The lawyer, looking like himself, in a plain, open, faded shirt, was sorting through a box of bullets. He was so feverish, so busy—choosing shells that fit the revolvers, putting them in—that he had not heard anything of the debate. But he saw the presser standing near. “A minute. A minute. Let’s say every other shot is a hit. So we shoot one hundred Others! A hundred! It’s enough! They’ll turn. They’ll run.”

Old Pipe in his pullover—it had a diamond design—came over. “Mister Lipsky. We have decided. You have to surrender to the Judenrat.”

“It’s not true! Don’t listen! There’s been no decision!” Sitting on a sandbag, holding his knees, Nisel Lipiczany continued. “There is a chance the Warriors are bluffing. Has anyone thought of that?”

Lipsky let the cartridges slide through his fingers. “What is this? I should surrender? Surrender? It is the eve of the battle. It’s when the Ghetto needs its leaders most.”

“It seems,” said Faulhaber, “we should take a vote.”

Hersh Einhorn: “This isn’t America, Faulhaber. We don’t vote on this and that.”

Kleiderman: “We are a military force, in wartime. Anyone who doesn’t follow orders is shot.”

“And Lipsky is our Commander. He gives the orders here.”

“Yes, that’s so, Madame Trilling,” young Kipnis said. “But don’t forget, our brigade, like the whole resistance movement, is only a single unit of the Red Army. Lipsky is our Commander, but above Lipsky, above all the generals and admirals, there is only one leader: the Man of Steel!” The boy wheeled. He pointed to the portrait, pasted to the wall, of the man with the mustache, the smoking pipe.

A sigh went up from the fighters. In the street someone screamed. Glass was breaking there. People were begging, as the deadline drew nearer, for a miracle to save them.

The cannibal woman—remember, she had not eaten her son—broke the silence. “Vote,” she said.

Everyone looked at Lipsky. He was squatting and, like a bird on a branch, turning his head. “No resistance group in history has handed over its own leader. Don’t be the first ones.”

Faulhaber took over. His suit was shredding in places. He brushed the hair from his eyes. “Everybody who thinks we should not turn Lipsky in, put up his hand.”

Nisel’s hand was first in the air. Then Einhorn’s, and Kleiderman’s, and of course the one that belonged to the widow Trilling. Four altogether. Then the cannibal woman raised her arm, too. A total of five. A pause.

Faulhaber: “What about you, Lipsky? Not voting?”

Across his chest the lawyer folded his arms. Not voting.

“Wait!”

The Jews looked over to where the last surviving Bloomgarden, Ignacy, stood with his hands in his pockets. He put one of those hands in the air. Six, then.

Said Faulhaber, “All opposed?”

The following raised their hands: Pipe, Chaffer, Kipnis, Faulhaber himself, the presser, Miss Bibelnieks, Zam. In other words, seven.

Imagine the astonishment of all the fighters when Lipsky burst into tears. The drops poured out of his eyes like water from pipes. Of course everyone looked at his or her shoes. But they had to hear what their Commander was saying.