The other Jewish defenders of Biali had suffered much worse. It would take a long time for Yatom to fully assess the casualties, but the aid station was collapsing under the strain of dozens of seriously wounded men and women. Yatom knew that there were still bunkers still full of dead or the badly wounded. Yet until the Germans were completely gone, there was little he could do. And while it seemed clear that the Germans were indeed retreating, they were taking their time about it, doing what they could to recover their own casualties and equipment.
It wasn’t the German way to leave anything behind if they could help it, a trait they shared with the Israelis. Teams of SS corpsman advanced to collect their wounded. Distaining white flags, they practically dared the Jews to shoot. Yatom held his forces back, so long as the corpsmen didn’t get too close. When a few Germans approached Roskovsky’s body Yatom and Roi drove them off, Yatom shooting an MP-40, Roi an MG-34, their 5.56 mm ammunition almost fully exhausted. Later a working German halftrack moved out from the German line to attempt the retrieval of a damaged machine. This was too much for the surviving Jews, who without orders drove it off with massed machinegun fire.
Finally, late in the afternoon, the Israelis listened to what they hoped was the last rumbling of the retreating German vehicles. Yatom doubted that the Germans would pull out completely, without leaving at least a covering force, and so his little army went about its own cleanup and recovery very carefully, and only after sending out a couple of tired and reluctant patrols. To his surprise, the patrols reported that the area seemed to be completely clear. Doubting them, near to sunset, Yatom led a patrol accompanied by Nir and Han. The scouts had indeed been truthful—for whatever reasons, the German battle group was gone.
The Germans’ complete withdrawal had as much to do with their original orders as the battering they took on the hills near Biali. Neither Stadler nor Kumm had been ordered to occupy the area around the town, or to seize it. Their orders had been to engage and destroy a partisan force in the area. Having done that, after a fashion, Stadler decided to terminate the fight, and withdraw. It wasn’t the job of the SS to pull security duty. Globocnik may have ordered one battalion to camp guard duty at Belzec, but Stadler would be damned if his men were going to stand guard over the blasted forest and hills around Biali. His men had managed to repair one Stug III and two of the damaged halftracks sufficiently to drive away, while a recovery vehicle pulled out the Stug III knocked out by Roskovsky’s EFP. Leaving behind two destroyed assault guns and several halftracks looked bad, but the fighting had been hard, and his men had killed many partisans for the price. Anyway, he didn’t have the support or reinforcements to do otherwise.
Stadler had no intention of characterizing the battle as anything other than a victory. Anything else would dishonor the memory of Colonel Kumm and endanger his own career. His battalion had suffered, but Stadler convinced himself, had dealt out as much punishment as it had taken. Like Kumm, Stadler had been shocked that the partisans stood and fought, rather than fleeing after some initial skirmishing. That decision, reckoned Stadler almost certainly had led to catastrophic losses among the partisan force, even if a few bunkers held out at the end. He’d taken twenty-three prisoners to boot. And although the worthless police sergeant Mueller could not identify any of them as British commandos, Stadler decided to keep them alive as proof of his victory. Anyway, Mueller might change his mind.
Stadler’s men had seized many enemy weapons as well, which always was good for display after a partisan operation. Especially telling, he believed, was the capture of a British commando weapon unlike any he’d seen before, and which alone, might justify the price of the battle The machinegun-like rifle was far more impressive than the little Ootzi submachinegun. If the German army copied it, it would make a marvelous assault weapon.
By the accounts of his combat soldiers and his own observations, and considering the effects of the artillery bombardment, Stadler guessed that his men had killed or wounded at least 200 partisans besides his captives. Stadler reasoned, as he guessed Globocnik would as well, that it was unlikely a partisan force larger than that could even support itself in eastern Poland for very long. Therefore, concluded Stadler, the enemy force must have been virtually wiped out—nevermind that they were still shooting a few machineguns at the end. Stadler drove back into Lubin like a conquering hero, and sent on the body of his regimental commander for burial with full honors, along with the other truckloads of lesser dead.
The next day when the people of Biali counted up their losses, Stadler’s estimate of the cost didn’t prove to be too far off the mark. By dawn on the June 29th Sobel, who was keeping the statistics, had counted 63 Jewish dead, 92 wounded and 25 missing—not counting the sayeret’s casualties. And many of the wounded, in the absence of medical facilities, supplies and antibiotics, would die. It was a devastating blow to the little community, and it wasn’t long before some of Jezek’s people, who had been rescued before reaching Sobibor, were questioning whether the terrible battle had been worth the cost. An irate crowd gathered around the overflowing clinic within the town, where dozens of wounded lay inside and out.
Sobel addressed them, his face red with anger. “You would all be dead, every last one of you if we had not fought” he spat at the weeping wives, mothers and fathers, without compassion. “And you’ll die still, you and your loved ones, if you don’t remember that.”
His words didn’t calm the traumatized citizenry, but silenced them. De Jong, who returned from the battlefield bloodied but intact, reinforced Sobel’s words, surprised and grateful that the Polish Macher had stepped forward. Four wounded SS troopers ended up in the Biali clinic as well, the focus of much hate and scorn. Sobel and his men wanted to execute the soldiers immediately, but De Jong and Jezek convinced former Sobibor prisoner to keep the men alive, at least for the time being.
The sayeret remained on the shattered ridgeline with Fliegel and his men, holding the ground, and collecting what weapons and ammunition they could find off the German dead, and their own. Norit emerged from the fight little worse for wear, but Feldhandler was in biting pain from his badly burned hands. Yatom and the other Israelis were just glad he was alive, lest they be permanently stranded. But it was unlikely Feldhandler would be able to work the upside-down computer in the capsule any time soon.
Rafi was the most pressing issue for the sayeret. Ido assured them that without access to modern medical treatment the commando would die. This made returning to modern Israel an acute issue—Feldhandler had to get the device operational, regardless of his own injuries. Mofaz pressed the issue most aggessively, and Yatom allowed his unruly subordinate some room.
Feldhandler, tired and weak, but fearing Mofaz’s rages as much as his own painful injuries, reluctantly agreed to return to the capsule with Perchansky on the evening after the fight. Yatom, speaking with the scientist in as kindly a way as he could manage, told Feldhandler that as soon as the sayeret heard from Shapira, if they heard from him, they would the capsule was operational. And if they did not hear from the Lieutenant in two days, Rafi needed to go anyway. Somehow, Feldhandler and Perchansky had to make it work.
Chapter 41
Shapira and Chaim, with their demolition men, drove south for Belzec for two tormenting days, dodging patrols and aircraft the whole way. The Germans, it seemed, were intent on protecting their most productive death factory. Shapira and his men finally made camp in a forest several kilometers from the death camp. The redoubtable Sandler found the encampment early on the morning of June 28, at which time Shapira sent Yatom a brief signal—about all the platoon radio could handle at the range Sandler had thirty-one men still with him. Of the prisoners freed from Treblinka, many had already been killed or captured. The survivors had split themselves into a dozen smaller groups, some intent on attacking the Germans, others on hiding. Sandler’s unit consisted of his remaining Bulls, and twenty of Treblinka’s youngest, fittest and most vengeful men. Mostly, like Sandler, they were baleful former Sonderkommandos. Sandler had given them the best of the captured weaponry from Treblinka, supplemented occasionally by loot taken from unfortunate German units that crossed his path. All of Sandler’s men carried MP-40s or MG-34s—there wasn’t a Mauser to be seen Their belts were festooned with pistols, knives and grenades. They looked like outlandishly armed buccaneers, and acted that way too. But they were death’s men, and they knew it.