Striking the Balance

“Yes,” Mordechai breathed. Visions of might floated through his head-hurting the Lizards and getting the Nazis blamed for it, smuggling the bomb into Germany and taking real revenge for what theReich had done to the Jews of Poland. Reality intervened, as reality has a way of doing. “There’s only the one bomb-if there’s any bomb there at all. We have to find it, and we have to get it out of the ground if it’s there-you’re right on both counts, Solomon-before we can even think about what to do with it.”

“If we go with half the fighters in the ghetto, other people will know we’re after something, even if they don’t know what,” Gruver said. “We don’t want that, do we? Find it first, then see if we can get it out without raising a fuss. If we can’t-” He shrugged.

“We’ll walk through the cemetery and the ghetto field,” Anielewicz declared-if he was commander here, hewould command. “If we find something, then we figure out what to do next. And if we don’t find anything”-he too shrugged, wryly-“then we figure out what to do next.”

“And when someone asks us what we’re doing there, what do we tell him?” Gruver asked. He was good at finding problems, not so good at solutions.

It was a good question. Anielewicz scratched his head. They had to say something, and something both innocuous and convincing. Bertha Fleishman said, “We can tell people we’re looking for areas where no one is buried, so we can dig in those places first in case we have to fight inside the city.”

Anielewicz chewed on that, then nodded, as did Solomon Gruver. Mordechai said, “It’s better than anything I could have come up with. It might not even be a bad idea for us to do that one of these days, though there are so many graves there I’d bet there isn’t much open space to be had.”

“Too many graves,” Bertha said quietly. Both men nodded again.

The cemetery and the ghetto field next to it lay in the northeastern corner of the Jewish district of Lodz. The fire station on Lutomierska Street was in the southwest, two, maybe two and a half kilometers away. It started to drizzle as Mordechai, Bertha, and Solomon Gruver tramped across the ghetto. Anielewicz looked gratefully up at the heavens; the rain would give them more privacy than they might have had otherwise.

A white-bearded rabbi chanted the burial service over a body wrapped in a sheet; wood for coffins had long since become a luxury. Behind him, amid a small crowd of mourners, stood a stooped man with both hands pressed up to his face to hide his sobs. Was it his wife going into the increasingly muddy ground? Mordechai would never know.

He and his companions paced among the headstones-some straight, some tilting drunkenly-looking for freshly turned earth. Some of the grass in the cemetery was knee high; it had been poorly tended ever since the Germans first took Lodz, almost five years before.

“Would it fit in an ordinary grave?” Gruver asked, pausing before one that couldn’t have been more than a week old.

“I don’t know,” Anielewicz answered. He paused. “No. Maybe I do. I’ve seen regular bombs the size of a man. Airplanes can carry those. What the Germans have has to be bigger.”

“We’re wasting our time here, then,” the fireman said. “We should go down to the ghetto field, where the mass graves are.”

“No,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Where the bomb is-that doesn’t have to look like a grave, you know. They could have made it seem as if they’d repaired the sewer pipes or something of that sort.”

Gruver scratched at his chin, then finally nodded. “You’re right”

An old man in a long black coat sat by one of the graves, a battered fedora pulled down low over his face against the drizzle. He closed the prayerbook he’d been reading and put it in his pocket. When Mordechai and his friends went by, the fellow nodded but did not speak.

A walk through the cemetery didn’t show any new excavations of any sort bigger than ordinary graves. Gruver had an I-told-you-so look in his eye as he, Mordechai, and Bertha headed south into the ghetto field.

Grave markers got fewer there, and many of them, as Solomon Gruver had said, marked many corpses thrown into one pit: men, women, and children dead of typhus, of tuberculosis, of starvation, perhaps of broken hearts. Grass grew on a lot of those mounds, too. Things were not so desperate now. With the Nazis gone, times had improved all the way up to hard, and burials were by ones, not by companies at a time.

Bertha paused in front of one of the large interments: the board that was all the marker the poor souls down there would ever get had fallen over. When she stooped to straighten it, she frowned. “What’s this?” she said.