Mila 18 - Leon Uris [222]
This was the sudden realization of the brute who thought himself invincible being felled and stunned for the first time and crawling to his feet with a new appraisal of his adversary. Germany was stunned and smarted. The contemptuous smile was wiped from his lips. He was in pain.
Funk’s visits with Eichmann at Gestapo 4B showed that Eichmann was still going about his job of rounding up the Jews with uncommon zeal, but he was hitting stone walls. Finland flatly defied German orders to turn over the Jews and threatened to use the Finnish army to defend them. A second flat refusal came from the Bulgarians. Then Denmark. King Christian of Denmark responded to the German order for Jews to wear the Star of David by putting on the first one himself and ordering all Danes to follow suit in a display that one Dane was the same as the other.
In France and Belgium and Holland, Jews were hidden in convents and attics, and even the Rumanians balked and the Hungarians split on the issue. Italy refused to become a partner to genocide.
Although Eichmann’s agents were able to flush out Jews, get them through subterfuge and threat and strong-arm methods, nowhere in western Europe were they for sale for extra rations as they were in Poland, Ukrainia, and the Baltics.
Funk arrived in Berlin during a period of agonizing reappraisals. Himmler, Eichmann, and those most interested in the final solution agreed that the Warsaw ghetto, largest symbol of European Jewry, had to be liquidated quietly. It would indeed be a terrible propaganda setback for Berlin to admit the Jews were capable of fighting. It would be worse if Jews were to conduct the first rebellion against the Nazis that could start a chain reaction among the restless undergrounds.
Alfred Funk returned to Warsaw just long enough to turn the matter of peaceful liquidation over to the district Kommissar, Rudolph Schreiker. He left immediately for Denmark, where the pesky Danish underground was chopping the rail system to bits and leading in British bombers. Denmark, symbol of the “little Aryan” brother, was behaving badly.
Throughout February 1943, Rudolph Schreiker bumbled through a fruitless campaign to lure the forty thousand survivors out of the ghetto. Joint Jewish Forces had a standing order that anyone volunteering for deportation or attempting to leave under German auspices would be shot.
Joint Jewish Forces allowed small numbers of Germans to enter the ghetto unmolested. Schreiker’s emissaries went to the factories, attempting to win “labor transferrals” by guaranteeing good working conditions in Poniatow or Trawniki. To back up his intentions of good faith, Schreiker shipped in some food and medicine.
A few prominent Jews in prison in Warsaw were sent into the ghetto to form a new Jewish Civil Authority to open schools and hospitals and resume cultural activities.
But no one budged from his hiding place.
In a week Schreiker realized the new Civil Authority was powerless and in an angry rage over his own failure had them executed in the bloody Civil Authority building.
The newspapers and the radio decried the lack of Jewish co-operation in the resettlement for “honest labor.” The Polish people were fed a line that it was Jewish behavior that was to blame for the Polish misfortunes, for if Jews reported for “honest labor,” then Poles would not be needed. It was a “logic” the Poles accepted.
Simon Eden had the one thing he wanted most, time. It was time he had played for when he held fire when the Militia was taken to the Umschlagplatz. Time gave him the chance to augment his meager forces.
The Revisionists made firm contact with a small right-wing underground group, the ND Brigade, on the other side. Through the ND Brigade, the Revisionist groups—Chayal, Jabotinski, and Trumpeldor—were the best-armed company in the ghetto.
The Communist underground People’s Guard was ill armed and