Isaac's Army (23 page)

At first he was unable to eat. His depleted organs could process only tiny amounts of food because Boruch was
suffering from ascites, or the “wet form” of severe malnutrition—fluid in the abdominal cavity bloating him like a balloon. His mother had to be very careful feeding him, as any sudden caloric surge could overwhelm Spiegel’s metabolism. It would go into overdrive, causing his weakened heart to go into cardiac arrest, laboring to pump the extra blood various organs needed to process increased digestive activity.

Because malnutrition was becoming so prevalent in the Ghetto, Boruch’s mother probably heard many cautionary tales of starving people dropping dead after eating a single large meal. Once Boruch’s system started responding to food, his body began jettisoning excess
fluid.
This was known as the diuretic phase of starvation treatment, a critical excretion period, when the balance of minerals and electrolytes in the body must be kept in check or death becomes a possibility once again. Boruch’s mother probably understood little about biochemical ratios and could not have monitored her son’s sodium, potassium, and calcium levels even if she was aware of the delicate equilibrium her patient needed to maintain. Instead, she trusted a higher order.
“For her, everything was ‘God’s will, God’s will,’ ” Spiegel explained. “She was very religious.”

Slipping in and out of consciousness, Boruch was blissfully unaware of his continued danger. Once the excess fluids had flushed themselves from his system and the swelling subsided, Spiegel, like all starving patients, underwent a startling transformation. Like a deflated balloon, he instantly shrank, his bluish, stretched, almost transparent skin hanging grotesquely from what must have seemed an impossibly frail frame. He was literally skin and bones: almost no subcutaneous tissue was left.

For the Spiegel family, Boruch’s skeletal condition presented a serious financial burden. They desperately needed to fatten him up but had no money to buy food on the black market. Stan had stopped smuggling materials for clogs in and out of the Ghetto. It had simply become too dangerous. The October 10 announcement setting the death penalty as punishment for leaving the district or harboring Jews wreaked havoc on the underground economy. For many Gentiles, the price of doing business with Jews became too high. Moreover, many of the corrupt Polish Blue Police officers who had facilitated the illicit trade were being replaced with Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries. These new Ghetto guards immediately distinguished themselves with acts of shocking brutality. They showed particular zeal in a cracking down on illegal trade. The Ghetto’s lifeline, the all-pervasive smuggling operations that kept food flowing and tens of thousands of residents employed, was severed. In November 1941, the Nazis dealt a final blow to the underground economy: They shut off almost all electricity to the Ghetto. Lights flickered only in the wealthy southernmost quadrant of the district, near the elegant townhouses of Sienna Street, where thanks to bribes “
in the evening you could see well-dressed women, wearing lipstick and rouge, strolling calmly down the
street with their dogs, as if there was no war,” the Ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum recalled. Meanwhile, hundreds of clandestine factories and mills that had formed the backbone of illicit trade shut down.

To feed Boruch, Berl sold the one item of value the family still possessed: their father’s prized violin. “
He had had it for eight or nine years,” Boruch recalled. “He played beautifully. Our house was so full of life and love and music even though we were poor.”

Now their apartment, like countless others, was virtually empty, stripped of everything that could be traded for a meal: furniture, kitchen appliances, floor coverings, clothes. When Boruch eventually learned that the food he ate had come from the sale of the treasured violin, he was struck by guilt. “
I didn’t know if I could bring myself to swallow that bread.” What Boruch also didn’t realize was that his father had stopped eating so that Boruch could recover. “There was not enough food, so he started giving his share to me and to my sisters.” By the time Spiegel understood what was happening, it was too late. “
I watched him fade, day by day. It was terrible,” he said, the guilt still overwhelming him to tears seventy years later. “Starvation is the worst possible death.”

CHAPTER 19

SIMHA LEAVES ZIVIA TO HER PROPHECY

When Boruch’s father passed away, the family carried his naked body out onto the street. They covered him with newspapers weighted by rocks—because “
bedsheets could be traded for half a kilo of bread” and would immediately be stolen, as would any clothing on a corpse—and left him there. Eventually the sanitation department would collect him in a wheelbarrow and bury him in a communal grave at the Jewish Cemetery, along the far western wall of the Ghetto. Paying the exorbitant fees charged by undertakers
like Model Pienkert or Nathan Wittenberg’s Final Journey Funeral Parlor was only possible for the very rich. By the end of 1941,
forty-three thousand people had died of hunger and disease in the Ghetto and the streets were littered with decaying corpses. “
Dead bodies had become part of the landscape. At first it was shocking. But soon there were so many that you stopped paying any attention to them,” explained Simha.

Like the Spiegels, the Ratheiser family was faring progressively worse. Simha’s mother, Miriam, could no longer venture outside the Ghetto to collect food from her Catholic friends and former neighbors. She was still a head turner, blond and statuesque, but she smiled
less now. Her features were grayer and worry lines creased her once flawless skin. It was as if she had aged a decade in the course of one year.

Her husband Zvi’s dark beard had also grayed prematurely, and he had visibly lost weight. But Simha’s pious father was in reasonably good spirits. He prayed a great deal, even more than before the war, and seemed content to entrust his family’s fate to God. Miriam was of a different mind. She felt the situation was spiraling out of control and that the Ratheisers needed to do something.

Miriam worried most about Simha, who often sneaked out of the Ghetto to trade for food. Smuggling had become mortally dangerous even before the October death penalty decree. German and Ukrainian guards took to shooting smugglers for sport, and one guard earned the nickname Frankenstein because he developed a lethal routine of killing two or three Jews with his morning coffee. Child smugglers were particularly vulnerable to German cruelty. One such child was walking across the bridge from the farmer’s market in Praga when he encountered an SS patrol. “
I could only guess that this was a Jewish boy. He was around ten years old, very thin, and dark haired,” a witness, who was also Jewish and posing as a Christian, recounted. “The little boy was now nearer the SS man, who suddenly without uttering a word, without asking the boy any questions, seized him by the collar and threw him into the dark and turbulent waters of the Vistula.”

Another Jewish witness reported seeing a child from the Ghetto begging on bustling Jerusalem Boulevard. “
A little skeleton, four or five years old, as in India. People wouldn’t give him money, but would put a bun in his hand. An elegant German came by, opened a sewer grating, took the child, and threw him into the sewer.”

Given the rising dangers associated with smuggling, Miriam had forbidden Simha to go to the countryside to buy food anymore. He wasn’t pleased, but he did not rebel against his parents’ decision. For a while, he tried to earn money by hiring himself out as a replacement forced day laborer, taking the place of older Ghetto residents willing to pay to avoid cleaning Warsaw streets. “
I was almost seventeen and strong, so substituting was a good way to make a few zlotys,” he explained. But that, too, had its inherent dangers. At any time, Simha could be snatched and taken to a labor camp.
“My parents didn’t like
it. They were scared of what might happen and looked for something else for me.”

Simha’s life was still largely dictated by his mother and father, even though many other boys his age had effectively become heads of their households, supporting extended families through smuggling. As with any teen, part of Simha longed to break free of the parental cocoon. Although his father increasingly took a backseat as a provider, in the evolving family dynamic, Miriam emerged as more of the authority figure, and Simha still deferred to her on major decisions. “We were very close.”

Miriam was the one who thought of sending Simha out of the Ghetto for good. Since he could pass for a Gentile, she reasoned, he would be safer on the Aryan side, away from the typhus, the snatchings, the starvation. “
My mom had relatives who lived in a tiny village deep in the countryside,” Simha recalled. The place was near Radom, about three hours south of Warsaw by train. Its principal appeal was isolation; it was small enough not to figure on any map, and there were no Germans permanently posted there. It was also a farming community, which meant food was plentiful and strong hands were always welcome to toil in the fields, especially given the chronic labor shortages. In short, it was the perfect hideout to stash Simha while Miriam figured out what to do with his sisters and her Orthodox husband. “
I was very eager to leave,” Ratheiser recalled. And not just because he would be out of harm’s way. More important, he would be on his own, an adult fending for himself. In fact, this would be the last decision his parents would ever make on his behalf.

Simha Ratheiser’s December 1941 departure from Warsaw coincided with a distant event that had immediate ramifications for the roughly 430,000 Jews trapped inside the city. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor finally pushed the United States to declare war on Germany and Japan, and the news was greeted with great joy followed by deep consternation in the Ghetto. At first, people rejoiced at the prospect of Hitler’s facing such a formidable adversary, an industrial giant with seemingly endless reserves of manpower and armament. But within days, the care packages that arrived regularly via Switzerland from
relief organizations in New York stopped coming. The Germans were no longer letting them through, and another critical food source had dried up.

On hearing of the U.S. entry into the war, Zivia Lubetkin shuddered. Far from making her hopeful, it immediately reminded her of a speech that Hitler had given, warning, “
If international Jewry, in Europe and outside of Europe, once again pushes nations to world war, the result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.”

When she first heard that declaration, Zivia had dismissed it as the “barking of a mad dog.” Only now, with America mobilizing, did it fill her with dread, like a dark premonition she could not shake. She suddenly had an uncontrollable urge to hear from Lonka and Frumka and prayed that her prized couriers would return with tidings from the east.

When some news finally reached her, shortly after New Year’s Eve—which was celebrated with abandon by smugglers and gangsters at the Eldorado, the Melody Palace, the Arizona, and other champagne-soaked nightclubs frequented by the new Ghetto elite—the reports were far worse than she had imagined. They were all the more terrifying because they came not from the wild and pogrom-prone east, but from the west, from the orderly industrialized territories long incorporated into the Reich. There, on the very day that Japanese aircraft had struck the American fleet in Hawaii, the Germans had opened what could only be called an extermination camp. It occupied an abandoned castle near Chelmno, forty miles northwest of Lodz. The following day, December 8, Jews from surrounding villages were brought to the camp, according to a terrified eyewitness who described the scene to Lubetkin. “
A fat German officer greeted them politely,” the witness recalled. “We have treated you unfairly and would like to make amends,” the corpulent SS officer said in a soothing voice. “You have suffered,” he continued, puffing on a cigar, and he assured the gathered families that their torments were over. “You will all go to work, but first you must wash yourselves. Here’s a place for women and here for men,” he waved nonchalantly to separate entrances with his cigar. “Undress and go take a shower and you will be issued new clothes.”

Once the Jews were inside the building, the tone and demeanor of
the Germans changed abruptly. Instead of being led to showers, the naked and unsuspecting victims were crammed in groups of fifty to sixty into large trucks. The doors were sealed, the engines were started, and carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were vented into the sealed rear cabins while the trucks drove to a nearby wood. When the screaming and pounding ceased, the doors were opened and the bodies of victims, some still alive and writhing in agony, were buried in huge pits, according to the eyewitness, a Jewish prisoner who had managed to escape while digging the mass graves and made his way to Warsaw.

“
Nobody believed him,” Lubetkin recalled. “Nobody wanted to believe him.” His story was entirely outside the Jewish experience. Pogroms, Jews could understand.
They had ample historic precedent: the Cossack Rebellion of 1648, which claimed a hundred thousand lives; the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, whose aftermath left ten thousand dead; the 1903 and 1905 outbursts in Kishinev, Edelman’s hometown of Gomel, and Zhitomir that resulted in nearly a thousand murders; and the awful wave of killings during the Bolshevik Revolution, where in Ukraine and Belarus alone, fifteen thousand Jews lost their lives.