Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  School was a forty-five-minute commute from Simha’s home near the Vistula River. Catholic public schools in his district were much closer. But his parents, like the parents of half the Jewish children in Poland, had insisted he attend a private Jewish academy. “My father was an observant Jew, and he wanted me to study at a Jewish institution,” Simha would later explain.

  Ratheiser’s school was in the southernmost part of the Jewish Quarter at 26 Mushroom Street, an imposing neoclassical edifice that also housed the offices of the Jewish Community Council, the modern administrative successor of the Kehila self-governing bodies that had existed in Poland since the fifteenth century. Large oil paintings of long-deceased community elders decorated the building’s cavernous halls, their gaze scrutinizing future leaders as they trudged between classes.

  Simha was popular. It was not just his good looks, or the fact that the girls, both Gentile and Jewish, thought him intriguing. He was in fact unusually cool: blessed by some inner regulating mechanism that lent him the ability to stay calm when others grew agitated. Perhaps that helped explain why his neighborhood bullies—the sheygetzes, as Gentiles were called in Yiddish—didn’t bother trying to get a rise out of him. He certainly wasn’t big or intimidating. He didn’t curse, or talk tough, like some of his Polish neighbors, and other kids at school. But he carried himself in the sort of detached, casual manner that suggested he belonged in whatever environment he found himself in.

  Like Isaac Zuckerman and so many other young Polish Jews, Simha Ratheiser had been captivated for a time by Zionism’s dream of a Jewish homeland. The previous summer he had gone to a camp run by Akiva, one of the dozens of Zionist youth organizations in Poland, and he had been captivated by stories of daring kibbutzniks, of camels and exotic Bedouins, of fearless settlers turning parched desert into blooming orchards. But the fervor had passed. Simha, by his own admission, “was never overly political.” And there was a monastic, cultlike atmosphere in some Zionist groups that left him cold. In the meantime, the usual teenage interests—soccer, girls, the movies—had replaced Palestine.

  Those teenage preoccupations kept Simha from cracking the books on September 1. The sound of sirens and airplanes were distracting him, and he and his schoolmates stared at the cloudless sky, trying to guess whether the unsettling aircraft circling overhead were Polish or German. They were not alone. Most of Warsaw was gazing skyward. “Those are our planes,” people on the streets said, pointing excitedly. “No, they are not,” others countered. “Those are exercises,” some reassured. “No, they aren’t.” The debates raged. The planes were in fact antiquated Polish P-6s retrofitted with British Vickers engines, and ungainly P-11s, or Bumblebees, as the slow and bulbous machines would become known, part of a squadron of fighters that had been redeployed to defend the Polish capital. But like most Varsovians, Ratheiser could not yet distinguish the distinctive sound and silhouette of enemy bombers. Nonetheless, he was intensely curious about them. Much like any fifteen-year-old, he had longed to see a dogfight—the real-life, swooping version of the World War I duels shown in the American movies that played at the Napoleon Theater in Three Crosses Square.

  His wish would be granted shortly after the lunch bell.

  At 3:30 that afternoon, steam whistles sounded throughout Praga, the smokestack district on the eastern, unfashionable bank of the Vistula River—a tough, mixed neighborhood where 40 percent of the residents were Jewish. The day shift had ended, and 3,870 workers streamed out of the Lilpop, Rau & Lowenstein plant. The forty-acre facility assembled Buicks, Chevrolets, and Opel Kadetts under license from General Motors, as well as locomotives, trams, heavy trucks, and armored vehicles. It was one of Warsaw’s largest industrial concerns, a joint venture between Belgian Jews and ethnic Germans who founded the conglomerate in the mid-nineteenth century to build rail ties for the tsar, after Poland’s annexation into the Russian empire had opened vast new markets and attracted great sums of foreign investment.

  Next door, thick pale fumes billowed from the vents of the Schicht-Lever soap and laundry detergent plant, an Anglo-Dutch concern that would morph into global giant Unilever, while the three hundred workers of Samuel and Sender Ginsburg’s BRAGE Rubber Works poured out onto November 11 Street, a road that commemorated the date of a failed uprising against tsarist dominion.

  Nearby, Joseph Osnos, Martha’s tall and elegant thirty-five-year-old husband—an urbane businessman and fastidious dresser who bore a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn—was also letting his employees out for the weekend. He had raised his start-up capital as a diamond broker in France and Belgium, and now his plant, Karolyt Incorporated, produced toasters, electric irons, and kettles. During the long run-up to the invasion, he had introduced a new line of hermetically sealed food containers to protect against the mustard gas attacks that figured prominently in every newspaper report about German arsenals and tactics. Sales shot through the roof, and the plant operated at full capacity throughout the summer of 1939 to meet the media-driven demand. Gas masks and duct tape also sold out, because if the Nazis struck, the Sanation government had repeatedly warned during its incessant military fund drives, it would surely be with chemical weapons.

  Years later, Joseph’s family would not remember how many workers he had employed. But as they streamed out of his plant that Friday, those workers had reason to be anxious. In the distance, rising hundreds of feet in the air, beyond the huge Koneser Vodka distillery with its production capacity of a million liters a month, a black, noxious cloud swirled over the Pea Town Oil Reservoir—Warsaw’s first industrial casualty of the war.

  Watching the reservoir blaze, Osnos made a mental note to contact his notary and attorney on Monday morning. He would put the factory in Martha’s name, and put a few financial matters in order. As a precaution, in the unlikely event the situation spiraled out of control and something happened to him. At least Martha and Robert would be protected and provided for.

  As dusk descended on the first day of the Second World War, the quasi-normalcy that still prevailed over the Polish capital assumed its typical nocturnal features. In blue-collar Praga, the drunken bar brawls that inaugurated the launch of every weekend flared up, even as firefighters fought in vain to douse the raging inferno in Pea Town. Across the Vistula, Simha Ratheiser’s father, Zvi, locked up his store early, as was his custom every Friday, and set off on foot to synagogue, skirting the Royal Gardens, Warsaw’s stunning central park, where the shrill, lustful cries of free-ranging peacocks and swans echoed over the ponds, amphitheaters, and manicured lawns.

  The elegant, tree-lined district bordering the park had once been King Stanislaw August’s private hunting preserve. It now was home to imposing government ministries and high officials, high-ceilinged apartments with elaborate plasterwork, and the gated villas of minor aristocrats and the city’s financial and industrial elite; a mixed neighborhood where Jews and Gentiles shared gardeners and stock tips, but rarely socialized.

  On Belvedere Street, whose principal palace would later adorn bottles of high-end vodka, black Citroën limousines with headlights doused raced past Zvi, shuttling between the presidential residence and the gleaming white façade of the Ministry of Defense, where the anti-Semitic commander in chief, Marshal Smigly-Rydz, was issuing the Sanation regime’s first official communiqué of the war.

  Blue Chevy trucks with loudspeakers on their roofs and the swirling logo of Polish State Radio on their sides carried Smigly-Rydz’s triumphal announcement throughout the city center. “Today a total of 16 enemy airplanes were destroyed. Our own losses—2 aircraft,” the taped message proclaimed in a continuous loop. “We have captured prisoners at many points.… In [Danzig], three enemy attempts to storm Westerplatte were repulsed.”

  Martha and Joseph Osnos caught the happy developments on Warsaw One, the main state broadcaster, that evening, while Helen, their Gentile nanny, packed young Robert’s bags so he could join his cousin Joanna at the Mortkowicz country house the next morning—alth
ough now, apparently, there was less urgency in getting him out of the city.

  The Osnoses usually went out or entertained on Friday evenings, and their guest lists conformed to the prevailing norms and degrees of social segregation in prewar Warsaw. “My parents only associated with other assimilated Jews,” their son Robert would later recall. “Yiddish was taboo in our house.” That Friday, however, there was no dinner party, and dark blackout drapes shaded the Osnos home—a spacious art-filled apartment with a baby grand piano in the parlor and white oleanders blooming on the balcony. The Sanation’s battle communiqué might have been comforting, but Joseph was not entirely convinced.

  Across town, Boruch Spiegel and his family heard the glorious news from a passing sound truck because like many other poorer residents of the Jewish Quarter, they did not own a radio. The Jewish neighborhood that Friday was as still and silent as on any Sabbath, with the notable exception of the crowds milling around the marble pillars of the Great Synagogue near Banker’s Square, and the raucous Theater District a few blocks west, where reassured patrons devoured the late edition of the Evening Times-7: TO COMPLETE VICTORY, its banner headlines jubilantly declared.

  And so, as the sun set on September 1, 1939, the city’s restaurants and theaters slowly filled. The bars and cafés on New World Street resounded with cheers and celebratory toasts. And Warsaw’s four hundred synagogues and prayer houses reverberated with relief.

  CHAPTER 3

  WOLSKA STREET IS COVERED WITH BLOOD

  On the evening of September 6, 1939, the Sanation regime fled Warsaw. Boruch Spiegel was stunned by the ensuing pandemonium. He had never witnessed such chaos before—a national government dismantling itself overnight and running for dear life, so all that remained of once-powerful ministries were the charcoal embers of hastily burned documents, along with trailing declarations that Poland’s strongmen held “the firm resolve of returning once the war has been won.”

  The Spiegels, like countless other Varsovian families, weighed the rapidly deteriorating situation and debated their options. Marshal Smigly-Rydz, before decamping, had called on all able-bodied men to withdraw to the east, where the Polish armed forces were to regroup and launch a counteroffensive. Boruch, like many other Jews, did not put much stock in Smigly-Rydz, who had distinguished himself more in rhetorical campaigns against mythical Hebraic cabals than on any real battlefield. Boruch’s brother Berl, however, insisted they go. The German juggernaut, he argued, had already overrun much of Western Poland. “Warsaw was going to surrender,” Berl declared. “There was no point in staying.”

  Despite misgivings, Boruch respected his big brother’s judgment. At twenty-two, Berl was only a few years older than Boruch. But he was a bookkeeper, the first member of the Spiegel family to finish high school and to earn a living with his mind rather than his hands. Boruch himself had left school in seventh grade, the educational norm for Warsaw’s working class. In spite of his own love of opera and high culture, he viewed his older brother as his intellectual superior and an authority figure. Berl was also an active member of the Bund, one of the two competing forces that divided Polish Jewry—Zionism’s great rival and antithesis. Bundists believed that Jews had to carve out a future in Poland—der hoym, or “the homeland,” as they called it—and fight for their political, linguistic, and economic rights there, rather than waste time and energy on unrealistic expectations of creating a Jewish state in some distant future and far-off place. To Poland’s three hundred thousand registered Bundists, Zionism was nothing more than a fairy tale, “a utopian illusion,” in Boruch Spiegel’s words, while the Bund was a real political force. The Bund could negotiate better social and working conditions, combat fascist groups (who on occasion found their Warsaw offices mysteriously torched), sway public officials, even shut down entire cities with strikes, as the Bund had done in Warsaw in 1937 to protest anti-Semitic violence.

  To Boruch, the Bund “was about Jewish pride and dignity.” It was also the biggest Judeocentric political entity in Poland, having received an outright majority of all Jewish votes cast in the 1938 nationwide elections that the Sanation had permitted for city legislatures. That Berl was rising in the ranks of the organization conferred additional status in Boruch’s eyes, and if Berl said that the Bund’s beloved co-leaders, Hersh Erlich and Victor Alter, were evacuating east to join Smigly-Rydz, then they, too, should leave at first light.

  In the early morning hours of September 7, Isaac Zuckerman had no idea that Warsaw was leaderless. He was literally mired in mud, frantically digging an antitank trench. It was 2 A.M., and he was working along with several hundred other civilian volunteers under the glare of portable sodium lamps, desperately trying to shore up the Polish capital’s western defenses.

  Four days had passed since the battered cab Isaac hired in Kleban had finally delivered him to Warsaw, rattled, dusty, and raw. He had spent much of this time, and expended a great deal of his considerable charm, trying to mobilize the youngsters in the left-leaning Zionist youth group he led. He was bothered by their apathy, which he tried to shake by stoking anti-German resentment and appealing to Polish pride. While young Zionists were eager to defend their families, it was understandably difficult for them to rally under a patriotic banner—to overlook, as Isaac acknowledged, “the injustices and hatred of the Polish state against the Jews.”

  Yet many of his Young Pioneers were there with him that night, shovels and picks in hand, toiling alongside the Gentiles, gouging out deep troughs to impede the passage of tracked vehicles. They were in Wola, a blue-collar Catholic neighborhood flanking a major industrial zone that was home to breweries, armament factories, and the sprawling steelworks that made Poland the world’s eighth-largest producer of steel in 1939, and a high-tech corridor where multinationals like Philips, Telefunken, and Marconi had large electronics plants.

  Wola lay due west of the Jewish Quarter and was judged to be the most likely initial target of any German ground assault. All day, while he dug, Isaac saw refugees pouring into Wola from the cities of Lodz and Kielce, Kalisz and Serock, and many of them brought horrifying tales of mass executions, of children burned alive, of Polish forces in disarray, and of an enemy that did not seem to distinguish between civilians and combatants.

  By 4 A.M., Zuckerman was filthy and exhausted. He had been digging all day, and the effects of his labors showed in his blistered hands and shredded clothes. Yet he was also elated. It felt good to see Gentiles and Jews working together in harmony. Relations between the two communities had deteriorated sharply in the decade following the Great Depression, arguably reaching a five-hundred-year low. Animosity toward Jews spiked all across the European continent during the troubled 1930s. It even breached the relatively tolerant shores of the United States, as pollster Elmo Roper reported in 1938: “Anti-Semitism has spread all over the nation, and is particularly virulent in urban centers.” But Poland had been among the worst offenders, and it was good to see mutual animosities momentarily forgotten. “We worked hard and the Poles were nice to us,” Zuckerman recalled. “We didn’t sense a whiff of anti-Semitism.”

  His spirits sank, however, when, just after daybreak, he returned to the Young Pioneers’ communal clubhouse on Goose Street, in the heart of the Jewish district. With its oversized wall maps of Palestine, dog-eared agricultural manuals, and portraits of Theodor Herzl, the clubhouse should have been full of slumbering teenagers and the stirrings of breakfast. Instead there was an unearthly silence. Where was everyone? What could have happened overnight?

  By dawn a frenzied river of humanity was pushing and shoving across the three bridges that offered the only eastward passage out of the metropolis.

  Some three hundred thousand people fled Warsaw on the morning of September 7, 1939, all in the space of a few hours. Traffic was so impregnably dense that Boruch Spiegel worried the groaning spans would collapse into the Vistula under the weight of the exodus. Every manner of conveyance had been pressed into service: fire trucks, police
cars, taxis, ambulances. Even the distinctive blue Chevys that carried Polish Radio’s mobile loudspeakers were evacuating eastward because the retreating Sanation regime had ordered the 800-foot transmission mast for Warsaw One, central Europe’s tallest structure, disabled.

  The disorganized civilian horde was not limited to men of military age responding to the Sanation government’s appeal. Entire families had taken their cue from the commander in chief and were running for safety: Women, children, the elderly, and couples wrestling with strollers completely overwhelmed the columns of retreating troops, blocking all the roads leading east, bogging down military traffic, and swamping any possibility of an orderly withdrawal and redeployment. Most evacuees were on foot, like the Spiegel brothers, or on bicycles, and had brought only what they could carry, which in Boruch’s case was a spare set of clothes, toiletries, and a few apples and boiled eggs his mother had put in the backpack that now drooped from his small frame. “It was crazy, it was chaos,” he remembered. “We barely moved. Cars were constantly honking. Army drivers were screaming to clear the way. It took hours just to get through Praga [on Warsaw’s east bank].”

  Somewhere in the heaving throng around Boruch, Joseph Osnos rode in a borrowed British sports car, blaring his horn impatiently. Osnos, like Isaac Zuckerman, was big and fit and not one to sit still, and also like Zuckerman he had been trying to join the fighting ever since he signed the power of attorney for his factory over to Martha. His brother Zano, a doctor and reserve army officer, was already in the east tending to Marshal Smigly-Rydz’s wounded. Joseph, too, wanted to do his duty. “Go, I will stay with Robert,” Martha had urged, when the call for able-bodied men had gone out the night before. “Join the army. We are safe. The radio says so. We will just be a nuisance. Besides,” she added, “how can I leave my job?”