Isaac's Army (38 page)

The work was dangerous and not without mishaps. “
One morning the entire ghetto shook to a mighty explosion, which threw everyone
into a panic,” senior ZOB operative Tuvia Borzykowski recounted. “Only a few knew that the bomb was our own.”

Slowly but surely, the Organization’s weapons and munitions caches grew. Every day, a few revolvers trickled in from the black markets on the Aryan side. With each passing week, the stores of homemade grenades increased. With each shift, the rows of bottled Molotov cocktails lengthened.

During the feverish preparations, the question arose of whether to follow the JMU’s lead and build fortified bunkers and tunnels. Underground hideouts were being frantically excavated in basements and cellars throughout the Ghetto in February and March 1943, in anticipation of the next
Aktion
. The vast majority were dug by ordinary residents and never intended as entrenched fighting positions. Their purpose was purely concealment. Many of these hideouts were engineering marvels, with lighting and electricity, running water, and complex ventilation systems. A thriving cottage industry of skilled contractors had sprung up to design and build shelters for those who could afford them. Others dug their own, crude crawl spaces shored up by planks ripped from the floors of abandoned apartments. Some of the more sophisticated designs could house hundreds of refugees, with stores of food and drink for several weeks. These were so well camouflaged, with false walls and entrances through the coal furnaces in boiler rooms, that even the residents of the buildings above could not find them.

Zuckerman advocated mimicking the JMU’s bunker strategy. The January Rising proved that it was impossible to fight the Germans in the open from exposed positions. And now the element of surprise was gone. The SS would be better prepared next time, expecting resistance. The ZOB, he argued, needed escape routes and fallback positions where it could regroup and hunker down.

Mordechai Anielewicz had a different view. The point of any future battle, he argued, was not survival. There would be no survivors; the only hope was to inflict the maximum possible casualties on the enemy before the inevitable demise. To accomplish this would require holding the high ground: the rooftops and attics that provided the optimum lines of sight.

Zuckerman thought “
this was a mistake.” Edelman grumbled that
“
not all of us were in such a hurry to die.” But Anielewicz’s reasoning prevailed. He was, after all, the great hero, the living symbol of resistance who had already attained cult status within the ZOB’s largely teenage rank and file. If he wanted to reenact a modern Masada, they would follow him to their martyr’s graves.

Zuckerman and Edelman viewed their co-commander in a less hallowed light. Isaac and Mark had become close. During Zuckerman’s convalescence from his leg wound, the two spent a lot of time together. They struck up a genuine friendship that transcended their ideological differences. Not so with Anielewicz. “
I had not gotten to know him well because I didn’t mix with Communists,” Edelman explained frankly. “Isaac and Zivia lived with him for a while. They used to read his journal entries in Hebrew and laugh. He’d never seen the Umschlagplatz and yet was so desperate to lead. Seeing 400,000 people go to their death changes you—you can break down. That’s certainly why the [April] uprising turned out much harder on him.”

Zuckerman, Lubetkin, and Edelman resented the implications of Anielewicz’s private diaries: that had he been in Warsaw during the
Gross Aktion
, he might somehow have single-handedly saved the Ghetto. They felt better prepared for the coming conflict precisely because they had already witnessed death on an unimaginable scale. In their view, Anielewicz had not yet paid his psychological dues.

Edelman’s few interactions with his commander served only to reinforce his reservations that Anielewicz was “
very emotional and sometimes acted rashly.” This spontaneity caused significant friction between the ZOB leaders when Anielewicz, in late March 1943, shot two Latvian SS auxiliaries on Pleasant Street in the Central Ghetto. Edelman and Zuckerman were furious. While the ZOB had openly assassinated Jewish collaborators—at least sixty traitors, possibly more, were killed in all—it had never targeted Germans because of the risk of retaliation. The Gestapo did not care if a Jew was murdered in the Ghetto, but an SS auxiliary was a different matter. Within hours of the hit on the Latvians, more than two hundred Jews were rounded up on Pleasant Street, lined up against walls, and machine-gunned. Many ZOB leaders held Anielewicz responsible for the deaths of those innocent people. “
After this incident the Coordinating Committee of the ZOB wanted to remove him from his post,” Edelman recalled.

Anielewicz’s good standing with the ZOB’s impatient teenage rank and file was unaffected by his actions, and because of his popularity he survived the no-confidence vote. The ZOB suffered another, potentially more serious blow when envoy Ari Wilner fell into German hands. His arrest prompted the Home Army to immediately suspend all contact with the ZOB. Wilner had been betrayed by a Polish informant during an arms pickup. Taken to Gestapo headquarters, he was tortured, suspended upside down, the soles of his feet burned with branding irons. The Germans had no idea he was a Jew and their interrogations focused entirely on the Home Army. He endured the questioning for several weeks before finally breaking down and confessing that he was a Jew. When the Gestapo confirmed this, they lost interest in him. They were only after information on the Home Army, so Wilner was sent to Peacock Prison in the Ghetto.

The Home Army, in the meantime, completely disappeared from the ZOB’s radar. Every effort to reach Captain Wolinski failed; every channel of communication suddenly went silent. As the weeks passed and March faded into April, the frustrated ZOB leaders became convinced that General Rowecki was using Wilner’s arrest as an excuse to suspend further aid. At the time, Mark Edelman felt the same way. Only later did he learn that “
the Home Army had an iron-clad rule that if someone was burnt, all contact was ruptured for six weeks.” The underground term for this was quarantining an “infected” agent. (The security precautions were standard procedure, though hardly foolproof. In June 1943, General Rowecki himself was betrayed by an infected member. Sent to Berlin, he was subjected to months of interrogation before being shot at Sachsenhausen.)

Almost six weeks to the day after Wilner’s arrest, Captain Henry Wolinski reestablished contact. The call came on April 12, 1943, with a cryptic message stating “if you don’t want the salt to spoil the meal, you should come immediately to pick it up.” Presumably this meant the Home Army had a weapons shipment ready. But whom would the ZOB send to retrieve it? A replacement had to be found for Wilner, someone with sufficient gravitas to act as the Organization’s new ambassador on the Aryan side.

Once more the choice came down to Mordechai Anielewicz or Isaac Zuckerman. Anielewicz’s advantage was that he was a native
Varsovian. “
He talked and looked like a typical Warsaw Pole. He didn’t speak like the Jewish intellectuals, who, because of their fluency and literary speech, would fail and be exposed.… My disadvantage,” Zuckerman went on, “was that I came from eastern Poland, from Vilna. In normal times, Warsaw Poles mocked the Polish of Vilna, which had many Russianisms.”

Anielewicz also had the considerable advantage of having led the January Rising. The Poles would respect that. Unfortunately, though, he had no intention of playing diplomat; Mordechai wanted to stay and fight. So in the end it was Isaac who represented the Organization on the Aryan side. He packed his belongings and left the Ghetto on April 17, 1943. Little did he know that he would never again set foot in the Jewish district.

CHAPTER 29

ZIVIA LETS LOOSE

It was 2
A.M
. on April 19, 1943, less than forty-eight hours after Isaac Zuckerman’s departure to the Aryan side as the ZOB’s new liaison officer with the Home Army, when a courier burst into Zivia Lubetkin’s quarters.

From the boy’s grave expression, Zivia immediately sensed something was wrong. For an agonizing instant, she thought Isaac might be in trouble: betrayed by an informant or apprehended by the Gestapo. These things usually happened quickly, at the outset of a mission, when inexperienced operatives blundered into traps. Zivia’s heart skipped a beat. Much as she tried to conceal her emotions behind the hard mask she wore in public, Lubetkin constantly worried about her lover. She couldn’t forget that the last time Zuckerman had left the Ghetto, he’d barely made it back, with a bullet lodged in his leg. And she was only too keenly aware that the man he was now replacing as ZOB envoy, Ari Wilner, had been betrayed to the Gestapo and tortured.

The runner, however, wasn’t bearing news of Isaac’s capture. The Germans, he stammered, were massing troops throughout Warsaw.
Word from the Home Army was that special SS units would storm the Ghetto at first light.

Relief swept over Lubetkin. Not only was Isaac safe, but the hour she had long awaited was finally at hand. This was what the Jewish Fighting Organization had been preparing for since its inception. This was what all the sacrifice was about: the weapons training, the Exes, the bomb making, the rip-offs and endless haggling with the uncooperative Polish Underground and unscrupulous arms dealers. Zivia had been anticipating this moment for weeks now; the entire Jewish community had been preparing for it for months. The civilians had feverishly dug their bunkers and camouflaged their hiding places; the combatants—from both the ZOB and its rival, the Jewish Military Union—had fortified their defenses and honed their strategies.

Everything that could be done had been done. The guns had been distributed. (Boruch Spiegel, who had been afraid of accidentally shooting himself when he first held a revolver,
now couldn’t sleep unless he had his trusted pistol under his pillow.) Sandbags had been filled and food supplies laid in. Mines and improvised explosive devices had been buried beneath the entry gates to the Ghetto’s three remaining sections. Molotov cocktails had been strategically stored in upper-floor windows overlooking every major artery that the Germans would have to traverse. Holes had been cut in attic fire walls so that fighters could slip unseen from building to building and track their prey from above.
The ZOB’s twenty-two fighting units had all been mobilized and deployed. Nine were in the Central Ghetto, eight in the main shops district, and the five battle groups under Mark Edelman’s command were positioned in the Brushmakers Area.

By 4
A.M
. the Ghetto was on high alert, a hive of activity as fifty thousand residents scrambled into basements, disappearing behind false walls and trapdoors that opened onto preprovisioned hideouts. “
In the bunkers, people push and shove and lie down on planks,” Zivia noted. “Suddenly a child begins wailing. It has gotten separated from its parents. Immediately, from all sides, people rush to calm the frightened child, whose cries can alert the Germans and doom them all.”

The apartments were almost empty now. The last stragglers were burrowing underground, and silence once again returned, as if, thought Zivia, “all life was erased from the face of the earth.”

The only Jews the Germans would encounter now—Zivia smiled at the thought—were armed Jews.
There were roughly 750 of them dispersed throughout the Jewish district’s three remaining sections: five hundred from the ZOB and the balance from the JMU, whose forces were concentrated in the northernmost part of the Central Ghetto near Muranow Square. The two groups would fight separately, despite a last-ditch attempt to overcome their differences. But Zivia wasn’t thinking about that. It was too late for recriminations. Her only regret now was that the ZOB didn’t have more guns. If not for the weapons shortage, “
we would have a thousand warriors rather than five hundred,” she sighed.

Lubetkin holstered her pistol and took up her preassigned position in the predawn gloom. She was calm and completely unafraid, almost giddy with anticipation. “At last,” she thought. “
The day of revenge is upon us.”

Had Zivia seen what Simha Ratheiser was witnessing at that very moment from his forward position on the easternmost edge of the Brushmakers District, she might have felt decidedly less confident. For only the second time in his life, Ratheiser was truly scared. The scene unfolding before his eyes was terrifying. As the sun rose pink over the horizon, wave after wave of German troops were crossing Cordials Street on their way to the Central Ghetto. Ratheiser watched them in the weak morning light, dense helmeted blocs moving in robotic unison just outside the wall. They formed “an endless procession,” he recalled. “
Behind them were tanks, armored vehicles, light cannons and hundreds of Waffen-SS units on motorcycles.” Further still were the ambulances, field kitchens, and communications trucks. The rumble of the approaching armada grew steadily louder, more ominous. Windowpanes began rattling from the reverberations of track treads on cobblestone. Diesel fumes permeated the still-frigid air. The bark of marching orders grew louder.