by Peter Albano
“I’ve heard. There has been scuttlebutt.”
Roosevelt chuckled. “Naturally. That’s the navy.” He put the holder to his lips, inhaled, and leaned back luxuriously as the smoke filled his lungs. He exhaled slowly as if he were enjoying every breath of carbon monoxide and speck of hot ash. “What you hear here stays here.”
Rodney smiled. “Of course, sir. We’ve already made that agreement—not that it was necessary, Mr. President.”
“Of course.” The eyes caught Rodney and held him. “I enjoy talking with you, Lieutenant. You’re from the line, the trenches in a way, with a refreshing viewpoint. I rarely have an opportunity to talk with someone like you. My advisers are lost in grand strategy, world-shaking economic decisions, for the most part. It’s interesting to meet a man who has your perspectives.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The president sighed. “It’s time for a bite. Would you care to join me for dinner?”
“Thank you, sir. But I’ve got to return to New York—to be with my family.” He glanced at his watch. “With a little luck I can catch the twenty-one hundred train.”
Roosevelt nodded and placed his cigarette in a brimming ashtray. Rodney stood and walked to the desk. The handclasp was firm and forceful. “I want to see you again, Lieutenant.”
“I’d be honored, sir.”
Roosevelt scribbled a number on a sheet of paper and tore it from a pad. “This is a confidential number. I want you to have it. You can always get through to Missy and if I’m here I’ll talk with you.” He handed the sheet to Rodney.
“I’m honored, sir.” Rodney felt sudden confusion. “Is there anything in particular. . .”
The president interrupted him with a wave. “No. You’re not a spy—a confidential agent. You’re smart and perceptive. If you see something in your service that you feel the President of the United States should be informed about, use that number. Consider yourself my man in the field, and that’s all.”
“Thank you, sir,” Rodney said, pocketing the sheet of paper.
“I enjoyed our conversation, Lieutenant. I may send for you again.”
“I’m at your disposal, Mr. President.”
“Here are your orders,” Roosevelt said, extending a long brown envelope. “Cut by the secretary of the navy and handed to you by the President of the United States.”
“No one, absolutely no one, will ever believe this,” Rodney said, pocketing the envelope.
The president grinned broadly. “I know. But, someday, when you have grandchildren, tell them anyway. They’ll believe you.”
“Until age ten, sir.”
Roosevelt nodded. There was a warm glow in his eyes. “I know. I have two granddaughters. They still believe me.” He narrowed his eyes. “Before you leave, I’d like to know if there is anything you’d like to ask me?”
Rodney thought for a moment and a dark memory clouded his mind. He spoke earnestly, “Yes. I have a sister in Warsaw. She married a Jew.” Rodney heard the president catch his breath. “Have you heard anything—anything at all I haven’t found in the papers?”
Roosevelt shook his head. “Only that all Jews in the Baltic states have been ordered to wear the Star of David and mass relocations are going on.”
“Pogroms?”
The president bit his lower lip. “British Intelligence has picked up rumors of some massacres in Poland and Russia.”
“No!” Rodney cried in an agonized voice.
“Rumors, Lieutenant, rumors,” Roosevelt pleaded. “All kinds of wild stories are coming out of Russia. This information came from Swedish sources. They reported a massacre of Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. One report puts the date of the killings in the spring of ‘forty. But that seems impossible. They don’t even know who to blame, the Russians or the Germans. In any event, we have no confirmation of any of this. I really can’t believe any of it is true.”
“I understand, sir,” Rodney said, feeling some relief. He grasped the firm hand again and left the room.
VI
The Warsaw Ghetto
July, 1941
By the end of 1940, the Germans had crammed all of the Jews of Warsaw into a deadly pen two and a half miles long and a mile wide. Surrounded by a ten-foot-high brick wall topped with barbed wire and imbedded glass splinters, the ghetto was shaped like a flat-headed mushroom. In all, the ghetto covered almost nine hundred acres of slums in the northern section of the city. There were twelve exits guarded by “Polish Blues” (police) and by vicious Lithuanians. Most of the solid blocks of tenements were two to six stories high and dated to the nineteenth century. Plumbing was primitive or nonexistent, sanitary conditions appalling. Into this foul, festering pressure cooker designed to hold 150,000 residents, nearly a half-million Jews were jammed.
They squeezed into every corner of every room, averaging a dozen to each room. They overflowed into the halls and stairwells. Some slept in courtyards, others on sidewalks. Maggoty potato soup made with straw, twenty grams of bread, an ounce or two of groats, a tiny portion of condensed milk, were the principal daily fare. Seldom did a resident consume more than three hundred calories in a single day—far below what a human being needed. Starvation and disease were endemic. Each morning corpses littered the sidewalks and gutters. “Death squads” picked them up and carted them to fields in the northeast section where they were buried in mass graves.
Oppressed people learn the art of survival. House committees were established in each building to help the poorest. Gardens were cultivated in every patch of ground, even on balconies and roofs. Risking instant execution, children crawled through sewer pipes and tiny breaches in the wall to the “Aryan side” to trade family possessions and jewels for food. Professional smuggling proliferated, Jews and Poles alike engaging in highly organized operations that involved bribed guards and corrupt German officials. They ruthlessly exploited their customers while living lavishly among the starving. However, most people began to eat more than their meager daily allotment, thwarting the Nazi effort to destroy ghetto morale, the will to survive. Still, starving skeletons and bloated children staggered through the streets and the death squads collected their harvest each morning.
Josef Lipiski lived here, worked here, and was convinced that he would die here. With his wife, Regina, and year-old daughter. Rose, he lived on the first floor of an old three-story brick building in the heart of the ghetto. Located at the corner of Leszno and Karmelicka streets, the building was a block west of the Thomaka Synagogue. Because Josef had completed his premedical training in the United States, he was proclaimed a “physician” and placed in charge of the “Leszno Hospital” after the old doctor, Abraham Chernowitz, dropped dead during a cesarean section he was forced to perform without anesthesia. The patient and baby soon followed the doctor. They were all thrown into a mass grave the next day.
Josef Lipiski was an impressive man. The son of Warsaw’s most respected tailor, he was tall and slenderized by poor nutrition, giving the impression of towering height far beyond his six feet. The breadth of his shoulders under his threadbare shirts was wide and powerful. His hair was very dark and uneven in color—appearing as if lampblack had been combed through strands the color of ocher. Very thick and unevenly cut, he wore it brushed back from a wide, unlined forehead. The head was broad at the temples, features large, the bones of his jaw and cheeks and forehead weighty and massive-looking as if they had been fashioned by a stonemason. His most impressive aspect was his eyes. Big and brown, they were set in deep sockets where they glowed with a penetrating perception that proclaimed to all that this was a man of great intelligence and character—a man to be reckoned with.
The hospital was located on street level in a storefront of what had been a bakery. The surgery, where Chernowitz and his patient had died, was in the shop itself. The ward of sixteen lice-ridden straw mattresses occ
upied the workroom and storage area. Often, three people crowded each mattress. To call the facility a hospital was a macabre joke. Usually, there were no linens. Most of the patients suffered from malnutrition or typhus or both. They came with their own blankets and usually died under them. There were three other “hospitals” in the ghetto. All three were staffed by older, experienced physicians. However, the conditions were the same and the death rates astronomical. Each morning, bodies were carried from all four facilities and stacked on the sidewalks for the death squads.
The hospital brought Josef several advantages—he had his own flat behind the bakery and enough rations to keep his family alive. Also, because of the increased rations, he had a large staff of volunteers who tended the patients around the clock.
In their three-room flat, the Lipiskis actually found privacy—a rare commodity, indeed. The living area had a battered couch, two chairs, a lamp, and a large bookcase filled with Chernowitz’s old medical books and journals. Two packing cases served as tables. The kitchen was a small alcove with a two-burner stove, cutting block, and wooden sink. The baby slept on a straw mattress in the corner while Josef and Regina’s bed was in a small curtained area. At first, with his father, Janus, mother, Leja, and teenage sister, Sara, living in the apartment, too, conditions were crowded. However, in May, his parents and Sara had been sent with a work party of nearly two thousand other Jews to help build a new camp at a small town on the Bug River called Treblinka. The Germans claimed Treblinka was to be a model work camp with abundant recreational and cultural facilities. Janus and Leja had volunteered while Josef remained as an assistant to Doctor Chernowitz.
Usually, in the evenings, Josef found time to play with Rose, who could already walk and was learning her first words. These few moments were the only moments of joy he could find in his existence. There had been no letters from Treblinka. In fact, no one had received a single letter from members of the work party. However, in the evenings, playing with his daughter, Josef could put the terrible worries aside for a few moments. At these times, he could hold his daughter and watch his wife as she cleared the table and washed the dishes. He still marveled at Regina’s beauty.
Strongly resembling her mother, Brenda Hargreaves, Regina Lipiski possessed the elegant grace of an orchid in full bloom. Josef loved everything about her. Like her mother, her hair was auburn and long and she wore it like a cloud flickering with sunbeams. Her skin was jade, eyes large and dark, hinting at Celtic origins in the deep past. Josef guessed this came from her British father. Captain Reginald Hargreaves, after whom she was named. He loved Regina’s long, slender neck, vaulted cheekbones, soft, sensuous lips cut in perfect sweeps like the wings of a butterfly. He loved her large silky white breasts, narrow waist, and hips that flared like the curve of an Egyptian vase. He was glad there was no resemblance to her grandmother, Ellen Ashcroft, a bigot who hated “Wops,” “Spies,” “Kikes,” and every other ethnic group not descended from English stock.
Ellen was typical of all the other bigots he had met and learned to loathe in America. He found them all hypocrites who stridently espoused their patriotism and the Bill of Rights, and then excluded Jews and other “undesirable foreigners” from their neighborhoods, clubs, schools, and even their part of the bus. At least, in Poland, a Jew knew he was hated, his oppressors wearing their hatred on their sleeves as boldly as the yellow Star of David the children of Israel were forced to wear. Nothing was hidden, there was no hypocrisy, it was hate and be hated.
Eyeing his wife, he could not wait for the baby’s playtime to end—for the moment he and Regina could move to the curtained alcove in the corner where he could find her hot, naked body and lose himself in her and for a few moments forget the anguish of their existence. But she did not belong here. There was a good chance she could escape this hell. He pushed aside the warm thoughts and opened an old argument.
“You’ve got to leave, Regina,” he said. “You’re a Gentile—we should try to get you out—find refuge with an Aryan family. There are some good goyim on the other side. Maybe, even send you to Switzerland and back to the States.”
She whirled, a half-dried dish in her hands. “No! Leave you—the baby? She’s no Gentile. How could she get out? What Aryan family would risk sheltering a Jew baby?”
“There are some and you have a passport.”
“Ha! Do you really think it would matter to the Germans? They’ve picked up hundreds of counterfeit passports. Or maybe, all passports are automatically considered counterfeit to them. No! I’ll stay regardless of what you say or do.”
He felt anger rising. He opened a hideous wound. “Maybe the SS (Schutzstaffel—Protection Detachment) will fumigate this building the way they did Number Seventeen, Gensia Street.” He heard her gasp and she stopped as if frozen. The memory of 157 men, women, and children shot to death because the Germans claimed they were “filthy with typhus, fleas, and lice, and a menace to the community”’ sent a cold tremor through the room.
Her eyes flared with cold blue light and her voice was deep, “If it comes to that—ever comes to that—I’ll meet it with you and our baby.”
Josef sighed and sagged back hopelessly, holding Rose very close. She felt thin. Terribly thin. He placed the squirming baby on the floor, shrugged resignedly, and moved to a new subject. “We haven’t had a single letter or package from your family for months.”
“I know, Josef. The Germans steal everything and you know it. No one is getting mail anymore.”
Before he could answer, there was a knock on the door. They looked at each other anxiously. But the knock was soft, not the fearful pounding of the SS or Polish Blues. Regina opened the door cautiously.
Jan Tyranowski entered. The newcorner strode across the room like a sergeant about to shout orders to his platoon. And, indeed, he had been a sergeant with Company A of the Bozny Mounted Brigade until his unit made a suicidal charge against a column of German tanks near Lodz. He was one of three survivors of his company. A big man, he still appeared muscular despite the work of two years of malnutrition. Clean-shaven with blond hair and blue-green eyes, he was very un-Jewish in appearance. A talented violinist, he occupied the first chair in the ghetto’s fine symphony orchestra.
Jan’s father, a concert pianist and professor of music at the university at Poznan, had been taken by the Russians in 1939 while lecturing at Brest-Litovsk. He disappeared with thousands of others in the Katyn forest. There were black rumors of a horrible massacre of tens of thousands of officers, teachers, and intellectuals. Jan’s mother had died of exposure when the new governor general of Poland, an infamous Jew-hater named Hans Frank, had decided to enforce a policy of Judenrein (purging of the Jews). Hundreds of thousands of Jews were routed from rural communities and concentrated in ghettos in the larger cities. Jan’s mother was packed into an open railroad wagon in Poznan and transported to Warsaw in the terrible winter of 1939–40. Whole trainloads froze to death. Only four people of the sixty crammed into her wagon survived. The rest were thrown into an open pit just north of the Umschlagplatz—the great square at the northern edge of the Warsaw ghetto where a railhead had been built. Jan had been in the work detail that had unloaded the wagon and he carried his mother’s stiff corpse to the pit.
Jan Tyranowski hated both the Germans and Russians with equal venom. He was Josefs best friend.
“There’s a meeting tonight?” Regina asked, gesturing to a chair.
Jan nodded agreement and remained standing. “Yes. The prayer group.”
“But you usually pray on Monday and Thursday nights,” Regina insisted, naming the traditional market days and evenings for prayer.
Jan nodded his shaggy head like a big bear. “True. But we’re trying out a new cantor. We need the whole group.”
Josef knew something was up. He guessed it was not a prayer meeting at all. He suspected Jan wanted him to attend a meeting of the Kosciuskos, a new, secret resistance
group Jan was forming. He had given it the name of Thaddeus Kosciusko. A famous Jewish fighter, Kosciusko had died with his entire unit defending Warsaw against a Prussian army in the eighteenth century.
“We need you to make our minyan (ten),’’ Jan said, turning to Josef.
The reference to the all-male group aged thirteen and above required by Jewish law to form a quorum for prayer brought an angry mask to Regina’s face. “Can’t you get someone else to make your minyan, Josef is working himself to death. He’s on the Judenrat (Jewish Council) in charge of food, apartments. . .” She slapped her head. “And he’s on the Education Committee, teaches the Torah, the Talmud. . .”
“Regina,” Josef said, interrupting. “They can kill us, but our religion must live on or there will be no Jews. Our children must learn the legal part of the Bible and Talmudic law.”
Regina spoke with an impatient wave of her hand, opening another old argument, “And celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Simchas Torah, Passover. . .”
“Yes! Yes!” Josef said, face flushed. “And thirteen-year-old boys must celebrate their Bar Mitzvah.”
“Even if they—you are killed for it.”
“That’s how it’s been since the destruction of the Second Temple and the Diaspora. We’ve been over this before.”
Regina slapped the sink. “I know the damned history. Must you die for it? It’s been going on for two thousand years.” She waved at the baby. “All of us die for it?”
Josef looked at Jan who stared back silently. He turned back to his wife. “We are Jews and the children of Abraham. Like it or not we have inherited our past. Our lives would have no meaning without our law.” He thumped the top of a packing crate for emphasis, “And you know it, Regina.”
Regina was not finished. She stabbed a finger toward the front of the store. “You’re working yourself to death in the hospital, you belong to a half-dozen committees and councils. You teach the Torah and the Germans would kill you for it. You need your rest and get none.” She brushed an errant strand of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. “The SS won’t have to kill you. You’ll do it for them.” She turned away, shoulders shaking. Quickly Josef walked to her, took her in his arms. She turned away, but he held her and kissed her cheek.
