife’s horrifying electrocution, the father only had a moment to size up the situation. “Take my children. Keep them safe,” he said to Peter through the fence.
He waved to his boys, still hidden behind the bushes, but protected by Noah from witnessing the horror of their mother’s death. “I love you. Remember that. I love you!” the father called to his children. “Go with them. Don’t look back. We will come to you shortly. We will all be together. Go! Now!”
Frightened, the three brothers all ran toward the park after Peter and Noah, obeying their father’s final command. Peter remembered when his own mother had lied to him, that she would shortly follow him to England, that they would soon be reunited in a new country. Without the lie, he wouldn’t have gone, but to discover the deceit was overwhelming, and the feeling of being abandoned left a hollowness that could never be filled.
He wondered if these boys would ever be able to forgive their father. Peter knew he hadn’t fully forgiven his mother until he helped Olga deliver her calf. Then, he’d understood the connection of a mother to her child and how his mother might be willing to do anything, even the unthinkable, to save her children.
The police guards’ flashlight beams hit the father near the fence in the forbidden zone, as he shouted to his children. Shots rang out. The father crumpled beside his wife, dead, but on the ghetto side of the fence.
The children ran on with Peter, unaware they were orphans.
They were focused only on escape from their prison, obeying their father’s last words. They ran across the park and through the open market to where a farmer’s truck was loaded with produce, hay, and burlap sacks.
Sloan and Mica, dressed like local farmers, sat on the front seat of the truck. They turned when they saw the children running toward them.
“What happened?” Sloan demanded.
“Went off a little early,” Peter said, shrugging.
“So, the building blew up too early, and you brought me three children that I have no escape plan for? Not an overwhelming success, young rebel,” Sloan said, shaking his head.
“They followed us out. The police shot their mother and father,” Peter whispered to Sloan. “I couldn’t leave them.”
“Don’t get personally involved. It makes you weak,” Sloan scolded.
“Get them on the truck, now!” Mica said, glancing back at the ghetto.
Peter pulled up the burlap bags to reveal an entrance to a hollowed tunnel under the hay. He lifted Marc, Normie, and Kramden up and pushed them through the hole. He motioned to Noah, who ducked down and followed them in to the crowded spot.
Peter walked over to Sloan. “Can I drive the truck?”
Sloan shook his head. “Not today, the cab is full.”
“No, it’s not. There’s still room. I’m a good driver. I used to drive my father’s meat truck when I was little.”
“We’re waiting for one more. Get in the back, meat-man,” Mica said.
Peter shook his head and grumbled. “Why can’t he get in the back?” The faulty connectors had sped up their departure. The flames of Operation Rakete still lit the darkening sky behind them in the ghetto. It was a bit of a risk exploding early. Although Sloan was not pleased, Peter considered it a celebration of sabotage and not bad for a new rebel boy and his young ghetto guide.