Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  But each time he and a fellow Zionist presented themselves to the authorities, the answer was the same. “We reported to the officer, a pleasant young man,” Isaac later wrote, describing their second attempt to enlist, “who told us he wished he knew what to do with his own soldiers, let alone civilians.”

  That Poland’s armed forces were in such disarray astonished Zuckerman. The Polish government, the Fascist-leaning Sanation regime, which had seized power in a quasi-coup, supposedly to cleanse the republic in a sanitary sweep, was essentially a dictatorship run by generals. Diplomatic tensions with Berlin had boiled throughout the spring and summer, with threats and counterthreats leaving little doubt that conflict was imminent. In July, state radio had begun issuing instructions on how to black out windows and use gas masks. Patriotic fund drives had been launched, urging citizens to donate to rearming the nation. Even the anti-Semitic vitriol of the right-wing press had been suspended during the campaign, which stressed unity and a newfound tolerance toward minorities. Newspapers praised Jewish entrepreneurs for their generous contributions toward the purchase of tanks and artillery pieces, and the entire country feted the “wonderful news” that students at Public School Number 166 in upper Warka had raised 11.75 zlotys, or roughly $2.00, for ammunition. The war did not come as a surprise to anyone, it seemed, other than Poland’s authoritarian military leaders.

  Enlistment aside, Isaac faced an even more pressing problem on the morning of September 1. He needed to get back home to Warsaw. He had been delivering a series of lectures at a Zionist training seminar in the town of Kleban, not far from Rovno in present-day Ukraine, when the Nazis struck. He felt certain the authorities would have a more sophisticated view of events in the capital than they did in Kleban, a shtetl of a few thousand impoverished Jews in the equivalent of the Polish Appalachians. Isaac had no intention of wasting away in this speck on the map 220 miles southeast of Warsaw while the Germans marched on the capital. The defense would surely be far better organized there than it was in the provinces, where the chain of command seemed diffuse, the order of battle confused, the officers visibly frustrated. In Warsaw, the largest urban center in Central Europe, the cultural and political center of world Jewry, the situation would be clearer.

  Just before dawn on September 1, Adolf Hitler had staged a Polish invasion of Germany. German convicts dressed in Polish uniforms were forced to “storm” a Reich border post. Photos of the convicts’ bullet-riddled bodies served as evidence of Polish aggression and were the official pretext for the war Hitler had just launched in response.

  The ruse was so blatantly farcical that many Poles doubted that the accompanying campaign would be any more serious, that the whole thing would be regarded as anything but staged theater, a few shots fired in another of the Führer’s famous antics. “Not everyone understood what war with the Germans meant,” Zuckerman would later say.

  Whether the war was real was a topic of much discussion and little agreement in the Polish capital on the morning of September 1, 1939. At the Landed Gentry Café, outdoor tables buzzed with speculation. The fashionable eatery was a liberal bastion in a city that had turned rightward in lockstep with Germany and so many other European nations in the 1930s, and one of the few places in Warsaw where Jews and Gentiles still socialized outside of work.

  The Landed Gentry only started filling up around eleven that morning, since its principal clientele—writers, poets, and journalists—tended to be late risers, and lived in the northernmost part of the city, in leafy Jolie Bord, an upper-middle-class enclave anchored around Woodrow Wilson Square. But already heated debate raged, and that morning’s newspapers were thrust from hand to hand like intellectual batons amid a breathless relay of theories and conjecture. The hostilities would last only a few weeks, posited the optimists. Hitler was making another limited land grab. He probably wanted the Pomeranian Corridor, the coastal landmass awarded to Poland in 1918 that cut off West Prussia from the rest of Germany. Naturally, he’d demand Danzig—the disputed Baltic port that President Wilson’s League of Nations had declared a Free City following World War I, when Poland reemerged on world maps after more than a century of foreign dominion. Maybe the Führer would also seek some of the Silesian lands that Berlin had lost in the Versailles Treaty. A territorial price would have to be paid. Then peace would return.

  Martha Osnos later compared the hopeful assertions to “blind people discussing colors.” But she, too, had felt optimistic that September morning, when she was thirty-three years old, a confident and worldly woman who had lived in Paris for several years. A biochemist by training, she spoke six languages, though pointedly not Yiddish, and could hold her own in any of the high-minded discussions that usually accompanied the signature plum cake at the Landed Gentry: from the latest developments in the romantic poetry movement to the latest outrages of the Sanation regime. Osnos’s smile was wide and effortless. Her cheeks glowed, and her dark hair, which she kept short, cut above her ears, gave the impression of a person at ease with herself.

  Martha’s cousin Hanna was more troubled by the rumblings of war. Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak and Martha Osnos were frequent dining companions at the Landed Gentry, as famous in prewar Poland as Elaine’s in its heyday in New York. The café owed its lettered clientele to Osnos’s uncle, the publisher Jacob Mortkowicz, whose flagship bookstore was next door, and whose stable of writers—cultural stars in the pre-television age, many of them Jews—had permanently reserved tables on elevated platforms that denoted their celebrity status.

  Hanna was Jacob Mortkowicz’s thirty-six-year-old daughter, a stately dark-haired woman with hypnotic, hooded eyes, a doctorate in fine arts from the University of Warsaw, a gift for foreign languages, and a failed marriage to a Gentile geology professor. There were many such mixed marriages among the Warsaw intelligentsia, but Hanna had converted to Protestantism, the first person to abandon Judaism in a family that traced its Talmudic heritage to great-grandfather Lazar Horowitz, one of the leading rabbis of Vienna, himself the son and grandson of rabbis dating back to seventeenth-century Bavaria.

  Hanna had inherited the financially troubled publishing empire after her father’s suicide in 1931. Though a visionary—a man who had introduced the paperback to Poland, founded a nationwide chain of kiosks to sell mass-market books, and nurtured some of the country’s brightest literary talents—he had been an indifferent money manager, and the 1929 stock market collapse wreaked havoc on his affairs. It had taken Hanna eight years to nurse the business back to health, and as the war was about to begin, she finally had reason to celebrate. A few weeks earlier, she had paid off the last of the J. Mortkowicz Publishing House debts, which meant its printing presses and the beautiful building that housed them in Old Town Square were finally free of liens. A further sum equivalent to around $100,000 had just been deposited at the PKO State Savings Bank to fund the autumn advertising budget in expectation of a big Christmas season.

  September 1939 should have been a triumphant month for Hanna. She had saved her father’s legacy. She had won the admiration of Warsaw’s elitist intellectuals. She was arguably the most influential female publisher in Eastern Europe, and perhaps on the entire continent, since the field was not crowded with women. And while her marriage had unraveled, in part due to her success, she had a lovely and intelligent five-year-old daughter, Joanna, a strong and supportive mother in Jacob Mortkowicz’s vivacious widow, Janine, and a future that at last seemed secure.

  Instead she was worried about the plume of smoke rising menacingly to the west of the city, from the airport, where German bombs were said to have fallen at dawn. Martha, she suggested, should send her eight-year-old son, Robert, to join little Joanna at the Mortkowicz country house, south of Warsaw, safely out of bombing range. At least for a few days, until the politicians settled their differences.

  And calm would return, the city’s widest circulation daily confidently declared in its September 1, 1939, special edition. The Sanation regime, its editors insi
sted, had the situation well in hand. The Warsaw Courier had always been sympathetic to the strongmen who ruled Poland with increasingly rabid anti-Semitic pomp since the 1935 death of the country’s beloved leader, Joseph Pilsudski. That Friday, however, the conservative paper outdid itself—both in sycophancy and in misleading its readers. Coverage of the Nazi invasion was relegated to the bottom half of the first page. In the prime journalistic real estate “above the fold” were patriotic headshots of Poland’s authoritarian leaders: the puppet president Ignatius Moscicki, resplendent in white bow tie, tuxedo, and aristocratic whiskers, and the de facto ruler Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, his gold-braided uniform straining under the combined weight of the nation’s highest honors. Wedged between them, an official statement from President Moscicki pledged: “The entire Polish nation, blessed by God in its Holy and Righteous cause, together with the Army, will march arm in arm to battle and total victory.”

  The portraits said it all. They projected such arrogant authority, such confidence and power, that the message couldn’t be clearer: Poland’s government would deal with Hitler with the same forceful dispatch they had hitherto reserved for unruly Ukrainians and overly enterprising Jews.

  CHAPTER 2

  SIMHA’S FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

  Reassured by their leaders’ confident declarations, Warsaw’s 1.3 million residents thus permitted themselves one more day of near normalcy.

  By midmorning on September 1, 1939, the Saxon Gardens and Count Krasinski Park, a few blocks north of the Landed Gentry Café, rang with the laughter of Jewish children running along its warm pebble paths, splashing in the round white marble fountain, flinging chestnuts, and climbing the circular oak girders of the Summer Amphitheatre, where a performance of A Divided Heart would be given that evening. Their parents were hard at work on Nalewki, or Cordials, Street, which bordered the park’s ornate wrought iron fence, running north of Marshal Boulevard, Warsaw’s main artery, into the heart of the congested Jewish neighborhood above the city center.

  Boruch Spiegel, like thousands of others in the Jewish Quarter that Friday, at the height of the sweater-knitting season, one of the busiest times of the year, was seated in front of a sewing machine. It was a prized Singer, far superior to models like Pfaff or Kempisty-Kasprzycki, or the larger industrial-sized Adlers, and it had been a parting gift from an uncle who managed to emigrate to the United States despite the hated Johnson-Reed Act, which had all but slammed shut America’s doors to Eastern European Jewry after 1924.

  Spiegel’s motions that morning, like every morning, were mechanical, already the unthinking product of endless repetition, though he was barely twenty, and technically still an apprentice. With one hand he fed a piece of felt into the rapidly plunging spear of a whirring needle. With the other he deftly guided the emerging seam along contours and curves, overlapping the soft material in some places, leaving excess to be trimmed off in others, all the while adjusting the speed and pitch of the process with foot pedals. His father sat next to him, holding shears, chalk, and a wooden template, which he used to pre-cut sections from the rolls of black and brown felt that Boruch sewed into spats. Between them they could make five or six dozen pairs of the fashionable shoe covers in a good day.

  But September 1 was not a good day. News of the German offensive and air raid sirens were distracting Spiegel, a short and slim youth with round, sensitive features and large, expressive eyes that could look deeply wounded in one moment, indignantly angry the next, pleading a few seconds later. He could not sit still. He made an excuse to his father about running an errand and set off for Cordials Street, the commercial hub of the large Jewish Quarter, to find out what was happening.

  Ironically, an earlier German onslaught, during the First World War, had brought the Spiegel family to Warsaw from a small town near Plotsk, where Boruch was born. The Quarter was a way station for new arrivals in the capital, much as New York’s Lower East Side was a gateway to the American middle class; except that Cordials Street was more prosperous and had remained largely unchanged since it was first cobbled in 1783. Wave after wave of eastern migrants, the so-called Litvaks, had passed through its busy tenements over the years, some escaping Tsarist repressions and pogroms, others fleeing the poverty and limited opportunity of the shtetls. By the 1930s the Quarter had already produced several generations of attorneys, university professors, and doctors—two-thirds of Warsaw’s prewar physicians were Jewish, as were 37 percent of its lawyers—and though the predominantly Yiddish-speaking district had lost many former residents to assimilation and upward mobility, its fundamentally ambitious and hardworking character had stayed the same.

  The mood on the streets that morning was uneasy, Spiegel later recalled, but there was no greater sense of urgency in the Quarter that Friday than in the rest of Warsaw: no panic, no preparations for mass flight, no visible deviations from the usual routine. The prevailing atmosphere seemed to be one of heightened tension, “collective nervousness.” Radios in shops were all tuned to the show of Zbigniew Swietochowski on Warsaw One, the main state broadcaster, who assured listeners that “we are strong, united and ready,” and customers—both Gentile and Jewish—anxiously awaited bulletins and updates, asking one another for the latest news.

  As always, Cordials Street teemed with frenetic activity before the Sabbath. Porters, horse-drawn delivery vans, droshki, bicycle rickshaws, trucks, and saloon cars clogged the broad road, bisected by the dual tracks of tram line 17. Pedestrians jostled one another on sidewalks lined with all manner of goods; hats, lamps, ladders, barrels of nails, pickles, pungent sauerkrauts, and umbrellas—Cordials alone boasted 28 umbrella factories. Street vendors stabbed the smoky air with their long skewers of bagels, neatly speared on sticks. Carp wallowed in murky tubs, waiting to be sold, clubbed, and cooked. And the Dubicki refreshment stand offered its famous lemonade, served either sweet with “pure sugar” or bitter and “doubly saturated.”

  The three- to five-story buildings that lined Cordials were equally crowded with billboards, advertisements, and multilingual signs bearing the names of small businesses and their proprietors: Jacob Stein, S. Goldstein, M. Grubstein, Lancev, Leningradter, Tyrman, Pik. Shops occupied the ground floors: opticians, tobacconists, pharmacists, and florists; haberdashers, factors, and travel agents; shoe stores, hardware stores, and bookstores. The artisans and craftsmen—tailors, cobblers, upholsterers, and radio repairmen—were generally relegated to the second floors, where rents were cheaper, while the wholesalers, small leather-goods factories, furniture and curtain makers, basket weavers, tinsmiths, and sweatshops filled out the garrets and cellars. Narrow passages tunneled through some buildings, where informal secondary markets for promissory notes thrived. Most small manufacturers around Cordials were paid with IOUs by “jobbers,” who resold their products in stores throughout Poland. “Speculators who had money would walk in the courtyards that ran from Cordials to Zamenhof Street, and they would buy notes at a discount,” one participant in the trade recalled. The notes were discounted depending on their term and the reputation of the jobber, and they formed the backbone of a back-alley banking system in the Jewish Quarter.

  Rear courtyards were the real hubs of economic activity throughout the district, and enterprising landlords like Abraham Kalushiner rented out stalls for mini interior shopping plazas, over which apartments doubled as workshops. The Spiegel family rented such dual-use accommodations three blocks west of Cordials, at 30 Peacock Street. Their atelier occupied the front parlor of the ground-floor apartment, and Boruch, his two sisters, his parents, and his older brother shared three small back rooms. It was crowded and loud, and privacy was nonexistent. But it was a typical living arrangement in the Quarter, which housed more than half of Warsaw’s 380,000 Jews.

  When Boruch returned from his putative errand, his mind had still not settled, and his thoughts meandered from talk of war, and the probability of victory, to girls, and to the opera, his other great passion. He had inherited his love of music
from his father, whose most prized possession, a violin, stood carefully wrapped in a closet. And while Boruch did not have his father’s gift with instruments, he had developed a fine ear and a keen appreciation for opera. The fall season, as always, brought Boruch mixed feelings. There would be new performances—Faust was already being advertised—but also the obligatory paid coat check that accompanied the chillier temperatures. That would add to the price of admission, an unwelcome burden on Spiegel’s very meager resources. Many years later, he would reflect with wonder how such a seemingly trivial concern competed with the German invasion in his list of worries on September 1, 1939.

  For Simha Ratheiser, and for every school-age child in Warsaw, the first day of the Second World War coincided with the commencement of classes, an unhappy date even at the best of times. In Poland, September 1 signified the traditional conclusion of the summer break, of sailing in the Mazury lake region, hiking in the Tatra Mountains, and camping in the primeval forest of Bialowieza, where wild bison roamed among the ancient pines. September 1 meant no more visits to distant and gift-laden relatives, no more picnics in ruined castles. It brought an abrupt end to those carefree August afternoons in the sand dunes of the Hel Peninsula, with kites fluttering in the maritime breeze and the sun warming the frigid Baltic waters just enough to splash around in the waves.

  On this particular September 1, the ring of school bells competed with air raid sirens throughout the city, followed by radio announcements of “All Clear.” No doubt the more reluctant returnees cursed their bad luck that classes had not been canceled as a result of the outbreak of hostilities. Simha Ratheiser was too distracted by the sight and sound of planes buzzing over the capital to think much about school that morning. The fifteen-year-old was entering his sophomore year. He was a good and generally attentive student and an excellent athlete, a gifted striker who played soccer with Gentiles in the Christian suburb where he lived. With his pale blue-green eyes and light chestnut hair, he fit in with his Slavic neighbors.