Upfall

Hahn‘s order slowly worked its way up the line and the column began another hesitant move forward. The vanguard wasn't so much assaulting the target as crawling into it meter by meter. Hahn followed, crawling now on his belly, mouth dry, his stomach cramping in fear. Up ahead he saw the first of Wirth‘s men in the extermination camp, either lying prone or crouched in the dust. They should have been shooting at the towers but the barrels of their rifles and machine-pistols remained silent. Finally Hahn reached the end of the passageway and looked around. The towers loomed above him dark and silent. He now allowed himself the same hopeful thought that had induced his men to lie about and hold their fire—maybe the raiders had fled. He crawled out a couple of meters and waved on the men behind him. Surrounded now by nearly twenty well armed SS men, Hahn shook off his fear. Of course, the raiders had fled. They stayed only while safe in their positions, but with the arrival of a genuine SS attack they had turned and run, like any partisans. Hahn stood up to his full height and said firmly ”Aufmarsch!"

In his tower Yatom saw a large German stand and wave his men forward like they were crossing the Polish frontier in 1939. The German leader was surrounded by nearly twenty soldiers who huddled around him near exit from the passage. Yatom could feel the tension of Nir and Feldhandler in the tower with him. Finally, like a jockey loosing his mount he let them go. Yatom spoke calmly into the Madonna at normal volume. "Yatom here. All teams fire at will."

In the quiet that had settled over Treblinka Hahn heard the strange voice from the tower. The language sounded vaguely familiar, like the shouting of dying Jews. A second later three different Israelis peppered Der Speiss with more a half-dozen rounds that sliced through his body from head to knee. An SS sergeant who had crouched next to him was ripped apart by a burst from Feldhandler's Galil. Some of the panicked SS men about the passageway threw up their arms in a vain attempt to stop the Israeli rounds while others attempted to crawl back into the main camp. But the sayeret's fire enveloped them like a deluge from which it was impossible to emerge dry. Within a minute every German who had emerged from the Himmelgang was off to heaven, or hell, or nowhere.

Next to Yatom Feldhandler shoveled magazines in and out of his Galil, firing with a demented abandon at the Germans below him, apparently indifferent that he was running through irreplaceable ammunition. Yatom called a ceasefire into the radio and placed a hand on the receiver of Feldhandler's smoking Galil shaking the scientist out of his mania. "lt‘s done Feldhandler!" he shouted. "They are all dead. The Germans here are dead or fled." Feldhandler stared at Yatom a moment and then smiled. The same strange quiet had returned to the camp.

"Well" said the scientist "let‘s get out of this tower."

"Wait" ordered Yatom. He looked down at the mass of dead Germans below the tower, and scanned the camp once more with the thermal binoculars. Satisfied that the German resistance was broken, or nearly so, he raised Shapira on the radio. "Ron—Yatom here. What's your position."

"We are near wire on the east side of the camp ready to cut in."

"Send Sandler’s or Fliegel's men in first. Let them take the risk in case there is a trap."

Shapira looked over at the Jewish fighters spread out around him. In the thirty minutes since the rout of the Ukranians he had reorganized the men, and given them a little rest. Now prone in a small depression outside the Treblinka fence they seemed recovered and capable of further action. He called over Sandler and Fliegel and issued them orders in a matter of fact way.

The Bears moved first. Mimicking the strange commandos, Fliegel stepped out in front of his men and simply said in Yiddish "after me." The Bears set off at a trot for the wire, while the Sandler‘s team remained prone, their weapons pointing toward the camp. Shapira watched the advance nervously through his thermal binoculars, searching for potential dangers—he found none.

A minute later the Bears reached the wire, where two men began cutting the dense fencing. Fliegel's men had an easier time of it then had Itzak and Roskovsky, since nobody was shooting at them. Indeed, Treblinka remained eerily quiet.

As he squatted in the dark, waiting for Fliegel's men to open a breach in the barbed-wire fencing, Sandller couldn't help but marvel at the irony. For the last few months of his life he had thought of little else than finding a way to cut himself out of Sobibor. Now having found deliverance, he was cutting his way back into a death camp. The thought suddenly scared him, and he wondered if he had gone mad. He quickly gave up his macabre musings when one of the Bears signaled that he was through the wire, and Fliegel, standing now like traffic cop, waived him on.