Isaac's Army (4 page)

For Simha Ratheiser, and for every school-age child in Warsaw, the first day of the Second World War coincided with the commencement of classes, an unhappy date even at the best of times. In Poland, September 1 signified the traditional conclusion of the summer break, of sailing in the Mazury lake region, hiking in the Tatra Mountains, and
camping in the primeval forest of Bialowieza, where wild bison roamed among the ancient pines. September 1 meant no more visits to distant and gift-laden relatives, no more picnics in ruined castles. It brought an abrupt end to those carefree August afternoons in the sand dunes of the Hel Peninsula, with kites fluttering in the maritime breeze and the sun warming the frigid Baltic waters just enough to splash around in the waves.

On this particular September 1, the ring of school bells competed with air raid sirens throughout the city, followed by radio announcements of “All Clear.” No doubt the more reluctant returnees cursed their bad luck that classes had not been canceled as a result of the outbreak of hostilities. Simha Ratheiser was too distracted by the sight and sound of planes buzzing over the capital to think much about school that morning. The fifteen-year-old was entering his sophomore year. He was a good and generally attentive student and an excellent athlete, a gifted striker who played soccer with Gentiles in the Christian suburb where he lived. With his pale blue-green eyes and light chestnut hair, he fit in with his Slavic neighbors.

School was a forty-five-minute commute from Simha’s home near the Vistula River. Catholic public schools in his district were much closer. But his parents, like the parents of half the Jewish children in Poland, had insisted he attend a private Jewish academy. “
My father was an observant Jew, and he wanted me to study at a Jewish institution,” Simha would later explain.

Ratheiser’s school was in the southernmost part of the Jewish Quarter at 26 Mushroom Street, an imposing neoclassical edifice that also housed the offices of the Jewish Community Council, the modern administrative successor of the Kehila self-governing bodies that had existed in Poland since the fifteenth century. Large oil paintings of long-deceased community elders decorated the building’s cavernous halls, their gaze scrutinizing future leaders as they trudged between classes.

Simha was popular. It was not just his good looks, or the fact that the girls, both Gentile and Jewish, thought him intriguing. He was in fact unusually cool: blessed by some inner regulating mechanism that lent him the ability to stay calm when others grew agitated. Perhaps that helped explain why his neighborhood bullies—the
sheygetzes
, as
Gentiles were called in Yiddish—didn’t bother trying to get a rise out of him. He certainly wasn’t big or intimidating. He didn’t curse, or talk tough, like some of his Polish neighbors, and other kids at school. But he carried himself in the sort of detached, casual manner that suggested he belonged in whatever environment he found himself in.

Like Isaac Zuckerman and so many other young Polish Jews, Simha Ratheiser had been captivated for a time by Zionism’s dream of a Jewish homeland. The previous summer he had gone to a camp run by Akiva, one of the dozens of Zionist youth organizations in Poland, and he had been captivated by stories of daring kibbutzniks, of camels and exotic Bedouins, of fearless settlers turning parched desert into blooming orchards. But the fervor had passed. Simha, by his own admission, “
was never overly political.” And there was a monastic, cultlike atmosphere in some Zionist groups that left him cold. In the meantime, the usual teenage interests—soccer, girls, the movies—had replaced Palestine.

Those teenage preoccupations kept Simha from cracking the books on September 1. The sound of sirens and airplanes were distracting him, and he and his schoolmates stared at the cloudless sky, trying to guess whether the unsettling aircraft circling overhead were Polish or German. They were not alone. Most of Warsaw was gazing skyward. “Those are our planes,” people on the streets said, pointing excitedly. “No, they are not,” others countered. “Those are exercises,” some reassured. “No, they aren’t.” The debates raged. The planes were in fact antiquated Polish P-6s retrofitted with British Vickers engines, and ungainly P-11s, or Bumblebees, as the slow and bulbous machines would become known, part of a squadron of fighters that had been redeployed to defend the Polish capital. But like most Varsovians, Ratheiser could not yet distinguish the distinctive sound and silhouette of enemy bombers. Nonetheless, he was intensely curious about them. Much like any fifteen-year-old, he had longed to see a dogfight—the real-life, swooping version of the World War I duels shown in the American movies that played at the Napoleon Theater in Three Crosses Square.

His wish would be granted shortly after the lunch bell.

At 3:30 that afternoon, steam whistles sounded throughout Praga, the smokestack district on the eastern, unfashionable bank of the Vistula River—a tough, mixed neighborhood
where 40 percent of the residents were Jewish. The day shift had ended, and
3,870 workers streamed out of the Lilpop, Rau & Lowenstein plant. The forty-acre facility assembled Buicks, Chevrolets, and Opel Kadetts under license from General Motors, as well as locomotives, trams, heavy trucks, and armored vehicles. It was one of Warsaw’s largest industrial concerns, a joint venture between Belgian Jews and ethnic Germans who founded the conglomerate in the mid-nineteenth century to build rail ties for the tsar, after Poland’s annexation into the Russian empire had opened vast new markets and attracted great sums of foreign investment.

Next door, thick pale fumes billowed from the vents of the Schicht-Lever soap and laundry detergent plant, an Anglo-Dutch concern that would morph into global giant Unilever, while
the three hundred workers of Samuel and Sender Ginsburg’s BRAGE Rubber Works poured out onto November 11 Street, a road that commemorated the date of a failed uprising against tsarist dominion.

Nearby, Joseph Osnos, Martha’s tall and elegant thirty-five-year-old husband—an urbane businessman and fastidious dresser who bore a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn—was also letting his employees out for the weekend. He had raised his start-up capital as a diamond broker in France and Belgium, and now his plant, Karolyt Incorporated, produced toasters, electric irons, and kettles. During the long run-up to the invasion, he had introduced a new line of hermetically sealed food containers to protect against the mustard gas attacks that figured prominently in every newspaper report about German arsenals and tactics. Sales shot through the roof, and the plant operated at full capacity throughout the summer of 1939 to meet the media-driven demand. Gas masks and duct tape also sold out, because if the Nazis struck, the Sanation government had repeatedly warned during its incessant military fund drives, it would surely be with chemical weapons.

Years later, Joseph’s family would not remember how many workers he had employed. But as they streamed out of his plant that Friday, those workers had reason to be anxious. In the distance, rising hundreds
of feet in the air, beyond the huge Koneser Vodka distillery with its production capacity of a million liters a month, a black, noxious cloud swirled over the Pea Town Oil Reservoir—Warsaw’s first industrial casualty of the war.

Watching the reservoir blaze, Osnos made a mental note to contact his notary and attorney on Monday morning. He would put the factory in Martha’s name, and put a few financial matters in order. As a precaution, in the unlikely event the situation spiraled out of control and something happened to him. At least Martha and Robert would be protected and provided for.

As dusk descended on the first day of the Second World War, the quasi-normalcy that still prevailed over the Polish capital assumed its typical nocturnal features. In blue-collar Praga, the drunken bar brawls that inaugurated the launch of every weekend flared up, even as firefighters fought in vain to douse the raging inferno in Pea Town. Across the Vistula, Simha Ratheiser’s father, Zvi, locked up his store early, as was his custom every Friday, and set off on foot to synagogue, skirting the Royal Gardens, Warsaw’s stunning central park, where the shrill, lustful cries of free-ranging peacocks and swans echoed over the ponds, amphitheaters, and manicured lawns.

The elegant, tree-lined district bordering the park had once been King Stanislaw August’s private hunting preserve. It now was home to imposing government ministries and high officials, high-ceilinged apartments with elaborate plasterwork, and the gated villas of minor aristocrats and the city’s financial and industrial elite; a mixed neighborhood where Jews and Gentiles shared gardeners and stock tips, but rarely socialized.

On Belvedere Street, whose principal palace would later adorn bottles of high-end vodka, black Citroën limousines with headlights doused raced past Zvi, shuttling between the presidential residence and the gleaming white façade of the Ministry of Defense, where the anti-Semitic commander in chief, Marshal Smigly-Rydz, was issuing the Sanation regime’s first official communiqué of the war.

Blue Chevy trucks with loudspeakers on their roofs and the swirling logo of Polish State Radio on their sides carried Smigly-Rydz’s
triumphal announcement throughout the city center. “
Today a total of 16 enemy airplanes were destroyed. Our own losses—2 aircraft,” the taped message proclaimed in a continuous loop. “We have captured prisoners at many points.… In [Danzig], three enemy attempts to storm Westerplatte were repulsed.”

Martha and Joseph Osnos caught the happy developments on Warsaw One, the main state broadcaster, that evening, while Helen, their Gentile nanny, packed young Robert’s bags so he could join his cousin Joanna at the Mortkowicz country house the next morning—although now, apparently, there was less urgency in getting him out of the city.

The Osnoses usually went out or entertained on Friday evenings, and their guest lists conformed to the prevailing norms and degrees of social segregation in prewar Warsaw. “
My parents only associated with other assimilated Jews,” their son Robert would later recall. “Yiddish was taboo in our house.” That Friday, however, there was no dinner party, and dark blackout drapes shaded the Osnos home—a spacious art-filled apartment with a baby grand piano in the parlor and white oleanders blooming on the balcony. The Sanation’s battle communiqué might have been comforting, but Joseph was not entirely convinced.

Across town, Boruch Spiegel and his family heard the glorious news from a passing sound truck because like many other poorer residents of the Jewish Quarter, they did not own a radio. The Jewish neighborhood that Friday was as still and silent as on any Sabbath, with the notable exception of the crowds milling around the marble pillars of the Great Synagogue near Banker’s Square, and the raucous Theater District a few blocks west, where reassured patrons devoured the late edition of the
Evening Times-7:
TO COMPLETE VICTORY
, its banner headlines jubilantly declared.

And so, as the sun set on September 1, 1939, the city’s restaurants and theaters slowly filled. The bars and cafés on New World Street resounded with cheers and celebratory toasts. And Warsaw’s four hundred synagogues and prayer houses reverberated with relief.

CHAPTER 3

WOLSKA STREET IS COVERED WITH BLOOD

On the evening of September 6, 1939, the Sanation regime fled Warsaw. Boruch Spiegel was stunned by the ensuing pandemonium. He had never witnessed such chaos before—a national government dismantling itself overnight and running for dear life, so all that remained of once-powerful ministries were the charcoal embers of hastily burned documents, along with trailing declarations that Poland’s strongmen held “
the firm resolve of returning once the war has been won.”

The Spiegels, like countless other Varsovian families, weighed the rapidly deteriorating situation and debated their options. Marshal Smigly-Rydz, before decamping, had called on all able-bodied men to withdraw to the east, where the Polish armed forces were to regroup and launch a counteroffensive. Boruch, like many other Jews, did not put much stock in Smigly-Rydz, who had distinguished himself more in rhetorical campaigns against mythical Hebraic cabals than on any real battlefield. Boruch’s brother Berl, however, insisted they go. The German juggernaut, he argued, had already overrun much of Western Poland. “
Warsaw was going to surrender,” Berl declared. “There was no point in staying.”