“The pumper!” Kleiderman shouted. “The battle has already begun!”

The whole crowd ran forward. But now Jews, with rags to their faces, were going the opposite way. The boys rounded the corner. “There’s the warehouse!” one of them cried. The front ranks slowed. The rest crowded behind them. They all stopped and stared.

All of Stefanska had been turned into a lake. The strikers were knee-deep in water. Some of them were lying in it, rolling around. The fire brigade had retreated to the top of the hook and ladder. As for the Guardsmen, they were all on the roof, on the edge of it, with their legs hanging down. Beneath them, from every window of the Stefanska Street depot, water was gushing and streaming. It came in a flood through the open front doors. It even trickled between the seams of the bricks. And where the waterfalls landed, at the spot where the geysers struck, a great silver mound was building higher and higher. In the sunshine it gleamed, dazzlingly, blindingly, like a hill of coins. It was tens of thousands of thawed butterfish.

One man sloshed forward to the band of raiders. He had a handkerchief over his nose. “Rotten! All rotten!” he cried. His mask fell aside. It was Marbled, of the Buttonhole Makers’ Guild. He swept his arm back toward the glittering pile. “The Jews who ate it are poisoned!”

Rievesaltes sighed. “A million zlotys.”

“This,” said Lipsky, “was one of Trumpelman’s bargains.”

A moan came up from the stricken men, upon whom the sun unrelentingly glared.

The Mosk Works presser folded his giant arms. “It’s the winter staple, you know. The whole February allotment. Ha! Ha! We’re going to starve!”

Ladies and gentlemen, for the government of the Ghetto, and for its plain citizens, too, this was a crisis. First of all, what to do with the fish? The smell had already reached the neighboring villages, and in the Aryan section people complained that the fumes were making them ill. The bald Polish mayor drove to the Chancellory at Dworska 20. He took off his shoe to pound on the Chairman’s door. Madame Trumpelman, not the Elder, came out. She was wearing a black hat over her black bangs, and there were little dark dots on her veil. This is what she said—and to an elected Polish official:

“Put your shoe on! Don’t be a fool!”

And it was this same Phelia Trumpelman who, beginning with the morning of Strike Day Three, did the most to restore some kind of order. Her first step was to send the fumigation squads to Stefanska, to spray the thousands of fish. The mound was by then surrounded by visible vapors. It seemed to float off the ground. The fumigation experts raced forward, squirted a little, and then staggered back. Not effective. Then the Ghetto Queen, watching from behind her spotted veil, ordered every member of the Gravediggers’ Guild to be placed under special arrest. The Elite Guard rounded them up and set them to digging an enormous trench down the length of the street. The men worked in shifts through the rest of the day and into the night. When they looked over the lip of this grave they saw that, in the darkness, in the midst of the blackout, the fish, like phosphorus, had started to glow.