Resistance

by Jennifer A. Nielsen

  Esther and I rolled back against the wall, away from the windows, and my pulse was still racing when Tamir ordered us to gather up our weapons. “They’ll target these windows when they return,” he said. “Let’s move below.”

  He ordered some of my team into the buildings at street level, but Esther and I were sent down into one of the many tunnels constructed beneath the streets. From here, we could secretly access small holes that allowed us to shoot from almost ground level, or to roll grenades under the feet of the marching soldiers. They wouldn’t even know where the bullet that caught them came from.

  We were barely in place when the soldiers returned again. This time, they weren’t in formation, and Tamir was right, they shot wildly at the windows, taking aim anywhere they thought we still were. In return, I fired at targets ahead of me, while Esther rolled at least three more grenades at passing troops.

  We were close enough to the Germans to hear their confused shouts. They didn’t know where to aim, or where we aimed from, resulting in orders to advance shouted out at the same time as orders to retreat or to take cover. The soldiers’ reactions were equally confused, panicked men running or diving to the ground, or standing frozen, unsure of which order was meant for them. They hadn’t been trained for this.

  Which made me smile. They’d faced down whole armies, conquered countries with Blitzkriegs on land, sea, and air. They boasted of their superiority in technology, manpower, in their very race. Yet for all of that, the Germans were not prepared for us.

  Within a half hour, the Germans retreated a second time, and shouts passed through the streets that they had left the ghetto entirely. Tamir dashed through the tunnels, asking for reports on how many of us were injured or wounded. With each response, a swell of pride rose within me.

  “We’re fine,” I called out, as all the others had.

  “Not one,” Tamir said, hope thick in his voice. “Not one of us is injured yet.”

  Yet.

  That single word remained locked in my mind. But for now, the victory was ours.

  “They’ll be back,” Esther whispered. “Twice as strong as before.”

  No, not twice as strong. The Germans would return with ten times the strength. Or more.

  Tamir and a few other senior leaders crept out onto the street. After they determined it was safe, they called for the rest of us to come out. I was nervous, remembering what had happened to those in Akiva who were out in the open when the Germans responded to the Cyganeria attack, including my friend Jakub. I was still alive because I knew how to blend into the background and when to hide. But I did want to see the effects of what we had done, knowing that I might never have another chance for it.

  The narrow street was covered with broken glass and plaster, and the shrapnel left behind from our explosives. Fallen German soldiers littered the streets. Some were dead, some wounded, uttering pleas for help from the very people they were intent on slaughtering.

  I stared at one soldier’s face, his eyes closed in death. He couldn’t have been much older than me, little more than a boy. Who was he before the war? Had he sat at Hitler’s feet, absorbing the doctrines of anti-Semitism? Had he volunteered to be here, hoping to rid the earth of everyone who looked different from him, who believed differently? Or had he been torn from a loving mother’s side, forced into this ugly war against his will, against his beliefs?

  Whoever he had been, he was no longer my enemy.

  Most of the other fighters who emerged wrapped arms around each other with cries of “Mazel tov.” Even if this was only our first scrape, it went far better than any of us could have expected.

  Then we were hushed and immediately fell silent. From outside the ghetto walls, we heard orders shouted for soldiers to come in and retrieve their injured.

  We waited, listened, and nothing happened.

  Nothing happened.

  How could that be? Those were direct orders. Where were the soldiers who’d been ordered in?

  Still there was nothing, and no one.

  Esther leaned over to me. “They’re scared. They won’t come in, because they’re afraid they won’t come back out.”

  They were right to be afraid, while we were full of confidence and pride, and feeling for the first time in years that we were no longer victims, but that we controlled our own future. I would remember this moment always, the morning I stood with my fellow resistance fighters to claim our own destiny again. Even if it wasn’t the future we wanted, this was the day I stood on my feet, faced my enemies with my own name—Chaya Lindner—and took my life back.

  Someone farther down the street called out, “Let’s get to work with the fallen soldiers. Everything that can be scavenged from their bodies must be taken.”

  Esther took a few steps back, shaking her head. “I can’t do this, Chaya. Please, let’s find another way to help.”

  I agreed. I knew that salvaging everything from them was a necessary disrespect for the dead. But Esther and I could be of value elsewhere in the ghetto.

  We headed toward Mila Street, where ZOB had its headquarters. This was where Yitzchak had been assigned, and I hoped we could join him there. I had one round of ammunition left in my gun, two Molotov cocktails, and three grenades. Despite the continuing cheers and self-congratulations behind me, I knew we’d need much more than this.

  More than we had.

  More than we could possibly get in time.

  April 19, 1943

  Warsaw Ghetto

  Esther and I found Yitzchak in a building overlooking Mila Street, inside what must have been very nice apartments at one time, and there we joined one of four groups that had been ordered to hide. They hadn’t seen much fighting yet, but I described to them our success and warned of the consequences of humiliating the Germans the way we had.

  Yitzchak was too excited about their plan to have properly heard me. With a smile of naïve enthusiasm, he said, “We’ve seen them lining up outside the gate. This is the most likely road for them to come down. When they do, our orders are to wait.”

  “Wait?” Esther asked. “No, if we allow them to get deeper into the ghetto, that’s where the civilians are. We have to keep them—”

  “Our orders are to wait.” Yitzchak put his head down as if to end the conversation, and I followed his gesture. There were many times over the past few years when it had been my job to think on my feet, to make my own decisions. This was not one of those times.

  It wasn’t long before another column of soldiers appeared, hundreds of them, mostly Ukrainian SS men and Jewish police officers, similar to what had happened early that morning. My gun was trained on the SS officers. It infuriated me to see the OD march with the enemy, traitors to our people, traitors to their own beliefs. But I couldn’t fire on them.

  “Did your father send in the OD?” a man hissed over to Esther. She shrunk behind me, and I glared at the man until he looked away.

  “He’s afraid,” I whispered to Esther. “He’s afraid and angry and he doesn’t know what to do with all that emotion. What he said wasn’t about you.”

  “It was,” she replied. “I loved my father, Chaya. I still do. But being in the Judenrat was an impossible situation. I remember at the beginning, he thought he could help the people here, and he did a lot of good. But very soon, the choices weren’t between good and bad, they were between bad and awful.”

  “A choiceless choice,” I mumbled. “There is no winning, only a decision as to how we will lose.” How many times had I faced that very problem myself?

  Esther nodded. “Exactly. Either my father cooperated with the Nazis or they’d punish his family.”

  “So he sent you away.”

  Her voice cracked. “I asked to go. I had to go. Of course I’d rather have stayed with my family, but not if I was a tool used against my people.”

  I put an arm around her, drawing her in close. “Your own choiceless choice.” And just like that, I wasn’t angry with her anymore, for lying about her past,
or about Lodz, or for any of the mistakes she’d made. I’d made many more mistakes myself and not had to pay half the price for it that she had.

  Orders were shouted to the soldiers on the street, reminding me of the need for silence and to pay attention. I looked outside again, waiting until the lines passed. But my mind became a constant zigzag between three thoughts. The first was for Yitzchak and Esther. How much I loved them. How much I wanted to protect them. I would give my life for either of them if necessary. If it would matter in the end.

  Then I thought of Akiva. Our leaders, the Draengers, could have left Poland before the war took effect, but they came back to fight for us, just as I’d come here. I missed my friends in Akiva too, Rubin, and any others who continued to fight from the forests. Those who were gone. Without their training, their example, I would not be here today. And even if I had the choice not to be here, but living in freedom a thousand kilometers from here, I’d choose to stay and fight. This was where I belonged.

  Which pulled my mind back to the present. To the rows of Jewish fighters on either side of me, each of us waiting. Each of us hoping our contribution to the fight made a difference.

  The column of soldiers passed us by entirely. Their eyes were focused directly ahead, as they’d been trained to do, but that was a mistake. We were to the side of them, and above them, and below. Nothing was ahead but a dead end.

  Literally.

  Because once they were ahead of us, with a shouted order in Yiddish, the fight began. It was mostly gunfire and a few grenades, but it took surprisingly little to scatter their lines and force a retreat.

  “That was easy,” Yitzchak said.

  Too easy. They’d be back.

  And they were, only fifteen minutes later. But this time, the advancing army was accompanied by three tanks. Again, we were ready.

  “Let’s stop them,” I whispered, holding my hand out to Esther.

  But she only grinned over at me. “This one’s mine.” She pulled a match from our matchbook, lit the rag on the outside of a fuel-filled wine bottle, and threw it into the street, smashing the bottle directly on the nearest tank. The spilled liquid immediately ignited and would have done little good, except others had the same idea. Something must have leaked inside the tank because suddenly the top hatch burst open like a popped cork. Flames shot from within the tank. The entire thing was on fire.

  “Evacuate!” someone shouted from within our bunker. “That thing’s gonna explode!”

  Esther, Yitzchak, and I grabbed what remained of our weapons and scurried to a lower floor, but we were still only halfway down the stairs when the explosion shook the walls and chunks of ceiling fell around us.

  “Now there are two tanks,” Esther said, nimbly dodging another piece of falling plaster as we ran. We followed the rest of our group into a neighboring building and were told to find new positions. Esther and I ran up to the third floor, where I hoped to see another round of explosions, but by the time we found a window, the remaining two tanks were retreating. An entire column of German soldiers had been hiding behind the tanks, but our grenades and gunfire took care of them.

  A woman at the far end of the room from me sat back against the wall, nodding as if an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. “German blood. At long last, the blood spilled in the ghettos is not from the Jews.”

  She was right, but I couldn’t cheer for that either. I wanted a world in which no blood must be spilled. A world free of hatred that made a fight such as this necessary.

  The walls rattled sharply, ending the celebration around me. We rushed to the windows, but wherever that explosion came from, it was at least a few blocks away, a reminder that success on one corner did not guarantee success elsewhere.

  “They’re in retreat!” a man shouted up from the floor below. “Wait where you are until we get further orders.”

  The same woman who spoke earlier passed around some rusk bread and we shared drinks from a few bottles of water. It was rust-colored, which couldn’t possibly be healthy, but then, I was hiding in a war zone surrounded by impassable walls and German soldiers. Dirty water was the least of my concerns.

  After an hour, Tamir came with a radio and a report from elsewhere in the ghetto.

  “The Germans have left … for now,” he said. “One of our fighters is dead, only one, which is a miracle, but still one dead.”

  I almost couldn’t believe my ears. Only one dead, when so many Germans had fallen?

  Don’t feel hope, I reminded myself. Don’t let yourself believe that this is over.

  But I did hope, and I did wonder if maybe we had a chance. I knew it was foolish, even dangerous, to dwell on what I knew to be impossible, but I couldn’t help it. What if we did make a difference here?

  The radio was switched on and tuned to the German broadcast; everyone who was not assigned to keep watch elsewhere huddled around it to listen. For those who didn’t speak German, Tamir gave the translation.

  At first he smiled. “They call us bandits. Perhaps we are.”

  I smiled too. I considered that a compliment.

  Then his face darkened. “The commander of this first wave is being replaced. That means they will return with a new strategy, and an officer determined to prove himself to his superiors.”

  Another smile now. “The new commander has rejected a call for aircraft bombers. He says it’s not necessary against vermin such as us.”

  This was good news. It meant the Germans were underestimating us, just as we underestimated them early in the war. They believed we were incapable of sustaining an attack fierce enough to require a bomber. They’d think differently before this day was over.

  Which left a pit in my stomach. Before this day was over, they would have changed their minds. They would send in a plane to bomb us, sooner or later.

  Despite what the radio said, I was sure it’d be sooner.

  April 19, 1943

  Warsaw Ghetto

  By noon, the strategy of the Germans’ new commander became clear: mass force. Our radio alerted us to his call for more troops and vehicles.

  Good. If they were here, they could not be on the front lines or tormenting innocent people in the death camps. I wanted them here.

  Esther took the news better than I expected, but I leaned over to her. “That package you were supposed to deliver. Could we use it now?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  Yitzchak leaned over to me with a wry smile. “There’s no package, you know.”

  Perhaps not, but even if there was, it was probably already too late. Esther could not have brought along anything that could save us now.

  The Germans entered the ghetto once again through the north gate, but this time, rather than marching in organized columns that were easy for us to pick apart, they came in fast, shooting, then diving for cover, then shooting and moving again. We fired back, of course, but by the time we found one man, he’d already moved on to a different place. Some of us were good shots, but many of the fighters had never held a gun before today.

  Tamir shouted for us to move to the rooftops and attics. There, we hoped to be out of reach of the German bullets, but plenty able to drop explosives on them.

  I set my gun into the makeshift holster at my side. Then Esther and I followed our group up the stairs. Once we emerged onto the rooftop, four stories high, I drew in a sharp breath. I’d never been up here before. In fact, I’d never been this high up in my entire life.

  From here, I saw much of Warsaw, and the view unnerved me. In the distance, the Polish and German neighborhoods were full of spring blossoms and children playing in a park, while mothers cradled their infants and gossiped with one another about the struggles of feeding a family with far more rations than my people were ever allowed.

  More important, I saw the gathering of German troops and tanks outside the ghetto walls: ten times the number of soldiers who had been ordered in here so far. Some were spreading out across the city to quell
any further uprisings before they started.

  “They must be afraid of the violence spreading,” Esther whispered.

  “Why?” I asked. “Do they really think those people would skip their midday tea to help save lives?”

  “I need more ammunition,” a man nearby called out. “Who has extra?”

  No one responded. No one had extra. I had only three or four shots left in my gun and had to conserve them for now. Between Esther, Yitzchak, and me, we had just five grenades left. More supplies remained in our bunker, but we’d have to break through a hundred or more enemy soldiers to get there.

  By four o’clock in the afternoon, another mass of troops began to roll in, far greater than anything we’d seen yet. From our count on the rooftops, there were several more tanks and armored cars, our estimation of two thousand SS men, two battalions of German police, as many as four hundred Polish police, and perhaps other forces as well. We’d also begun to see some signs of fighting outside the ghetto, individual Poles who were finally taking their own opportunity to fight.

  But as always, it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

  We dropped grenades, Molotov cocktails, and for that matter, anything we could find that might create trouble for the Germans below. The bulk of the fighting moved north of us, where another ZOB cell was firing at the Germans with a machine gun they’d acquired. It represented the fourth battle of the day in our area alone. I wished I knew what was happening elsewhere in the ghetto.

  “Leave the rooftop!” Tamir called to our group, his tone taking on a sudden urgency. “We’ve got to move deeper into the ghetto. Now!”

  “Why?”

  Even before the question left my mouth, I got my answer. From our vantage point, a single airplane crossed the horizon. A bomber.

  They had called in a bomber.

  I knew they would, but I didn’t expect it today. The order would have come from the same commander who only this morning dismissed our threat as a mild skirmish. Now he’d seen what we could do.