Highlander - Donna Lettow [13]
“They didn’t have ears to hear him, did they?” A deep sigh of resignation seemed to stoop the old man’s shoulders even more. “Everyone’s got their own problems. Their own war.” He sat heavily in the wing chair, tugging nervously on his graying beard. “Nobody’s got time for the tsores of a bunch of ‘worthless Jews’ in Poland.” He spit out the words with surprising venom.
“Rebbe, it’s not like that,” MacLeod protested.
“No, Mr. MacLeod? Then you tell me what it is like.”
The silence between them was long and heavy. MacLeod couldn’t tell him, not in Yiddish, not in Polish, not in any language on earth, because there was no rational explanation he could find for the Allies’ disregard of Shimon’s plea for help. He tried a different approach. “Shimon feels that if you and your wife can join him and get to England, or even America, to bear witness with him—”
“My wife is gone,” the rabbi said quietly, not looking at MacLeod.
“I’m sorry,” MacLeod said after a moment. “I…I didn’t know.”
“Irena was taking medicines to her sister on Franciszkanska Street. That was at the end of August, two weeks before the Aktsia, the expulsions, stopped. I never saw her again…A neighbor said he saw her and Irka at the Umschlagplatz—those Nazi demons were putting them on the train to Treblinka.” The rabbi stood and turned to MacLeod. “In two months, they took a half a million people—my wife, my neighbors, my congregation. All gone. And now those of us they’ve left behind wait in fear of the day the demons decide to come and finish the job.” His voice was quavery but his eyes were hard, boring into MacLeod. “So you tell me again how no one cares, Mr. MacLeod. You tell me again how they can say this isn’t happening!”
MacLeod could say nothing. Instead, he reached out and placed a hand on the rabbi’s shoulder, for strength, for comfort. Rabbi Mendelsohn grasped his arm like a lifeline and buried his face in MacLeod’s chest, his own shoulders shaking with mute anger and grief.
MacLeod gave him a moment, then gently reminded him, “Rebbe, we have to go. There is transport waiting to take you to Shimon, but we have to hurry.”
The old man released MacLeod’s arm and stepped away, nodding his understanding. He wiped his eyes. “Yes, yes, but first, I must get the rest of my things.” He hurried to a basement door.
“No, wait—” MacLeod tried to stop him, but he disappeared down the dark stairs.
MacLeod checked his pocket watch, concerned. This was taking longer than he’d expected. It was nearly six in the morning. Soon the sun would be up. He hurried to the window and cautiously pulled back a comer of the drape.
She was still there, across the street on the corner, still vigilant, keeping watch for the soldiers just as she’d promised she would. It was a good sign.
Her name, she’d told him, was Rivka. MacLeod knew she couldn’t be any older than thirteen. He first saw her soon after he arrived in Warsaw. He’d traveled from Paris as a German businessman—his German and his papers were both impeccable and “Herr Münte” had had little trouble passing border guards and checkpoints throughout the New German Reich. But “Herr Münte” couldn’t help him in occupied Warsaw, where most of the Poles would sooner spit on a German than give him the time of day. It certainly wouldn’t get him past the formidable iron gates and machine-gun emplacements barring the entrances to the Jewish Ghetto.
He’d spent a day carefully studying the Wall surrounding the Ghetto, analyzing it surreptitiously from the apartment buildings and shops across the narrow streets. It was almost beyond his comprehension—wherever he stood outside the Wall, Polish children played in the streets while their mothers went about their daily chores, shopping, chatting with their neighbors, trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy in the face of the Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, less than twenty yards away, if the sketchy reports reaching Paris were at all accurate, hundreds of thousands of their fellow human beings were being systematically murdered. It just didn’t seem possible.