Mila 18 - Leon Uris [213]
“Now!” Creamski called down into the black hole.
Wolf Brandel’s head popped out of the tunnel. He moved quickly out of the checker’s office, scrutinizing the long high stacks of lumber. “Move them out,” the beardless commander ordered. One by one, forty Jewish Fighters emerged from the underground passage. The Franciskanska bunker a few blocks away connected to the Kanal. Wolf’s company had followed the sewer to a point inside the Brushmaker’s complex and dug the tunnel into the checker’s office.
With hand signals he dispersed his force of ten women and thirty men to pre-fixed positions. They ducked behind the lumber with their weapons ready. Wolf blew a long breath and nodded for Creamski to return to the assembly room.
Creamski grunted and strained to put the loaded cart into motion. As he turned into the lathe room he gave a hand signal which could be seen by a table “leader” in the assembly room. Every eye in the room was on the “leader.” He nodded.
Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!
The feet of the inmates thumped against the floor in unison.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
They took their wooden handles and banged them on the tables, setting up a din.
“What’s going on!” shrieked the foreman through a megaphone from his balcony cage. “Stop this noise! Stop it! Do you hear!”
Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The clatter from the building swelled over the compound.
“Guards!” the foreman shouted into his alarm phone. “Guards! Building number four! Quick!”
Alarm sirens erupted all over the complex in a series of short whistles to draw the guards to assembly building number four.
The foreman locked the barred door of his office. He snatched the pistol from his desk and looked down at the five hundred pairs of maddened eyes staring up at him.
Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!
“Krebs dies! Krebs dies! Krebs dies! Krebs dies!” they chanted his name.
Ukrainians, Latvians, and Estonians poured out of the guard barracks with whips, guns, and dogs, racing for the spot of the insurrection.
Part of Wolf Brandel’s force, hidden around the outside of the building, let them pass through. There was only one entrance, through the main corridor. He watched the first of the guards pass into the assembly room from his position in the lathe room.
“Now!”
Wolf and ten of his Fighters stepped into the corridor and faced a mass of guards. The Ukrainians had trapped themselves. A pipe grenade shattered in their midst, followed by a tattoo of pistol fire.
The Ukrainians outside plunged backward for the exit, but the Jewish Fighters outside moved in to cut them off. A massacre ensued.
A half dozen guards reached the assembly room. The slaves leaped from their benches. In pent-up wrath they attacked their tormentors and their tormentors’ dogs with bare hands. Within seconds the guards and dogs were pummeled to death and their bodies smashed with spit and kicks and disembowelment and decapitation.
Benches were overturned and smashed, lathes broken up by sledge hammers.
“Krebs! Krebs! Krebs! Krebs!”
The foreman was bug-eyed, insane with fright, locked in his own prison. They were coming up the balcony after him. No way of escape!
“Krebs! Krebs! Krebs! Krebs!”
He placed the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger as the outstretched arms of the slaves reached through the cage for him.
Ana Grinspan, with a company in the central district, was the highest-ranking woman commander in the ghetto. Her company was the most integrated of the various parties and final proof that unity had been achieved. Thirty-two Fighters came from the Bathyrans, Poale Zion, Gordonia, Dror, Communists, Akiva, Hashomer Hatzair, Hechalutz, and the Bund. She even had four members from religious Zionist Mizrachi who could no longer stomach the passive attitudes of the Orthodox Agudah.
The secondary objective at Brushmaker’s was the confiscation of the fleet of five trucks. The instant Brushmaker’s was secured Wolf turned the trucks over to Ana, who put into