Briar Rose (19 page)

And so they came, by slow, cautious stages, to the outsk Lublin. There they joined up with a larger group of partisans woods but were warned that Majdanek was too well guardc stories of death began again; they told them like beads on a The Shuttle and the Reed left Josef's group then, for ther other women who took them in. And Ivan the aesthete, tirec in the woods, was given false papers and sent on his way t1

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the various undergrounds towards the west, a trip which se doubling back along some of the same trails they had just ti

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They heard months later, rumor piled upon rumor, that he had been killed near Paris, captured and tortured but refusing to give out any names.

"Who would have thought the bastard had it in him," was the Rebbe's terse comment. As it seemed an appropriate enough obitu-ary, no one said anything more.

But Josef thought about Ivan's death, doubting he, himself, could have held out in silence. After all, hadn't he given the names of all his lovers, living and dead? Hadn't he held back in the raid when

Henrik and Donner and Blitzen and Nadia and the rabbi and Mutter Holle and the Hexe had all gone down under the rain of the Nazi guns? Then, unable to bear thinking any more about his failures, he thought instead of Paris, remembering it as it had been when he had lived there: the small cafes, the busy streets, the life that had been so quietly purposeless and so full of hope.

He was still trying to sort it all out when they broke into groups of sixes and sevens and eights and began, over a period of a month, an active campaign of sabotage against strategic railway lines and storage depots.

"Always railway lines and storage depots," he muttered once.

"Those bastards don't shoot back," the Rebbe answered, Josef did not mention how his earlier companions had died. He concentrated instead on their stealthy incursions, on the feel of a steel pry under the tracks.

And one night, the tracks they worked on were the ones that led to the little town of Chelmno, by the Narew River.

It was in June.

i

How does one become a man of honor (he asked); how di redeem a life? Think of Oskar Schindler. He was a gan womanizer, a drunk, a profiteer, a Nazi. His life was spelle(

one dishonor after another. Yet he saved 1,200 people. The.

saved said, "Among the unjust, we do not forget the just.'

just so, a piece of driftwood like Josef P. became a herc Unlike Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, the camp at C

was a secret. Even the Jews of the Lodz ghetto who were se by the thousands,. even the entire Jewish population of the gau killed there did not fear the name. They had never I Chelmno has no national survivor organizations. No one s Two men only escaped; two men were found there aliv war's end. Four men. And one woman.

Ksi~iniczka.

A rumor came to Josef's group from the Warsaw ghetto p

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But it was rumor only. It was said there was an exterminab fifty kilometers from Lodz. The rumor was horrible enoi they had all seen horror. They were men and women who I tortured, who had numbers burned in their arms, who ha their butchered babies or seen them thrown into a fire, ~

been in a building where the drains ran red with human b course they believed the rumor. They just did not know w could do.

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"We will blow up the tracks to Powiercie." Holz-Wadel offered his one solution, running his fingers through his thick grey hair. The rumor had said prisoners were brought into that town, then r4arched down the dusty road to Zawadki where they spent the night in a large unheated mill building.

"We will blow up the mill," argued Rebbe, hawking up a big glob of phlegm and deliberately missing Josef's boot by the space of a finger. "We could rush the Nazi bastards there." But the rumor had also said that in Zawadki there were SS barracks, "We could dynamite the SS

barracks," said Avenger. "If we had enough dynamite. If we dared." But he said it with a grin to show that even he thought it was a terrible idea. His smile was so infectious, a small laugh ran around the circle of plotters.

"The schloss," said Ash, and the tree brothers agreed with him.

The rumor said that it was in a schloss, a castle, that the prisoners were held.

But Josef shook his head vigorously and threw his hat on the ground. "We want to live, not die.

We want to save people, not be martyrs. Yes?" He spoke directly to Rebbe, but he meant it for them all. And he spoke with such ardor, they all nodded their heads: yes, yes, yes.

"Then we must follow where they take the prisoners, and rescue who is left alive." For the final part of the rumor said that this was a camp on wheels. On wheels. They did not know what that meant, but they meant to find out.

That night, and without further preparation, three men-Birch, Ash, and Avenger-went to watch the trains come into Powiercie. Three men-Rowan, Rebbe, and Holz-Wadel-went to scout the mill building. Three men-the brothers Hammer, Anvil, and Rod-went to check on the SS barracks. And one man-Josef, because he was not

Jewish, because he spoke both Polish and German with an aristocratic accent-actually went into the town of Chelmno, called Kulmhof by the Germans, to see what he could find out.

The brothers never returned. If they were captured, if they were tortured, they surely gave nothing away. But they were gone as if they had never been. So it was with this war.

The others met back in the woods three nights later to report.

"The trains are heavily guarded, soldiers everywhere," said Birch.

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"The mill likewise," Rebbe said. "Bastards!" He spit ground, but this time away from Josef.

For a moment they were silent, thinking about the SS ba thinking about the brothers and their
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fate, wondering if the alive, believing that they were dead, willing still to wait but ing nothing. So it was with everyone Josef had met in the in the woods. One day a man was there, the next he was i did not even have any more tears.

"What of the town?" Holz-Wadel asked, the sentence eve mouth, without emotion, without fear, almost without hc most.

"The town," Josef said, and for a moment stopped. Wha he say? It was nothing, that town. Small, insignificant, a sinj through it and mud-colored. A church, a fine house for the i a ruined castle surrounded by high wooden walls festoont barbed wire. And Nazis everywhere.

"I hitched a ride with a local man, on his hay cart. His ho as old as he, and with probably as few teeth. He was quii tive."

"The horse?" Avenger asked, but he winked at Josef to sl joke.

"The horse had little to say, but the man spoke like at horse pulling an ass," Josef said. The others laughed.

"I told him I was a Potocki and he pulled his forelock. F.

if I was traveling home, and I agreed. To see my mother, I ti He had a cousin who had once seen my mother, he said, on to a ball. Or maybe it was my grandmother. A fine wc:

handsome woman, he said, if he could be allowed the com

I said he could."

"Ah, the aristocracy . . ." Rebbe said. This time he did

"Then the old man looked at the road and gave a little s the reins as if that could urge the old horse on. 'The Jews, mumbling between widely spaced teeth, 'they are like leec wound. Better to salt them down.' "

The woodcutters grumbled at this.

"I did not say it-he did," Josef said. "But I asked him I salt was to be applied. And he told me that it was to directly. There. In Chelmno. And he was glad of it. 'How

I asked. And he said the Jews of the Warthegau were being

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by freight trains to the Kolo junction, transferred to another train on the narrow-gauge track, and proceeding to Powiercie."

"Maybe we could dynamite the tracks between Kolo and Powier-cle," mused Holz-Wadel, but the others ignored him.

"He said that transports from the ghetto came in special twelve-car trains from Lodz."

"We saw one, then," Birch interrupted.

"Yes-twelve cars," Ash added. "We counted."

"And over a hundred police accompanying it," Avenger put in.

"That's what the old man said." Josef nodded. "A special unit."

"For an ass, he certainly brayed a lot." Rebbe hawked up, thought better of it, and swallowed his spit.

"What of the town?" Holz-Wedel prompted again, and again without emotion, neither impatience nor anger.

"They come by van to the schloss, " Josef said. "This I saw myself.

Through the gates. I could not get closer."

"And the old man? What did he say about them once they are inside?" asked the boy, putting his hand on Josef's arm.

Josef was silent for a long moment, remembering. When he spoke, his voice was low, on the verge of a whisper. "He said that they go in and they come out but it is not the same. And he laughed.

I laughed with him. We had a good laugh at those Jews." His arm was trembling under the boy's hand. "I saw several men walking, their ankles in chains. I pointed at them. We had another laugh."

"And the town?" Holz-Wedel said.

"It is small and full of SS men. The vans that take the Jews from the schloss head out of town, towards a forest. I did not go there nor show any interest in it. It would have been too suspicious. The old man and I laughed all the way through Chelmno, about the Jews, about the Gypsies, about social deviants, about fags. How we laughed. He admired the crest on my ring. I laughed and said farewell, He would have invited me to his home to meet his wife but I was afraid I might murder him in his kitchen. I said my mother was expecting me and the one thing she would not tolerate is that

I be late. He nodded. He understood."

"Towards a forest . mused Holz-Wedel, and there was the tiniest bit of emotion in his voice.

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They circled carefully through the woods towards the far Chelmno. It took them three nights traveling, three days hi carefully dug trenches, the tops overlaced with branches. Th taking no chances. They came at last, round and about, to tl of the forest. Up to twenty feet away were alfalfa fields, the flowers moving sluggishly in a puzzling wind. There were hutches at the field's end, and they could see three men an of about thirteen shuffling along, feeding the rabbits. To tt was the Narew River, meandering slowly. They kept thei down, for flat-bottomed boats were occasionally poled alo The guards seemed quiet and they had no dogs, which least was thankful for. He had no wish to shoot a dog, tho had no compunction about shooting the guards if he had to had he come in his two years of war.

They waited several hours, before Holz-Wedel said wh were all thinking. "This is not yet where the vans go." H

peared quietly into the deeper woods, the others followin~

Josef watched the shuffling men at the rabbit hutch for a more and saw how they seemed to watch over the boy, tho one of them touched him. Then he, too, went back into woods.

That night they circled even further away from Chelmno morning were in place, crouched on the edge of another c

The sun came up and the birds sang their hearts out, as if th were as sweet and pure as the first morning of God's paradis

Josef would know the name of the wood: Rzuchow.

sunrise it seemed like Eden.

Then a group of thirty-five men in an open truck arriv when they got out at the far edge of the field, they shu manner that made Josef know at once that these were p They stood still, as if waiting, but unlike most people in anticipating an event, they did not move about or talk or at flies. They were as still as statues and, in the golden s looked made of bronze.

Only the truck driver and the gua him spoke, slapping one another on the back twice in the c their conversation.

There was a moment of complete silence-guards and bird taneously quieting-and Josef could suddenly hear a stra

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rumbling. If later he remembered that rumble as the sound of the Wild Hunt, it was only a fancy on his part. Pot within minutes the, rumloling turned into ffiree IaTge vans, Vike furniture-moving vans, about six by three meters. The outsides of the vans were covered with narrow overlapping boards, and with the sun glinting off the sides, he thought at first that they were armored. It was only later he realized they were merely wood painted a dark grey.

"Why such vans here?" Avenger whispered to him, and Josef had no answer. The old man had said nothing about them.

Then the vans stopped and the shackled men shambled to the back. One man strained for a moment at each door and the nearer van's doors suddenly flew open and a naked woman tumbled out onto the ground.

A small moan ran around the watching men in the forest but Josef silenced them by lifting his hand. In the few seconds the moan and the ensuing silence took, three more bodies had fallen from the back of the truck.

Every two hours the vans arrived in the clearing and all Josef and his comrades could do was squat behind the dark trees at the forest's edge and witness the horror of the events, for the vans were escorted by scores of SS vehicles. The partisans were vastly outnumbered and outgunned.

When they saw the first bodies tumble out, they were angry. But when that woman was followed by another and another and another~eighty-two people in all pulled, dragged, and rolled out of the van-they were numb. And though they could not see clearly from behind the trees, they found out soon enough that the corpses had been mangled for the gold in their teeth and then rolled into an enormous mass grave there in the field by the grey Narew.