The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  Michal Klepfisz, who engineered bridges across uncross-able rivers, looked at his positions through binoculars. He watched the street and whistled twice. He heard footsteps and echoes. The Jewish fighters looked out from their perches, eyeing Trawniki men on foot-borne reconnaissance with radios and telephones and binoculars, darting into alleys and up stairways and through open doors of empty buildings.

  Five minutes passed then ten, then twenty, a waiting, waiting, waiting. The fighters heard screeching gears and motors, hissing and roaring. They felt the ground tremble. They saw the long gun on the first turret turn onto Nalewki Street. Still they waited, for the fleshy part, the belly—the foot soldiers, swaying under arms. When they heard the click clack click clack click clack of marching boots, the fighters raised their weapons and before the diesel beasts could roar, the first whistle blew. Then another and another and another, until whistles blew from every position and bullets pelted the enemy like sudden hail. The soldiers thought insects were stinging them at first, and swatted the air until they saw blood and scorches on their threads. Some fell and the whistles and the gunfire confused the others and they panicked and ran, but some ran into Underground positions and saw the barrels and the smoke before they, too, fell.

  Bottles hit the first tank and flames spread and the beast stood still. No one came out. The tank burned. The other armor stopped. A truck turned around. The fighters threw grenades and fired. The foot soldiers retreated. The morning was explosions and machine gun fire and soldiers falling and bleeding with their dead eyes open in surprise. They tried to pull back but the fighters cut them off.

  JURGEN STROOP WASHED SHAVING CREAM OFF his face when his aide, a young lieutenant, answered a pounding at the door of the general’s suite at the Hotel Bristol on the Aryan side. Sammern-Frankenegg rushed past the lieutenant and looked in every room until he found his commander.

  “We’ve sustained losses, Herr Stroop.”

  Stroop was staring at himself in the mirror over the sink.

  “To be expected,” Stroop said.

  “Serious losses.”

  “How serious?”

  “I ordered a retreat.”

  Stroop lit a cigarette.

  “We need aircraft,” Sammern-Frankenegg said. “We could get them from Krakow in under an hour.”

  “Bullshit.” Stroop spoke through his cigarette. “How long can these sewer rats resist?”

  “A much shorter time if we had aircraft.”

  “And how would that look?” Stroop drew on his smoke. “There are Reds across that fucking river. Reds looking for planes. I don’t want them here. The only red I want to see is the blood of these sewer rats.” He looked at Sammern-Frankenegg. “I’ll take charge from here, Herr Oberführer.”

  “I can handle this, Herr Brigadeführer.”

  Stroop looked at Sammern-Frankenegg through cigarette smoke and the sun that streamed into the room.

  STROOP WENT INTO THE GHETTO LATER that morning under heavy guard and set his paper work and makeshift battle plan on a bench outside the Judenrat office. “I want your men to take the corner of Nalewki and Gesia,” he told Sammern-Frankenegg. “Commence at noon. Hit and run.” He lit another cigarette and looked at the sky. “We included some artillery support at Muranowska Place,” he said.

  The resistance fighters assaulted the Germans with an air attack of their own, dropping or throwing grenades from rooftops, then hopping across the narrow alleys that separated one roof from another. Stroop relented on his previous order and permitted Sammern-Frankenegg to call up light aircraft, but “only one or two. They give us no choice,” the general said.

  The bombers approached from the east, and the fighters torched the German warehouse at 31 Nalewki Street and retreated to Rabbi Maisels Street to let the aircraft waste ammunition on a deserted battlefield.

  Back at the Hotel Bristol, Stroop wrote his first report to Himmler and Krüger.

  “At our first penetration into the ghetto, the Jews and Polish bandits succeeded, with arms in hand, in repulsing our forces, including the tank and armored vehicles. The losses during the first attack were: 12 men.” Stroop ordered bombers to hit the ghetto hospital in retaliation for the warehouse fire. He sent Askaris and a few German troops to start “checking the patients out permanently.”

  IN THE MAIN HALL OF THE HOSPITAL, battalion sergeant Hans Streger conceived a stunt to please Stroop and demoralize the resistance. He rounded up an eighteen-year-old private and his sixteen-year-old sidekick who had lied about his age to join the defense of the Fatherland and two days later received orders from Berlin to Warsaw by way of Trawniki for urban warfare training. The older boy, Ludwig—Luddy—and the younger boy, Wolferle—Wolf (who had lost part of his hand in a factory accident)—had been together since they first met in Berlin. Luddy came from a farm and Wolf from a depressed section of a German industrial town. They both taught themselves the rudiments of reading, and they both looked forward to a proper education paid for by the Reich at the end of their service.

  Ludwig’s father had cattle and sheep and he ran a small slaughtering operation. Wolf’s family sold produce in a market they owned. He and his mother went to work in an armament factory shortly after Germany started declaring war on her neighbors. Some day—they told each other and everyone who would listen—they would leave Germany and see the world, maybe even come to America. Neither boy knew exactly why they were in Warsaw.

  “I want you to go down to the rooms where they have the pregnant women,” Streger told the boys. “Do some damage.”

  “Shoot the women?” Ludwig asked.

  “You have bayonets,” Streger said. “Use your imagination.”

  The boys hesitated.

  “Go,” Streger said. “Raus!” He looked around at the burning hospital. “She’s not going to last forever.”

  The boys went through the smoke down the hall. The maternity wards were on the other side of the hospital, and they were lost at first. They went upstairs. They went down hallways toward deserted wards and saw other soldiers. When they found the rooms with the cribs and bassinets, they entered awkwardly. Two nurses were dressing three women—all with child—and when they saw the baby-faced soldiers, they stiffened.

  “What do you want?” said one of the nurses. She spoke broken German. “You come to kill us?”

  The boys looked at each other. “We have orders,” Ludwig said.

  “Just let us go,” said a patient. “We’re going to die anyway, don’t you suppose?”

  Ludwig raised his bayonet and the nurse grabbed his arm but he stabbed the woman and she grabbed herself and fell. The other nurse jumped him and grabbed his neck and he tried to throw her back.

  “Wolf,” Ludwig yelled. “We have orders!”

  The patients screamed and cried and the nurses shouted profane things and smoke crept under the door. Wolferle grabbed a nurse and dug his fingers into her arm and tried to pull her away. Ludwig stomped toward the fallen woman and stabbed her again and cut her. He turned with his rifle and shot a patient and turned and shot a nurse. The other nurse ran for the door and Ludwig fired at her, but an explosion jolted him and he missed and dropped the gun. The nurse pushed through the door and ran into the smoke. Wolferle looked at the fallen woman, whose stomach heaved and was big.

  “Cut it out,” Ludwig said to him.

  Wolferle hesitated.

  “Cut it out!” Ludwig grabbed Wolferle’s rifle and positioned the bayonet over the woman’s stomach. He cut her superficially and her blood streamed.

  “See,” Ludwig said. “We have orders.”

  Wolferle moved back.

  “Okay then,” Ludwig said. “I’ll do it.” He aimed for the woman’s stomach near the side and cut it again.

  “Fuck you!” Wolferle said.

  Ludwig heard a sidearm cock and looked up.

  “Fuck you,” Wolferle said. “Get away from her!”

  “You’re crazy,” Ludwig said. “You’ll be hanged. We both wil
l.”

  “Get away!”

  “I won’t.”

  “I will shoot you if you don’t.”

  They heard a muffled cry. It was the woman, not the baby, but it sounded like a baby.

  “Oh God,” Wolferle said. “Oh God.” His hands shook and he was losing his grip. Ludwig stepped forward and Wolferle snapped the pistol taut again and stepped back. They heard sirens and aircraft engines. They heard crying sounds, loudest of all. Wolferle stepped back. He lowered his pistol and fired it into the woman’s head. He fired again. The crying stopped.

  “You’ll be hung for this,” Ludwig said. “They may not even court martial you first.”

  Wolferle raised the pistol to Ludwig again. “How will they know?” he asked. “Who’s the witnesses? Who’s going to tell them? Who’s going to tell them I wouldn’t help you tear a baby out of its mama?”

  “You going to shoot me?” Ludwig said.

  “We don’t deserve to live,” Wolferle said.

  “We won’t live if we don’t get out now,” Ludwig said.

  “That’s right,” Wolferle said. He walked over and sat on a bed, keeping the pistol on Ludwig. More bombs dropped. They heard walls collapsing and flames roaring and sucking out the air.

  “You crazy enough to kill us both?” Ludwig said.

  Wolferle looked at him, blank and rigid.

  Ludwig marched forward and said in cadence “Well I won’t let you,” and reached for the pistol and thought he heard the closest burst yet, until pain struck him and he touched his stomach and felt wetness and warmth. He pulled his hand away and looked at the blood. He looked at Wolferle. “You fuck.”

  Wolferle undid the strap on his side arm and pulled it out and aimed the barrel at his temple.

  “No,” Ludwig said, but it happened with a loud pop.

  Ludwig stood stunned. But the heat moved him and he stepped over Wolferle's body to the wall and stumbled under the weight of his wound and saw smoke around his ankles. He tried to right himself by pushing off the wall. He moved toward the door. He pushed it open and stumbled into the hall. Flames closed one side but the other side was clear. He gathered himself and tried to breathe and leaned against the wall and moved his feet along the tile floor, sideways, toward the door at the end of the hall. He slid along the wall and choked. The smoke thickened and swirled, lapped at his legs and hugged his waist. It rose and caressed his neck. He pushed himself forward and gasped and heard the flames behind him roar. He looked up and saw fire along the ceiling, creeping and fluid. He lost his thoughts in the swirls, white and yellow wheels churning overhead, and smoke all around. He caught himself and looked toward the door. A few more steps. A few more sideways passes along the wall.

  He was finally to it. He raised his hand but the heat wouldn’t let him touch the metal door. He leaned into the handle but the heat pressed through his uniform and he backed away. He gathered himself and leaned again and pushed the door. It opened and light flooded in but the fire sucked the air and pulled the door. He felt flames lick his neck and his back and the backs of his legs and then the door shut. He pushed again, against the air, against the fire that pulled the door back. He pushed and felt cool air and he pushed and pushed but the fire leaped out, snarling and roaring, and pulled him back.

  From outside, Hans Streger saw fingers of flame wrapping the door. Two Trawniki men saw the opening door and the sleeve of a soldier and ran toward the door, but Streger saw the General’s finely shaved cheeks. He called the men back.

  “But Herr Oberscharführer,” they protested.

  Stroop’s finely shaved cheeks and his gray-green eyes.

  “Too dangerous,” Streger said.

  The door stopped opening soon enough.

  AT 3 P. M., STROOP TOOK PERSONAL CHARGE of three hundred SS troops and they assaulted Marek Edelman’s area. Edelman was twenty four years old, and he always fought at the head. He commanded the resistance at Swietojerska, Walowa, Franciszkanska and Bonifraterska streets. Short on bullets, the fighters set mines along drainage pipes and threw grenades. A mine exploded in the right place and a tank rolling unstoppably jolted to a stop and burned. Flames swept out of the turret, and the fighters thought they heard the men inside, and maybe screams, but they couldn’t be sure. The turret never opened. The thing just sat in the street and burned.

  In the late afternoon, trucks with anti-aircraft guns blasted fighters on Muranowska Street. Soldiers stormed the Jewish positions and in hand-to-hand fighting, the Germans took eighty prisoners and the Jews killed a senior SS officer. Stroop ordered a hundred Jewish prisoners executed—unarmed women and children, and a few old men.

  Captain Jozef Pszenny and Polish Armia Krajowa (AK) forces arrived at night outside a desolate part of the ghetto wall that faced Bonifraterska Street. Early in the revolt, the AK hesitated to get too involved with the Jews, and only smuggled a few guns and a little ammunition. After the terror bombing of the hospital and the early successes of Michal Klepfisz and his men, Pszenny urged his comrades to support the resistance. He planned to establish a supply line between the ghetto and the outside. He alerted the ZZW and the ZOB that he would blast a hole in a part of the wall across Bonifraterska Street that was poorly lit and ignored by the Germans. Pszenny’s men would stand ready with crates of rifles and ammunition and food.

  The resistance leaders were skeptical. The sudden solidarity of the Roman Catholic Armia Krajowa—Europe’s largest Nazi resistance group—with the Jewish fighters struck some of the leaders as too little, too late. The ZOB sent only half a dozen men to Bonifraterska Street that night. Pszenny arrived as planned, but the land mine his team exploded didn’t pierce the wall. Polish police, sympathetic to the Germans out of necessity, reported the incident. German troops showed up and fired on Pszenny’s squad, forcing them to abandon the smuggling operation and leave behind a food and supply cargo of such significance that Marian and Klepfisz described the incident as “heartbreaking.”

  The German advance for the day ended in late evening at the gate to Wolowa 6. Marian watched from across the street as the German detachment positioned an anti-aircraft gun and aimed it at a building. They were preparing to fire when Marian pushed a button and a mine planted in the gate exploded. Twenty-two Germans fell and the others retreated behind a resistance volley of bullets and grenades.

  RABBI ANNOUNCED TO JAKUB AND THE WOMEN and the fighters in the bunker that they would celebrate Seder—the traditional Passover meal—in two parts. To eat the entire meal at once, though it was meager, seemed disrespectful to the fallen. They reclined in candle light on mats and straw bedding. Rabbi blessed the wine by reciting Kiddush and adding “this day of the Festival of Matzos, the time of our liberation.”

  Marian raised his eyes from the table. They each drank a small portion of wine. The rabbi washed his hands in a bowl that was never used to mix bread dough. He dried his hands and took a different bowl of water and dipped a radish into it twice. He bit the radish, a bitter vegetable called here “maror.”

  “There is no salt, Rebbe,” Marian said. Normally the water would be salted to symbolize the tears of Egypt’s Jewish slaves.

  Rabbi passed the bowl to Rebekah. The fifteen people in the bunker took turns dipping radishes twice and eating them. The rabbi next broke one of three unleavened bread lumps—matzos—on the table. He set half the broken matzo back with the other two. “Shosha,” he said. “Mah Nishtanah.”

  Shosha looked at Jakub and smiled. She was the youngest and she began to sing in Hebrew. Her song answered Four Questions.

  “Mah nishtanah ha-lahylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-layloht, mi-kol ha-layloht?”

  Why is this night different from all other nights, from all other nights?

  “She-b’khol ha-layloht anu okhlin chameytz u-matzah, chameytz u-matzah. Ha-lahylah

  hazeh, ha-lahylah ha-zeh, kooloh matzah.”

  On all other nights, we may eat chametz and matzo, chametz and matzo. On this night, on

  this night, on
ly matzo.

  “She-b’khol ha-layloht anu okhlin sh’ar y’rakot, sh’ar y’rakot. Ha-lahylah ha-zeh, ha-lahylah

  ha-zeh, maror.”

  On all other nights, we eat many vegetables, many vegetables. On this night, on this night,

  maror.

  “She-b’khol ha-layloht ayn anu mat’bilin afilu pa’am echat, afilu pa’am echat. Ha-lahylah

  hazeh, ha-lahylah ha-zeh, sh’tay p’amim.”

  On all other nights, we do not dip even once. On this night, on this night, twice.

  “She-b’khol ha-layloht anu okhlin bayn yosh’bin u’vayn m’soobin, bayn yosh’bin u’vayn

  m’soobin. Ha-lahylah ha-zeh, ha-lahylah ha-zeh, koolanu m’soobin.”

  On all other nights, we eat either sitting or reclining, either sitting or reclining. On this

  night, on this night, we all recline.

  The rabbi turned to Jakub. “You are welcome to pray with us,” the rabbi said.

  Jakub looked at him. “I don’t know your prayers.”

  “Pray in your own way.”

  Jakub bowed his head and he was silent.

  “Out loud,” the rabbi said.

  “Rebbe?” Marian said.

  “Out loud,” the rabbi said again.

  “Our Father,” Jakub began. “Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name.”