Suddenly Vitka changed tack. “You’re right. I am a Jew and a partisan. That is why you should let me go.” She explained that the Nazis were losing, and whoever killed her would soon be killed himself. Plus, many policemen worked for the partisans. At Gestapo headquarters, one of the police took her to the side entrance. He shoved her papers in her hand, told her never to cross that bridge again, and added that he hoped one day to meet her commander.
When Vitka came back to camp, after a black-market purchase of medication and an episode of hiding in a haystack that was searched with a pitchfork, inches from her head, she declared that she’d completed her last mission. “It is a miracle that I made it back,” she said. “How often can a person depend on miracles?”
*
It turns out, not that often. Some miracles are little more than mirages.
A few days after the second group left B?dzin to join the partisans, one of the participants, Isaac from The Young Guard, returned. His face was barely recognizable, his clothes were torn, he shook with terror, hardly able to walk. Renia was stunned.
He told them what had happened on that hot June day:
“We left the ghetto, removed our Jewish patches, and once we saw the first trees, became excited, took out our weapons, our dreams of killing Germans about to come true. . . . After six hours of walking, as it turned to night, Socha told us we were no longer in danger of being caught by the Germans and that we could safely sit down and eat supper. He gave us water as we rejoiced, elated that we’d escaped the horrid ghetto. He told us to rest for a moment before we continued on our hike, and went to check on our location.
“Suddenly we were surrounded. Military men on horses. They started shooting wildly. I’d been sitting under a bush, so I fell but wasn’t injured. I managed to stay alive. But the Nazis killed everyone else. Everyone. Then they took out their flashlights and searched the corpses, robbing them of whatever they had in their pockets. I hid under the shrubbery, lying motionless. One German lifted my leg, satisfied I’d been murdered. After they left, I crawled out of my spot and ran.”
The B?dzin resistance could not believe his words.
It had all been a ruse. They’d been sold out by Socha, whom they’d trusted. Even the man’s apartment with the crying babies was fake. For all their own efforts at disguise, the ZOB hadn’t recognized their enemy’s charade.
Their best people, dead. Some during the liquidation, and now this, twenty-five souls lost in the two groups. There were hardly enough people left to fight.
“The news stunned us,” Renia later wrote. “We are failing in everything we do.”
Marek wanted to kill himself. Mad with remorse, he slipped out of the ghetto. No one saw him leave.
Adding to the pain of this betrayal was Chajka’s loss. The comrades did not know that, a while earlier, Chajka and David had been secretly married by a rabbi. David had been offered papers to leave Poland but would not go. Promoted to commander, he’d insisted on fighting alongside the boys he trained and had taken some with him into the forest with Socha. “He did not sleep, but forged and created,” Chajka described. “Omnipresent, he dreamed of action.” At least, she consoled herself, he’d had no time to suffer, no time to think.
Now Chajka was a widow, in despair, boiling with anger. More vengeful than ever.
Chapter 20
Melinas, Money, and Rescue
Renia and Vladka
JULY 1943
Weeks after the deadly partisan fiasco, the head of the B?dzin Judenrat was arrested. Renia knew what that meant: the final expulsion was coming. The end of the ghetto. The end of them.
The kibbutz had to prepare.
But there was discord. Most of the group no longer dreamed of a grand battle. So many potential fighters had died already. It was time to run. Chajka and comrade Rivka Moscovitch, however, refused to leave, still insisting on revolt. Fight or flight.