Two Princes and a Queen

by Shmuel David

  At that moment, Mara arrived with tears in her eyes. “They took Father and Zanek,” she said, shrinking back when she saw the wounded man. Inge just had time to fill a glass of water for him and hold it to his lips before the firing started again. The second man, who’d stayed hidden all that time behind the sand sacks, knelt beside his friend, stroked his face, and said to us, “Look after Pavel. He’s my best friend. I’m going to run forward so as not to lose the other fighters.”

  This was the moment I’d been waiting for. The time had come.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said at once. “I’ll take Pavel’s rifle. I know how to use one.”

  “No, not the gun. But take two grenades. Do you know how to use a grenade?” he asked, quickly opening his friend’s weapon belt.

  “You go,” said Inge. “Can’t leave someone who’s wounded.”

  Armed with two grenades, I joined the Partisan, whose name was Peter, and together we slipped away among the bullets.

  “The goal is City Hall. You know how to do it?” he asked, as he scanned our new position.

  “Of course,” I said confidently. “Follow me.”

  I never saw Inge again. That first week, I thought she’d come after me, but I quickly realized her devotion would never let her leave.

  ***

  Alan had a very pressured week at work. Rachel was busy with the renovation of the kitchen, and whenever she could, she took him with her to various related craftsmen. He was stressed with work, and Rachel was frustrated by his lack of involvement in the home and family. He spent the small hours of the night going through Erica’s recordings.

  “I’ll just finish getting all the material together,” he told his wife one day, when she protested. “It’s really important. I have to hurry. She isn’t well, and apart from that, she needs me. Most of the time, she has nobody, and at least I’m there two hours a week.”

  When he arrived on Monday at the usual hour, standing next to her bed he saw a woman with a little girl. Erica’s daughter was glad to see him and thanked him for his visits from the bottom of her heart.

  “I wish I could come more often,” he said. “But I have work and family, which limits me.”

  “It’s very hard for me too,” she responded. “I live far away and have to fly, and it’s so expensive. I’ll just say goodbye to Mother. Will you walk me to the elevator?”

  “Bye, Grandma,” her granddaughter approached and kissed Erica. “Feel better.”

  Alan accompanied her daughter and granddaughter to the elevator.

  “You know that her situation has grown worse?” she said. “The hospital called me to say I should come and see her.”

  “If it was so bad, they’d have moved her from here by now.”

  “They explained to me about the markers that indicate the progression of the illness,” she said, pressing the elevator button.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But sometimes, you know, even despite the progression, she might live for another year or more.”

  “Anyway, you are truly an angel. What you are doing is sacred work. I am so grateful,” she said as the elevator arrived.

  When he got back to Erica’s room, she made a dismissive gesture with her hand.

  “Oy, children, children…” She sighed.

  “What’s so bad about children?” he asked her.

  “Just as well I don’t have to rely on them. Life has taught me not to rely on anyone.”

  “What about friends?” He turned on the recorder and let her continue her story.

  The Railway Bridge, October 1941

  Once we’d taken up position at City Hall, we tried to locate the source of the shooting, and at that point, the German reinforcements arrived. Scores of armed combat troops poured into town, on their backs were square backpacks with the swastika. We realized that the battle was lost and tried to retreat. Each time a small Partisan unit made an attempt to escape among the walls and retreat, Peter and I covered them, firing from the City Hall veranda. When the Germans surrounded City Hall, we decided to retreat and try and join the base regiment.

  At first, I didn’t realize what I’d gotten myself into. I thought I’d joined Tito’s Partisans, until I recalled what Mara told us about Četnici Partisans. When we reached the regiment’s base in the forest, I understood that they were indeed Četnici Partisans, who were collaborating with the Partisans. It didn’t bother me. Peter treated me well and took care of all my needs. I didn’t believe we’d get to the base. We joined up with ten other fighters who’d escaped from Sabac when the German reinforcements arrived.

  The walk was very hard. I didn’t have comfortable shoes and was wearing the refugee clothing we’d worn at camp in Sabac; I looked like a ragdoll. When we reached the base, Peter brought me some clothes. Navigating to the base wasn’t easy. Fortunately, we had Goran with us; he had a map, and we all followed him. On the way, we avoided German ambushes. When darkness fell, we took shelter under a bridge and continued walking early the next morning. After a day’s hike, we came, exhausted, to the regiment. Peter was immediately called to make his report to the intelligence officer. I was sent to do a shift in one of the improvised hospital tents at the edge of the camp. There, I met Jelka Shavnich26 for the first time. She was in charge of instructing us in methods of first aid. She’d arrived as a nurse only a week before me. Jelka was abundantly motivated. She was raised in Hashomer Hatzair in Zagreb and joined Tito’s Partisans at the end of August. The regiment was in the process of getting organized and was joined by young people who’d heard about Čiča’s heroism. He was a fighter who became a legend in his own time. We very quickly became good friends. She filled the empty space Inge had left but was far more idealistic than Inge. As a communist, she was very resentful of Četnici Partisans. We spoke intimately, and she told me a great deal about herself and her childhood in Zagreb.

  Peter met me the following day when I was in the middle of a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation lesson with Jelka. He enthusiastically told me about an ambush planned for two days’ time near Valjevo and asked if I wanted to go along.

  He also told me about his meeting with regiment commander Čiča, known as the “old man from the Romanian mountains,”27 the stories of his heroism well-known among the Partisans.

  “No bullet could touch him,” enthused Peter. “This evening, he wants to get all the regiment fighters together to report our achievements and future plans.”

  I told him I preferred to participate in smaller operations until I felt more experienced as a nurse. Jelka impressed me with her composure and the knowledge she passed on to us. To this day, I remember her quick hands sewing up a deep cut with the skill of any surgeon I met here later on in my work at Mount Sinai Hospital. Not even the whistle of nearby bullets disturbed her. After several days of instruction, I became her assistant. But I didn’t have much time to get organized. I participated in all kinds of small operations not far from the camp.

  The high point was the blowing up of the bridge of the train from Nis to Belgrade, planned for the end of October. We were seven fighters and the regiment commander himself. It was then I saw what a hero he really was. The evening before, he called us to his tent and explained the details of the operation. The cargo train carrying food and equipment for the German army in the north would go over the bridge just after four in the morning, but we would get there three hours before in order to quietly prepare the bomb.

  He showed us the travel route on a map, using a sharpened stick to point out the starting point, Nis in the south, and the twisting route in the direction of Belgrade and from there to Slovenia. We had to sabotage the track, destroy the carriages and engine, disconnect telegraph and telephone lines, and of course, kill as many of the German enemy as we could.

  The excitement was enormous. It was the first time I’d participated in an operation of this kind. The night was quiet and cold, a
nd apart from the barking of a dog in a nearby village, there was complete silence. We walked quietly in the direction of the bridge. I carried the first-aid bag, two grenades, and a revolver. I feared unexpected fire, but most of all, my first test as a nurse under fire. Would I be able to do my job if the life of a young man was my responsibility? Would I be nervous; would my hands tremble if I had to stop the flow of blood? We were filled with pride and the desire for revenge.

  It was then we caught the gypsy in the forest. He told us everything with terrified eyes. At first, we thought he was making up the story. How could we believe that they’d lined up fifty people and shot them in the back of the neck? And then fifty more, and fifty more after that. All this took place at Zasavica, not far from the camp at Sabac, where we lived together with the Jews from Sabac. We swore to avenge the blood of our brothers, crying to us from the earth and igniting the spirit of battle in us. All the gypsy knew was that German soldiers had come to the Senjak camp near Sabac and taken about a hundred gypsies for burial work.

  We sat around him, and Čiča managed to get the whole horrifying story from him. I didn’t connect the murder with our group at all. The gypsy told us that many gypsies were at the slaughter. I didn’t know what happened to Ancel, Inge, Friedl, and our other friends. Were they among the murdered?

  Early in the morning, the German soldiers had woken them with shouts, hurrying them to work. They didn’t yet understand what kind of work, because they sometimes went out to do agricultural work for farmers in the area. It was only when they got to the maize field that they were told it was digging work. They were ordered to dig a long, wide ditch without knowing what it was for.

  In the meantime, trucks with Jewish and gypsy prisoners arrived from the camp on the Sava. They were taken off the trucks, put in three lines, and made to join in the work. When the ditch was longer than two hundred meters, the soldiers shouted at them to widen it to two meters and make it deeper. A German officer walked up and down above them all the time, occasionally looking with dissatisfaction at the ditch. When the ditch was two and a half meters deep, he ordered the soldiers to drive stakes into the mounds of earth on one side of the ditch, at a distance of four meters from each other.

  At this point, the gypsies from the Senjak camp were ordered to go and wait by the trucks. When they were some distance away, the soldiers led the Jewish and gypsy prisoners from the camp up to the ditch. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were positioned with their legs slightly apart, each one opposite a stake exactly between their legs, their faces to the yawning ditch underneath them. Once the prisoners were in a straight line, the shooters were called to stand behind them. The order “fire” was answered by a burst of gunfire, and the line of prisoners collapsed to the earth. The gypsies at the trucks were then called to continue their labor and throw the bodies into the ditch.

  It was only a few days later that we got the terrible news. Almost all the men from the Kladovo transport and many gypsies were executed above the ditch dug by friends of the gypsy they’d caught. The murder was in retaliation for the killing of twenty-one German soldiers ambushed by Serbian Partisans near the town of Topola.28 This was immediately followed by a decree whereby, for every German soldier killed, a hundred Jews would be killed as punishment.

  Cold swept through my warm clothes. The gypsy’s story about the three days of slaughter tormented me. I was ready to explode the grenade on my body in order to avenge the deaths of my people. But we had to complete our operation quietly and cause as many losses as possible for the other side and send that train into the gaping abyss under the bridge. We made our way stealthily through the terraced vegetation that smelled of fungus and leaves. Suddenly, in the pale moonlight, I saw the shining train tracks twisting below us like a river. But the bridge was still some distance away. The first-aid bag weighed heavily on my shoulders, swaying on my hips. We climbed up a steep hill, and I breathed deeply with the effort. When we reached the top, we saw the deep valley from the other side and the bridge on its huge pillars connecting our hill with the next. One of the young men participating in the operation was Lazo from Belgrade, who’d been trained as a saboteur. He showed incredible courage. We crouched down quietly, waiting for Lazo and the commander to finish preparing the bomb and leave for the appointed place to set it on the bridge. Unease and fear filled my mind. What if the train came early and crossed the bridge while they were still on it? They’d have nowhere to run; the bridge was narrow. What if we were all seen by a German patrol guarding the bridge? Čiča and Lazo laid the bomb and returned with the electric cable to our hiding place behind the hills. Iche, a nice young man from Hashomer Hatzair in Belgrade, crawled on his stomach up to the track and placed his ear to the ground to hear if the train was near. He lay there listening for about a minute and then stood up. “It’ll be here any minute.”

  Like a serpent with an eye of fire, the train zigzagged through the valley toward us. We heard its snorts and saw the smoke rising from its chimney into the pale night sky. And now it was passing above us as we lay motionless, waiting for the last of the carriages to gain the bridge, and then an explosion was heard, and an enormous jet of fire rose into the sky. A series of further explosions was heard, probably from explosives on the train, and the carriages fell into the valley like a toy train, some still attached to each other, hanging for a moment between sky and earth. Screams of alarm and fear were heard, and then the groans of the wounded. None of our people were hurt. The commander looked through the binoculars and commented, “A huge success. Everything collapsed. No need to open fire.”

  ***

  When Alan returned home on the train that evening, he was consumed by Erica’s story about the slaughter at the maize field. He continued to envision the picture of the Jews, old people in city clothes, as described by the gypsy caught by the Partisans. How they stood on the edge of the ditch, when German soldiers, who’d gone by with a blanket collecting all their valuables just a moment before, had shot them. Did they know these were their last moments? Did they realize that in a second they’d drop dead into the ditch in front of them?

  * * *

  26 A daring fighter and nurse who saved many people. She fought in Čiča’s regiment and was killed in March 1942 when a Četnici group surprised the regiment camp. Characteristically, Jelka grabbed her gun in one hand and her first-aid bag in the other and ran to the wounded. While helping them, she was hit in the shoulder and stomach.

  27 Slaviša Vajner Čiča, born in 1903, son of a poor Jewish family, was the popular commander of a Romanian Partisan unit, a member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, and a hero of the Bosnian uprising. He was killed in the struggle against the Germans in 1942. Vajner Čiča, a legend in his lifetime, was declared national hero of the Yugoslavian people in November 1944.

  28 Ambush at Topola. On October 2, the Partisans won a victory against Wehrmacht soldiers near the town Topola, far away from Sabac. Twenty-one soldiers were killed by Partisan fire. This stinging failure persuaded the German General Böhme to order Turner, head of the German Administration in Serbia, to hand over 2,100 Jewish prisoners from the camps at Sabac and Belgrade for reprisal actions in response to the blow they’d received.

  Beth Israel, January 2002

  On Monday morning, a day before their usual meeting, Alan received a call from the hospital. Erica had been transferred to the oncology ward at Beth Israel Hospital. Her condition had deteriorated. He left the office early that day and hurried to the hospital. When he asked the nurse at reception where Erica was, he suddenly remembered that he didn’t know her surname. Fortunately, the nurse helped him.

  “Mrs. Grinberg, she’s at the end of the corridor on the left. Are you her son?”

  Again, he felt uncomfortable, and, fearing they might not let him see her, he almost answered in the affirmative.

  “No, but I am very close to her,” he said after a brief p
ause. “She hasn’t any family in town.”

  “That’s all right, just don’t stay too long. She’s just had a treatment.”

  “What treatment?” he asked worriedly.

  “Chemotherapy. It leaves her very weak. Didn’t you know?”

  “She didn’t say a word to me,” he said, embarrassed by her not telling him. “How long has she known?”

  “Several months now.”

  When he sat down next to her and saw the IV in her arm, he realized that she probably didn’t have long to live. He was suddenly anxious at the thought she might not have time to tell him the story of her war from the Partisan lines. He was angry with himself for being bothered by that now—her story instead of her condition, and he looked at her with concern.

  “Hi, Alan,” her voice was peaceful when she opened her kind eyes.

  “Hi, Erica. How are you?” he asked, continuing, “This how you treat a friend, by not telling me?”

  “What’s there to tell?” She played innocent, “Old woman with cancer. That’s the whole story.”

  “Yes. But don’t you think you could have told me? I feel close to you, a member of the family, and here you are, hiding something so serious from me.”

  He remembered he shouldn’t be upsetting her, that she was weak after the treatment.

  “I didn’t want to make an issue of it.”

  The nurse came in to check the drip.

  “Your friend is a brave and rather odd woman,” said the nurse quietly, so that Erica wouldn’t hear. “Better you let her rest today. It’s best you talk to her two days after her treatment.”