Page 49 of In the Balance (Worldwar 1)

“Warning, yes, that is word. Thank you. Good day, Herr Russie.”

“Good day, Your Excellency.” Russie bowed again; this time Zolraag did not detain him with more questions. In the waiting room outside the governor’s office sat a handsome, strikingly masculine-looking young Catholic priest. His pale eyes went icy for a moment when they met the Jew’s, but he managed a civil nod.

Russie nodded back; civility was not to be despised. Asking Poles to love Jews was asking for a miracle. Having asked for one miracle and received it, Moishe did not aim to push his luck with God. But asking for civility-that was within the realm of the possible.

Zolraag’s headquarters lay in a block of two and three-story office buildings on Grojecka Street in southwestern Warsaw. A couple of the buildings had taken shell hits, but most were intact save for such details as bullet holes and broken-out windows. That made the block close to unique in the city, Russie thought as he scrunched through shards of glass.

Nazi artillery and unending, unchallenged streams of Luftwaffe bombers had torn gaping holes in Warsaw when the city stood siege after the Germans invaded Poland. Most of that rubble still remained: the Germans did not seem to care what sort of Warsaw they ruled, so long as it was theirs. The buildings smashed in 1939 now had a weathered look to them, as if they’d always been part of the landscape.

More ruins, though, were fresh, sharp-edged. The Germans had fought like men possessed to hold the Lizards out of Warsaw. Russie walked by the burnt shell of a Nazi panzer. It still exhaled the dead-meat stench of man’s final corruption. Shaking his head, Russie marveled that so many Germans, here as elsewhere, had expended so much courage for so bad a cause. God had given mankind that particular lesson at least since the days of the Assyrians, but its meaning remained obscure.

A Lizard fighting vehicle purred past the wrecked German tank. When the Nazis entered Warsaw, their roaming, smoke-belching panzers, all hard lines and angles as if the faces of SS men were somehow turned to armor plate, seemed dropped into 1939 straight from a malign future. The Lizards’ smoother, faster, nearly silent machines showed that the Germans were not quite the masters of creation they fancied themselves to be.

It was a couple of kilometers back to the edge of the, Jewish quarter Russie wore his long black coat unbuttoned, but he d started to sweat by the time he drew near the ruined walls that marked off the former (God be praised!) ghetto. If Zolraag thinks this is cool weather, let him wait until January, he thought.

“Reb Moishe!” A peddler pushing a cart full of turnips paused to doff his cloth cap.

“Reb Moishe!” A very pretty girl, no more than thirteen or fourteen, smiled. She was gaunt, but not visibly starving.

“Reb Moishe!” One of Anielewicz’s fighters came to a fair approximation of attention. He wore an old Polish helmet, a peasant blouse, and baggy trousers tucked into German army boots. Twin bandoliers full of gleaming brass cartridges crisscrossed his chest.

The salutes pleased Russie, and reminded him he’d become an important man here. He gravely gave back each in turn. But as he did so, he wondered whether any of the people he’d greeted would still have been alive had the Lizards not come and, if so, how much longer they would have survived. He wondered how much longer he would have survived himself.

And so I decided to help the Lizards, in the hope that they would then help my people, he thought. And they did, and we were saved. And what have I gained from this? Only to be branded a liar and a traitor and a renegade by those who will not believe their fellow men capable of what the Germans did here.

He tried to tell himself he did not care, that the recognition of those inside Warsaw, those who knew the truth, counted for more than anything anyone else could say. That was true and not true at the same time. Given a choice, he would sooner have worked with any human beings-save only the Germans-against the invaders from another world.

But what choice had he had? When the Lizards came the Russians were far away and themselves reeling under German attack. The British were beleaguered, the Americans so distant they might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Set beside the Nazis, the Lizards looked like a good bargain. No, they were a good bargain.

All the same, he sometimes wished he’d not had to make it. Such thoughts flew away when he turned a corner and saw Mordechai Anielewicz coming toward him. The young leader of the Jewish fighters was surrounded by several of his men, all of them heavily armed, all in the ragged mishmash of military gear and ordinary clothes Russie had seen on the other warrior.

Anielewicz himself carried no weapons. Though he dressed as shabbily as his followers, his firm stride and the space the others kept clear around him proclaimed him to be cock o’ the walk here.

He nodded, cautiously, to Russie. Allies and rivals at the same time, they drew their power from different sources: Anielewicz straight from the barrels of his fighters’ guns, Russie from the confidence the Jews of Warsaw placed in him. Because of that, neither was as confident with the other as he would have been with one of his own kind.

Anielewicz spoke first: “Good day to you, Reb Moishe. How did your meeting with the Lizard governor go?”

“Well enough,” Russie answered. “He complained the weather was too cool to suit him, though.”

“Did he?” Anielewicz said. A couple of the Jewish fighters laughed. Anielewicz’s smile was broad, but never quite reached his eyes. “He’ll complain more in a few months, and that’s a fact. What else did he have to say?”

“It doesn’t sound as though there’s much hope for more rations any time soon.” Russie explained Zolraag’s supply problems. They were something the Jews’ military leader needed to know.

“Too bad.” Anielewicz scowled. “We really need more than the Poles, because we had so much less for so long. But if he can’t, he can’t I don’t want to start a war with the Armja Krajowa over this; they outnumber us too badly.”

“Bor-Komorowski was in to see Zolraag just before me. He isn’t too happy about how much we’re getting now.”

“Too bad,” Anielewicz said again. “Still, it’s worth finding out, and it’s not what you’d call a surprise.” His gaze sharpene

d; he peered at Russie as if over a gunsight. “And what did His Lizardy Excellency have to say about the Nazi bastards and SS swine who couldn’t run fast enough when they got thrown out, of here? Has he figured out what he’s going to do with them yet?”

“He asked me what I thought, as a matter of fact,” Russie said.

“And what was your answer?” Anielewicz asked softly.

Russie took a deep breath before he answered: “I told him that, if it were up to me, I would treat them as prisoners of war.” Almost all the fighters growled at that. Ignoring them, Moishe went on: “Doing so would pull the teeth from the propaganda the Germans are putting out against us. And besides if we treat them as they treated us, how are we any better than they?”

“They did it to us for sport. When we do it to them, it’s for vengeance,” Anielewicz said with the same exaggerated patience he would have used in explaining to a child of four. “Do you want to be the perfect ghetto Jew, Reb Moishe, the one who never hits back no matter what the goyim do to you? We’ve come too far for that.” He slapped one of his men on the shoulder. The fellow’s slung Mauser bounced up and down.

Standing up to armed ruffians, Russie discovered, was hardly easier when they were Jews than it had been when they were Germans. He said, “You know what I am. Was I not with you when we rose? But if murder in cold blood was wrong for the Germans, I tell you again that it does not magically become right for us.”

“What did Zolraag think when you said this to him?”

“If I understand him rightly, he thought I was out of my mind,” Russie adimitted, which jerked a few startled laughs from the fighters around Anielewicz.

“He may well have a point.” The smile Anielewicz gave Russie was far from pleasant; it reminded him of a wolf curling back its lip to show its teeth. He studied the young Jewish fighting leader. Anielewicz was different from the Germans who had until lately been his models in matters military. Most of them were professionals, going about their business no matter how horrific that business might be. Anielewicz, by contrast, gave the impression that he loved what he was doing.

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