Isaac's Army (2 page)
Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
CHAPTER 25: SIMHA RETURNS AND JOANNA FLEES
CHAPTER 26: BORUCH AND ROBERT LEARN DIFFERENT LESSONS
CHAPTER 27: ISAAC’S NOT-SO-MERRY CHRISTMAS
CHAPTER 35: ROBERT’S AMERICAN PLEDGE
CHAPTER 36: ZIVIA GETS HER GUN
CHAPTER 37: SIMHA’S SECOND SEWER RESCUE
CHAPTER 41: MARK AND THE MOHICANS
CHAPTER 42: NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM
CAST OF CHARACTERS
PRIMARY
Isaac Zuckerman:
Socialist Zionist youth leader, co-founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization and its leader following the Ghetto Uprising.
Simha Ratheiser:
High school student. Eventually Isaac’s bodyguard and lead courier.
Mark Edelman:
Bundist orphan. Commander in the Jewish Fighting Organization.
Boruch Spiegel:
Bundist tailor. Foot soldier in the Jewish Fighting Organization.
Zivia Lubetkin:
Socialist Zionist organizer. Highest-ranking female in the Jewish Fighting Organization, and eventually Isaac’s girlfriend and wife.
SECONDARY
The Osnos family:
Martha, Joseph, and Robert. Assimilated upper-middle-class entrepreneurs.
The Mortkowicz family:
Janine, Hanna, and Joanna. Three generations of Poland’s greatest publishing dynasty.
TERTIARY
Bernard Goldstein:
Bund Special Ops chief. Early architect of organized resistance.
Mordechai Anielewicz:
Marxist Zionist youth leader. Led the Jewish Fighting Organization during the Ghetto Uprising.
Tuvia Borzykowski:
Isaac’s deputy in the Jewish Fighting Organization.
Chaika Belchatowska:
Jewish Fighting Organization foot soldier, Boruch’s girlfriend and later wife.
Monika Zeromska:
Gentile Resistance operative. Protector of the Mortkowiczes.
Berl Spiegel:
Boruch’s older brother. Bund activist.
David Apfelbaum:
Alleged right-wing Zionist resistance leader. His existence is disputed by historians.
CHAPTER 1
HANNA’S TRIUMPH
On the first morning of the Second World War the city of Warsaw slept. A willful calm reigned over the Polish capital, as if the early German incursions in the north and west of the country were minor irritants, not entirely unexpected, and best ignored.
September 1, 1939, fell on a Friday, which partly explained the initial insouciance, the reluctance to rouse to a threat that would ultimately destroy 90 percent of the city and kill nearly half its inhabitants. It was date night, and the jazz clubs, movie houses, and restaurants were packed.
A comedy by the up-and-coming playwright Maria Pawlowska was premiering that evening at the New Theatre. At the Ali Baba, an encore presentation of the hit political satire
Facts and Pacts
played to a full house.
Despite the Nazi invasion, the racetrack stayed open. W. Kruk Jewelers did not cancel their autumn sale. The confectioners Fuchs, Wedel, and Blikle continued their century-old rivalry. And despite the wail of air raid sirens, the window grilles at the Jablkowski Brothers department store stood defiantly retracted, exposing the delicate stained glass landscapes that beckoned customers inside the four-floor
kingdom, the Harrod’s of prewar Warsaw, where the liveried staff staged puppet and fashion shows and
addressed clients as “Your Excellency,” regardless of age.
In Napoleon Square, at the heart of the financial district, under the shadow of the Eisenstadt & Rotberg Building and the Prudential Life Insurance Tower,
billed by its architect, Marcin Weinfeld, as central Europe’s tallest skyscraper, banks and brokerages awaited the latest stock market results almost as eagerly as news from the nascent front. On Marshal and Jerusalem Boulevards, it was
petite robes floues
, not panic, that were on display at the Hersh Fashion House and in the neo-Renaissance shopping arcades
built by developers Karol Fritsche, Jacob Lowenberg, and Pinkus Loth, the Trumps of prewar Poland. Outside the luxurious boutiques, near the Aliyev Turkish Sweets shop and the Elite kosher restaurant next door, traffic was no heavier than usual on September 1—sparse, in fact, for a city that in 1939 was almost twice as big as Boston and nearly the size of metropolitan Los Angeles. Photos taken that day show Packards, Oldsmobiles, Fords, and Fiats idling under an enormous Chevrolet billboard, while farther uptown, near the medieval battlements and Baroque basilicas of the historic district, patrons outside the five-star Bristol Hotel could be seen reclining in elegant wicker chairs, refreshments in hand.
But there were also signs, to be sure, that all was not business as usual on that Friday.
Outside the PKO State Savings Bank, depositors lined up to withdraw cash. Greengrocers, butchers, and pharmacists witnessed a spike in sales as many Varsovians stocked up on food and medical supplies. The municipal government canceled all vacation leaves, and general mobilization notices began appearing on poster columns, papering over the fall Opera schedule. And all the while, from the outlying suburbs, the distant and distressing rumble of antiaircraft batteries could be heard.
Isaac Zuckerman needed no prompting to volunteer to fight for his country—a nation that he loved as a patriot but whose leaders he loathed as a Jew, a country he was willing to defend with his life but ultimately wanted to leave.
His dilemma was not unusual within the Zionist community, a vibrant, fractious, restless agglomeration of dreamers, loafers, activists, firebrand intellectuals, and sober realists who knew from bitter historical experience that Europe, and especially Eastern Europe, was not an American-style melting pot, and that Jews would always be treated as outsiders there, as second-class citizens, or “resident aliens” as some Polish politicians liked to say.
On the morning of September 1, 1939, Isaac Zuckerman’s dilemma was particularly acute, and it had nothing to do with his hopes for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He wanted to enlist, yet no army unit would take him, although officers must have looked wistfully at the twenty-four-year-old volunteer standing before them: Isaac was a large and imposing individual, well over six feet tall and solidly built. He was rakishly handsome, with strong Slavic features, a square jaw, and the blond bushy mustache favored by the minor nobility. He looked like a recruiting poster for the Polish cavalry, a career he had briefly contemplated, since he could ride well, a legacy of equestrian summers at a rich uncle’s estate near Vilna.
But each time he and a fellow Zionist presented themselves to the authorities, the answer was the same. “
We reported to the officer, a pleasant young man,” Isaac later wrote, describing their second attempt to enlist, “who told us he wished he knew what to do with his own soldiers, let alone civilians.”
That Poland’s armed forces were in such disarray astonished Zuckerman. The Polish government, the Fascist-leaning Sanation regime, which had seized power in a quasi-coup, supposedly to cleanse the republic in a sanitary sweep, was essentially a dictatorship run by generals. Diplomatic tensions with Berlin had boiled throughout the spring and summer, with threats and counterthreats leaving little doubt that conflict was imminent. In July, state radio had begun issuing instructions on how to black out windows and use gas masks. Patriotic fund drives had been launched, urging citizens to donate to rearming the nation. Even the anti-Semitic vitriol of the right-wing press had been suspended during the campaign, which stressed unity and a newfound tolerance toward minorities. Newspapers praised Jewish entrepreneurs for their generous contributions toward the purchase of tanks and artillery pieces, and the entire country feted the
“wonderful news” that
students at Public School Number 166 in upper Warka had raised 11.75 zlotys, or roughly $2.00, for ammunition. The war did not come as a surprise to anyone, it seemed, other than Poland’s authoritarian military leaders.
Enlistment aside, Isaac faced an even more pressing problem on the morning of September 1. He needed to get back home to Warsaw. He had been delivering a series of lectures at a Zionist training seminar in the town of Kleban, not far from Rovno in present-day Ukraine, when the Nazis struck. He felt certain the authorities would have a more sophisticated view of events in the capital than they did in Kleban, a shtetl of a few thousand impoverished Jews in the equivalent of the Polish Appalachians. Isaac had no intention of wasting away in this speck on the map 220 miles southeast of Warsaw while the Germans marched on the capital. The defense would surely be far better organized there than it was in the provinces, where the chain of command seemed diffuse, the order of battle confused, the officers visibly frustrated. In Warsaw, the largest urban center in Central Europe, the cultural and political center of world Jewry, the situation would be clearer.
Just before dawn on September 1, Adolf Hitler had staged a Polish invasion of Germany. German convicts dressed in Polish uniforms were forced to “storm” a Reich border post. Photos of the convicts’ bullet-riddled bodies served as evidence of Polish aggression and were the official pretext for the war Hitler had just launched in response.
The ruse was so blatantly farcical that many Poles doubted that the accompanying campaign would be any more serious, that the whole thing would be regarded as anything but staged theater, a few shots fired in another of the Führer’s famous antics. “
Not everyone understood what war with the Germans meant,” Zuckerman would later say.
Whether the war was real was a topic of much discussion and little agreement in the Polish capital on the morning of September 1, 1939. At the Landed Gentry Café, outdoor tables buzzed with speculation. The fashionable eatery was a liberal bastion in a city that had turned rightward in lockstep with Germany and so many other European
nations in the 1930s, and one of the few places in Warsaw where Jews and Gentiles still socialized outside of work.
