Mila 18 - Leon Uris [100]
“What about the ghetto in Lodz?”
“I don’t know if we can set up Self-Help houses there. This bastard Chaim Rumkowski is acting like a mad emperor. He walks around with a pair of German guards.”
Simon grunted. Andrei relayed the rest of the events, city by city, and a pall of gloom as thick as the heat settled on them. Simon needed no expert to disseminate the news. His dark rugged features strained with the words of a uniformly worsening situation.
“What does Alex have to say about all this?”
“I haven’t seen Alex yet,” Andrei answered. “I came straight here from the terminal.”
Simon looked at him curiously.
“What’s on your mind, Andrei?”
“You were an officer in the army, Simon. We’ve been friends since I can remember. Out of everyone in this whole business, you and I think the most alike. When all this started I wanted to cross the border and get arms. Alex talked me out of it. I’ve gone along with everything, but ... after this last trip ... Simon, we’ve got to start hitting back.”
Simon took another nip of vodka from the bottle and scratched his unshaven jaw. “Not a day passes by that my stomach doesn’t turn over. It is all I can do to keep from exploding.”
“If I go to Alex he’ll talk me out of starting a resistance movement. He can talk a leopard out of his spots. But if you and I went to him—you, speaking for Federated Zionists—and issued him an ultimatum, he’d have to start giving us some of the funds from American Aid to buy arms. We’ve got to do it now. Thompson is afraid the Germans are watching him. If they send him out of Poland, one of our chief sources to get dollars in is gone.”
Simon Eden wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and walked to the tiny window which looked straight down for six stories. Hundreds of impoverished refugees lined up before Leszno 92 for a bowl of soup and a Kennkarte which would give them the “privilege” of joining slave labor.
“What about them down there?” Simon asked. “We are all they have.”
“How long can you get slapped in the face without raising your hand!”
Simon spun around from the window. “What the hell can we do!”
“Kill the bastards! Make life hell for them!”
“Andrei! Denmark, Norway, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland! Will they give in to us? Twenty, thirty, a hundred to one in reprisal for every one we kill, and they’ll murder women and babies and old men. Can you take that responsibility?”
“You’re a damned fool, Simon, and Alex is a damned fool. Do you really think they will stop with ghettos and slave labor? They mean to wipe us off the face of the earth.”
The two giants glared at each other, portraits of anger and frustration. Simon shook his head.
“One of these days we will be at the twelfth hour, and by God you’ll know then there is no way but to fight our way out,” Andrei said.
Andrei left Simon Eden in a huff. He did not go to Mila 19 to see Alexander. There would be hours of reports and bickering. Alterman and Susan and Rosy would listen to his monotonous repetitions of the fear of new ghettos, the continued murder of intellectuals, the slave-labor camps, the unbelievable abuses. And they would try to put up a new Self-Help house in Bialystok or Lemberg. They would try to print a one-page paper. They would put up a few bags of sand to hold back a rising, rampaging river.
Andrei walked fast for Gabriela’s flat, trying to shut out the sight and the sound of the agony around him. Many people were becoming anonymous in Warsaw these days. Gabriela was one of them. It was an unwritten code that if you ignored a friend who recognized you in a public place it was understood.
Gabriela had moved from her flat to a smaller one on Shucha Street. Through Tommy Thompson she sent messages to her mother and sister that it would be dangerous for her if they were to communicate with her. She stopped her allowance from coming into Poland and took an inconspicuous job as a tutor in French and English in the small, exclusive school in the Ursuline Convent.
Andrei stopped before her flat on Shucha Street Across the street stood Gestapo