Exodus - Leon Uris [75]
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.”
“How long can we hold out like this, Mundek? We have only thirty people left and ten pistols and six rifles.”
Mundek smiled. “All of Poland held out for only twenty-six days. We have done that well already.” Mundek assigned his guards, rationed what little food was left, and mapped out a dawn patrol.
Ryfka, one of the girls, picked up a battered accordion and began playing a soft, slow tune. In that dank and slimy bunker ten feet beneath the earth the remaining Redeemers sang in a strange and wistful blend of voices. They sang a song that they had learned as children at Redeemer meetings. The song told them that the land in Galilee in Eretz Israel was beautiful and that wheat grew in the fields and the grain bent softly in the wind. In a bunker in the Warsaw ghetto they sang of the fields of Galilee that they knew they would never see.
“Alert!” a sentry called down as he spotted a lone figure weaving in and out of the flames and rubble.
The lights went out and the bunker became black and silent. There was a knock in code. The door opened and closed and the lights were turned on again.
“Dov! For God’s sakel What are you doing here?”
“Don’t send me away again, Mundek!”
The two brothers embraced and Dov wept. It felt good to have Mundek’s arms around him again. Everyone gathered about Dov as he relayed the final tragic news that the Polish underground definitely would not come in and that everyone else on the outside was being very quiet about the uprising.
“When I came back,” Dov said, “the sewers were filled with people just lying in the muck. They are too weak to stand up. They have no place to go. No one wants them in Warsaw.”
And so little Dov returned to the ghetto and a very strange thing happened. All over Warsaw and the surrounding countryside Jews who had managed to escape and live as Christians were beginning to return to the ghetto for the last-ditch stand. They had concluded that it was a privilege to be able to die with dignity.
MAY 1943
At last the