Faulhaber jumped up, then sank down. “It’s madness! Kill the leaders of the Ghetto? That’s anarchy! You have to have a government here!”

“False!” Szypper shook his triangular head. “Such incorrect logic proves you are ignorant of world historical forces.”

Kipnis: “I quote from V. I. Lenin. While the state exists there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no state.”

Einhorn: “Everyone knows that in the higher phase of Communism the state, in the words of Engels, shall inevitably wither away.”

“Yes! Wither away!” Faulhaber could not help himself from debating. “But you are talking about violence! About shooting people!”

“Force is the midwife to the birth of every new social system. Karl Marx.”

“But, but, the Ghetto is a special case. Who will care for the sick? Who will teach the children? And feed the Jews who are hungry?”

Hersh Einhorn addressed this point. “Faulhaber, that was the Jewish state marching those people away. The more government, the more of us disappear. First they wanted fifty. Then one hundred a week. Then two hundred. Now it’s nearly a thousand. Starving isn’t fast enough. Typhus is too slow. So the Judenrat itself will speed up the slaughter. Without a government, it’s true, there will be chaos. People will suffer and people will die. But it won’t be like it is now. The way it is now there won’t be a Jew left in Poland!”

Kipnis came up. His eyes, and the tears in them, were magnified. “You saw? Faulhaber! You saw?”

Szypper also came closer. “The cursing? The clubs?”

Faulhaber: “Yes. With my own eyes.”

Einhorn gripped the American’s shoulder. “Comrade,” he said.

At that moment footsteps were heard on the nearby stairs. The boys sprang for their weapons—the pistol, the two captured guns. A warning light flashed. A large man put his head in the door. It was the presser with the broken nose.

“It’s our men,” he announced.

Then a group of ex-Mosk Mill workers, led by Lipsky, squeezed into the room: Kleiderman, Kemp, old Mister Pipe. Also the woman who they said ate her son. Thus one of the most important results of the Five Day General Strike: those who had taken part in it had become progressives. There was a stranger, too, who stood a little off to one side. He was wearing an English raincoat and had the kind of bald head that bulged in the back, as if from brains.

“Comrades!” Szypper exclaimed. “Faulhaber’s with us! He understands!”

Lipsky’s hair was still standing up in the back. He spoke as fast as an automatic gun shoots. “That doesn’t matter. The situation has changed. We’ve got to do more than shoot one or two people. Listen, the attack on America has been confirmed. Tomorrow or the next day one side or the other will make a declaration of war. Not only that, Stalin himself has issued a secret order for the counteroffensive. The slogan will be: Victory in 1942! Quiet! Quiet! No time for chitchat. We can’t wait for the Americans to open a second front. The Jews of Europe will become the second front! Kipnis! Try to contact the partisan groups. Call Bialystok! The time has come for the Suburb to arise!”