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EVENTS APRIL, 1943. ENTRY APRIL 26, 1943. N.L. Rachel and Berson have been like fellow conspirators lately. They are inseparable. I wonder what is between them. [NOTE. EDITOR. It must be remembered, again, that N.L. has not yet had the 
CONVERSATIONS, and so is unaware of the episode in the bunker the night of his speech, herein placed under EVENTS APRIL 24.]
EVENTS APRIL 26–27, 1943. ENTRY APRIL 27, 1943. N.L. Rachel and Berson away since yesterday afternoon. I hope nothing has happened to them.
EVENTS APRIL 26–28, 1943. ENTRY APRIL 28, 1943. I now discover that Rachel and Berson planned to absent themselves from us. Before they went out day before yesterday, Rachel held a conference with her section and battalion leaders, going over all possible contingencies with them, weaning them, as it were. She said that her brother Mordecai would be in command in case anything happened to her. Mordecai, unfortunately, is not a popular deputy. The fighters adored their Little Mother, but they find Mordecai rather surly and overbearing.
EVENTS APRIL 26–28, 1943. ENTRY APRIL 29, 1943. FROM DOLEK BERSON. Since last evening, Rachel and Berson are back with us. And they tell a strange story. At least, Berson tells it; Rachel is taciturn, even for her. It seems that their separation from us was accidental, after all.
Rachel and Berson were out together on the twenty-sixth, Berson tells me, because Rachel wanted to report personally to Yitzhok on the general situation of her Group and asked Berson to convoy her. They did report to Yitzhok and then started on their return trip to our bunker. On the way, at the corner of Mila and Lubetzkiego, at a place where there is a gap in our communications and they would have had to run across the street, there was some fighting going on. They therefore remained in a building on the north side of Mila Street. Hearing sounds of the skirmish for some time, they decided to go up in the building to some point of vantage, from which they could watch for an opportunity to get across the street. They had just begun to sneak up the stairs when a Jewish fighter ran in at the street door in quite a panic, as if someone were close after him, and clattered up the stairs.
Not wishing to be overtaken by the fighter’s pursuer, Rachel and Berson jumped up and followed the man upstairs. On the top flight, he looked back at them doubtfully, but Rachel gave that day’s Z.O.B. password, and the man led them into an apartment and through a bedroom to a closet, down from the false ceiling of which, at a tapping, a rope ladder was unrolled. The three ascended into a perfectly concealed attic strongpoint belonging, Berson says, to Ketzl’s Dror Group.
About eight men were up there, playing cards. Ketzl himself was not there; this was apparently a “reserve stronghold.” There were sounds of searching downstairs, and while they lasted, the card-players stayed absolutely still. Finally the pursuers gave up. The card game was resumed. A scout went down from the attic after a few minutes, but he came back up very shortly, saying that a group of Germans had bivouacked in a back room on the second floor: they were apparently Germans of a stubborn turn: they were going to play cat to the mice they had heard running upstairs. For two full days the Germans camped in that second-storey room.
Berson (as he tells the story) : —— Perhaps they were waiting for us. Perhaps they were just tired of fighting and wanted a short vacation.
For the entire forty-eight hours while the fighters were trapped in the attic room, the men played cards. Berson joined the game for a time at their invitation, but he says he is a poor gambler (he himself says he seems to have the idea that he can prove he is a daredevil and a sport by accepting every wager that is offered; he has no eye for odds and probabilities; he should be, he says with a twinkle, lucky in love) and he had very soon lost all the money he was carrying except for the ten-zloty note I once gave him for a memento.
During the long wait, Berson says, Rachel was extremely impatient to get back to her Group. She kept wanting to send a scout below, or to go herself. The men were enjoying themselves; they were in no hurry; they laughed at her a little.
At last, on the second afternoon, a reconnaissance discovered that the Germans had decamped—leaving behind them a debris of ration tins and cigaret butts. Rachel and Berson hurried back to their bunker.
EVENTS APRIL 29, 1943. ENTRY DITTO. N.L. At a meeting of Z.O.B. commanders tonight, to which I was invited as recorder, I asked Yitzhok, on a hunch, after Rachel had left, whether she had personally reported to him on April 26. Yitzhok said not! I then discovered from Ketzl that he does not have any “reserve stronghold” on the north side of Mila: he has three strongpoints, all on Niska. Peculiar. Berson might have got Ketzl mixed up with one of the other Z.O.B. commanders, but that business of the nonexistent report to Yitzhok is not so easy to explain. For that matter, nor is my hunch….
EVENTS APRIL 26–29, 1943. FROM CONVERSATIONS OF MAY 9–10, 1943. FROM DOLEK BERSON….Next Berson told me that everything he said ten days ago about his and Rachel’s “accidental” disappearance, April 26–28, had been pure invention.
I asked him why he had told such a careful and complicated story to me, none of it true.
Berson: —— To protect Rachel.
What really happened, he now says, was that, having discovered the night of my lecture on Peretz that they felt as they did, they now decided that for a few hours before they died (as in the extremity of battle they then expected to do) they wanted to find privacy and each other. They planned the escapade carefully, even to making arrangements in advance with a smuggler to rendezvous with them at a certain place once each evening while they were gone, in order to supply them, not only with necessities, but also with current Polish and German newspapers and even a bottle of wine. (That is where all of Berson’s money except my ten-zloty note went!) They spent the time in a wild house on Nowolipie Street. They spent it, I gather, well.
I asked Berson why that detailed invention about the attic and the card game.
Berson: —— We settled on that story. We had to have some story. After all, Rachel had deserted her fighters in a way.
—— And what made her do that?
—— You’ll have to ask her. I can’t speak for Rachel…I have only this idea: we all sensed that the end was near, and I believe that Rachel felt that because her face is not too pretty, she had so far in her life missed a tremendous experience—for which she thought she might have a certain talent.
—— In this was she right or wrong?
—— She was right. A very appreciable talent, in my opinion.
—— And did not the matter of Rachel’s face trouble you?
—— I love her.
—— I see.
I then asked Berson whether his remark about the imaginary German soldiers who camped on the imaginary second floor [INSERT. FROM ENTRY APRIL 29. Berson: Perhaps they were just tired of fighting and wanted a short vacation.…] might have had an unconscious application to himself and Rachel.
Berson: —— Perhaps in my case it might have applied. In Rachel’s case I am almost certain not.
—— Then did Rachel show the restlessness and impatience to be back with her fighters that you imputed to her in the imaginary attic during the imaginary card game?
—— I do not wish to sound immodest…but…no! She regretted leaving her fighters, but I flatter myself that she did not regret being with me.
—— Possibly you are lucky in love, as you suggested in speaking of your imaginary losses!
My next question may have been an unkind reminder (in these last moments I want to know everything!). I asked Berson whether he did not feel that he was somehow betraying Symka.
Berson, with directness and yet leaving something unsaid and withheld: —— Symka is dead.
Then I asked Berson why he had told me that Rachel reported to Yitzhok on the twenty-sixth, when that was a fact so easy to be checked; the same as to Ketzl’s “stronghold.”
Berson: —— I’m not a practiced liar.
And that, at least, I feel sure, is the truth.
LATER IN THE SAME CONVERSATION. FROM DOLEK BERSON. I would never, until this moment, have attributed to Berson the slightest poetic streak. But now (I am not saying that his poetry is any good: I only say that it is a stuff I had never seen or imagined in Berson) :
Berson: —— The moment we entered the room I knew we had come home. It was just right. The place had not been looted. There was dust on the woodwork but Rachel drove it away with a cloth she found. She was frightened. I thought she was going to be irritable, but instead she whistled and worked as if I were not there. I watched her. Then I felt that she was crying and she ran to me and we embraced standing. I bent over and picked her up in my arms. I can say that what came next was natural, if as you listen you will think with all your mind that everything that happens in nature is a miracle. It was as if a bud had been imprisoned in its scales too long and now came into full flower all at once, almost exploding into a wonder of fragrance and color. I could not suppress her, Noach, and she could not imagine me. We were wild enough for a lifetime….