Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [85]
“Listen, Minsk was Minsk. At this moment my family needs me more than Eretz Israel.”
“You’re a coward and a liar,” Yossi said, slapping Nathan across the face.
Perchik stepped between them and pushed Yossi away.
“Oh, you can’t imagine how courageous he was shouting down at us from the platform in Minsk.”
“Shut up, Yossi!” Perchik demanded. “Or I’ll make chicken soup from you.”
“Are you angry with me, Perchik?” Nathan sputtered.
“Why do you think I risk my life running our boys through the battlefields? You’ll never be anything but a shtetl yid. You’ll live groveling and spouting out every phony street-corner philosophy and you don’t deserve any better.”
Nathan was more than willing to explain, to argue that his decision was motivated by his overpowering love for his family. But he had no one to argue with. They left him standing there in the clay pit, ankle deep in water in his shabby, ill-fitting coat, and lost themselves quickly in the lingering smoke and fog that had come up from the river.
WITH YOSSI GONE, the way became difficult for Nathan. He was frightened all of the time, indecisive a good part of the time, and lost a great deal of the time. Somehow he made it to the outskirts of Bialystok before he collapsed from hunger and fatigue in the barn of a peasant. Nathan had not been too crafty in his moves. A farmer and his son had watched him cross their fields and crawl up into the hayloft. He had barely dozed off when he was awakened by a hard kick in the sole of his shoe and ordered in Polish to stand up.
Nathan wobbled to his feet and grimaced as the prongs of a pair of pitchforks pinned him against the wall.
“Russian deserter,” the farmer ventured to his son.
“No, I am Nathan Zadok. I am a Russian, but I am not in the Army. I was traveling west and the train stopped out in the middle of nowhere. I am only trying to get home to Wolkowysk.”
The farmer and his son digested this suspiciously.
“So, I can be going on my way now?” Nathan said.
The farmer’s eyes opened wide as something occurred to him. “Yid?”
“Pull down your pants!” the son ordered.
“I’m a Jew,” Nathan whispered dejectedly.
Smelling the extra reward the Germans had put out on stray Jews, the farmers trussed Nathan up, threw him into a cart, and drove him to a barracks the Germans occupied at the freight depot of the railyard. The peasant was paid a bounty, enough for a bottle of vodka, and Nathan was dragged off by a pair of guards to the office of the commanding officer.
“Russian stray, Jew boy,” one guard said. “He told a couple of Poles his name was Nathan something, but his papers say Pinchas Hirsch.”
“So, who are you?” the officer demanded.
“I am truly Nathan Zadok of Wolkowysk, only trying to get home,” he answered in German.
The officer studied Nathan’s smallness, calculated his worthlessness. He wouldn’t last two weeks in a labor battalion. What’s the difference? Every day, a hundred more, a thousand more. Jews were fleeing all over the landscape, clogging the roads, cramming the rails. The German shook his head and laughed aloud—everyone’s trying to chop off their tails with a carving knife. ...
Nathan trembled but remained wordless. The German detested Nathan’s silence. Why didn’t the Jew boy at least plead for his life? Why didn’t he argue? Was the acceptance of inevitable death so easy for him? As he picked up his pen to sign an order, the guard leaned over the desk.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but Major Mühldorf is having some trouble getting organized in the marshaling yards. He badly needs someone who can translate from German into Polish