by Jana Zinser
“These are my last bombs, since my supplier was discovered by the Nazis and shot. I only have some simple explosives left,” he said.
He showed Peter how to make a rudimentary bomb from TNT hidden in a hollow pine log as a camouflage casing. “I call these pine bombs,” Abraham said, and he gave Peter the bundle of TNT. “You’ll have to find the logs yourself. They are scarce in my neighborhood.”
“What will you do now?” Peter asked.
“I will die a free man, here in the pipe,” Abraham said. “That’s more than I can say for most.”
“Freedom is worth any price,” Peter said, as he hugged the old scientist.
Abraham nodded with a slight bow. “May God guide your feet.”
Peter looked down at his boots as he walked away. He would miss his odd, but determined, sewer friends.
Sloan, Mica, and Peter rendezvoused in Lodansk on January 16, 1945, a cold day with icicles hanging from the eaves of the rooftops. Their plan was to go into the Reinigen camp at night, so people would be asleep in the barracks. They would blow up all the other buildings without danger to the prisoners, because prisoners were restricted to the barracks and the medical building, the only buildings the rebels would spare from demolition.
The frigid air chilled them through to their bones. The frozen ground crunched under Peter’s boots as he looked through the binoculars at the camp in the distance, like he had several times before. His hot breath vaporized into the cold air. He was hidden at a safe range in a barn a short distance from Lars’s farmhouse.
Lars, a Polish pig farmer and a devout Christian willing to risk his family’s lives to help the Jewish Resistance, was the opposite of Emil, the troll farmer. Lars was a compassionate man, whose soft lilting voice soothed his animals and gave confidence to anyone bold enough to attempt the supreme sabotage of destroying a Nazi death camp.
Peter was now eighteen. He had grown taller than his father, and was head to head with Sloan the Bear. He had filled out and was lean and muscular from his years with the underground. He was a handsome young man and a poster boy for a rugged, daring rebel. Sloan and Mica looked him up and down with weary eyes and saw Peter’s good looks as a problem. “You’re too much of a pretty boy for a prisoner, too much muscle, too well groomed,” Sloan said. “You’ll be spotted right away.”
“You look mighty well fed yourselves,” Peter pointed out.
“But he makes a good Nazi. Even Karl Radley fell for it,” Mica observed, smiling.
“Oh, no! No! No! No! I’m not doing that again!”
“Oh, yeah, you are,” Sloan said. He pulled out the Nazi officer uniform Peter had worn before. This time he filled it out.
“Bruno? Johan Bruno? Exit the refuse vehicle! Schnell!” Sloan said, laughing as he imitated Commandant Radley when he’d seen Peter driving the garbage truck.
Peter shook his head. “No! No!”
“This was your idea, the big sabotage, the big rescue,” Mica said. “Be bold, you said.”
“You can’t back out now, rebel boy,” Sloan said. “Your destiny awaits, Johan Bruno!” They laughed.
Lars gently nudged the pigs with a stick to make his way through their pen. “Come on, men, let’s go inside until dark. The moon will be full tonight, and you haven’t tasted my wife’s paczki.”
Inside the small but cozy farmhouse, Lars’s wife made them coffee and paczki, a deep-fried, flattened, round dough. It reminded Peter of the pastries his family had eaten on Sunday nights, when he was a child. Sloan, Mica, and Peter sat at the kitchen table and set up explosive devices inside hollowed-out, split wood that looked exactly like the logs the Nazis used to fire up the crematorium and other furnaces at the camp.
Peter also assembled two petrol bombs. He modified his usual bomb, eliminating the fuse. This time he made the petrol bombs out of sulfuric acid, sugar, and potassium chlorate like Abraham had shown him. “This will ignite on impact. It doesn’t need a rag fuse. I’ve found some people don’t know how to light a fuse.” He looked meaningfully at Mica.
Mica picked up a piece of his paczki and threw it at Peter. It hit his arm and landed on the table. Peter picked it up and popped it in his mouth. “Don’t waste the paczki.”
They laughed, and Peter continued to make the bombs that would free the Reinigen prisoners. They would be prepared for anything and accept nothing but total destruction of the Nazi camp.
“Don’t forget to tighten the connectors this time, boy,” Sloan teased. Mica and Sloan laughed, heartily.
Peter rolled his eyes. “Who saved you from the hanging noose? You ungrateful renegades!”
“The meat man,” Sloan said, “in a dustbin lorry!”
Sloan and Mica laughed.
“But who taught you to be a heartless rebel?” Mica reminded him.
“Two old washed-up commandos,” Peter said, as he spread a map on the table. “Now, let’s look at the map one more time. We leave the barracks and medical buildings alone. We explode the gas chambers and crematorium first. I will personally see to that. We check the warehouse to make sure only Nazis are in it, and then, systematically, we eliminate them all. Sloan, you take these buildings, Mica these, and I will take these.” Peter pointed to the buildings on the intricate homemade map.
“You have taken the most dangerous for yourself,” Sloan pointed out.
“It was my idea,” Peter said.
“You are either very stupid, very brave, or a little touched in the head,” Sloan said.
“I’m with you, aren’t I?” Peter teased.
“Our goal is complete annihilation,” Mica said gravely. “You realize if it doesn’t work, it will surely be our deaths.”
“I cannot think of anyone else I would rather die with,” Peter said.
The humor evaporated from the room. Sloan pointed to Peter. “If I am ever lucky enough to be a father, I hope I have a son like you, who is not afraid to attempt big things.”
Peter hugged Sloan. “You are the closest thing to a father I have had since I was eleven.” Then he hugged Mica. “We will do this together.”
Mica put his hands on Peter and Sloan’s shoulders. “Whether we are successful or not tonight, my friends, together we will make history. We will do something great. We will fight the Nazis, and one way or the other, free our people.”
“Tonight, we fight for God,” Peter said. They raised their coffee mugs in salute to their revolt.
Late that night, a light snow fell. The moon shone brightly, casting its white light like a lunar lantern on their daring deed. Peter was dressed as the fake Nazi. Mica and Sloan were dressed like prisoners in baggy striped pants and shirts Lars’s wife had sewn to hide their healthy thickness. They headed to the entrance of the camp in a farm wagon driven by Lars, a Christian pig farmer with a sense of justice.
Peter got out from the front of the wagon. Radley’s old gun, the one Peter had retrieved with the yo-yo, was in Peter’s holster, but bullets were nearly impossible to get. The gun was only for show. A large leather pouch strapped across his shoulder rested at his side. He usually used it for carrying important papers or packages, but that night, it contained two petrol bombs as ba
ckup. “Leave no room for failure,” he whispered to the others.
Then Peter motioned to Sloan and Mica in the back of the wagon and raised his voice. “Out! Schnell! Schnell, you Jew scum! Carry the farmer’s wood for my fire; it is cold tonight.”
Mica and Sloan got out, heads hanging as they shuffled toward the camp’s entrance, carrying armloads of split logs with explosives nestled securely inside.
Peter shouted at the police guards. “Open the gate!”
And remarkably, the gates opened.
They moved through the entrance, carrying the armloads of small logs filled with bombs. The gate clanged shut. They were in, but without complete success, there was no way out. They had to destroy the camp and kill, or run off, all the Nazi guards, or they would be trapped inside and killed as Jewish rebels, the worst kind of prisoners. In his head, Peter recited the cuts of meat, as the Kindertransport boy who escaped Germany, returned, and infiltrated a death camp dressed as a Nazi officer.
Lars drove nervously away to wait inside the farmhouse with his wife for the camp’s fireworks show and an end to their unwelcome neighbors that was long overdue. Soon, they hoped their country would be returned to the good people of Poland.
Peter marched Sloan and Mica, carrying the small but powerful explosives, disguised as logs, through the dark camp. Once out of sight, they divided the matches and pine bombs, each taking four bombs.
“It is time,” Sloan said.
“May God guide our feet,” Peter said, repeating Abraham’s last words to him.
They turned to go. A flashlight shone on Mica and Sloan. A German Shepherd growled and pulled at his leash beside the big man holding the flashlight. Mica and Sloan quickly turned their faces away from the light.
“What are you doing here? You will be shot for leaving your barracks!” the man shouted.
Peter set his four log bombs down in the snow and stepped out from the shadows. “They are my responsibility. I will escort them back.” He crossed into the beam of the flashlight and stood face to face with Karl Radley.
Peter froze. Radley was the Commandant at Reinigen Camp? The unexpected confrontation with his Nazi enemy would put a huge kink in their bomb plot.
“Bruno? You worthless scum. You owe me a hanging,” Radley said, as he pulled his gun and aimed it at them, his hands shaking slightly. “Tonight, I have you trapped, and this time I will not miss.”
Sloan and Mica turned, still holding their logs, and faced Radley.
Radley stared. “Ah, your rebel friends. A bonus.”
Sloan whispered out of the side of his mouth in Yiddish: “On the count of three, rush him. He can’t kill all of us.”
Peter grabbed the pine bombs from the ground.
“One,” Sloan said.
Without waiting for Sloan’s count to finish, Peter hit the vicious dog and charged toward Radley.
Sloan and Mica, only a second behind him, caught Radley off guard, but he fired, as he ran backwards trying to avoid the unexpected commando onslaught. The shot missed them, but alerted the police guards. Bullets riddled the ground around them.
“Run!” Sloan commanded. They stopped their attack and sprinted into the darkness of the camp and the cover of the camp’s many buildings. Radley shot repeatedly, but the darkness and their swift flight prevented a hit.
“Traitors!” Radley yelled, shooting randomly at them. “Attention! Jew rebels are among us! The traitors are here! Kill them on sight.” The three commandos could hear his murderous orders as they hid behind the water tanks.
“You don’t understand what ‘count to three’ means?” Sloan scolded Peter.
“Three was too long.” Peter put his pine bombs in his leather pouch, along with the matches. “Take the opportunity, you taught me that.”
Sloan breathed heavily. “This was a shorter rebellion than I anticipated.”
Peter shook his head. “We are not done. There is still fight in us.”
“You are like a cat with an unrealistic notion of the size of the dog,” Sloan said.
“You were a good teacher,” Peter said.
“Don’t blame me. If we are to do this, we must do it quickly. They won’t be far behind us,” Mica said.
“Get done what we can before we die,” Sloan said.
“We will not die today,” Peter said. “We will take down the big dog.”
Sloan smiled. Peter’s confidence helped him collect his shattered bravado. “Let’s go.”
They took off in different directions to execute their schedule of demolishing buildings and to strike a blow against Hitler for Reinigen and all Jewish people.
Karl Radley gestured excitedly to the officers summoned by his shouting, Eric among them. “I tell you, it’s Johan Bruno, the traitor of Germany, who freed Sloan the Bear and Mica the Murderer. They are all here!” Radley said excitedly.
“Here in Lodansk?” Eric asked.
Radley nodded. “Here, inside the compound.”
“Then they are trapped like rats. We will find them and kill them, and we will be the talk of Germany,” Eric bragged.
Borg ran up to the group. “Commandant, on the teletype there are reports that Allied Forces have crossed the border and are headed this way,” he said, breathing heavily.
Stunned for a moment, Radley grimaced, and he paced like a man used to giving orders. He shouted, “Send all the children to the gas chambers! And march all those who are able out of camp. Stop for nothing. Evacuate and shoot whoever refuses. No one will take this camp. The rest must hunt down and kill those worthless rebels at any cost! They will not humiliate me again!”
A short time later in the kinderlager barracks, Ramona burst through the door, letting the frigid night air blow into the already frosty, unheated building. She stood stiffly in front of the children, staring straight ahead, not willing to look them in the eyes. She cleared her throat. “All kinder are to report to the showers, now!”
She turned on her heels and strutted out. The door banged shut.
The children stared. The inevitable had finally come on the dark wings of night, and all hope evaporated into the frosty air. There was muffled crying and moaning at the realization that death had at last come calling, and they were being forced to answer.
Eva was still in the children’s barracks, and as the oldest, she was responsible for them. She was extremely thin, and her hair was jagged, dirty, and matted. In spite of that, she was still a beautiful girl. She lay in her bunk and thought about her childhood. She wished she’d been able to take that ride with Peter in the garbage truck.
She closed her eyes and curled up in a ball, contemplating which would be worse, to be shot in the cold barracks or to die in the showers. Either way, death was a certainty. She decided to stay and be shot. She would refuse to go. It would be her last defiance, her last stand.
Three shrill warbling whistles broke through the silence of the night, like Peter’s call she remembered from her school days. She opened her eyes and sat up. She listened, her ears straining for the sound of Peter’s distinctive call, but everything was quiet.
She
shook her head. She had crazily misheard a train whistle, or she was hallucinating from lack of food and complete exhaustion. Perhaps her mind had finally snapped. It could not be possible; it could not be Peter. He was in England. The memory of Peter and her life before her arrest, however, gave her the courage to get up and face her fate. She would not abandon the children who depended on her in their last moments.
CHAPTER 45
A HEART’S LIbERATION
(January 1945)
In the kinderlager, Ramona led Eva and the other children from their barracks.
“They’re going to kill us,” Eva said.
Ramona nodded, but looked away.
“How can you do this?” Eva asked.
“Dark days call for dark choices,” Ramona answered.
Eva and the children lined up outside the gas chambers, as they had seen so many others do. Ramona leaned in and whispered to Eva, who stood at the head of the line. “Take deep breaths; you’ll die faster.”
Eva stared and nodded. “Now you want to help me?”
The three commandos could wait no longer. Radley was implementing his kill orders. Guards were beginning to round up the inmates for a death march out of the camp. A line of children waited at the front of the gas chambers, which would make their sabotage more dangerous, but it was time. If the rebels didn’t act, their bold mission would be jeopardized.
Peter stood outside the officers’ building. He could explode it quickly because no inmates were ever allowed there. He pulled the thin fake end off a pine bomb. It was not on securely after Peter had thrown them on the ground when Radley surprised them. He lifted up the fuse. If ever there was a time for God to be watching, it was then, thought Peter. It was at that crucial moment when his daring rebellion needed intervention for his people, God’s chosen people. Right then was the moment when life could change, when the advantage could go to the Jewish people.