Short Story: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

 by Dawn Sands

Day One

The Nazis are coming for us soon - all of us this time, like they came for the others. We don't know where we're going, when we'll come back. If we'll come back. The others definitely didn't. 

Not to say there haven't been rumours - in a place like this, there is nothing to do but create rumour after rumour, good or bad - of escape or of capture. Except this time we know: we know they're coming for us. I've heard a lot of things. Some of them say there are death camps enclosed behind barbed wire, abandoned in a wasteland somewhere in Poland or Germany. Some talk of gas chambers, where they lock us in and fill the room with poisonous gas until we die. I can only hope that's not true - but, if it is a lie, it can't be much better. 

Some of the other inhabitants are organising an uprising. We're going to fight back with our ammunition - and, if that fails, we're going to hide. How long can we hold out, nobody knows. They seem to have conveniently overlooked that flaw in their plan. But maybe they know we're going to die anyway. Maybe this, like everything else, is just a pointless exercise - done to give ourselves a sense of purpose. Die without a fight, or die in a fight. There's really no difference. They tell each other there's no reason for life at all. Kill or be killed. If rebellion gives us some bare thread of hope to hold on to, the distant dream that there may be somewhere better over the horizon, I'm not against it. 

Day Two

Today, I joined them officially. At first, I was hesitant - it seemed pointless to give effort when the end was so clearly defined anyway. But I couldn't help but crouch in the mud and daydream, my hunger-driven hallucinations leading me every time to the midst of their discussions in my mind. 

Sometimes, I like to play with the mud. It's easy to manipulate; it makes me kid myself I have control. I can force it into any shape I want; it can dictate my future and my past and my present - the potential of what my present could have been. Once, I built a fortress out of mud. I built it high and tall around me, as if it could protect me from anything the Nazis might send my way. But it didn't. The next day, the Nazi soldiers came with their guns and their fake smiles and kicked it down with their silver-nailed boots. 

At around four o'clock this afternoon - although time hardly matters if time never starts - I went to find them. A name drawn from a memory of time gone by springs unexpectedly to mind: Les Amis de l'ABC, the student rebellion in . . . some book or another. Does that really matter? 

It didn't take me particularly long to find them - in all honesty there isn't much of the ghetto in which to find them. They were huddled over a blank scrap of paper, stowed away from somewhere, although where they could have got it from eludes me. A few of them glanced up as I scurried in; a few of them stayed heads-down, leaning far over the paper as if it held some kind of mystery. 

Evidently, they were expecting the Nazis to attack in no more than three days and every minute spent discussing was vital. Apparently, they have a secret stash of ammunition stored somewhere - not that our stocks  amount to anything compared to the stuff the Nazis have. They have things I've never even heard of, weapons from beyond the realms of my imagination, while what do we do? Some scraps, some shoes and some loose bricks fallen off the buildings. 

I suggested we build a barricade, but the idea was shot down almost instantly. The Nazis, they explained to me - in a rather condescending manner, I thought, but I won't go there - have bombs, grenades and tanks, that could blow apart a barricade, and anyone manning it, in an instant. Either way, I thought silently, we could get murdered pretty quickly. As far as I know, they don't have any kind of bunker underground in case we lose - maybe I should ask them tomorrow. But what's the point in a bunker? After all, the whole ghetto isn't nearly enough for us all. A mere bunker would kill us all in seconds; we'd suffocate. 

There is no way out of this mess - I realise that now, as I write this. There's no way we can win against them; why not just surrender now? Why, as I crouched in the mud earlier today, did I not realise that the rebellion that lived in my daydreams would not come close to the reality of it? Was there any real plan in my imagination? Or is this like everything else, just a minor detour, a subsidiary distraction along the never-ending path to death?

Day Three

Tomorrow, they're going to attack. There is no time to plan anything, everyone is working, everyone, even those who were never part of the rebellion. Everyone is working. I'm supposed to be working. I desperately want to be working and yet I'm not, I can't and I've failed them. I can see his face in my mind's eye, screaming at me though I'm not there. We needed you! he cries. Where the hell did you go? 

Where didn't I go. Where didn't I go in my mind as I sat still and stared? Where didn't I go as I kneeled, hunched over her body and begged her to be alive, wailing until my tears dried up. I have been everywhere and nowhere in this world and the next and the last, in all of them and none of them simultaneously. She was going to live. That's what I told her as I cradled her in my arms by night, you're going to live, my dear, you're going to live, you have to live . . .

I still tell her that now as she rests her clammy head on my knees, her eyes unseeing, her lungs unbreathing. You're going to live. But it's too late. You were too weak to fight, my friend. Farewell, child, until we meet again. 

Until we meet again . . . I repeat those words over and over in my head until it drives me insane or maybe I was insane already. Until we meet again, my child. I can only hope that that will be soon. 

Yet I curse myself for feeling all these things. People die every day here. What difference should it make whether the corpse is mine? This is a place that gives back nothing, where nothing can be yours, even your children, even your soul cannot truly belong to you. To mourn in this environment is selfish. Everyone is working on an escape route, yet I am crying in the dirt. I desperately want to help them, yet I can't tear my eyes from her body. 

I realise that this would be my body if I were to die. Nothing more than a skeleton; you could count not just my ribs but every bone in my body. This isn't how it was supposed to be. 

I wonder how many others there are like me, mourning like I am, away from all the work. 

*

They found me and made me work. I feel terrible for not joining in, yet there is still something inside me that yearns for justice. A voice in my head that tells me I have the right not to join in. That voice is even stupider than I am. I know we have no rights here. We don't even have the right to live, yet we do, somehow. Those of us who have managed to survive. It's a strange connection you form with fellow survivors. A sort of unity in our individuality, it allows each of us to be alone by ourselves yet still feel part of something bigger. As far as I know it is not enforced. I don't want it to be enforced and I can only hope it's not imagined. It's nice. 

I worked all day after they found me and I've only just stopped. We've built a tunnel system underground. There are four entrances at various places in the ghetto and they all lead in the same direction: out. They're not finished yet, however. We still need to fight before we can hide; that's what he says. Going into the tunnels too soon, he says, is a death trap. The Nazis can follow us down here, they can drop bombs down here and have us all destroyed in a second. We need to fight first. I'm terrified, everyone is terrified. I berate myself again, I tell myself there's no reason to feel terrified because it's happening to everyone. I feel selfish. Everyone else is going through exactly the same as I am but they work hard, they at least have the courage to tell me it'll be OK though their voices waver on tears and I can tell they know it is all for nothing. They hunger and thirst the same as I do, they sleep in the dirt and they know it's unjust like I do. But they actually do what they can to change things. I just write in a diary and cry until I have no tears left. 

Twenty people died as we were digging the tunnels today. Twenty souls gave in to their exhaustion right at the last. They did nothing for those twenty souls, not out loud, anyway; but I can hear the silent vigils in their heads, one word resounding high above the rest: why?

Day Four

I can't breathe. The air inside the tunnels is suffocating; I'm surrounded in all directions by sweaty bodies gasping for breath. I can barely move my arm to write, let alone turn around. It's been terrible, far, far worse than anything we've endured ever in our time here. These last few days have exhausted me to my core and I know I haven't had the worst of it by far. It's bad enough doing nothing on minimal food and water, but now we've had to fight, we've had to run, we've had to escape, we've had to yell until our throats were hoarse. For one day, we've had to live. And after so long of not living, it's harder than it might sound. 

But it's good to have a chance to live before we die. It's shown us that maybe living isn't so good after all, maybe living is overrated; for who wants to live if it's a life like this? Trapped in a tunnel with no room to breathe. 

 I don't think any of us fear death any more. There is no suffering in death - if anything, it's harmonious. It instills a certain image: the purified human soul hovering over still waters, free from all bondage, wending its casual way to a better place at a simple meander. It's hard to imagine that a place like that exists, here where even the brightest of days is dark in comparison. 

The Nazis attacked at dawn, presumably in an attempt to catch us unawares, but none of us were sleeping. The ghetto never sleeps, for sleep is a symbol of inner peace and we have none. When we do sleep, our sleep is plagued by nightmares. Last night, however, the nightmares didn't come. We were waiting for the living nightmare, the attack. 

When it came, our supplies ran out fast. It eludes me how they ever thought fighting would work. Yet I suppose, somehow, I believed it too. It's strange what desperation does to you. It's like a hallucination, but you're fully conscious, mentally well. Except we're not. If you were to look at us now, crowded in this earthy tunnel that may as well be a vacuum for all we can breathe - you wouldn't see sanity. We are insanity personified, driven to this state, for all our promise, by brutal men intent on driving us to the ground. Intent on grinding us into the dirt. And here we are, trapped in mud and soil, waiting for who knows what?

When we realised we could carry on fighting no longer, the rush to get to the tunnels was frantic. We ran faster than we thought imaginable and dived into the tunnels, running until we could run no more. The tunnels are unfinished and we're all to exhausted to carry them on - or at least we are, in our tunnel. There are four tunnels and none of us have any clue what's going on in the other three. Maybe they've escaped to freedom; maybe they're dead already. It's only a matter of time before the Nazis find our tunnel after all. One bomb down here, and we'd be dead in an instant. And we never know when that instant will come. 

I would say that this is dehumanising, but that happened a long time ago. What they are doing to us now, what they are forcing us into doing now - this is not dehumanising, for we are no longer human. They have neglected us and ruined us until not even our humanity remained; we are worms in the soil, the scum of the earth. We toil and slave all hours of the day and night, and for what? To carry on doing it again the next day. This drabness, this greyness is all we can see in our once colourful futures. We are workhorses, nothing more. A few days ago I wrote that I like to play with mud. Those are not the words of a human. They are the words of an ex-human reduced to outright animalism by the power of a beast even stronger than a human. 

This is not a human's war. This is a war of the animals. 

Day Five

Somehow, we are still here, or I am still here, at the very least. It's hard to tell how many dropped dead in the night, hard to tell how many raucous hacking coughs resulted in death and how many are still here, looking the same as me and thinking the same as me. We are one, we are the Jew, and we are to be obliterated. This tunnel will be filled with corpses before long; does a few extra days of dying life count? We may as well already say the Nazis have won. 

Sometimes, I wonder whether I am dead already and have landed myself in Hell, only I can't tell the difference because in the ghetto I was already in Hell. Sometimes, I even wish that was the case; the knowledge that you are going to be in a place of eternity, no matter how horrible the place, must surely be better than the uncertainty of not knowing whether you will be alive in five minutes' time. But I can't be dead. If I was dead, I would be feeling no sensations; I would be feeling nothing instead of half of something, that feeling of dwindling life, of my soul slow ebbing away - perishing, vanishing, sinking slowly into the mortal soil that is my grave and was always my destiny. With every passing moment I can feel my soul swooning more and more and faintly falling away; I am dying. Dying slowly. Every person's nightmare, but then I am not a person. How could you call what I am a human?

The uprising has failed. I want to say that our spirit will live on but that would be untrue. My spirit can never live on. I will be forgotten, just another wave in the ocean, another ripple in the stream, another stone on the beach and I have no worth. All my life I dreamed, I wished. And for what? For a slow, painful death at the hands of an enemy greater than death itself. Death swamps death and I am in the midst of it, adrift in the whirlwind of existence. 

My strength disintegrates more and more with every second; I can barely move my wrist to write. My throat and tongue are completely parched. I am gasping for breath, but to no avail. There is an empty pit where my stomach should be; my gut is about to explode with hunger. There is no point in living any more. I can't bring myself to stay alive. I am at the bottom of the world, and there is no way of getting back up. I am a worm. I am lost. I am forgotten.