Mila 18 - Leon Uris [156]
“How dare you!”
“Good God, Paul! Didn’t you hear your son today? Can’t the courage of a little boy touch you, move you?”
“I won’t listen!”
“You will listen, Paul Bronski! You will listen!”
He knelt before her desperately and grabbed her arm and shook it. “We can talk aesthetics until hell freezes, but what I am saying to you is reality.”
The tears fell down her cheeks. “Reality? My poor man, you are the one who has been hiding from reality. I’m going to tell you what reality is. Your daughter is sleeping with Wolf Brandel, and I sent her to him because her marriage would endanger her father’s precious position as a collaborator.”
“That son of a bitch—”
“Good! At least you have the decency to show anger. But he is a fine young man and I thank God she is able to find a few moments of happiness in this hell. Shall I tell you more reality? I am working on manufacturing bombs in the cellar of the orphanage, and your son Stephan is delivering the underground newspaper.”
Paul Bronski stood up and grunted like a confused, dying animal.
“Do you know why, Paul? He came to me and pleaded—‘Momma, I’m going to be thirteen. ... Momma, someone in our family has to be a man.’ ”
Paul crumpled into a chair and sobbed. She stood over the groveling, shaking cur, and the disdain ebbed into a terrible weariness. “I only did it for you,” he wept, “only for you.”
“I’m tired, Paul. ... I’m all done in.” Suddenly, without plan, the words found their way through her. “I have a chance to leave the ghetto with the children.”
He looked up at her, blinking. “De Monti ... De Monti.”
She nodded.
“You’d do this to me?”
“I have made my atonements. I have paid, repaid a thousand, thousand times, and I swear I don’t know if I was ever wrong even in the beginning. But if I was, I have been punished by you. I promise you, Chris will never touch me. All I want is to find a hole someplace to crawl into where I can’t hear starving children cry. Maybe a patch of grass ... that’s all I want ... just ... a patch of grass.”
Paul slid to the floor on his knees and doubled up before her feet. “Please don’t leave me,” he wept, “please don’t leave me ... please don’t leave me ...”
Chapter Five
Spring of 1942.
THE AWESOME WINTER WAS done, but the smell of death lingered. The little ghetto on the south was all but shrunken. Polish families inched back in as the Jewish decimation increased. All that remained in the south were a few streets of Jews, the woodwork factory, and Wild Areas. The big ghetto became more crammed than ever.
With the reinforcement of the Waffen SS guard, the ghetto fell into a grip of fear worse than any it had experienced. The smug Elite Corps with their lightning streaks on black uniforms entered Warsaw fresh from their jobs as Kommandos in the Special Action massacres on the eastern front Placed under Sieghold Stutze, they were wild, drinking louts, turned into savages by the sight of the blood of their victims. They filled the barracks at 101 Leszno Street just beyond the ghetto wall, opposite Koenig’s uniform factory.
A second set of guards arrived. Latvians and Lithuanians wearing uniforms of Nazi Auxiliaries with insignia of skull and crossbones on their epaulets. These peasants from the Baltics had carried out their share of the eastern massacres with relish.
A third force came in from Globocnik’s headquarters in Lublin. Ukrainians. Their men’s choir, sober or drunk, sang with such harmony they were dubbed the Nightingales. The Litts, Latts, and Nightingales took the red brick building eater-corner to the SS barracks.
Each night the sounds of drunken revelry heightened the fear.
SS General Alfred Funk, courier of the verbal messages on “Jewish problems,” arrived in Warsaw as a harbinger of doom. Fresh from