“Gone.”
Bela ran, managing to get out of earshot before she began wailing. She knew then that if she wanted to go on living, living for revenge was her only option.
In the spring, Lonka was sent on a mission to Warsaw, carrying four revolvers.
She disappeared.
The leaders in Bia?ystok decided that someone had to find her. Bela volunteered. “Go bring back your bones,” they told her, everyone nervous.
Bela’s boyfriend, Hanoch, walked her to the station. Strong, muscular, a man who’d stolen weapons from Nazis, he inspired her bravery. They planned to get married after the war and move to Palestine.
He gave her two guns, which Bela hid in her oversized pockets. She wove a Hebrew underground bulletin printed on thin paper inside her braids. She felt confident on her way to Warsaw and passed all inspections with her fake papers.
Until she reached the village of Malkinia Gorna.
An officer got on the train and approached her.
“Yes?”
“Come with me,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”
Without a word, Bela got up and followed him off the train.
The train left.
The officer took her to a small room in the station, searched her body and suitcase, found the weapons. There was nothing she could do. Bela stared at them holding her guns and knew: she was going to be executed. The teenager decided to act as if nothing unusual was occurring. Men came to escort her to the forest, yelling at her to run, beating her on the back. She didn’t want them to shoot her from behind. She hummed a melody to calm herself.
They arrived at a small prison in the middle of nowhere. Bela panicked: What about the Hebrew material on her? They knew she was an arms smuggler, but they could not—must not—know that she was a Jew. She asked for a bathroom. They brought her to an open hut with a dug out. Somehow she managed to pull the paper bulletin from her braids and throw it down the hole.
In a small room, everything was taken from her. This was the end. No one would ever know what happened to her. Bela began to bawl. The officer hollered, “Stop crying or I’ll kill you!” The interrogation began. She lied incessantly, speaking Polish only, desperately playing with her accent.
“Yes, my father was the first cousin of the famous Polish politican Limanowski.”
“I bought my travel papers from a man on the train for twenty marks.”
“The weapons are mine.”
They beat her mercilessly. Then they asked about Polish officers, and Bela realized they thought she was part of the Home Army.
Suddenly one of them asked, “Do you know Christina Kosovaska?” Lonka.
“No.”
“Tell the truth, or I’ll kill you.” The man took out a photograph and thrust it in her face—the photo of Lonka, Tema, and Bela from the Gestapo Christmas party. Lonka had been so confident, she’d carried it with her on her missions. They’d found it.
“Do you recognize yourself?”
She said she’d met Lonka for the first time at the party. They didn’t believe her and beat her again, breaking a tooth.
After six hours of interrogation, Bela was exhausted and thrown on the cold dirt floor. All night, the guards tried to enter the room. She scared them off by screaming loudly. At five in the morning, she was handcuffed and put on a train with an escort. Passersby shot her pitying looks, but Bela held her head high.
She was brought to Warsaw’s Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Street. “Szucha”—as this Nazi head office came to be known—was in a stately Polish government building, that had been taken over by the Nazis. Set in a posh neighborhood with rolling boulevards and upscale Art Deco apartments—including the first Polish domicile to have an elevator—one might not have imagined that the white-columned structure had a torture dungeon in its basement. Arrestees waited for their interrogations in dark “tramway” cells, where the seats were arranged tram style, linked closely and all facing the same direction. A radio blasted music to cover the sounds of whips and screams, of clubs and bats and cries. All over, desperate messages were scratched into the concrete walls.