“No ... in fact, he said he wished he were like King David with a young wench to warm his bed.”
Simon spun around and into the corridor. “Fighters up!” he called. “We’re moving up for an attack!”
“Fighters up!”
“Fighters up!”
A hideous shriek came from the arsenal in the Chelmno room simultaneously with an explosion of the stored munitions.
Jules Schlosberg’s body was hurled into the corridor.
“Germans!”
Simon plunged over the bodies of confused, frantic civilians into the turn of the corridor. The bunker was in a dark panic. He smashed his way into the Belzec room, where half of the Fighters were housed. A blinding light probed through the secret entrance from the tunnel up to Kupiecka Street.
“Germans!”
“Juden ’raus!” a voice commanded from the other end of the tunnel.
Simon dived over the corridor to the Auschwitz room. Another light penetrated from the tunnel at Muranowski Place.
Mass screaming and wailing and praying and crushing broke loose among the scrambling, aimless ants who battered forth from the tunnels. Simon and the Fighters used pistols and clubs on them to force them back and into silence. He was crushed against a wall. A dozen broke out in the Auschwitz room up the tunnel.
“We surrender,” they cried.
Rat-a-tat! The German machine gun blasted them down.
Simon kicked his way clear and drove into the Majdanek room, where a dozen of his Fighters already blocked the room to keep the children from getting trampled.
Simon handed his flashlight to Deborah and pulled the bricks away which led into the sewer. He poked his head through and flashed the light up and down. There were no Germans, but billows of poison gas floated in from both directions.
With Alex and a dozen Fighters forming a chain across the Kanal to Mila 19, Simon and Deborah passed the children out of the room one by one to the old bunker across the Kanal. Some of them were swept up by the rushing sewer waters. Others doubled over, gagged and blinded, as the cloud of gas enveloped them.
Outside Majdanek, frantic people tried to batter past the bayonets of the Fighters to get to the dubious safety of the death-filled sewers.
“Hold your breath, children. Duck under the water! Keep your eyes closed!”
German machine gunners at the head of the entrances shot down the panicked civilians, and then poison gas and lashes of fire from flame throwers ate up what little oxygen was left in Mila 18 and the bunker became a huge gas chamber filled with a screaming, frantic doomed mass.
Chapter Twenty-one
CHRIS AND ANDREI FROZE for the rest of the day in the second floor of a gutted structure from which they could watch the Germans methodically move over the area inch by inch, dragging the dregs of humanity from beneath the ground. The Germans were finding bunkers quickly now. Thirst-maddened people who had to live in silence for days on end broke.
Often at dusk there was a respite as the Germans pulled their forces off the streets and out of the ghetto to give it a working over with artillery, picking out for target practice the diminishing numbers of skeletons of buildings.
Andrei used this lull to make the final lunge for the Franciskanska bunker. Andrei always looked forward to seeing Wolf, for there was always an air of frivolity, jokes, songs, poems.
Not this night.
When Chris and Andrei arrived, Wolf and Rachael and Ana were sprawled glassy-eyed on the floor of the big room. Andrei looked around. There were only twenty-odd Fighters present. Everyone seemed only half conscious. There was no greeting for them. There had been no guard at the bunker entrance.
Wolf’s head hung between bunched-up knees, and Rachael lay on the floor beside him, her face in his lap. Ana looked up for an instant and half recognized Andrei and sagged again.
“What happened?” Andrei demanded.
No one answered.
Andrei turned to Ana. He didn’t like looking at her these days. All the tall fine hard round woman that had once been Ana was gone. She was wasted.
“Ana! What happened!”
Ana sniffled and mumbled incoherently.
“Momma ... Daddy ... Momma ... Daddy ...” wailed a woman Fighter. “Momma, I’ll be with you soon.”
Andrei turned abruptly in all directions. Living dead.
He reached down and jerked Wolf Brandel to his feet Wolf slumped at the end of Andrei’s arms like a rag doll. Andrei shook him. Wolf blinked his eyes.
“Fool’s gambit,” he mumbled. “Fool’s gambit ... fool’s gambit.”
Andrei’s hands let Wolf go, and Wolf fell to the ground again and he lolled on the floor, smacking his lips for water. Rachael groveled for her canteen, turned it over. It was empty. Wolf pulled Rachael to him and propped his back against the wall and looked up at Andrei.
“What the hell do you want?” Wolf said. “The canteen is empty. We have no ammunition left.” His hand flopped and hit the accordion beside him. “Even this thing won’t work any more.”
“Get on your feet, you son of a bitch,” Andrei bellowed in a tone that shook the bunker. “Get on your feet! You’re a commander of the Jewish Fighters!”
Wolf Brandel was shocked back to life. He dragged himself up and hung laboriously before Andrei Androfski, swaying back and forth ... back and forth.
“Now, what happened?”
Wolf licked his lips. “Germans ... got close to the bunker ... we all came up. We were committed to fire by a fool who opened up on them. In ten minutes we were out of ammunition ... not a thing left ... so we started throwing stones! Know how well stones stop the German army! Know that, Andrei! Stones! Stones!” Wolf caught his breath and puffed to fill his lungs with air. “They hit us with mortars and flame throwers. I watched ... I watched while they turned my soldiers into torches and I threw stones at them ...”
“Leave him alone, for Christ sake,” Christopher de Monti demanded.
Andrei kept at Wolf. “Is this what is left?”
Wolf blinked like a drunkard and looked at his people. Last night seventy-four of them had sat in the bunker and laughed about wanting to take a bath and how the twenty girls could hardly service the men and if only the men had money what fortunes could be made! And they sang about the Galilee until the accordion broke.
Only a few scraggly scarecrows left ...
“Stop it!” Ana screamed. “Stop it, Andrei!”
Andrei lifted her up and slapped her across the face with a sound that struck everyone in the bunker.
“Stand up, damn you all!” he bellowed unrelentingly. “Stand up, you bastards.”
One by one they struggled to their feet.
“Now hear me. So long as your lungs breathe, you fight. We move back to Mila 18 and we find weapons.”
Christopher de Monti was paralyzed by Andrei’s wrath. Yes, Andrei had the mystic power to take this punch-drunk crowd for yet one more attack.
“Ssshhh ... someone is coming!”
Silence.
Tolek staggered into the bunker. His long hair was caked with innumerable, layers of dirt and muck. He looked like a wild hairy ape from another age. His clothing was torn and his head was bloodied from the reopening of an old wound. He wavered to Andrei and jerked his head toward the commander’s cell.
Andrei and Tolek were alone in Wolf’s room.
“They’ve got Mila 18,” Tolek said.
“Are you sure!”
“Yes. I am sure.”
Simon! Deborah! Rabbi Solomon! Alex! Andrei covered his face in his hands and bit his lip so hard that blood poured from it and he shook so hard that Tolek grabbed his hair and wrenched it. “Hold on, Andrei ... hold on ...”
And then things became very, very clear.
“How many Fighters do you have left, Tolek?” he asked softly.