The five of us went out into the cold. Each of us was hiding a pistol in their coat or sweater, and Amos had insisted that he be given the one functioning hand grenade.
I carried my gun in the inside pocket of my heavy coat. The cold metal pressed against my left breast through my sweater and blouse. I would pull it out with my right hand and then start shooting.
We walked down a couple of streets and met a group of about a hundred Jews being led to the Umschlagplatz by SS soldiers. The faces of the sentenced people were blank; any hope they may have had of survival had gone ages ago. They bowed to the fate the Germans had in store for them.
We joined the crowd with our hands up so that the SS would think we were just more Jews surrendering. The soldiers signaled to us to get in line and join the march to death. I stared at the ground. I didn’t want to see the faces of the men who I would shoot at in just a few minutes’ time, and I didn’t want to look at the men who were going to kill me.
As planned, we split up in the crowd. Mordechai was at the front, Amos more in the middle of the procession, with me a few meters away from him. Michal and Miriam were farther back.
We walked through the cold together, all doomed to die. I didn’t feel weighed down, as I had that other time when I had marched toward the Umschlagplatz in the cauldron; I felt all keyed up. I was going to kill someone in a moment. And I was going to die. The blood in my temples was throbbing so hard that I feared a vessel would burst.
We walked and I watched Mordechai, waiting for his signal to attack. I tried to do this without attracting attention, but it didn’t really matter. The SS men took no notice of us. They could not imagine that there could be any threat of danger from the people they were leading to slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had been hounded to the gas chambers without defending themselves already, so why should anything be different for the last few thousand inhabitants of the ghetto?
When we reached the corner of Ziska Street and Zamenhof Street, Mordechai turned round and nodded at Amos. I held my breath. Amos dug into his coat pocket, pulled out his hand grenade in an instant, pulled the ring, and threw it at two German soldiers. Before anyone could react, before anyone even understood what was happening, the grenade exploded and tore the SS men to bits.
The blast frightened the life out of me, although I had been prepared for it, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut. When I opened them again, I saw Amos staring at the dead soldiers. He, too, needed a second to realize what he had just done. He had killed SS men!
I heard shots from Mordechai’s direction. I turned round. He was holding his gun and shooting soldiers. Two of them fell down in the snow.
The crowd dispersed. Panic-stricken people were running in every direction. I could hear shots coming from Amos’s direction now, too. The soldiers were shouting, “They’ve got guns! The fucking Jews have got guns!”
Behind me, Michal and Miriam were shooting at the SS.
And the Germans were shooting back!
“Miriam!” Michal screamed.
She didn’t answer.
I looked back. But in the crush of fleeing people, I couldn’t see Michal or Miriam. I heard more shots. And Michal screaming. The Germans had got him, too.
Both dead. Both dead. Both dead. That was all I could think. Both dead.
I looked at Mordechai again. He was walking toward three soldiers, pointing the gun at them, shooting and shooting and shooting. When his magazine was empty he threw the weapon away, bent down to a dead SS man, grabbed his pistol, and kept on shooting.
I still hadn’t taken a single shot or even pulled out my weapon. As soon as I did, I would be a target for the Germans who were desperately trying to pinpoint the attackers in the crowd.
Amos yelled.
I looked at him, panicked. He was wounded in the arm. Not dead yet! Not dead!
Now I pulled my gun. I didn’t know where to start shooting. There were desperate Jews fleeing between all the soldiers. I didn’t want to hit any of them.
I ran to the curb where the soldiers Mordechai had mowed down were lying. Their blood mixed with the snow, turning it into red and white slush. A young wounded soldier was crawling away from me. No idea if he was Latvian, German, or Ukrainian, but he had a beautiful face, like an angel, and he said something I couldn’t understand. Was he asking for help? Was it a prayer?
I pointed my gun at him. He looked up at me. Pleading. He didn’t want to die.
Why did he hope for mercy? He wouldn’t have shown me any. The swine. With his angelic face. My hand shook. I wanted to pull the trigger. I had to.
The soldier started to cry, said something in German, and then, “Marlene…”
Like Marlene Dietrich in the American films. Was that the name of his wife or girlfriend? Or of his daughter? Or was he too young to be a father? My hand shook even more. The soldier cried. I bent my finger to squeeze the trigger. Then I heard Mordechai shout, “Mira, behind you!”
I turned round. An SS man the size of a bull was aiming his gun at me, less than three meters away.
I shot at once.
The man slumped down. Lifeless in the snow.
I felt sick.
Mordechai grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled in my ear, “Run!”
We both started running. So did Amos. The two of them shot at the SS who backed off, scared. We ran down two streets, and then Mordechai shouted, “In here!”
We dashed inside and up the stairs. I couldn’t breathe, and Amos was bleeding badly. His coat sleeve was soaked in blood, but Mordechai wouldn’t let us stop. We scaled up a ladder into the attic, and from there we went through a hole into the next house. The resistance had started building escape routes between buildings. A sort of street system above the actual streets. But the attics weren’t safe to hide in. We ran back down the stairs in one of the houses, and into a secret bunker where we fell to the ground, exhausted. I threw up. Mordechai applied a tourniquet above Amos’s bleeding wound. No one said a word. We were exhausted and wound up at the same time. Then Amos started to laugh. Hysterically. Mordecai joined in. Hysterical, too. And I laughed with them, and then I cried. For Miriam and Michal.
We hugged one another, feeling happy and sad. Sad because we had lost comrades—friends—and happy to be alive. We had killed SS soldiers. Jews had killed Germans. Nothing would ever be the same again.