Down on the street, soldiers had thrown incendiary grenades into the entrance of our house, and the first flames were already shooting out of the burst windows on the ground floor.
“We can’t stay here,” Amos said, and everyone agreed. There was no point in dying in the flames. We would have to flee and look for a new position to continue fighting.
We hurried down from the roof and ran out onto the stairs. Of course there was no way we could just run out the front door. Even if we managed to get through the flames unharmed, the Germans would be waiting to mow us down outside. Rachel’s fighters had prepared a retreat, though. We would escape into the house at 6 Gęsia Street through the holes in the attics and continue the battle from there. Rachel had sent someone to see if the coast was clear.
It wasn’t.
The scout was a man called Avi, who used to be a Jewish policeman. He had joined the resistance when the first trains started out for Treblinka—why, oh why had my brother not had the decency to do the same? Avi was standing in front of us sweating and stroking his red beard nervously. “The Germans have occupied 6 Gęsia.”
We all stared at one another in desperation. The flames were creeping up the stairs step by step, and there was no way out.
Rachel was the only one who stayed calm. “You…,” she pointed at Avi, “and you,” she pointed at Ben Redhead, “try to find an escape route that’s safe.”
She probably didn’t realize that she had picked the only two redheads among us to get us away from the fire. The two of them ran off, and the rest of us gathered in a dark attic room. The heat of the fire made us all sweat; the smoke made breathing difficult. We smashed the little attic window but that didn’t help at all. In fact it only made matters worse. The smoke from outside poured into the room. We coughed, and I was so scared that I blurted out, “Now we are going to be gassed and burned after all.”
Amos grabbed me. Instead of trying to calm me, he shook me hard and said sharply, “Shut up!”
He was right. I needed to pull myself together and not infect the others with my panic. At that moment, Avi returned.
“Well?” Rachel asked.
“Nothing,” he said, defeated. “There’s no way out.”
The smoke got thicker and thicker every second. Our eyes were streaming. But Ben Redhead wasn’t back yet, so there was still a chance.
Like everyone else, I couldn’t stop coughing. Even Amos, who was trying not to show any kind of weakness, was gasping for air.
The soldiers had thrown firebombs onto the roof, too. Burning timbers rained down on us. But no one screamed, although everyone wanted to. Not even when the floorboards started to twist.
“Over there!” Esther cried.
Through the little window we could see SS men in the house opposite. Without hesitating, Esther, Rachel, and Avi, who were close to the window, started to shoot at the soldiers. They fired back without hitting anyone and then retreated. The exchange of fire diverted us from the fact that we were surrounded by the flames.
Ben Redhead stormed in. “I think I’ve found an escape route into 37 Nalewki,” he said.
“You think?” Rachel asked coughing.
“I couldn’t go all the way. It would have taken too long. There’s not enough time.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Rachel decided.
We all left the attic slowly. Then went onto the stairs where you couldn’t see anything because of all the smoke and where breathing was virtually impossible. From there we went to another attic room where there was a little hole in the wall leading to the next house. This wasn’t one of the prepared escape routes. It was just a chance hole in the wall of a damaged building. The hole was so narrow that I thought at first we’d never fit. But, one by one, the fighters squeezed through. When it was my turn, I got stuck. I’d caught my shoulder and started to panic. I screamed, “I can’t … I can’t…!”
“You can!” Amos shouted, and shoved me through the hole. I thought my shoulder would break, but then I stumbled into the house next door. Only, there was smoke there, too. The SS had set the building on fire as well.
We moved forward, feeling our way rather than actually seeing anything, and held our breath so as not to burn our lungs. We managed to find another gap into the attic of the next house, but even here we still weren’t safe. The fire would jump to this house next.
We climbed through a skylight onto the roof, and we stayed low and crawled to the next house—we didn’t want to be moving targets for the soldiers—then from there, we jumped onto the roof of yet another house.
“There must be a bunker here somewhere,” Avi said.
The members of the ŻOB hadn’t built extra hideouts. When the civilians had started digging out bunkers everywhere in the ghetto, we had concentrated on preparing for the uprising: getting hold of weapons, killing collaborators, training to fight … We hadn’t even thought seriously about additional hiding places. Why should we have? We had not expected to last more than a single day. No matter how much some of us had gone on about Masada, not even the most daring dreamers had any kind of pretense that we were in the same league as our ancestors in the fortress against the Romans.
How I wished we were fighting the Romans. Their persecution of Christians seemed almost civilized in comparison to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Was Avi sure there was a bunker here somewhere, or did he just have an inkling? We didn’t really want to know. We swarmed out of the house into the yard to hunt for a concealed entrance. And it was Esther who found the hidden door to the cellar. Without knocking or asking permission, we tore the door open and entered a stuffy bunker where about twenty civilians including a number of children were hiding. We all flung ourselves onto the ground, exhausted. Until now, I’d fought back the smoke in my lungs, but now I coughed and choked until I threw up. I couldn’t care less. We were safe for a moment. I hadn’t burned to death.
“Get out!” a woman screamed at us. She was holding a starving child in her arms and was little more than a ragged skeleton herself.
“Go away! You are putting us all in danger!” shouted a haggard old woman. Another one of the living dead.
Before we could say anything, people started shouting at us from all sides. “We don’t want you here!” “You’ll be the death of us all!” “If the Germans catch you here, they’ll kill us, too!”
It was unbelievable. We were fighting for the whole of the ghetto, and these people were so scared of dying that they hated us.
From a corner where a number of children were gathered, a young man came forward and declared, “The fighters stay!”
It was Daniel.