Eight beeps, a pause, six more beeps. Repeat the message twice. Decoded, it meant: ‘Twenty coming through the Prosta Street manhole.”
Ten seconds after Andrei started his diversionary attack in the western ghetto, Wolf and Tolek began their perilous journey.
The lateral pipes connecting to the large ones were slightly more than a yard in diameter, and to move in them one had to crawl laboriously on hands and knees.
Silence—absolute, complete, utter silence—was commanded by the leaders.
They inched into the pitch-blackness while overhead Andrei leaped out at Manfred Plank’s SS company and threw the Germans into confusion to draw attention from the evacuees. Andrei had chosen the desperation route carefully. No one was apt to watch the smaller laterals under the ground simply because it was not believed that a human could move for long through them.
They came to Nalewki Street. Their small pipe dumped into the big Kanal. Wolf halted the line and sloshed around in the darkness, feeling the walls to find the continuation of the small pipe on the other side. Corpses floated swiftly down and hit against him and knocked his feet from beneath him and he went under in the sewer water. He got to his feet after being swept ten or twenty yards and again slogged upstream to feel for the lateral. An hour passed before his hands found it.
He recrossed the Kanal and took Rachael’s hand. Hand in hand, the chain crossed the big line and re-entered the lateral on their hands and knees.
For another agonizing hour of step by step, the chain pressed on in measured progress. Their backs were breaking, their knees raw and bloody from the dragging. The stench blinding and numbing.
The pipe ran into the Zamenhof Kanal.
Three tortured hours had passed since the beginning.
Again Wolf had to cross alone and grope around from memory.
Another hour passed.
When he had gotten the chain over the Zamenhof Kanal the lateral pipe was running high and fast. They crawled on hands and knees, ever southward, with the sewage splashing up to their chins, floating into their eyes and noses and ears and hair.
Six hours later they were under the Convert’s Church and the site of the demolished uniform factory ... now under the wall in the “Polish corridor.”
Along the chain one Fighter after the other fainted. They had to stop long enough to slap them into consciousness and drag them further. Silence could not be broken even when someone pitched flat into the sewage and drowned. The line tightened. There were twenty-two left instead of twenty-three.
Another went under and another.
After they crawled eight hours on hands and knees the pipe widened. They were able to stand bent over. The water running in this direction was only a few feet high. Wolf did not give them a chance to glory in the respite. He drove them on while the chance for making progress was good. The strong dragged the weak to their feet. Pain ... nausea ... numbness ... half sanity ... half life ... they trudged on, on, on through the bilge and filth, until in the ninth hour they had passed out of the ghetto and the “Polish corridor,” and now they looked for the main Kanal which would take them down Zelazna Street.
Somehow in the darkness they had taken a wrong turn and veered back north. Then they splashed around in aimless circles. Wolf stopped them, trying to find his bearings and the main Kanal. Without compass, light, conversation, and using only a hazy memory of a few hours’ study, he was utterly and completely lost. There was no use pushing on. Three more had fainted, including Ana. Unless he gave them rest they would all be done in. Wolf crawled back to Tolek and broke the nine-hour silence.
“Rest,” he said.
Rest ... rest ... rest ... the magic word fired back along the line.
They sat in the pipe with the sewage waters swirling around their chests and they gasped and groaned with hunger and thirst and weariness and bloody hands and knees.
Tolek and Chris held the head of Ana, who was unconscious from falling into the water.
Wolf crawled away alone, counting each step carefully until he came to a large Kanal. He was utterly confused, for the Twarda Street line veered into the system at an angle. He could not understand. They were more than a mile away from the designated Prosta Street manhole and completely confused as to direction, but the big Kanal had ledges and would give them a place to recover their strength.
Wolf retraced his steps and led them to the Twarda main, and they crawled on the ledges and collapsed.
Wolf and Tolek and Chris stayed half awake, trying each in his own mind to comprehend the situation, and the same set of questions crossed their minds without conversation. Had their message to the Aryan side been received? Would someone be waiting for them on Prosta Street ... if they reached Prosta Street?
As commander, Wolf Brandel had other decisions to reach. He tried to reason out their proximity. He guessed rightly that they were under the former little ghetto area which was now largely reinhabited by Poles. The area, he knew, was under close watch of the police because of its proximity to the ghetto. Overhead they could hear motor vehicles and the marching of soldiers. Perhaps we are near Grzybow Square, Wolf thought. It was an assembly point for the Germans to enter the southern end of the ghetto.
Daylight showed through manholes on either end of their ledge. Wolf looked his people over. It was a battle of endurance against exhaustion more than anything at this point. One by one his people had passed out into semi-consciousness. If his guess of location was right, they would now be safe from poison gas and out of reach of the prying sound detectors. The tides were going high again. Water splashed over the ledge. Nothing to do but wait until darkness ... nothing to do but wait.
Kamek’s house in Brodno was the first stop in the underground railway to the Machalin and Lublin forests. Gabriela arrived shortly after the morning curfew was lifted.
“They’re down there!” she cried.
Kamek was unexcitable. He put his hands behind his back and deliberately pieced everything together. “Where are they? We do not know. Neither you nor I got the signal clearly. It could be one of fifteen manholes.”
Gabriela pressed her temples and tried to reason.
“Moreover,” Kamek continued, “both of our trucks are gone. The Gestapo raided our headquarters last night; our people are dispersed.”
The Home Army ... Roman ...”
“We cannot depend upon them. Someone may sell out.”
Gabriela knew he was right. She winced. Kamek, once Ignacy Pownicki, had been a journalist and an ardent supporter of both the ruling colonel’s clique and the reactionary pre-war noblemen’s caste. Events during the war changed his thinking. Humanity overpowered nationalism. Kamek was one of the few who were revolted by and ashamed of the behavior of the Polish people toward the things happening in Poland’s ghettos. He did not embrace the leftists’ philosophy personally, but he joined them, for they were the ones who gave the fullest support to those in the ghetto. Kamek lost his identity as Ignacy Pownicki to immerse himself fully in the underground work of the People’s Guard.
He was a cool man, seeming almost lazily detached from the urgency.
“They’re under there somewhere,” Gabriela mumbled again.