The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  MORYC HEARD VOICES AGAIN AND RAISED THE SHOTGUN. The cellar door opened.

  “We can’t leave them out there—we have to get them.”

  Moryc recognized Wojskowy’s voice. He heard another low voice.

  “How can I worry about that?” Wojskowy said.

  Moryc saw Wojskowy bowed and limping in the arms of another man he didn’t recognize.

  “It’s all right,” Wojskowy said. “This is the angel I told you about.”

  Moryc lowered the shotgun and raised himself on his crutches and helped Jakub lower Wojskowy to a chair.

  “What the fuck happened?” Moryc asked.

  “How about some water,” Wojskowy said. Moryc pointed Jakub to the jugs. Wojskowy took the water from Jakub and splashed it into his mouth and over his face.

  “They set up artillery—outside a house about four blocks down,” Wojskowy said. “Three Krauts—I needed to get into the house. I had an opportunity and I ran.”

  “How’d you get out?” Moryc asked.

  “I never got in. Chelzak tackled me. Right before the cannon fired. Took out the whole fucking wall.”

  “What was in the house?” Moryc asked.

  Wojskowy looked away. He rubbed his face, rubbed away dirt, tears, and snot. “My boy.”

  “Roman?” Moryc asked.

  “Yes,” Wojskowy said. His voice and hands shook.

  Moryc put his hand around Wojskowy’s shoulder. “Did you see him?”

  “No,” Wojskowy said.

  Moryc extended his other hand to Jakub. “You’re to be thanked,” Moryc said. “How did you find him?”

  “This is Chelzak,” Wojskowy said. “He was drunk when we left him. It’s a miracle he found anything.”

  “He wasn’t hard to find,” Jakub said.

  “Where’s Mosze and them?” Wojskowy asked.

  “Not back yet, but they know they can’t leave Biggy ‘til they get a doc.”

  They listened to the rain outside. “The famous Chelzak,” Moryc said, extending his hand. “We have to get out of here.”

  “How can I leave?” Wojskowy asked.

  “We can’t stay,” Moryc said. “They know we’re here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I had visitors.”

  Jakub looked around. “We can go up—find another place,” he said.

  “There’s no other place,” Moryc said. “There’s through that tunnel and that’s the only place there is.”

  “How badly are you hurt?” Jakub asked Wojskowy.

  “I can walk,” Wojskowy said. “But I can’t leave. Not without my Roman.”

  Moryc leaned down to his friend. “Listen to me,” he said. “We have to go.” Moryc open a backpack and pulled out two large white cloth patches. He handed them to Jakub. “Take these upstairs and put them where they’ll be seen,” Moryc said.

  When Jakub returned, Moryc motioned him toward Wojskowy. Jakub leaned down to help Wojskowy to his feet. Wojskowy glared.

  “We can’t help Biggy if we stay here,” Moryc said.

  Wojskowy wanted to push Jakub away but needed his help to get through the tunnel. He stopped midway through and looked back with Jakub’s arms around him. He stood for a while and looked at the lamplight in the cellar. Jakub tugged him and he turned and they went to the other side. Jakub came back for Zydowski and carried him through the tunnel, setting him down three times to rest. It was quiet on the Aryan side and with a few more fighters they got Zydowski to the hospital in little over two hours.

  The Germans never came to the cellar at 7 Muranowska and during the night and the next morning, 34 men saw the white cloth that meant evacuation and entered the tunnel and went to the Aryan side.

  Two days after a doctor stitched Biggy’s wound with a needle he was unable to sterilize, Biggy died of bacterial sepsis. Wojskowy fantasized for a long time about killing the doctor but never saw him again. Wojskowy didn’t see Roman again, either, and for weeks he cried when he was awake. For many more weeks, he consoled himself by thinking his son would turn up. This thought grew harder to endure and Wojskowy had to become more determined in the thinking of it.

  When he rejoined Wiktoria and his brother Waclaw in the Aryan district, they sheltered and hid Jews and other refugees. To every person, Wojskowy showed photos and asked the same questions. No one had seen Roman, although two young women said he was extremely handsome from his photo. These same women talked together for an hour about how much they missed gentleness, how much they missed making love or just having sex, how much they missed being kissed or held, and how before, they never could have imagined that hunger for food could so kill hunger for everything else.

  After the war, the Israeli Ambassador in Warsaw decorated Henryk and Wiktoria Wojskowy with the Medal of Yad Vashem. After the ceremony, over his wife’s gentle protests, Wojskowy asked the ambassador if he had ever seen Roman Wojskowy.

  Moryc Zydowski had no family to return to. A few years later, he remembered the unfinished poem about the war in Warsaw and tried to finish it but never did.

  Twenty Two

  Good Friday

  23 April 1943

  On this holy day, the occupiers burned houses before sunrise. Searching for fighters, soldiers rushed stairs, beat doors, splashed kerosene, and threw long streams of fire from dark nozzles. They smoked out women and children and a few old men, living skinny and depraved in empty buildings. These were the ghetto’s walking dead. Every place the occupiers infected had walking dead—the death camps, the prison camps, the villages and the cities. Non-combatants who stayed in the ghetto as Easter 1943 approached were so starved and bowed they could barely move. Fire and smoke pushed them out and soldiers shot them.

  Some soldiers shot straight—aim, fire. Some soldiers shot crooked, piercing legs or blowing off fingers—even their own. Some soldiers pretended they were gunslingers in the old west, shooting Indians like John Wayne, a hero except when he was fighting them. In the movies, all the Indians fought valiantly. Here, the valiant ones leaped off balconies and rooftops onto the hard stone streets or into the flames. That suicide under these circumstances—the only act of self-determination left—was as honorable as fighting never occurred to the boy soldiers.

  Dust and smoke squatted over the ghetto by dawn and the air reeked of burning hair and feathers. Stroop sat at the desk in his hotel room. His hand slowly moved a pen. He read his words aloud to himself, stumbling on pronunciations.

  “Die jüdische haupsächlichgrupe,” he wrote, “mit einige polnische banditen gemischt innen, zog zurück.”

  “The main Jewish group, with some Polish bandits mixed in, withdrew.”

  He looked at “haupsächlichgrupe” and re-read it aloud. He crossed it out with a clean line and replaced it with “hauptsächlichgruppe.”

  “Zum sogenannten Mura…” he read—and he stopped writing again. “Fuck.”

  He looked out the window and saw the smoke on the other side of the wall. It was white, like smoke from a crematorium or the smoke of surrender, or the smoke that announces a new Pope. This smoke was heavy too, and of the kinds of smoke Stroop knew about, only crematoria smoke was as heavy. He let his thoughts wander and at first, he didn’t hear the knock. “Come,” he said finally.

  Stroop’s aide opened the door. “Polizeiführer Krüger, sir.”

  “Show him.”

  Krüger strutted in with papers.

  “Himmler wants an acceleration,” he told Stroop.

  “Acceleration? We’re not moving fast enough?”

  “Not for him. He expected this done days ago.”

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Stroop said.

  “We’re not building Rome, Herr Oberscharführer.”

  “No,” Stroop said. “We never build anything.” He looked at his report. “How do you spell Mura—Muran—?”

  “Muranowski?” Kruger replied.

  “Fucking Pole words,” Stroop said.

  Krüger looked at the report. He
took the pen and completed the word. “What do I tell Herr Himmler?”

  Stroop thought. “Tell him the action will be completed this very day,” he said.

  Alone in the room again, Stroop wrote a few more words, but the letters didn’t look right so he straightened curves and made an “s” into a “z.” The words still didn’t look right. He stopped and thought about dictating the report to his aide. Then he remembered that his aide couldn’t read.

  Twenty Three

  Holy Saturday (Shabbat)

  24 April 1943

  The rabbi saw Jakub Chelzak for the first time in two days, on the Sabbath during a ten-hour break in the fighting. He threw his arms around Jakub at the door to the ZOB bunker on Mila and Zamenhofa Streets and they spoke about the fighting in Muranowski Square. It was 3:47 in the morning.

  “Amazing,” the rabbi said. “It’s amazing that you ignored me and didn’t get the hell out of here when you had the chance.”

  “We can get through the tunnel,” Jakub said. “It’s still open. The Germans don’t know about it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “No one followed us through.”

  The rabbi thought. “I’d like to get Rebekah out,” he said. “But she’s frail.”

  “I can help, but we should go now, before light.”

  The rabbi thought again. “We get her out, where do we go?”

  “The Aryan side.”

  “For how long?”

  “Do you know of a boat? To go down the river?”

  “To cross the river, maybe,” the rabbi said. “I have friends in Praga,” a suburb of Warsaw across the Wisla.

  “I don’t know Praga,” Jakub said.

  “The Russians are there.”

  “We would be safe?”

  “The Germans are also there,” the rabbi said. “Not as many as here, but still.”

  “Any place is better than here.”

  “I don’t think Shosha will go,” the rabbi said. “And Rebekah won’t leave her.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Jakub said. He remembered Moryc and Wojskowy. “It’s hopeless here. We have to get out.”

  The rabbi leaned against the wall and rubbed his forehead. He looked at the ceiling and sighed. “We could get a boat. I’d have to pay a few guards,” he said. “That would take some doing.”

  “How long?” Jakub asked.

  “A few days,” the rabbi said. “I don’t want to risk getting stuck on the Aryan side. Everything has to be arranged—boom, boom, boom.”

  “Did you get the letter to my mother?” Jakub asked.

  “Yes. Which reminds me.” The rabbi pulled an open envelope from this jacket and handed it to Jakub. “I didn’t know if you were coming back and I thought I’d better see what it said,” the rabbi explained. “She’s been getting the money and she thanks you for it, but she and your brother want you back.”

  STROOP ORDERED THE NUMBER OF flamethrowers tripled. “Every man on foot needs to be behind one of these,” he told Kruger.

  The soldiers marched and turned in unison and fired streams of flame at every standing thing. Burning walls thundered down and black smoke seared lungs, stung eyes, and choked breath. The heat forced people from the deepest hideaways and radiated from the tight pores of every stone thing—bricks and blocks and even marble stairs. Along every street, buildings burned. Wild tenants climbed to higher floors but flames dogged them and they threw themselves out windows or off roofs. Their clothes were sometimes on fire and their faces filthy and sooty and as they fell, their bodies twisted like burning debris.

  By early evening the sun was setting, but darkness would not come here for three days. With the rising sun on Easter Sunday, the descent into Hell was complete. The resurrection seemed further away than ever.

  “WE HAVE TO MOVE.”

  This daily refrain dogged Rabbi Gimelman and his charges. Rebekah grew weaker, and Shosha thinner. Though he lost weight, Jakub was all muscle to begin with, and he changed only a little.

  The first bunker they moved from had been their home for several months—18 Mila St., the former nightclub and headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organization. They left Marian, ZOB Commandant, his best friend Jurek, and a dwindling number of friends. They moved to bunkers at Nos. 5 and 7 Mila Street and then to bunkers on Wolynska, Szczesliwa, Niska, Zamenhofa, and Nowolipki streets. At 29 Ogrodowa St., the occupiers killed every fighter. 36 Siwetojerska St. fell and with it, ZOB leader Szymek Kac.

  THE GERMANS CORNERED THE ZOB LEADERSHIP in a bunker on Leszno Street the night of April 27. ZOB leaders met into the early hours of April 28, calling on Regina Fudin, a courier with a photographic memory who knew the situation above ground better than any one else. Fudin would gather the remaining fighters in the factory area and lead them out. They would leave the severely wounded behind in the bunker with the ghetto’s fiercest fighter, a woman, Lea Korn.

  Late night April 29, Fudin and Lieutenant Wladyslaw Gaik’s Guardia Ludowa led forty Jewish fighters through the sewers to the Aryan side. A Pole, Riszard Trifon, sheltered them for the rest of the night in several attics. The next day, Guardia Ludowa trucks transported the group to the forest in Lomianka, about seven kilometers from Warsaw. The Nazis learned of the escape and with a few Trawniki men attacked the remaining fighters. Lea Korn held them off for hours. Indeed, as Stroop would later write, the women fighters in the ghetto were among the most valiant and courageous.

  “The women belonging to the fighting groups were armed in the same way as the men,” Stroop wrote. “Sometimes these women fired pistols from each hand at once. It happened time and again that they kept their pistols and hand grenades hidden in their bloomers till the last minute, and then used them against the armed SS, police and Wehrmacht.”

  The soldiers killed Lea Korn and everyone else in her bunker.

  “TWO DAYS,” THE RABBI SAID. “I can’t believe it’s been two whole days since we last moved.”

  Men sat along the walls of a cellar stocked with barrels and bags. In candlelight, Shosha saw her mother, pale and tired, lying on a lumpy mat with her head on a sack of grain.

  “Our next move needs to be away from here,” one of the men said. “Far away.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere but here.”

  “It’s too late for us,” Shosha said. “We waited too long.”

  “Others get out,” Jakub said. “I’m sure the tunnel at Muranowska is still open.”

  Shosha looked at Jakub's eyes. “Mama couldn’t make it,” she said.

  “She could,” Jakub said. “We all could.”

  Shosha took his hand. “I can't believe you stayed with us,” she said. She traced the area near his wrists where the wounds appeared. “I don't see them,” she said.

  “I don't have them all the time,” Jakub said. “If I did, I couldn't live.”

  Shosha looked at her mother, at her wane eyes and sallow cheeks. She took Jakub's hand to her face and held it there, against her skin. He felt her tears and squeezed her fingers.

  “I'm crying,” she said. “I didn't think I still could.”

  Twenty Four

  The 23-year-old man who would lead the first major Jewish revolt against an oppressor since the Masada staved off the Romans in the year 135 AD, Marian—Mordecai Anielewicz—was born in Wyszkow, Poland to a working-class family in a poor neighborhood. He was a member of Betar, the Zionist youth group. When war erupted and he heard about Jewish mass murder, Marian led HaShomer HaZair, Poland’s first Jewish youth movement. “We must fight and we must never, never give up,” he said to anyone who would listen. He single-handedly took charge of the Jewish Fighting Organization, the ZOB.

  Marian sent his last communication to ZOB contacts outside the ghetto in late April 1943. “This is the eighth day of our life-and-death struggle,” he wrote. “The Germans suffered tremendous losses. In the first two days, they were forced to withdraw. Then they brought in reinforcements in the form of tanks, armor, artillery, even
airplanes, and began a systematic siege.

  “Our losses, that is, the victims of the executions and fires in which men, women and children were burned, were terribly high. We are nearing our last days, but so long as we have weapons in our hands, we shall continue to fight and resist.

  “Sensing the end, we demand this from you: remember how we were betrayed. There will come a time of reckoning for our spilled, innocent blood. Send help to those who, in the last hour, may elude the enemy—in order that the fight may continue.”

  On May 8, 1943, the soldiers came to one of the last houses in the ghetto that still stood—the main ZOB bunker at 18 Mila Street. They covered the five entrances. They screamed and threatened. They fired their rifles. Some of the men standing around pissed on the side of the building. Three hundred civilians surrendered. But eighty armed fighters—including Marian and many boys—fought for every floor, every window, every square inch of that building’s ground. They fought through grenades and gas bombs. They fought through smoke and dust. They fought hand to hand. They used knives against bullets, sticks and pipes against bayonets.

  “While it was at first possible to catch the Jews, who are by nature cowards, in great numbers, this became increasingly difficult as the action went on,” Stroop reported. “Fighting groups of 20 to 30 or more Jewish youths, aged 18-25, kept turning up, sometimes with a corresponding number of women who kindled fresh resistance. These fighting groups had been ordered to defend themselves to the last and, if need be, to escape capture by suicide.”

  Marian committed suicide. Thirty four fighters who could have died by chance discovered an exit through tunnels that led to the city sewer system. After thirty hours in the sewers, they emerged outside the ghetto. The Guardia Ludowa drove them to join their fellows in the Lomianki forest.

  Eight days later, Stroop wrote his last report to Berlin. “The action was completed on May 16, 1943 with the blowing up of the Warsaw Synagogue at 8:15 p.m. All the ghetto buildings have been destroyed.” He praised his troops. “The longer the resistance lasted,” Stroop wrote, “the more implacable became the men of the SS, the police and the Wehrmacht, who continued untiringly in the fulfillment of their duties in the true comradeship in arms.”