The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  THEY WRAPPED LEIOZIA’S BODY IN BURLAP. It wasn’t hard to move because she was dehydrated and had starved to under one hundred pounds—a full twenty pounds, at least, less than her normal weight. She was stiff with rigor and her body didn’t sag much when Jakub lifted her with the rabbi’s help.

  “Marian would spit if he knew about this,” Rebekah said.

  “He has enough problems,” Shosha said. “This is one problem he won’t have.”

  They lowered Leiozia and slid her through the narrow opening to the tunnels, into the blackness, where there was no light and the eyes never adjusted. The rabbi moved with Shosha and Jakub toward an opening on the alley. They tied her body with ropes to a makeshift gurney pieced together from wooden crates and burlap sacks.

  “Lech Shalom!” Rabbi Gimelman said to each of them and they kissed, cheek to cheek, and he hugged them. He took Shosha’s head in his hands and looked at her, and looked at her eyes.

  “Come back,” he said.

  They lifted the gurney and walked out. These early hours of Monday were still. Soldiers and circumstance had driven anyone still living underground, to cellars, caves, catacombs, sewers, and tunnels. The Underground had constructed strategic bunkers around the ghetto and behind these little fortresses fighters hid, waiting for the sun.

  Shosha walked behind Jakub supporting Leiozia’s bound feet. They walked in the alleys and side streets. Shosha saw Gesiowka Prison, dark and empty. She walked up to a locked gate.

  “We have to go around,” she said.

  They went up steps to open doors, passing through empty buildings to back doors and out again. They walked over broken glass and crumbled bricks, and paper everywhere—newspapers, notes, letters, books, magazines, propaganda, waving in the rubble. Jakub stopped and gasped and heaved, but never let Leiozia down.

  “The smell?” Shosha said.

  “Terrible.”

  “I must be used to it.” Then around a corner, “Bread!”

  Shosha saw something she had seen many times—a cage on a baker’s table imprisoning a loaf. But this time no one was around demanding too much for it.

  “Can we set her down?”

  “Yes,” Jakub said.

  “Can we set her down?”

  “Yes,” Jakub said.

  Shosha looked in all directions. She ran to the table, leaning against a wall on the narrow street. She took the loaf out. It was large, with a hard crust, a little stale, perfect. She bit into the bread without a thought of her companion, bit in and swallowed whole and let the hard crust slide into her stomach. She was not so hungry that food would make her sick, but eating too quickly could cause her to throw it up and she remembered this and looked at Jakub leaning against the bricks with Leiozia lying on the walkway in front of him.

  “Oh!” She went back to him. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Good time to rest,” Jakub said.

  She held the loaf up to Jakub and he took a small piece. She took another piece and started to chew it, then instead let it sit in her mouth. She took another bite, and another, slowly. With each piece, she chewed a little more. She leaned against the wall and let her eyes roll with the slow, savoring up-and-down movements of her tongue and the moist insides of her cheeks.

  “A mekhaye! Mekhaye!” she said. She looked at Jakub. “You don’t know how good this tastes. You just don’t know.”

  Jakub moved along the wall, creeping on his feet. At the edge of the alley, he saw men running with their hands in the air.

  “The police.” Shosha spoke from behind him. “Our police, the Jewish police.”

  Four uniformed SS officers wearing long dark coats followed. They lined up the Jewish police and the SS men raised pistols and fired until the pistols emptied and the police fell. A few twitched then stopped. Men with guns in heavy, dirty uniforms wearing heavy boots stepped from the backs of trucks. These fighters were Trawniki men, or Askaris, from the SS training camp near Lublin, recruited from the prisons of the conquered Eastern territories. The German commander Stroop was turning them loose with weapons and rounds. Marian had said the arrival of the Askaris would be the first sign of the end, the final fight to clear the ghetto and its evidence so the Germans could move men and weapons from here to the Russian front.

  Two Trawniki men lugged large metal cans across the street. They set the cans down and unscrewed them and poured fluid over the bodies. The SS men laughed and talked, leaning and smoking and moving their hands and swaying their backs, tapping their feet and snapping orders at the Trawniki men and laughing again. With a monotonous sweep of their hands, the Trawniki men lit matches and flicked them one by one onto the bodies. The flames barked and crackled, and warmed the air as far as the alley where Shosha and Jakub stood with Leiozia.

  The SS men stepped back from the heat. Through the fire, Shosha and Jakub saw their faces—their smiles, laughs, frowns, and furrowed brows in ordinary conversation.

  They waited until the flames died and the soldiers dispersed. They raised Leiozia and walked. Before they reached the cemetery gates at the corner of Gesia and Okopowa, Shosha brought her scarf to her nose. She held another one to Jakub, who waved it away. An armed gendarme usually stood at the gate, but not now.

  “Just like I thought,” Shosha said.

  Vandals had toppled tombstones and shattered statues. Graves lay open and heaped with the dead and the stench was unbearable. The air was warmer here, and in the morning, the place buzzed with flies and farther away, the noise sounded like a low hum.

  They walked past tent-like tombs, the ohel reserved for the rabbis. Jakub felt his hands and feet aching but he kept walking with Shosha behind him, supporting Leiozia’s feet and legs.

  “We’re close,” Shosha said.

  They turned right and followed the road to the back three plots. Shosha lowered Leiozia’s feet and Jakub turned to let her head down. He leaned and stretched his back.

  “We need to find an empty grave,” Shosha said. “They were opening more back here.” Shosha walked along the maze of paths at the end of the yard. She found open graves, but with occupants in various stages of dress and decay. If not for the dark, she would have recognized someone. She came finally to holes and dirt piles on either side of the path. The larger grave cradled five bodies and the smaller grave, two. She went back to Jakub who was sitting against a tree with the tail of his shirt over his nose.

  “We have to move two bodies,” she said.

  They walked to the open graves. A breeze fluttered the early spring leaves and punctuated the smell. Shosha raised her chin and closed her eyes and let the cool air drift across her cheeks.

  “There’s another cemetery called the Skra but it’s not really a cemetery, but just a grave,” Shosha said. “I didn’t want Leiozia at the Skra.”

  They stepped into the smaller grave and lifted the bodies, Jakub at the shoulders and Shosha at the feet. The bodies were decayed and lightweight and they swung them up and onto the path. They stepped out of the grave and lifted the bodies again. They lowered each body into the larger grave.

  “May your souls return to G-d and your bodies rest in peace,” Shosha said.

  Jakub blessed himself in the manner of the Catholic Church, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. They went back for Leiozia and together carried her to the small open grave. They lowered her into it and Shosha stood over the body.

  “Your soul return to G-d and your body rest in peace,” she said. While Jakub blessed himself, Shosha saw blood on his hand in the faint light of the rising sun.

  She put her hand on her blouse and cried out, and tore the right side of it.

  “Leiozia, Leiozia, Leiozia, you were my friend, my loyal friend and I will miss you with every part of my being!” She cried but gathered herself. “We need to bury her,” she said. She looked at Jakub’s hands. “I can do it,” she said. “Your hands are bleeding raw.”

  “I’m okay,” Jakub said.

  Shosha got behind the di
rt pile and began pushing it into the hole with her hands. “I don’t need it all. Just enough to cover her—and them.” She nodded toward the larger grave.

  Jakub moved to help.

  “No—the soil must be free of blood,” Shosha said. “I can do it.”

  She squatted and pushed more dirt into the hole. Then she stopped and sat back. Perspiration covered her face.

  “Free of blood? Did you hear what I just said? The soil here free of blood?” She pushed more of it into the hole. Then she rested again and pushed her wet hair out of her face. She looked at Jakub’s hands. “Is that what Rabbi was talking about?”

  “What?” Jakub said.

  “The bleeding.” Shosha looked at his face. “May I see it?”

  Jakub sat next to her. She took his hands and turned his palms into the light. She saw blood, dry at the edges, and felt his palms.

  “Not there,” he said.

  He pulled back his sleeve. Near the top of his wrist, where it joined arm to hand, she saw a fleshy, wet protrusion. On the other wrist the protrusion was in a different place, off center, smaller, as though the nail had gone in from the side, carelessly, and not all the way through.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “It looks terribly painful. How do you bear it?”

  “I’m used to it.”

  Shosha lowered his hand and looked at his head—there was no blood there—and his feet, also dry. “Do you get all the wounds?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” Jakub said.

  Shosha placed her index finger on his wrist. “Am I hurting you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She traced the wound, careful to avoid touching any blood. “So what do you think of this?” she asked.

  Jakub coughed and raised the shirt to his nose again. “The wounds?”

  “No.” Shosha looked around. “This,” she said.

  Jakub lowered the shirt. “It’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “How do you bear it?”

  Shosha thought about this question, which no one had ever asked. “I don’t,” she said. She rolled away from Jakub and pushed more dirt over Leiozia and covered her, but barely. She was too tired to do more.

  “We need to get back,” she said.

  “SHOSHA!”

  She and Jakub had walked from the cemetery, hiding in the usual places, and now they crouched in a doorway on an alley. Shosha heard her name, but didn’t recognize the urgent, hushed voice.

  “Shosha.” She stood and bent around the edge of the doorway. “Up here!”

  She looked up. From a building across the street, a man waved in a window without glass.

  “Antek,” she said.

  “Yes. Who’s with you?”

  “A friend.”

  “Come up. It’s not safe down there.”

  “We have to get back,” Shosha said.

  “Not now.”

  “Yes now!”

  “Wait up here,” Antek said. “Till the fighting dies down.”

  Shosha looked at Jakub. “Why not?” he said. They hurried out of the alley and across the street.

  “Come up the stairs,” Antek said.

  Shosha and Jakub went into the building and up four flights of stairs. Antek heard them. He walked into the hallway. “Shosha.” Antek had gun oil on his chin and oily strands of hair hung across his forehead. They hugged. “What were you doing out there?”

  “We buried Leia,” she said.

  “At Kirkut?” Antek said. “You took Leia to Kirkut?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “With Jakub.”

  “Chelzak? You’re Chelzak?”

  “He came with back with Rabbi.”

  “Unbelievable.” Antek extended his hand to Jakub. “Welcome to Hell,” he said. “What a devil Rebbe is. He actually brought you.”

  They entered a flat overlooking the street. Shosha saw a typhus quarantine sign on the door. Overturned furniture and papers littered the place.

  “We should be in here?” Shosha asked.

  “You mean the sign?” Antek said. “Just more bullshit. This family didn’t go to any sanitarium.” Antek picked up his rifle. “You have a good arm?” he asked Jakub. “They gave me these and I have no use for them.” He pointed to women’s stockings bulging with grenades. “I’m a shooter,” he said.

  “I’m not trained,” Jakub said. “I wouldn’t be much help.”

  “Friends who won’t fight for friends are cowards,” Antek said. “Are you a friend?”

  “Friend or not, I don’t think Jakub would be much good at throwing anything,” Shosha said. She held up one of his hands. “He’s rubbed his hands raw helping me carry Leiozia.”

  “Leiozia,” Antek said. He took Shosha’s hand and squeezed and kissed her forehead. He looked at Jakub. “Too late,” Antek said.

  “I can throw those things,” Shosha said. “But we’re hungry. Any food?”

  “In the cabinets,” Antek said and pointed. “Some flour, some old potatoes. They’re starting to grow.”

  Shosha gathered the potatoes and a dwindling sack of flour and brought the feast to a place near the window and they sat.

  “It’s quiet now,” Antek said. He sliced the sprouting roots off a potato and chewed it. “It wasn’t earlier.”

  “We need to rest,” Shosha said. “We’ve been walking forever.”

  AN EXPLODING MINE AWAKENED SHOSHA. Jakub sat against the wall chewing a potato. Antek stood to the side of the pane-less window.

  “Somebody’s fighting,” Antek said. He peered out. “Will you look at this, will you look at this.” A Trawniki man emerged from under a building. “Dumb bastard.”

  Shosha peeped above the window and yawned. Antek raised his rifle.

  “Do I shoot him in the face or in the back?” He looked at Shosha and grinned. He turned to Jakub. “Which is it?” Antek said. “In the face or in the back?”

  “Why ask me?” Jakub said. “Just shoot him and get it over.”

  “Ah—you’re a tough guy.” Antek kept the Trawniki man in his gun sight. “In the face or in the back? Top of the head or smack in the ass? Maybe the knee.”

  “In the back,” Jakub said. Shosha looked at him. “In the back, so he won’t know what hit him.”

  “Listen to your friend,” Antek said. “In the back, just like a coward.” He narrowed his eyes and glared at Shosha. “What do you say?” He looked back through the rifle site.

  She watched his fingers move on the trigger. Buds of perspiration sprouted on his brow. He turned to her again and she watched his other hand come to her face and she flinched when she felt it, hot and rough.

  “Live or die,” he said.

  She saw his dirty fingernails move toward her temple and she flinched and pulled her head back when his fingers touched her hair. She moved her hand.

  “In the back,” Jakub said and on “back,” his hand landed on the rifle and he snatched it from Antek and brought the scope to his eye. He fired through the window and the Trawniki man turned and ran. Antek scrambled while Jakub fired again, but the Trawniki man was gone. He shoved the gun at Antek.

  “Out of range,” Jakub said. He gathered Shosha and they walked out of the flat.

  SHOSHA AND JAKUB ARRIVED AT RESISTANCE headquarters within the hour. The rabbi threw his hands around Jakub and kissed Shosha. Rebekah hugged them and cried. They had buried Leiozia in the Kirkut, they said, and she was not lying in an uncovered grave like so many others, though the layer of dirt that covered her was thin.

  “Did you say Kaddish?” rabbi asked Shosha.

  “No,” Shosha said. “Mama?”

  “Rabbi should say Kaddish,” Rebekah said.

  The rabbi nodded and led them into one of the storerooms where candles burned and Rebekah had covered a broken piece of mirror. He stood Rebekah and Shosha side by side and whispered to Jakub that unless he wished otherwise, his participation, as a person w
ho never knew the deceased, was not necessary. Jakub nodded and took his place next to the women.

  “Then may we begin,” rabbi said. The women turned and faced him. He stepped up to Rebekah and grabbed her blouse and tore it. Shosha had already torn her blouse so the rabbi took it in both of his hands and tore it only a little.

  “Yeetgadal v’ yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah,” the rabbi began in Hebrew. “May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.” After the prayers, “Amein,” the women said. “Amen,” Jakub followed.

  Shosha had taken extra potatoes from the apartment. She pulled two from her pocket and handed them to the rabbi. It was custom at the first meal after the funeral for mourners to eat something round to indicate that life is like a circle.

  “Do you know Kaddish?” the rabbi asked Jakub.

  “No, but I prayed on my own.”

  “Leiozia has a friend in you,” the rabbi said. “As do we.”

  Eighteen

  Monday of Holy Week, First day of Pesach

  19 April 1943

  “Why are you doing this?” Rebekah entered a bunker and saw the rabbi and Jakub. It was early Sunday morning before the first day of Pesach, or Passover and the rabbi was on his knees cleaning the underside of the baking table. Jakub wiped down a shelf with a moist cloth.

  “Chametz,” the rabbi said.

  “We cleaned it two days ago,” Rebekah said.

  “Just to be safe.”

  The rabbi was cleaning away chametz, or leaven—any unbaked thing made from the five major grains—wheat, rye, barley, oats and spelt—used to make bread rise. He had to be thorough. Cleaning away the leaven commemorates Jews who did not have time to let their bread rise because they had to flee Egypt. It could take a day to clean a house of chametz, but in this house only one room would be prepared for the holiday.

  The rabbi stood and looked at Rebekah. She smiled. “If you’d like to help,” he said. “I promised our friend here I would help him get a letter to his mother.”

  JEWISH FIGHTERS SAW GERMAN GENDARMES and Polish police circling the outer ghetto walls around two in the morning the following Monday. All Underground fighter groups were ready. Alerts went out, and most ghetto inhabitants moved to shelters and cellars and attics. When dawn broke, German tanks and armored cars rumbled and pounded Mila and Zamenhofa streets. Behind walls, windows and doors, from the top stories of the row houses to the makeshift bunkers beneath basement stairwells, Jewish fighters watched. The ground stilled and the motors idled and each man and boy—there were many boys—waited. The Germans laughed and cheered. No one was here to fight them. “Fucking cowards,” they cried. They looked around in the empty silence.