Exodus - Leon Uris [72]
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.