Warsaw Requiem

by Bodie Thoene

  Both woman left the office and stood, stunned, in the center of the drab corridor. The sound of typewriters and voices echoed around them, but they heard nothing but the replay of Harold Weyland’s unpromising words.

  ***

  The telephone call from Holland came in to the London TENS office just as Murphy was rolling down his sleeves and searching for his hat. It had been a long day, with news breaking like a line of dominos clacking down one after another. Murphy was ready to turn the operation over the Harvey Terrill, ready to go home to Red Lion Square, to look at Elisa and the boys and think on whatever was true, whatever was noble, whatever was right, whatever was pure . . . .

  Murphy, at the suggestion of his father-in-law, had been putting that Scripture to a lot of use lately as the news leaking out of Europe grew increasingly grim. For a while, Murphy had begun to believe that there just weren’t any good things left in the world to think about. Lately he had come to see that as the darkness had gotten darker, the little pinpoints of light had gotten stronger. There were fewer of those lights, to be sure, but the harder the blackness squeezed, the more vibrant the light became.

  With that in mind, Murphy had given Timmons, the Berlin correspondent, the assignment of reporting on those bright spots in the Third Reich. Who was left in Germany? What were they doing?

  Mindful of the impossibility of getting such a story past the Nazi censors, Timmons had carried it in his mind to Holland, where he placed the trunk call to the TENS bureau chief.

  Night desk editor Harvey Terrill looked annoyed as he poked his head into Murphy’s office. “Sorry. It’s Timmons on the line from Amsterdam. Says he has to talk to you. Just you. Nobody else but you,” he said with a shrug. “Doesn’t trust me to get it right.”

  It was only the first few minutes of Terrill’s shift, but already he was edgy, Murphy thought as he picked up the receiver.

  On the far side of the English Channel, the boyish voice of Timmons sounded frantic, as usual. The kid was learning journalism the hard way, after all. He had been picked up and interrogated by the Gestapo in Germany twice already. He did not want to take a chance on another stay in Himmler’s resort.

  “Must be some story,” Murphy said, dispensing with the usual greeting.

  “Probably the last we’re going to see any of those little lights shining in Germany, Boss,” Timmons said. His voice sounded as if he were shouting through a garden hose. “This morning two thousand Christians gathered outside the rubble of New Church. Nine pastors read the names of their colleagues who are now in prison, including Pastor Karl Ibsen and Martin Niemöller. Hitler is saying publicly, “It is them or me . . .” You know what that means around here. It will be them!”

  “Let me get a copy editor. You’ve got the whole story?”

  “I watched from across the street. Not close enough to get arrested. Professor Bauchin spoke for fifteen minutes before the goons moved in and rounded everyone up. There were trucks waiting on the side streets. Nobody tried to make a run for it. Everyone was arrested. An announcement was made by the Gestapo that the German Confessional Church will transfer the use of the cathedrals to the Hitler elite guard for that body’s neo-pagan ceremonies. This is the penalty of the church’s Jewish influence and the political degenerations of Christianity.” He paused. “Those are exact quotes, Boss.”

  “They aren’t trying to hide their true purpose anymore, are they, Timmons?’

  “Don’t have to. The visible church in Germany is dead. No Bibles in the bookstores. I think we’ve just seen the last two thousand open Christians trucked off. Those lights you were looking for have all gone underground, Boss. A certain official from the German press told me that Ibsen is being held because he refuses to accept the Aryan paragraph that excludes all Jews and Jewish influence from the German church. Unless he accepts the Nazi version of Hitler’s church, they say he’s going to rot in there until he’s forgotten.”

  “Forgotten.” Murphy repeated the word as though it were the biggest threat to Karl Ibsen and the others who suffered in the same cause. Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy . . . think about such things!

  The men within the walls of Hitler’s prison camps were all of the above, Murphy reasoned, and then he added courageous to the list of things to think on as Timmons dictated the full story of the last Christian Alamo in Berlin.

  Murphy was two hours late getting home to Red Lion Square. In that time he had revised his interpretation of what Scripture meant when it said to think on these things. The apostle Paul had written those words while he was in prison, had he not?

  Men like Karl Ibsen embodied all the qualities of what was noble and right and true and just. These were the qualities the Führer wanted the world to forget; these were the principles he wanted to rot away in prison so he could continue his plan unopposed. He had promised Ibsen full restoration if only Karl would remain silent! But because he would not compromise, Karl was locked away in the darkest of Nazi holes.

  But Ibsen was not silent, Murphy realized. Behind those thick and terrible walls, his heart was still true to his God. His example rang out like a shout from the rooftop of St. Paul’s!

  Think on these things. . . .

  With that in mind, Murphy called Anna and Theo Lindheim, Helen Ibsen, and Winston Churchill. They walked together on the roof garden and looked over nighttime London to where the great dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral glistened in the spotlights like a moon rising over a mountain range.

  Where the voice of a few brave men had been silenced, the bells of ten thousand churches should toll, reminding the world to think on these things. . . .

  ***

  Allan Farrell read his morning edition of the Times as he sunned himself on a bench in Parliament Square. The headlines were all about Hitler. Troop buildups on the borders. Poland. Danzig. Editorials screamed about despots who gobbled up other people’s land like a hyena tearing the flesh of a wounded animal.

  Noble sentiments, considering their source, Allan thought. Noble and full of hypocrisy. Like English political philosophy for four hundred years, these words about the German Führer were colored by what was best only for England.

  Allan raised his eyes to the weathered stones of Westminster Abbey, where Portestant Queen Elizabeth lay buried in the same crypt with her half sister, the Catholic queen known as Bloody Mary. Catholics and Protestants had been slaughtering one another since before the reign of those two sisters. There had been a continuous and brutal war going on a long time before the strutting German Führer appeared on the scene.

  James had succeeded Queen Elizabeth as Monarch. He had commanded the publication of his Bible at the same time he ordered English and Scottish Protestants to settle the ancient land of Ireland. In the name of religion, the executions and murders had begun in the early years of the 1600s. The troubles were that old. Seasoned in the keg of bitterness, three and a half centuries had not mellowed the hatred of Irish Catholics for the Protestant usurpers in Ulster. Allan could recite his family tree from the list of those hanging by nooses on its branches. There were no monuments to those men in their own land. Ah, but here in England there were monuments everywhere to the rulers who had hanged them!

  Just across St. Margaret’s Street, Allan could make out the bronze statue of Oliver Cromwell standing on the green outside of Parliament. Now there was a blood-soaked tyrant for the ages! He had plunged England into a civil war for the sake of his religion. He was responsible for the execution of King Charles I, just a few miles from this spot! Cromwell had taken the government into his own hands and melted down the Crown Jewels to pay his armies. He had smashed the Irish revolt with an iron fist and titled himself “Lord Protector of the Realm.” And now, Cromwell, who had cried out against the graven images of the Catholic church, was himself a graven image on the green of Parliament.

  Despots had only to be victorious, Allan thought, and all their brutalit
y acquired the status of a holy crusade!

  Allan studied the statue of Cromwell for a minute, then looked back at the front-page photograph of Hitler and Mussolini. All these two modern-day dictators had to do was win; then they would also be cast in bronze to stand as Europe’s most recent graven images. They were no better or worse than all those of any nation who had gone before them. Weapons were more advanced, to be sure. Evil could be refined to an art. But evil had always existed within the lofty world of politicians and kings.

  Allan examined his hands. They were too much like his mother’s to be called strong and masculine. He had always been ashamed of his hands, had tucked them into his pockets or stood with clenched fists. But her hands had been strong. She had used them to wage war against the oppression three centuries of her kin had suffered. Why, then, were Allan’s own hands not strong? Why had Colin and the others marked him as a messenger for the cause, but not a fighter?

  He glared at Cromwell. “They have made you a saint, you bloody butcher. You’re worse off now than the men you killed, and there’s nothing to be done about it, is there?”

  Glancing away, Allan sighed. “There is one Irishman sitting across from your shrine, Lord Cromwell. They think I am too weak to do anything but shuttle messages to and fro, do they?” He raised his eyes to Big Ben as the hour hand slid into place, and the great bells began to chime noon. He let his gaze glide over the piles of sandbags that were stacked thick and deep along the facade of every public building. The Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Margaret’s Church—all looked as if they had been prepared for a flood . . . or at least a heavy German-sent storm.

  Sandbags, ditches—all in preparation for what might come from the belly of a German bomber. But what about the damage one lone fighter might do behind those barricades?

  Allan’s eyes narrowed as he spotted his German contact snapping photographs like a tourist across the square. For now their common enemy, England, had made them allies. On this one point they could agree—it would be a lovely sight if the walls of Parliament came tumbling down. Did it matter if the weapon fell from the sky or came from within?

  Allan pulled a small envelope from his coat pocket and folded it into his newspaper. Leaving the Times on the bench, he strolled away from the approaching contact. Then he paused, as if to study the statue of the Earl of Derby. The German took his place on the bench and opened the copy of the Times. It was that simple. That antiseptic. Allan did not even know what message the note contained. The secret business of his unlikely allies.

  There was nothing in the process that had given him one moment of excitement or nervousness. Room and board. Clean sheets and polished boots. Good payment. And for what?

  Allan walked slowly along the sidewalk, past the sandbags and the statue of Cromwell. He thought that perhaps the old Lord Protector was worthy of a more active opponent.

  Tucking his hands in his pockets, he quickened his pace to catch the red omnibus at the corner.

  A fluttering poster nailed to a tree caught Allan Farrell’s attention:

  REMEMBER THESE MEN!

  A list of names followed, as well as the explanation that these men were currently in prison in Nazi Germany. A great rally, a Remembrance Service, was to be held on their behalf on September 1. The bells of all the churches in England and America would ring out a message to the Nazis that those unjustly imprisoned were not forgotten.

  Allan pulled the paper from its nail and studied it carefully. At the top of the list of those scheduled to speak was Winston Churchill. Allan frowned. Like Cromwell, Winston Churchill was also an opponent of everything Allan believed in. A hypocrite of the first order. Churchill had opposed the turning over of naval bases to Ireland. He argued on behalf of keeping Ulster chained to the leg of the British Empire!

  And yet Winston Churchill was going to speak on behalf of martyrs imprisoned in Germany! The irony of it was almost too much for Allan. He folded the paper and angrily shoved it into his pocket.

  ***

  Extra sugar. Extra butter. Extra coffee. The cupboards of the Lubetkin house were overflowing with little bits of this and that brought from the members of the congregation to the rabbi’s family. All those little bits had accumulated into so much that there was room for nothing else.

  Mama stood in the pantry with her hands on her hips. “You would think we are having a bar mitzvah, Rachel!” she called over her shoulder. “So much! Go get David’s wagon. Bring it to the kitchen door. We should take most of this to the soup kitchen. Your father says. So go.”

  Rachel hated pulling David’s wagon anywhere. The left front wheel wobbled drunkenly after an unexpected collision with an elm tree in the square. Pulling the wagon was like taking a rabbit for a walk on a long leash. The wagon went its own way no matter which way Rachel tried to guide it. Why had Papa ordered that she should show up at the shul with this thing in tow? Everyone would be there. The members of the congregation who manned the staff often fed their own children there as well. They would all see Rachel in the undignified task of fighting a little red wagon up the street.

  “Can’t I go later?” She checked the kitchen clock. Later would be after dark, and after suppertime as well. The kitchen would be empty, or nearly so. No friends or schoolmates to see her—nearly a grown woman—tugging a child’s wagon!

  Mama looked irritated at the suggestion. “So look at the clock. If you can’t tell time, then look at the sky. Later will be dark. You can’t go out these days after dark. You know that. Get your brother’s wagon and quit kvetching. Your father said now take the stuff to the shul!”

  Reluctantly Rachel retrieved the offending vehicle from beneath the shade tree in the back. It was covered with pigeon droppings! Humiliation heaped upon humiliation!

  It squeaked and resisted all the way to the door. Mama heard it coming. Everyone would hear it coming. Mama was waiting behind the screen with her arms full. She gasped at the sight of the wagon. “You cannot go with it covered in bird droppings,” she scolded.

  Rachel smiled slightly in spite of the tone of Mama’s voice. Here was an unexpected reprieve. She blessed the birds who roosted in the tree! “It is a mess,” Rachel said cheerfully.

  “Soap. A little water, maybe! So wash it! And hurry, if you please!” Bang! The door slammed shut.

  Rachel grumbled and scrubbed the wagon. Red paint chipped off in big flakes beneath the brush, giving David’s wagon the appearance of something that had been pulled by refugees coming to Warsaw and other refugees going back to Cracow and still others back to Warsaw again.

  “They will think I am a refugee,” she moaned when the task was completed. She thought of the ragpickers and beggars roaming about Warsaw even now. None of them would stoop to pulling such a pitiful cart.

  “Mama, it is not dignified,” Rachel said as the last of the food was crammed between the slats, and then bundles of old clothes were placed on top.

  “Dignified!” Mama scowled at her. “Five hundred homeless arrived only yesterday in our neighborhood, and you speak of your own dignity! Your father sick on his bed is not thinking of himself! He is thinking about those down at the shul. What would he say about your dignity? I should tell him you don’t want to take our contribution to the shul because your pride would be wounded maybe?”

  After Mama’s speech about dignity, the loud squeaking of the wagon wheels was a pleasant relief. At least until Rachel reached the main street to the shul.

  The rhythm was a steady grooooan, clunk, shriek! Rachel pulled right, and the wagon rolled left. When she went around the streetlamp, the wagon stopped like a dog looking for a place to lift its leg. The thing was alive! An evil spirit seemed to have possessed it.

  “Hello, Rachel!” called Frau Potemski from her stoop. “The rabbi, your father, he is better?”

  Rachel felt her face color. “He is sending charity to the soup kitchen.”

  “They won’t want the wagon.” She laughed.

  Rachel forced her lips
to smile politely. “Good day, Frau Potemski.” The wagon lurched toward the stoop as though it wished to greet the good Frau.

  “If you’re going to have a pet, you should teach it to heel.” The moon-faced housewife gave the wagon a nudge with her toe.

  “Yes, Frau Potemski.” Rachel’s cheeks were bright red.

  She did not look to the right or the left as she struggled up the next block. Friends hailed her and asked after her father. Strangers stared at her with the same curiosity with which she had stared at the red-haired young man in Muranow Square. She looked like one of them! Old clothes bundled on top of a cart. Why had Mama not been content to only send food?

  “Well, good evening, Rachel!” It was Herr Menkes, the baker. “Running away from home?”

  Clunk. . . . shriek. . . . grooooan . . . clunk . . .

  “I am sorry, Herr Menkes, I cannot hear you! This assassin of a cart is making too much noise.” She raised her nose slightly and struggled on. “And I cannot stop to talk because I am running away from home.”

  “You won’t get far with that beast you are pulling!” he called after her. “Are you pulling it, or is it pulling you?”

  She chose to ignore the jibe of the baker. He was more filled with sarcasm than a jelly donut was full of jelly! She would think especially hard before she went into his shop next time so she could have something clever prepared to say in reply when he teased her.

  She approached the corner of the street, its curb looming up like the brink of a steep ravine. Rachel paused. The beast rolled up on her heels, then veered to the left, toward the curb. She tugged back on the handle, jerking the rusty axle around. With a loud moan, the wagon reared up on its hind wheels and then threw itself upside down!