The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “Shosha—this is completely wrong,” the rabbi said.

  Past the hemp, she wrapped her legs around the dead man’s legs and hugged herself to his body. She felt him give but she was light and he did not give. She lowered her feet a meter or so above the street, positioned herself, looked down, gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and let go. She fell and hit the street, but before she could gather herself, she heard a whistle. She looked up and saw another man above a different gallows looking down at her. She stood and felt her ankle give. She limped to her feet and looked up at the rabbi and her mother.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Mama next.”

  “I don’t like this,” the rabbi said. “It’s completely disrespectful.”

  “You’re the practical one,” Shosha called back. She looked over to see the man on the other balcony descending the same way and more people coming out. “It’s the only way,” she said.

  The man from the other balcony dropped to the street and joined Shosha. “Come on,” he called to Rebekah. “I did it.”

  Rebekah looked over the railing. “I can’t,” she said. “I’d rather jump.”

  “You can’t jump,” the rabbi said.

  “Then I’ll die. I don’t care.”

  The rabbi looked down and thought. “I’ll go,” he said.

  Rebekah looked at him. “What about me?” she said.

  “That’s up to you,” he said. “I figure if you see both of us made it, you’ll come down the same way.”

  “What if you don’t make it? What if the body breaks?”

  “That could happen,” the rabbi said, “but what’s the alternative?”

  “The doors?”

  “None of us is strong enough to break them,” the rabbi said.

  The rabbi let Rebekah go and started over the side of the railing.

  “I don’t want to be here alone,” she said.

  He reached for one of the ropes. Rebekah grabbed his arm. “No, no. I’ll go. Let me go before you.”

  “Sure?” he asked.

  “No, but what’s the alternative?”

  Rebekah went over the railings. She climbed down the same rope Shosha used. “I hate this,” she said. “I hate it.”

  The body gave. Rebekah stopped.

  “Come on mama,” Shosha called. “You can’t stop now.”

  Rebekah froze.

  “Lower your feet,” said the man with Shosha. “Just a little more.”

  Soon there were other people in the street.

  “Come on—you can do it,” Rebekah heard.

  “I did it, and I’m an old woman.”

  The body gave again and Rebekah started to drop. Shosha and two men reached up and took her feet and lowered her to the street. The rabbi prayed to himself as he descended a different rope. Three others reached up to help him and more people joined them in the street. Near the end of the rabbi’s descent, the rope gave way and the body fell with him and just missed hitting him on the street.

  “Oh, what have we done? What have we done?” the rabbi said.

  Rebekah looked at him. “We’ve survived,” she said.

  Twenty Seven

  Pushed back by the Soviets, the Germans retreated from the East and began to overwhelm the streets of Warsaw. Cars and trucks congested narrow byways. Foot soldiers pushed wounded comrades in stolen farm carts. Deserters in mangy tattered uniforms drove plunder from surrounding villages—cows and goats, chickens and pigs. The chaos provided cover to AK and resistance operations, and made it easier to transport contraband.

  On February 1, 1944, a 20 year-old AK scout, Lieutenant Bronek “Lot” Pietruszkiewicz, led an attack on Warsaw’s SS commander, Franz Kutschera. This third attempt on Kutschera’s life succeeded. The Gestapo arrested General “Grot” (Stefan Rowecki)—founder of the Armia Krajowa—in a Warsaw apartment after an AK reconnaissance officer betrayed him, then defected to the German side. The Gestapo took Grot to camp Sachsenchausen and murdered him there on Himmler’s orders. General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski took Grot’s position as leader of the AK.

  General Bor had heard of Shosha Mordechai’s courage after the Jagiellonska Street massacre in Praga. In early May 1944, the resistance assigned her a delivery—of false identification cards, maps, and messages—to a Polish family in Skierniewice, about seventy kilometers (forty miles) southwest of Warsaw. This family—Warnickz, an old name in Polish industry—operated warehouses the Germans had appropriated. Family members stayed on to run the operations, siphoning off goods to resistance fighters around Warsaw. They used their influence and contacts to help people escape from trains going to the camps. They rescued entire transports, hiding people in various warehouses when supplies were low and they had extra room. They provided papers—proof of employment, identity, and passports.

  “I don’t want you to go—not at all,” Rebekah told her daughter. “I don’t know why you would ask me. You know how I feel.”

  “I’m asking you because if you really don’t want me to go, I won’t.”

  “Rabbi?”

  “I’m staying out of this,” the rabbi said.

  “What would papa want?” Shosha asked.

  “Papa would want you safe,” Rebekah said. “He would say we’ve done our part.”

  “I don’t believe that” Shosha said.

  “Rabbi—you know Lev.”

  The rabbi looked at Rebekah. “Yes,” he said.

  “What would he say?”

  The rabbi thought.

  “Well?” Shosha said.

  “What do you think he would say?”

  With some food packed in a small bag and her mother’s reluctant blessing, Shosha used false identification to board the tram back to Warsaw and a train to Skierniewice, which she reached in the late afternoon. The Warnickzs warned her to be alert for gendarmes. She made her way to their house, where they received her warmly and invited her to stay the night.

  The sun awakened Shosha the next morning and she dressed and went into the family’s courtyard at the rear of the house. The day was clear and blue and the nighttime chill was fading. No one else was up and Shosha stood with a mug of coffee in crisp, quiet solitude until she heard faint yelling and barking dogs. Gendarmes might be coming. If they saw her, they could arrest her and the family. The barking came closer. She heard familiar words.

  “Raus! Schnell! Banditen!”

  Her stomach tightened. She tossed the coffee. She looked over a fence toward the street in front of the house, where German soldiers were going house by house. She hurried out of the courtyard onto the back alley where after walking a ways, she found a hole in a brick wall. She tucked herself into it. She heard footsteps and panting. She closed her eyes and her stomach seized. A dog stuck its snout in the shadows where she hid. Shosha opened her eyes and saw it—an enormous Alsatian on a leash.

  “Man or woman?” she heard a voice say in Polish.

  The dog breathed and drooled.

  “Man or woman? Answer me or I’ll shoot you.”

  Shosha hesitated. “Woman.”

  “Armed or unarmed?”

  “Unarmed.”

  “Pole or Jew?”

  She hesitated again.

  “Pole or Jew?”

  “Both,” Shosha said.

  She saw a large hand reach in and pull the dog back by its collar.

  “Come out,” she heard the voice say. Everything inside of her dropped. “Come out!”

  She stuck her head out. She stood, bending down to massage a cramp under her thigh. The dog barked and jumped. She felt her knees shake. She saw the big hands holding the leash and her eyes traveled up a Reich uniform too large for its wearer. The soldier was a slender boy. He had big hands but without his gun, she felt sure she could take him.

  “You’re very pretty,” he said. “Skinny, but pretty.”

  She felt sick but fought the feeling. To overpower this boy and escape, she had to stand firm and not faint. The boy relaxed the leash and the dog ran to Sh
osha and sniffed her. She stood, with her hands at her sides, squinting in the sun that peeked over the buildings. The dog licked her hand.

  “He likes you,” the boy said. “He doesn’t usually. He doesn’t like Polacks.”

  Shosha gathered her courage and knelt. The dog licked her cheek.

  “He really likes you,” the boy said.

  “He’s very friendly,” Shosha said.

  “Not to Polacks,” the boy said.

  Shosha looked at him. “Where did you learn to speak my language?” she asked.

  “I grew up on the border,” the boy said. “Near Kostrzyn.”

  “Oh,” Shosha blurted. “I have an uncle in Debno and cousins around Sulecin.”

  “Really?” the boy said. He tugged at the dog. “You know Chesmykin?”

  “The dairy?”

  “Yes!”

  “My family knows them from way back.”

  “I used to work there,” the boy said. “Before all this. My father was Chezzie’s best friend.”

  “You have to be kidding,” Shosha said. “Chezzie. I haven’t seen him since I was a girl.”

  “I saw him at Christmas,” the boy said.

  “Is he still fat?”

  “Not since Hitler,” the boy said.

  Shosha looked at him. He looked at his dog and then at her. He petted the dog and his hands shook. “I’m supposed to take you,” he said. “Or shoot you.”

  Shosha felt a terrible, sinking hollowness in her gut, but she didn’t flinch or tremble.

  The boy tugged on the dog. “This dog,” he said. The dog barked. He pulled it back. He looked at Shosha.

  “You taking me?” she said. “Or shooting me.”

  The boy loosened the leash and the dog went to Shosha again. She stood.

  “This dog,” the boy said. “He’s hungry.”

  The soldier pulled the dog away. He looked at Shosha, and she thought he looked at her for a long time. Then he turned away.

  “He’s hungry,” the boy said. He started up the street. “He gets cranky, like a baby.”

  Shosha stood still until dog and soldier were far enough away. She stepped back, one step at a time. She thought if she turned and ran he might draw his sidearm and shoot her in the back. She stepped backwards until she came to a street. She kept her eyes on the boy then slid around a building, gathered her breath, looked around, and hurried out of sight.

  Identified now, she couldn’t return to the Warnickz house, not even to gather her things. If the boy happened to be around, to see her again, to see her with the family or in town with anyone else, he could make a lot of trouble, he could round them all up with his Nazi friends and have them deported to some camp. Or he could just shoot them. Shosha went to the train station and used her return ticket. She would tell the Warnickz what happened after her return, and the Underground would have to send someone else. She traveled back to Warsaw but without her Kennkarte, crossing the Wisla to Praga would have to wait.

  CAMP

  Twenty Eight

  Jakub Chelzak spoke little during his interrogation and the gendarmes determined that the circumstances surrounding his activities in Warsaw were not clear. To clarify his situation, they sent their reticent captive to a new resettlement facility erected to empty the country’s Jewish ghettos. During the journey, Jakub thought about his family and the Mordechais, but tried to put them out of his mind. Whenever he thought about Shosha, his stomach knotted. He considered forcing himself out a window as the train drifted past empty fields, then remembered the trains that crossed his own fields. Besides, several armed German soldiers sat in the car ahead.

  The train passed the village of Melinka, a clean hamlet nestled in a picturesque valley called the Dolina Koscieliska in the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland. The train slowed as it approached the resettlement camp, named for the village. It stopped near a row of wooden ramps. Jakub stepped off the car with the rest of the “resettled.” A letter regarding his dispensation had not yet arrived, so the guards left him at the ramps, where the camp’s chief physician, Dr. Joachim Hehl, had months ago instituted an orderly regimen. Two stocky women herded the groups into an open area.

  “Streifen!” they yelled. “Streifen!”

  People unbuttoned their shirts with shaky hands, slipped off their shoes and pulled down their trousers. Guards whipped the modest, or the slow, or the ones who stopped at their underwear. Jakub stood naked, no sign of his wounds. The women stopped yelling orders while the newest doctor, Fiddler, wove through the group. His face was red and his nose speckled with petechiae and his breath smelled like old rum. He brought his thumb up and for each person he passed, he twisted his wrist, sometimes right—a soldier and a kapo pulled this person aside—sometimes left, lazily, with a drunken, disinterested gaze.

  The doctor came to an old man who could barely stand on his knotty legs. The doctor looked at the kapo and turned his thumb to the right. “By truck,” the doctor said. The kapo and a guard took the man’s arms and he stumbled and muttered as they dragged him away.

  Fiddler came to a boy. “Can you shine these?” the doctor asked, and looked at his dirty shoes.

  “Oh yes,” the boy said. “Oh yes! Those and a hundred more.”

  The doctor motioned the boy to fall in behind the kapo. They continued the awkward trek through the ranks and the kapo stood behind the doctor, motioning the new arrivals to keep their heads up, stand straight, chests out, shoulders high. Other women entered the crowd and gathered clothes and purses and wallets and watches that squatted at each person’s side. The guards ordered the new arrivals to bend and lean. They took jewelry. They tore pierced ears if taking earrings took too long or the new arrival didn’t bend low enough. The women rammed their fingers into mouths looking for fillings, and wrote on a clipboard for each gold tooth they found. They spread anuses with gloved fingers and looked up noses and in ears with lights and swabs and rough wooden probes. They watched the doctor, which way his thumb would turn—left for life, right for death.

  Fiddler thinned the group by half with his languid hitchhiking. The selected ones formed two lines by two trucks marked with red crosses. Each truck filled with people, drove away, and returned for another load. An unselected woman became selected by asking, “Where are they taking them?” and receiving the polite and logical answer, “Why don’t you find out?”

  Fiddler came to Jakub. “What can you do?”

  “I live in Marienburg,” Jakub said in Polish. “I was sent here to get papers.”

  “Really?” Fiddler said. He understood barely a word. He turned his thumb to the right.

  “But Herr Doktor,” a kapo said. “This one looks strong.”

  “Fine,” Fiddler said. The kapo waved off the guard approaching Jakub.

  “You’re being too conservative.” Fiddler turned to the Arbeitsführer, a Reich Labor Service major walking toward them. “By the looks of the size of this crowd,” he added.

  Fiddler signaled a stout woman.

  “Anordnung,” she yelled to the unselected group. Line up!

  The women guards led the group to a row of outdoor showers. They turned on the water and pushed each person under it and held them there for exactly 90 seconds by stopwatch, per Dr. Hehl’s written instructions. Next, they shaved every head, exposed every bump and scar. Women with long hair fought or wept. They beat the women who fought. To the women who wept, they handed their hair, in ironic piles. The other hair they carted to a repository at the northern end of the camp.

  “Anordnung!”

  The women handed a standard uniform to each arrival—a thin shirt with a serial number sewn on the back, thin pants, and a pair of wooden clogs. Then they led them to the blocks. Each block had an entry, washroom, and sleeping quarters. Two-tiered bunk beds three rows deep lined the sleeping quarters. The beds were narrow boxes filled with wood shavings and waste paper where inmates slept, four to a bunk with one blanket for two people. The women yanked the arrivals to their bunks.<
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  “Achtung. Achtung!” The group stood at attention. Kapos passed out a paper to each person.

  “Diese sind Ihre Aufgabenanweisungen,” the lead woman yelled. These are your duty assignments. Serial number 166097 was assigned to the infirmary. This serial number belonged to Jakub Chelzak.

  Twenty Nine

  When Heinrich Himmler first visited the Dolina Koscieliska, he saw the beating, heart of Lebensraum, the “living space” Hitler ordained in Mein Kampf for his master race of blue-eyed Aryans. The Death Camps, the Polish Blitzkrieg and Operation Barbarossa—Germany’s disastrous attack on the Soviet Union—were all bricks on the road to Lebensraum.

  Before Himmler, colorful travel guides attracted American tourists, calling the Dolina Koscieliska “Eden in Poland.” At the urging of Karol Lutz, who described the valley and the little village of Melinka as a “perfect little paradise,” Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald visited and wrote bantering, chatty travel notes about sitting in the soft fall sun sipping cheap burgundy in their Sunday best. They positively charmed their Long Island readers.

  “I think the spirits must pool crimson in her cheeks,” Scott wrote. “The way she giggles while we toast the valley tempts me to make love to her right here, to hell with the villagers, to hell with the friars in their cassocks mouthing their beads.”

  “Zeldy, how do I describe this pretty morning?”

  His wife was on the balcony of their room.

  “These lovely mornings glisten in the dust,” she said.

  “What dust?”

  “Who’s been sneezing, goofo? Pollen. ‘The early fall pollens that float in the dying circumstance of another drunken summer.’”

  “Dying circumstance,” Scott said. “Very good.”

  That afternoon, Scott finished his thoughts with a bourbon and a view of the valley in the late September sun. “These days make me feel all the man, the Adam,” he wrote. “At my highest, I can’t help but think it is here our damnation began.”

  FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, THIS AROSE IN THE VALLEY: eight guard towers; rows of plain, wooden barracks; a triple layer barbed-wire fence; three brick buildings with chimneys; a large stone manse; a glass greenhouse; and ground cleared bare to dirt. In normal times, one to three trains a week passed through Melinka village. For construction of the resettlement facility, Organisation Todt needed seven: one train per day bringing trucks and tools, soldiers and slaves—Jews mostly, from Krakow, and homosexuals.