Briar Rose (18 page)

In March, the little band finally planned a real raid. Henrik told them of a storage depot on the other side of Berlin, and even drew a map to show them how they could fan out and then meet again safely.

"We have only four guns," Josef pointed out.

"We have courage," said Mutter Holle.

"They are shits," Henrik said. "If necessary we will kill them vAth our bare hands." He said it in his growl of a voice but Josef noted with some detachment that he did not offer to give up his own gun.

And so the plan was set. The guns were in the hands of those who knew how to use them-Henrik, Donner, Blitzen, and Josef who, as a boy, had often gone hunting on his stepfather's estate. He did not them that he had never actually killed anything on those trips,

'i~xcept once a wood pigeon, and that by accident. The blood on his

. I

hands as he tried to breathe life back into the little grey bird had I ,

made the gameskeeper and his stepfather laugh.

Those without guns-the three women and the Jew, who was, 148

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after all, a student and a rabbi-carved spears out of bran making the points as sharp as Henrik's knife.

In their layers of cast-off clothing, makeshift weapons in I they looked less like a band of partisans than a pleistocene hu party out after sabertooth. But Henrik's fierce leadership sust them. "They are shits," was the war party's hunting cry.

The outcome of the raid was never in doubt. They all exp to die, though not a one of them said it aloud. They revived tf resistance stories: the mothers who would not give their ch: over to the Nazis, the rabbis who rushed onto the points (

bayonets screaming the Shema, the partisan who threw him,~

front of a bus as a diversion so his comrades could escape.

filled themselves with such stories, never mentioning that a stories ended in death.

Josef alone said it. "We are all going to die."

They shunned him then. They literally turned their backs o though he was telling no more and no less than the truth t~

knew. From the moment he said what was in their secret hea no longer existed for them. Henrik took his gun away and ~

to one of the women. She kept her spear as well. So Josef went into that final battle against the storage depot witk weapon.

Because of it-who says that God does not have a sei humor?-he alone was not killed.

The storage depot was not one building but three great silo~

rik's plan had been simple; he had drawn it with a stick muddy ground. Those with guns would be in the forefront without guns behind. They would rush the small wooden h(

which the depot manager lived, take him prisoner, find sorr with which to blow up the silos, and escape.

"Melt back into the woods," Henrik said.

When Josef asked how they might expect to find somet]

blow up the silos with, no one answered. He had become person, his questions not worth answering. And he unde then, that the point of their raid was not to blow up anythin, The point was to die so that they, in turn, could become sto other partisans to tell around the fires that were not fires.

So when Henrik and Donner and Blitzen and the womai

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I Sy Nadia went forward with their guns, followed closely by the rabbi, Mutter Holle, and the third woman, who had rabbity teeth and was called Hexe-witch-josef stayed behind. He was not afraid. Having

9 lived a year in Sachenhausen, having managed through four months cl in the woods, he had no fear left. But he did not want to die for someone else's story. If he had to die, he wanted to die for his own.

He watched them cut down by machine gun fire, for Henrik had not mentioned, perhaps had not even known, that there were

:n guards atop the silos. He watched and he did not even weep for te them. He knew that when he told their story a day or a month or year from then, then he would cry.

He went back into the woods, found the last of their meager ie supplies, broke off a walking stick for himself which, without

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Hen-

rik's knife, he could not sharpen as a weapon, and began to go due east: towards the rising sun, towards the border that was no longer

,n a border, towards Poland, towards home.

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It is difficult to believe (he said) that Josef P. made it to his ther's estate alive and unharmed. But the war was filled wit unbelievable stories. This man hid in the cupboard of his nei~

house the entire war. That one was killed out walking his do woman missed her train and it was blown up. That woman a ride and was murdered. This child lived safely three years woods. That one had its brains slammed against the camp':

wall. There is nothing that is not believable in this world.

came home.

He walked into the house to find Potocki dead, taker conspirator and shot in the gameskeeper's hut where he often gutted rabbits and skinned deer. His mother, still be was mistress to the commandant who had set up his headc in the house. Josef stopped only to take a few possession, fresh clothing, a backpack of food, a passport with an extra graph, a knife, his stepfather's prized hunting rifle and extra I

he was no fool after all. These were given to him by his olc who also cut his hair and trimmed his nails and let him s nightfall in her own bed, his head resting on her breasts as if I still a child and not a man. He did not see his mother.

"Take your father's ring," the old nurse had said, put stepfather's ring in his hand.

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151

"This is Potocki's ring," Josef said, looking at the crest and the entwined letters.

"He was your true father," she said. "You are his true son."

"My mother?"

"Ah, poor lamb, no better than she should have been. But the old man. . . " and by this she meant the first husband, whom Josef had always believed was his father, ". . . the old man was a beast.

Unnatural. Her true love was Potocki. And you were of that union indeed." She kissed him and sent him into the night. He never was to know whether that story was, like all her stories told to him late at night, a fairy tale or real. His mother died near the war's end, her beautiful golden hair shaved off, hanged by the local partisans as a collaborator. He never saw her again.

The woods around his stepfather's estate were well known to him and he planned to stay there throughout the war, for everyone said it would not be a prolonged seige. The Germans would never stand up to the combined might of the world, not to the revenge of the Poles. So his old nurse had told him; so he now chose to believe.

Forgetting Sachenhausen and the tales he had heard. Forgetting the deaths he had already seen.

Clean clothes, a fresh haircut, food in the belly-they are great convincers. Josef was tired of death. He dreamed of peace. He dreamed of sleep.

He woke up surrounded by men.

The sun was already overhead and streaming down in bright ribbands through the trees. At first all he could see were the shadows of men bending over him, elongated, black, backlit, menacing.

Then one moved closer and he could make out a face, an angel's face haloed in gold curls. For a moment he thought he had died and was in heaven and Alan had found him again. Then the angel pulled him roughly to a sitting position and Josef saw he looked nothing like Alan, the gold curls being only a trick of the light behind. He had brown hair with gold highlights and his nose was slightly beaked.

His eyes were the dark mud of the Vistula in flood, "Who are you?" he asked Josef in Polish, then in German.

Caution, never an old habit, suddenly claimed Josef. He answered in Polish. I am called ...

Prince. "

"He looks like one," a man commented. "Those clothes."

"Don't be stupid. What would a prince . . ."

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':They shot the old one."

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, Is he the sen?"

"The mother is a collaborator."

"We should kill him now."

"Wait." It was the boy. He knelt beside Josef and puE

Josef's left sleeve.

"What are you doing?" Josef asked.

"Looking for a number," the boy said. "To see if you a or an escapee."

"There were no numbers in Sachenhausen."

The boy sat back on his heels. "So .... a Jew?" He spok(

in a language Josef did not know, though he guessed it was Josef shook his head.

"You do not have the look of a Rom."

He shook his head again. "I am a Pole. I am ... a faggot.

A . . .11

The boy stood. "He would not admit to that if he

German."

"Why not?" The speaker was a heavy-faced man, I growing in black and white clumps. "All Germans are se If he is a fag, he is just telling us he is a German. And you kn fags are: liars and blabbermouths, incapable of loyalty."

"That," Josef said, finally standing and looking straig man, "is exactly what Himn-Aer said.

Perhaps you are t

German spy."

The man hit him and Josef went down like a stone.

The boy knelt beside him again, but he was laughing, pure laugh. Joseph had not heard such laughter in yez seemed to be no cynicism in it. None at all. "No German E

be so inept," the boy said, helping Josef to his feet once say we keep him."

"He will be the death of us all," the bearded man w Secretly Josef agreed with him, if past history were any And that is how he fell in with a group of Jewish pa

There were thirteen in all. The boy-who was no boy twenty-three-was called The Avenger, for his entire f been burned alive in their synagogue and he alone, away school, had been spared.

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The bearded man was known as Rebbe though, as far as Josef was concerned, he was the least holy man he had ever met: foul-mouthed and quick to judge.

There were three brothers known as The Hammer, The Anvil and The Rod who rarely spoke, except to each other. There was a thin, dark Russian aesthete who answered to Ivan the Terrible and who had carved a tiny chess set out of oak, with acorn chessmen. He had played the game by himself until Josef arrived and then, after Josef won their third game together, he never played again. There were actually two women, known as Shuttle and Reed-though in all the weeks Josef was with them he never was able to tell which was which.

They stayed to themselves and always slept apart from the men, their arms about one another.

They might have been sisters, with the same square jaws, green eyes, blue-black curly hair cut short, large peasant hands. They might even have been mother and daughter, though Josef couldn't have said which was the older.

There were five men in their sixties, grey-haired and grey-bearded, who had come from the same
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village. Woodcutters, they had been away deep in the woods when the Germans had arrived. On their return they had found their families slaughtered, their homes looted and burned. "Even the gold wedding ring on my wife's finger was gone," one said. "Along with the finger." He did not say it sadly or angrily or with any emotion at all. It was as if he were reciting an old old story told to him so long ago, it had lost its power to shock or wound. Four of the men had taken the names of trees: Oak, Ash, Rowan, Birch. But the fifth, who was their leader, called himself Holz-Wadel because that was the forestmen's name for the full moon, a time when felling of trees was at its height. "I fell only

German trees," he said. Again, without emotion.

They were on their way to the outskirts of Lublin. There, almost in sight of the city, was a new death camp: Majdanek it was called.

It had been started the previous December and was filled with Russian soldiers-prisoners of war. It was Holz-Wadel's idea-and supported by other partisan groups they had come in contact with-that if they could liberate at least some of the camp, their ranks would swell with men who had been trained as fighters.

Josef nodded his head. It was at least a plan, so unlike the sort of stories and silly dreams that Henrik and his crew had been about.

"Take me," he said.

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They were all practiced woodsmen, the women, too: careful, (

and strong. It would have been hard to tell where one had tra~

through the forest, much less fourteen, and Josef reveled in company. The stories they traded at night had nothing to do resistance and horror, nothing to do with the many awful wa-dying. They told one another the old stories: the woodcutte counted the folk tales of their mountains; the Avenger being cl of them all to childhood, the nursery stories his mother had him; Rebbe, true to his name if not his nature, recalling stories the Old Testament. The Russian aesthete told Russian stori verse, translating them for the others in a voice made high emotion.

When it was his turn, Josef began by reciting English ballad Sir Patrick Spens and The Wife of Usher's Well. He ignored h favorites-Schiller and Goethe-judging that his audience i guess his choice of German poets meant more than simple ac tion. They were still unsure of him. He was the only non-Jev his training in the theater stood him in good stead, and he became their favorite entertainment. He ran through the ear glish poets and then remembered pieces of Dante for good me though the portions of the Inferno proved too dark and too r(

them. When he translated "Abandon All Hope. . ." the two xh put their hands up over their ears and began to weep silently stopped, watching them in fascination. He had never seen a weep without a sound. When he mentioned it the next morr the boy, he was told they had learned to weep that way in i the camps, so as not to be noticed. The Avenger did not te which camp. Josef did not ask.