Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Simha Ratheiser was too young to answer the call to arms. He had desperately wanted to go east, to continue the heroic struggle. But his father, Zvi, would not hear of it. Simha was barely fifteen. Bar mitzvah notwithstanding, he was still a child. War was no place for him to discover his manhood.

  Simha glared at his father but did not press his case. The two had a complicated relationship at times, and its strains went beyond the usual teenage rebellion against authority. The generation gap between Simha and Zvi was even wider than that of the typical father and son because they were the products of two very distinct eras—pre- and post-independence Poland. Many young Jews born or reared after 1918, when Poland reappeared on maps and Polish replaced Russian or German as the country’s official language, experienced a similar gulf—a phenomenon that was also documented among the children of immigrants in America. Simha, as a product of the new generation, was bicultural. He spoke Polish fluently, thanks to public elementary school, and looked and dressed like any Gentile. Had he lived in America, with his fair hair and athletic frame, he would have been described as a surfer kid. Zvi Ratheiser, on the other hand, wore a dark beard, a skullcap, and the black suits favored by the pious. His Polish was poor, since had come of age under tsarist colonial rule, when the Cyrillic alphabet graced street signs in Warsaw and a neo-feudal order still largely segregated Jews as a separate commercial caste self-governed by learned rabbis. Zvi was a kind and loving parent, and he did not press his religious views on his son. He knew instinctively that secular twentieth-century forces—Bundism, Zionism, Communism—were replacing faith-based isolationist movements like Chasidism as the driving cultural forces among Jewish youth. But it was also crystal clear to him that in this yawning gap between Jewish generations, he did not fully understand Simha, just as Simha found his father’s old-fashioned ways equally baffling at times.

  So Simha reluctantly stayed, glumly shuffling around the family compound just southeast of the Royal Gardens Park, where the city petered out, cabbage fields sprouted between dwindling housing tracts, and gypsy caravans camped in the low brush. There was little to do but putter around the garden—a lifelong passion of Simha’s—and listen to Warsaw Two, the less-powerful backup broadcaster, relay ominous bulletins about the approaching German army, the deployment of gas masks, how the smell of mustard and garlic could signify a chemical attack, and how the French and the English, who had declared war on the Nazis, had still not fired a shot.

  Simha felt frightened and helpless. It was the waiting that was most intolerable, and the certain knowledge that the Germans were coming.

  They struck the following day. Shortly after noon on September 8, four Panzer armored divisions stormed Warsaw’s westernmost outer suburbs. By 3 P.M. they had seized the airport, a critical installation that allowed the Luftwaffe to refuel and rearm locally rather than lose valuable time and fuel flying to and from distant airfields. At 5 P.M. the surging columns of tanks reached the inner districts of Ochota and Wola, where a thin line of defenders cowered behind the trenches that Isaac Zuckerman had helped dig.

  “Wolska Street is covered with blood,” one combatant said, describing the scene. “There are dead horses, burnt hulks, and pulverized corpses crushed by tank treads. An uninterrupted wall of fire precedes the Germans; a hurricane of bullets. The sound is deafening. They are massacring civilians, mowing down running refugees, indiscriminately clearing a path straight toward our barricade. Before our eyes, it seems as though every rule and custom of civilized warfare is being violated. They are only a hundred meters away now.…”

  CHAPTER 4

  ROBERT’S PAPER AIRPLANES

  Twenty miles east of the carnage, surrounded by sunflower fields and the weathered, bucolic huts of small farming villages, Isaac Zuckerman raced to catch up to his Zionist friends on September 8, 1939. He had not slept or eaten in two days, and his pride still felt the sting of being left behind. “I don’t know why they went off and left me,” he lamented. “I think it was because of the general panic and chaos.” For Isaac, who like many charismatic men was sensitive and not immune to vanity, this was the second perceived slight in as many weeks. The first occurred when he had not been selected as a delegate to represent his He-Halutz youth group at the 21st Zionist Congress, held in Geneva just days before the invasion of Poland. His omission from that prestigious gathering had hurt. He was, after all, a professional Zionist, not merely a dabbler like hundreds of thousands of other Polish Jews who dreamed of Palestine. He was a salaried career man within the fractious movement, who opted to devote himself to preparing Polish Jews for immigration to Palestine rather than attend university and enter a traditional profession like law or medicine, as his parents had wanted.

  The evacuation traffic had thinned this far from Warsaw, though it still stretched as far as Isaac could see down the rows of telegraph poles that lined the country road. These were crowned, every few hundred feet, with giant stork’s nests, and the huge white birds served as an early warning system whenever an aircraft approached and they fled their nests. Panic would then ensue, with refugees scattering in every direction and Isaac herding the group of very young Zionists he had stumbled across into a nearby forest or ditch.

  The Germans strafed almost all the roads. Boruch Spiegel also recalled these moments of sheer terror, which punctuated hours of shuffling monotony, of aching forward movement. First came the sight and sound of a distant plane. Then a split second of uncertainty: Was it was friend or foe? Then shouts, screams, and a mad scramble for cover. The staccato of machine gun fire and the roar of propellers drowned out all other noise. Where the bullets struck, clumps of earth and pavement burst loose, gouging a double line down the median. And then, just as quickly, it was over—except for the anguished cries of those whose loved ones had not gotten out of the way fast enough. “There would always be a dozen bodies lying on the road,” Spiegel recalled. “You tried not to look at them as you walked past.”

  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 shepherdi
ng 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 o
r 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.