Immense belches of violently twisting columns of smoke streamed skyward and turned into yellow-black clouds and blocked the sun and turned day into night. Showers of soot rained down thickly, covering the city with a snowfall of ashes. Everything was an ugly disintegrating gray.
One by one Simon called his groups down from the roof. The very key to their defenses were burned from under them. Fighters whom the Germans had been unable to force down were now driven out by the ever-probing, darting flames.
The wall of fire billowed down Zamenhof and encircled and ate the Civil Authority building and ran down Gensia, once a commercial artery of Warsaw, and the Pawiak Prison erupted like an immense torch.
Easter Sunday!
The mighty organ of the cathedral bellowed a tribute to the resurrection of the Son of God. The confines of the cathedral and of every church in Warsaw were overrun with pious who knelt, crossed, prayed, Hailed Mary, dipped holy water. Choir boys with shiny faces sang out to the glory of the Lord in falsetto voices.
The flames from the ghetto warmed them and caused the pious to perspire profusely, but they pretended no discomfort, for this was a joyous time.
“Hail Mary, full of grace ... Mother of God ...”
Gabriela Rak knelt in the last row of the mighty tabernacle. She had wept until she had no more tears. A coughing broke out in the cathedral as a wind shift sent gusts of smoke from the ghetto racing down to the altar.
Gabriela looked up at the bleeding, limp Christ. The archbishop chanted prayers rapidly in Latin.
“Oh my God,” Gabriela whispered to herself. “My hatred for these people around me knows no bounds. Help me, God. Help me not to hate them ... help me not to hate ... please let my child live. My child must live, but I am afraid because of my hatred. O Jesus ... how can you do this to your own people?”
Gabriela knelt alone after the cathedral was empty.
It was a bad day for an Easter Sunday. The gardens and the Vistula River and the places where one celebrates the resurrection and the coming of spring were simply unbearable because of the damned fire inside the ghetto. Soot poured down on their clothing, and it was humid and dark. A perfectly wonderful day was being ruined.
“O Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Why are you making them suffer?” Gabriela moaned. “Help me, help me. Help me not to hate.”
In deference to the holy day, the fire brigade poured their water jets over the ghetto wall to keep the Convert’s Church from falling to the flames as they reached the southern boundary.
Easter night.
Fires lit the sky from the Convert’s Church on the south to Muranowski Place on the north; from the cemetery on the west to the Brushmaker’s on the east. All of the ghetto blazed.
Horst von Epp stood transfixed before his window and watched. A naked oil-covered girl lolled on the bed behind him. He was drunk as he had never been drunk. He hung onto the curtain.
“Fire is fascinating,” the girl observed.
“That is no fire. That is hell. That is hell the way the devil meant it to be!”
“Horst be a good boy. Close the curtain and come to bed.”
“Hell!” He poured a drink sloppily. It ran over the edge of his glass and down his arm. “I salute our thousand-year empire! See it! See it! We shall live in fires like that for a thousand years! We are cursed!”
He turned and looked at the girl wildly. “Cursed, damned ...” The shadows of the flames crisscrossed her body.
“You frighten me,” she whimpered.
“Get out, you slut!”
Inferno! Inferno! Inferno!
Large beams devoured by the fire plunged from the roofs through floors. Choking, gagging, blinded Jews scrambled dazed into the streets and walked in helpless circles. Jews hurled their children from windows and then themselves. Jews were crushed and buried under collapsing walls.
On the thirteenth night of the rebellion the artillery began again to make up for its one-day Easter holiday.
Jews were charred into unrecognizable smoldering corpses.
Jews were roasted in bunkers which were turned into coffins by wind shifts and downdrafts.
Jews were choked to death in clouds of smoke which crushed their lungs.
Jews leaped from their hiding places into the sewers and were boiled to death in bubbling, sizzling waters.
On the fifteenth day the ghetto burned.
On the sixteenth day the ghetto burned.
On the seventeenth day it burned. Pillars of smoke continued to reach for the sky, and for miles in every direction it was black. Undraped skeletons defiantly remained standing.
Searchlights picked out the dissenters and the guns rankled and the walls fell.
Because of the extreme depth of Mila 18, it had been spared direct contact with the fire. But the bunker was a continued scene of the epitome of agony. Heat reached 170 degrees. Naked people collapsed atop each other in exhaustion. The Treblinka room, the central area hospital, was loaded with groaning, charred ruins of human beings. Many were burned beyond recognition. Deborah Bronski and the other nurses had no salve for their wounds and but a drop of water for their parched lips. Day and night they begged to be put to death to escape their misery, but not even a bullet could be spared for that.
And when they died they were taken through the Majdanek room, the children’s part of the bunker connected to the sewer. Their bodies were floated out in the sewer to make room for more near death to be brought down from the inferno above.
His voice grew weaker and weaker, but day and night Rabbi Solomon wailed in a stupor the chant “Eli, Eli.”
“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
In fire and flame our race did they burn,
With shame our masses brand.
Yet none turned away from Thee.
Not from Thee, my God, nor Thy Torah. ...
On the nineteenth day nearly everything that could be burned had burned. Now was a time for smoldering. Iron beams sizzled out their stored-up heat. Pavements could not be walked on. The boiling sewers ran cool again.
And when the sizzling slowed on the twentieth day, the Germans returned to probe the enemy strength, hoping that their work had been complete.
But most of the Fighters lived and throughout their agony begged to see the face of the enemy once more. Rodel and ten of his people moved behind the broken walls, searching out bunkers of Fighters, when the Germans came in.
He hid his men in a rubble pile as a patrol advanced toward him along Lubecka Street.
The Germans moved cautiously, fearfully, hopefully expecting every Jew would be gone.
An officer pointed to his sub-machine gunner to check the rubble pile on his right.
Rodel had a quick decision to make. The Germans had twenty men spread on the street. His people did not have the equipment to attack them. Yet the soldier would surely discover them if he kept coming. Rodel tightened his fat lips and felt his pistol. His eyes became glued to the soldier’s weapon. A lovely sub-machine gun, and then he saw the soldier’s water canteen.
The German had almost reached Rodel’s group.
“Stay under cover,” Rodel ordered, and in the same instant leaped out of the rubble.
“Jew!” screamed the startled German in his last word. Rodel’s knife slit him in half. He snatched the sub-machine gun, jerked off the ammunition belt, and drew the German patrol away from his own Fighters.
“After him!”
The Waffen SS fired.
Rodel dropped back into the skeleton of a building. Half its walls had fallen away, exposing the stairway up to the top floor, which was still burning. He crouched and let go a burst which scattered them and he began to climb the exposed stairs. Half of the twenty Germans raced in after him, and the second half stayed in the street and fired into the denuded building.