Mila 18 - Leon Uris [271]
“A ladder?”
“Yes. The guns we are running are up in a loft.”
Noon.
Gabriela and Tolek drank their fourth cup of tea in a café on Prosta Street. Bells pealed. Tolek was a nervous wreck.
The pious paraded in their finery after their hour with God. “What the hell is holding Kamek up?” Tolek sputtered. “They’ve been down in that hole almost thirty-six hours.”
Gabriela patted his hand. “Kamek won’t let us down,” she said.
In the sewer the food and drink had restored the twelve survivors to a state of consciousness and gave them enough strength to cling to life for another few hours.
They could hear the church bells.
Children played in the street almost directly above them. The children stood in a circle and threw a ball and sang a song and clapped hands.
“Raz! dwa! trzy! One! Two! Three!
The ball was thrown.
The Roman king had many sons,
Until one born became a Caesar,
Low to the ground, high to the air,
Raz! dwa! trzy! One! two! three!
Yes he was, yes he was,
The great Caesar.”
Zamoyski’s truck rumbled up Jerusalem Boulevard.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Prosta Street.”
He turned up Zelazna, then into Prosta.
“Where?”
“Stop by the manhole halfway up the block opposite the café.”
Zamoyski’s face opened with the sudden discovery. “What’s this all about, Kamek? I don’t like this business. Wait a minute. Jews! I’m not getting mixed up in Jew business!”
Zamoyski felt something cold against the side of his face. It was the barrel of Kamek’s pistol.
The truck screeched to a halt beside the manhole. Kamek held Zamoyski at bay. Tolek and Gabriela sprinted out of the café. Tolek knocked the cover off the manhole, ran to the back of the truck, and pulled the ladder off. Gabriela took a short-barreled shotgun from inside her trench coat.
The burst of light from the street blinded those in the Kanal for an instant. Chris held one side of the ladder, Wolf the other. They dragged the other ten and literally threw them up. Tolek reached down and pulled them through.
“Raz! dwa! trzy! One! Two! Three!
The Roman ...”
The children stopped and gawked at the things emerging from the sewer. Gabriela’s shotgun menaced them back.
People stopped their Sunday stroll and looked at the sight.
Stunned customers of the café gaped in amazement.
Zamoyski cried and cursed. “I am ruined! I am trapped! Holy Mother! I am dead!”
Wolf Brandel tumbled out last and hobbled heavily. He was thrown bodily atop the others in the back of the truck, and within two minutes of their stopping they sped away toward the bridge and Brodno.
Chapter Twenty-four
Journal Entry—December 1943
I, CHRISTOPHER DE MONTI, shall make the final entry in the Brandel journals of the Good Fellowship Club. After months of hiding I have arrived here in Sweden with Gabriela Rak, whose child is due at any moment. She does not want it to be born on Polish soil. I shall see to it that neither she nor her child shall ever want.
Little is known here about the uprising despite the fact that Artur Zygielboim, a Jewish member of the Polish government in exile in London, committed suicide last June in protest to the world’s indifference to the genocide of his people.
What of the Warsaw uprising? How does one determine the results of such a battle? Jewish casualties were in the tens of thousands while the Germans merely lost hundreds.
I look through the books of history and I try to find a parallel. Not at the Alamo, not at Thermopylae did two more unequal forces square off for combat. I believe that decades and centuries may pass, but nothing can stop the legends which will grow from the ashes of the ghetto to show that this is the epic in man’s struggle for freedom and human dignity.
This rabble army without a decent weapon held at bay the mightiest military power the world has ever known for forty-two days and forty-two nights! It does not seem possible, for many nations fell beneath the German onslaught in hours. All of Poland was able to hold for less than a month.
Forty-two days and forty-two nights! At the end of that time SS Oberführer Alfred Funk ordered