Page 31

‘Are you all right?’

Noemi gulped down the water Matthias ladled out from yet another barrel that was emptying too quickly.

The streets outside were baking in an unseasonal heatwave.

Her mouth was dry with brick dust. Her clothes were sticky with the tar that coated the attics, a gluey residue of melted glass and sodden wood no amount of scraping could remove.

Her limbs were screaming for a bed, for an hour’s unbroken sleep; for silence.

She was a long way from all right, but she nodded anyway.

‘How bad is it? Have they brought more troops in?’

She let him check her hands for splinters and burns while she struggled to recapture her voice. She didn’t think she was hurt, but it was a while since she’d stopped and taken any notice of her body.

‘Yes, and it’s escalating fast. They’ve brought in another flamethrower which is a real problem – there’s not enough water left to tackle the fires as it is, and those are causing issues we didn’t foresee.

The heat from the buildings that are already burning has started to boil the air in the bunkers underneath, which means they’re not safe anymore.

Anyone caught in them will suffocate. And every time the soldiers find an exit hole, they block it up, or drop gas or grenades down. People are…’

She let him think a sudden and deliberate coughing fit was what stopped her.

The truth was she didn’t have a word for what the civilians still hiding a dozen days into the uprising were suffering.

Terrified wasn’t wide enough, neither was desperate , although both were true.

Going mad was probably more accurate. The few hundred who’d survived this far had been through more trips to hell than the Bible would wish on the worst sinner, and they’d committed no sins at all.

From what Noemi and Matthias had gleaned since their first exposure to the cruelty that was life in the ghetto, most of its inhabitants had tried, to varying degrees, to co-operate at the start and make themselves useful to the Germans.

They’d taken on roles as policemen or on the Jewish council, which was there to carry out German orders and administer daily life, because they’d thought that would make conditions more bearable and themselves indispensable.

They’d registered for work in the factories, which were delighted to have a source of forced labour, because they believed nobody would harm or get rid of a key workforce.

They’d carried on believing in justice long after that disappeared and had tried to behave inside the ghetto as if they were the respectable members of society they’d considered themselves to be on the outside, whatever the Nazis said to the contrary.

None of that had worked. Instead of being valued, they’d been dealt blow after blow and suffered humiliation after humiliation and lost themselves in the process.

No one was whole anymore. By the time Noemi and Matthias entered the ghetto, the people shuffling through its filthy streets were little more than a collection of broken pieces loosely held together by skin.

Everyone Noemi encountered had watched a family member suffer and die because they couldn’t provide the most basic medicine or food to save them.

Or had been forced to watch as their loved ones were executed for ‘infringements’ no one explained and which changed on a whim.

The men and women they’d helped find hiding places for when the uprising began had learned to survive by becoming as blind to the dead and the dying they walked past every day as the rest of the city was blind to them.

They’d learned to be grateful when somebody else was summoned for deportation rather than them.

To survive one day at a time and not to think forward or back, until the morning the ghetto had exploded with cries of revenge and filled them with hope.

There was precious little of that left now.

The enraged Germans might have been caught by surprise on day one, but this was almost day thirteen.

The Germans had recovered the upper hand.

They’d roared back with every weapon they had, from an arsenal that – unlike the beleaguered and isolated fighters forced to make bombs out of scrap – they could easily replenish.

The struggle went on, but – while the struggle sustained the fighters – for the civilians, there was no hope anymore.

There was precious little of anything beyond the near certainty of a pain-filled death.

‘Did you hear about the announcement they broadcast this morning?’ Noemi wiped her mouth and passed the empty ladle back to Matthias.

She didn’t bother asking if there was any food.

‘The Germans have offered one last day of free movement. Anyone who comes out of hiding and voluntarily reports for transfer to a ‘labour camp’ will be spared. Anyone who doesn’t will be burned along with the buildings.

They’ve basically offered people the choice of facing the flames here or in Treblinka. ’

Matthias produced a small square of black bread from his pocket and answered while Noemi fell on it.

‘Yes, I heard. Mordechai’s been going round trying to explain what the offer actually means, that it’s a trap, but all most of them can hear is spared .

Which is why he wants to get things moving.

He’s asking for volunteers to lead the civilians who are fit enough out through the tunnels and sewers and into the relative safety of the Kampinos Forest.’

Noemi shuddered as an extra choice that wasn’t a choice was added to the toll.

She’d spent the morning leading dazed and empty-eyed men and women through the connecting holes into a slightly less dangerous attic than the bullet-ridden one they’d been hiding in.

She couldn’t imagine any of them having the strength to wade through filthy waist-high water in the dark.

They would panic; the soldiers would hear them and throw grenades down.

It would be a suicide mission. And if they made it through, surely none of them had the stamina to cope with life in the open; that would be a challenge enough for the fighters.

She was about to say that – until she caught the pinched look on Matthias’s face.

‘You’re going to lead one, aren’t you?’

Her heart plummeted when he nodded.

‘Yes, I’m taking the first group out tomorrow.

I know the risks, but we have to give them a chance, and they won’t get one stuck in this death trap.

And he wants you to lead a group of fighters out too, in a couple of days’ time when the civilians are clear.

He knows the battle here is as good as over.

He wants to keep our best people alive for the next one. ’

Noemi’s first instinct was to refuse. She didn’t want to be without Matthias, but she also didn’t want to leave. She’d stopped thinking about her own survival; she’d stopped thinking about anything except standing with the ghetto to its end. She’d taken her cue in that from The Angel.

‘Is Mordechai going too?’

Matthias shook his head. ‘No. He was never going to leave – he made that clear from the start. But he was also very clear this morning about what he expected from us, and it wasn’t taking part in a last stand. And he told me to tell you that leaving is an order.’

The speed with which he dropped to his knees beside her as she started to argue took Noemi completely by surprise.

‘I can’t make you do it, and neither can he, but listen to him, I’m begging you.

I’m twenty-four years old; Noemi, you’re twenty-two.

I want to beat these bastards one day, and we will – we have to.

But I also don’t want to die in here. I want to live and fight again; I want to have stories to tell my grandchildren. And I want the same future for you.’

Grandchildren . She rolled the word round her tongue, but it didn’t make sense to her. Neither did the word future ; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d considered it.

I always hoped you’d be my daughter one day.

Noemi had to bite her lip as Carina’s words came unbidden into her head. And Pascal’s face instantly followed them in a memory that filled her with fury and she didn’t want.

This has to stop. That life out there was never going to be mine. Besides, he wouldn’t rescue me if he was in here. He wouldn’t care. He’s a Nazi now. He’d be leading a charge on a bunker, he’d be wielding a flame-thrower.

There was a corner of her heart which hoped that – whatever Pascal might have become in the last two years – he’d never take part in such a callous act against civilians, especially if it involved her. She wouldn’t let herself listen to it.

‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

Noemi couldn’t meet Matthias’s eyes. How could she admit what kind of a man had sprung into her head when a good man like him had mentioned the future and hinted that it might be a shared one?

Or how her heart had leapt at the thought of Pascal before she’d crushed it back down when they were fighting for their people’s survival?

He would never trust or respect her again.

‘It’s nothing – a memory, that’s all. It’s not worth?—’

‘Don’t listen to it. Whatever it is, it won’t help you.’

When she finally looked up, there was more love in his eyes than she’d remembered could exist in the world.

She stared at him, pushing out the thought of grenades and panic and the flames gobbling up the buildings less than a block away.

Pushing out the thought of Pascal. Desperate to feel what Matthias was feeling, desperate to feel anything at all.

This is the man I should love. This is the man who fits with my life, who my parents would want for me.