Falling Through the Roof of Hell

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Rahel and Patek, upon their arrival in November 1940, were assigned a second-floor room on Dzielna Street, about half a block east of Smocza Street, which they shared with six other people. The building, located near the centre of the Quarter, had no plumbing, no hot water, marginal electricity, and a single small stall with no privacy for taking a shower and going to the bathroom. The room reeked of abominations. There were no beds and everyone slept together on the hardwood floor. On the first night Rahel, exhausted from the journey to the Quarter and the momentous, traumatic nature of the day, despite going to bed at 10 p.m., could not fall asleep until three a.m. Every time she started to slip into slumber the intrusion of cockroaches, centipedes, and spiders crawling on her body and face would snap her awake. The building was also unheated and in the crowded darkness she was certain everyone could hear her shivering. The images of death and dismemberment she had encountered in their trek to the Quarter gnawed at her crumbling sanity. Not far from where they had been staying they had come across a naked young woman, propped into an upright sitting position on a cart, her hands bound together with wire and her wrists cut and bloody but holding up a sign written in Polish. The sign read: ‘I LIED TO THE SS AND TOLD THEM I WAS NOT A JEW.’ Her left breast had been hacked off and she was disembowelled. She had died, but the look frozen on her face betrayed sheer agony. There was the strong scent of gasoline on her, and an empty gas can stood on the cart. They had threatened to set her on fire unless she told them she was a Jew. Rahel and Patek saw two others in similar staging on the way to their new home: gruesome warnings to all those who thought they might pass for non-Jews or lie about their ethnicity if questioned. Patek, too, had refused to submit to wearing the identifying white armband with the blue Star of David which German law required of all Jews in Poland since November 1939, following the occupation. In retrospect they had both been lucky beyond belief in spite of their defiance, but those days were over. Just after dawn, Rahel awoke in a sweat, overcome with terror such that sleeping was now out of the question.

An older couple, Hannah and Sol, were already up. They were the first residents in this unit and knew quite a lot about the street and immediate environs. Nearby a popular theatre called the El Dorado at Dzielna 1 Street by Zamenhofa Street showed various theatrical productions written and performed by Jewish artists. There were street singers and two teahouses down the street. Hannah took delight in describing the vibrant street life of the Quarter in spite of the circumstances: she possessed a good-natured glee and optimism in the face of atrocity which others could not help but be affected by. After the three of them shared some stale bread—a bit past 6 a.m. with the others still asleep—Rahel saw, through the front window, two neighbours next door on their porch, stooping over a dead body. In time she could tell from their actions this was a loved one, for the woman cupped the young man’s face between her hands and kissed him, first on one cheek, then the other. She appeared to be saying goodbye and was wiping tears from her eyes. The man did the same, stroking the young man’s hair and grasping his hand in his own, saying some words, perhaps in prayer. Rahel thought this man must have been their son. 

As she watched, the couple began in a rush to undress him, untying his shoes and removing his socks, unbuckling the belt about his trousers and unzipping them at the crotch and pulling them down his legs and off. As the woman unbuttoned his shirt and removed it, the man removed his skivvies, so that their loved one was now lying naked on the porch.

Rahel pointed to the window, altogether distressed. ‘What is this?’ she demanded to know, ‘What in Hell—’ and she moved towards the door. Hannah blocked her path, holding out an arm in front of her. ‘No, let me pass, please—’ she said in a firm, angry voice.

‘You don’t understand where you are, my dear,’ Hannah whispered. ‘The Nazis come for the corpses in the first light of morning, they should be here by now—’ She paused, trying to form the right words. ‘We must pay the Germans a tax if we want them to be buried proper. But we can’t afford it. We are all penniless here. And clothes are valuable, they can be sold—then the Judenrat comes by and disposes of the bodies.’ 

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Excerpt from Chapter 2

According to local rumour there had been several sightings of the creature in recent days and one young mother had reported the disappearance of her infant son after entering into the vault and falling to her knees in prayer. The mother, however, a known drunkard, had described the creature as changing its form right before her eyes and spewing forth great plumes of fire. She also described it as wingèd and the size of a horse.

Leo, upon being attacked by the great reptile, beseeched our Lord God and Saviour to banish the creature from our city, even as it hissed at him within the vault. Waving his arms and striking at it with his foot, he managed to drive it out of the room where it disappeared into a hedge just beyond the entrance, never to be seen or heard from again.

Somehow over time this odd but trivial tale transmogrified on the streets of Rome into an epic battle worthy of Heracles and the Nemean Lion. As the tale gathered ever-increasing momentum it pitted Leo the fearless dragon-slayer against a monster of supernatural strength and size that he dispatched with courageous calm. At any rate, Leo’s heroism and miracle-working powers were secured for posterity by the incident and later recorded in the Chronica pontificum, though with modification of many salient facts. 

Then, not long after his installation, in the first days of May, 847, a massive fire of unknown origin threatened the Basilica of St Peter. Although no cause or point of origin was identified, there had been a thunderstorm of some commotion in the small hours of the night before, and one of the papal staff reported that the lightning and thunder had persisted for some time after the rain had passed, offering a plausible explanation. This occurred on a Saturday, and no one alerted people to it until just before Terce, when the flames already engulfed the better part of an entire block and a half of the Saxon settlement contiguous to St Peter’s.

On our way to the fire, I could not resist commentary upon the significance of its location. ‘What is the arcanum of St Peter’s ill fortunes these days?’

‘There is nothing “fortunate” or “unfortunate” about it,’ Leo quipped. ‘Our Lord has a message for us this day: the same one we failed to hear the first time round!’

By the time we arrived a number of Roman citizens had taken up a common effort to extinguish the fire, by then within perhaps fifty metres or so of the Basilica’s portico. However, the few pails which had been found and were being applied to the flames were drawing water from a well closest to the fire’s opposite end, by a row of storage facilities and commercial buildings, and being pitched thereon, whilst the blaze’s approach to the Basilica was proceeding unabated.

‘Oh, Leo, this will not do!’ I gasped, tugging at his vestment and pointing at the flames. ‘We must apply the water to this end of the fire, else it will be upon the Basilica in no time!’

‘Good Lord, you’re right. Father Terrari, go to the other end and instruct them to reroute at once—we must find more pails!’

With that we undertook a search for pails—and with the assistance of monks and Roman citizens we found perhaps a dozen pails in less than a half-hour as others continued applying water with the few pails already got.

‘At this rate we are done for,’ Leo snapped. ‘We may as well build the damned things!’

But with these words an image popped into my head. ‘The flour and grain stores in the cellar! There must be a dozen or more barrels down there—’

‘Excellent, Johannes, excellent! But—’ Leo fingered his  chin in thought. ‘Imagine how heavy those barrels will be, large as they are, filled with water—how to lower them down, draw them up, and then lift them up, over and onto the flames—?’

I did not have an immediate answer to his question, not all of it, at least. I reasoned several men could lift the barrels up and onto the fire. However, the mechanics of lowering the barrels down into and up out of the well was trickier. The barrels would be many times heavier than the wooden pails we were using, and without handles they would not afford the same structural ease of transport into and out of the well.

‘All right. We will not be able to lower the barrels into and out of the well. But we can set up the barrels at the edge of the well, draw up the pails of water as fast as possible, empty them into the barrel and transport the barrel to the end of the fire by the Basilica. One barrel can be transported to the fire while the next one is being filled, so we are not waiting for a new barrel to be filled while the fire rages on.’ I put up my hands in exasperation. ‘It is the best we can do.’