Mila 18 - Leon Uris [252]
“Fire is fascinating,” the girl observed.
“That is no fire. That is hell. That is hell the way the devil meant it to be!”
“Horst be a good boy. Close the curtain and come to bed.”
“Hell!” He poured a drink sloppily. It ran over the edge of his glass and down his arm. “I salute our thousand-year empire! See it! See it! We shall live in fires like that for a thousand years! We are cursed!”
He turned and looked at the girl wildly. “Cursed, damned ...” The shadows of the flames crisscrossed her body.
“You frighten me,” she whimpered.
“Get out, you slut!”
Inferno! Inferno! Inferno!
Large beams devoured by the fire plunged from the roofs through floors. Choking, gagging, blinded Jews scrambled dazed into the streets and walked in helpless circles. Jews hurled their children from windows and then themselves. Jews were crushed and buried under collapsing walls.
On the thirteenth night of the rebellion the artillery began again to make up for its one-day Easter holiday.
Jews were charred into unrecognizable smoldering corpses.
Jews were roasted in bunkers which were turned into coffins by wind shifts and downdrafts.
Jews were choked to death in clouds of smoke which crushed their lungs.
Jews leaped from their hiding places into the sewers and were boiled to death in bubbling, sizzling waters.
On the fifteenth day the ghetto burned.
On the sixteenth day the ghetto burned.
On the seventeenth day it burned. Pillars of smoke continued to reach for the sky, and for miles in every direction it was black. Undraped skeletons defiantly remained standing.
Searchlights picked out the dissenters and the guns rankled and the walls fell.
Because of the extreme depth of Mila 18, it had been spared direct contact with the fire. But the bunker was a continued scene of the epitome of agony. Heat reached 170 degrees. Naked people collapsed atop each other in exhaustion. The Treblinka room, the central area hospital, was loaded with groaning, charred ruins of human beings. Many were burned beyond recognition. Deborah Bronski and the other nurses had no salve for their wounds and but a drop of water for their parched lips. Day and night they begged to be put to death to escape their misery, but not even a bullet could be spared for that.
And when they died they were taken through the Majdanek room, the children’s part of the bunker connected to the sewer. Their bodies were floated out in the sewer to make room for more near death to be brought down from the inferno above.
His voice grew weaker and weaker, but day and night Rabbi Solomon wailed in a stupor the chant “Eli, Eli.”
“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
In fire and flame our race did they burn,
With shame our masses brand.
Yet none turned away from Thee.
Not from Thee, my God, nor Thy Torah. ...
On the nineteenth day nearly everything that could be burned had burned. Now was a time for smoldering. Iron beams sizzled out their stored-up heat. Pavements could not be walked on. The boiling sewers ran cool again.
And when the sizzling slowed on the twentieth day, the Germans returned to probe the enemy strength, hoping that their work had been complete.
But most of the Fighters lived and throughout their agony begged to see the face of the enemy once more. Rodel and ten of his people moved behind the broken walls, searching out bunkers of Fighters, when the Germans came in.
He hid his men in a rubble pile as a patrol advanced toward him along Lubecka Street.
The Germans moved cautiously, fearfully, hopefully expecting every Jew would be gone.
An officer pointed to his sub-machine gunner to check the rubble pile on his right.
Rodel had a quick decision to make. The Germans had twenty men spread on the street. His people did not have the equipment to attack them. Yet the soldier would surely discover them if he kept coming. Rodel tightened his fat lips and felt his pistol. His eyes became glued to the soldier’s weapon. A lovely sub-machine gun, and then he saw the soldier’s water canteen.
The German had