Isaac's Army (41 page)

Then came the terrifying shouts of ZOB fighters on the lower floors. The building was on fire. Smoke was rapidly rising. The flames were gaining momentum. Artstein ordered an evacuation. Everyone rushed into the attic, where a prearranged escape route had been hacked through the walls of neighboring structures. The buildings were all more or less the same height, four or five stories, creating a concealed road network for the ZOB. The fighters had just started squeezing through the narrow exit passage when they encountered a breathless scout coming from the opposite direction. The enemy had occupied the rendezvous point at the Goose Street hospital. Vengeful SS men were taking out their frustrations on the patients, going from bed to bed and shooting immobilized victims.

Zivia and Zacharia Artstein stared at each other in disbelief. At twenty, Artstein was nine years younger than Lubetkin, and very much her junior in the Socialist Zionist party hierarchy. That he outranked her in the ZOB chain of command was more a function of prevailing chauvinistic norms than of any superior military or tactical experience. Zivia’s notoriously frosty demeanor, however, lent itself well to crisis. She kept her cool and dispatched scouts to look for other ways out. For the time being, the combatants were stuck. Going forward into the arms of the waiting Germans was out of the question. Staying put too long also meant certain death.

The minutes passed agonizingly slowly and the attic began to fill with smoke. People started coughing and covering their mouths with torn bits of clothing. The temperature steadily rose; everyone was soon sweating. “
We were beginning to feel the fire,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “The smoke was so thick we could hardly see each other. We were starting to choke, our eyes were full of tears, pieces of burning wood were falling from the roof, the floors were beginning to give way, and tongues of flames were already licking our clothes.”

This was it. They had run out of time. In another minute they would all be dead. The mood in the burning attic abruptly changed. The shouting and panicked running from corner to corner ceased. Everyone became still, as if they were all making peace with their maker.

All of a sudden, one of the scouts burst into the flaming room. He had found a way out. “
It was a way so difficult, leading through such narrow tiny passages, that it seemed unbelievable that a human body could pass,” Borzykowski remembered. “But we were desperate. And in such a state the impossible becomes possible.”

CHAPTER 31

GHETTOGRAD

The Ghetto was ablaze by the fifth day of the Uprising. Fires raged uncontrollably in every enclave, sending plumes of ash over the entire city of Warsaw.

With each passing hour the inferno intensified, fed by the flamethrowers that squirted lethal streams of liquid hell. The jets of pressurized kerosene could reach second- and third-story windows, penetrate crevices, and breach the narrowest openings. They had become Jürgen Stroop’s most effective weapon, the fiery pillar of his new strategy to smoke out the stubborn “Jewish bandits” who, contrary to all expectations, were still holed up in pockets of determined resistance.

The Uprising should have been over by now—Stroop had assured his superiors as much: Kruger, in the daily teletype reports he sent to Krakow, and, more important, Himmler in Berlin, during a series of jarring late night phone calls. The Reichsführer was a notorious night owl and had an unsettling habit of ringing his underlings at all hours. Unaware of the SS leader’s insomnia, Stroop had exploded with indignant fury the first time his phone jingled at three in the morning.
“
Damn you,” he had roared into the receiver before realizing the identity of his caller. “How dare you wake me? Are you stupid?” The Reichsführer had only laughed. “Don’t be angry with me, my dear Stroop,” he apologized in his famously soft cadences, at once maternal and menacing.

Stroop savored every word of that glorious conversation. Himmler had called him Maestro—music to the general’s ears—and compared his tactical rout of Zivia’s group to a “Wagnerian overture”: masterful, with the promise of heightened crescendos. “
Continue to play thus, Maestro, and our Führer and I shall never forget it,” Himmler had promised his eager conductor.

The nocturnal calls had continued, but the pitch and tenor of Himmler’s voice progressively changed. The Reichsführer remained punctiliously polite. That was his manner. But he was growing impatient. So was Kruger, to the point that the Higher SS and Police Leader East was making a special trip up from Krakow to personally review Stroop’s progress. His concern was motivated by office politics in Wawel Castle, where Hans Frank, the Governor General and Himmler’s hated rival, had seized on the Ghetto revolt to make trouble for the SS. Frank had Hitler’s ear because of his long service as the Führer’s personal attorney. And he was sending increasingly alarmist dispatches to Berlin that Warsaw was out of control, that the SS was unable to subdue a handful of Jews. The Wehrmacht was also beginning to snicker. Jokes were starting to circulate throughout the army about how the vaunted SS, unaccustomed to frontline action, was facing a Jewish Stalingrad, its very own Ghettograd.

In truth, Stroop was taken aback by the determination of the Jews. After his forces had overrun Zivia’s position on Cordials Street that first day of fighting, he had met very stiff resistance from his next target: the JMU stronghold off Muranow Square, on the Ghetto’s northeastern edge. Though Stroop had no idea he was battling a separate rebel group, the right-wing Zionists led by Paul Frenkel and David Apfelbaum proved far more difficult to dislodge than the ZOB. For one thing, they were much more entrenched: Muranow was the Jewish Military Union’s headquarters, complete with a tunnel to the Aryan side, reinforced underground bunkers, relatively sophisticated communications gear, and makeshift pillboxes. A pair of flags defiantly
flew over the converted tenement/fortress, as if to attest to its permanence: the blue-on-white JMU banner and the red and white national colors of its Polish Underground partners. The combatants at the Muranow bastion were also far better armed,
thanks to the four submachine guns delivered by Security Corps, the conservative, arch-Catholic Home Army splinter group that had been supplying the JMU since 1939. (It had always operated quasi-independently of Home Army command and had apparently decided to ignore the “stand down” directive.)

Stroop, in his report to Kruger, referred to the Muranow fort “as the main Jewish fighting unit” of the Ghetto, noting that it was reinforced “by a considerable number of Polish bandits.” This was an exaggeration—there were only five confirmed Gentiles in the JMU fortress at the time. But the specter of Polish partisans helped justify Stroop’s heavy losses—officially fifty-two wounded soldiers and one dead officer, in reality many more—and the embarrassing fact that the two rebel flags, though riddled with bullets, continued to stubbornly flutter for all of Warsaw to see. “
Get those flags down, Stroop,” Himmler had hissed, his voice a menacing whisper. “Whatever the cost.”

Despite the Reichsführer’s chilling exhortations, Stroop fared no better when he regrouped and tried to take the Brushmakers District next. Inside the tiny eastern enclave, the smallest of the three remaining in the Ghetto, Simha Ratheiser waited impatiently. The nineteen-year-old was no longer scared or intimidated. Now that it was at hand, the moment he had daydreamed of a thousand times seemed anticlimactic. He was itching for the Germans to strike,
his finger on the trigger of an IED, yet somehow he was not elated at the prospect of killing. Revenge didn’t taste as sweet as he had thought. Though he was intent on wiping out as many Germans as possible, he drew surprisingly little pleasure from the prospect.

As Stroop’s assault squad crept cautiously toward them, Simha’s commander, Hanoch Gutman, snatched the detonator from his hand and exploded the huge mine that had been buried under the enclave’s main gate. It was the biggest bomb yet made by the ZOB, and its concussive wave was so powerful that it pinned Ratheiser to a wall, knocking the air out of his lungs. By the time he regained his senses, his fellow fighters were pummeling the disoriented invaders.
Many of the
hundred German and Ukrainian soldiers in the assault party had been flung so high by the explosives that body parts and cobblestones had soared over upper-story balconies before falling back into the giant crater carved out of Embankment Street. At the center of this grisly shower of rubble and human entrails,
a geyser of water shot straight upward: a city water main had been ruptured by the blast.

The crater and the street soon flooded in a murky, impassable mess, forcing the invaders back and preventing their ambulances from collecting the dead and wounded. The assault had failed. Once again the Ghetto resounded with the sound of Jewish cheers and German moans. Once more a visibly rattled Stroop shook his head in disbelief. Simha also couldn’t believe his eyes when a few minutes later he saw a pair of SS officers waving white flags. The Nazis wanted a truce so they could evacuate their wounded and offer a final chance for civilians to flee the combat zone. This uncharacteristic concern stemmed from the fact that
most of the four thousand slave laborers hiding in cellars in the Brushmakers District belonged to the industrialist Walther Casper Tobbens. He planned on relocating many of them to his new factories near Lublin, and he desperately wanted to protect his assets. Stroop was under strict orders not to damage the goods.

Mark Edelman responded to the flag bearers in typically brusque fashion. “
Shoot them,” he ordered casually. Edelman famously suffered no fools. And the SS officers were obviously taking him for one if they thought he was going to negotiate. Despite his youth and lack of military experience, he had already earned a solid reputation for his hard and unflappable demeanor as area commander. He could nap between skirmishes, astounding everyone around him, and bark out orders with the ferocity of a drill sergeant within seconds of waking. With his mustache, red angora sweater (“taken from a very rich Jew”), twin ammunition belts crisscrossed over his chest, and two holstered pistols, he was the perfect picture of a revolutionary. “Use the machine gun,” he added, for enhanced effect. It was the ZOB’s only automatic weapon in the Brushmakers District, and Edelman wanted to make a lasting impression on the Nazi commander.

The fusillade sent the SS officers scurrying back to Stroop, who was seated at a folding table a few blocks away, poring over Ghetto maps and feigning calm. It took him several more hours, long after it
became obvious that no civilians were answering the evacuation call, to work up the nerve to attack again. The result was much the same. The Jewish defenders, now five fighting units strong because Edelman had redeployed all his resources to the point of attack, peppered the assault force with fragment grenades and drenched them in burning oil. “
Hans, look, a woman!” Simha overheard a shocked German say, as one ZOB member hurled a Molotov cocktail at a fallen SS man.
Four of the ten fighters in Simha’s group were women, and they were rapidly proving themselves to be some of the ZOB’s fiercest combatants. “
These females fired pistols from both hands,” Stroop later remarked with evident awe.

The general had had enough. This was turning into a miniature Stalingrad. He would not fall for the same “rat trap” that had decimated the 6th Army Group. The ruse, also known as the “hugging” strategy, had been shrewdly used by the Soviets to deprive the Germans of their vast technological, tactical, and training advantage by luring them deep into the city of Stalingrad and forcing them into house-to-house combat that favored dug-in defenders. Denying a superior adversary room to maneuver was the military equivalent of immobilizing a karate expert in a bear hug; as long as he was trapped in close quarters, all his moves, speed, and agility would be rendered useless. Only brute force and fierce determination would matter.

Stroop ordered his men back and the artillery forward. To hell with Tobbens and the other greedy Wehrmacht contractors; they were costing SS lives. He was going to flatten the entire Brushmakers District, regardless of collateral damage.