Two weeks later Dov Landau came back from Wanda’s apartment at Zabrowska 99 with a shocking report. The report stated that those who had been rounded up on Tisha B’Ab and in five subsequent roundups had been sent off to death in gas chambers in a place called Treblinka. Further information from other ghettos around Poland reported the existence of other such camps: Belzec and Chelmno in the Cracow area, and Maidanek near the city of Lubin were in operation or being readied. It appeared, said the report, that a dozen more camps were under construction.
Mass murder in gas chambers? It did not seem possible! Mundek, as head of the Redeemers, met with half a dozen other Zionist groups in the ghetto and issued a joint decree
for everyone to stage an immediate uprising and break
through the wall.
The plea was emotional rather than practical. The Jews had nothing to fight with. Furthermore, everyone who held a card in a labor battalion had convinced himself that it was a passport to life.
The main reason that no uprising could be staged was that there was no support for it in Poland outside the ghetto. In France, the Vichy government had absolutely refused the Germans’ demands that French Jews be turned over to them. In Holland, the unanimous feeling of all the citizens was to hide their Jews. In Denmark, the King not only defied German edicts but the Danes evacuated their entire Jewish population to safety in Sweden.
If the Poles did not agree to the extermination of their Jews, they did not disagree. If they disagreed, they did nothing to show it. Only a very small minority of Polish people would shelter an escaped Jew.
Inside the ghetto, each different organized group of Jews embraced a different philosophy. The religious and the labor people argued. The conservatives and the left-wingers argued. Jews liked to argue. In ghetto life argument and debate had always been a great pastime. But now the time of greatest peril had come. Mundek’s Redeemers joined all the diversified groups in forming a unified command. The combined organizations carried the initials ZOB, and had the momentous task of saving the rest of the Jews in the ghetto.
Dov made one trip after another to Wanda’s apartment at Zabrowska 99. On each trip through the sewers he carried a message from ZOB to the Polish underground begging for help and for arms. Most of the messages were never answered. The few answers that were received were evasive.
Throughout that horrible summer while the Germans continued rounding up Jews for Treblinka the ZOB worked desperately to stave off total annihilation.
One day early in September, Dov had a particularly dangerous trip into Warsaw. After leaving Wanda’s he was spotted by four hooligans who chased him into a dead-end alley and demanded to see his papers proving he wasn’t a Jew. The boy had his back to the wall, and his tormentors closed in on him to pull off his pants to see the circumcision, the sure identification of a Jew. As they set to pounce, Dov took out a pistol he was carrying back to the ghetto and with it killed one of the hooligans and chased the others off. He darted away and soon found the safety of the sewer.
Back at Redeemer headquarters the boy broke down under delayed shock. Mundek tried to comfort him. Dov always felt warm and wonderful with his brother near. Mundek was
almost twenty-one now, but he was gaunt and always tired-looking. He had been a good leader and he worked beyond the limits of exhaustion. He had kept almost the entire Redeemer group intact and had never let their fighting spirit flag. The brothers talked quietly. Dov calmed down. Mun-dek put his arm around Dov’s shoulder and they walked from headquarters to their apartment. Mundek talked about Ruth’s baby, which was due in a few weeks, and how wonderful it was going to be for Dov to be an uncle. Of course, everyone in the Redeemers would be aunt and uncle to the baby but Dov would be the real one. Thefe had been many marriages in the group and there were already three babies-all new Redeemers. Ruth’s baby would be the finest of them all. Things were bright, Mundek told Dov, because they had found another horse and there would be a real feast. Dov’s trembling passed away. As they neared the top of the stairs Dov smiled at Mundek and told his brother that he loved him very much.
The instant they opened the door and saw the expression on Rebecca’s face they knew disaster had struck. Mundek finally got his sister coherent enough to talk.
“Mother and Ruth,” she cried. “They were taken out of the factory, Their work cards were invalidated and they were marched off to the Umschlagplatz.”
Dov wheeled around for the door. Mundek grabbed him. The boy screamed and kicked.
“Dov! Dov! There is nothing we can do!”
“Momma! Momma! I want to go to Momma!”
“Dov! Dov! We can’t look at her being taken away!”
Ruth, eight months pregnant, cheated the gas chambers of Treblinka. She died in the agony of childbirth and her baby died with her in a cattle car so packed it was impossible for her to lie down.
At Treblinka, SS Colonel Wirth, the commandant, was furious. There had been another breakdown in the mechanism at the main gas chambers and another trainload of Jews was en route from the Warsaw ghetto. Wirth had been proud that Treblinka had the best record for dispensing “special treatment” of all the camps in Poland. His engineers informed him that it would be impossible to get things into working order again before the train arrived from Warsaw.
To make matters worse, both SS Colonel Eichmann and Himmler himself were due on personal inspection tours. Wirth had planned to hold special gassings in their honor.
He was forced to round up all the old, obsolete gas vans he could find in the area and send them to the rail siding to meet the train. Generally the covered vans could accommodate only twenty people, but this was an emergency. By forcing the
victims to hold their hands over their heads the Germans could make space for another six or eight Jews. The Germans discovered that there were still several inches between the tops of the heads and the ceiling of the van. In this space they packed another eight or ten children.
Leah Landau was in a daze of grief over Ruth’s death as the train pulled to a siding near Treblinka. She and thirty others were taken from the cattle car and forced with whips, clubs, and dogs to get into one of the waiting vans and hold then-hands high. When the van held an absolute maximum the iron door was shut. The truck started into motion, and in a matter of seconds the iron cage was filled with carbon monoxide. Everyone inside the van was dead by the time the trucks entered Treblinka and halted before the open pits where the bodies were unloaded and the gold extracted from the victims’ mouths.
At least Leah Landau had cheated the Germans, for her gold teeth had been extracted long before and exchanged for food.
Winter was coming once again and the German roundups were becoming more and more frequent.
The entire ghetto moved into cellars, taking everything of value with them. The cellars expanded and some, like the Redeemers’, became elaborate bunkers. Dozens, then hundreds, of bunkers sprouted and connecting tunnels began to weave through the earth.
The sweeps of the Germans and their Polish Blues and Lithuanians netted fewer and fewer Jews for Treblinka.
The Germans became angered. The bunkers were so well concealed they were nearly impossible to locate. At last the commander of Warsaw himself entered the ghetto one day to speak to the leader of the Jewish Council. He was angry and demanded that the Jewish Council assist the Germans in speeding up the resettlement program by locating the cowards who hid from “honest labor.” For over three years the Jewish Council had been trapped and torn between carrying out German edicts on the one hand and trying to save their people on the other. Now, shortly after the German demand for assistance, the leader of the Jewish Council committed suicide.
It was winter in the ghetto again.
Mundek’s Redeemers were assigned to plan the defense of a section of the Brushmakers’ district. Dov spent his time either in the sewers or in the bunker forging travel passes. Actually his trips “under the wall” allowed him one or two decent meals a week at Wanda’s. On his trips out of the ghetto he now led old people or others unfit for combat. On his trips in he carried arms and radio parts.