Isaac's Army (9 page)

Edelman had not gotten very far east during the evacuation, and he was one of the first to make his way back home. He was shocked at how his adopted city had changed. “
It was terrible,” he said, describing the once prosperous Jerusalem Boulevard, a street that only weeks earlier had teemed with French fashion boutiques and Martini umbrellas shading diners at expensive restaurants. “Now it was full of soup kitchens with long lines, and people on the sidewalk selling anything they could—pots, pans, bed sheets, household appliances—anything to raise a few [pennies] so they could eat.”

Nazi newsreel crews filmed the crowds waiting for free soup and bread. The handouts had been supplied by
the Hilfzug Bayern “help trains” that arrived as part of the capitulation agreement to alleviate food and medical shortages. And though the trains supplied only a small fraction of the capital’s needs, footage of the Wehrmacht dispensing aid to Poles made good propaganda. Many of the shots, alas,
were marred by the grim faces of the recipients of German largesse, and frustrated camera operators had to resort to snatching back the bread to elicit forced smiles.

But for Edelman, it was a sight in the Jewish Quarter, where, outside the benevolent spotlight, drunken soldiers accosted pedestrians demanding
“Sind Sie ein Jid?”
(Are you a kike?), that left the most lasting impression. “
I saw a crowd on Iron Street. People were swarming
around this barrel—a simple wooden barrel with a Jew on top of it. He was old and short and he had a long beard,” Edelman recalled of the scene, one of the seminal moments in his life. “Next to him were two German officers. Two beautiful, tall men next to this small bowed Jew. And those Germans, tuft by tuft, were chopping this Jew’s long beard with huge tailor’s shears, splitting their sides with laughter all the while.”

The surrounding crowd was also laughing, despite the fact that many of them were also Jews. “Objectively, it was really funny: a little man on wooden a barrel with his beard growing shorter by the moment. Just like a movie gag,” Edelman explained. “After all, nothing really horrible was happening to that Jew. Only that it was now possible to put him on a barrel with impunity.”

For Mark Edelman—up until then a feckless youth, a grown child without purpose or direction—the scene was transformational. “At that moment, I realized that the most important thing on earth was going to be never letting myself get pushed onto the top of that barrel. Never, by anybody.”

The humiliation that Edelman witnessed in the fall of 1939 was repeated throughout Warsaw as the Germans set about dividing the conquered in addition to robbing them blind.

Jews and Gentiles had closed ranks to a remarkable degree during the siege. The rapprochement that began during the buildup to the war, and that Isaac Zuckerman had witnessed while digging ditches, only strengthened once the shelling started. The two communities fought side by side, manned barricades together, and shared bomb shelters. Jewish women fed Gentile soldiers and helped tend their wounds while Christian housewives carried water to parched Jewish combatants in the trenches. Martha Osnos fondly recalled the initial shock of a Gentile co-worker, a fellow chemist, whom she brought home during a bombardment that happened to fall on Yom Kippur. “
She had never even spoken to a Jewish person before she met me,” Osnos said of the woman, who for the first time in her life was exposed to Judaic rituals. “The wailing of the tallis-clad men was for her as frightening as the constant bombing.” Despite the cultural chasm,
powerful bonds formed during the siege. Religious and linguistic differences were largely overridden by shared life-and-death experiences, by the personal connections forged in trenches and air raid shelters.

Not surprisingly, the newfound unity and uncharacteristically cordial state of affairs did not sit well with the Nazis. Almost immediately, the Third Reich’s propaganda machine set out to stoke the mutual suspicions that were more typical of relations between the Catholic majority and the large Jewish minority in the Polish capital. Nazi newsreels and newspapers like the
New Warsaw Courier
, which began publication under German editorial control in the second week of October, began disseminating stories about Jews collaborating in the Gestapo’s hunt for hidden weapons. Varsovians woke to frontpage photographs
(staged, as it turned out, by Arthur Grimm of the Waffen-SS Propaganda Company) showing individuals with distinctly Semitic features pulling heavy-caliber machine guns from unearthed coffins while others pointed to the hidden location of ammunition stores.

Though such shots were blatantly phony, they found a receptive audience among certain segments of Polish society, as did similarly ludicrous newsreels of German police officers saving Poles from mobs of violent Talmudic students, or of Jews greeting Soviet troops with flowers, cheering as Polish soldiers were led away to Siberian camps.

“
German propaganda agencies worked ceaselessly,” Mark Edelman recalled. “
We also started hearing about how Jews were turning in Poles [to the NKVD Russian secret police in the Soviet Occupation zone],” he added. “But we now know that German propaganda was behind many of these tales.”

What was remarkable was how little effort the Nazis needed to expend to erode the goodwill that had built up between Jews and Gentiles during the siege. Driving a wedge between the two proved far easier than many Poles would later care to admit.

Like a great many Poles, Edelman took his first step toward conspiracy during this period of propagandizing and looting, under the cover of the ghostly darkness that still permeated the Polish capital at night in December 1939.

Electricity, gas, and water supplies had not yet been fully restored
to large swaths of the battered city. Every evening after the 9
P.M
. police curfew, Warsaw plunged into a dark and barren wasteland patrolled by German gendarmes who enforced the mandated blackout by shooting at any window emitting light. Most windows were boarded up with plywood because there was no replacement glass for the hundreds of thousands of panes that had been shattered during the siege; Warsaw was quite possibly the darkest metropolis on the planet.

That suited Edelman just fine, for almost every night he crept out to his old school on Carmelite Street, in the heart of the badly damaged Jewish Quarter, where a hand-cranked mimeograph machine was hidden in the basement. There, the Bund printed pamphlets and newsletters in defiance of the German media monopoly.

The underground press was the first manifestation of organized resistance in occupied Poland. Virtually every prewar group, ranging from the Boy Scouts to major political parties, set up small printing operations designed to counter German propaganda, disseminate accurate information, and boost morale.

Edelman had eagerly signed up to help print the Bund’s clandestine pamphlet largely for that reason. He and his Bundist friends needed to do something, anything, “
to overcome our own terrifying apathy. To force ourselves to the smallest spark of activity, to fight against our own acceptance of the generally prevailing feeling of panic.”

This sensation was unnatural to Edelman, who unlike the humble and self-effacing Boruch Spiegel did not usually suffer from self-doubt. Edelman, before the war, might well have been an underachiever—“
lazy” in his own words. His sloth, however, had been of his own choosing. Now, under the Nazis, no Jew was master of his own destiny, thanks to the stream of ever more restrictive anti-Semitic edicts issued by the
General Gouvernment
—the new colonial administrative body that had been given the mandate to rule central Poland. It was led by Hans Frank, Hitler’s longtime legal adviser and personal attorney. From his headquarters atop a massive medieval castle in Krakow, Frank already issued a torrent of decrees freezing all Jewish bank accounts, barring Jews from many industries and trades, and subjecting them to daily humiliations and onerous forced labor requirements.

So for the free-spirited eighteen-year-old orphan, participation in
the underground press was as much about exercising control over at least one aspect of his life as it was about lifting the sinking spirits of his fellow Bundists. “Considerable effort went into the publication of these papers,” Edelman recalled. Printing supplies were not easy to come by. Paper and ink had to be acquired on the burgeoning black market and discreetly delivered to the school, which like all other educational facilities in Warsaw had been closed by the Nazis.

The printing was done with a cumbersome hand crank by the harsh light of homemade carbide lamps, which were used because of the kerosene shortage.
They consisted of two small metal pots mounted over each other. Lumps of calcium carbide were placed in the lower container, while water dripped through a pinhole in the upper chamber. When the drops came into contact with the carbide, they released acetylene gas, which fueled a flame. “
Working by carbide light proved extremely strenuous,” Edelman remembered. By 2
A.M
. everyone’s eyes burned, but the printing went on until seven in the morning, when the exhausted printing crews had to go to their day jobs. “We averaged two or three sleepless nights a week,” he recalled.

The riskiest aspect of the process also started in the morning, when the five hundred copies Edelman had printed overnight were sent out for distribution. To lessen the potential for capture, a system of “fivers and tenners” was instituted, whereby activities were divided among different groups—cells—comprised of no more than five or ten individuals. Mark Edelman’s nocturnal printing operation was one such fiver. It received its materials—the essays, articles, and proclamations—from another fiver, and then handed off the finished copies to the leader of a tenner, who distributed them to ten others, stratifying the process in such a way that if someone was caught with an illegal pamphlet, the entire chain was not at risk.

The only publication officially permitted in Warsaw was the
New Courier
, which featured Nazi notices and poorly translated articles whose German authors all worked for Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry. All other forms of mass communication were banned, and their disseminators subject to arrest, interrogation, and execution. The prohibition included ownership of radios, which Varsovians had been ordered to relinquish on pain of death lest they listen to the BBC’s new Polish language service, or Radio Paris, where the Polish
government in exile under a new leader, General Wladislaw Sikorski, a career soldier and centrist, broadcast daily. Eighty-seven thousand of the estimated 125,000 transistor radios in the Polish capital were confiscated by late 1939, and the Germans were conducting sweeps to search for the remainder.

The
Courier
itself was an unexpected publishing success.
It had a daily circulation of two hundred thousand copies and was almost always sold out at newsstands. Varsovians read it mostly for its obituaries, to learn the names, for instance, of the
ten people sentenced to death for tearing down a German flag, or of the eighty shot for tampering with a telecommunications cable. The paper was also scoured for formal announcements like the arrest of Mayor Stephen Starzinski, the hero of the siege of Warsaw, who was sent to Dachau, where he would be executed for daring to defy Hitler.

It was in the pages of the
Courier
that Edelman and the rest of the Jewish community were informed that as of December 1, 1939, “
All Jews and Jewesses within the General Government who are over ten years of age are required to wear on the right sleeve of their inner and outer garment a white band at least 10cm. wide, with the Star of David on it. Jews and Jewesses must procure these armbands themselves, and provide them with the required distinguishing mark. Violations will be punished by imprisonment.”

CHAPTER 8

JOANNA’S RHYME

Publisher Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak read the December 1939 armband decree with anxiety. The new regulation condemned her mother and her cousin Martha Osnos to wear the identifying mark. But as a convert to Christianity, as a Protestant, did the edict apply to her? And what of her daughter? As a five-year-old, Joanna was exempted by virtue of age. But on racial grounds, was she Semitic? Her father, Hanna’s ex-husband, was a Gentile. Hanna’s conversion had also predated Joanna’s birth. Was this sufficient to spare the child a Jewish classification?

Such anguished questions were posed in thousands of homes throughout the Polish capital by those who had switched faith, or intermarried, or were themselves the products of mixed marriages. The list included descendants of the biggest Polish banking and industrial dynasties, the country’s Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Mellons; the Baumans, the Bersons, the Blochs, the Epsteins, Kohns, Wawelbergs, Rotwands, Nathansons, and Kronenbergs, who were among the many nineteenth-century oligarchs who adopted Christianity to circumvent tsarist restrictions. Would they, too, be affected? How far back would
the Nazis search for Jewish genealogy? And what of mixed marriages? Would these spare spouses? Or would there be a rash of divorces and nullifications in the coming months, as there had been in Germany in the mid-1930s?