Mila 18 - Leon Uris [93]
That night Deborah lay awake. The mention of Chris had stirred a restlessness in her. She ached for him. She closed her eyes and began to remember moments of coming up the path in the Saxony Gardens ... his touch, the warmth of him. The music in his room as they lay in the shadows. She squirmed about the bed.
She had run from him in anger and fright. But always in the back of her mind she knew she would see him again. Now ... cut off, completely. Not even a stolen glance ... a touch ... not even his voice on the phone. He must have been terribly, terribly hurt. But he is still in Warsaw ... he is still here. She wanted him to touch her. Oh, Chris ... Chris ... Chris ... please touch me.
Her tears fell on the pillow.
Paul reached out for her, and her body turned tense and rigid as it always did. Deborah forced the tears to stop and breathed deeply several times to make herself relax, and she rolled over to her husband.
Paul was in trouble. He was walking a tightrope. In the old days before the war he was so sure of himself, so independent and clever. He was floundering and now he had to lean on her more and more.
“You aren’t angry about what I said about Stephan? If it means so much to you, then we will chance it. We’ll let the boy continue with Rabbi Solomon.”
His hand went beneath her waist. She put her arms about him as he lay his head on her breast.
“I need you so much,” Paul said.
After sixteen years of taking her for granted, it was the first confession he had ever made.
Chapter Fourteen
Journal Entry
SOMETHING NEW HAS BEEN added. As if we don’t have enough to worry about, we were presented with Sturmbannführer Sieghold Stutze. Despite the lowly rank of SS major, it looks as if Stutze holds great power.
He came from Globocnik’s SS, SD, Gestapo capital in Lublin. Like Globocnik and Hitler, Stutze is an Austrian. He arrived with a detachment of SS troopers who are billed as “specialists in Jewish affairs.” We are learning that Globocnik and not Governor General Hans Frank is the real boss of Poland. It may hold true then that Stutze and not Rudolph Schreiker will be the real boss of Warsaw.
Whereas Rudolph Schreiker has shown himself to be a plain and simple pigheaded bully, Stutze is exhibiting a maniacal lust for cruelty. He is small in stature, thus a Napoleonic complex. He is slightly deformed in one leg and has a limp. This is a clue to his sadistic delight in inflicting pain. We are very concerned about this development.
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
Although religious study had been banned, this merely meant it would be carried on in secret places, as had been done by the Marranos during the Spanish Inquisition and a hundred times in a hundred places where it had been banned during Jewish history.
Stephan Bronski had entered a most impressionable age. After a lifetime of immunity, the sudden branding of being a Jew made his trips to Rabbi Solomon’s home part of a great adventure of discovery. He liked the secrecy of it. He was fascinated by the strange cryptic scrawlings in Hebrew and much awed by the infinite wisdoms of the rabbi. The gradual understanding of the two thousand years of unspeakable persecution did much to alleviate the confusion within him.
His class had six other boys. They studied in the basement beneath the home of Rabbi Solomon. They spoke in whispers. All about them were the treasures taken from the synagogue for safekeeping. The synagogue’s library of many thousand books of Talmudic and Jewish literature was there. The menorah, the sacred candelabra, were there. The heart of Judaism, the Torah scrolls from the ark of the synagogue, were there.
The boys learned Hebrew prayers, ethics of the fathers, and prepared for the bar mitzvah.
The old man would walk from one to the other and pick up the chant of their prayer, pat one on the head, twist another’s ear who was lagging. Although he was ancient, the boys could not put anything over on him, for it seemed he could see in back of his head and hear all seven of them at the