That night we learned of the losses the other groups had suffered but gave one another courage as we ate; we had survived two days already; we had defied the Germans for two days and we’d manage a third.
Early in the morning, we moved into position on the fourth floor while the civilians stayed in the bunker. But we didn’t engage in any fighting. There were only a few sporadic sounds of shooting in the ghetto.
“The Germans don’t dare fight anymore,” Esther said around midday, looking pleased.
“We’re not that lucky,” Amos answered.
Of course he was right.
Half an hour later, we heard the sound of trucks. One of them stopped farther down the street. SS men jumped out, too far away for us to shoot. The soldiers rolled barrels in front of the houses.
“Those are barrels of gasoline,” Amos realized.
The soldiers got back into the truck, threw burning torches, and then raced away. The barrels caught fire and exploded. Within seconds, the first houses went up in flames.
“Oh no…,” Esther gasped.
No one else said a word.
Civilians ran to the windows and out onto the balconies of the burning houses. There was no choice but to jump. The SS men had gathered in front of the burning buildings and took turns shooting at the civilians as they jumped. When they hit someone as they fell, the SS all cheered. Someone earned an especially huge cheer when he shot a mother holding her baby.
An old woman fell from a balcony onto a heap of burning rubbish. But she was injured and couldn’t get down. She was on fire in a matter of moments and screamed and screamed, begging the soldiers to put her out of her misery, “Shoot me, please, please, please, shoot me!” But the soldiers didn’t do her the favor. They preferred to shoot the jumping Jews. That was as much fun as a shooting stand at a fair for them.
We watched, shocked, unable to move. Rachel was the first to find her voice again. “We need to get closer.”
But before we had time to get close enough to shoot the bastards and be shot ourselves, soldiers went from house to house and threw firebombs into the doorways.
I grabbed Rachel. “We’ve got to get the civilians out of the bunker,” I said. “They’ll set this house on fire, too!” I was mainly worrying about Daniel and his little sister.
“You are right.” Rachel nodded. Her desire to seek revenge was not as great as the desire to help others.
We rushed down to the cellar and just as we tore open the door to the bunker, we heard an explosion. The Germans had thrown a firebomb into our house.
“Hurry up!” Rachel called to the civilians. “We have to get out of here!”
The next moment, a hand grenade rolled down the cellar steps.
“Take cover,” Amos yelled.
We all ran. Most of us ran back into the bunker. Only Esther … Esther headed for cover in another room in the cellar. The grenade rolled in that direction and exploded.
“Esther!” Amos screamed above the noise of the explosion, and ran out of the bunker through the flames to help her. But all he found was her body, torn to pieces.
Amos screamed like an animal.
“The stairs! My God! The stairs!” Avi yelled.
The soldiers’ grenade had destroyed the cellar stairs. Above us the house was on fire and we couldn’t get out! We were trapped in a hole in the ground like rabbits in a blocked burrow.
“We’ll burn to death! We’re going to burn to death!” Avi screamed hysterically.
“We need a ladder or a plank or something!” Rachel shouted. She was the only one who seemed to be able to think clearly.
We all started looking. Except for Amos, who stood staring into the flames where Esther’s body was burning.
“Amos!” I shouted.
He didn’t react.
“Amos! We need something to help us get out of here!”
Slowly, very slowly, he managed to tear himself away from the terrible sight.
In the bunker, people were starting to scream. Daniel tried to calm them down. “We’ll get out,” he kept saying, “we’ll find a way out.”
But it was no use. There was nothing he could do. The people were panic-stricken.
“This’ll do!” Ben Redhead shouted. He pointed at a long plank that was lying in a corner. We propped it up where the steps had been just two minutes earlier. It stood upright at an extremely steep angle. You couldn’t just run up it; we were going to have to climb up the plank to get out.
Daniel came over to me and said, “The old and the sick will never make it out.”
We let the civilians go first and helped them as best we could. Even Amos, though he stared back at the flames that had engulfed Esther’s body every other minute. I tried not to look.
At last there were about a dozen people still left in the bunker: old people, the sick, the wounded, the weak. Including the skeleton woman and her child.
“We can’t leave them behind,” Daniel said.
“We have no choice,” Rachel insisted.
The people in the bunker were calling, “Don’t abandon us! Please don’t abandon us!”
Some were weeping. Some didn’t move at all. Would they have hidden here for so long, survived for so long, only to be burned to death now?
The fighters climbed up the plank, one by one, and so did Daniel, who had decided to remain alive for his little sister’s sake instead of staying with the doomed people we had to leave behind.
There wasn’t a moment left to grieve for them, or for Esther. When we got into the yard, the fire-lit sky was glowing red. Towering tongues of flame devoured the houses all around us.
“This is what hell must be like,” Ben Redhead said.
We went through hell. Twenty fighters and maybe forty civilians. We ran through the burning streets. The Germans had retreated so as not to be caught in the inferno themselves. Buildings collapsed. The surface of the road beneath our feet started to melt. I was certain my shoes would stick to the ground. The roar of the flames was deafening. Any moment now, I feared the pandemonium would make my head explode. Burning timber rained down on us. One civilian was killed when he was struck by a falling beam. Another was hit by a barrage of falling roof tiles.
Daniel didn’t let go of Rebecca the whole time, and she held on to her glass marble. She knew that if it were to fall onto the road, her treasure would melt.
The things people cherish in the face of death.
We made our way to a part of the ghetto that wasn’t burning, and which might be spared as long as the wind didn’t shift. In the early evening we reached a courtyard where about a hundred civilians had gathered, all of them with the few possessions they had been able to save from their burning houses and which still seemed to mean as much to them in all this madness as Rebecca’s marble did.
This time, no one swore at us. It was the reverse. They begged us to help them. “Get us out of the ghetto!” “Save my child!” “Help!”
Everyone gathered around us. But we had no idea what to do, either.
“We can’t take all these people with us,” Avi said.
“Well, we certainly can’t leave them!” Rachel retaliated.
And I realized they were both right.
“We’ll have to find a new hiding place.” Rachel said what we were all thinking. “A bunker large enough for all of us!”
“And just pray that the Germans don’t come back tonight!” Avi added.
“I don’t pray!” Amos and I both said at the same time.
The fighters split up into groups of scouts. Amos and I headed off at once. The night sky was glaring eerily above the ghetto. I stared at Muranowski Square and could still see the flags flying there. But they were a small comfort now. We had seen people die. Seen Esther die!
Amos didn’t say anything as we walked through the streets.
“Esther…,” I said.
“Died honorably,” he said curtly, stopping the conversation at once.
Honorably! To be torn to pieces by a hand grenade didn’t seem like an honorable way to die to me. No matter how hard I tried to think otherwise, I felt she had died as miserably as any other Jew in the ghetto.
We didn’t say anything else. We combed through the houses in silence, hoping to find a bunker. We just stopped once when we found water in an abandoned flat and drank. We drank until we weren’t thirsty anymore. It took about another hour, and then we found a bunker under the rubble of a half-demolished house.
“There is no way we can all fit in here,” I said while I stared at the squalor. The bunker was already crammed with people. Sweating. Despairing. Terrified.
“There’s enough room for our unit,” Amos said.
“We can’t leave the others behind,” I shouted.
“Let’s let Rachel decide,” he said, and I agreed. I had no idea if Rachel would leave the civilians behind or not. What about Daniel and Rebecca? I couldn’t stay with them, could I? No. One fighter would not be able to help them, anyway.
It was almost midnight when we got back to the courtyard. We were surprised to see that everyone was getting ready to leave. Before we could ask, Daniel told me, “Your people have found a bunker.”
“For all of us?” I asked.
“That’s what they said.”
“That … that’s a miracle!” I stammered.
“I said we weren’t going to die.” Daniel smiled.
He believed in survival. Against all odds.