“He is,” said the cannibal woman, “a devil.”

But the commando merely shrugged this indictment off. “What you say may be true. Yes, it is true. But so is something else. Of all the ghettos of Europe, only Trumpelman’s yet survives. How could this be accomplished except through the measures you describe? Whether or not he enjoyed his task is beside the point. I am from Warsaw. A Jew like you. I know what happened to the Elder there. He felt anguish. He felt torture. He couldn’t collaborate any longer. Suicide. An honorable act. And the next day the Others rounded up all the children.”

Hersh Einhorn, in the blackness, stood stiff. “Comrade, I must inform you that the Judenrat President, Trumpelman, has been sentenced to death by the underground movement. I warn you: the Red Army must not associate with such a man.”

“Of course you feel this way,” Taradash answered. “From your point of view, with all that you’ve lived through, it’s proper to have passed this sentence. The Red Army will not interfere if, after Operation Ural Mountains has been completed, and after the liberation, you still wish to carry it out. In my opinion, however, it would be a mistake to do so. In the eyes of history, it is you who will appear violent, vengeful, not your Elder. You must attempt to put aside your sufferings and see the wider perspective. Trumpelman has always known precisely what he was doing. He was in a race with time. And he won.”

Just then, from the midst of the resistance fighters, there came a hissing, sputtering sound. For an instant everyone feared that a pin had come loose from one of the homemade grenades. But there was no explosion. It was Nisel laughing. “Yes! Yes! I see! I see!” he cried. “He’s going to be a hero!”

The next thing you knew, Nachman Kipnis began to yip more or less like a dog. “Ha! Ha! Ha! A statesman! That’s the wider perspective!”

“A freedom fighter! That’s what they’ll write in the books. Ha! Ha! The history books!” This was Bloomgarden. He began to roll on the ground, squeezing his sides.

Then Einhorn, the last of the children, began to giggle, to grunt. “They’ll teach about him in school!”

The outburst, it was hysteria really, did not stop there. Within minutes the grown people were laughing, too. Not just laughing, but roaring, screeching, striking their thin chests, their bony kneecaps, with real force. Chaffer was the most animated of all. He shook and rolled. The dirt on top of his body flew in every direction. “Do you know what?” he finally managed to gasp. “Hee! Hee! The Russians on one side. The Americans—Ha! Ha!—on the other!” He broke off, whooping, howling. What he said next made the entire brigade, like the silk parachute, collapse limply onto the ground. “They’re going to say that Horowitz lost the war!”

What could the buttonholer mean by such a remark? He meant this: the war that Horowitz had already won wasn’t going to be mentioned. The Big Man would be robbed of his victory over the Jews! And in just that way, Trumpelman, the criminal, would become their savior. What the Ghettoites—the children first, and then the older people—had glimpsed, what became clear to them, was the nature of history. A farce. A misunderstanding. A kind of joke.