Zealot (5 page)

Warsaw: January 18, 1943

MacLeod moved closer to the Torah, taking the precious scroll carefully from the shaking hands of the man who clutched it
to his chest for protection. “
Rebbe
, please, we must hurry “

“My son, he is
gut
?” Rabbi Mendelsohn asked for perhaps the third time in the ten minutes since MacLeod had roused him from his sleep in the
predawn gloom. The old man was smaller than MacLeod had expected, stooped and bowed with the effects of age and three years
of deprivation, confined behind the formidable walls of the Jewish Ghetto. Only the rabbi’s clothes, carefully patched and
mended and hanging from his gaunt frame, bespoke the strong, robust man his son Shimon had described to MacLeod in such loving
detail back in Paris.

“Shimon is fine,
zai’er gut
,” MacLeod reassured him. MacLeod knew only a little Yiddish, although Shimon Mendelsohn had tried to teach him all he could
before MacLeod left. The rabbi’s Polish was rusty, Yiddish having been the language of daily life and commerce in Warsaw’s
Jewish community for centuries, but quickly they’d discovered they could communicate in a rough pastiche of the two languages,
mixed with a little German, a little Russian. It was enough. “He’s living with monks outside of Paris. He is safe there.”

“Safe.” The old man savored the word and his eyes grew bright with unshed tears. “
Danken Gott
, Shimon is safe,” he repeated to himself while MacLeod set the Torah down carefully by the rabbi’s hat on a low table near
the door. The table and an old wing chair were the only furnishings left in the room. “Then his story has been told?” Rabbi
Mendelsohn asked him, tugging eagerly on MacLeod’s sleeve for emphasis. “The West knows? Shimon has told them?”

How to tell the old man the messenger had gotten out safely, but not the message? How to tell him his only son fought his
way to the West to proclaim the word, eager to expose for all the world the atrocities of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the world
had turned its back on him? How to tell him Shimon Mendelsohn had escaped the death camps, broken the news that the Germans
were systematically destroying his people, and instead of finding aid, found only apathy and disbelief?

He didn’t have to tell him. The rabbi, no stranger to the human heart, read it in his face, saw the despair and the shame
in his eyes.

“They didn’t have ears to hear him, did they?” A deep sigh of resignation seemed to stoop the old man’s shoulders even more.
“Everyone’s got their own problems. Their own war.” He sat heavily in the wing chair, tugging nervously on his graying beard.
“Nobody’s got time for the
tsores
of a bunch of ‘worthless Jews’ in Poland.” He spit out the words with surprising venom.

“
Rebbe
, it’s not like that,” MacLeod protested.

“No, Mr. MacLeod? Then you tell me what it is like.”

The silence between them was long and heavy. MacLeod couldn’t tell him, not in Yiddish, not in Polish, not in any language
on earth, because there was no rational explanation he could find for the Allies’ disregard of Shimon’s plea for help. He
tried a different approach. “Shimon feels that if you and your wife can join him and get to England, or even America, to bear
witness with him—”

“My wife is gone,” the rabbi said quietly, not looking at MacLeod.

“I’m sorry,” MacLeod said after a moment. “I…I didn’t know.”

“Irena was taking medicines to her sister on Franciszkanska Street. That was at the end of August, two weeks before the
Aktsia
, the expulsions, stopped. I never saw her again…A neighbor said he saw her and Irka at the
Umschlagplatz
—those Nazi demons were putting them on the train to Treblinka.” The rabbi stood and turned to MacLeod. “In two months, they
took a half a million people—my wife, my neighbors, my congregation. All gone. And now those of us they’ve left behind wait
in fear of the day the demons decide to come and finish the job.” His voice was quavery but his eyes were hard, boring into
MacLeod. “So you tell me again how no one cares, Mr. MacLeod. You tell me again how they can say
this isn’t happening!
”

MacLeod could say nothing. Instead, he reached out and placed a hand on the rabbi’s shoulder, for strength, for comfort. Rabbi
Mendelsohn grasped his arm like a lifeline and buried his face in MacLeod’s chest, his own shoulders shaking with mute anger
and grief.

MacLeod gave him a moment, then gently reminded him, “
Rebbe
, we have to go. There is transport waiting to take you to Shimon, but we have to hurry.”

The old man released MacLeod’s arm and stepped away, nodding his understanding. He wiped his eyes. “Yes, yes, but first, I
must get the rest of my things.” He hurried to a basement door.

“No, wait—” MacLeod tried to stop him, but he disappeared down the dark stairs.

MacLeod checked his pocket watch, concerned. This was taking longer than he’d expected. It was nearly six in the morning.
Soon the sun would be up. He hurried to the window and cautiously pulled back a comer of the drape.

She was still there, across the street on the corner, still vigilant, keeping watch for the soldiers just as she’d promised
she would. It was a good sign.

Her name, she’d told him, was Rivka. MacLeod knew she couldn’t be any older than thirteen. He first saw her soon after he
arrived in Warsaw. He’d traveled from Paris as a German businessman—his German and his papers were both impeccable and “Herr
Münte” had had little trouble passing border guards and checkpoints throughout the New German Reich. But “Herr Münte” couldn’t
help him in occupied Warsaw, where most of the Poles would sooner spit on a German than give him the time of day. It certainly
wouldn’t get him past the formidable iron gates and machine-gun emplacements barring the entrances to the Jewish Ghetto.

He’d spent a day carefully studying the Wall surrounding the Ghetto, analyzing it surreptitiously from the apartment buildings
and shops across the narrow streets. It was almost beyond his comprehension—wherever he stood outside the Wall, Polish children
played in the streets while their mothers went about their daily chores, shopping, chatting with their neighbors, trying to
maintain some semblance of normalcy in the face of the Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, less than twenty yards away, if the sketchy
reports reaching Paris were at all accurate, hundreds of thousands of their fellow human beings were being systematically
murdered. It just didn’t seem possible.

When he thought no one was looking, he’d stood by the Wall, touched it. In some places it was as tall as he was, in others
it must have been as much as six feet taller, all of it of sturdy red brick and mortar. At the top, barbed wire spiraled its
length, supplemented in places by shards of broken glass embedded in the mortar. A serious wall, designed to let no one in,
and no one out. He could take the Wall, he knew—especially under the cover of night—and make it into the Ghetto. But back
out, with an elderly rabbi and his wife…He had to keep looking for a weakness in the Germans’ design.

It had been midafternoon when he noticed Rivka near a bakery on Zelanza Street, close to the western face of the Wall. He
had remembered seeing her in another market earlier in the day, the dark-eyed waif remarkable among the other pigtailed Polish
girls because of the tattered and frayed overcoat that seemed way too large for her but not nearly warm enough for the January
cold. But now the coat seemed to fit her, in an odd sort of way.

From across the street, he had watched her go into the bakery and, quick as a flash, stuff two loaves of bread into the coat
while the baker was distracted. She scurried from the shop before the baker had even looked up from his customer, then she
strolled casually down the street as if nothing had happened.

Smuggling. Stealing food to smuggle back into the Ghetto, MacLeod was willing to bet. And she was good at it, too, by the
look of things. If she could get in and out of the Ghetto, there must be a way for him, as well. He had followed her from
a distance.

Soon they had reached a section of the Wall that faced onto several blocks of apartments blown to hell by the Germans in the
battle for Warsaw. Corners of brick buildings jutted up out of rubble a yard deep, bleak monuments to those who had lived
and died there. There were no other pedestrians around, no shops, no residents. Only devastation, and a young girl on a mission.
MacLeod was careful to stay hidden in the shadows.

She looked around carefully, then started toward the Wall. Then, in that paranoia that is only bred of desperation, she must
have heard something, or caught a glimpse of something, because she turned around abruptly and spotted MacLeod.

Her eyes grew wide with fear, but the fear quickly mixed with something that could have been defiance when she realized he
wasn’t a soldier and he was alone. MacLeod spoke fast, before he lost her. “Little girl,” he said quietly, “I need your help.
Proszg
.” But his strangely accented Polish had only proven to her he was an outsider, and she turned and ran through the rubble,
away from the Wall as fast as she could, as if the devil himself was chasing her.

MacLeod had tried to follow—she left a clear trail of food dropped from her overcoat that would have pleased Hansel and Gretel—but
when he’d made it through the shifting rubble and back to a busy street nearby, he had lost her.

All the next afternoon he had hidden in the rubble, hoping against hope that she’d make her rounds again and have to return
his way. Just before sundown he finally saw her, coat bulging with stolen food, looking around her constantly as she walked,
wary, waiting. He took a big chance—”
Shimon Mendelsohn shikt mir
,” he called out in halting Yiddish.

She stopped, looking around for him, frightened but not running. At least, not yet. “Shimon sent you?” She was wary, waiting
for a trap.

“I’ve come to see the
rebbe
.” He threw a large bag over the ruined wall behind which he was hiding, and it hit the ground with a thunk. She moved away
from it quickly, then cautiously approached it again when it was clear it would not explode. “Please, can you help me?” MacLeod
asked. After looking around quickly, furtively, like a squirrel with a nut, she opened the bag, rifling through bread and
potatoes and cheeses. She touched them reverently, like manna from heaven, then reached farther in the bag and pulled out
the sausages. Stunned, she looked around for her benefactor, still wary, but with tears pooling on her cheeks. Looking at
her gaunt bare legs, red with cold, and her dark sunken eyes, MacLeod wondered how long it had been since she’d had any meat.

Slowly, arms spread to show he had no weapon, that he was no threat to her, MacLeod came around the wall. She hurriedly stuffed
the food back into the bag, as if afraid he’d take it away from her. “Will you help me find
Rebbe
Mendelsohn?” MacLeod asked again and held his last treasure out to her—a sturdy woolen coat, lined with fleece. He’d purposely
gotten one too large for her, so she could still ply her craft in it. But at least she’d be warm.

She snatched it from his hand and stepped away from him. She considered him solemnly for a long moment, child’s eyes, shadowed
with hunger and fatigue, searching him. MacLeod met her eyes with sincerity, and realized hers were a child’s eyes no longer.
He’d seen those eyes before, in many lands, in many wars—eyes that had seen too little happiness and far too much death.

“Two hours before sunrise,” she finally said in Polish. “Meet me here. I will take you.” Before she had even finished speaking,
she scooped up the bag of food and, with bag in one hand and new coat in the other, hurried away from him.

“Wait!” he called after her. “
Vi haist it
?”

“Rivka,” she called back from the shadows, and disappeared.

She’d kept her promise, returning in the dead of night to lead him silently to a breach in the Wall, hidden away behind a
tailor’s shop on Krochmalna Street. Though Rivka could pass easily through the small opening, it was a tight fit for an adult,
but with effort MacLeod managed to make it through to the Jewish sector.

More relaxed in the relative safety of the Ghetto, Rivka took his hand and led him through the dark, abandoned streets to
the rabbi’s home. There she promised to wait outside and lead them back to the Aryan side again.

“Best lookout in the Ghetto,” she told him proudly.

MacLeod had smiled at her warmly. “I have no doubt,” he said, playfully tugging at one of her plaited pigtails. He was rewarded
with the first smile he’d seen from her.

Now, as he watched her on the corner, there was no trace of that smile. He watched her hunker down in her ragged cloth coat
as the wind blew against her. A light snow was just beginning to fall. He wondered why she hadn’t worn her new coat, then
realized with sadness she had probably sold it for more food.

MacLeod heard Rabbi Mendelsohn coming up the basement stairs and turned from the window. The rabbi was carrying a large metal
strongbox. “No, no,
Rebbe
, you don’t understand,” MacLeod explained patiently. “We have to travel light. You’ll have to leave that here.”

“No, Mr. MacLeod, it is you who does not understand.” He pushed the box toward MacLeod, who took it reluctantly. “These are
my writings, my journals. I keep a history for
Oneg Shabbat
. It is all there—the expulsions, the camps, the hunger, the disease—everything that has happened since the Germans.” The
old man was adamant. “What happens to me does not matter. But
these
must survive. These must go to Shimon. These
must
bear witness to the world when we no longer can.” He pleaded, “That is the only voice we have left. You cannot allow it to
be destroyed, Mr. MacLeod, or everything we are, everything we were will vanish into nothing, like the smoke from Treblinka.
And then the Germans will have won.” He grabbed MacLeod’s arm with surprising strength. “Promise me.”