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“I agree,” Mordechai said. “Bertha, that’s wonderful. If you’re not right, you deserve to be.” He frowned after he said that, working it through to make sure he’d really given her the compliment he’d intended. To his relief, he decided he had.
She smiled back at him. When she smiled, she wasn’t plain and anonymous any more. She still wasn’t pretty, not in any ordinary sense of the word, but her smile gave her an odd kind of beauty. She quickly sobered. “We’ll need to have fighters along, not just diggers,” she said. “If we do find this hideous thing, people are going to want to take it away from us. As far as that goes, Lizards are people here.”
“You’re right again,” Anielewicz said. “Draining the nerve gas out of the Nazi bomb made us dangerous nuisances. If we have this bomb, we won’t be nuisances. We’ll have real power.”
“Not while it sits in a hole in the ground,” Gruver said. “As long as it’s there, the most we can do is blow ourselves up with our enemies. That’s better than Masada, but it’s not good. It’s not good enough. If we can get the bomb out and put it where we want it, now-that’s good. For us, anyhow.”
“Yes,” Mordechai breathed. Visions of might floated through his head-hurting the Lizards and getting the Nazis blamed for it, smuggling the bomb into Germany and taking real revenge for what theReich had done to the Jews of Poland. Reality intervened, as reality has a way of doing. “There’s only the one bomb-if there’s any bomb there at all. We have to find it, and we have to get it out of the ground if it’s there-you’re right on both counts, Solomon-before we can even think about what to do with it.”
“If we go with half the fighters in the ghetto, other people will know we’re after something, even if they don’t know what,” Gruver said. “We don’t want that, do we? Find it first, then see if we can get it out without raising a fuss. If we can’t-” He shrugged.
“We’ll walk through the cemetery and the ghetto field,” Anielewicz declared-if he was commander here, hewould command. “If we find something, then we figure out what to do next. And if we don’t find anything”-he too shrugged, wryly-“then we figure out what to do next.”
“And when someone asks us what we’re doing there, what do we tell him?” Gruver asked. He was good at finding problems, not so good at solutions.
It was a good question. Anielewicz scratched his head. They had to say something, and something both innocuous and convincing. Bertha Fleishman said, “We can tell people we’re looking for areas where no one is buried, so we can dig in those places first in case we have to fight inside the city.”
Anielewicz chewed on that, then nodded, as did Solomon Gruver. Mordechai said, “It’s better than anything I could have come up with. It might not even be a bad idea for us to do that one of these days, though there are so many graves there I’d bet there isn’t much open space to be had.”
“Too many graves,” Bertha said quietly. Both men nodded again.
The cemetery and the ghetto field next to it lay in the northeastern corner of the Jewish district of Lodz. The fire station on Lutomierska Street was in the southwest, two, maybe two and a half kilometers away. It started to drizzle as Mordechai, Bertha, and Solomon Gruver tramped across the ghetto. Anielewicz looked gratefully up at the heavens; the rain would give them more privacy than they might have had otherwise.
A white-bearded rabbi chanted the burial service over a body wrapped in a sheet; wood for coffins had long since become a luxury. Behind him, amid a small crowd of mourners, stood a stooped man with both hands pressed up to his face to hide his sobs. Was it his wife going into the increasingly muddy ground? Mordechai would never know.
He and his companions paced among the headstones-some straight, some tilting drunkenly-looking for freshly turned earth. Some of the grass in the cemetery was knee high; it had been poorly tended ever since the Germans first took Lodz, almost five years before.
“Would it fit in an ordinary grave?” Gruver asked, pausing before one that couldn’t have been more than a week old.
“I don’t know,” Anielewicz answered. He paused. “No. Maybe I do. I’ve seen regular bombs the size of a man. Airplanes can carry those. What the Germans have has to be bigger.”
“We’re wasting our time here, then,” the fireman said. “We should go down to the ghetto field, where the mass graves are.”
“No,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Where the bomb is-that doesn’t have to look like a grave, you know. They could have made it seem as if they’d repaired the sewer pipes or something of that sort.”
Gruver scratched at his chin, then finally nodded. “You’re right”
An old man in a long black coat sat by one of the graves, a battered fedora pulled down low over his face against the drizzle. He closed the prayerbook he’d been reading and put it in his pocket. When Mordechai and his friends went by, the fellow nodded but did not speak.
A walk through the cemetery didn’t show any new excavations of any sort bigger than ordinary graves. Gruver had an I-told-you-so look in his eye as he, Mordechai, and Bertha headed south into the ghetto field.
Grave markers got fewer there, and many of them, as Solomon Gruver had said, marked many corpses thrown into one pit: men, women, and children dead of typhus, of tuberculosis, of starvation, perhaps of broken hearts. Grass grew on a lot of those mounds, too. Things were not so desperate now. With the Nazis gone, times had improved all the way up to hard, and burials were by ones, not by companies at a time.
Bertha paused in front of one of the large interments: the board that was all the marker the poor souls down there would ever get had fallen over. When she stooped to straighten it, she frowned. “What’s this?” she said.
Mordechai couldn’t see what “this” was till he came close. When he did, he whistled softly under his breath. A wire whose insulator was the color of old wood ran the length of the board, held to it by a couple of nails pounded in and bent over. The nails were rusted, so they didn’t stand out. The wire stopped at the top of the memorial board, but kept going from the bottom. There, it disappeared into the ground.
“Wireless aerial,” he muttered, and yanked at it. It didn’t want to come out. He pulled with all his strength. The wire snapped, sending him stumbling backwards. He flailed his arms to keep from falling.“Something’s under there that doesn’t belong,” he said.
“Can’t be,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “The ground’s not torn up the way it… ” His voice trailed away. He got down on his hands and knees, heedless of what the wet grass would do to his trousers. “Will you look at this?” he said in tones of wonder.
Mordechai Anielewicz got down beside him. He whistled again. “The grass has been cut out in chunks of sod and then replaced,” he said, running his hand along one of the joins. If it had rained harder and melted the mud, that would have been impossible to notice. In genuine admiration, Anielewicz murmured, “They made a jigsaw puzzle and put it back together here when they were done.”
“Where’s the dirt?” Gruver demanded, as if Anielewicz had stolen it himself. “I don’t care if they didn’t bury the thing deep
, they were going to have some left over-and they would have spilled it to either side of the grave as they were digging.”
“Not if they set canvas down first and tossed the spoil onto that,” Mordechai said. Gruver stared at him. He went on, “You have no idea how thorough the Nazis can be when they do something like this. Look at the way they camouflaged their antenna wire. They don’t take chances on having something this important spotted.”
“If the board hadn’t fallen over-” Bertha Fleishman said in a dazed voice.
“I’ll bet it was like that when the SS bastards got here,” Anielewicz told her. “If you hadn’t had the keen eyes to notice the aerial-” He made silent clapping motions and smiled at her. She smiled back. She really was quite extraordinary when she did that, he thought.
“Where’s the dirt?” Solomon Gruver repeated, intent on his own concerns and not noticing the byplay between his comrades. “What did they do with it? They couldn’t have put it all back.”
“You want me to guess?” Mordechai asked. At the fireman’s nod, he went on, “If I were running the operation, I would have loaded it onto the wagon they used to bring in the bomb and hauled it away. Throw canvas over it and nobody would think twice.”
“I think you’re right. I think that’s just what they did.” Bertha Fleishman looked over to the detached wire. “The bomb can’t go off now?”
“I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or, anyhow, they can’t set it off by wireless now, which is good enough for us. If they hadn’t needed the aerial, they wouldn’t have put it there.”
“Thank God,” she said.
“So,” Gruver said, sounding as if he still didn’t believe it. “We have a bomb of our own now?”
“If we can figure out how to fire it,” Anielewicz said. “If we can get it out of here without the Lizards’ noticing. If we can move it so that if, God forbid, we have to, we can fire it without blowing ourselves right out of this world. If we can do all that, we have a bomb of our own now.”
