Different Paths

Author's Note: This fic deals with the character of Majorek in movie; Majorek being the character that works for the Polish underground distributing leaflets in the Warsaw ghetto and later meets up with Adrien Brody's character while they are both working on the construction sites outside the ghetto walls.

The last we see of him is when Brody leaves the ghetto permanently to be hidden by his friends outside. This is what could have happened to Majorek after Brody escapes.

As usual this is a non-profit piece so please don't sue me.

#1

I remember the day Wladyslaw left, it was snowing but the man looked so different. The rest of us were tired, as usual from the brickworks. Building houses and re-building the shattered old ones was exhausting.

Wladyslaw by this time had got himself a job in the supply shed, handing out screws and nails and tools to the workers that needed them. It was dangerous work as he often had to quickly sort through new deliveries to find any contraband the Polish resistance had sent us and hide it, but most of the time he was left alone. Plus he was indoors next to a stove, not twenty feet in the air on rickety wooden scaffolding building walls with insufficient mortar.

'G-d, how I hate the Nazis. I think the worst thing about them is their arrogance. They are so opinionated, so mean, so holier-than-thou. The way they strut about in their leather sickens me.

They really believe the garbage about being superior to our subhuman; Unter-mushen they call us and they think it gives them the right to do anything.

It's strange but I sometimes can't believe there used to be half a million Jews in this place.

And now?

After the deaths, shootings, suicides and deportations something like thirty thousand remain.

I'm tired of taking orders, tired of the labour, humiliations, the lies and most of all the fear. The fear that they will kill us all someday.

Someday? In the future?

I thought people looked towards the future with hope; what do we hope for? A bullet, typhus or a train-ride to Treblinka.

No. if my future must end it will end when I decide, not some green uniformed devil with hate behind his frosted eyes. I'm going-…'

"Majorek?"

I stopped writing, unsure as to who was calling me. If the 'wrong people' discovered I was writing in the ghetto they'd turn me in and I'd find myself dead sooner than I wished.

Unconsciously I collected the papers and slid them back into their hiding place between the steel bed frame and my thin mattress. They were hidden as the voice came again.

"Majorek?"

This time I recognised the voice, Yakob. A friend.

Not that I needed to fear the Nazis now, they wouldn't have used my name. We only feared collaborators here, people who'd turn members of the underground over to the Gestapo for an extra loaf of bread and a smile full of empty promises.

I finally found my voice in a reply.

"I'm here".

Yakob crept over, it was a round midnight and most workers in our section were asleep, lost in their own personal nightmares.

"Yakob, what is it? What do you want?"

Yakob put his face to mine so to not wake the others. He was clean shaven, one of the few personal traits he refused to let the Nazis beat out of him, he was never scruffy. Very dapper.

"Januk wants to see you".

"Now?"

"Yes".

"Why now?"

"I don't know why, he just told me to get you".

"Does he think something's on the rise?"

Yakob shrugged, he didn't know. I'm going to have to go and see Januk then.

"Ok, I'm coming" I said. Just hoping that I'd be able to stay warm a little longer; nothing like a Polish winter to make you appreciate heat.

We slept in our clothes in the barracks, the single wood stove producing pathetic amounts of heat. Good in a way as it saves us time putting our clothes on in the mornings, or of course when we want to do a moonlight flip out of the barrack and into another part of the ghetto.

We're lucky too; the Nazis are currently lax in their interest. Continual haranguing of three hundred thousand people over four months onto trains means they are beginning to overlook the movements of the last few thousand.

I knew where Januk was but I let Yakob lead the way as we crept down into the cellar of the building they used as a barracks and slipped out a window and into the ruins that surrounded the waste ground they used for the roll call.

Januk's building was a good ten minutes away and that ten minutes didn't include 'hiding time' if we happened to run in the irregular Nazis patrols that occurred all over the ghetto. Sometimes I wished they were more regular, and then we could work our plans around them. But like I said the Germans were beginning to get sloppy and although this was a problem it's certainly the least of many.

Finally after scurrying through two bombed-out apartment blocks and across the first floor of what used to be a textile factory I saw our objective.

Januk was holed up in the basement of a warehouse; the only way in was through a sewer conduit accessible from the main part of the street. In order to see him we were going to have to pry open the man-hole cover in front of the warehouse. I'd done this twice before, but never with Yakob and not with a German patrol encamped less than two hundred yards away.

This is going to be a problem.