Mila 18 - Leon Uris [184]
She picked up her suitcase. Without remorse, without tears, without regret, without pity, she left everything that had been between them, forever.
“We must have help!” an impassioned Andrei cried.
Roman, the Home Army commander in Warsaw, listened with head cocked, eyes lazily half shut. The nobleman placed a cigarette in the long holder delicately and lit it. A frustrated Andrei waved off Roman’s offer of a smoke.
“Jan Kowal,” Roman said softly, “just last week we sent you thirty-two rifles.”
“Of six different calibers with a hundred and six rounds of ammunition. One of the rifles becomes obsolete the moment it fires its three bullets.”
“If there is suddenly a downpour of heavy-caliber automatic weapons from the skies, I’ll be the first to let you know.”
Andrei smashed his fist on the table.
Roman got up and clasped his hands behind him dramatically. “Just what do you want?”
“We haven’t the strength to mount an attack without help from outside. If you had three companies of the Home Army make simultaneous diversified strikes in the suburbs, we can push out of the ghetto.”
Roman sighed with frustration. Despite the rigors of living underground, he had lost none of the fine edge that characterized a French-bred snob. “It is impossible,” he said.
“Can you be that much of a Jew hater to watch us cooked alive?”
Roman leaned against the window sill and bit on the ivory holder with the studied gestures of one who knows he is on stage. His eyebrows raised on his high forehead. “Shall we get coldly realistic? What if I carry through your plan? Where will you go? How many will you break out?”
“As many as you can make provisions for.”
“Ah,” beamed Roman, “that is the rub. Ninety per cent of the peasants would turn in a Jew for a bottle of vodka. Ninety per cent of the city people are quite certain this war is being fought because of international Jewish bankers. Not my personal feelings, mind you, but I am in no position to carry out a program to educate the Polish people.” Roman was deadly accurate again.
“Then at least let the fighting force find its way out with the children.”
“Children? Those convents and monasteries which take Jewish children are filled to the brim. Most won’t. The few others want ten thousand zlotys a head in advance with the right to convert them to Catholicism.”
Andrei closed his eyes.
Roman warmed up to his arguments, sliding his tongue over his teeth as he paced. “I cannot allow partisan units made up of Jews. I do not command an army on discipline. The underground depends upon secrecy and loyalty. You know full well you will be betrayed just as you were betrayed when you gave us the report on extermination camps. It was sold by someone to the Gestapo.
“At least—at least give us guns and money. At least the money you’ve stolen from us.”
Roman frowned and sat at the table, lifting some papers to read to demonstrate he was too busy for further bickering. Andrei snatched them out of his hand and flung them to the floor.
“All right, Jan!” Roman snorted. “Your precious report was smuggled out of Poland by someone or other and has been published in London. Have you heard the heads of state make impassioned cries for justice? Has the world suddenly stormed to its feet in indignation? Jan Kowal, no one really gives a damn.”
Andrei pushed back from the table. “Don’t slop your Polish garbage on the rest of the world, Roman. This is the only corner of the world where extermination camps could exist. The German army doesn’t have enough divisions to guard against the people if they tried it in London or Paris or New York. Only in your goddamned Warsaw! All over this continent men and women are behaving with basic Christian decency. You are a Christian, aren’t you?”
Roman went through arrogant gestures of indulgent disgust.
“You won’t walk away from this free. They’re already starting to gas Poles at Auschwitz only because you let them get away with it with us. March into the