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No road signs warned him he was coming into Widawa. For one thing, Polish roads had never been well marked. For another, Widawa wasn’t a town important enough to require much in the way of marking. And, for a third, the war had been here before him. If there had been signs, they weren’t upright any more. A lot of trees in the forest just north of Widawa weren’t upright any more.
When the road curved around the forest and gave him his first glimpse of the town, he saw that a lot of the houses in it weren’t upright any more, either. His mouth tightened. He’d seen a lot of ruins in the first round of fighting and now in this one. Another set wouldn’t have been so much out of the ordinary-except that these might hold the bodies of his wife and children.
A burnt-out German panzer and an equally burnt-out Lizard landcruiser sprawled in death a few meters apart, just outside of town. Had they killed each other, or had some different fate befallen them? Mordechai knew he would never know. He pedaled past them into Widawa.
People on the street hardly bothered to look up at him. What was one more middle-aged bicycle rider with a rifle slung on his back? They’d surely seen a surfeit of those already. He put a foot down and used a boot heel for a brake. Nodding to an old woman with a head scarf who wore a long black dress, he asked, “Granny, who knows about the refugees who came in from Lodz?”
She eyed him. He spoke Polish notable only for a Warsaw accent. He looked like a Pole, being fair-skinned and light-eyed. But the old woman said, “Well, Jew, you’d best ask Father Wladyslaw about that. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything.” She went on her way as if he didn’t exist.
Anielewicz sighed. Some people had a radar better than anything electronic in the Lizards’ arsenal. He’d seen that before. “Thanks,” he called after her, but she might as well not have heard.
A couple of shells had hit the church. Workmen were busy repairing it. Mordechai shrugged at that, but didn’t sigh. Jews would have fixed up a synagogue before they worried about their houses, too. “Is the priest in?” Mordechai asked a carpenter hammering nails into a board.
The man nodded and shifted his cigarette to the corner of his mouth so he could talk more readily. “Yeah, he’s there. What do you want to talk to him about?”
“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Anielewicz answered. “They came here out of Lodz not long before the Germans invaded.”
“Ah.” The cigarette twitched. “You a Jew?”
At least he asked, instead of showing he could tell. “Yes,” Mordechai said. The other fellow had a hammer. He had a rifle. “Don’t you like that?”
“Don’t care one way or the other,” the carpenter answered. “But you’re right-you’d better talk to the father.” He gestured with the hammer toward the doorway. As Mordechai walked over to it, the Pole started driving nails again.
Inside the church, Father Wladyslaw was pounding away with a hammer, too, repairing the front row of pews. He was a young man, and startlingly handsome in a tall, blond way. If his politics had fit, the Nazis would have scooped him into the SS without a second thought. With all the noise, he didn’t notice Mordechai for a bit. When he did, his smile was friendly enough. “Oh, hello,” he said, getting to his feet and brushing sawdust off his cassock. “What can I do for you today?”
“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Mordechai said again, and gave his name.
Father Wladyslaw’s eyebrows flew upward. “The famous fighting leader!” he exclaimed. “Your kin would have been some who came out of Lodz.”
“That’s right,” Mordechai said. “People in town tell me you’d know about them if anybody does. Are they alive?” There. The question was out.
But he got no sure answer for it, for the priest replied, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know. The Germans overran us twice, and kidnapped people each time they retreated. Some were Jews. Some were Poles who’d lived here for generations uncounted. I’m not even sure why, but who can tell with Germans?”
“They’ve run out of Jews in Germany,” Anielewicz said bitterly. “They need some fresh people to keep the gas chambers and the ovens busy.”
“You may well be right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish I could give you more definite news of your loved ones, but I fear I can’t. You’ll have to go inquire among the refugees who are still here. I pray your family is among them.”
“Thank you, Father,” Mordechai said; the priest seemed a decent fellow. Then he added several choice comments about the Nazis. He was ashamed of himself as soon as they were out of his mouth, which was, of course, much too late. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Father Wladyslaw told him. “If you think I haven’t called them worse than that, you’re wrong.”
“They’re supposed to have published a list of the people they took. They’re supposed to have already released those people,” Anielewicz said. “And they have published it, and they have turned a few people loose. But nobody believes that list is everybody, or even close to everybody.”
“Your family is not on it?” the priest asked.
“If they were, I wouldn’t be here,” Mordechai answered. “Thanks for your help, Father. I won’t take up any more of your time. The refugee tents are on the south edge of town?”
“That’s right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish you luck there, either in finding them or in learning of them.” Nodding, Anielewicz walked out of the church. The priest started hammering again even before he’d left.
The tents and huts in which the refugees were staying looked even shabbier than the town of Widawa. The fighting had smashed them up, too, and they’d been less prepossessing to begin with. A sharp stink assailed Mordechai’s nose. He wouldn’t have let his fighting men pay sanitation so little heed.
Poles and Jews spilled out into the spaces between tents to see who the newcomer was. Anielewicz got the notion the people of Widawa would just as soon they all disappeared.
But with Lodz radioactive rubble, a lot of them had nowhere to go. He stared this way and that. He didn’t see his family. He did spot someone he knew. “Rabinowicz! Are Bertha and the children here?”
“Were they ever here?” the other Jew answered. “News to me if they were. But I’ve only been here a couple days myself.”
“Wonderful,” Mordechai muttered. He looked around again. He’d thought a good many Jews had come from Lodz to Widawa, but Rabinowicz’s was the only face he recognized. What had happened to the Jews who were here, then? Were they dead? Were all they hauled off to the Reich for a fate that couldn’t possibly be good? He asked some of the Poles, and got a different answer from each of them.
“Damn Nazis took ’em away,” a woman said.
“Not everybody,” a man disagreed. “Some got taken away, yes, but some got shot right here and some ran off.”
“Nobody got shot right here,” another man insisted. “The Germans said they were gonna, but they never did.”
“Does anybody know if Bertha and Miriam and David and Heinrich Anielewicz got away safe, or if they got taken back to Germany?” Mordechai asked.
Nobody knew. Any which way, people were too busy arguing over what had happened to be very interested in giving details. The two men who’d disagreed went nose to nose with each other, both of them shouting at the tops of their lungs. Mordechai wanted to knock their heads together. That might have let in some sense. He couldn’t think of anything else that would.
He lacked the energy to treat the two loud fools as they deserved. Instead, he turned away, sick at heart. His wife and children were either carried off to Germany or dead: a bad choice or a worse one. He would have to beard the Nazis in their den to find out. He’d need help from the Lizards there, but he thought they would give him the paperwork and help he’d require. They despised the German ruling party, too.
