Isaac's Army (20 page)

The law enforcement body had been created by German fiat during the 1940 Ghetto closure. It answered nominally to the Jewish Council chairman, Adam Czerniakow, a portly, urbane engineer and polyglot who favored bow ties and read classics late into the night to ward off insomnia. He was a gentle, cultured, and well-intentioned man, bald and bespectacled, “
the picture of bourgeois respectability,” as were most senior Jewish police officers, many of whom were attorneys before the war.
Most of the sixteen-hundred-strong force hailed from an upper-middle-class background. “
Many used bribery and influential connections to obtain a prized appointment to the force,” noted one Ghetto chronicler. “People with college educations, professional men, former white-collar workers, idle and sheltered sons of the wealthy rushed to get into the precious uniform.”

Like many other Ghetto residents, Zuckerman had not initially viewed the Order Service as a threat. The agency had enjoyed widespread support early on under the principle that it was better for Jews to police themselves than to have the Gestapo rampaging through the sealed district. Jewish officers provided a protective buffer between the populace and their German masters and acted as conduits for greedy German guards, funneling millions of dollars in bribes that kept the Ghetto’s lifeline flowing. The temptation for Order Service employees to participate in this institutionalized corruption proved powerful. Jewish police officers soon began dressing in expensive tailored suits and demanding “contributions” from smugglers, factory owners, and homeowners wishing to avoid delousing and disinfection. They took to wearing the newly fashionable knee-high military boots that were the most ostentatious mark of war profiteers in Warsaw, and their reputation as honest brokers began to erode.

Isaac Zuckerman was not present at the Valiant Street clubhouse when the raid took place. He and Zivia Lubetkin had stolen off to another apartment that evening so they could spend some time together alone. The two had fallen for each other, which was not unusual in conspiratorial circles, with so many teenagers and college-age leaders sharing secrets and close quarters. What was unsual about their budding romance was that both initially seemed intent on keeping their affair discreet—not an easy task in the overcrowded Jewish district.

When Zuckerman got word of the raid, he rushed to Valiant Street, where the police were herding young Zionists into the courtyard. “
I heard cries and shouts. They gathered about ten people from our commune.” The sweep, Isaac already suspected, had nothing to do with any of the conspiratorial activity that went on at the clubhouse, or the Gestapo would have been there. The Jewish Police were not tasked with rooting out the Underground. Instead, Isaac’s Young Pioneers were being led off to the Jewish Council’s Labor Department, another extremely controversial institution whose reputation was rapidly deteriorating. Like the Jewish Police, it had been established at the behest of the Germans to supply manpower for the colonial administration. The Nazis provided the Jewish Council with daily requests for laborers, and the Council supplied the specified number of workers, drawn from a draft lottery of Ghetto inhabitants. Wealthy residents could pay a special labor avoidance tax to have their names struck from the lists, which did not sit well with socialist groups like the Bund or the Labor Zionists. But the imperfect system was preferable to having the Germans randomly snatching people, terrorizing the entire community in the process.

The Nazi appetite for forced labor, after a brief lull, had once more become ravenous. By spring of 1941, well over a million Polish slave laborers had been shipped off to work in munitions plants in Germany—
a number that would peak at 1.6 million by war’s end—and nearly a hundred new labor camps had been created within the General Government, most near the Soviet border. The spike was so alarming that the Polish Resistance notified British Intelligence that Hitler could be preparing for some major offensive that summer. It also meant that the Jewish Council, through its enforcement arm, had
to resort to the same sort of ambush tactics the Germans themselves employed. “
These snatchings were done in streets and in houses, and at night with a system of manhunts,” Zuckerman recalled.

Isaac had mistakenly thought his Young Pioneers were exempt from forced labor because the Zionist left had good connections at the Jewish Council, which to date had spared them. But when he went to complain at the Labor Department offices on Forestry Boulevard, where several hundred anxious Jews rounded up that night awaited shipment to various camps, not only were his pleas ignored, but he, too, was added to the group of captives when the count proved short.

It took three of the inexperienced policemen to wrestle the furious and towering Zuckerman into submission, and he spat in their faces until a German soldier finally put an end to the scuffle by pointing a pistol at his head. He was now headed for a labor colony.

“
Before dawn, we were led through the streets of Warsaw and the suburb of Praga, to the railway station,” he would later reproach himself. “I had two opportunities to escape, and twice I wrestled with myself: I was used to this sort of thing, and I thought I could escape at the bends in the roads. I was experienced by then, and thought I would succeed. But I was in a group.”

Zuckerman was loath to leave his young Zionist comrades behind. While being loaded onto a cattle car, however, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake.

CHAPTER 17

ISAAC AND BORUCH
GLIMPSE HELL

The Jewish Police came for Boruch Spiegel at almost the exact same time as they came for Isaac. As with the Zionist clubhouse raid, the police arrived just after curfew, when all Ghetto residents were required to be home. Only Boruch’s older brother Berl was not home. He had been tipped off by friends in the Bund that his name had been drawn in the labor draft, so he stayed away from his apartment. Unlike Isaac Zuckerman’s Zionist faction, the Bund had a policy of actively resisting forced labor. The two groups, though both socialist in political orientation, had vastly different philosophies about cooperating with the Judenrat. While Zuckerman and the Zionists tended to view the Judenrat as the lesser of two evils and its chairman, Adam Czerniakow, as a good man in an untenable position, the Bund was less charitable.
Czerniakow was “weak,” according to Mark Edelman, someone who served “German rather than Jewish interests.” The Judenrat was rife with corruption and collaborators, claimed Bund Special Ops chief Bernard Goldstein. Czerniakow may have been honest, but he was surrounded by “
scoundrels, vipers, and louses,” as he himself decried, and the fact that he “spoke Polish exclusively” rankled the Yiddish-centric Bund, as did his Zionist sympathies.

The Bund and the Judenrat had experienced an early and acrimonious rift, dating back to the first German attempt to create a ghetto in late 1939. At the time, the Bund’s ranking official in Warsaw was Arthur Ziegelbaum, a trade union leader from Lodz, who had been appointed to serve on the Jewish Council. But he resigned in disgust and organized a large civic protest when Czerniakow proposed a motion—forced on him by the SS—to create a “Jewish residential district.” The SS had had to back off, because the Wehrmacht was then still in charge of Warsaw, and the Gestapo vengefully issued an arrest warrant for Ziegelbaum. He fled Poland, with help from a socialist faction of the Polish Underground, and made his way to Belgium, where the Socialist foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak (the future secretary general of the United Nations) arranged for his passage to New York. In the spring of 1941, Ziegelbaum was back in Europe as a representative of the Bund in the Polish government in exile in London.

Boruch Spiegel, like most Bundists, viewed Ziegelbaum rather than Czerniakow as the legitimate leader of the Jewish community. Boruch was not, however, as fiercely critical of the controversial Judenrat chairman as some of his Bund colleagues. “
He was in an impossible position,” Spiegel reasoned. “Maybe he should have quit. But I think he meant well, and tried to lessen Jewish suffering by going along.” Indeed, had the Bund known of the toll that governing the Ghetto was taking on its soft-spoken chairman, they might have dampened their criticism. “
Vomiting at home,” Czerniakow recorded in a typically anguished diary entry. “
At 2
A
.
M
. I begin to fret. And so on until 5 or 6 in the morning when I get up,” he wrote in another.

Nonetheless, it was Czerniakow’s police force that came to Boruch’s door, looking for his brother Berl. Boruch had hidden under a bed as soon as he heard the knock. He didn’t know at first if the Order Service was after him or Berl, so he had acted on impulse. The Jewish officers hauled him out and checked his papers before resuming their search. The Spiegels’ ground-floor apartment was sufficiently cramped that it did not take long for the intruders to determine that their quarry was missing. “
When they found out he wasn’t there, they said ‘we’ll take you instead.’ ” Boruch was stunned. His mother started screaming that the police couldn’t do that. His younger sister clutched him protectively. His usually tranquil father began cursing, letting
loose a flurry of Yiddish invective since he spoke virtually no Polish, the preferred language of most Jewish policemen.

The protests fell on deaf ears. The Order Service had a quota to meet, and one B. Spiegel was as good as the next. An officer took Boruch aside and intimated that if the Spiegels had money, the cops could look elsewhere. Unfortunately, the family’s material situation had markedly worsened by spring 1941. The piecework carving clogs that Boruch and his father did for Stan, their Christian business partner, was becoming increasingly irregular. Stan was delivering wood supplies less and less frequently, complaining that access to the Ghetto for Gentiles was becoming too difficult. Nearly half of the district’s initial twenty-two gates had been closed to restrict traffic, and bilingual signs warned in German and Polish that
Ghetto entry for Christians was
Streng Verboten
, or strictly prohibited. The punishment for Jews caught outside the Ghetto was growing harsher by the month and the number of exit passes issued to Judenrat officials was being drastically reduced. The steady and systematic constriction of the knot around the Jewish community had its most profound effect on the quantity, quality, and cost of basic foodstuffs. For the poorest Ghetto residents, those clustered around the crumbling tenements in the northwest section of the district where Boruch’s girlfriend lived, it meant a starvation diet that officially allotted 196 calories a day, consisting of a watery gruel distributed by aid agencies that was derisively known as a “spitter soup” because recipients were just as likely to spit it out as swallow it.

The forty to fifty thousand additional refugees who had arrived in the Ghetto throughout the harsh winter as the Nazis emptied surrounding towns of Jews fared even worse. Dumped inside the gates, the terrified latecomers had found every available accommodation already occupied. With nowhere to live and with the temperatures well below freezing, thousands crammed into unheated synagogues or deserted factories. “
They remain all day on their filthy straw mattresses, with no strength to rise,” Edelman reported. “The walls are green, slimy, mildewed. The mattresses usually lie on the ground, seldom on wooden supports. A whole family often receives sleeping space for one. This is the kingdom of hunger and misery.”

Not only did the unfortunate new arrivals have nowhere to live,
but the vast majority had nothing to live on. As strangers to Warsaw, they had no local support network—no former neighbors like Miriam Ratheiser’s to turn to for food, no prewar acquaintances like Boruch’s wood clog supplier through whom to earn money, no old business partners with whom to continue to trade. “
Very rapidly they started to die,” Spiegel recalled. “At first, it was a few a day. Then a few hundred a week. Then by the thousands.”

For the Spiegels the clampdown meant dramatically less money in family coffers. The sum mentioned by the policeman was far beyond their financial means.

“
So they took me.”

The blood on Isaac Zuckerman’s face had coagulated, forming a crusty patina on his temple and cheek. One eye was swollen shut, and his ribs throbbed with every breath. He lay in a detention cell at the bottom of a mud pit in the Kampinos labor camp, twenty miles northwest of Warsaw.

Between the iron grates of his cell, Isaac could see the long rows of wooden barracks and the emaciated Jewish workers, their damp clothes tattered and filthy with bog stains, filing out to morning roll call around the gallows in the camp’s square. Shovels and spades were stacked in neat pyramids next to wagons that would deliver the workers to the nearby swamps they would drain. Ukrainian guards, still drunk from their past evening’s revelry, lurched through the ranks, flailing haphazardly with their whips, shouting in their slurred and heavily accented Polish.

Isaac shivered uncontrollably, fighting fever and chills. He lay half-naked, immersed in the muddy water that filled the bottom of the fenced pit, water stained red with his own blood. The guards had beaten him all night, trying to get him to talk. “
Who was that woman?” they demanded. “Why was she asking about a Yid?”