Isaac's Army (63 page)

Edelman spent his final days with the Sawicki family, dictating one last memoir:
And There Was Love in the Ghetto
. He died in 2009.

It was through Edelman that I found Boruch Spiegel, one of the least publicized veterans of the Jewish Fighting Organization. “I think he’s in Toronto,” Mark had said. Actually he was in Montreal, where he had moved with Chaika Belchatowska in the late 1940s, after a brief sojourn in Sweden. The two had married after the war, and Boruch had returned to his trade, managing a small leather goods factory until his retirement. Chaika was no longer alive when I first visited Boruch in the fall of 2007. By coincidence, his American son-in-law had been one of my professors at McGill University, though I had no idea we shared this connection. I did, however, immediately recognize the address of the assisted living facility where Spiegel was staying. It was two blocks from the medical center where my mother had established her practice after immigrating to Montreal, in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood that was one of the few places in Canada where a medical degree from the University of Warsaw meant something.
Her first patients were almost all Polish Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors, and I was startled to hear so much Polish and Yiddish in the elevators and lobby of the old age home where Boruch now lived. I probably met more Polish Jews in that one high-rise than in the three years I spent living in Warsaw, which struck me as terribly sad. In fact, it was from one of Boruch’s fellow residents that I first heard the term “sound good.” We were in the cafeteria having lunch and speaking Polish, when a woman at the next table, an Auschwitz survivor, volunteered the compliment. At the time I thought she was praising my linguistic skills. Only much later did I realize that she was referring to my non-Yiddish accent, and I was amazed by how deeply ingrained her survival instincts remained even after all these years.

Boruch had only recently moved into the facility, a converted apartment building across the street from a shopping mall, and he wasn’t happy about the move, or about having to cope with a full-time nurse. But like Edelman, his health was failing him. He got around with a walker and only with great difficulty, and he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, a condition from which I would see him deteriorating dramatically over an interval of a few short months. It was heartbreaking: Boruch, one of the kindest and gentlest men I ever met, could recall the slightest detail of events that had occurred seventy years earlier, but could not remember that we had talked the day before. His memory could be astonishingly vivid in one instant, and he could lapse into a prolonged silence the next, staring numbly at a framed photo of his granddaughter. (She looked just like Chaika, who was pictured in another framed photograph, shaking hands with Vice President Al Gore.)

At times I had to gently nudge Boruch when he drifted off, and I felt guilty for pushing him—for ghoulishly trying to extract every last bit of information before his mind went completely blank. My parting memory is of him dozing on a couch in the lobby of his building. He had fallen asleep during one of our talks, and I had waited for half an hour for him to wake up when his nurse intervened. “It is enough,” she said. “Mr. Spiegel needs to rest.”

The flame that Hitler had strived so maniacally to snuff out was slowly being extinguished by time. Joseph and Martha Osnos had passed
away in New York, and their son Robert was retiring after a long career as a psychiatrist when I first reached out to him in 2008. Janine and Hanna Mortkowicz had died of old age in Poland, and Joanna was now a grandmother, living in Krakow, where the family had remained after the destruction of Warsaw. She kept the Mortkowicz legacy alive as a well-regarded author and screenwriter, and her 2001 family history had won Poland’s equivalent of the National Book Award. She was finishing a biography of Janusz Korczak, the great children’s writer and martyr whose statue stands at the foot of one the many new skyscrapers now rising in the former Warsaw Ghetto, when we met at her old bookstore. Joanna had not seen her family’s former store since the war, and she was visibly astounded at its recent transformation into a high-end martini bar. “Everything is changing so quickly,” she said of the economic boom that is throwing up glass towers in once dreary Warsaw at an almost Chinese pace.

Already all physical evidence of the Ghetto had been erased—first by hideous Communist edifices and now by shiny condominiums and office blocks that are replacing the Stalinist architecture. In a few more years the living memory of the Holocaust will also be gone. The final witnesses will pass away, closing one of the darkest chapters of human history. But the inspirational light of people like Simha and Isaac, or Boruch and Mark, or Joanna and Zivia, will burn on forever. Their courage and nobility transcend time. My life is richer for having made their acquaintance, and they have provided me with an answer to the question I posed at the outset of this tale: What would I have done in their place?

Before embarking on this narrative journey, I imagined myself valiantly fighting the Nazis. I now know that that would not have been the case, because of something Mark Edelman said. To join the Resistance, one had to leave one’s family behind to face starvation, disease, and the roundups. It took less courage, in Mark’s opinion, to pick up a gun than to stay with one’s children and comfort them in the face of almost certain death. It was not a coincidence, he explained, that Resistance fighters were almost all young and unmarried. In fact, one of the bravest scenes Edelman witnessed during the war was the sight of a man entering the Umschlagplatz with his son on his shoulders. The boy was frightened and asking where they were going. “Not far,” the father reassured him. “Soon it will all be over.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have come into existence without the early support of Paul Golob and John Flicker, two of New York’s finest editors. They opened up their hearts and purse strings for the project and I owe them both a lasting debt of gratitude. My agents Scott Waxman and Farley Chase, ably assisted by Beth Phelan, tugged and loosened those literary purse strings—both in the United States and abroad—and I am always in their debt.

At Random House the brilliant Will Murphy and Katie Donelan acted as surrogate parents, birthing and shaping the manuscript, which at times behaved like a difficult child. Emily DeHuff, Anna Bauer, and Jennifer Rodriguez all raised the book’s standards through its unruly growth spurts, as did early readers Eric Rubin, Allen Feldman, and especially Alan Cooperman, whose trained eye rarely misses a beat.

In Warsaw, a few people made three long years pass more quickly: Jen and Michael Sessums, Esko Kilpinen, Marina Kotanska, and most of all Dagmara, Anya, and Zbigniew Roman, who give all Poles a good name. At home, Ari, Anna, and Lena heard more about Nazis
and death camps than any seven-year-olds ever should, and when they are older I will apologize to them. And as always, the last acknowledgment is reserved for Roberta, my combative chief editor, muse, inhouse censor, and designated adult. There is a lot of her in this book, and she reminds me of some of its characters.

NOTES

C
HAPTER
1: H
ANNA
’
S
T
RIUMPH

1
A comedy by the up-and-coming playwright Maria Pawlowska
Czeslaw Grzelaka, ed.,
Warszawa we Wrzesniu 1939 Roku: Obrona I Zycie Codzienne
(Warsaw Rytm, 2004), p. 480.

2
addressed clients as “Your Excellency”
Magdalena Dubrowska,
Gazeta Wyborcza
, April 26, 2008, p. 8.

3
billed by its architect, Marcin Weinfeld
Ewa Malkowska, “Stolica,”
Warszawski Magazyn Ilustrowany
, no. 4, April, 2008, p. 28.

4
Built by developers Karol Fritsche, Jacob Lowenberg, and Pinkus Loth
Maria Irena Kwiatkowska and Marek Kwiatkowski,
Historia Warzawy XVII–XX Wieku: Architectura I Rzezba
(Warsaw: Panstowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2006), pp. 106–11.

5
Outside the PKO State Savings Bank
Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz,
Warszawa W. Latach, 1939–1945
(Warsaw: Panstowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984), p. 24.

6
“We reported to the officer”
Isaac Zuckerman,
A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 3.

7
students at Public School Number 166 in upper Warka had raised 11.75 zlotys
Martha Osnos, unpublished journal, p. 1.

8
“Not everyone understood what war with the Germans meant”
Zuckerman,
Surplus of Memory
, p. 4.

9
“blind people discussing colors”
Martha Osnos, unpublished journal, p. 1.

10
though pointedly not Yiddish
Robert Osnos, author interview, New York City, September 2008.

11
equivalent to around $100,000
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier,
W. Ogrodzie Pamieci
(Krakow: Znak, 2001), p. 216.

12
should send her eight-year-old son, Robert, to join little Joanna at the Mortkowicz country house
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, author interview, November 2008.

13
“The entire Polish nation, blessed by God”
Kurjer Warszawski
, no. 741, September 1, 1939, p. 1.

C
HAPTER
2: S
IMHA
’
S
F
IRST
D
AY OF
S
CHOOL

1
far superior to models like Pfaff or Kempisty-Kasprzycki
Exhibition of Jewish crafts, attended by the author, Kazimierz, Krakow, August 2008.

2
Between them they could make five or six dozen pairs
Boruch Spiegel, author interview, Montreal, November 2007.

3
first cobbled in 1783
Kwiryna Handke,
Stolica: Warszawski Magazyn Ilustrowany
, p. 24.

4
two-thirds of Warsaw’s prewar physicians were Jewish, as were 37 percent of its lawyers
Marian Fuks,
Mowia Wieki: Magazin Historyczni
, April 2008, p. 14.

5
“we are strong, united and ready”
Stanislaw F. Ozimek,
Media Walczacej Warszawy
(Warsaw: Fundacja Walczacej Warszawy, 2007), p. 12.

6
tram line 17
Handke,
Stolica: Warszawski Magazyn Ilustrowany
, no. 4, April 2008, p. 24.

7
either sweet with “pure sugar” or bitter and “doubly saturated”
Jerzy Kasprzycki,
Korzenie Miasta
, vol. II (Warsaw: Veda, 2004), p. 158.

8
“Speculators who had money would walk in the courtyards”
Harold Werner,
Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 3.

9
“My father was an observant Jew”
Simha Ratheiser-Rotem, author interview, Jerusalem, March 2009.

10
“was never overly political”
Ibid.

11
where 40 percent of the residents were Jewish
Michal Pilich,
Warszawa Praga
(Warsaw: Center of Europe Foundation, 2006), p. 67.

12
3,870 workers streamed out of the Lilpop, Rau & Lowenstein plant
Marcin Jablonowski,
Polski Przemysl Wojenny z Perspektywy 1938
(Koszalin: PMTW, 1988), p. 48.

13
the three hundred workers of Samuel and Sender Ginsburg’s BRAGE Rubber Works
Pilich,
Warszawa Praga
, p. 97.

14
“Today a total of 16 enemy airplanes were destroyed”
Grzelaka,
Warszawa we Wrzesniu 1939 Roku
, p. 377.

15
“My parents only associated with other assimilated Jews”
Robert Osnos, author interview, New York City, September 2008.
TO COMPLETE VICTORY
Czas-7 Wiezcor
, September 1, 1939, no. 242, p. 1.

C
HAPTER
3: W
OLSKA
S
TREET
I
S
C
OVERED WITH
B
LOOD

1
“the firm resolve of returning once the war has been won”
Ozimek,
Media Walczacej Warszawy
, p. 22.

2
“Warsaw was going to surrender”
Boruch Spiegel, author interview, Montreal, November 2007.

3
the Bund “was about Jewish pride and dignity”
Ibid.

4
“the injustices and hatred of the Polish state against the Jews”
Zuckerman,
Surplus of Memory
, p. 5.

5
made Poland the world’s eighth-largest producer of steel in 1939
Andrew Hempel,
Poland in World War II: An Illustrated Military History
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 2005), p. 6.