Isaac's Army (18 page)

“
Getting out of the Ghetto was not that difficult,” Simha explained—at least not initially. The district was not hermetically sealed; the wall was actually quite porous. It ran through a great many buildings, where windows and doors had been sloppily bricked up, or where the preexisting fire walls between apartments acted as makeshift boundaries, leaving gaps in cellars and attics or between structures. “
At Goat Street smuggling is through a door in a wall bordering on the Aryan side,” Emmanuel Ringelblum noted in his journal. “It costs 5 zlotys to pass through. The Jewish owner of the apartment is making a fortune.” Alternatively, trams traversed the Jewish Quarter, and for a few zlotys’ bribe one could board any of the municipal lines that ran through the Ghetto. With money, the gates were effectively open.

In the subtle generational power shift that began with the closure of the Ghetto’s twenty-two gates, it was the child smugglers who made the most significant mark early on. Often they were simply catapulted over the wall, or pushed through some narrow crack, with a shopping list and money or articles of value to trade. How parents felt about entrusting the family finances to sixth or seventh graders is hard to
imagine. Most of them never went farther than a few blocks into so-called Aryan territory, but some, like Simha, traveled by commuter train far into the countryside to obtain better deals.

Seventy to 80 percent of the food sold in Warsaw outside the Ghetto was already smuggled, with hefty risk premiums priced in—a consequence of German decrees barring the free flow of all perishable goods in occupied Poland. Poland’s role was to feed Germany, not itself, and the General Government’s colonial overseers had set ruinous requisition quotas on all farming districts. Peasants had to relinquish their crops and their dairy, pork, and poultry production to Nazi agencies for export to the Reich, and anyone caught hoarding grain or eggs faced arrest and sometimes summary execution. The delivery of food to Polish cities was strictly controlled through ration cards issued monthly, and it could fluctuate wildly. During one brief and bountiful month, for instance,
Ghetto residents were allotted a daily high of 400 calories, while Gentiles were given far more generous rations equivalent to 1,377 daily calories. In other months Jews got next to nothing, while the rest of Warsaw’s 1.3 million residents received a mere 385 calories each.

At official ration rates, the entire city would soon have starved. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Poland’s metropolitan regions, farmers proved adept at concealing food from the rapacious Germans and sneaking it into towns. Thanks to the thriving black market, food was widely available in all Polish cities. It was just incredibly expensive.
A kilogram of sugar, for instance, purchased with ration cards, retailed for 1.6 zlotys at official prices. On the black market the same kilo sold for 65 zlotys. In the Ghetto—where the wall now added another level of risk, an additional transport and payoff premium, and one more set of intermediaries—it could easily cost twice that sum. Meat cost the most because animals had to be brought in alive, to conform to kosher butchering laws. This was accomplished by placing mobile ramps on either side of the wall. Cattle were walked over the wall while the Blue Police or German gendarmes were paid to look the other way. Milk was relatively cheaper, since it was pumped—by the cisternload—through reconfigured plumbing or drainage pipes in buildings that straddled the boundary. Dairy products thus benefited from both economies of scale and discretion, requiring fewer bribes.

The peculiarities of the underground agro-economy quickly became apparent to Simha. To cut out the middlemen, he started traveling to outlying villages and buying directly from farmers. “
I’d jump on and off moving trains to get there,” he recalled. His parents opposed this activity, especially since his mother was getting food from her old neighborhood friends. Like hundreds of others, she bribed guards at the gates to let her out and then back in. Simha’s smuggling route was riskier, but it saved the cost of the bribe. “I’d wait for the forced labor gangs to march in or out of the ghetto,” he recalled. Every day hundreds of Jews were taken out to clean streets, clear snow, fill in potholes, or work at construction sites on the other side. Simha would wait for the right moment, when the guards were distracted, and melt into the moving groups. His Slavic appearance, ironically, often worked against him in these instances. “
The other Jews would think I was a Polish smuggler, and threaten to denounce me to the police. I would have to recite a prayer in Hebrew to prove I was one of them.”

Taking trains was also far riskier than shopping in Warsaw, but Simha felt comfortable in the now exclusively Gentile milieu. “I don’t remember being frightened or nervous. I was used to being among Poles. It was not a big deal to me.”

Though he did not fear being exposed as a Jew, there was still the constant danger of being robbed or caught up in one of the Arbeitsamt’s forced labor roundups, which often targeted trains whenever the Labor Office fell short of its human export quota. By the end of 1940,
798,000 Poles—all Christians—were already working as slave laborers in Germany, in conditions resulting in ever greater death tolls. To slow the brutal deportations, the Polish Underground launched a concerted campaign against the Arbeitsamt. Labor offices across the General Government were torched at night. The agency’s headquarters in the former Land Credit Bank building across the street from the Mortkowiczes’ bookstore was firebombed in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the central labor registry records. Huge billboards enticing labor draftees to
COME WITH US TO GERMANY
were defaced to read
DON
’
T
COME WITH US TO GERMANY
. And tens of thousands of false identity papers were issued to people dodging the draft.

The rebellion led the Nazis to redouble their efforts to catch evaders, and every time Simha boarded a train, he faced the prospect of
being herded into a cattle car. Still, the rewards outweighed the risks. Going to the source of food saved considerable sums. “
I remember the smell of the huge round loaves, freshly baked,” he recalled of the bread he bought from peasant bakers, which was fresh, free of the sawdust often found in Warsaw’s bread, and a hefty two feet in diameter. “One [loaf] was enough to feed a whole family.” What Simha’s family did not eat could be resold inside the walls at a substantial profit, which could finance further trips to the country and put more food on the table.

“
Apparently I was rather successful,” Ratheiser recalled of his smuggling expeditions. “Friends and relatives used to come to our apartment for a bowl of soup, a sign that there was at least some food in our house.”

Simha did not give much thought to his trips to the “other side.” He was just doing what he could to help his family. The handsome sixteen-year-old did not realize that he had become the man of the house and that he was gaining invaluable training that would soon serve a greater Jewish cause.

A deceptive calm reigned in the newly isolated Jewish Quarter as the winter of 1941 set in. Jews, for the first time since the invasion, were left relatively unmolested. Germans had little reason to enter the sealed district, other than to deliver inmates to Peacock Prison, trips they used as opportunities to run down pedestrians with their trucks. But the random beatings, the petty harassments and daily humiliations, had significantly decreased now that Jews were being left largely to themselves. The community was even policing itself, thanks to a newly created law enforcement agency staffed entirely by Jewish police officers.

Smuggling continued in ever more sophisticated forms, and the underground economy rapidly grew to encompass virtually every branch of commerce that operated outside the Ghetto walls. Christian entrepreneurs smuggled raw materials—leather, textiles, dyes, tobacco leaves, sheet metal, cocoa—into the ghetto, and smuggled out finished products—chocolate, shirts, shoes, cigarettes and cigarette lighters, canned goods, watches, even jewelry—for resale on the black market. The scale of these illicit enterprises soon became mind-boggling,
involving not only mom-and-pop shops but entire tanneries and canneries and factories with delivery trucks and hundreds of employees.
Insurance companies offered policies on the safe delivery of goods, with premiums based on distance covered and delivery location and depending on the degree of bribability of the relevant officials. These indispensable payoffs lubricated every stage of the operation, and bribes were earning corrupt German overseers the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly.

For Boruch Spiegel and his family, the clandestine work offered a lifeline. They had been in desperate straits when the market for spats dried up following the 1939 invasion. While Boruch and his older brother were in the Soviet zone, his father had survived by selling everything of value—the Singer sewing machine, the Persian carpets—everything but his most prized possession: his violin. Upon the brothers’ return to Warsaw, the Bund had helped feed the Spiegel family through its network of soup kitchens. These were open only to Bundists, Boruch explained. “
The Zionists had theirs. We had ours. All the groups looked after their own.”

Around the time of the creation of the Ghetto, Boruch’s father was contacted by a prewar business acquaintance, a Gentile by the name of Stasiek, the Polish equivalent of “Stan.” Stan had a proposal. He would provide Boruch and his father with wood blocks, which they would carve into clogs that Stan would smuggle out and sell on the black market. Clogs were in high demand in Warsaw because they were the only form of footwear, other than the knee-high military boots worn by the rich, being produced under Nazi occupation.

The pay Spiegel and his father received for each pair of clogs was small, but it was enough to buy a small piece of chicken once every few weeks, a kilo or two of
kasza gryczana
, the buckwheat cereal that was the staple of the Varsovian wartime diet, and occasionally a little lard to fatten the thin soups they ate as most main courses. The items they bought were almost all smuggled, as was nearly 90 percent of all the food in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a result, the average Ghetto resident, according to
Judenrat
(Jewish Council) calculations,
actually consumed 1,125 daily calories in early 1941 instead of the allotted 184. Middle-class Jews had an average intake of 1,400 calories a day. The poorest subsisted on only 785.

It was hardly a time of plenty, but Boruch, like many others, would
remember this early ghetto period with melancholy fondness; in Isaac Zuckerman’s words, it was a time “of flourishing autonomy.” The phones worked. Mail was delivered. Shops were open. And prewar billboards, advertising shampoo, floor wax, “Carmel” Palestinian wines, and Wrigley’s spearmint gum, lent the district an air of normalcy. “
The innumerable confectionery stores that have sprung up lately,” the resident historian Emmanuel Ringelblum remarked in early 1941, “give a distorted picture of the Ghetto.”

The crowds on the streets were now denser, and more shabbily dressed. But people seemed more relaxed, more willing to linger at a shop window or stop and converse with a neighbor. The change in attitude in the Ghetto could even be heard. The Yiddish that reverberated throughout the district was no longer hushed and halting, but louder, brasher, more confident and rapid-fire—impenetrable to outsiders once more, as it had so famously been before the war. “
It would take even a fluent Yiddish speaker coming from the more distant parts of Poland to Warsaw quite a bit of time to get acquainted with the extremely fast and economical way of speech in which sentences were reduced to single words, single words to syllables and syllables to phenomes,” Ewa Geller, a philologist at the University of Warsaw, explained. “Their speech reflected the pitch and marrow of Jewish Warsaw, its very busy, hasty and pragmatic way of life.”

Warsaw’s Jews were trapped, and yet many felt paradoxically freer within their walls, within their “Garden City,” as the wits had sardonically dubbed the district because not a blade of grass grew inside the walls. “
Things were better,” Boruch recalled. “We even thought that perhaps the worst was behind us, that we would be left alone.”

Boruch was unusually upbeat during this period, in large part because he had met someone who would play a major role in his life. Her name was Chaika Belchatowska, and she was exceedingly pretty, with dark bangs, high cheekbones, and almond eyes. She lived on Dragon Street in the poorer northwest quadrant of the Ghetto, closer to the main Jewish cemetery and the Skra Stadium. Chaika was twenty-one, the same age as Boruch, and also a Bundist, though she was more active in the organization than he was. She was part of a “fiver,” a cell that distributed underground newsletters like the
Bulletin
, printed by Mark Edelman.

“
Dating in the Ghetto was different,” Spiegel recalled. “I obviously couldn’t afford to go to dinner and a movie. But we had a very rich cultural life.” Many of the theater district’s two dozen prewar playhouses, almost all located inside the Ghetto, had reopened to cater to the newly rich smugglers and other well-off residents. On Valiant Street, not far from Isaac Zuckerman’s headquarters, the Eldorado featured
a musical comedy called
The Rabbi’s Little Rebecca
, starring Regina Sugar, or Cukier, as she was known in Polish.
The twelve-hundred-seat Yiddish Artistic Theater, built in 1913 by the legendary stage star Ester Rachel Kaminski with money she earned from an American tour, put on some subsidized Molière plays and a dramatic adaptation of
The Brothers Karamazov
, also at cut-rate prices. The Azazel on New Linden Street premiered a new play,
Got Fun Nerume
, directed by and starring Adam Samberg.

But what Boruch, the lifelong music lover, looked forward to most were the free concerts.
More than eighty former members of the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Opera Chamber Orchestra, and the Polish Radio Orchestra were in the Ghetto, accompanied by some of Poland’s most celebrated prewar composers and conductors, two winners of the Chopin prize, awarded annually to the nation’s top pianist, and solo violinists like Ludwig Holtzman, twice recognized as Polish concertmaster of the year. The musicians formed the Jewish Philharmonic Orchestra, under the patronage of Jewish Council chairman Adam Czerniakow, and staged concerts at venues such as the Femina movie theater on Forestry Street, the Melody Palace on Rymar Street, and the Great Hall, near the Children’s Hospital on Sienna Street. “At those concerts, you temporarily forget that there was a war, a ghetto,” Spiegel recalled. “To me they were an escape.”