Mila 18 - Leon Uris [249]
The last of the Revisionists passed the entanglement. Their bloody legs were washed with sewage. The manhole cover behind them clunked open. A blasting light probed in. German voices! The Revisionists flattened against the slimy side of the bricks, just out of reach of the beams.
“See? Some of the wires have been cut!”
“Get a ladder!”
Samson was dizzy. Simon’s warning about going through an arterial flashed through his mind. Trapped in a black fetid coffin. Oh God! He could feel the tremors of fear running up and down the line. Stay? Fight when they come into the sewer after us? Run back to the ghetto? Bolt for the river?
“Let’s go, we can’t stay here!” He pushed on down Franciskanska Street, slushing as fast as his feet could hold in the slime and muck. Samson wanted to flash his light to study the map and find a small connecting Kanal, but there was no time to stop. Two mains converged. Freta Street. Large intersection. We are halfway there. The sewage ran swiftly.
Behind them they could hear the Germans lowering a ladder and they could see a crisscross of lights searching for them.
“We have to change our course,” Samson said.
“No.”
“Yes, I say. Up Freta Street.”
“No. We won’t make the river.”
“Come on. Up Freta Street!”
“Samson!” someone shrieked at the end of the line.
“Samson! Poison gas!”
Samson turned on his flashlight and saw the billows of smoke rolling at them.
There! A built-in iron ladder leading up to the street! Coughing, screaming at the end of the line! Samson climbed the ladder and put his shoulder against the manhole and shoved the lid off. He poked his head out, then squirted onto the street. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, they fled after him.
Blinding lights!
Red streaks of tracer bullets from an arc of German machine gunners shot them down. Some scampered back to the sewer and were shot down the hole into the poison gas. And then, after a few more shattering screams as the gas converged from four directions, it was still.
The long-sought German breakthrough came just before dawn on the eighth day with the destruction of the Revisionists whose attempt to break down a main Kanal proved as foolhardy as Simon Eden had feared.
On the eighth day the Germans roared into the ghetto, inspired by the victory. It had had a strange reaction on the Jewish Fighters. It brought to them a full and final realization that there was no escape, that the fight would have to be fought to the very end on this ground. The Jews turned savage, hurling themselves into German ranks as living grenades and torches. Cornered, out of ammunition, they fought with rocks and clubs and bare hands.
Each step the Germans took into the central area, they paid more heavily. The Jews were on top of them, behind them, beneath them, and they fought like maniacs.
On the eighth day they drove the Germans out.
The calculated concealment of news of the uprising burst apart. The word rolled over the length and breadth of Poland.
Jews have rebelled in the Warsaw ghetto!
Jews have been holding against onslaught after onslaught for over a week!
Tales of the fanatical Jewish courage dribbled out. The myth of Jewish cowardice was burst.
Berlin was shocked.
Jews fighting, routing the Elite Corps! It was catastrophic, a humiliation as bad a propaganda defeat as Stalingrad was a military defeat.
On the ninth day Funk mounted his most furious assault, using six thousand troops, and at the end of the ninth day he received his officers, who babbled stories of yet another defeat.
“Herr Oberführer, they strike like phantoms!”
“And you strike like cowards,” Funk shouted. “You disgrace the SS, the Fatherland. You disgrace our Führer, Adolf Hitler.”
Funk threw them all out except Horst von Epp. He loathed the man personally but had to rely on him more and more in the past days. Von Epp could make up the most magnificent excuses.
Funk sat at his desk to write his report. Six hundred Jews had been taken out of the ghetto on this, the ninth day. In all, only eight thousand removed in ten days and most of them