Isaac's Army (6 page)

The German pilots didn’t distinguish between Jew and Gentile, adult and child, civilian and combatant. “They flew so low you could sometimes see their smiling faces,” said Boruch.

That the Luftwaffe, by September 8, had near total control over Poland’s skies was partly a result of Marshal Smigly-Rydz’s order to withdraw all squadrons to the rear, behind the Bug River, where he was raising what some skeptics were already calling a “phantom army.” Fighter pilots had been particularly furious at the relocation order and had argued against abandoning the capital, which they had defended with remarkable success up until then. Though their rickety P-11s
flew at only half the speed of the far more advanced Messerschmitts and Junkers, carried only one-quarter of their armaments, and could climb only half as high,
the Warsaw Fighter Brigade had knocked out 72 German craft while losing 38 of their own planes in the first week of the war.

All told, the Luftwaffe had lost six hundred planes that week, a quarter of all its squadrons, and now that it no longer had the pesky
P-11s to contend with, it seemed intent on exacting retribution by strafing civilians.

Country roads provided little cover for the Spiegels, Joseph Osnos, Isaac Zuckerman, and the tens of thousands of other refugees. Even forests offered little refuge from the vengeful German airmen, as Zuckerman discovered on the night of September 9, when he and his followers camped next to a Polish military unit.
“They began bombing the woods. Trees fell right before my eyes,” he recalled. “It went on for hours, and it was extraordinary luck that we weren’t hit. The Polish army group was hit.”

Zuckerman’s Zionists suffered their first casualty the following day—from friendly fire. The youths he was leading were German refugees. They belonged to the Berlin chapter of Zuckerman’s Young Pioneers, and their parents had arranged for them to go to Poland to escape Nazi persecution. Since they spoke only German and Yiddish, Isaac ordered to them to keep their mouths shut and stay close to him. “
I didn’t know whether to walk at the head of the line or bring up the rear,” he recalled of shepherding the group. “These were youngsters and you had to watch them.”

One of the lads wandered off and was stopped by a Polish military patrol. Because he could only respond in German, and because it was widely known that Germany had agents on the ground equipped with radios to call in the location of military targets for air strikes, a soldier mistook him for a spy and shot him on the spot.

While Isaac and Boruch dodged German planes, an astonishing development fifty miles to the west was styming Hitler’s plan for the rapid conquest of Poland. After a week of virtually unimpeded progress, the vaunted Wehrmacht had run into a solid wall of unexpected resistance in Warsaw. “
No one gave any thought to serious fighting,” General Eric Hoepner, commander of the 16th Panzer Corps, later recalled of the assault on the Polish capital. “Many [tank crews] already envisioned themselves in the best hotel rooms, lords of the city.”

But Warsaw mayor Stephen Starzinski apparently had not understood that his beloved town was supposed to surrender without a fight. The youthful former banker (who, unlike his Sanation superiors,
had never engaged in baiting Jews or any other form of populist politics) could not stomach the notion of capitulation. During the desperate days when Poland seemed devoid of national leaders and the tough-talking ultranationalists had fallen uncharacteristically silent, he almost single-handedly rallied the city.

Surprised, the Germans regrouped and tried a second assault, with an even greater force of 250 Panzer tanks. And once more they were compelled to retreat—with only 194 Panzers left intact. Their armored behemoths, after advancing hundreds of miles with little or no opposition, had suddenly encountered an inhospitable landscape. The urban setting offered little room to maneuver, with claustrophobic lanes and blind alleys, potential traps around every street corner, and countless vantage points for adversaries to hide. Here the line drawn by Starzinski and
82,000 civilian and military defenders simply would not budge.

On September 10, 1939, the German High Command changed tactics. They were going to bomb the city into submission. Adolf Hitler could not afford to wait.

He had counted on a quick victory to forestall fighting with Britain and especially France, which had
nearly one hundred battle-ready divisions sitting behind the Maginot Line. The Führer had only twenty-five divisions on his western frontier, and they were third-rate reserves, since his best troops were busy pounding Poland. He was thus exposed and vulnerable. If the French attacked, they could easily overwhelm his temporarily weakened western flank. But if German troops could take the Polish capital before Paris committed its hundred divisions to the conflict, Hitler thought there might still be a chance to avoid all-out war.

On Sunday, September 10, three divisions of heavy Junker bombers, totaling several hundred aircraft, flew seventeen sorties over the city, unleashing “
a rain of bombs.” Joseph Osnos’s small plant, Karolyt, was hit, though without loss of life or significant damage to the assembly line. His notary, however, was not so fortunate. The rush to sign all those documents before Joseph left had seemed “
so urgent and important.” Now Martha’s power of attorney had gone up in flames, along with the notary, his office, and all his papers.

Her cousin’s famous bookstore next door to the Landed Gentry
Café had fared only marginally better. Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak’s then five-year-old daughter, Joanna,
saw piles of books shaken from the shelves by the concussions from the blasts. “Paintings and beautiful color prints had been ripped from the walls and lay strewn on the floor, their frames shattered, their canvases tattered, dirty, and covered with ash, dust, and glass.”

The youngest heir to Poland’s greatest prewar publishing dynasty, Joanna was still too immature to grasp what was happening to Warsaw. “
This new reality offered certain attractions, a world of wonder. There was no longer any glass in the front display windows and I could jump straight through into the street, which was so unexpected. So were the military horses that now whinnied in what used to be the Landed Gentry’s outdoor terrace.”

Like Joanna, eight-year-old Robert Osnos also marveled at the new landscape of rubble and twenty-foot-deep craters, at the smoke and sirens. “
I don’t recall once being scared, not of the bombs or the burning buildings,” he would say. “Maybe I was repressing my fear. I do remember very clearly, however, playing paper airplanes. Making them and having dog fights with my cousin [Joanna].”

Simha Ratheiser was not only old enough to understand the gravity of the situation, but could see that the Sanation regime had made a serious strategic error in withdrawing air support from the besieged capital. Ratheiser no longer confused Polish and German planes. He could by now tell Junkers and Heinkls and Dorniers apart. “
The planes swooped so low over the Royal Gardens that soldiers next to me were shooting at the cockpits with their rifles.”

The Royal Gardens Park was uncomfortably close to Simha’s home in the southern suburbs of Warsaw. Their house, with its garden and barn and his father’s store, was also a mile or so from a Polish military base and residential compound for ranking officers, which was being targeted by the Luftwaffe. So Simha’s father, Zvi, decided to move the family to the center of the city to stay with friends in the Jewish Quarter. Simha didn’t initially agree, reasoning that the more wide-open suburban spaces offered better protection than the congested heart of the city. But thousands of Varsovians relocated every day, depending on which part of the city was being bombarded. After a few close calls in her predominantly Gentile neighborhood, even
Martha Osnos moved to the Jewish Quarter,
to her brother-in-law’s spacious apartment on Hard Street. It was empty, since Zano Osnos was with the medical corps in the east, and it had the additional recommendation of being on the ground floor, which was judged safest, in one of the more upscale parts of the Jewish district that had not yet been hit.

Unfortunately for the Ratheisers and for Martha and Robert Osnos, by September 17 the Wehrmacht had reached Wawelberg Street, a road in neighboring Wola named after the Jewish philanthropist and banker Hipolit Wawelberg, who had built hundreds of units of affordable housing in the working-class district. From its new vantage point, the Wehrmacht launched a devastating artillery barrage. That day,
five thousand shells fell on the Jewish Quarter and Midtown.

Many of the city’s greatest landmarks vanished in a fiery instant. The majestic dome of St. John’s Cathedral crumpled in a heap of medieval red brick. The Parliament disappeared in a choking pile of white plaster dust. The Opera burned so hot that its massive steel doors melted. The Philharmonic Building—erected in 1909 thanks to the then
astounding donation of $15 million by another Jewish philanthropist, Leopold Kronenberg, the Polish Rockefeller—lay in ruins, its columns of imported marble pulverized.

On Hard Street, Martha Osnos saw only “
an ocean of flames.” Next to her brother-in-law’s intact apartment building, “several furniture stores were burning, with tables, beds, mattresses spread on the pavement.” There were grisly body parts in the rubble, and structures collapsing while residents frantically scrambled to douse the flames. “
Young Poles and Jews performed miracles of heroism. I saw how the young Jews of the block at 13 Forestry Street kept on fighting the fires that broke out endlessly. There was no water. The fire was smothered with sand and put out with water collected from the toilets of individual flats. These young people were competing with German pilots, who were dropping incendiary bombs from a height of tens of meters. When the pilots saw the tenants trying to put out the fires, they machine-gunned them.”

By the close of the second week of the war, Isaac Zuckerman reached the Polish town of Kovel, in present-day western Ukraine. The Spiegel brothers, by coincidence, were also there, along with thousands of other refugees and military personnel milling around Kovel’s main market square, impatiently waiting for Marshal Smigly-Rydz to launch his great counteroffensive.

“
There were no weapons, no uniforms, no trucks, nothing,” Boruch Spiegel recalled of the general disappointment that greeted would-be volunteers. Amid the disorganization, and the glaring lack of orders or fighting infrastructure, it was becoming increasingly obvious to all that there would be no westward march to repulse the invaders. Joseph Osnos had come to this realization earlier than most others. Poland, he decided, was “kaput.” He avoided Kovel and other rendezvous points where Polish officers might try to commandeer his sports car, and instead headed straight for the Romanian border in the hope of escaping the country before it was too late.

Kovel, meanwhile, like countless other eastern Polish hamlets, sagged under the burden of so many new arrivals.
The town had had a prewar population of 33,000 and was half Jewish. It had swollen remarkably over the past few days, more than doubling in size with the influx of so many refugees. The lack of accommodations was such that Boruch Spiegel slept in the lobby of a Jewish-owned bank on Legionnaire Street. Zuckerman was luckier. He secured a cot in the apartment of a local Zionist. Hundreds of others camped in a tent city pitched beneath the onion domes of several Ukrainian Orthodox churches or slept on long benches inside the town’s big rococo railway station.

The station and the spur linking Kovel to Warsaw had been built in the late nineteenth century by the Jewish industrialist Jan Bloch,
Poland’s “railroad king.” The construction of the line had transformed the sleepy shtetl into a transportation hub and a center of light manufacturing, brewing, and leather processing by the beginning of the twentieth century. That same rail and road network made it a major transit point for tens of thousands of refugees in 1939.

Only now, Kovel seemed more a terminus than a way station. To Boruch Spiegel, it was obvious that “
no one knew what to do, or where to go. There was a lot of confusion and meetings and different opinions.”
Once people realized that the Polish Army had no real plan, they began thinking of their own welfare. In various corners of the town, Bundists and Zionists huddled in separate circles and weighed their options. The two groups had no contact, however, and made no effort to coordinate. The war had not changed the fundamental fact that the two movements were still essentially at cross-purposes, much as they had been in peacetime. Zionists, now more than ever, were focused on finding ways out of Poland and into Palestine. Zuckerman planned to head north on horseback—since he could ride well and had somehow procured a stallion—through Lithuania. Many of his colleagues had already been dispatched to the south to look for an escape route through Romania.

For Bundists like the Spiegel brothers, however, escape was not an option. The Bund was committed to Poland and therefore duty bound to assist the Sanation regime in any way possible. That Marshal Smigly-Rydz’s largely anti-Semitic staff did not want their help, nor seemed to be in any position to help itself, only made the Bundist dilemma greater.