Mila 18 - Leon Uris [253]
“Stay under cover,” Rodel ordered, and in the same instant leaped out of the rubble.
“Jew!” screamed the startled German in his last word. Rodel’s knife slit him in half. He snatched the sub-machine gun, jerked off the ammunition belt, and drew the German patrol away from his own Fighters.
“After him!”
The Waffen SS fired.
Rodel dropped back into the skeleton of a building. Half its walls had fallen away, exposing the stairway up to the top floor, which was still burning. He crouched and let go a burst which scattered them and he began to climb the exposed stairs. Half of the twenty Germans raced in after him, and the second half stayed in the street and fired into the denuded building.
Up one flight, up two. He crouched and shot down on his pursuers.
His own Fighters used that moment to make their escape.
Rodel came to the top floor. The rooms were burning. He retreated to a dead end. Fire lapped all around him. The Germans came up the steps and forced him to break ground with a grenade lobbed at his feet. He reeled back, his machine pistol spewing defiantly. Curses poured from his mouth. The fire caught his shirt and flared up his back. He snarled and moved into his tormentors and fired, and they began retreating down the stairs, awed by his rage.
A human torch spit at them from a landing. His gun went empty. He pulled his pistol out and fired.
A German bullet struck him, two, three. He staggered and crashed out of the building, flaming down to the sidewalk, and his body smashed on the pavement. With broken bones protruding from his body, he kept crawling toward the Germans on the street and firing his pistol.
On the twentieth day the Germans returned with sound detectors, engineers, and dogs. Thirst-crazed Fighters leaped at them with vengeance, but the tide of war had turned unalterably.
While the ghetto burned, Oberführer Funk meticulously planned the block-by-block extermination of what remained of the ghetto. With military efficiency the Germans set up barricades over a block and then took it apart house by house, room by room. They were able to unearth one bunker after another and find people cowering in the rubble. Once a bunker was located, the engineers moved in efficiently and set dynamite charges in them. The blasts were followed up by teams of flame throwers, and finally the last of the “experts” pumped poison gas in.
Manhole covers were thrown open and poison gas filled the sewers. They were flooded to the height of the pipes.
Soon the putrid waters were clogged with corpses entangled in the barbed-wire traps.
On the twenty-first and twenty-second days, bunkers fell by the dozens. Still the pesky, arrogant Jewish Fighters continued their attacks. The Germans detested running into the Fighters because it called for a struggle to the death.
By the twenty-third day a hundred fifty bunkers had been methodically located.
A new tactic was tried.
Five-gallon cans of drinking water and freshly baked bread were set up by the Germans at intersections to lure the starved, thirst-crazed survivors into the open. Once a child was captured, he was tortured before his mother to reveal the location of a bunker. The bestial dogs forced their share of confessions.
Fifteen thousand near dead were uncovered and marched to the Umschlagplatz by the end of the twenty-third day.
On the twenty-fourth day the Germans were certain they had won the hardest battles and it was now a downhill fight. During the night Andrei Androfski, whose job was to reorganize the Joint Fighters after each day, pulled together two hundred sixteen fighters and the entire stock of firearms and waited for the enemy. Fighting out of rubble, they audaciously threw the Germans out of the ghetto in a series of ambushes, captured the planted food and water, and crashed through the Gensia Gate into the Aryan side, where they raided a small arsenal and threw the arms over the wall to their waiting comrades. They had captured enough food, ammunition, and water to sustain them for another angry gasp.
Sylvia Brandel