The Final Reckoning. Sam Bourne

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       CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      Tom rubbed his eyes; the overnight flight was catching up with him. It had been a long time since he had read an individual story like this: case histories, they used to call them. When he had first started at the UN he would pore over such documents, absorbing each detail. After a few years, he would skim read them, seeking only the pertinent legal details. One person's horror story was pretty much the same as anyone else's. But he was reading this one attentively: must be out of practice.

       The Jewish policeman – and you must remember we despised these traitors as much as we hated the Germans and the Lithuanians – left me there, where we stood. Once he was gone, I realized the street was completely silent. It was a terrible silence. It was quiet because all the people had gone.

      I walked back to our little stretch of Linkuvos Street, past buildings that were now empty and still. I felt as if I was the last child on earth. Four thousand people had gone that day. Everyone else was either outside the ghetto, doing forced labour, or they were hiding. No one was on the streets.

      I was twelve years old and I was all alone. I felt jealous of my sisters, imagining them living somewhere new.

      I carried on working, still pretending I was sixteen. I did not dare tell even the other workers the truth about my age. Some were nice to me, as if they knew I was just a child. But some were so desperate they were no longer the people they had been. They were so hungry, they had become like animals. Such people would have betrayed me in an instant if they believed it would have made my ration theirs.

      I lived in the same room we had shared, though now with a different family. The other lady and her children had been on the convoy to the Ninth Fort with my sisters. Now, the rooms were not so cramped. In fact, there was more space throughout the ghetto, because so many thousands had left. We did not know where they had gone or why we had not heard from them.

      Nobody I knew was around. The children I had once gone to school with were all gone. The only familiar face belonged to that policeman who had stopped me getting on the convoy, that pig of a traitor. I only had to look at him to feel revulsion. And yet he seemed to be around often. I would return exhausted after twelve hours working on the building site, my legs and back aching, and there he would be, at the entrance to the ghetto. Or he would be patrolling outside the building where I slept. Sometimes he scared me, the rest of the time he just disgusted me.

      Then one night there was a knock on the door. An urgent knock, three times, four times. At first, the woman in the apartment looked terrified. She believed it was the Gestapo. She glared at me in terror. What misfortune had I brought down on them? Had I been seen smuggling?

      Then we heard the voice on the other side of the door. ‘Polizei, open up!’

      It was the Jewish police of the ghetto. Everyone knew they could be as vicious as any Lithuanian collaborator. I looked over to the window, wondering if I should jump down onto the street and make a run for it. We were two floors up: could I drop down on the ground without breaking any bones? I saw that my hands were trembling.

      Before I had even had a moment to make a plan, the woman had made her decision. She opened the door and there he was, the policeman who had pulled me off the convoy some three weeks before. Here, at my door, in the middle of the night.

      ‘You, boy, come now.’

      I was frozen with fear. I did not move.

      ‘NOW!’

      I was still wearing all the clothes I had. You did not dare take them off at night because they might be stolen. I let the policeman lead me away.

      He marched me down the stairs and into the street, loudly promising to take me to the authorities for what I had done. I did not understand what I had done.

      Eventually, he turned left and right, then into an alley and down an outdoor stairwell to the entrance of a cellar. This, I knew, was not the police headquarters. By now he had stopped shouting about how I was going to be punished. I felt the fear tighten in my stomach.

      Then the policeman knocked on the door. Not a normal knock, but in a strange rhythm. Three quick blows, then two slow ones. A voice spoke on the other side of the tiny basement door.

      ‘Ver is dort?’ Who goes there?

      ‘Einer fun di Macabi.’ A son of the Maccabees.

      The door creaked open and the policeman darted in, grabbing me with him. Inside were three other men, their faces lit by a single candle at the centre of a small, rotting table. To me they looked old, their eyes dark and sunken, their faces gaunt. But now I know they were young, one of them barely twenty.

      They stared at me until one, who seemed to be the leader, said finally, ‘It's a miracle.’

      Then another nodded and said, ‘He's perfect. Our secret weapon.’

      The leader then spoke again, his face harsh. ‘Take off your trousers.’

      I hesitated and he repeated it until I realized I had no choice. I lowered my trousers slowly.

      ‘All the way down! So we can see.’

      And once СКАЧАТЬ