Isaac's Army (30 page)

Forced laborers often bought food while on the Aryan side, so Frumka packed the hand grenades and pistols in the bottom of a sack of potatoes. When the labor details returned in late afternoon, she and Wilner donned Magen David armbands and slipped into the long formations. “The guards at the gates were checking everyone carefully,” Lubetkin recalled. “They had dumped out the potatoes of the man in front of Frumka, and they were rolling around on the road.” Frumka kept her cool. She was exceedingly pretty, a prerequisite for the job, and said something flirtatious to the Polish and Ukrainian guards, who waved her through with a cursory pat-down.

“
I’ll never forget the drinks in honor of that event,” Isaac Zuckerman
said of the celebration that evening at Valiant Street. “We were thrilled. There was genuine joy.”

Alas, it proved short-lived. On September 3, 1942, the Gestapo arrested ZOB co-founder Joseph Kaplan. A few hours later, they shot his colleague Samuel Braslaw. The two Young Guard leaders had formed half of the ZOB’s command staff. Isaac had no time to mourn. As soon as he heard that Kaplan was in the hands of SS interrogators, his thoughts raced to the ZOB’s weapons cache. The arms had been stored at a Young Guard safe house on Cordials Street. “
I gave orders to bring the weapons to us,” Zuckerman recalled. While a courier was transporting the grenades and guns, she stumbled across a German patrol. “This, then, was the sum of our day,” Isaac recalled glumly. “Kaplan arrested, Braslaw killed, and our weapons captured.”

CHAPTER 24

LITTLE ANGEL

Simha Ratheiser forced himself to smile and shifted in the late summer sun, which still blazed brightly in September 1942. He tried his best to feign amusement, since his life depended on it. The Germans were watching him, expecting him to share in their mirth. They were clearly enjoying themselves, these tall and dashing cavalrymen, with their polished boots and riding crops, as a trembling, elderly Jewish man urinated in his pants. The cavalrymen pointed at the dark stain spreading down the terrified man’s trousers, and made jovial remarks that Simha was meant to appreciate as well. He willed himself to smile and thrust his hands in his pockets, partly to conceal their trembling and largely because he feared he, too, would “
wet myself, I was so frightened.”

Operation Reinhart, the SS code name for the liquidation of Polish Jewry, had reached Klvov. In the waning days of August 1942, the hamlet’s twenty Jewish families were herded into a makeshift ghetto of roped-off walls and were told they could not cross the staked-out lines on pain of death. A group of Waffen-SS cavalry officers rode into town a few days later, intent on using the captive Jewish villagers for sport.

“Come here,” they had ordered the elderly man. When he did as he was told, crossing the putative ghetto boundary in the process, they screamed, “
You are outside the area!” in feigned outrage. The startled old man was accused of committing a capital crime and was tossed against a barn wall. “
I was standing ten feet away,” Simha recalled. “The Germans had no idea I was Jewish too.” They were busy conducting a mock trial, doubled over with laughter, debating with exaggerated gravity whether to execute their victim. Ratheiser couldn’t bring himself to look into the old man’s pleading eyes. He knew the man vaguely. He was one of his relatives’ neighbors, and he, in turn, knew Simha’s true identity.

Since Simha had never worn the yellow star and had chosen to work for Gentiles, the Germans presumed he was a simple farmhand, an eager spectator to their sport. Perhaps his strong Aryan features led the cavalrymen to assume that he appreciated the service the SS was rendering Klvov by ridding it of Jews.

Ratheiser nodded with all the enthusiasm his pounding heart could muster and the soldiers roared in approval. Simha felt shame for playing their cruel game. But his urge to live outweighed his instinct to flee, or to shout indignantly that he, too, was Jewish and that the cavalrymen were murderous scum. So he remained rooted to the spot, praying that the old man would not address him in Yiddish.

Just then, to Simha’s astonishment, the leader of Klvov’s minuscule Jewish community stepped in front of the firing squad to plead the condemned man’s case. At first the Germans were amused. But when the Judenrat chairman gently tried to push one of the rifle muzzles down, the cavalrymen were nonplussed by his defiance. Their grins faded, and their faces took on a uniformly hard look. In unison, they raised their rifles and shot the chairman at point-blank range. “
I remember the blood pooling on the ground near my feet,” Ratheiser recalled. “I was so frightened I wanted to run. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t show any emotion. The Germans were watching my reaction.”

For Simha, the execution “
was the first time that I really understood what was happening to my people.” He realized that while he could continue to hide among the Gentiles, the notion of passively observing genocide filled him with a deep sense of shame. Then and there, Ratheiser decided to return to Warsaw to rescue his family before it was too late.

In the Polish capital, a collective guilt also gripped the Jewish community as shell-shocked survivors of the
Gross Aktion
struggled to come to terms with the full enormity of the deportations. “
So many of our comrades were gone, and we were too ashamed to look one another in the eye,” Zivia Lubetkin recalled.

The “resettlement” program was officially over. The last transport to Treblinka had
departed on September 21, 1942—Yom Kippur—carrying two thousand Jewish policemen. Their services were no longer needed, now that the seven-week extermination campaign had reduced Warsaw’s Jewish population by over three hundred thousand.

The Ghetto itself had become a ghost town. On street after street, block after block, buildings stood hauntingly empty. Other than the still-functioning Peacock Prison, the central core of the district was completely deserted. Every tenement south of Forestry Boulevard was vacant. All the residents along the Cool Street corridor were dead, as was every inhabitant south of Mushroom Street.

Throughout the abandoned areas, doors to thousands of apartments were left eerily ajar. Inside, the moldy remnants of interrupted meals and half-smoked cigarettes stood testament to the savage urgency of the final phase of the
Gross Aktion
, when entire blocks had been emptied in the space of a few hours. The looting that followed had transformed these deserted sections into postapocalyptic landscapes where nothing stirred save for the strips of torn clothing that flapped from bits of broken furniture.

At street level, the billboards advertising chewing gum, shampoo, and travel agencies still beckoned, but all the storefronts had been shattered, the shelves stripped of anything of value, the lighting and toilet fixtures carted off by bands of scavengers. In ransacked apartments, prewar electricity and phone bills, family letters and postcards lay scattered on bare floors, the desks and bureaus that had contained them having been chopped up for firewood or hauled off for resale. Mice and rats scoured the debris for leftover crumbs.

It was only at dusk that the depopulated parts of the Ghetto began to show faint signs of life: a moving shadow here and there; a bent figure scurrying from a courtyard; the crunch of glass underfoot; the
echo of a can being kicked inadvertently in the dark. Occasionally, the red ember of a cigarette might glow in the distance, or a whispered greeting might be heard. But otherwise, blackness and silence stretched in every direction—until an abrupt explosion of life and light: the shops.

The shops housed the 34,969 Jewish slave laborers who had been spared deportation so they could toil in German-owned factories that supplied the Wehrmacht with everything from winter coats to camouflage netting. Clustered in four separate enclaves, each barricaded with barbed wire and wooden fencing, the shops comprised some four hundred converted apartment buildings and were now the only places in Warsaw where Jews had a right to live. Anyone outside the four cordoned industrial sectors was considered an “illegal,” subject to summary execution, and had to hide in the “wild,” in the vast depopulated dead zones that now comprised most of the empty Ghetto.

In one such wild area, in a dark and damp cellar near
the Wilfried Hoffman Works, where twelve hundred Jewish tailors sewed SS uniforms, Zivia Lubetkin and Isaac Zuckerman tried to regroup the remnants of the decimated Jewish Fighting Organization. A single candle lit the room, and several dozen ZOB members sat around a sparse meal prepared from canned goods scoured from neighboring tenements. Food was no longer an issue now that the Ghetto was mostly empty and the “legals” were fed by their Nazi employers. Almost anything could be foraged at night from the tens of thousands of vacant apartments and later traded on the Aryan side for fresh produce. Still, Zivia and Isaac ate without appetite. “
We were consumed with shame,” she recalled. “How could we live when we had watched hundreds of thousands of Jews taken to slaughter?”

The question tormented the young Zionists, now that the immediate danger of death was over. During the deportations, no one had had the time or the luxury to reflect. Escaping the daily roundups had been all-consuming. Now there was no escaping from the full horror of the calamity. The toll was staggering in every demographic.
Of 51,458 Jewish children under the age of ten in Warsaw, for instance, only 498 remained alive. Ninety-eight percent of all teenage girls had been sent to Treblinka, as had an only slightly less devastating 89.5 percent of males in their twenties. The genocide spanned all age brackets,
occupations, and political orientations. Statistically, only the various underground organizations had fared better than the general population, losing around half to two-thirds of their members, thanks to their clandestine experience.

Ironically, this heightened survival rate now filled many with guilt. “
We hid like mice in holes,” Isaac Zuckerman lamented. “That was our shame and our disgrace.” As he looked around the cellar at the hunched figures of newly orphaned teenagers, of fellow Resistance members whose brothers and sisters were dead, the same thought ran through everyone’s mind: Why hadn’t they risen up? Why hadn’t they picked up a stick, a knife, a stone, and flung themselves on the Germans, as Joseph Kaplan had valiantly done? Kaplan and Samuel Braslaw had died heroically. In the furtive glances directed at Ari Wilner, the blond and blue-eyed courier who was now the ranking Young Guardsman in the ZOB, the unspoken question appeared to be whether they should do the same.

“What now?” someone broke the gloomy silence. “
I don’t remember who spoke first, Zivia or Ari,” Zuckerman said. “The words were bitter, heavy, determined: There would be no Jewish resistance. We were too late. The people were destroyed.”

It was pointless to continue, the speaker said. “When there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw we couldn’t organize a Jewish fighting force. How will we succeed now, when only tens of thousands are left? We didn’t win the trust of the masses. We have no weapons and we almost certainly won’t have any. There’s no strength to start all over again. Honor is trampled.”

Murmurs of assent and looks of shame followed the statement. It was true, someone declared. They had failed. The situation seemed utterly hopeless until one of the younger ZOB members spoke up. They should go out in a blaze of redemptive glory, he suggested, using the one weapon they still had: hundreds of gallons of gasoline stored in canisters throughout the basements of abandoned buildings. “Come on,” exhorted the youth. “
Let’s go out in the streets tomorrow, burn down the Ghetto and attack the Germans. We’ll be liquidated. We are sentenced to be liquidated anyway. But honor will be saved.”

That suicidal outburst changed the tone of the conversation. Zuckerman would later call it one of the ZOB’s seminal moments.
The proposal unleashed a torrent of pent-up anger. In one instant, the gloom lifted. Everyone started talking at once. Plans for kamikaze-style attacks were presented and shot down. Fierce arguments broke out over how best to die.