Isaac's Army (58 page)

The scavenging sappers often prowled the basement, looking for keepsakes. “I remember one dramatic moment when Max and Willie came up to the cupboard, both holding flashlights. We saw the light through the cracks; it wandered from face to face, and though the two men could not see us, we felt as though they were probing our hideout. Then we heard them touching the cupboard, and we braced ourselves for the long-expected moment, but all we heard was Willie saying to Max ‘There’s some grain here.’ We realized they had found a sack in the heap of rags lying around the cabinet. They took the grain and went away.”

Meanwhile the detonations around them grew louder, closer, and more intense. Soon the sappers would be finished with their work, and they would then blow up the house in which they had set up their temporary headquarters. Isaac was growing frantic with despair. By his forty-second day in the hellish tomb, he could no longer sleep. “
That night was a night of horrors. I had nightmares and then woke up to discover that it wasn’t a dream at all: I dreamed that the Germans had burst in on us. We heard the banging of hammers on the wall I was lying next to. We prepared our weapons, our grenades, so that we wouldn’t be taken alive,” he recalled. Then everything went quiet. The sappers had gone on a break. “Suddenly we heard a knock at the door, and shouts of ‘Celina, Celina.’ ”

Celina was Zivia’s code name. It was the rescue party. Tuvia’s girlfriend
had managed to reach Home Army operatives at a hospital in one of the satellite camps that handled the overflow from Pruszkow. She told the doctors there that some Home Army officers were trapped in Jolie Bord. “
She had to be careful since she didn’t know whom she was telling it to,” Zuckerman recalled. “But it turned out that the director of the hospital was one of the Righteous Gentiles. He and his comrades formed a delegation of six volunteers who had [fake] Red Cross passes.”

The “Red Cross” delegation arrived at the perfect moment, just as the soldiers had gone to eat at a nearby mobile cantina. The rescue party was led by a young Jewish doctor, Ala Margolis, who was familiar to Edelman because she had previously worked with the Bund. Margolis stayed on the Aryan side during the Ghetto period, posing as a Gentile. She brought stretchers and white smocks with her now to give credence to the Red Cross cover story, and she ordered that Edelman and another ZOB fighter with pronounced Semitic features have their faces wrapped in gauze. These two were placed on the gurneys, while Isaac and some of the others played the role of orderlies and carried them.

“
Passing Germans looked at us with curiosity,” Tuvia recalled. “We were the only civilians around. Occasionally a German soldier would ask, pointing at the stretcher, ‘Is he dead yet?’ ” Anna, a pretty blond nurse who spoke fluent German, flirted with the guards at each checkpoint,
warning
“Achtung, Fleckfieber,”
which meant “Watch out, typhus,” which produced the intended result: The party was waved on without inspection. She even persuaded one group of friendly patrolmen to supply her with a horse-drawn wagon so the orderlies would not have to carry their heavy loads all the way to the hospital. The wagon was driven by an old Wehrmacht veteran with an eye patch. When Anna asked where he had been wounded, the old veteran cursed that it had been during the Ghetto Uprising. “
Despicable Yids,” he growled. Anna shook her head sympathetically, while in the back of the wagon Isaac had to nudge Tuvia to keep him from bursting into laughter.

CHAPTER 41

MARK AND THE MOHICANS

On the night of January 16, 1945, as temperatures plunged far below freezing, the western outskirts of Warsaw groaned with the rumble of thousands of engines. Looking out the frosted window of their new hideout, a rented brick tenement in the exurban town of Grodzik, the startled members of the ZOB witnessed column after column of vehicles exiting the Polish capital. Tanks, trucks, half-tracks, Mercedes and BMWs, motorcycles, and horse-drawn wagons—all manner of conveyances clogged the roads heading toward the Reich. Mark, Isaac, and Zivia looked at one another, stunned. The Germans were pulling out.

Early the next morning, when the familiar charcoal gray of the Wehrmacht was replaced by olive-green Buicks and Fords bearing large
MADE IN THE USA
labels, there was momentary confusion. Only the crudely welded T-34 tanks, with their distinctively rounded turrets and ingeniously sloping deflective armor, were unmistakably Soviet. The Red Army, riding a fleet of Lend-Lease American vehicles, had rolled into Warsaw.

The jubilation was immediate. Lubetkin, Zuckerman, and Edelman
threw on their threadbare boots and rushed out into Grodzik’s market square to greet the liberators. Thousands of others had already done the same, tears freezing on their sunken cheeks as they jumped and shrieked and waved at the bewildered soldiers. It was less the sight of the fur-clad Russians that filled them with glee than the sudden exhilaration of being safe at last from imminent death. All at once the specter of the SS, of torture chambers and killing squads, of concentration camps and random cruelty, had been lifted. The sudden rush of freedom was overwhelming. Many broke down and sobbed with joy.

Mark Edelman was not among them. Scanning the exuberant revelers who were hugging, kissing, singing, and passing bottles of vodka around, he was suddenly overcome by sorrow. Of the thousands of flushed faces in the ecstatic crowd, he recognized none as Jewish. This square had been inhabited almost exclusively by Jews before the war. Now only the broad blond visages of elated Slavs stared back at him, chanting the Polish national anthem—“And Poland Has Not Yet Perished.”

Mark had never felt as alone as he did at that moment, surrounded by thousands of cheering people. The enormity of what had been lost suddenly hit him. Now that he was no longer consumed with concern for his immediate survival, he realized for the first time that nothing would ever be the same. Grodzik’s town center would never again reverberate with Yiddish. Its Market Square would never again scramble to shut down before the Sabbath. In Warsaw, Cordials Street was gone. So were the Jewish cabarets, the bagel bakeries, the synagogues, Gold’s Pharmacy, the jazz bars, Haberdasher’s Row, the row of shoe stores on Frog Street.

The list of missing landmarks was endless and heartbreaking. Half a millennium of Polish-Jewish culture had been wiped out and nothing could bring back the millions of dead. In Poland, Jews now had only a past. The future had been erased. “
It was the saddest day of my life,” Edelman would later say of January 17, 1945. After the liberation festivities, he crawled into bed, refused to eat, and did not reemerge for weeks.

Post-traumatic stress disorder can affect individuals in vastly different ways. Stoic Zivia, usually so self-possessed that many thought her cold, wept uncontrollably. Boruch Spiegel lost his memory. Seventy years later, he drew a blank when asked about the period preceding the Soviet entry into Warsaw and his first weeks of freedom from Nazi persecution. Tuvia Borzykowski lost the ability to feel free. He developed a claustrophobic fear of small rooms, and for months he could not enter one without feeling that he was trapped. As for Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak, she lost the most precious commodity a child can possess: the ability to laugh, smile, and feel joy.

Simha Ratheiser was not even aware that he suffered from the stress. Only years later did he learn that every night, after he fell asleep, he cried, screamed, and thrashed in bed as though he were being tortured. In the mornings he awoke refreshed, unaware of the nightmares. Like countless other Varsovians, Ratheiser had returned to the capital as soon as the Soviets swept in. “
I finally realized that it was over,” he recalled of walking through the endless ocean of ruins, trying to find his bearings. Nearly 90 percent of the city had been destroyed by the time the Germans pulled out, leaving Simha with an overwhelming sense of emptiness.

“I had been too busy doing a million things before to think about anything,” he recalled. Now he and Irene understood clearly that they were looking “at a different world” from the one they had grown up in. Ratheiser, however, had still not grasped the full magnitude of the seismic political shift that Poland was undergoing. Encountering a Soviet patrol, Simha mouthed off to the rude Russian soldiers. “
Are you crazy?” Irene grabbed him by the arm. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“I was naïve,” Simha later acknowledged. “I thought the Soviets were our friends.”

It did not take long for most Poles to comprehend that they had simply traded one occupier for another, and that the Red Army was not just passing through Poland on its way to Berlin. Within a few short weeks, the country’s fate had effectively been sealed at Yalta in Crimea, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill gathered in February 1945 to decide Europe’s postwar reorganization. That the meeting was held in Stalin’s backyard, at his summer palace on the shores of
the Black Sea, was a testament to the Soviet dictator’s extraordinary negotiating position. He had forced the ailing and visibly frail American president to make the taxing Atlantic crossing and then fly over dangerous German-controlled airspace to come to him. Roosevelt had done so, in the words of one U.S. negotiator, because it had been his long-standing policy to accommodate the Soviets: “
Give them everything they want, for after all, they are killing Germans, they are fighting our battles for us.”

Statistics proved the statement true.
Soviet losses were sixty-five times greater than America’s in World War II, and eight out of ten Germans who died in the war had fallen on the Eastern Front. Three-quarters of Hitler’s forces were engaged against the Red Army, leaving the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, the Free French, Polish, Czech, and other Allied formations to face what were often second-rate or reserve Wehrmacht divisions. The battles raging in the Western European theater were undeniably important, but the war had been fought primarily in the Soviet Union—in the slaughterhouses of Ukraine and Belarus and on the ravaged Russian steppe.
More than twenty million Soviet citizens had died fending off Hitler. And now that Stalin’s T-34 tanks were within forty miles of Berlin, he was demanding a geopolitical return on his bloody investment. Although he wanted all of Eastern Europe, Poland represented the jewel in the wrested crown, the largest and most populous of the sought-after acquisitions.

It was also the biggest thorn in Soviet-U.S. relations. The “Polish question,” as the fate of a free and democratic Poland was referred to in the flurry of diplomatic communications between Washington, London, and Moscow, had been the main sticking point in preparations for the Big Three talks at Yalta. In the run-up to the conference, Churchill had been vehemently opposed to acquiescing to Stalin’s land grab, as had U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman, who bombarded Roosevelt with increasingly desperate pleas to stem “
the barbarian invasion.”

Once in Yalta, the recalcitrant Churchill was largely shunned, treated as a third wheel in the negotiations. Stalin monopolized nearly all of Roosevelt’s time, and the British prime minister barely had a moment alone with the exhausted American president. Harriman,
who had forged a close personal bond with Churchill from his time in London as Roosevelt’s point man on the Lend-Lease program, also found himself sidelined in Yalta. “
Harriman was never included in the private talks on Poland,” his biographer bitterly noted, “although he undoubtedly realized better than any other American present how seriously Poland threatened all of Roosevelt’s postwar dreams.”

Roosevelt would subsequently come under criticism from some historians for sacrificing Eastern Europe to keep Stalin happy and to secure his pledge to enter the war against Japan. In fairness, the FDR who posed feebly next to a beaming Stalin on the shores of the Black Sea was not the same leader who twelve years earlier had rallied Americans from the depths of the Great Depression. “
He is a very sick man,” Churchill’s physician commented during the Yalta Conference. “He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries in the brain in an advanced stage, so that I give him only a few months to live.” The diagnosis proved prophetic. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage exactly two months later.
On April 5, 1945, one week before the U.S. president passed away, the United States formally withdrew the accreditation of Poland’s London government in exile and recognized the new Provisional Government of National Unity, the puppet pro-Communist regime installed in the eastern town of Lublin by the NKVD. In London a sorrowful Churchill informed shocked Polish officials that “
his heart bled for them, but the brutal facts could not be overlooked.” The Polish question had been relegated, he sighed, to “little more than a grievance and a vast echoing cry of pain.”