The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  Soldiers fainted and dropped and lay with the dead until their conscious comrades revived them with smelling salts or a kick in the side. Lucky gendarmes kept busy marching ghetto residents to the Umschlagplatz, where on the worst days thousands waited for cattle cars to trundle in on the tracks in a plague of heat carried to the city by a thick, muggy swarm of degrees. Less fortunate soldiers stood around bored in hot buildings, hot courtyards, hot doorways, and on hot streets, smoking, swearing, spitting stale tobacco and gum, and kicking rocks, bottles, and mangy dogs. Another favorite practice of the bored soldier was to shoot a ghetto resident—preferably in the head near a wall—then force other residents to clean up the mess.

  Guards at Pawiak Prison with nothing to do urinated on the Alsatian hounds that guarded the yard, trying for their eyes. That routine got old so in an instance that reeked of the blind pathos that had befallen Europe, the guards took to starving the hounds then sicking them on a Roman Catholic priest who had been arrested on a charge of “issuing phony baptismal certificates to help disguise and save Jews.”

  This barbarity went on for a week, in the first mornings of early autumn, until the morning Leiozia walked by, on the other side of the street from the yard where the priest lay alone near the inside edge of the barbed wire, bitten and bleeding. Leiozia hurried because the rule on the street was to avoid the street, but if you had to be on it, to walk quickly, but not too quickly. Running brought soldiers, who were as likely to shoot you as stop you and ask for your papers. Leiozia walked without much attention to the dead because they lay everywhere and had become the second-most common obstacle to avoid, behind the soldiers. The dead were a nuisance because they stunk and brought flies and sanitary personnel, who would look around at the surrounding houses and remind themselves which ones they had yet to disinfect. The dead, as they always are, were a reminder—of things past and of things not done and of things yet to come.

  The priest was not dead, but his small movements and whispered groans consigned him to the third class of obstacles to avoid—the dying—who also lay everywhere, moaning, begging, or in the semi-comatose sleep that precedes a quiet end, without pain, drama, or untoward event. This man of God—with his lacerated knuckle resting against the fence and his fingers opening and closing in slow, fruitless grasps—should never have caught Leiozia’s eye. She had left the house before dawn and followed a circuitous path through alleys and side streets to the last place within walking distance that sold coal on the black market. She was coming back now without any coal, angry she had wasted valuable physical energy, angry she was hungry again, angry no one had told her the coal stores had not been replenished for a week. Rabbi should have known; we have an underground newspaper; someone is always talking and gossiping about the latest bad news, even competing over whose news is worse. Why wasn’t this news reported? Thank G-d it was only autumn and coal was not as necessary, but stocking up for winter was on everybody’s mind.

  The sun crept over the tops of tall buildings and peered between spires and struck the priest, a singular figure. A black cassock wrapped him below his white face and his white hands and his white hair. Leiozia stopped when she first saw him and stood with her fingers wrapped around the rough wooden handle of the empty coal basket. She had never seen a prisoner alone in the Pawiak yard before and hopeful thoughts presented: they’re short staffed; they’re planning to abandon the place; or they already have.

  She was alarmed to see the priest move his head. She watched him and felt compelled. She looked up and down the street and when she saw it was clear, she walked across and stepped over the rust-colored water that trickled in the gutter. She was closer to the priest and saw blood in his hair. The torn cassock stuck to his skin.

  “Can you hear me?” Leiozia asked. She crouched along a brick-and-stone berm the length of the block. The prison fence ran along the top of the berm. She couldn’t see his face, but she heard a low sound that seemed to come from it. She thought about what to do.

  “Can you move your finger if you hear me?”

  He bent his index finger up and down.

  “Where are the guards?”

  The priest opened his entire hand.

  “Are they still here? Move your finger if you mean yes.”

  The priest moved his index finger up and down again.

  “Will they come back for you?”

  She saw him move his arm. “They’ll see you if you move much,” she said. “Just move your finger.” Leiozia examined him. “The soldiers did this?”

  The priest hesitated. Then he moved his finger again.

  Leiozia considered. “You’re going to die,” she said. “Do you want water?”

  The priest moved his index finger.

  Leiozia unwrapped her scarf from her head and dipped it in the gutter. She slid her hand through the fence and held the scarf against the priest’s lips. She could feel him and had an uncharacteristic thought.

  “Do you want revenge?” she asked. For a time that seemed long, the priest didn’t move his finger. Then he moved it, up and down.

  Leiozia withdrew her hand and opened her jacket. She dug her fingernails between the top threads that sewed her inside pocket shut. She tore open the top of the pocket and reached in and brought her fingers around the white grenade. She took the grenade out and slipped it inside the fence and placed it in the priest’s hand and wrapped his fingers around it.

  “This is a grenade,” she said. “Do you know how to work it?”

  He raised his index finger. She slipped it into the firing pin.

  “Can you do it?”

  He grasped the egg-shaped bomb as though to pull down on it and separate it from the firing pin with his index finger.

  “When you see them coming, close your hand. Take as many as you can.”

  Leiozia looked around and saw no one. She dipped the scarf into the water again and set it to the priest’s lips. She looked around a second time and stood and walked to the other side of the street and away. She remembered later that she had left her scarf with the priest and panicked until she realized that nothing would be left of it.

  “A WONDERFUL THING HAS HAPPENED.” The rabbi kissed Rebekah on both cheeks and threw up his hands. “A bomb went off inside the Pawiak.”

  “A bomb?” Rebekah said. “Who put it there? Was it an accident?”

  The rabbi shut the back door. “Our enemies are tight lipped. Won’t say anything. Running around like a gaggle of lost geese. Don’t know who did it. Don’t know why. Don’t want to talk about it.”

  “They’re usually out with the guns, lining people up anytime a thing like this happens.”

  “A thing like this has never happened,” the rabbi said. “A stealth attack on their own turf. It’s completely exhilarating.”

  Rebekah heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “Leia?”

  “Yes, ma’am?” Leiozia spoke from the drawing room, out of sight.

  “Have you heard about this?”

  “About what?”

  “This bomb in the Pawiak.”

  Leiozia’s heart leapt. Her mouth dried. A pang knotted in her stomach.

  “Leiozia?”

  Leiozia grabbed her fleeting composure and stepped around the corner into the kitchen. “What a place for a bomb to go off.” she said. “Do they know who put it there?”

  “The only thing I’ve heard—and this is only a rumor—a priest,” the rabbi said.

  “A priest?”

  “The only problem with the story is that it appears, from the people who were walking on the street before it happened, the priest was dead.”

  “He must have been very well connected,” Leiozia said.

  The rabbi laughed. Rebekah cast her eyes downward.

  “What?” Leiozia said. “What’s funny?”

  The rabbi choked on his chuckle and bent over the counter.

  “Oh, oh.” He stopped and caught his breath and rubbed his eyes. “It’s terrible to laugh at such
a thing, I know. But—hah!” He took a deep breath again and smiled. “I haven’t had a laugh like that in—I can’t remember how long. Can you forgive me?”

  “A priest, for heaven’s sake,” Rebekah said.

  “Please—no more,” the rabbi said. “Are these puns deliberate?” He sighed.

  “Where does this leave us?” Rebekah said.

  The rabbi lowered his voice. “I think it leaves us in a good position.”

  TERRIFYING REPRISALS SHOULD HAVE PUNCTUATED the story of Leiozia’s grenade, but Leiozia, a simple Jew, a peasant here, had executed the perfect crime. She had murdered three German soldiers in an explosive volley of shrapnel that looked like a suicide and destroyed any evidence that might suggest otherwise. She had employed a Roman Catholic trigger man who wore a collar attached to a virtual leash that led to all the way to Italy, and Il Duce—Mussolini—who was an important Nazi ally engaged in a precarious dance with the Vatican.

  The first officers in Berlin to receive word of the incident—which became known as “the Pawiak Incendiary”—vowed it would never reach Hitler or any of the General staff and sent orders back quashing the “usual course of action.” Retribution against the Poles would only draw attention to the sorry lapse of security that permitted the first successful surprise attack from within not one, but two walls. These were dual barricades, a fenced prison in a walled-off ghetto, a hell within a hell, where the flames of sadism were supposed to burn white-hot and untouchable.

  The occupiers also realized the potent effect this story might have on the occupied, so they guarded what they knew of it—three gendarmes dead, two Alsatian hounds blown to bits, German uniforms scattered on the barbed wire. Despite the cover up, ripples of gossip swelled into a tsunami of exaggeration, a twice-told tale of daring-do told twice again, each time with added bravado. The impetuous act of a housemaid and a doomed cleric became a planned assault orchestrated by the Underground in concert with the local Catholic authorities, a short but victorious preamble to a bitter battle yet to come.

  Leiozia was as unsuspecting of the factors that conspired to protect her as she was unsuspected of any crimes. Fear lapped at her, dogging her movements through days and nights of secret panic, stalking, watching, waiting, but never pouncing, because perfect crimes toll like petty blackmailers. Although like everyone in the ghetto, Leiozia suffered from chronic hunger, malnutrition and fatigue, she nonetheless lost what little appetite she had and forfeited her coveted ability to sleep through the loudest gunfire. Her purposeful street-smart stride became dazed and unbalanced, a fleeting, loopy heartbeat held her hostage to bouts of light headedness, and worry-driven surges of adrenaline churned her stomach, tossing what food she could keep down into a froth of anxiety. She fretted to the point of illness and she despaired, for she could tell no one.

  THE FIRST ORDERS ISSUED POST PAWIAK Incendiary commanded the residents of Mila, Niska and Smocza streets to assemble on the Umschlagplatz, where two directors of a military uniform factory—Schultz and Toebbens—would select the strong for labor and the right to live. Selected persons would have Lebensnumern—numbers of life—stitched to the backs of their shirts.

  The bold rhetoric of the Underground and the recent success at Pawiak empowered the physically strong, who generally avoided selections, hiding instead as so-called “wild tenants” in cellars, lofts, basements, and secret rooms in houses that appeared deserted from the street. Those who stood on the Umschlagplatz during these, the ghetto’s latter days, were hungry, weak, impoverished, and resigned. The few selected for life hung their Lebensnumern like medals around their necks and marched to the Sheds—barracks and workshops arranged in blocks behind yet more blockades. The others boarded trains for the camps.

  Close contact in the Sheds yielded a harvest of sedition. Young lions of Zion once training to fight in Palestine formed the first resistance organization, the Zhydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy —Jewish Military Union—or ZZW. On July 28, 1942, about thirty Jewish members of the Polish Workers Party, men and boys, had formed the Zhydowska Organizacja Bojowa—the Jewish Fighting Organization—or ZOB. They named as their leader Mordecai Anielewicz, a 24-year-old economics and history student who dreamed of being a scholar before the war.

  The ZOB allied itself with the Jewish Aid Division on the Aryan side of the wall. Through the secretive and ethereal Waclaw—who had escaped the ghetto over a year ago, but lingered in the shadows of the Reich—the ZOB passed appeals with diaries and photographs to allies in Western Europe, France, England, and the United States. Bewildered black and white faces looked wide-eyed from blurred lines: lines of the camp bound; lines of the newly disinfected; lines of the fallen and the falling, captured surreptitiously on film.

  With journalistic precision, writings detailed day-to-day desperation, but also questioned G-d and mused on meaning and tried to weave hopeful threads into the ropes of anguish that bound every person, some by the hands, some by the heart, some by the neck. In time money came, and with money food, arms and munitions, smuggled into the ghetto from the Aryan side through tunnels and passages and sewage canals. Courage followed supplies, the first inklings of it in an appeal from the ZOB.

  “Stop! Defend! Fight!”

  Stop surrendering to certain death, the ZOB urged. “Stop marching like lemmings to the Umschlagplatz. Hide, and if they find you, barricade yourself and if you have a gun, shoot them as they reach in to pull you out.”

  A smuggling operation took shape between the wild tenants, the workers in the Sheds, and shadowy figures who lived on the Aryan side. Outside the Jewish Council buildings, where corpses came for dispensation and Jewish guards stood watch while Jewish civilians stripped their deceased brethren, the living—young and slender boys—hid themselves beneath the dead. Under this cover, the boys traveled out, beyond the gates, to the Skra, a sports field on the Aryan side converted to a mass grave of the un-buried that replaced the Kirkut.

  The dead went first into the open holes. The boys underneath stretched and smiled and raised their legs and arms to the pallbearers, who heaved them by their ankles and wrists into the graves with whistles and quips that made the nearby guards ponder what happy occasion could have befallen these sorry souls. The boys would wait in the open graves until night, sometimes hiding under the bodies, then slip out and run a well-traveled route to the Jewish Aid Division with maps, notes, and memorized information. The guards shot only one boy, mistaking him for one of the dead who had not quite died. The rule was never fidget or move, but pull oneself out and run, always at dark during the cold, wee morning hours. It was late in the year 1942, close to winter, and the revolt had begun.

  Nine

  The winter of 1943 settled over Warsaw. Twenty-degree below zero temperatures slowed the Germans and stopped the once daily round-ups decimating the ghetto’s population. The enemy’s pause energized the Underground, especially when word leaked a first-time visitor was coming to the ghetto during the lull.

  On January 9, Heinrich Himmler arrived. He wandered around for a few hours under heavy guard, waving his hands like a movie producer and saying things in the ears of henchmen who leaned forward and back and nodded and laughed. He stopped and looked into the gray sky and over the buildings. He walked within five feet of a camouflaged bunker, where two giddy boys watched him from the hole. Here Himmler himself stood, with SS Oberstandartenführer (Colonel) Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg and the chief of the security police, Dr. Otto Hahn.

  “Shh. Listen,” the older boy said.

  “By February 15, no later—we have about sixty six—tausend?”

  “Ja, Herr Reichsführer,” von Sammern-Frankenegg said.

  “Labor and resettlement.”

  “Ja, Herr Reichsführer.”

  “No later than February 15th—you know what I’m telling you?”

  “Ja.”

  “It’s fully understood?”

  “Absolutely.”

  On February 16, 1943, Himmler ordered Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüge
r, SS Polizeiführer of the General Government in Poland, to liquidate the ghetto by April 19, the day before Hitler’s birthday. “I expect it complete in three days and no more than three days,” Himmler told Krüger. “What a birthday present the Führer shall have—a Warsaw clean of the Jews.”

  Krüger assigned Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg and SS Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik to carry out Himmler’s orders.

  “Three days is a ridiculously short time to do such a massive job,” Globocnik told Krüger. “We would need no less than three weeks, at a minimum.”

  “Get Stroop” was Himmler’s only reply when Krüger tried to complain.

  A World War I veteran who conducted guerrilla warfare against Soviet partisans in the Ukraine, SS Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) Jürgen Stroop knew all about piss ant bandits who barricaded themselves behind makeshift fortifications and threw homemade bombs at legitimate troops. He knew only a massive offensive would shutter the ghetto in the three days Himmler commanded. He trained captured Ukrainians and other soldiers in brutal urban warfare at Trawniki, Poland, and assembled a hard scrabble lot of felons and murderers who would fight their way to freedom once he loosed them on the Jews.

  FROM THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY AND ALL through February, the siege continued, with morning street round-ups on the Aryan side. The soldiers dragged people out of their homes and shops, by the hair, the hands, by any part of the body they could grasp.

  The rabbi had bribed every member of the Judenrat and paid protection money to every ranking member of the governor’s staff and the local SS, but the forces that pressed for eradication surged. Himmler’s visit only confirmed the awful and inevitable.

  Most of the boarders at the Mordechai house had fallen victim to selection, and a few had died—one of typhus, two others from hunger. Rudi was still missing and now presumed dead. The heavyset man was heavy no more, but “skinny as the rail line to the platz,” he would say. He was a man with the tastes of an epicure who loved to eat but now lived in a miserable empty shell that affected him worse than it affected the others. Henryk was still Henryk, tall, lean, quiet, unflappable.