Leon Uris (22 page)

Ruth, eight months pregnant, cheated the gas chambers of Treblinka. She died in the agony of childbirth and her baby died with her in a cattle car so packed it was impossible for her to lie down.

At Treblinka, SS Colonel Wirth, the commandant, was furious. There had been another breakdown in the mechanism at the main gas chambers and another trainload of Jews was en route from the Warsaw ghetto. Wirth had been proud that Treblinka had the best record for dispensing “special treatment” of all the camps in Poland. His engineers informed him that it would be impossible to get things into working order again before the train arrived from Warsaw.

To make matters worse, both SS Colonel Eichmann and Himmler himself were due on personal inspection tours. Wirth had planned to hold special gassings in their honor.

He was forced to round up all the old, obsolete gas vans he could find in the area and send them to the rail siding to meet the train. Generally the covered vans could accommodate only twenty people, but this was an emergency. By forcing the victims to hold their hands over their heads the Germans could make space for another six or eight Jews. The Germans discovered that there were still several inches between the tops of the heads and the ceiling of the van. In this space they packed another eight or ten children.

Leah Landau was in a daze of grief over Ruth’s death as the train pulled to a siding near Treblinka. She and thirty others were taken from the cattle car and forced with whips, clubs, and dogs to get into one of the waiting vans and hold their hands high. When the van held an absolute maximum the iron door was shut. The truck started into motion, and in a matter of seconds the iron cage was filled with carbon monoxide. Everyone inside the van was dead by the time the trucks entered Treblinka and halted before the open pits where the bodies were unloaded and the gold extracted from the victims’ mouths.

At least Leah Landau had cheated the Germans, for her gold teeth had been extracted long before and exchanged for food.

Winter was coming once again and the German roundups were becoming more and more frequent.

The entire ghetto moved into cellars, taking everything of value with them. The cellars expanded and some, like the Redeemers’, became elaborate bunkers. Dozens, then hundreds, of bunkers sprouted and connecting tunnels began to weave through the earth.

The sweeps of the Germans and their Polish Blues and Lithuanians netted fewer and fewer Jews for Treblinka.

The Germans became angered. The bunkers were so well concealed they were nearly impossible to locate. At last the commander of Warsaw himself entered the ghetto one day to speak to the leader of the Jewish Council. He was angry and demanded that the Jewish Council assist the Germans in speeding up the resettlement program by locating the cowards who hid from “honest labor.” For over three years the Jewish Council had been trapped and torn between carrying out German edicts on the one hand and trying to save their people on the other. Now, shortly after the German demand for assistance, the leader of the Jewish Council committed suicide.

It was winter in the ghetto again.

Mundek’s Redeemers were assigned to plan the defense of a section of the Brushmakers’ district. Dov spent his time either in the sewers or in the bunker forging travel passes. Actually his trips “under the wall” allowed him one or two decent meals a week at Wanda’s. On his trips out of the ghetto he now led old people or others unfit for combat. On his trips in he carried arms and radio parts.

During the winter of 1943 the death rate became appalling. Out of an original five hundred thousand who had been put into the ghetto, only fifty thousand were alive by the end of the year.

One day in mid-January, Mundek and Rebecca took Dov aside before he was scheduled to descend into the sewer on a trip to Wanda’s.

“It seems that we don’t have much of a chance just to sit around and talk these days,” Mundek said.

“Dov,” Rebecca said, “we all talked it over here and took a vote while you were in Warsaw the last time. We have decided that we want you to stay on the other side of the wall.”

“You have something special for me to do?” Dov asked.

“No ... you don’t understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“We mean,” Rebecca said, “that we have decided to send certain members out to stay.”

Dov didn’t understand it. He knew the Redeemers needed him. No one in the entire ZOB knew the sewer routes as well as he did. If the ZOB was preparing to stage a defense then he would be more valuable than ever. Besides, the papers and travel passes he forged had helped get over a hundred people out of Poland. Dov looked at his sister and brother questioningly.

Rebecca pressed an envelope into Dov’s hands. “You have money there and papers. Stay with Wanda until she can find you a Christian family to live with.”

“You didn’t take a vote. This is your idea and Mundek’s. I won’t go.”

“You will go and that is an order,” Mundek said.

“It is not an order,” Dov answered.

“It is an order from me as head of the Landau family!”

The three of them stood in the tiny earthen room in one comer of the bunker. It was very quiet. “It is an order,” Mundek repeated.

Rebecca put her arms around Dov and stroked his blond hair. “You have grown up, Dov. We have not had much chance to spoil you, have we? I have watched you go into the sewers a hundred times and I have watched you bring us stolen food. We haven’t given you much of a boyhood.”

“It is not your fault.”

“Dov,” Mundek said. “Please don’t deny Rebecca and me this one thing we want. We have not given you much. You must let us try to give you your life.”

“Mundek, Rebecca. I don’t care as long as I am with you.”

“Please ... please ... understand us. One of the Landau family must live. We want you to live for us all.”

Dov looked at the brother he worshiped. Mundek’s eyes pleaded.

“I understand,” Dov whispered. “I will live.”

He looked at the package and slipped it into a canvas so that it wouldn’t get wet in the sewers. Rebecca crushed his head against her bosom. “We will meet in Eretz Israel,” she said.

“Yes ... in the land of Israel.”

“You have been a good soldier, Dov,” Mundek said. “I am proud.
Shalom, l’hitraot
.”

“
Shalom, l’hitraot
,” Dov repeated.

Dov Landau spent his thirteenth birthday in the sewers beneath Warsaw wading to Wanda’s apartment with a heart so heavy it nearly broke. In another day and another world it would have been his
bar mitzvah
.

JANUARY 18, 1943

Three days after Dov left the ghetto to the temporary safety of Wanda’s apartment the Germans, Polish Blues, and Lithuanians converged on the ghetto. With only fifty thousand Jews left they began rounding up Jews for the final phase of the “final solution.”

The Germans and their cohorts ran into a hail of bullets from ZOB defensive positions. They fled, leaving heavy casualties.

The news spread through Warsaw like wildfire!

The Jews were staging an uprising!

That night every ear in Warsaw was tuned to the secret ZOB radio which repeated this appeal over and over and over again:

“Fellow Poles! Today we struck a blow against tyranny! We ask all our brothers outside the ghetto to arise and strike against the enemy! Join us!”

The appeal fell on deaf ears. But from ZOB headquarters on Mila Street the flag of the Star of David was raised. Alongside it fluttered the flag of Poland. The Jews of the ghetto had chosen to fight to the death beneath a banner which had been denied them in life.

T
HE
G
ERMANS WERE CHAGRINED
at having been chased from the ghetto. Konrad, Gestapo chief of the ghetto security detail, reported to Hans Frank, the governor of Poland, that the matter would be cleared up in two or three days. The Polish people, who had been told previously that the Jews were cowards, were now told that the fighting had been the work of a few lunatics and sex deviates—the types who raped Polish girls.

ZOB assumed control of the ghetto and disposed of the Jewish Council. The fighters made a swift and merciless reprisal on all known collaborators and then moved into set defensive positions.

Hans Frank decided he would not play into ZOB’s hand by making an attack on the ghetto. The Germans decided to laugh off the attack and minimize it. They cut loose with a propaganda barrage and asked the people of the ghetto to come forth for voluntary resettlement and guaranteed they would be given decent treatment in exchange for “honest labor.”

ZOB issued an order informing the Jews remaining in the ghetto that they would be shot if they conformed with the German request. There would be no more evacuation.

After two weeks of quiet the Germans moved patrols in once again to round up Jews. This time they came heavily armed and moved with extreme caution. From carefully prepared positions the ZOB opened fire. Again the Germans fled beyond the wall.

The Germans decided to think it all over. Their press and radio were indignant over the Jewish Bolsheviks who were causing all the trouble. While the Germans wailed the ZOB tightened their defensive setups and desperately continued to plead for help from the Polish underground. They expanded their plea to the general public, but no arms came, no underground help came, and only a few dozen volunteers crossed into the ghetto “under the wall” to fight.

The German staff mapped one big crushing assault to wipe out the remains of the ghetto. The day they picked for the attack was the beginning of Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrated in commemoration of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under the leadership of Moses.

At three o’clock in the morning, three thousand crack SS troops flanked with Polish Blues and Lithuanians threw a ring around the entire ghetto. Dozens of searchlights crisscrossed to pick out possible targets for German mortars and light artillery. The barrage lasted until daylight.

At dawn the SS launched their assault over the wall. Converging from several sides they penetrated deep into the heart of the ghetto without resistance.

From hidden barricades, from house tops, from windows, the ZOB—men and women—turned loose a barrage of small-arms fire at pointblank range against the trapped and surrounded Germans. For the third time the Germans scurried from the ghetto.

In blind fury the Germans came back into the ghetto with tanks, and the tanks were met with a storm of gasoline-filled bottles which turned the iron monsters into flaming coffins. With the tanks disabled the German SS troops were forced to flee again; this time they left several hundred dead in the streets.

The ZOB fighters rushed out of hiding to take the German guns as well as their uniforms.

Konrad was dismissed and SS General Stroop was called in to take command. He was ordered to destroy the ghetto so thoroughly that no one would ever again dare challenge the power of the Nazis.

Stroop mounted attack after attack, day after day. Each new attack utilized a different strategy and hit from a different direction. Each attack and each patrol met the same fate. They were repulsed by the ZOB, whose members fought like madmen—house by house, room by room, step by step. They refused to be taken alive. Homemade land mines and booby traps, violent counterattacks, raw courage beat the Germans out of the ghetto every time they entered. Ten days passed and the Germans were desperate for a victory. They made a concerted attack on the ghetto’s lone hospital—entered, shot every patient, blew up the building, and claimed they had destroyed ZOB headquarters.

ZOB teams dressed in uniforms of German soldiers they had killed and used this device to trick, trap, and ambush their enemy. They crossed out of the ghetto time and time again to hit the Germans from the rear by raiding their arsenals.

The Germans continued their attacks and soon, by the sheer weight of their numbers and arms, made themselves felt. The ZOB could not replace a fallen fighter; once a defensive position was destroyed there was no choice but to retrench; they could not replace ammunition as fast as they were expending it. Still, with the power on their side, the Germans were unable to get a foothold inside the ghetto. ZOB began calling upon many of the Jews not in fighting units to escape into Warsaw, for there were not enough rifles to go around.

Wearing a captured uniform, Mundek led an attack on the Pawiak Prison and freed all the inmates.

The three-day cleanup Konrad had promised had stretched into two weeks. On the fifteenth day after the first German assault Rebecca Landau was fighting in a building in the Brushmakers’ district a few blocks from Redeemer headquarters. A direct mortar hit killed every defender but her. Under sustained mortar fire the walls of the building collapsed and she was forced into the street. As the Germans closed in on her and cut off all possibilities of retreat, she reached beneath her dress and withdrew a hand grenade. Running at three Germans, she pulled the pin, and killed them and herself.

After three weeks Stroop was forced to change his tactics. He had drawn heavy casualties and the Nazis were unable to cover up the valiant action of the Jews with propaganda. Stroop pulled his troops back, reinforced the ring of men and armor surrounding the ghetto, and declared a state of siege. He brought in heavy artillery which blasted into the ghetto at near point-blank range in a determined effort to knock down all the buildings which the Jews had used so well as defensive positions. By night Heinkel bombers saturated the ghetto area with incendiary bombs.

Mundek returned to the Redeemer bunker after a staff meeting at ZOB headquarters. He and his fighters were half dead with exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. Many were badly burned. They gathered around him.

“German artillery has knocked down just about every building. What is standing is burning,” he said.

“Have we been able to establish contact with the underground?”

“Oh yes ... we’ve made contact, but they aren’t going to help us. We cannot expect any more food, ammunition, or water than what we have on hand. Our communications are about ruined. In short, my friends, we can no longer fight according to a fixed plan. Each bunker is on its own. We will try to keep contact with ZOB through runners, but we will each plan and execute our own ambushes and encounters with the Germans when they come back.”