Isaac's Army (19 page)

CHAPTER 16

JOANNA CAUSES TROUBLE

Resistance, like crime, tends to capture the public imagination when it is organized. But in Warsaw in the winter of 1941, individual acts of defiance best defined the fighting spirit of the Jewish community. Within the eleven miles of walls that ringed the Ghetto, tens of thousands of people participated in the massive underground economy, actively undermining Gestapo attempts to deprive them of a livelihood. They educated their children in secret schools, printed and distributed clandestine newspapers, and thwarted Nazi efforts to starve them by engaging in near-universal smuggling.

Beyond the walls, thousands more sabotaged the German master plan; some, like the Osnoses, ran as far and as fast as providence would allow; others, like the three generations of Mortkowicz women, refused to submit to Ghetto decrees.

Hanna, Joanna, and Janine had gone into hiding at the suburban estate of a family friend. It was unobtrusively located about ten miles west of Warsaw, in what was then the sparsely populated countryside. The property was large, spanning several hundred acres, with a main manor house, many outbuildings and dependencies, a large barn, animal
pens, apple orchards, and a small church whose belfry dominated the rolling bucolic terrain. Joanna, who was now almost seven years old, vividly remembers sledding on those hills throughout the long winter and running through wildflowers when the snow finally melted in the spring of 1941 and the marshy land came to life. She remembers the nuns who rented part of the estate, and going to church for the sake of blending in, saying grace and reciting daily prayers that soon became as natural to her as to any Catholic child in Poland. Seventy years later, she could still recite them all from memory.

The hideout had been arranged by Monika Zeromska, the daughter of Poland’s Hemingway, who along with her mother now ran the renamed Mortkowicz bookstore, fronting for Hanna and Janine.
Every few weeks Monika brought money from the store, which was doing shockingly well. Varsovians were traditionally big readers, but during the war, with curfews, no radio, and precious little outside entertainment, books became one of the sole means of escape. People pooled their money to purchase copies they then shared among friends or neighbors, and the Mortkowicz bookstore flourished. (It helped that its biggest prewar competitor, Gebetner & Wolff, had been Germanized and served Nazi and colonial officials, selling only German-language books.)

Monika Zeromska resembled Hedy Lamarr, with dark doe eyes that hinted at innocent mischief. This was fitting because Zeromska, like many Poles, led a double life, as Joanna eventually discovered. The dawning realization that there was more to Monika and to the estate where the Mortkowiczes were hiding occurred over many months and a series of small incidents. Joanna, like most kids her age, was insatiably curious and prone to exploration, which brought her into conflict with the estate’s severe caretaker, Thaddeus Glaser. “
I was mortally afraid of Mr. Glaser,” she recalled. “He was often angry with me, especially when I peeped into the barn.”

The ill-tempered caretaker kept chasing Joanna away from the barn because a series of tunnels and secret chambers ran underneath it. “
Conspirators, underground agents, and saboteurs used it,” Joanna later learned. “So it was not surprising that he got mad when I was jumping around above their heads, or when I romped through the attic, where clandestine documents were stored.” The estate, as it
turned out, was a major hub of the Polish Resistance, which like its Jewish counterparts was slowly coalescing in 1941, still fractious and divided along prewar political lines but making strides toward centralization and unification. One joint body, the Foreign Affairs Department, met regularly at the estate to coordinate policy with the government in exile in London, and there were enough weapons cached about the property to arm a battalion.

“
Not bad for a hideout,” Joanna would later laugh about the place she called home for the next year.

Luck, like resistance, takes many forms. A chance encounter, an unconscious decision, a reflexive motion or misperception could spell doom or deliverance.

For Joanna’s cousins, salvation came in the unlikely form of an earthquake. The Osnoses had been stranded in Romania with no real prospects for emigration, fighting a losing battle against time and the looming anti-Semitic crackdowns promised by the pro-Hitler authorities. Like thousands of other Polish Jews in Bucharest, they were ready to go anywhere.

All roads, however, seemed to lead through Turkey. Every other potential escape route was controlled by either Berlin or Moscow. The Turks were still nominally neutral, theoretically in a position to grant Jews transit visas through their sovereign territory. But they weren’t particularly inclined to do so—at least not at a price that Joseph could afford. He had tried repeatedly to get an audience with Turkish consular officials and had been rebuffed on every occasion. Not easily put off, Joseph came up with a different strategy. He rented a room in a villa next to the Turkish embassy and moved there with Martha and Robert. The proximity, he hoped, might lead to a chance encounter: bumping into a diplomat on the street, or in the garden—any opportunity to strike up a neighborly conversation and to achieve socially what could not be done officially. To a large degree, Joseph made his own luck. But his plan did benefit from a little “
help from God himself,” in Martha’s opinion.

At 3:30 in the morning on November 10, Joseph, Martha, and Robert were rocked from their beds by
an earthquake that measured
7.7 on the Richter scale. The quake lasted five terrifying minutes, leveling large parts of Bucharest, and its shock waves were felt as far east as Kiev and as far west as Marseilles. The city’s tallest building, the thirteen-story
Carlton Hotel, collapsed, killing 267 guests, as did the roof of the Royal Palace, home of Romania’s recently deposed monarch. Fires from oil reservoirs and burst pipelines raged uncontrollably, while soldiers raced to extract thousands of injured residents trapped in the rubble.

The Osnoses escaped unhurt, running out into the street in their pajamas, where the disheveled Turkish ambassador had also fled, wearing little more than a bathrobe. In the dusty chaos, with gas explosions echoing in the background, Joseph shrewdly made sure that the traumatized Turkish envoy was well attended to in his time of need. “
Two days later we had a transit visa,” Martha said.

They departed from the Romanian port city of Constanta, on the shores of the Black Sea, southwest of Odessa. The tramp steamer that ferried them to Istanbul was crammed with Polish refugees, both Jewish and Gentile. The weather was torrid, the waves high, and the choppy twenty-four-hour crossing felt endless to the seasick passengers. In Istanbul, a boat carrying a group of illegal Jewish refugees had sunk in the harbor, and irate port officials were searching the stormy waters for survivors to arrest. When the ship carrying the Osnoses docked, angry customs officers checked for illegal Jews. Joseph and Martha had legitimate papers, but their transit visa was valid for only twenty-four hours. If they remained in Turkey any longer, they were told, they would be deported back to Romania. “
It seemed impossible to accomplish in a few hours all we had to do,” Martha recalled. “We wanted to go to Palestine or be able to stay in Istanbul, but everything had to be arranged immediately.”

They were exhausted, in the midst of a strange and alien town whose language they did not understand and whose warren of winding streets invited disorientation. And every path to assistance was proving a dead end. The Polish consulate, representing the London government in exile, was apologetic that it could not help. The Jewish Relief Agency provided a meal at the luxurious Park Hotel but was otherwise occupied with fishing bodies of drowned refugees out of the harbor. They could arrange for young Robert to go to Palestine on a
so-called
kinder
(children’s) transport, but the family would have to split up, and Martha would not contemplate such a separation.

The Osnoses were running out of options. It was pouring rain and after midnight—with only a few hours left before their enforced 6:00
A.M
. departure deadline—by the time they were directed to a seedy nightclub, where help could be purchased. It was “
known for all kinds of guides and
machers
,” Martha recalled, so Joseph would have to place their last hopes in the hands of unsavory fixers and smugglers.

The Osnoses wanted to go by boat to Cyprus and then Palestine, like countless other Jewish refugees. But at the seedy bar, a cursory negotiation had all but eliminated any hope of buying the required British visas. The documents were far too expensive to purchase on the black market. That left a land crossing as their only option, and Iraq as the closest British protectorate. Iraqi visas were far easier to obtain legally, because London was less fearful of an Arab rebellion there, whereas in Jerusalem, the Grand Mufti was stirring up popular resentment against Jewish immigration, communicating openly with Nazi agents who were promising aid from Berlin if the Palestinians switched sides and rose up against the English.

Reaching Iraq posed its own difficulties. It required traveling through Syria, which was under the control of the Vichy regime, the French Nazi puppet government that deported Jews. The Osnoses could get around that hurdle; they all carried forged baptismal certificates. What they couldn’t falsify were their Polish passports, and for Joe Osnos this was a serious problem. “Since Joseph was a Pole of military age, we would not be allowed to have a transit visa,” Martha explained, “because [once in British territory] he would be able to reach England and join the free Polish army.”

The only other way from Turkey to Iraq was the smuggler’s route: a weeklong raft trip down the Tigris River to the town of Mosul. It was dangerous and costly, and the Tigris was temperamental at that time of the year, prone to floods and bouts of roiling whitewater. Martha envisioned ten-year-old Robert being swept away by currents, her raft capsizing, breaking up into a thousand pieces. She would not risk it. Better to take their chances on the Syrian train, Martha argued. At worst, they would be turned away at the border when their lack of visas was discovered, which was certainly still preferable to a watery grave.

And so with only hours to spare before their Turkish transit visas expired, the Osnoses made their way to the train station, hoping to bluff their way onto the Syrian-bound Taurus Express. As luck would have it, the French colonial commissioner was on the very train they boarded. Syrian officials were so preoccupied with fawning over the Vichy representative that no one paid attention to the Jewish family huddled in the dark, windowless third-class compartment at the unfashionable end of the Taurus Express. They crossed the Syrian border unnoticed and no one challenged them when the train continued on its journey to Iraq. Martha, Joseph, and Robert arrived in Baghdad twenty-four hours later, overwhelmed by the generosity of their Arabic fellow travelers. “They constantly would feed Robert and me by stuffing us with their fat fingers, either from their own provisions or buying at the stations little baskets with colored and decorated hard-boiled eggs. They didn’t even let us peel them,” Martha fondly recalled. “They would peel them and then only feed us.”

Baghdad, Martha recalled less fondly, “was the most miserable capital we ever saw: the dirt, the smell of open urinals, mutton grease and cooking turnips on streetcorners; crowds of fierce looking men, especially Kurds whose matted hair mixed with the long fringes of their enormous turbans; women covered completely with their black robes. Robert said
‘Everyone is in mourning here.’ ”

Baghdad may not have been beautiful. But it was beyond Adolf Hitler’s reach. For the first time since the war began, Martha, Robert, and Joseph Osnos could relax. They were safe on British soil.

Back in Warsaw, the relatively mild winter had passed, but the spring of 1941 brought a renewed chill. The measure of autonomy that residents of the Jewish Quarter enjoyed during the initial period after the Ghetto’s formation was over. The Nazis and their various proxy organs—the Blue Police, the new Jewish Police—once more resumed tormenting Jews.

The Jewish Police stormed Isaac Zuckerman’s Zionist clubhouse on the last day of Passover, in mid-April 1941. The raid took place in the evening, just after curfew, and caught everyone by surprise.

Dozens of Jewish police officers dressed in civilian garb, with their peaked black caps topped by a blue Star of David and the identifying
orange armbands that constituted their makeshift uniforms, suddenly burst through the gate of the Valiant Street tenement.

Fanning out through the courtyard, they sealed all entrances and staircases, using the stubby truncheons that served as their only permitted weapons to trap everyone inside. The young Zionists on the third floor of the large apartment building had no time to escape. They had not anticipated trouble from the relatively benign Jewish police agency, formally known as the Order Service, or
Judischer Ordungsdienst
in German.