Mila 18 - Leon Uris [229]
Chris sagged to the cot and mumbled that he was sorry.
“What’s really bothering you, Chris?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Perhaps we’d better talk about it.”
“I don’t want to.” He shook his head slowly. “I just don’t want to.” They were at a dead end. In a few days Gabriela would find a route for him to take out of the country. Deborah would be left behind. There was no way for her to leave the children or Rachael or Stephan. There was no way for her to take them. He had to go and she had to stay. Simple and absolute.
“I never felt sorry for those poor bastards I preyed upon for my bread and butter. The generals, the admirals, the heads of state. The great doers. Many of them looked upon themselves as pawns of fate. Not me. I said to myself: They deserve everything they get. They really crave this destiny bit. They beg for martyrdom. So, now I feel sorry for them. Look at me, Christopher de Monti, the great white hope of the battered tribes of Israel. I am the voice beyond death which must not be stilled.”
“None of us has a choice, Chris. Be grateful you may be able to walk in the sun again.”
“Without you ... Deborah ... All I want is to come home at the end of a day to you. I’m not made of the sterner stuff of Andrei and Alex and Rabbi Solomon.”
“You’ll find it when the time comes.”
“I cannot reconcile myself to what I have given you, Deborah. Torment. Love in the catacombs. I can’t make peace with it.”
“Chris, listen to me. When I die—”
“Stop it!”
“When I die, Chris, dying will be very painful. I will want to live because I have known what ecstasy is. If we had never met, there would be no regrets. How lonely and empty it would be never to know giving and receiving love and, yes, all the pain it brings.”
Deborah knelt beside him. He lifted her face in his hands and smiled. “And on flows the Vistula,” he said.
“For these moments we can make it stand still. You and I have the magic power to transcend the flowing river and the guns and the cries. Right now love ... they are all far away ... far away.”
Chapter Eleven
ALFRED FUNK LOOKED DOWN at a blown-up map of the ghetto and rubbed his hands together with childlike glee and anticipation. He lifted a magnifying glass and moved it about, stopping at the displacement of troops, armor, and artillery marked with various colored pins. He changed a pair of pins indicating high-powered searchlight batteries.
He was honored that Berlin was forgiving enough to give him the chance to vindicate himself. This time there would not be failure.
His plan was simple. Every seven meters around the wall he would alternate a “foreign racial watchman” with a Polish Blue policeman. An SS officer would patrol each section of two hundred meters behind the Ukrainians to make certain their weapons could not be purchased by the Jews. The circle of soldiers around the ghetto wall would make a breakthrough impossible and reduce the possibility of a single man sneaking through.
The city engineers as well as army engineers advised him against blowing up the sewers. The huge Kanal pipes could cave in parts of the city as well as wreck the drainage to the Vistula. Instead, every manhole leading out of the ghetto would be under watch. Accordions of barbed wire would be dropped down the manholes. This would not impede the flow of sewage but would trap the Jews trying to escape through the sewers. Poison-gas smoke candles would be used both in the sewers and the bunkers inside the ghetto.
With all exits blocked, Funk would then move in the Reinhard Corps, Wehrmacht, and Waffen SS with armored pools held in readiness. Most of the forty thousand Jews were in the factory compounds. He would nip these off quickly and get them on the way to Treblinka.
The magnifying glass stopped at a bank of searchlight positions pinned on the map on the Aryan side near Muranowski Place. Master stroke, Funk complimented himself on the night lights. By working two shifts of troops day and night, the Jews would not have a chance to rest or alternate their positions. Once the factory workers were gone, he’d move in