Upfall

As Shapira moved down the line from east to west he heard the welcome grinding roar of the first two tank engines being torn apart. In the no-man‘s land between the gas complex and the treeline, sappers, including the dead and wounded, lay prone. Some were still leading out detonating cordi Some detonated the charges with their last breath. Shapira reached the team by the third engine. The pair of sappers planted the charge, then tossed their grenades and Molotovs. Shapira told them to run for the treeline with the detonating cord, while he moved off, crawling along in the slight defilade of the concret platform. The sapper stringing the cord fell fifteen meters from the engine. The second man grabbed the detonator from his dead comrade and ignited the charge, before a German bullet struck his neck, flinging him down upon the body of his friend. The charge detonated, wrecking the engine, while a chamber caught fire and began to burn.

Shapira felt the the conflageration on his back as he crawled toward the next team, working frantically at the fourth engine. As Shapira approached, their sachel exploded, blowing the two men up along with the engine. Shapira, protected by the platform, was partly deafened, but otherwise uninjured. Shapira looked about as best he could. It seemed that four engines and six gas chambers were wrecked, damaged or burning.

The fifth engine and the connected chambers remained intact. The teams assigned lay scattered near the platform, where SS bullets had found them. Shapira gritted his teeth and pressed on toward the last engine, moving on through the muffled sounds of machinegun fire and grenade explosions. He hardly registered the fact that the SS had begun to shell Sandler's positions with the battalion mortars and were laying down smoke for a deliberate assault. Around the flanks of the chamber complex, SS teams were already overlapping the surviving demolition men, threatening to cut off their escape. Shapira wiped sweat and grime from his face and tried to shake free of the clogged and congested feeling in his head. He reached the last engine and hoisted himself up onto the concrete. The fires engulfing the nearby death chambers signed Shapira‘s uniform and exposed skin. Shapira found a shadowed behind of the undamaged gas chambers and keyed his radio three times, signaling Chaim and Sandler to withdraw. Shapira repeated the order and then tossed the small personal radio into one of the fires raging nearby. He followed that with his NVGs and the ceramic plates from his protective vest. He crawled back several meters toward the last engine, pausing to fire off the last rounds from his Tavor at an advancing German squad. Shapira placed his own bomb under the engine. It was especially powerful, as Roskovsky had goosed it with extra C-4. He placed the empty Tavor next to the bomb, and played out his detonation cord, crawling back into into the camp, finding cover in the space between the two chambers that the engine fed. He pressed himself fiat between the sturdy buildings and ignited the charge.

The engine blew apart, showering debris over dozens of meters, and blowing in the back wall of one of the attached chambers Though dazed by the explosion, Shapira tossed his last Israeli grenade at another approaching team of SS and followed that with a pair of German stick grenades.

Shapira crawled between the gas chambers, toward the camp, as German soldiers started to flood the no-mans land behind him, chasing after a few surviving sappers, as mortars exploded along the treeline. He was hidden by the thick smoke belching from the destroyed buildings, and the drifting fog of the German barrages. Cries of triumph told Shapira that the SS had reached Sandler's former positions in the woods Shapira moved to the front of the platform, where he could see into the death camp. In the plaza that would have served as the final assembly area for Belzec's intended victims, Shapira watched as German squads forced a bucket brigade of Jewish prisoners forward in a desperate attempt to douse the flaming complex. When a Jew stumbled spilling his water the frightened and agitated SS guards shot him.

The Israeli lieutenant crawled toward the front of the intact gas chamber, which was the building on his left. Shapira was still hidden in the building‘s shadow and the heavy low hanging smoke. He slowly rose to his feet. Germans were thickly about the front of the complex, but safe from enemy fire, they talked among themselves, or directed their attention to the fighting in the woods, or to the reluctant Jewish firemen. Nobody noticed him. Shapira stepped to the front of the building and ran three steps to the door. It was locked from the outside with a simple bar. He removed the bar and dashed inside the chamber, just before German bullets struck the swinging door and its frame.