Mila 18 - Leon Uris [227]
“Momma, I’m a soldier.”
Deborah took off her daughter’s cap and unpinned her hair and let it fall down on her shoulders. “Don’t be a soldier for a while,” she said.
Rachael nodded.
“I caught you,” cried the voice of a child. “Off to the Umschlagplatz!”
“Such wonderful games they play,” Deborah sighed. She sat down with her daughter on the top step and watched the children dart in and out of the courtyard. “You look fine!” Deborah said aimlessly.
“You don’t, Momma. Are you sick?”
“No. Just that ... every once in a while this unreality becomes real and you stop working long enough to think. You’re in a hole under the ground, and the only way out is death. When I have time to think I become frightened. Just plain frightened.”
Rachael patted her mother’s hand. “It’s strange, Momma, but being with Wolf ... He has a way about him. I’ve always the feeling that we will get through.”
“That is a good way to feel,” Deborah said.
“Yes,” Rachael said quickly. “He makes everyone around him feel that way. I can hardly believe it sometimes because he’s just like a little boy. He didn’t let me go on the Brushmaker’s raid, but everyone told me afterward how he was. Calm—like ice. A real leader. I just know we can get through anything together.” Rachael stopped short. What was she saying? Speaking of the hope of freedom to her mother, when her mother’s position was hopeless. “I’m sorry, Momma ... I didn’t mean ...”
“No, dear. It’s nice to hear a voice filled with hope.”
“Tell me about it, Momma.”
“With Susan gone, I have no girl friends to talk to. You are my best girl friend now.”
“I’m glad.”
“Simon and Alex and Andrei are moving heaven and earth to get Chris out of the ghetto. He’s the most important man here now. Alex calls him our passport to immortality. One day he will have to run for it. He must go alone, of course. It’s killing him, and it’s killing me.”
Deborah lay her head on her daughter’s shoulder and sobbed softly, and Rachael comforted her.
How terrible for Momma to love without hope. Each day a hell of torture and the knowledge of inevitable doom. The inability to combat it, cry out against it. With Wolf there was hope, always hope.
“It’s all right, Momma ... it’s all right ...”
Deborah was wound up like a spring.
“It’s all right, Momma ... it’s all right ... shhh ... shhh.”
“I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s just that being shut in that bunker all day with the children ... pretending to them ... making believe everything will be all right. They know I’m an awful liar.”
“Tante Rachael!” Moses Brandel cried at discovering the visitor from Franciskanska.
“Tante Rachael is here!”
Children converged toward them from all corners of the building. Deborah dried her eyes. “It’s time for us to get back,” Deborah said.
They crawled through the tunnel into the Majdanek room. Rachael and Sylvia and Deborah lifted the children into layers of straw bunks and tucked them in. They lay close to the edge, tiny little faces looking to the lone candle on the wooden table near Rachael. Rachael strummed Wolf’s guitar, and her thin voice sang about a never-never land of milk and honey.
And soon they fell asleep and Rachael left and Deborah dozed, waiting for Andrei and Stephan to return.
“Deborah.”
She blinked her eyes open. Andrei stood over her. She smiled.
“Stephan is asleep in my office,” he assured her at once. “Come out into the corridor. I want to tell you something.”
From the rooms of the Fighter companies, the voices of singing, joking, storytelling. A beep-beep-beep from the radio. A howl of laughter as Moritz the Nasher slapped the cards of a winning hand of sixty-six on the table.
Andrei and his sister found a quiet place just inside one of the escape tunnels.
“Chris is waiting for you,” he said. “Muranowska 24. There’s a guard at the other end of the tunnel on the lookout for you.”
“Thanks,” she whispered.
“Before you go, Gabriela found places for three more children. You’ll have to make a selection. It’s an excellent place with a childless couple. Woodcutter