He Who Fights

Finalist in the Vocal Moment of Freedom challenge.

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For weeping has given no one their freedom

But he who fights—he has the world

– “March of the New Army” (translation)

Ezra breathed in, ignoring the acrid taste of the air and focusing on the sun on his skin instead. He found so few reasons to be outside anymore, so he took a moment to savor the spring day and its warmth. It reminded him of his days playing football with the other neighborhood boys until an automobile would blare its horn to clear the street. His cousins in Augustow had always complained that he had no shortage of friends living in the capital Warsaw. Meanwhile, they were stuck tending to hogs and plowing fields.

Except my friends are all gone now, Ezra thought, grinding his teeth to still the quiver in his lower lip.

Here he was in the same streets where he had scored so many goals. Except they had been turned into a prison. And he was not kicking a ball anymore.

He was playing a much more deadly game as his fingers tightened around the stock of his Karabiner 98k, waiting for the German patrol.

Waiting for his turn to die.

Ezra was only fifteen. He was not a soldier. He had been too young to fight when the invaders had sent their tanks and planes rampaging across his nation in 1939. The events that followed had cascaded together to implode his entire world.

His family had emerged from their basement after the shockwaves of bombs and shells had finally subsided to find white flags waving from rooftops. Somehow their house had survived the bombardment during Warsaw's final hours of resistance. His parents first told him and his sister that they would be okay if they cooperated. Even as he reassured them, Ezra thought his father's face had seemed ashen. As if he knew what was to come.

But what could he say, Ezra thought as he poked his head around the corner of the alley. Leszno Street was empty, as it had been every day since he and his fellows had taken up arms against the SS thugs. Take your baby sister and a rifle and head for the hills?

No. Ezra shook his head and patted his Kar 98k. That day would come later.

The Nazis had shown equal efficiency tearing apart Ezra's life and the lives of his friends and neighbors as they had slicing through the Polish Army. The schools were closed, their citizenship revoked, and the noose only tightened from there. A year later, walls rose across Warsaw, and Ezra's childhood home now stood in the center of prison camp, jammed full of men, women, and children who had done nothing but share a common history.

When the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto proved too resilient to all starve to death, the invaders decided more was needed.

The jackbooted SS men had kicked in the gates they themselves had erected and started marching house to house. When the fists had pounded on his family's door, his father had shoved half a loaf of bread in Ezra's hand and told him to run. Ezra had hidden in a storm drain for two days before emerging to find his family gone. That was when the resistance had found him, sobbing in an empty house.

Only later did it come to light that the "resettlement" program promised by the Nazis was to a gas chamber in Treblinka.

Now it was the final survivors of the ghetto's turn to decide more was needed.

Ezra realized the quiet had broken. He could hear boots grinding broken glass against the cobblestones. Peaking his head the slightest bit out, he caught sight of the Germans, just where his resistance commander had said they would come. Ten men in gray military coats walked forward at an easy pace, rifles and submachine guns slung over their shoulders. One was speaking and a few others laughed at his words, apparently amused by his story. None of them seemed the least bit alert.

Careful not to move too fast and show the glint of his gun barrel to the enemy, Ezra slid his rifle into position in the nook between the corner of the row house and the brick wall that followed the front steps to the door. He breathed in, letting his hands work their jitters out, and watched through the rifle sights watched as the ten-man SS patrol advanced down Leszno Street. Toward him.

He recalled the words of the local commander five days before. The first day that he and his comrades had taken up arms against the murderers dressed in feldgrau.

"There are no soldiers anymore. No resistance fighters. Only men," he paused, looking into the eyes of every man, woman, and teenager packed into the cellar, "and cattle. Cattle are herded into pens and slaughtered. We must show the Nazi butchers that we are not cattle. We are men."

There was no bravado in his words, no patriotic appeal to lay down their lives for the cause. Only a voice as firm as stone. "We will almost all certainly die in the days to come, but we choose this. We do not let the Germans decide the day and time of our fate."

Another voice rippled in Ezra's head as the individual features on each man's face came into view.

"Do not let your nerves make you fire too soon. It is better to wait for a sure shot and then reposition quickly than to attack when you are sure to miss."

Ezra followed the army captain's advice. The man had evaded capture by the Germans in 1939 and now served in the Polish Home Army. The memory gave him hope.

Hope that others would carry on the fight even if he fell here today.

In front of him, the SS men were throwing lit torches and Molotov cocktails through windows to root out any defenders hiding in the buildings that lined the street. The sun's warmth gave way to a more violent, punishing heat as the fires flared up behind the patrol. The smoke Ezra had tasted before nearly overwhelmed his lungs now, but it also concealed his position. The invaders had yet to show any signs they had detected him.

Ezra realized the man at the front of the arson squad was an officer. Carefully, he shifted his aim to center on the SS Truppführer. The death's head insignia on the officer's cap was in clear focus, but Ezra found his fingers were tremoring as he started to pull on the trigger.

Until now, everything Ezra had done had been a matter of instinct. Simply following the training of the Polish Home Army captain's and his commander's orders. He started to think about what he was doing. This man could have a family, too. Would Ezra be the one to take a father away from his children?

But then his thoughts shifted.

I had a family. I had friends. They took them all from me. These men could be the same ones that forced them into that boxcar that ended at the gas chamber.

Ezra found his hands were no longer shaking. He fired.

The Truppführer's chest exploded in a red cloud, and he dropped to the ground as the other SS soldiers shouted and scrambled out of the street. Their leader did not stir as the other thugs unslung their weapons and started returning fire.

The captain had told Ezra to reposition after getting his shot off, but Ezra was tired of running. Tired of hiding. He pulled back the bolt on his Kar 98k, ejecting the smoking cartridge and loading another round.

As bullets whistled through the air and ground the bricks around him, Ezra considered for the first time how the rifle he held was a captured German gun.

In the right hands, even the tools of the oppressors can be used for good.

The thought made him smile in the moment before the bullet found him.