Mila 18 - Leon Uris [263]
“We heard,” Chris said. “Mila 18 has been attacked. We’re going back with you.”
“Uh-uh,” Andrei answered.
“Don’t try to stop us,” Chris threatened.
In a single motion Andrei jerked Chris’s pistol from his belt and knocked Wolf Brandel flat on his back and shoved his niece sprawling.
“Tolek!” he said, flipping the pistol to him. “If either of these two move, use the pistol. You have my orders to put one through Wolf’s brain. As for Chris, just wing him—but not too seriously, or else he will be a horrible burden dragging through the sewers.”
Chris made an angry pass at Andrei, but Tolek was between them and the cocked pistol was leveled on him. There was no doubt in Chris’s mind that Tolek would follow Andrei’s orders. He snarled, then backed off.
“Chris ...” Andrei said softly. “Don’t forget where those journals are buried ... will you?”
“I won’t forget,” Chris answered hoarsely. “I won’t forget.”
Andrei took two steps up the ladder.
“Uncle Andrei!” Rachael cried.
He stepped down for an instant, and she flung her arms around him and wept.
“It is good,” Andrei said, “that even in this place we still have tears left for each other and broken hearts. It is good that we are still human. Rachael ... you will go from this place and become a fine woman.”
“Good-by, Uncle Andrei.”
Outside, Andrei wrapped the rags on his feet tightly and began darting over the rubble, playing cat-and-mouse with the crisscrossing searchlights, flopping flat ahead of the hurling bombs. A few things left that would burn seared and sizzled. A wall tottered behind him and crashed, sending flying debris about his head. He groped and stumbled and fell and ran in the holocaust.
In an hour he reached Mila 18.
The Germans were gone. As always, they left a bunker after they had poured gas and gunfire and bullets into it, returning in two or three days to send in their dogs before they dared enter themselves. Andrei climbed down the main entrance from the demolished Mila 18. The poison gas had spent its fury.
He was in the small corridor lined with tiny cells. He was standing on a mass of entwined corpses. His flashlight played over them. He pushed into the commander’s cell. It was empty. He found Rabbi Solomon in his cell, still stretched on his cot, a Torah in his waxy hands.
Andrei stepped over the bodies into the main corridor. The Chelmno room with its ammunition stores was a sight of devastation. Bodies were charred, unrecognizable from the explosions of the bottle bombs.
Wait!
Coughs!
Weak ... weak coughs!
Sounds of gagging and gasping from the Majdanek room.
Andrei plunged over the bodies.
“Simon! Deborah! Alex!” his lone voice called in the dark.
His light sped frantically over the bodies in Majdanek. Two or three of them were breathing with the desperation of fish out of water.
“Simon!”
Andrei rolled over the body of his commander. Simon Eden was dead. And then the light fell on the lifeless face of Alexander Brandel holding his infant Moses against his chest.
He turned the corpses over one by one. Fighters who had tried to hold back the civilians. Children ... children ... children ... and the light poked at the bricks removed to the sewer.
“Deborah!”
He knelt behind the body of his sister, who hung half in, half out of the room, stricken down while passing a child through the sewer to the safety of Mila 19. As he touched her she gasped. There was yet life!
“Deborah!”
“Don’t ... Don’t ...”
“Deborah ... you’re alive!”
“Don’t ... look at me ... I am blind.”
“Oh God! Deborah ... oh, my sister ... oh, my sister ...” He lifted her in his arms and found a corner and held her and rocked her back and forth and kissed her cheeks.
She coughed and gagged in terrible pain. “Some children are alive in Mila 19,” she rasped.
“Ssshhh ... don’t talk ... don’t talk.”
“Chris ... Rachael ... Wolf ...”
“Yes, darling ... yes. They have escaped. They are safe.”
She made a sound of relief and groaned as the sharpness of the gas jabbed her lungs.
“Andrei ... pain ... children in pain. Kill them ... put them out of their misery ...”