Mila 18 - Leon Uris [176]
“I’ve failed,” he whispered, “I’ve failed.”
“You’re a human being, Alex. You’ve given your life to other people. I can’t stand to see you let yourself be destroyed.”
“I’ve failed,” he mumbled, “I’ve failed.”
“Alex, for God’s sake!”
“I lost my head today. I’ll lose it again.”
“You’re tired ... so tired.”
“No. It’s just ... that I knew today ... everything I’ve stood for ... everything I’ve tried to do has been wrong.”
“Oh no, darling.”
“My way? Keep one more body alive for one more day. All my cunning to save a single man, and now thousands flood to their deaths and there is nothing I can do ... nothing.”
Sylvia gripped him awkwardly. “I won’t hear you berate yourself after all you have done.”
“Done?” He laughed. “What have I done, Sylvia? Trade with swindlers and Nazis? Use trickery and cunning? Done?” He took her hands and he was again gentle Alex. “They are going to destroy our entire culture. How can I preserve a few voices to show the world who we were and what we have given them? Who will be left?”
He walked away from her. “We don’t speak of it here in Mila 19, but Andrei and I have had little to say to each other since the war. Do you know why? When the Germans came here he wanted to take our people to the woods to fight. I stopped him. I took the guns and the bullets from him. My way—I had to have my way.”
“Alex, please!”
“Wrong! I am wrong and I’ve always been wrong! Not my journal or Rabbi Solomon’s prayers will deliver us. Only Andrei’s guns, and it is too late and I did this to him.”
Like the catacombs of Rome, an underground city was clawed beneath the ghetto of Warsaw. Every person capable of working joined in a frantic race to build hiding places.
Fifty thousand trap doors, fifty thousand secret entrances led to false rooms in sub-floors, closets, behind bookcases, in attics. In the stores and bakeries they hid in unfired ovens, under counters. They made hiding places by removing the stuffing in couches, under tubs, in garbage dumps.
They lived a second away from their escape hatches. Walking in the streets became a memory. Communication was by rooftop. Behind loose tiles, stoves, toilets, pictures, lay entrances to secret rooms.
Cellars were good to hide in, for they could hold larger stores of food and their entrances were easily concealed, but attics had the advantage of the best escape routes.
The epitome of ingenuity did not deter the Big Action from bagging their quotas for the deportations. The cry of children, the keen noses of trained dogs, the spying of informers continued to flush more and more secret places. Guards in the streets watched guards upstairs break every window in a house, for unbroken windows revealed the presence of a hidden room.
At Mila 19 and at Leszno 92, Andrei and Simon took attic rooms where an alarm bell would send them to the rooftops, where the guards were not so anxious to follow.
The entrance through the packing crates to the secret rooms in the basement of Mila 19 was abandoned as not safe enough, and a false water closet was constructed on the main floor. By removing a loose floor bolt the lavatory swung away, revealing a hole in the wall large enough for a man to crawl through. A ladder led to the new parts of the basement dug out since the Big Action and holding a dozen people Alex had snatched from the Umschlagplatz as well as the archives and arsenal rooms. An exit tunnel was dug to tie into the large drainage pipe which led many meters beyond Mila 19. The underground complex spread until it was halted by the main line of the pipe which ran directly down the middle of Mila Street. The sound of rushing sewage was constantly heard.
At the end of the third week in August the Big Action suddenly ground to a halt. The roundups stopped.
Chapter Ten
MAX KLEPERMAN HAD NOT only one of the few Jewish telephones in the ghetto, he had two, the second a direct line to Dr. Franz Koenig, with whom a vast amount of business was transacted. The license to buy and sell gold, agent real estate, smuggle, inform were exclusive rights