Elzunia was inside her bunker, desperate to know what had become of her mother, Gittel and Stefan during the past two days, when Jerzy rushed in.
‘Come and see the flags flying from the chimneytop at 17 Muranowska Street!’ He was so excited that saliva sprayed from his mouth as he spoke. ‘There’s our blue-and-white flag with the Star of David, and the red-and-white Polish flag with the eagle.’
‘How did they get there?’ Elzunia asked as she ran beside him. He told her that a Polish boy had crawled into the Ghetto from the Aryan side with the Polish flag and, together with some of the fighters, he’d scrambled to the top of the building and hoisted the flags on the lightning pole on the chimney for all of Warsaw to see.
By the time they reached the building, a large crowd of fighters and non-combatants had gathered to marvel at the two flags fluttering side by side. Elzunia pushed her way through the crowd and heard Edek telling them that he and his Catholic friend on the other side of the wall had hatched the plan. ‘We wanted all Warsaw to see these flags flying side by side to show them that we’re fighting for our honour and for theirs. Maybe now they’ll realise they should be fighting shoulder to shoulder with us.’ Standing beside him was someone she hadn’t expected to see inside the Ghetto.
‘Lech!’ She flung her arms around him. ‘You’re crazy to come here with all this going on. It’s too dangerous.’
He gave her a devil-may-care grin. ‘Who do you think brought the Polish flag?’
He wanted to say that he couldn’t bear to stand by knowing she was in such danger, that every time he heard an explosion, a crash or the rattle of gunfire, his heart stopped beating. The only way to end the torment was to get to the other side of the wall. When Edek had sent him a message to say that the fighters wanted to hoist a Polish flag next to the Jewish one, he was jubilant. Now he had an excuse to cross over to their side of the wall, be part of their fight and perhaps even win Elzunia’s love. And from the way she had reacted when she saw him, he thought that she must care about him.
He blushed when she praised his courage in coming into the Ghetto, but, while he was figuring out what to say, she said a hurried goodbye and ran back to her bunker.
That night Elzunia dreamed that the building was on fire and there was smoke all around. The dream was so real that she woke up coughing. But it wasn’t a dream; something was burning. The others were trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from when Lech burst in and looked around for Elzunia.
‘Get out, quick!’ he panted. ‘I’ve just been outside. The Germans are using flame-throwers to set the houses on fire to flush people out, and they’re lined up outside with machine guns waiting to shoot them as they leave.’
Panic-stricken, Elzunia and her group bolted into the passageway that connected their building with the adjacent one but the smoke there was even thicker and more pungent. It stung their eyes and choked their throats. Elzunia clutched Lech’s sleeve in terror as they heard the crackle of flames all around.
They ran from building to building, through cellars and attics, but wherever they went the smoke was there before them. Unable to defeat them in battle, the Germans had resorted to setting fire to their houses.
With the glow of burning buildings and thick smoke blackening the air, the light was so murky that they could hardly see one another.
‘They haven’t got into the central part of the Ghetto yet, so we’ll try to break through there, otherwise we’ll be burnt alive or machine-gunned in here,’ Itzak rasped in between paroxysms of coughing and choking.
As they crept from the burning building, they found themselves standing in the centre of an ocean of flames, surrounded by Germans and Ukrainians waiting to shoot. To stay where they were meant death by fire, but the prospect of going through the flames paralysed Elzunia. They hardly dared to breathe, unable to stand still but too terrified to move. When Elzunia finally forced herself to inch forward, the burning asphalt melted under her feet and she felt herself sinking into a soft mass that stuck to her shoes and seemed to be sucking her in. She looked down and saw that the soles of her shoes were on fire.
A little ahead of her, Lech urged her on. He jumped from foot to foot on the burning ground and grabbed her hand. ‘Come on, we’ll run together.’ She looked at the wall of flames in front of them and shook her head. ‘Save yourself,’ she mouthed. There was no air to breathe. The heat sucked all the saliva from her mouth and all the moisture from her body, and she had become a brittle shell about to crumble into a thousand fragments.
‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it,’ she heard herself sobbing. A thousand hammers pounded in her skull as Lech grabbed her arm and pulled her down into a cellar where some of the group were sheltering. Their faces were blackened with soot and cinders, their hair was singed, and they were almost unrecognisable. There was a crash, and she jumped away just in time to avoid a burning beam that collapsed, missing her by centimetres. Someone bent forward to push aside a chunk of broken sink placed there to conceal the entrance to an interconnecting passageway.
One by one they lowered themselves into it and didn’t stop running until they reached the other end. Perhaps now they would be safe. But as soon as they peered out through the chink in the wall, they drew back. Soldiers were wandering all over the place. Two were coming towards them. Any moment they’d be discovered. Elzunia closed her eyes. This is it, she thought. Suddenly Lech motioned for them to stand back and, to her horror, he squeezed into the narrow opening in full view of the Germans. She wanted to cry out, tell him to get away from there, but the words died in her throat. She heard the crack of rifle fire. Inside the passageway, they flattened themselves against the walls and held their breath, waiting for the soldiers to burst in, but Lech’s body was so firmly wedged into the opening that the soldiers couldn’t pull him out and, after a few kicks and loud curses, they strode off.
Elzunia was numb. She knelt beside Lech and saw that his eyes were open and he was looking at her. ‘Oh, thank God,’ she whispered. ‘Thank God. I thought you were …’
His lips moved but a bubbling sound came from his throat and a trickle of blood oozed from his mouth. She bent forward to try and catch what he was struggling to say.
‘Now will you be my girl?’ he rasped.
She clasped his hand and nodded.
A faint smile flitted across his face and the light went out of his eyes.
Wrapping rags around their shoes to deaden the sound, they crept out of the passageway towards the central part of the Ghetto. Bullets were flying everywhere. Several times Elzunia thought she must have been hit and was astonished to find she wasn’t dead. They were tip-toeing through the smoke and fire when the Germans shone a powerful reflector on them. Elzunia raised her arm and hurled one of her grenades at the reflector. It shattered, allowing her and the others to disappear into the smoke.
But when they reached the central area, they discovered that fires were raging there as well, and flames enveloped entire buildings. Wherever she looked, wooden beams were cracking and collapsing, red-hot walls and staircases were crumbling, and balconies were crashing to the ground. Such searing heat emanated from the buildings and the ground that it seemed as though the jaws of hell had opened up.
The suffocating smoke was tinged with a strange, sweetish stench. Elzunia sniffed as she tried to identify the peculiar smell. Then her stomach turned over. It was the smell of burnt flesh. On balconies, in window frames, on bits of broken stairs, lay the blackened corpses of those forced from their hiding places by the flames. Dazed, panic-stricken people wandered around aimlessly, not knowing where to go.
Elzunia scanned the faces anxiously for her mother and Gittel. What had happened to them? Surely someone had seen them. But most people either stared at her with dull, uncomprehending expressions or shook their heads and turned away. She looked up and froze. People were leaping from the burning buildings like living torches. Up on the third floor, a couple were standing by the open window. The man kissed his wife, took her hand and they jumped together. A moment later, their bodies hit the ground with a sickening thud. Elzunia wanted to scream or cry, but no sound came as she stared at these apocalyptic visions.
‘They remained free to the end,’ Edek whispered. ‘They chose when and how to die.’
As the days turned into weeks, the weary insurgents fought on, their small cache of arms augmented by captured German weapons. Furious at the Ghetto’s continued resistance, and their inability to destroy it, the Germans brought in sniffer dogs to detect the bunkers and flushed out the occupants with flame-throwers. And after each attack, Elzunia waited and held her breath until she checked that the bunker where her mother and Gittel were sheltering hadn’t been destroyed. One morning, five weeks after the start of the Uprising, she was in the bunker with the remnants of her group when their building vibrated from an explosion in a nearby building. ‘They’re throwing grenades into the bunkers now,’ Edek said. ‘I wonder how long we’ll be able to hold out.’
As soon as night fell, and the Germans had left the Ghetto, Elzunia picked up a torch and crept outside. The sky was the colour of bruised strawberries and the street was eerily lit by flames that leapt up and crackled all around her. She darted into a doorway, stumbled along the passageway that had been tunnelled out to connect the bunkers, and felt her way in the dark until she reached her mother’s bunker. Something was jammed against the entrance and she couldn’t get inside. She called out softly but there was no reply. Picking up a beam of fallen timber, she pushed with all her might until the door gave way and she fell inside.
She shone her torch around the bunker and her knees gave way. When she looked down, she saw she was standing in a pool of thickening blood and the floor was covered with bodies and parts of arms and legs. Grenades. She heard herself moaning as she ran frantically around the bunker, looking at the faces. In the far corner she found her mother, curled up as though asleep. Elzunia almost sobbed with relief. Thank God, she was only sleeping. She tapped her shoulder. ‘Mama! Wake up! We’ve got to get out of here.’ She tugged her arm, surprised at how heavy it was. Then she shook her, harder this time. ‘Get up, Mama!’ she heard herself shouting. She tried to raise her up but collapsed on the floor, panting. ‘Mama! You have to get up! Get up!’ Her panic-stricken voice made her scalp prickle. Exhausted, she sank to the floor and her sobbing filled the bunker and echoed against the walls. She held her mother’s stiff hand and kissed her dead face. Cradling her mother’s thin body in her arms, Elzunia thought about the happy days that would never come again, and the life that they would never share. Time had run out. The misunderstandings and conflicts would never be resolved, and the future would not bring her mother peace nor restore her husband. And Elzunia would never have the chance to live up to her mother’s expectations, or get to really know her. She looked at her mother’s stiffening face and saw a stranger. Forcing herself to remember the woman she had once been, Elzunia saw her sitting erect at the piano, filling their apartment with music that they had all thought would go on forever, and she cried for her mother, for herself, and for all the wasted lives and missed opportunities. Her hand brushed against something hard and, through her tears, she saw that it was her mother’s amber brooch. Tenderly she unpinned it and placed it deep into the pocket of her skirt.
She didn’t know how long she had sat without moving, cradling her mother while tears flowed down her face, but suddenly she leapt to her feet. Gittel! Where was Gittel? Swallowing hard, she forced herself to walk very slowly among the bodies strewn all over the bunker, but there was no sign of the little girl. What could have happened to her? Was she hiding somewhere? Had she run away? Had someone smuggled her out of the Ghetto at the last moment? She had to believe that Gittel was still alive. It was the only thing she had left to cling on to.
The sun had already risen in the red sky and the light had begun to dawn when she returned to her bunker. As she made her way to her corner, she avoided her comrades’ eyes, and they didn’t comment on her swollen eyes and frozen expression. She didn’t stir when they heard the rumble of tanks outside. Their weapons were almost used up and there was nothing to hope for except a quick end. Suddenly, Edek rushed out and planted himself in front of a tank. Elzunia rose and saw a Lilliputian with nothing but a grenade in his hand confronting a giant. She closed her eyes.
‘Throw it, for God’s sake. Throw it, before they see you,’ she whispered over and over. ‘Oh God, why doesn’t he throw it?’ But the pin was stuck and he couldn’t release it. ‘This can’t happen, I can’t let this happen.’ The words were still echoing in her head as she inched out of the bunker and flattened herself against the wall. As though in a dream, she hurled her grenade at the tank with more force than she thought she had. It lurched and exploded.
‘Run, Edek, quick, run!’ she shouted. He turned and she saw his cheeky grin but at that instant a shot rang out and Edek fell, clutching his leg. The second tank moved forward. Biting her hand until it bled, Elzunia watched in horror as it rolled over her friend’s body.
She was slumped against the wall in the corner of the bunker, her face in her hands. Their miracle was over and the end was coming. She’d never get out of there alive and she no longer cared. What was the point of staying alive when the best and noblest souls had died? She thought of her mother, of Lech and Edek, of Itzak and Rahela, and those brave young insurgents, all killed. She paced up and down the bunker, sobbing, muttering to herself, and wondering whether she was losing her mind. How much grief and loss could one person endure? Dying would be much easier than staying alive when everyone you loved was gone. She was seventeen but she had lived through a thousand years of stress and sorrow.
Overhead, she could hear salvos of gunfire and closed her eyes. Soon it would all be over. Then she heard Madame Ramona’s voice saying, ‘You will have three lives.’ In her first life, she’d been a Catholic girl living an indulged existence with a father she hero-worshipped. In the second, she had become a Jewish activist, fighting for her life in the Ghetto. Maybe the clairvoyant was right and she’d have a third incarnation. Curiosity overcame despair. What would her third life hold?
Somehow she had to find a way out because the heat in the bunker was scorching and sucked up all the air. She tried to remember the network of passageways and tunnels that ran underneath the buildings, but most of the bunkers had been burnt out and the passageways linking them had collapsed. Only a few minutes earlier, she’d been prepared to give up but now she felt a spirit of defiance stirring. She hadn’t gone through so much to surrender now. If she did, who would be left to tell what had happened here? Who would keep the memory of her mother, Lech, Edek, and all the others alive? If she died, they’d all die with her. Perhaps that was why she had been spared when so many had perished. To describe the indescribable. And what about Gittel? Perhaps she was hiding somewhere, waiting for Elzunia to find her. She had to search for her.
Inside the dark passageway, she gritted her teeth, pushed her hair inside her scout’s cap and tucked her skirt into her underpants. Her heart in her mouth, she inched along, holding her hands in front of her to feel for any obstacles. At times she crawled on her hands and knees over craters left by exploded shells and across piles of broken masonry and charred bricks. From the scorching heat, she knew that the buildings above her were ablaze and could collapse on top of her at any moment.
Occasionally a piece of burning timber would crash in front of her and she would leap out of the way just in time. Sometimes she felt something soft underfoot and gagged when she saw she was treading on dead bodies. She whispered an apology. Sometimes she heard skittering underfoot and a rat’s smooth fur brushed against her legs.
As she rested in the dark passage, too exhausted to move, she became aware that she was leaning against something that was too soft to be stone or masonry. She turned and ran her hands along its length. At the end of the soft surface, she came to something that felt like polished wood. She climbed on top of it and felt something that resembled a couch. Either she was hallucinating or these were pieces of furniture.
As she groped around in the dark, she wondered whether she’d come to the secret entrance on the Aryan side of town, through which she had led the airman into the Ghetto. She started heaving and pushing the old sofa, tables and cupboards away from the entrance, until a chink of light speared the darkness, making her blink. From here, it was impossible to see what was going on above street level or who was lurking in the shadows or patrolling the block, waiting to catch the Jews who’d escaped the flames. She waited, her ear pressed to the roof of the passageway and shrank back each time she felt the vibration of passing trucks or heard footsteps and snatches of conversation.
When she could no longer hear anything, she climbed onto the table, and reached up. She could feel something hard, and pushed it with all her strength. It was an iron grille covered with leaves and branches, and after a few attempts she managed to raise it. She hoisted herself up with hands that shook so much she could hardly support herself. Her heart drumming in her ears, she scrambled to her feet and looked around to make sure no one had seen her. With her blackened face, tangled hair and blistered hands, it would be easy to tell that she had emerged from the inferno on the other side of the wall.
The bright spring day was drawing to a close and the curfew hour was approaching. Elzunia stood up, straightened her skirt, and tried to brush off the dirt and cinders that clung to her. In the murky half-light, the sky glowed a fierce red from the flames that burned a short distance away. The Ghetto had held out for almost six weeks but all that was left of it now was rubble and ashes. She murmured a few Hail Marys and some half-remembered snippets of the Kaddish prayer, took one last look at the dying Ghetto, and hurried away in the shadows as smoke billowed over the silent city.