Isaac's Army (17 page)

Janine Mortkowicz never even contemplated moving to the Ghetto. The sixty-five-year-old matriarch had not waited for the November 15 deadline to act. The moment the Nazis announced their intention to seal off the Jewish population, she began to plan. “
I don’t think it ever crossed her mind to follow the [relocation] order,” recalled Joanna. She was not alone.
The Germans issued 11,130 arrest warrants for Jews who disobeyed the ghetto decree, including for twelve members of the extended Mortkowicz clan.

“
I don’t know if there had been a family-wide discussion about it. But everyone decided to stay on the Aryan side,” said Joanna, employing the widely used German nomenclature for the Christian parts of Warsaw.

Two factors weighed heavily in favor of staying put: “We had money and we had [Gentile] friends,” both of which would be essential for survival. Joanna herself had not initially been subject to the Ghetto relocation order. But the Germans had just tightened race regulations and the criteria by which the Nuremberg Laws determined Jewish origin. Under the new restrictions, Joanna’s status as a
mischling
, an individual of mixed parentage still classified as Christian, had been changed to Jewish.

Staying put, however, could not mean remaining at their current address in Old Town Square. The SS knew that Jews lived there, because they had hauled Janine Mortkowicz in for questioning in August. She had packed a toothbrush then, as everyone in Warsaw invariably did when summoned to Gestapo headquarters on Szuch Avenue, because so few people ever walked out freely again.

Janine’s Gestapo troubles had apparently stemmed from an innocent housecleaning. Janine had ordered Vincent, their devoted caretaker, to throw out some of the old unsold inventory when they moved into the former printing facilities, and the discarded books had found their way to one of the open-air markets in the Jewish district. Unfortunately, the castoffs included 1905 volumes by Karl Marx—now considered seditious propaganda.

“
As she was entering Gestapo headquarters, the doorman insulted her with some anti-Semitic abuse,” Joanna recalled. Far from cowering, Janine opened her own interrogation by going on the offensive and berating the investigating officer for the doorman’s offensive remarks.
“She stood up and in a loud voice proclaimed that she was proud of her heritage, that her father was from Vienna, that he held a doctorate, and that she was unaccustomed to such rude treatment.” Perhaps it was her fluent German, or the sight of such a tiny, gray-haired grandmother daring to admonish him, but the amused Gestapo officer was obviously taken aback. Janine was not sent to Serbia, the women’s section of the Peacock prison. She was released and returned home, more determined than ever not to bend to the will of the Nazis.

Remaining on the “Aryan” side would not be easy for Janine, Hanna, and little Joanna. Jews in hiding needed to invent new identities and find new places to live. They required a constant source of income to support themselves. And they had to rely almost entirely on the friendship and protection of Gentiles.

The outlines of the newly formed Ghetto formed a squat T with a large notch carved into its wide base. Its surface area covered just under a thousand acres, roughly the size of New York City’s Central Park. On the morning of November 16, 1940, its four hundred thousand inhabitants discovered to their shock and horror that the Ghetto’s twenty-two gates would not be open, as they had been led to believe. They were now permanently shut, guarded by German gendarmes and the despised Polish Blue Police, who permitted only special pass holders to exit on official business.

Panic spread throughout the sealed district that morning, with neighbors waking one another to deliver the grim news, and word quickly reached Zivia Lubetkin and Isaac Zuckerman. Zivia was not surprised. She was by nature less hopeful than the gregarious and perennially cheerful Isaac. But even to Zuckerman, the move had not been entirely unexpected. Together, they called an emergency meeting to address the situation. In some ways, the Ghetto made clandestine life easier: There was no longer a need to post lookouts on balconies and straircases since there were no Gentiles snooping about. The expulsion of Christians had also left Zuckerman free to hire a loyal Jewish building superintendent in place of the Gentile who had previously occupied the position. Isaac no longer had to worry about being denounced to the Gestapo, who frequently kept doormen and concierges on the payroll. The new man was a Zionist.
“As soon as the Poles were
sent out we grabbed that job,” Zuckerman recalled. “The porter kept a list of residents so we knew everything. On the top floor,” where Isaac and Zivia lived, “was a bell attached to the concierge’s lodge by a concealed string, and a ring for me meant an alarm.”

The new isolation and the lack of potential Gentile informants made security arrangements easier in the Ghetto, but contact with the outside world became far more difficult. “We cannot allow ourselves to be cut off,” Zuckerman warned. Until then, communicating with other Zionist cells throughout Poland had been relatively easy. Isaac himself had toured the German-occupied western territories extensively, and delegates from smaller towns had routinely come to Warsaw. This was no longer possible, as closed Ghettos now trapped Jews in all the major population centers.

“
We need to know what is happening to our brothers and sisters in the rest of the country,” Zivia declared. This was important not only out of concern for the fate of fellow Jews and Zionists, but for their own safety as well. Events in other cities often presaged the future in Warsaw. The capital tended to follow Lodz, because that big industrial center, now renamed Litzmannstadt, was annexed directly to the Reich, fast-tracked for Germanization. The hated
Treuhandstelle
had started its confiscatory work in Lodz,
seizing the 2,300 mostly Jewish-owned textile mills that had given the city its nickname, the “Manchester of the East.” The Lodz ghetto had also been established and sealed months ahead of Warsaw. If one could keep abreast of events there, one could predict what lay in store for the former Polish capital.

To stay connected, Zivia proposed forming a team of couriers who would travel surreptitiously from ghetto to ghetto maintaining links. For this purpose she would employ women almost exclusively. Women traveling alone were less likely to arouse suspicion in Nazi-occupied Poland, since so many men were now absent, having been relocated to Siberian gulags or German POW, concentration, or labor camps. And in a part of the world where most males were uncircumcised, female liaison agents could not be betrayed by the surgical cut that distinguished all Jewish men. So Zivia, who would be in charge of recruiting the “liaison women,” set out to search for potential couriers.

“
They had to have an Aryan appearance, speak Polish well, and
act a certain way,” she recalled, “and we did not have many candidates that fit those criteria.”

Few Jews “looked good,” the expression widely used in the Ghetto to denote those with Slavic appearances. And fluency posed another serious issue. In the last census conducted before the war,
only 5 percent, or 19,300 out of 353,000 Warsaw Jews, classified themselves as native Polish speakers. While many of these may have been proficient, “
most Polish Jews could not speak Polish well,” according to the American Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec, herself a native of Warsaw and a Holocaust survivor.

Zivia’s recruitment difficulties were not restricted to physiognomy and language. They were also cultural, relating to a lack of familiarity with prevailing customs and mannerisms. “
These differences permeated all aspects of life,” explains Tec (whose many works on the war include
Defiance
, the story of Polish-Jewish partisans that became a Hollywood blockbuster starring James Bond actor Daniel Craig). “For centuries Poles and Jews lived apart and in different worlds. Whatever contacts there had been between them were commercial rather than social. Partly because of this, each felt like a stranger in the world of the other.”

Just as the Polish Underground might find it challenging to locate agents who could pass as Jewish, converse knowledgeably with a rabbi, set a kosher table, or discuss Zionist politics, Zivia struggled to find candidates able to field innocent questions about the Catholic catechism, Polish politics, or literature.

Zivia herself was disqualified by her appearance. Her features were Semitic, her hair and skin tone too dark—unlike Isaac, who was often told by fellow Zionists, “
Your Aryan face is worth its weight in gold, worth a hundred thousand zlotys.”

Isaac’s problem was his accent. “It was terrible,” one of his fellow combatants recalled. Zuckerman’s Polish was inflected with heavy traces of both Yiddish and Vilnoese, the lilting, drawn-out dialect from his native Vilna. The Vilnoese helped mask the Yiddish, but Isaac had to be constantly vigilant, like an actor permanently onstage, since one mispronunciation, one slip of the tongue, could give him away.

So far, the only couriers Zivia had been able to find with any experience were the Plotnicka sisters, Frumka and Hancia. It was Hancia
who had been sent by her older sister Frumka to Lvov in December 1939 to plead for Zivia’s return. And it had been through Frumka as well that Isaac had learned a few months later that Zivia needed him back in Warsaw. Frumka was fair and light-haired, tall and leggy—she “looked good.” Her biggest drawback was that she didn’t “sound good.” “
Her Polish wasn’t fluent,” worried Isaac.

There was one final obstacle in Zivia’s courier plan: travel documents. Up until now, Zionists had used either no identification papers whatsoever or very crudely forged ones. For the courier plan to succeed, their amateurish operation would have to become far more professional.

CHAPTER 15

SIMHA AND BORUCH
PAY THE BILLS

The most immediate effect of sealing the Ghetto was an astonishing spike in the cost of basic foodstuffs. Overnight, the price of a kilo of potatoes tripled, coal more than doubled, and every other staple rose by at least 100 percent. “
There are long queues in front of every food store, and everything is being bought out,” the historian and Ghetto archivist Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote on November 19, 1940. “
On the first day after the Ghetto was closed, many Christians brought bread for their Jewish acquaintances and friends. This was a mass phenomenon,” he noted—which ended abruptly three days later, when the Germans shot a Pole for transferring a sack of flour over the wall. The message of that public execution was clear: The sealed district was to be cut off from the city’s meager food supply, just as Zivia Lubetkin had predicted.

The Jewish community reacted instantaneously, in near-universal defiance of the food import ban. In just a few days a massive smuggling industry sprang up, incorporating thousands of people on a full-time basis on both sides of the wall. Some acted individually, others collectively. Some were organized around tightly knit family units,
others in sprawling and sophisticated for-profit ventures that reached deep into the countryside and produced huge fortunes. These smuggling networks
provided an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the food consumed in the Warsaw Ghetto over the next two years.

Simha Ratheiser, like many other Jewish children and teenagers, who were naturally more adept than adults at scaling walls and squeezing through narrow openings, turned to smuggling to help his family survive. This assumption of responsibility was perhaps his first act of adulthood. Until then he had never worked—even in his father’s former store. And he had never apprenticed for a trade, like spats maker Boruch Spiegel. He had not needed to. His parents were sufficiently well off that he had received a small allowance, like many ordinary middle-class teens: new pants or shoes when his old ones wore out, pocket money for the movies, or perhaps a bike for his birthday.

“
It was not at all uncommon for ten- or twelve-year-olds to support entire families,” Ratheiser recalled of the part kids played in the burgeoning ghetto black market, where markups could be thirty-, forty-, or fiftyfold from prewar prices, and two to three times the rate charged in the rest of Warsaw.