What came through the clouds in actual fact was an airplane. It dived straight for the thousands of Jews. For a moment it seemed that the pilot meant to crash into the wooden scaffold. He got closer and closer. One of his rubber wheels was spinning. The wings shook and dipped. Then, thundering, it swooped up and away, making a wind that knocked off dozens of caps. The Jews understood: this meant that they would be bombed. A cry went up from the crowd. Lipsky! Lipsky! We want Lipsky! It was an understandable reaction. Against the lives of so many thousands, the fate of one man weighed no more than the wing of a fly.

The manhunt went on all afternoon. Bands of Jews ran through the streets, shouting, Hand him over! Give him up! Search parties broke down apartment doors. They swept through attics, through cellars, and poked the hollow walls. Everywhere they found people hiding, in wardrobes and bunkers and inside chimney flues. But no matter how frantically, how carefully, they searched, they were unable to find a single member of the Edmund Trilling Brigade. The rain, needles of it, came thicker, faster. Down some whirlpool went the light of the day. That meant the Baluty Suburb, the last ghetto in Poland, had only four or five hours to live.

Suddenly, at the intersection of Jakuba and Franciskanska, in the factory district, there was a disturbance. There he is! Stop him! Kill the traitor! Down the length of Jakuba a little man came dashing. His cheeks were puffed up. He had a wing collar on. Behind him, with sticks, ran the mob. With each step they were gaining. And from every side street came more Jews. A roar went up. The poor man was trapped. He stopped. You could see his black mustache, his white collar. Then somebody grabbed him by the knees and another person took hold of his shoulder. He disappeared.

“He came out of a manhole! I saw him!”

“Like a rat!”

“We should have looked there from the start! Ha! Ha! An underground leader!”

In a moment a man came with a gasoline lantern. The Jews stepped back. Lipsky, with his arms broken, lay on the ground. The trouble was, it wasn’t Lipsky the lawyer. The yellow light flashed and sizzled. It was the tailor Lipsky. Originally from Kamenets-Podolsk.

Where was the Bolshevik, then? The answer, of course, is that he was at the brigade headquarters, the same little room, the one with the slanted roof, the paper over the windows, that James Faulhaber had once been led to—upstairs and downstairs, blindfolded, on hands and knees. It was so cleverly disguised that no one—not the Ghettoites, not even the Warriors—would ever find it. Faulhaber, the American, was in that room now. He was wearing the wool suit in which he had arrived at the Ghetto gate, nearly two years before. In all that time his hair had not once been cut. With those locks, with the loose strands of wool, he looked more like a poet than anything else. “It’s unbearable!” he moaned. His hands were over his ears. “Won’t they ever stop?”