“Go to the kitchen building,” he whispered.
“Come with me.”
“No,” he insisted. “Go alone.”
Chajka went.
A soldier stood in front of the door.
He let her in.
*
Aliza, Pesa, Chawka, the Warsaw fighter, and Sarah—Renia’s sister—joined Chajka in the kitchen. They told the militia to go get Hershel. Then the commander arrived. Chajka knew she’d be sent back because of her face. Aliza went to hide. But Chajka didn’t. She couldn’t take it anymore.
The commander looked at Chajka for a long time, then shook his head. “New faces,” he said. “But [okay], they should stay.”
At ten o’clock, the transports left for Auschwitz. Hershel left with them. “How odd,” Chajka reflected later. “A two-minute walk from the barrack to the kitchen has saved me for now from Auschwitz, from death. How strange this whole life of ours is!”
*
Meir told Renia that after the others were taken outside the bunker, he and Nacha hid under the cots for several days before escaping to this Polish mechanic’s house. “We have a little bit of money,” he said. “But what will happen when it runs out?” They knew that a couple of Young Guard girls were still in B?dzin, disguised as Gentiles. The Schulmans didn’t know anything else and did not know about those who’d crossed to the kitchen.
Renia’s written accounts from the 1940s do not mention her sister Sarah here—perhaps for security reasons, perhaps because Renia was so distraught that it was difficult to write about her, perhaps out of respect for the movement, where one was not supposed to favor birth siblings over comrades. But what had happened to Sarah? Was she dead? Was any other Kukielka alive? Or was Renia completely alone?
She was indeed going to lose her mind.
Fortunately, Ilza arrived at the mechanic’s apartment just then. Crying, she grabbed Renia, hugged her, words rushing forth, too much for her to contain. “Frumka died, our comrades died.”
Ilza sat with Renia and recounted the tale of a different bunker, “the fighters’ bunker,” under a small building on a slope, a modest, ugly edifice on a grassy surround. Frumka and six other Freedom comrades were staying in a well-camouflaged cellar under this house. It was the team’s finest construction, with an entrance superbly concealed in the wall, as well as electricity, water, and a heater.
The whole time, these seven heard every noise from outside. Freedom leader Baruch Gaftek stood by a small crack and guarded the bunker. Suddenly, German voices—they were standing right above, booming loud. Had they seen light emanating through a crack? Without thinking, filled with rage, Baruch called out, “Let’s retaliate before we fall!” Then he cocked his gun and shot right through the opening. Two Germans fell to the ground, their sturdy bodies shaking the earth.
His girlfriend hugged him from behind so intensely that the others heard their bones crack.
The shot’s echo drew attention. A mob of panting Germans besieged the house, but did not get too close. They carried away the two Nazi corpses, crazy with rage, astonished that there were still Jews willing to fight.
Frumka, chain-smoking despite the ban in the bunker, stood taller than anyone. She held her weapon, tough and cold, an unusual sparkle shimmering in her long-depressed eyes. “Practice caution,” she called out, “but kill a few and die an honorable death!” The comrades cocked their guns and fired.
The Nazis, dozens of them, ambushed the house with grenades and smoke bombs. It became dark in the bunker. The haze from the bombs and the burning house above them made the fighters’ eyes smart. They began to suffocate. They grabbed their throats, cried that they wouldn’t be able to use their weapons. “Barbarians!” they screamed, and skillfully lobbed a grenade, but the Nazis jumped out of the way. The Germans used a special pump brought in from Auschwitz to fill the bunker with water, to drown them all.