After about half an hour, any soldiers who could still run fled out of the ghetto past their dead comrades and the burned-out tank. It didn’t matter if they had been ordered to retreat or had simply fled in panic. What mattered was that German soldiers were running away from the Jews! It was unbelievable! They were running away from us!
And there was something even more amazing; once the chaos abated a little, and we got the reports on losses in from all the groups positioned at the crossroads, we discovered that there weren’t any! All the fighters had survived.
We couldn’t believe our victory, our luck, our survival. We fell into one another’s arms. Hugged, laughed, cried, whooped for joy. A few fighters even started singing and waltzed round and round.
I’d have loved to dance with them but I still didn’t know how.
Mordechai gave me a huge hug. So did comrades I hardly knew because they had joined us while I was in the Polish part of the city with Amos. Even Esther threw her arms around me.
“Did you see the tank burn?” she asked, beaming.
Our triumph was bigger and more important than anything that had gone before.
Ben Redhead looked even happier than everyone else. Still holding his rifle, he came up to me at the shot-up window and shouted, “Eight!”
He had been counting.
“I got eight of them!”
He’d stopped stuttering. He had probably always felt guilty because his father had collaborated with the Germans, and now he felt free. “For Hannah,” he said seriously, and he seemed grown-up all of a sudden.
I wasn’t sure if I should reply, “For Hannah,” even though I had joined the resistance to give her death a purpose. But my sister would be forgotten forever when Ben and I died. And we would be dead very soon—tomorrow or the next day—despite today’s triumph. No, we weren’t doing this for Hannah. Amos was right. We were doing this for future generations. We would live on in their thoughts.
I stroked Ben Redhead’s cheek. Even if he seemed grown-up and had stopped stuttering—maybe for the rest of his life—I would never forget the boy who had been kissed by my sister.
Amos came up to me, laughing. “We’re alive!”
“Yes, we are,” I agreed. It was a miracle.
And we kissed each other as if we hadn’t been fighting for future generations at all, but simply for this one kiss.