Highlander - Donna Lettow [16]
MacLeod thought fast as he watched the Germans pile out of their trucks. Too many to try and fight. Too many to try and hide. He turned from the window, setting the strongbox on the table and removing his jacket. “Take off your coat,” he ordered the rabbi.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it. There’s no time to explain.” MacLeod took the Torah from the rabbi, placing it on the table, then helped him off with his coat. Pressing the Torah and the strongbox into the old man’s arms, he guided him by the shoulders to the basement door.
They could hear the Germans fanning out through the neighborhood, calling the Jews from their homes. “Raus! Juden, Raus!”
MacLeod lifted the hat from Rabbi Mendelsohn’s head and placed it on his own. “You can’t do this!” Rabbi Mendelsohn protested, beginning to realize what MacLeod had in mind. “I won’t let you.”
“Shvieg!” Quiet! MacLeod commanded, “Stay here. I’ll be back for you.” He could hear soldiers banging on the door. “Jude Mendelsohn! Raus!”
“My life is not worth losing yours,” the rabbi whispered urgently, begging. ”Take the box and run! Please!”
MacLeod gave the old man a gentle push onto the basement stairs and swiftly locked the door behind him. “Wait for me. I will be back. I swear it.”
The pounding grew louder, more insistent. “Mendelsohn!” They were trying to break the door down.
“MacLeod!” he could hear the rabbi cry out as he began to put on the old man’s coat. “Do not do this! No one comes back!”
Quickly, he tugged on the coat. Even at his prime, the rabbi had been a smaller man than MacLeod, and the seams of the old coat strained but held.
The same could not be said of the door, which finally broke under the force of the battering, and suddenly the room seemed full of uniforms. Two of the soldiers grabbed him by the arms and forced him painfully to his knees.
“Mendelsohn, Zalman?” their leader barked in his face, and MacLeod nodded in mute acknowledgment. The soldier looked at him suspiciously for a long moment—MacLeod held his breath—then signaled to his men to take him away. As they dragged him roughly from the house to a truck waiting in the street, he overheard the leader tell another soldier he probably wasn’t Mendelsohn, but they had a quota to fill and “one dead Jew’s as good as any other” as far as the final tally was concerned. MacLeod had been counting on that.
The canvas-covered truck stank of stale urine and fear. Three guards, armed, rode the tailgate, completely ignoring their defenseless cargo. There were about two dozen Jews packed tightly in the truck, mostly women, a few children, a few old men, all terrified. As the truck pulled away, MacLeod maneuvered his way toward the tailgate, trying to calculate the best way to escape and take the others with him. Or at least not get them all killed in his attempt. He had a pistol in his boot and knew he could take out the guards before they could get off an answering round. Surprise was in his favor—they obviously weren’t expecting any resistance.
His dilemma was the vehicle he could see out the back of the truck, an open car with six more Germans. Yes, he could take out the guards, but at the first shot the chase car would be alerted, and then there would be nothing to prevent them from opening fire on the truck.
He heard the other passengers whisper nervously among themselves. They were nearly to the Umschlagplatz, the railway station that led to Treblinka. Pressed against one canvas wall of the truck, a toddler in his mother’s arms began to wail, as if hearing the name of the bogeyman. His mother hurried to shush him, clutching his face tightly to her bosom, but the wailing grew louder.
“Stille!” a soldier on the tailgate commanded, annoyed by the sound. The young mother did what she could to quiet the