Striking the Balance

“Fuck hello,” the Pole-presumably Tadeusz-said with a big, booming laugh. “Where’s the five hundred zlotys he owes me?”

Anielewicz swung down off his horse: that was the recognition signal he was supposed to get back. He stretched. His back creaked. He rubbed at it, saying, “I’m a little sore.”

“I’m not surprised. You ride like a clodhopper,” Tadeusz said without rancor. “Listen, Jew, you must have all sorts of weird connections. Leastways, I never heard of any other clipcocks a German officer was trying to get hold of.”

“A German officer?” For a moment, Mordechai simply stared. Then his wits started working again. “A panzer officer? A colonel?” He still didn’t trust the big Pole enough to name names.

Tadeusz’s head bobbed up and down, which made his bushy golden beard alternately cover and reveal the topmost brass fastener on his overalls. “That’s the one,” he said. “From what I gather, he would have come looking for you himself, except that would have given him away.”

“Given him away to whom? The Lizards?” Mordechai asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

Now Tadeusz’s head went from side to side, and so did the tip of his beard. “I don’t think so. Way I got the story, it’s some other stinking Nazi he’s worried about.” The Pole spat on the ground. “To hell with all of ’em, I say.”

“To hell with all of ’em is easy to say, but we have to deal with some of them, though God knows I wish we didn’t,” Anielewicz said. Off to the north and east, artillery lire rumbled. Mordechai pointed in that direction. “You see? That’s the Germans, likely aiming at the railroad or the highway into Lodz. The Lizards have trouble getting supplies in there now, and a devil of a time fighting out of the place-not that we haven’t done our bit as far as that goes.”

Tadeusz nodded. Shaded by a shapeless, almost colorless cloth cap, his eyes-a startlingly bright blue-were very keen. Mordechai wondered if he’d been a peasant before the war broke out, or perhaps something like an army major. Under the German occupation, Polish officers had had plenty of incentive to make themselves invisible.

His suspicion gained intensity when Tadeusz said, “The Lizards won’t just be having trouble bringing in military supplies, either. Your people will be getting hungry by and by.”

“That’s so,” Mordechai admitted. “Rumkowski’s noticed it-he’s hoarding everything he can for the bad times ahead. The bastard will lick the boots of anybody over him, but he can smell trouble, I give thealter kacker that much.”

Tadeusz had no trouble understanding the couple of words of Yiddish in the middle of the Polish conversation. “Not the worst thing for a man to be able to do,” he remarked.

“No,” Anielewicz said reluctantly. He tried to wrench matters back to those at hand. “Do you have any idea who this other Nazi is? If I knew that, I might have a better notion of why the panzer officer was trying to warn me. What do you know?”What will you tell me? If Tadeusz was a Polish officer lying low, he was liable to have the full measure of aristocratic contempt for Jews. If, on the other hand, he really was a peasant, he was even more liable to have a simple but even more vivid hatred running through his veins.

And yet. If that were so, he wouldn’t have relayed Jager’s message in the first place. Mordechai couldn’t let his own ingrained distrust of the Poles get in the way of the facts. Now Tadeusz tugged at his beard before answering, “You have to remember, I got this fourth, maybe fifth-hand. I don’t know how much of it to trust myself.”

“Yes, yes,” Anielewicz said impatiently. “Just tell me whatever you got, and I’ll try and put the pieces together. This German could hardly rig up a field telephone and call right into Lodz, now could he?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Tadeusz said, and Mordechai, remembering some of his own telephone calls out of the city, had to nod. The Pole went on, “All right, this is everything I got told: whatever’s going to happen-and I don’t know what that is-it’s going to happen in Lodz, and it’s going to happen to you Jews in Lodz. Word is, they’ve brought in some kind of an SS man with a whole bunch of notches on his gun to do the job.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Mordechai said. “It’s not just that we’re not doing anything to the Nazis: we’re helping them, for God’s sake. The Lizards haven’t been able to do much of anything out of Lodz, and it isn’t because they haven’t tried.”

Tadeusz looked at him with what he first took for scorn and then realized was pity. “I can give you two good reasons why the Nazis are doing what they’re doing. For one thing, you’re Jews, and then, for another thing, you’re Jews. You know about Treblinka, don’t you?” Without waiting for Anielewicz to nod, he finished, “They don’t care about what you do; they care about what you are.”