Mila 18 - Leon Uris [251]
At the end of the tenth day of the uprising the northern quarter of the ghetto was in flames.
On the tenth night the new artillery battalions went to work. They poured five thousand rounds of artillery fire from the mouths of their cannons over the wall at point-blank range. Debris flew in the wake of the shell fire. Walls that refused to fall to fire were blasted apart.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! bellowed the German guns.
The earth shook and windows rattled and the muzzles flashed lightning and no one slept in Warsaw.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! they reached out at the silhouettes outlined in the fire. Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! until daylight.
And then the Heinkels came back and showered more coals into the inferno, and the fire raced from house to house, leaped over intersections, block to block. The tightly packed poor Stawki area raged, and the fire raced down Zamenhof, up Niska, along Mila, along Nalewki, devoured the Brushmaker’s complex.
Immense belches of violently twisting columns of smoke streamed skyward and turned into yellow-black clouds and blocked the sun and turned day into night. Showers of soot rained down thickly, covering the city with a snowfall of ashes. Everything was an ugly disintegrating gray.
One by one Simon called his groups down from the roof. The very key to their defenses were burned from under them. Fighters whom the Germans had been unable to force down were now driven out by the ever-probing, darting flames.
The wall of fire billowed down Zamenhof and encircled and ate the Civil Authority building and ran down Gensia, once a commercial artery of Warsaw, and the Pawiak Prison erupted like an immense torch.
Easter Sunday!
The mighty organ of the cathedral bellowed a tribute to the resurrection of the Son of God. The confines of the cathedral and of every church in Warsaw were overrun with pious who knelt, crossed, prayed, Hailed Mary, dipped holy water. Choir boys with shiny faces sang out to the glory of the Lord in falsetto voices.
The flames from the ghetto warmed them and caused the pious to perspire profusely, but they pretended no discomfort, for this was a joyous time.
“Hail Mary, full of grace ... Mother of God ...”
Gabriela Rak knelt in the last row of the mighty tabernacle. She had wept until she had no more tears. A coughing broke out in the cathedral as a wind shift sent gusts of smoke from the ghetto racing down to the altar.
Gabriela looked up at the bleeding, limp Christ. The archbishop chanted prayers rapidly in Latin.
“Oh my God,” Gabriela whispered to herself. “My hatred for these people around me knows no bounds. Help me, God. Help me not to hate them ... help me not to hate ... please let my child live. My child must live, but I am afraid because of my hatred. O Jesus ... how can you do this to your own people?”
Gabriela knelt alone after the cathedral was empty.
It was a bad day for an Easter Sunday. The gardens and the Vistula River and the places where one celebrates the resurrection and the coming of spring were simply unbearable because of the damned fire inside the ghetto. Soot poured down on their clothing, and it was humid and dark. A perfectly wonderful day was being ruined.
“O Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Why are you making them suffer?” Gabriela moaned. “Help me, help me. Help me not to hate.”
In deference to the holy day, the fire brigade poured their water jets over the ghetto wall to keep the Convert’s Church from falling to the flames as they reached the southern boundary.
Easter night.
Fires lit the sky from the Convert’s Church on the south to Muranowski Place on the north; from the cemetery on the west to the Brushmaker’s on the east. All of the ghetto blazed.
Horst von Epp stood transfixed before his window and watched. A naked oil-covered girl lolled on the bed behind him. He was drunk