Highlander - Donna Lettow [86]
The young ZOB leader looked at the raging mobster calmly and said, “There’s nothing we can do about it, Shmuel. They got into your ventilation system. There’s no way to stop it.”
“So you’re just going to sit here and do nothing and let them come and kill us all?” Issachar said, poking a meaty finger into Anielewicz’s chest. The young ZOB leader ignored it.
“It wouldn’t be my first choice,” he said quietly, but there was an edge of steel running through his words. “But we’ll do what we have to do. Are you in or out?”
“You’re crazy.” Issachar backed away from the young man.
“You’re all crazy if you think I’m going to stay down here. I’d rather take my chances with the Germans.”
Anielewicz shook his head sadly. “They’ll kill you, Shmuel. As soon as you step out that door. They don’t care how much money you have, they don’t care how many people you can intimidate. To them, you’re just a Jew. And soon you’ll be a dead Jew.”
A river of sweat trickled down the pudgy man’s face, betraying his fear, but his voice was full of bravado. “We’ll take our chances.”
Anielewicz signaled to his people, “Get him out of here.” Several fighters made a move toward Issachar, who held up his hands and walked out the door on his own, followed closely by his henchmen. As soon as the door closed behind them, Anielewicz sagged back against the table like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Mordechai? You all right?” Avram moved toward him, concerned.
Anielewicz waved him off. “Sure, fine. Never better,” he said in a bitter voice. “Let’s get together everyone who can still move under their own power. Get them in here for a council in five minutes.” Several fighters hurried out to do his bidding.
“What are you going to tell them?” MacLeod asked, as gently as he could.
“God only knows.” He looked up at them with anguish in his eyes. “Who knows, maybe Issachar’s right. Maybe we should go out and take our chances in the street. One big shootout. I don’t know anymore.” Anielewicz’s voice was strained, his nerves to the breaking point. “God help me, I don’t know!” He struck at the table angrily, then sat down, turning his chair away from the others, unable to face their eyes. He clenched his fists and looked up to the ceiling waiting for answers that would never come. He sat unmoving while the others filed silently into the room, watching him, waiting for his wisdom.
Finally, the commander whom MacLeod knew as Jurek stood up slowly with the help of a cane. His hair was blond and his eyes were blue and once he had looked like a Hollywood film star. Once, before one of his arms-dealing contacts on the Aryan side denounced him to the Gestapo and the sign of his covenant with God, his circumcision, denounced him as a Jew. The ZOB had managed to rescue him from a work camp outside of Warsaw just prior to the beginning of the Uprising, but not before the burns and scars of the Gestapo’s interrogation had been branded into his body forever. But he had never broken, never betrayed them, and to an organization full of heroes, he was more than a hero. They all waited intently for him to speak.
“Mordechai,” Jurek said, “none of us will come out of this alive—we’ve known that since the beginning. Maybe it’s time to stop struggling for an extra day or an extra week or even an extra hour and accept it.” Slowly, painfully, he moved a few steps closer. “I think the question is not how do we try to save our lives, but how do we choose to end them.”
Anielewicz turned around slowly, looking at Jurek with new eyes. “Arye, what are you saying?”
“Winning or losing isn’t measured in whether we live or whether we die. We know we can’t save our lives—but we can save the honor of our people, the honor of mankind. We can show the world that the bastards didn’t break us, and they didn’t beat us. We can take winning out of their hands.”
“Oh God, no,” MacLeod heard Avram whisper beside him as he echoed the words in his own heart. Didn’t they understand? While there was life, there was still hope. They needed to