The Bleiberg Project (Consortium Thriller) (16 page)

A village north of Warsaw, October, 1940
.

T
he children ran through the
long grass in the field alongside the region’s solitary road. Roman was so small, his head appeared only when a gust of wind buffeted the grass. As usual, an eager smile was etched on his face despite his missing teeth. The smile got wider as he came closer to catching his brother, who was not only bigger and faster, but also smart enough not to dishearten Roman. They could keep playing this game indefinitely, but Old Bartocz would tan their hides if he caught them gamboling around on his small property.

The chase continued until Roman’s asthma sapped his energy. The attacks were increasingly frequent. The boys were allowed to play outside only if they promised to be especially careful. The chase always ended by the old tree. With the agility of monkeys, they climbed to the biggest branches, from which they would while away the afternoon contemplating the scenery.

Today was no exception. At the foot of the thick gnarled trunk, Roman gasped for breath, but his hands knew every hold. He swiftly reached the branch from which his brother would haul him up next to him.

Sitting side by side, they sparred and punched each other on the shoulder. “Three times three?” demanded the older brother.

“Three times three equals three threes,” said the younger brother. They laughed.

“No, three times three is six.”

The answer was accompanied by another playful punch. Roman answered a dozen more simple questions without fooling around. In their family, education was no laughing matter. Their father, the local doctor, emphasized the need to learn and, above all, understand. “It’s the only way to control of your destiny,” he never tired of telling them. “Knowledge unlocks every door for you if you use it right.”

With the encouragement of their mother, the children integrated learning into their play. With their lessons finished, they settled down to watch the day decline. The sound of an engine drew their attention. Trucks were a rare sight in the region, and cars even rarer. They peered down the road usually traveled by horse-drawn carts. A long column of vehicles bristling with men in uniform stretched as far as the eye could see. In the lush landscape, the gray cohort seemed to tear the world apart.

“Roman, we have to go home. Now!” Dumbstruck by a spectacle he didn’t understand, the little boy didn’t say a word. As fast as Roman’s asthma would allow, they ran back to the village hand-in-hand.

By evening, an overwhelming number of German troops were occupying the small town, whose populace made no attempt to resist. Indeed, here and there, a few inhabitants welcomed them with cheers. Grouped together and surrounded by a dozen guards with machine guns, the children watched incredulously as a strange spectacle that was beyond their comprehension took place.

The men of the village were lined up in a row facing soldiers who stood stiffer than old Bartocz’s fence posts. A peasant farmer walked by, his cap pulled down over his ears and a handkerchief clutched to his mouth, so only his eyes were visible. He stopped and pointed an accusing finger. “Him! The doctor. He’s Jewish.”

An hour later, when the sun finally dipped behind the hills, father, mother and sons emerged from their house in the square opposite the village hall with suitcases in hand.

The older brother, who hadn’t spoken for hours, shuffled closer to his parents. “Dad, it was Ignaziewski who denounced you. I recognized him, even though he was covering his face. Why’d he do that?”

The father ruffled his son’s curly brown locks. The child’s maturity filled him with pride and joy. Roman was following in his brother’s footsteps. Two fine boys. “You’re right, it was Ignaziewski. I recognized him, too. People sometimes do incomprehensible things out of fear. Or hatred.”

“But you cured his flu last winter.”

“True. But that was last winter. Things have changed. The world has changed.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“I thought so, too. It’s human nature, Eytan. Human nature.”

The march was
long and painful. For three long days, Yitzhak, Alina, Roman and Eytan Morgenstern trudged forward, flanked by armed vehicles and men. They stopped in every village, every tiny hamlet, to play out the same unchanging pantomime. They were joined by one family, then ten, then a hundred. The new arrivals’ protests soon gave way to silence and despair. The Germans showed no leniency, no compassion. Dissolved in this human tide, they finally reached Warsaw. Few of the local population dared even glance at the marchers. The soldiers had the city in a stranglehold, stifling every sign of life.

The column—herd, Eytan thought to himself—stopped. Only the sobbing of children could be heard above the rumbling tanks and deafening, repetitive thump of boots on cobblestones.

German officers designated leaders and informed them of the rules in the area where the Jews were to be consigned. The news spread rapidly through the marchers’ ranks. Some clung to the hope that this forced reorganization of their lives was only temporary. The situation wasn’t good, but it was bearable.

The following days
and weeks removed any doubt as to the German occupiers’ intentions toward the Jewish community. From a few hundred, the population of the small area rose to a few thousand and eventually reached three hundred thousand people.

At gunpoint, the Jews were forced to put up a perimeter wall, building their prison within the city. The streets filled with a motionless crowd, bystanders of their own tragedy. Sitting on sidewalks, old folks bartered mementoes of a life of hard work for cigarettes and food. Filth took over, as scarce water supplies made basic hygiene impossible. Cramped living conditions didn’t help matters. In the Morgenstern’s apartment, twenty people eked out an existence in a space intended for four. The family didn’t complain. The last to arrive were packed into damp cellars overrun by rats and vermin. Infections proliferated, and disease was rampant.

The guards of their pestilential prison provided nothing except one meal a day. And what a meal! Thin gruel and a slice of stale bread. Absolutely insufficient for the old folks and children huddled around cold, desperately empty pots. Malnutrition ravaged the inhabitants. A typhoid epidemic spread terrifyingly fast.

Despite frequent, brutal raids orchestrated by the Germans, Yitzhak Morgenstern and other doctors set up makeshift infirmaries in the least putrid cellars. Illegal schools bloomed in apartments that were deserted during the day. Education had become a crime. The death of the mind preceded that of the body.

The grown-ups’ defiance and determination to maintain the shaky façade of normal life inspired the children to make their own small contribution. A small group led by Eytan loosened bricks in the northern section of the wall. Ingeniously, they opened up a tiny passage to the outside world. No adult could get through. But it enabled them to orchestrate a nightly plunder of bread and vegetables.

Roman had just celebrated his sixth birthday. He was losing strength, because the foul air aggravated his asthma, but he was as cheerful as ever and followed his brother everywhere, except when Eytan led his brigade, as he called it, on a raid into the city. That evening, the little boy pleaded with his older brother to take him with them. “Simon’s only six,” he argued reproachfully. “And you let him come.”

“It’s too dangerous, Roman. You have to run fast without stopping. It’s not an old farmer who’ll be chasing us if we’re spotted. Stay here and keep watch. If nobody notices you, you’ll have won a point, OK?”

Sulking, the little boy hunkered down to keep lookout from the protective shadow of an electricity pole while the gang got to work removing the red bricks from the wall.

Fog inexorably wreathed the sleeping ghetto like a ghost, infiltrating every nook and cranny and protecting the boys in their perilous but heroic undertaking. The Germans’ unbending discipline had its advantages. The arrival of their patrols could be predicted to the nearest minute. They were machines. Their punctuality delighted Eytan, whose watch had been confiscated, along with the meager goods the family had been allowed to bring with them. He had learned to keep perfect time in his head.

A few apples and some warm bread, furtively passed through a gap in the window by a sympathetic old lady, were the expedition’s only spoils. They had only a few minutes left to get back into their open-air prison. A gentle but glacial breeze blew through Warsaw.

The children flitted down the street like shadows on the walls of the building at the street corner opposite the ghetto. One by one, they made the frantic thirty-yard sprint to the tiny gap in the wall. As always, Eytan was last to go.

On all fours, peeking through the hole, Roman waited for his brother while the others grabbed the bricks, ready to cover their tracks as fast as possible.

The breeze picked up, and harsh gusts of wind blew through the rundown streets and avenues of the occupied city, brutally dispersing the fog. As he ran, Eytan dropped three apples, which bounced off the sidewalk and scattered on the cobbled road. He scrambled to pick up the precious food whose curative properties his father constantly praised.

Roman peered up and down the street. The distinctive sound of boots on pavement warned of the soldiers’ imminent arrival long before the patrol came into sight. Then, behind Eytan, four soldiers smoking cigarettes emerged from the mist, rifles over their shoulders. Two of them held German shepherds on leashes. For fear of giving away the location of the hidden passage, Roman didn’t cry out. Instead, without hesitation, he ran toward his brother who was still ten yards from safety, gathering the last apple.

Cursing his clumsiness, Eytan looked up and immediately recognized his brother’s frail silhouette and awkward running style. A gunshot rang out. Roman kept running. A second gunshot covered the dying echo of the first. The little boy crumpled face-first on the ground.

Despite the barking dogs and screamed orders, Eytan rushed to him. Tenderly, he raised the little head, placed it on his lap and brushed aside the curly brown locks. Those closed eyes would never open again. Pain seared Eytan’s stomach. He opened his mouth and waited for a cry that never came.

A rifle butt sent him flying. On his side, dazed, Eytan saw a boot slam twice into Roman’s corpse. He would join his brother in a few seconds. Death would be a release.

The patrol’s commanding officer hesitated before giving the order to shoot. Two machine guns pointed at the boys like snakes seeking the best angle of attack. Finally, a decision was made. Solid hands grasped the child. He was hauled away through the dark streets, intermittently illuminated by shapeless, dirty haloes of light from the tall street lamps. Through blurred eyes, Eytan saw the tailgate of a green truck identical to those he and Roman had seen arriving in their village a handful of months earlier, when life still had meaning. Around the vehicle, spotlights shot through the darkness. Forlorn rolls of barbed wire protected it from a nonexistent revolt. He was thrown aboard like a bale of straw loaded on a farmer’s flatbed. He rolled across the metallic grooves in the floor of the truck, surrounded by motionless men and women—silent, petrified, waxwork figures.

Four soldiers climbed up, and the truck juddered away. The elder Morgenstern boy slumped into welcome unconsciousness, leaving behind him the insane and evil grown-ups’ world.

But that merciless
world, devoid of affection, devoid of the slightest trace of love, revived him. Eytan was shaken around like a rag doll. He opened his eyes and winced in the dazzling light aimed at the back of the truck, from which a guard expelled him with a series of kicks. He nearly fell on the rocky ground, but his agility kept him upright and provoked sarcastic whistles of admiration from the soldiers gathered around the tailgate.

The sight before the boy’s eyes wrenched his gut. He watched helplessly, with no chance of comprehending, as men, women and children were unloaded like livestock from trains and lined up facing the guns of cold, expressionless soldiers. The jagged outline of tall chimneys scarred the sky, pumping out nauseating smoke. The landscape of posts, barbed wire and barrack huts was an ode to hatred and destruction. The barked orders of the guards drowned out the silent sobs of a tortured people.

Eytan expected to join the cohort of prisoners, but a German grabbed his arm and dragged him over to a group of three men in white coats, who were chatting and even swapping jokes as they smoked their cigarettes. The soldier’s heels clicked together, and he launched into an incomprehensible explanation. One of the doctors—whose stethoscopes convinced Eytan of their function—nodded toward a small stone building nearby. Eytan was whisked away. Inside the building, as he sat on a stool, his head was shaved, and a number was tattooed on his forearm. The pain was nothing, compared with the humiliation. Torn from his parents, separated from his little brother, deprived of the freedom he loved, he was now stripped of his identity, his status as a child and, worst of all, his humanity. Treated like an animal, he refused to give his persecutors the satisfaction of seeing him cry or struggle in vain and took refuge behind a wall of silence, withdrawing deep into himself.

The man in the white coat examined him thoroughly, tested his reflexes, took measurements and carefully noted everything on a brown card that he pinned to the boy’s sweater.

Ten minutes later, Eytan was escorted across the railroad tracks and loaded into a curious train composed of a locomotive and single car. Inside, about twenty children gazed at the new arrival. Most were huddled against the wooden sides of the car. A few were in tears. As soon as Eytan was aboard, the heavy door slid shut.

A long, painful journey began. Yet another.

The last one.

The children sought
a sign of affection, a hint of love, in the eyes watching them, but Eytan soon realized that love had been banished from this place. In turn, he banished the questions that assailed his mind. How? Why? The answers were no use to him. Their existence was no longer their own. An animal intended for the slaughterhouse received more consideration. Understanding was impossible. Like the reasons for the second tattoo, whose brutal and painful application resulted in fearful beatings for those who cried. All for three extra numbers! Eytan tugged at the sleeve of his sweater and knotted it with his handkerchief, the only possession that the guards, reluctant to handle snotty-nosed kids, had deigned to leave him.