He was willing to let the Deutsche use the crossroads first, and held up his males so they could. The Tosevite officer led his Big Uglies forward. They towered over the males of the Race. Some of them shouted things. Some shook their fists. But, to Gorppet’s vast relief, they didn’t start shooting.
“Forward,” he called after the Deutsche had passed. Forward his own small group went. He kept one eye turret on the terrain, the other on the map he’d been given. Unlike the maps he’d had in the SSSR, this one seemed to know what it was talking about. When, toward evening, his males reached a town, he stopped a local and asked, “Greifswald?”
He made himself understood. The local nodded a Big Ugly affirmative and said, “Greifswald, ja.”
Gorppet turned back to his males. “We have reached our assigned station. Dismal-looking dump, isn’t it?”
3
With a curse half in Yiddish, half in Polish, Mordechai Anielewicz used the hand brake on his bicycle. “How am I supposed to get anywhere if the roads are all kaputt? ” the Jewish fighting leader muttered.
Burnt-out trucks made the asphalt impassable. These particular vehicles were of human manufacture, but he had to look closely to see which side had used them. The Lizards had pressed plenty of human-made models into service in Poland, and most of them had been imported from Germany.
He got off the bicycle and walked it around the jam. He’d been doing that every kilometer or two on the journey down to Widawa. He’d got his family out of Lodz before the fighting started, and sent them southwest to this little town. That had kept them safe-or safer, anyhow-when the Germans hit the city with an explosive-metal bomb. But the Wehrmacht had overrun Widawa-and Bertha and Miriam and David and Heinrich were every bit as Jewish as he was, of course.
Even after he passed the wrecks, he couldn’t get back on the road right away. Someone’s airplanes had cratered it with bomblets. Anielewicz’s legs ached as he brought the bicycle forward. They’d been doing that since the last round of fighting, when he’d breathed German nerve gas. Without the antidote, he would have died then. As things were, he’d got off lucky. Of the others who’d breathed the gas, Heinrich Jager, after whom his younger son was named, had died at an early age. Ludmila Gorbunova had suffered far more from the lingering effects of the stuff than he had. Ludmila had been in Lodz. Odds were all too good-or all too bad-she wasn’t suffering at all any more.
Over the years, Mordechai had come to take his aches and pains for granted. He couldn’t do that now. The Nazis had used poison gas again in this new round of fighting. How much of it had he breathed? How much harm was it doing? Just how much residual damage did he have? Those were all fascinating questions, and he lacked answers to any of them.
And, in a most important sense, none of them mattered much, not when measured against the one question, the overriding question. What happened to my family? No, there wasn’t one question only. Another lay underneath it, one he would sooner not have contemplated. Have I still got a family?
After half a kilometer, the road stopped being too battered for a bicycle. He got back up on the bike and rode hard. The harder he worked, the worse his legs felt-till, after a while, they stopped hurting so much. He let out a sigh of relief. That had happened before. If he put in enough exercise, he could work right through the cramps. Sometimes.
No road signs warned him he was coming into Widawa. For one thing, Polish roads had never been well marked. For another, Widawa wasn’t a town important enough to require much in the way of marking. And, for a third, the war had been here before him. If there had been signs, they weren’t upright any more. A lot of trees in the forest just north of Widawa weren’t upright any more.
When the road curved around the forest and gave him his first glimpse of the town, he saw that a lot of the houses in it weren’t upright any more, either. His mouth tightened. He’d seen a lot of ruins in the first round of fighting and now in this one. Another set wouldn’t have been so much out of the ordinary-except that these might hold the bodies of his wife and children.
A burnt-out German panzer and an equally burnt-out Lizard landcruiser sprawled in death a few meters apart, just outside of town. Had they killed each other, or had some different fate befallen them? Mordechai knew he would never know. He pedaled past them into Widawa.
People on the street hardly bothered to look up at him. What was one more middle-aged bicycle rider with a rifle slung on his back? They’d surely seen a surfeit of those already. He put a foot down and used a boot heel for a brake. Nodding to an old woman with a head scarf who wore a long black dress, he asked, “Granny, who knows about the refugees who came in from Lodz?”
She eyed him. He spoke Polish notable only for a Warsaw accent. He looked like a Pole, being fair-skinned and light-eyed. But the old woman said, “Well, Jew, you’d best ask Father Wladyslaw about that. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything.” She went on her way as if he didn’t exist.
Anielewicz sighed. Some people had a radar better than anything electronic in the Lizards’ arsenal. He’d seen that before. “Thanks,” he called after her, but she might as well not have heard.
A couple of shells had hit the church. Workmen were busy repairing it. Mordechai shrugged at that, but didn’t sigh. Jews would have fixed up a synagogue before they worried about their houses, too. “Is the priest in?” Mordechai asked a carpenter hammering nails into a board.
The man nodded and shifted his cigarette to the corner of his mouth so he could talk more readily. “Yeah, he’s there. What do you want to talk to him about?”
“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Anielewicz answered. “They came here out of Lodz not long before the Germans invaded.”
“Ah.” The cigarette twitched. “You a Jew?”
At least he asked, instead of showing he could tell. “Yes,” Mordechai said. The other fellow had a hammer. He had a rifle. “Don’t you like that?”
“Don’t care one way or the other,” the carpenter answered. “But you’re right-you’d better talk to the father.” He gestured with the hammer toward the doorway. As Mordechai walked over to it, the Pole started driving nails again.
Inside the church, Father Wladyslaw was pounding away with a hammer, too, repairing the front row of pews. He was a young man, and startlingly handsome in a tall, blond way. If his politics had fit, the Nazis would have scooped him into the SS without a second thought. With all the noise, he didn’t notice Mordechai for a bit. When he did, his smile was friendly enough. “Oh, hello,” he said, getting to his feet and brushing sawdust off his cassock. “What can I do for you today?”
“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Mordechai said again, and gave his name.
Father Wladyslaw’s eyebrows flew upward. “The famous fighting leader!” he exclaimed. “Your kin would have been some who came out of Lodz.”
“That’s right,” Mordechai said. “People in town tell me you’d know about them if anybody does. Are they alive?” There. The question was out.
But he got no sure answer for it, for the priest replied, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know. The Germans overran us twice, and kidnapped people each time they retreated. Some were Jews. Some were Poles who’d lived here for generations uncounted. I’m not even sure why, but who can tell with Germans?”
“They’ve run out of Jews in Germany,” Anielewicz said bitterly. “They need some fresh people to keep the gas chambers and the ovens busy.”
“You may well be right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish I could give you more definite news of your loved ones, but I fear I can’t. You’ll have to go inquire among the refugees who are still here. I pray your family is among them.”
“Thank you, Father,” Mordechai said; the priest seemed a decent fellow. Then he added several choice comments about the Nazis. He was ashamed of himself as soon as they were out of his mouth, which was, of course, much too late. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Father Wladyslaw told him. “If you think I haven’t called them worse than that, you’re wrong.”
“They’re supposed to have published a list of the people they took. They’re supposed to have already released those people,” Anielewicz said. “And they have published it, and they have turned a few people loose. But nobody believes that list is everybody, or even close to everybody.”
“Your family is not on it?” the priest asked.
“If they were, I wouldn’t be here,” Mordechai answered. “Thanks for your help, Father. I won’t take up any more of your time. The refugee tents are on the south edge of town?”
“That’s right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish you luck there, either in finding them or in learning of them.” Nodding, Anielewicz walked out of the church. The priest started hammering again even before he’d left.
The tents and huts in which the refugees were staying looked even shabbier than the town of Widawa. The fighting had smashed them up, too, and they’d been less prepossessing to begin with. A sharp stink assailed Mordechai’s nose. He wouldn’t have let his fighting men pay sanitation so little heed.
Poles and Jews spilled out into the spaces between tents to see who the newcomer was. Anielewicz got the notion the people of Widawa would just as soon they all disappeared. But with Lodz radioactive rubble, a lot of them had nowhere to go. He stared this way and that. He didn’t see his family. He did spot someone he knew. “Rabinowicz! Are Bertha and the children here?”