Danzig Passage Read online

  THE ZION COVENANT BOOK 5

  DANZIG PASSAGE

  The Zion Covenant Book 5

  Bodie & Brock Thoene

  www.FamilyAudioLibrary.com

  ThoenE-Books

  Visit the Thoenes’ exciting Web site at www.thoenebooks.com

  Copyright © 1991 by Bodie Thoene. All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration copyright © 2005 by Cliff Nielsen. All rights reserved.

  Edited by Ramona Cramer Tucker

  Designed by Julie Chen

  Published in 1991 as Danzig Passage by Bethany House Publishers under ISBN 1-55661-081-5.

  First printing by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. in 2005.

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the authors or publisher.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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  Printed in the United States of America

  11 10 09 08 07 06 05

  7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to you, dear friend and reader. We have come far together, haven’t we? You have read enough to know our hearts by now and so we really are friends! Your letters have cheered us and encouraged us. Your prayers for this ministry have called a mighty strength to help us and guide us as we work. Your prayers and encouragement are as much a part of the work as the writing of it. Philippians 1:2-6 and 1:8-11 best say how we feel about you!

  Baruch Hashem!

  Brock and Bodie Thoene

  May 1991

  “In my Father’s House”

  Prologue

  West Berlin—At the Wall

  November 9, 1989

  Ten thousand candles flickered in feeble contrast to the floodlights that drenched the concrete wall with light. Television cameras panned, capturing a sea of hopeful faces. News anchors made their reports, while chanting throngs provided a united chorus in the background.

  “TOR AUF! TOR AUF! Open the gate! Open the gate!” The shout resounded from the East and was echoed in the West. The words were no longer a plea but a demand. “TOR AUF!”

  The whole world watched this uprising of the human spirit. Men and women who had never known life without the Wall stood transfixed before their television sets to stare in wonder as the earth seemed to shift. Here was a miracle. Unthinkable, but real.

  “TOR AUF!”

  “For twenty-eight years this Wall has stood as the symbol of division for the world,” a commentator said above the din. “A twenty-eight-mile-long scar through the heart of a once-proud capital city.”

  The camera view was crowded with bright, exuberant faces. Bottles of champagne popped open and bubbled in joyful celebration as thousands roared and rushed toward the barrier.

  Young. So young, these faces. They had lived always in the gray shadow of this Wall. It had ordered their existence; it had dictated the boundaries of freedom. It had held them captive by its very existence.

  Now denim-clad men and women climbed onto it; trumpets rang out; hammers and chisels clanged down to break off chunks of concrete as horns honked and people danced along the Wall.

  “Berlin is Berlin again!”

  The camera caught an occasional glimpse of gray hair or a lined face streaked with tears. But few remained who remembered Berlin when it had been Berlin. Before Hitler. Before the war. Before the Communists.

  Berlin had been beautiful, yes; and it had been proud. It had become too proud, and that pride had sown the seeds of violence and destruction. Few among the crowd this night could remember clearly when the Wall had first begun to appear. It was not a mere twenty-eight years before. The scar upon the heart of Germany was much older than that.

  Elisa Lindheim Murphy wiped tears from her cheeks. She held tightly to the gloved hand of her husband as the crowd surged forward toward the Wall. At seventy-five, she was not a young woman anymore, but tonight she felt twenty again!

  Fifty-one years exactly had passed since her father, Theo Lindheim, had witnessed the violence of Kristal Nacht in Berlin. Elisa wondered if these young people remembered that tonight was the fifty-first anniversary of that shame and sorrow, when the wound that had formed this concrete scar had been gouged deep and bloody across the heart of the nation.

  She and Murphy had been young in those days, young like the people who danced and embraced on top of the Wall.

  “They are kids.” Murphy laughed.

  “So were we.” Elisa squeezed his hand.

  “I didn’t think we would live to see this.” He raised his hand and whooped with the others. They moved slowly amid the crush.

  “Hey, old grandfather!” shouted a young bearded man to Murphy. “What do you think? Berlin is Berlin again!”

  Murphy nodded and raised his eyes toward Brandenburg Gate. Tears of joy brimmed over. “What does he know about Berlin?” Murphy said to Elisa. His thoughts were on the eastern side of the Wall, where the heart of Berlin had beat, where he had seen Elisa for the first time from a window at the Adlon Hotel.

  Elisa forgave this youthful ignorance easily. “Perhaps it is good they can’t remember, Murphy. Let them be. It is better they can’t imagine the waste of it, the heartache of what might have been.”

  The passage of time had not managed to extinguish the brightness of Elisa’s blue eyes. Her shoulders were as straight as the day she had given her first concert at the Prussian State Theater. She knew what had been. She had been born there, had grown up and fallen in love and had her heart broken there. Her dreams had been shattered like the glass of Jewish shops along the Unter den Linden. She and her family had been hunted. They had fled, then returned to help those who remained. The full circle of love and tragedy had been enacted behind that Wall. She could tell these young people a thing or two about Berlin!

  Fifty-one years ago tonight Berlin had heard different shouts. Stones and hammers had smashed businesses and lives; prisoner lorries had rumbled through these streets, beneath the pillars of the Brandenburg Gate. Seventy thousand had been arrested and imprisoned on that night.

  Lindheim’s Department Store had been burned because it had once been owned by a Jew. Its smoke had mingled with that of the synagogues of the city and with the smoke of those who perished. New Church had opened its doors for refuge, and in so doing, had sealed its fate.

  Theo Lindheim had seen it all from the window of the British Embassy in Berlin. He had heard the cry of the Jews who begged for refuge.

  “Tor auf! Tor auf! Open the gate!”

  On that terrible night the gate remained closed, and Theo had seen the vision of what was to come.

  Elisa fingered the yellow slip of stationery in her coat pocket. It bore the logo of the British Embassy, and beneath Theo’s message was his signature and the date: November 9, 1938.

  Suddenly, as they neared the gate, Murphy asked her, “Do you have it?”

  She nodded, took the paper from her pocket, and held it up. “All these years I kept it,” she said, “only half-believing that this moment would come. Papa is here tonight, coming home with me at last.”

  “TOR AUF! OPEN THE GATE!”

  Guards yielded at the stroke of midnight, and the crowds surged together in one vast embrace. At last the scar that Hitler had carved upon the heart of Germany was being erased!

  Murphy pulled Elisa closer to him as they walked forward towar
d the East. Fifty-one years of marriage. Children, grandchildren, and soon a great-grandchild. Fifty-one years of joy and sorrow; the fullness of life and death. But this was the first time Elisa could look up at him and say, “I’m going home.”

  The opera. The university. New Church. Lindheim’s Department Store—all were altered or gone forever. But tonight the Wall was coming down. Perhaps heaven offered another chance to the descendants of those who had destroyed the nation with hatred.

  Elisa walked on with the knowledge that she and Murphy might not live to see what Germany made of that second chance. She prayed for the people of East and West together; prayed that true light would shine here, lest a more terrible darkness rush in!

  “Tor auf,” she prayed quietly for those around her. “Open the gate.”

  1

  Martyr

  November 9, 1938

  The face of Big Ben’s clock glowed like a full moon behind a veil of London fog. The chimes of the great bell tower rang out eight o’clock and were answered by the lonely bellow of a fog horn.

  Below the crinoline spires of Parliament, the black waters of the Thames slid toward the sea. It was Thursday night, and most of the theaters and concert halls in London were dark and empty. The panic that had swept through the city with rumors of impending war had been replaced with tranquility. Nearly everyone believed Prime Minister Chamberlain. Peace was at hand. The Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia had purchased “peace in our time.” The citizens of London had put away their gas masks and filled in the trenches that had crisscrossed Hyde Park. Flags and bunting were hung from public buildings and streetlamps in anticipation of the celebrations planned for the twentieth anniversary of the Armistice. It had been twenty years since the end of the war to end all wars. This year England had plenty to celebrate. The lions of war had been tossed a small bone and placated at last!

  Tonight, London was safe. Safe beneath her fog.

  ***

  The black bowl of the sky above Galilee was dusted with ten thousand bright stars. An arch of gold and silver glittered in the Milky Way, the constellations almost lost against such a backdrop.

  Sharon Zalmon knew the constellations by name. She had learned them all in an astronomy class at the University in Warsaw two years before. The sky above Poland was not quite like the sky above Galilee, however, The lights of the city of Warsaw obscured the glory which the shepherd David had written about in the days when Israel had been a great nation.

  Tonight, on duty in the tiny Jewish settlement of Hanita, Sharon only glanced at the stars. There was no time for contemplating their glory, no time for writing new psalms. On this night there was no nation of Israel. There was only a memory of what had been, the hope of what could be once again.

  Little could she know that on this night, as in the times of David, enemies hid in the dark ravines of Galilee. They crept toward the outpost where Sharon stood guard with an old shotgun. Their single purpose was to destroy the memory of what Israel had been and to make certain that the nation would never exist again on the soil of Zion. Kill the people of the Covenant! Kill the dream! Destroy forever the promise God made to the shepherd King, and to his people!

  At the cry of jihad, holy war, enemies came from Jordan and Syria and Egypt and Iraq. They banded together, united by hatred, beneath the banner of the Prophet Mohammed and Allah. Their shouts in the city of Jerusalem grew silent; now they moved through the darkness of Galilee beneath the peaceful stars. They slipped toward the tiny mound of sandbags where Sharon Zalmon kept watch, planning to inflict the dreamless peace of death upon her and all the Jews of Hanita.

  It was early yet. Sharon scanned the black rolling hills beyond the perimeter of the settlement. Shifting the aged shotgun in her hands, she rested the heavy barrel on top of the sandbags.

  Three minutes before, Lazlo had left her here and went to patrol the barbed barricade between this position and the next. The Arab gangs had cut through the wire before and had killed settlers. For this reason, the settlement posted stationary guards like Sharon and moving patrols like Lazlo, who would make his rounds and return in a few minutes.

  Something terrible was coming to the Jews of the Yishuv; after the Jerusalem riots, everyone believed it, even the British High Command. They had sent Captain Samuel Orde to help the Jews of Hanita. Sharon had heard of this Englishman who was known as Hayedid, “The Friend.” Scheduled to arrive tonight, he would no doubt be out here to make the rounds of the patrol. This thought made the night seem not quite so dark, the unseen enemy not so terrifying. Hayedid, The Friend, would help them.

  Sharon looked up briefly at the constellation of Orion as it moved toward her from the horizon. She could just make out the stars where the ancients said his sword hung from his belt. The stars remain unchanged since that time. Our dreams remain the same, she thought.

  In that moment she heard the sound of a stone as it slithered down an embankment twenty paces from the barricade beyond her post!

  The sound jerked her back to the present earth; back to this small patch of ground that the dreamers had purchased and cultivated and made to blossom from desolation. They must now defend it as well. They must not look up at the stars and dream, or all their dreams would be destroyed!

  “Who is it?” she demanded. Her heart pounded as she tried to fix the exact location of the falling stone. Was it there, behind the outline of a boulder? Or to the left, where the ground dropped steeply away? Or maybe it was behind her. Perhaps it was only the footstep of Lazlo as he made his rounds.

  She lifted the heavy barrel of the shotgun and pointed it out toward the boulder. If someone were there, he would not escape the blast of a shotgun. Lazlo had showed her. She did not have to take careful aim. The small pellets of this old British hunting gun would down a Holy Struggler like a pheasant rising from a bush. Still, the sound of movement left Sharon frightened. What might be beyond the reach of the shotgun’s range? Her mouth went dry; she licked her lips and listened. What had she heard?

  “Is someone out there?” she asked again. Her voice sounded small and vulnerable in the night. She wished Lazlo would hurry. She thought of calling an alarm, but what if it was nothing?

  The silhouette of the land stretched out like an unmoving sea beneath the rolling star scape. Surely, Sharon thought, she would see movement if the stone had shifted outside the barbed wire fence!

  Why did Lazlo not return? Was it not time for him to call out the password and leap into the circle of sandbags?

  At that instant another stone clattered down a few feet from her. She opened her mouth to call out the alarm just as a hand clamped down hard on her mouth.

  Sharon Zalmon had no chance to scream.

  Searing hot pain filled her. She felt terror and then a rush of warmth as she was pushed down onto the dirt floor of the outpost. She blinked twice in amazement at the brightness of the stars above Galilee and the realization that she was seeing them for the last time. Then the dreams died. Just that quickly, it was finished. The darkness of the land overwhelmed the brightness of the skies above Galilee, and the peace of death came once again for a child of the Covenant.

  ***

  The German Führer promised weapons for the revolt of the Mufti’s army against the Jews and the British. He made good on that promise.

  On a dark field in Jordan, Haj Amin Husseini walked through the stacks of heavy crates containing rifles and ammunition from Germany. He felt the satisfaction of a man with great power behind him.

  As Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin had also kept a promise to Hitler. He had issued the call for jihad, a holy war against the Jews and English infidels. Riots even now rolled across Palestine. These thousands of weapons would assure victory and an Islamic kingdom for Haj Amin.

  For a time, to be sure, Haj Amin was forced to flee from the English law, which even now pursued him for inciting the riots in Jerusalem. But Haj Amin had no doubts about the ultimate outcome. He had Adolf Hitler behind him—an ally almost as powerf
ul as the Prophet Mohammed and the Koran! Both Hitler and the Prophet proclaimed the destruction of the Jews. The Islamic religion provided passion to the people, while Hitler supplied crates of weapons and Nazi commandos to help accomplish that goal.

  The three motors of the silver German airplane sputtered to life. Haj Amin extended his hand to each of his faithful commanders and the fair-skinned Germans among them. They would carry on while he was in exile. He had communications in place which assured that orders from Berlin and Baghdad would be followed with the same devotion as if he remained in Jerusalem.

  “Allah is great.” Ram Kadar bowed low before Haj Amin. “It will be a short time before you will return to us as king in Jerusalem.”

  These words made Haj Amin smile. “It has been two thousand years since any king has ruled over Jerusalem alone. I have seen the Prophet in a dream Kadar; the promise is given to me! Soon, indeed, I will sit on the throne, and you will sit at my right hand.”

  Others kissed his hand as he passed through the ranks. All vowed to finish what they had begun. There would be no more Zionist settlers. A new Arab kingdom would take the orchards and the fields the Jews had cultivated and distribute the bounty among the True Believers. Thus it was written, and thus it would be accomplished.

  The final words of the Mufti were almost drowned by the hum of the engines. As he boarded the plane to flee from British justice, the Jihad Moquades repeated his words over and over to one another.

  “This is only the beginning! The Prophet has promised us victory in the Mother of All Battles against Jews and infidels! Only the start! The world and Paradise belong to those who believe this!”

  The plane had barely lifted off the crudely constructed airfield before the Holy Strugglers cheered and cracked open the crates of new rifles and bullets—enough to kill every Englishman and Jew three times over. The Mother of All Battles against Jews had begun, even as it began throughout the Reich of the German Führer, Adolf Hitler.