Читать книгу The Art of Resistance - Justus Rosenberg - Страница 10

THE STREET CLOTHES placed behind the laundry pail in an unobtrusive corner of the hospital lavatory were right where they were supposed to be. I had managed to fake my way out of the Nazi internment camp by feigning agonizing stomach pains, but the last thing I expected was to have an appendectomy actually performed on my gut. The gash in my abdomen was far from healed, but I’d walked to the bathroom at the appointed moment and now, if I could slip into the clothes the Underground operative (disguised as a priest) had left for me, and if I could sashay out of the hospital without raising suspicions, the only thing I had to worry about was riding a bicycle to the halfway house in Lyon, without my intestines spilling onto the boulevard! I made it down the broad hospital stairway and out the heavy lobby doors, and the bicycle was parked by a bench just as planned. Gingerly I mounted the saddle and coasted down the long driveway to the main road, where, standing all the while with one hand on my stomach, I would hopefully pedal my way to freedom. Automobiles whizzed by me, the late summer breeze tousled my hair, but suddenly the whining crescendo of what I thought must be a police siren loomed up behind me. Had I been betrayed? Was I after all about to be sent back to the camp and from there to Auschwitz?