There! A built-in iron ladder leading up to the street! Coughing, screaming at the end of the line! Samson climbed the ladder and put his shoulder against the manhole and shoved the lid off. He poked his head out, then squirted onto the street. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, they fled after him.
Blinding lights!
Red streaks of tracer bullets from an arc of German machine gunners shot them down. Some scampered back to the sewer and were shot down the hole into the poison gas. And then, after a few more shattering screams as the gas converged from four directions, it was still.
The long-sought German breakthrough came just before dawn on the eighth day with the destruction of the Revisionists whose attempt to break down a main Kanal proved as foolhardy as Simon Eden had feared.
On the eighth day the Germans roared into the ghetto, inspired by the victory. It had had a strange reaction on the Jewish Fighters. It brought to them a full and final realization that there was no escape, that the fight would have to be fought to the very end on this ground. The Jews turned savage, hurling themselves into German ranks as living grenades and torches. Cornered, out of ammunition, they fought with rocks and clubs and bare hands.
Each step the Germans took into the central area, they paid more heavily. The Jews were on top of them, behind them, beneath them, and they fought like maniacs.
On the eighth day they drove the Germans out.
The calculated concealment of news of the uprising burst apart. The word rolled over the length and breadth of Poland.
Jews have rebelled in the Warsaw ghetto!
Jews have been holding against onslaught after onslaught for over a week!
Tales of the fanatical Jewish courage dribbled out. The myth of Jewish cowardice was burst.
Berlin was shocked.
Jews fighting, routing the Elite Corps! It was catastrophic, a humiliation as bad a propaganda defeat as Stalingrad was a military defeat.
On the ninth day Funk mounted his most furious assault, using six thousand troops, and at the end of the ninth day he received his officers, who babbled stories of yet another defeat.
“Herr Oberführer, they strike like phantoms!”
“And you strike like cowards,” Funk shouted. “You disgrace the SS, the Fatherland. You disgrace our Führer, Adolf Hitler.”
Funk threw them all out except Horst von Epp. He loathed the man personally but had to rely on him more and more in the past days. Von Epp could make up the most magnificent excuses.
Funk sat at his desk to write his report. Six hundred Jews had been taken out of the ghetto on this, the ninth day. In all, only eight thousand removed in ten days and most of them from the uniform factory. There were still over thirty thousand of them hidden, and it was getting more difficult to locate them each day. At this rate it could take forever. His promise of four days to liquidate the ghetto was haunting him like a joke—like Goring’s promise that no bomb would drop on Germany. He could sense the disdain of the officers. No, they would not dare replace him, for that would be admission that the Jews had defeated the SS.
Horst concentrated heavily on which woman to bring in for a weekend. Alfred Funk wrote his daily report. The report was concise and boasted of progress which had not been made and exaggerated enemy strength and expanded the myth of a large army of Polish bandits helping the Jews. Crisp, dull, military. Copies to Police General Kruger in Krakow, to Globocnik in Lublin, and to Himmler. Ultra-secret.
Horst walked over to him in a turmoil between a redhead and a blonde and lifted the report and scanned it. “Have you ever heard of the Ass of Balaam, Alfred?”
“The what of what?”
“The Ass of Balaam in the Bible.”
“Of course not.”
“The Ass of Balaam attempts to curse the sons of Israel and ends up praising them. I think the Americans call it a left-handed compliment.”
“Must you always talk in riddles?”
“Look at these phrases in your report You refer to the ‘enemy.’ Since when do we admit the Jews are a military enemy? And here—‘Jewish disregard for death and the unshakable decision to resist’—why don’t you recommend we decorate them with Iron Crosses?”
Funk took the report and tore it in half. “I’ll do it over.”
“They tell me it’s like a nightmare in there,” Von Epp said.
“I don’t understand this at all. Most of these troops have performed well on the eastern front ... I simply don’t understand it.” Horst’s mind was back on the women. Alfred Funk’s was not “We have to get them off the roofs,” he said. “Must get them down on the ground ...”
The phone rang. Funk answered. He turned sallow and clapped his hand over the mouthpiece. “Himmler calling from Berlin.” Alfred Funk lifted his latest reports and read passages, spoke of German devotion and courage, gave assurances. Then he became quiet and listened and listened. His shading turned to crimson and then to gray. He placed the receiver on the hook very, very slowly.
“News of this insurrection has spread all over Europe. Hitler has been in a rage all day.”
Horst von Epp’s hand clutched his throat unconsciously.
“Damn! Damn!” Funk walked to the window in a violent anger. “Damn their filthy Jew souls!”
He whirled to Horst. His face was a mask of evil. Von Epp was frightened.
“What are you going to do, Alfred?”
“I’ll get these filthy animals down from the roof. I shall burn the ghetto to the ground!”
Chapter Eighteen
“HEINKEL BOMBERS!” CRIED THE Fighters on the roofs.
The German airplanes swooped in at a height of two hundred feet over the Brushmaker’s and slowed their speed. Tons of black bombs fell from their opened wombs on the crush of buildings. They hurled down, tore through the roofs, splattered on the streets, ignited.
The incendiaries smoldered and their groping flames licked around for fuel. The wood spurted into sudden fire and roared up the stair wells to the roofs.
“The ghetto is burning!”
The Heinkels zoomed in on a second and a third pass. There was nothing to shoot back and deter their “drill” with human targets. Palls of smoke billowed and spiraled heavenward and flames leaped on the roofs, turning them into frying pans. Glass windows exploded and scattered on the streets, and orange-and-red fingers of flame leaped violently through the windows.
A scorched runner spilled into the bunker at Mila 18, holding his blackened hands, and another with wild eyes came in, and another. All of them had the same story.
“We have to abandon the roofs.”
The ghetto burned crisply, concisely, and helplessly, for there was not so much as a single drop of water to stop the conflagration. Fire, a hungry beast, devoured all that would succumb and relentlessly searched for more.
Warsaw’s fire brigades surrounded the ghetto with power hoses ready. Orders: keep the flames locked in on the Jews. Occasionally an angry spark would leap the wall and ignite on the Aryan side. These fires beyond the wall were quickly stamped out. Not a single drop of water went into the ghetto.
At the end of the tenth day of the uprising the northern quarter of the ghetto was in flames.
On the tenth night the new artillery battalions went to work. They poured five thousand rounds of artillery fire from the mouths of their cannons over the wall at point-blank range. Debris flew in the wake of the shell fire. Walls that refused to fall to fire were blasted apart.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! bellowed the German guns.
The earth shook and windows rattled and the muzzles flashed lightning and no one slept in Warsaw.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! they reached out at the silhouettes outlined in the fire. Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! until daylight.
And then the Heinkels came back and showered more coals into the inferno, and the fire raced from house to house, leaped over intersections, block to block. The tightly packed poor Stawki area raged, and the fire raced down Zamenhof, up Niska, along Mila, along Nalewki, devoured the Brushmaker’s complex.