Exodus - Leon Uris [73]
“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.
Chapter Twenty-three
THE GERMANS 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