The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (20 page)

After our brief victory the Germans stepped up their searches at the
Wache
. Every day, before passing to the Aryan side to work, we were randomly strip-searched. Often at gunpoint, facing the wall, we had to drop everything and stand naked under a grey sky in the excruciating cold. And yet many still risked their lives, every day, smuggling weapons and food. It was through such acts of courage that we managed to bring more weapons into the ghetto over the following weeks: hidden in potato sacks, baked into bread, even slipped into a secret pocket underneath a coffin. I continued to hide them in my coat. I felt Grandfather’s spirit more than ever in those weeks, as if the coat’s very fabric whispered ‘courage’ to me every time I approached the
Wache
. I was never caught.

Support from the Aryan side and from the Polish resistance grew slowly, but the weapons we received were never enough. In those grim days the idea of fighting sustained us better than any thin soup could; we were hungrier for dynamite than for bread, craving grenades more than potatoes. The truth is, no one talked about hunger any more. We transformed the churning cramps of our stomachs into fiery rage, and hunger’s light-headedness gave us courage and a strange kind of euphoria as we talked in detail about how to kill the rats. And we had the help of the puppets, who never needed to eat or sleep and continued to encourage us. Some nights Ellie and I scurried though the empty ghetto streets with a bucket of glue, a brush and rolls of posters, putting up a ‘Call to arms’ message, mobilising those who had not yet joined the fight.

Then, three months later, on 19 April ’43, the eve of Passover and the day before Hitler’s birthday, the real battle began. We heard them approach from outside the ghetto walls: a sinister, distant rumble, growing louder and louder as they surrounded the ghetto en masse. They sang marching songs as if with one terrible voice, and as they marched closer and closer, the ground trembled beneath their boots. The sound of their approach made the hairs on my neck stand up. Himmler had decided to send two thousand SS, Wehrmacht and police into the ghetto to round us all up in one last, giant sweep, to have Warsaw ‘
Judenrein
’ in time for Hitler’s birthday. But even after our first battle, they still hadn’t bargained on our fearsome courage.

By now we numbered over seven hundred fighters, mostly young men, but also many women and some children – a half-starved but furious army, equipped with the most basic of weapons: pistols and small handguns, grenades, some automatic firearms and a few rifles. We had only managed to smuggle one machine gun into the ghetto, but had plenty of explosives and petrol bombs waiting to hit their targets. It was this, our ghetto uprising, that would become famous all over the world and ignite other acts of resistance. We were the spark that soon burst into flames in other ghettos, raising people’s spirits, urging them to rise up and fight. Never before had Jews resisted the Germans in such a way. We fought hard, wounded the giant’s pride. The rats still didn’t expect resistance but our fight was desperate – David against Goliath. This ancient story touched my heart deeply as we clung to the hope of this unlikely match. But our weapons did not turn out to be as deadly as David’s pebble – indeed, they barely made a dent in the giant’s armour. And when the giant finally rose, it was the beginning of our end.

How can I even began to describe those days? The lack of sleep that left us raw, the ever-present fear, the unbearable thirst, the heat and smoke in the bunkers, the noise and the chaos, the deadly snipers . . . We lived from one moment to the next. With our petrol bombs, pistols and grenades, every shot counted.

This time I was given a pistol and holed up on the first floor of 17 Mila Street, close to our headquarters, together with two other snipers and Ellie. I remember the first rat I took out from up there, a tall young soldier. He was holding his rifle out in front of him, defending himself from any possible ambush from left or right, but he didn’t look up. My bullet hit him straight in the chest; he swayed, then fell like a tree without knowing what had hit him.

‘Yes!’ I couldn’t stop myself shouting. Only in my dreams and nightmares had I shot the rats. I could not afford to think about this soldier as a real person. All the terror and grief we had endured in the ghetto had been distilled into this fierce desire for revenge, this bitter flame.

The next afternoon Mordecai instructed two boys to climb on to the roof of 17 Muranowska Street, and raise two flags: the red-and-white Polish flag and the blue-and-white banner of the ZOB. My job was to watch out for any snipers who might take the boys down. They scrambled up on to the roof, trying hard to keep their footing as they held on with one hand and clutched the flags with the other. Jacek, who fixed the flags in place, moved quickly, his body as agile as a weasel’s, but when the two began the climb down bullets shot at them from all sides – and it was only sheer luck they weren’t hit. But what a boost it gave us to see our flags flying majestically over the chaos below. It infuriated the rats so much they ambushed the house with full force, although it took them some days to bring down the flags. The couriers, often the youngest and quickest of our boys and girls, recovered ammunition, weapons, even uniforms, whenever we hit the rats. I remember one boy, Uziel Rozenblum, who rushed out into the street where two SS men had been shot and brought back two pistols, a gun, ammunition and a steel helmet. He handed over the weapons but kept the helmet. At night in the bunker, he scratched off the swastika and painted a neat white Star of David on it. As he paraded it around the bunker with a broad grin, I couldn’t help but smile too.

We fed on such small triumphs, repeating the tale over and over when we came together at night in Mila 18. Like the flags, our spirits flew high for several days, but in the second week the Germans started to burn down house after house, street after street. The ghetto turned into an inferno as they kicked in doors and unleashed their flame-throwers. They tried to smoke us out of our bunkers like foxes in their holes. First they brought in their fierce Alsatians to sniff us out, then the poison gas arrived: listening for cavities, they drilled holes deep into the rubble then put in hoses where they suspected the bunkers to be. When they released the gas all was lost. We could hold out without food, resist the heat, but the smoke and poison gas killed us like vermin.

All over the ghetto we heard the cynical chorus: ‘
Komm, komm, komm
’ as the SS stood, hands on their hips in a triumphant pose, waiting for our surrender. Many of us jumped from buildings to escape the fires, others crawled from bunkers, coaxed towards the fresh air, only to meet their deaths. Anyone not shot was marched down Zamenhof Street to the
Umschlag
.

We fought fiercely and bravely. There were now almost as many women as men among us. Tough, uncomplaining women like Ellie. Our women delivered a special surprise for the rats: as they emerged from bunkers wrapped in coats and caps, they dug once more into their pockets, and with one last defiant gesture they threw grenades straight into the soldiers’ faces. Others hid a pistol in their underwear to fire a last deadly shot. These heroines handed death back one more time: if I must die, so will you. For a while those women were able to take quite a few Germans with them, but when the rats caught on, they forced all fighters to strip naked before they were allowed to crawl out of the bunkers.

Sometimes, when the wind was blowing in a particular direction, we heard the tinkling of the merry-go-round on Krasinski Square on the Aryan side. Round and round it went, with its jolly melodies, carrying Polish children while we continued our last fight amid thick smoke, fire, and the sound of gunshots. Did those people who put their children on horses and elephants have no shame, no compassion, no conscience? How could the carousel still turn when for us everything had ended? Their indifference to our struggle was the worst insult. I remembered the old merry-go-round; my mother smiling, waving at me as I sat on one of the horses. A brown one. It seemed a million years ago.

The fires in the ghetto burned for weeks, the flames fanned by strong winds. People threw themselves out of houses, burned to death or surrendered before they were marched in small groups to the
Umschlag
. If hell was an inferno, this was it.

Then Stroop, this last operation’s commanding officer, ordered his troops to systematically raze the ghetto to the ground. Where once had stood proud three-storey houses, shops or theatres, where we had fought and hidden all this time, nothing remained but a sea of smoking rubble. A landscape of ashes and ghosts. Except that the destruction of our ghetto demanded much more. Our fierce resistance had caused the Germans losses and huge embarrassment and many of us still hid in bunkers, although we knew we couldn’t survive much longer in these conditions. The Germans cut the water supply so our choice was to die of thirst, be gassed or shot. But I cannot speak of the very end: I didn’t stay.

Many decided to go on fighting, carrying a capsule of cyanide or a last bullet for themselves. Maybe I was just not brave enough. I didn’t want to die like a cornered animal. Or maybe the puppets intervened? I swear that one night I heard the fool whisper from my pocket: ‘Your job isn’t over, you know. Not yet. You can’t die here; we need you to tell the story.’

Was this the voice inside my head, the voice of terror?

I
t was hard to get any privacy in Mila 18, the main bunker, as there were more than two hundred of us crammed in together. It was also hot; the temperature rose every day just that little bit more until it became unbearable. Our bodies glistened with sweat but we had run out of water to wash with, as every drop was precious now in order to quench our burning thirst. Our lungs laboured to extract enough oxygen from the stale air and many of us had developed a constant cough. As in an anthill, activity was always frantic, but we kept our voices down as much as we possibly could. The rats still listened out for any signs of life during the daytime but hardly came at night – were they afraid of the ghost they had created? I had buried my grief about Mother as deep as I could, desperate not to think about her all the time, and only at night did I sometimes awake with tears running down my cheeks.

The bunker was full of young people and hormones raged despite our terrible situation. One evening, out of the blue, Ellie told me she wanted me. She had always been like that: direct and bold. She grabbed me from behind and swivelled me round, then looked straight into my eyes, her voice an urgent whisper. She wanted me inside her, not as a comrade or friend, but the way a woman wants a lover.

‘I don’t want to die like this, Mika. Not knowing. We need to grow up fast, there isn’t much time left.’ She took my hand; her grip was firm, her skin hot. I gasped – a wave of excitement, fear and a sudden sadness rushed through me like a current. Weren’t we growing up too fast, every day weighing like a month? Some days I felt as old as Grandfather, as if my eyes and ears could not take in any more; other times I still felt like a youngster, bursting out of my skin. Mostly time didn’t exist any more as we sat suspended and trapped in the twilight of our underground world. Did I desire Ellie? Of course – but differently now than when she first came to stay with us. I had lost so much innocence and my heart was heavy. It was strange to think about Ellie’s naked body and the secrets of sex when we were surrounded by a horror that could snuff us out at any minute. But maybe it was exactly the knowledge that our young lives could be cut short at any time that ignited our need for each other, the most natural thing that reminded us of life, of light, of something beyond the ghetto walls. Many paired off for some private time behind improvised screens, flimsily stitched together from old sheets. I cared deeply about Ellie and in some ways this had been a long time coming – I had been thinking about her in a special way for months. Ellie was the last bit of warmth and life left in my heart. After the first wave of embarrassment, Ellie slipped my hand under her shirt. Her heart was beating as fast as a hare’s. Then, manoeuvring awkwardly on the narrow field bed, we made love for the first and last time. Quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, or worse, be discovered and have to face the smirks of our comrades.

Ellie lay in my arms, nuzzled close into my neck, her breath warm and soft. Abruptly she sat up.

‘Let’s go outside, Mika, I want to see the stars with you. If we are to die down here, at least I want to see the stars one more time.’ She looked at me with her large brown eyes. I could see no fear.

It was dangerous. There were four possible exits, all well hidden from the outside. But the Germans could still be out there, listening for underground noises or trying to sniff us out with their dogs. We sought permission from Mordecai and he promptly gave us a mission: to go to the farthest exit, armed with pistols, and observe what was going on outside. According to a small map there should have been another bunker exactly opposite. It was up to us to find out whether there were still survivors. But when we surfaced we nearly forgot our task. It was a moonless night but the stars shone brightly and we could make out some constellations: the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, and Sirius. Ellie gasped.

‘It’s so beautiful!’

I wrapped my coat around us. It held us like a sheltering embrace, like my grandfather’s, our mother’s, reaching through time.

Suddenly I spotted a shadow opposite us, climbing over the rubble. In the darkness I could see no uniform, only a small skittish figure. I whistled – the sign all fighters knew. The shadow promptly returned the whistle. We had accomplished our mission.

When we scrambled back down, general excitement greeted us: one of the fighters who had been gone for three days, trying to find an escape route through the sewers, had returned. We joined the crowd that had gathered around him.

‘I found a tunnel that could lead us out of Warsaw. With luck we can make it . . . just to the outskirts, but still . . .’ he said.