Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  In Martha Osnos’s case, the Nazis didn’t even bother with the weapons charade.

  She ran into trouble on a visit to her pediatrician’s house in an exclusive part of the Mokotow district to pick up medication for a Gentile neighbor. She was surprised to see a large moving van parked outside the doctor’s office and two SS officers on the stairs. They were “very tall, very slick,” she recalled, and their pitch-black capes and tall, polished boots lent them an ominously “elegant” air.

  “Where are you going?” one demanded, as workers carried out select pieces of the doctor’s furniture. Responding in German, one of six languages she spoke, Martha tried to slip past them with an innocuous comment about purchasing medicine. “Are you single?” they persisted. “Where is your husband?” This question Martha could not honestly answer, because like nearly a million other Polish women, she did not know where her husband was; whether Joe was in a POW camp, or in Siberia, or dead like his older brother Zano, who along with twenty thousand other Polish officers was murdered by the Soviet secret police in the Katyn forest. She had no way of knowing that he in fact had made it safely across the border into Romania and that a kind Jewish family in the small town of Cernauti had taken him in. Since all communication with the outside world was disrupted, Martha did not know that Joe Osnos had managed to use his business acumen to make a few desperately needed dollars trading currencies, exploiting the wild cross-border fluctuations in the crashing Polish zloty, and that he had earned enough money to pay his way to Bucharest.

  SS men were always interested to learn of a lost husband. With so many Polish women home alone, an underworld fraternity of fraudsters, confidence men, and thieves, both Polish and German, had sprung up to prey on war widows and the wives of Poland’s eight hundred thousand imprisoned servicemen. “Where do you live?” the SS officers immediately asked Martha. “You must have very good furniture. How far is your house? We will drive there with you.”

  How many such “visits” took place in Warsaw in the early months of the occupation is impossible to say. But the expropriation started at the very top. The first thing Warsaw’s newly appointed district governor, Dr. Ludwig Fisher, did upon assuming his post was to go villa shopping in the resort suburb of Konstancin, Poland’s Beverly Hills. He selected the Art Deco mansion of industrialist Gustav Wertheim, which was known as Villa Julia after Wertheim’s Jewish wife, the art collector Julia Kramsztyk. Villa Julia had been famous before the war for the concerts and charity balls held there, parties that attracted a who’s who of Warsaw’s cultural elite, including many of the bestselling writers published by Martha’s cousin Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak. Julia Kramsztyk had been a formidable social doyenne and a much-admired hostess. Her support could launch a young artist’s career, and an invitation to Villa Julia could propel ambitious guests up the social ladder. It was unheard of for Julia Kramsztyk to be turned down, and she was not a woman who was easily intimidated. When she protested the confiscation of her 14,000-square-foot home, Governor Fischer’s henchmen dragged her out onto the garden terrace and shot her through the head.

  Homes, cars, pleasure craft—nothing was off-limits. Most of the antique furnishings and art stolen by the Nazis simply vanished, only to reappear, in rare cases, decades later in the most improbable locales. A painting looted in October 1939 from the Zacheta National Gallery, for instance, resurfaced in 2007 at a garage sale in Lexington, Kentucky. A few months later in 2007, a seventeenth-century canvas by the Dutch master Pieter de Grebber taken from the Cool Street shop of antiques dealer Abe Gutneyer showed up at Christie’s auction house in London, placed there by an anonymous Lithuanian seller.

  Many prominent Jewish collectors did not wait for the Germans to knock on their doors. They surreptitiously donated their paintings to the Zacheta National Gallery in the hope that the art would be hidden by the Underground and not fall into German hands. (A number of pieces were indeed saved. Seventy years later, dozens of priceless paintings, along with the impressionist collections of Jacob and Alina Glass, the Zacheta Gallery’s most prominent prewar patrons, adorn the National Museum on Jerusalem Boulevard.)

  When Martha Osnos arrived at her apartment with a pair of SS officers in tow, her eight-year-old son, Robert, froze at the sight, which he never forgot. He stared in terror at the towering black figures; at their death’s-head insignias, the metallic hussar skulls that rested between the silver piping of their visor bands; at the SS eagles on their sleeves, with their extended talons embroidered in bullion wire; at the twin lightning-bolt runes on their thick wool collar patches. “It was one of the only times during the war that I can remember being truly scared,” he later recalled.

  Martha rushed to embrace her son. “Don’t be afraid,” she soothed. “They mean no harm.” The SS men, paying no heed to the cowering child, “ran around the house making noise and a commotion not like two men but twenty.” They banged at the keys of Martha’s baby grand piano, trying their musical hand, poked around her closets, and zeroed in on a white marble bust she kept on her writing desk. “Who is this?” they asked.

  It was a likeness of Voltaire. Martha had bought it in Paris, where Robert was born, during the three years she and Joe had spent in the French capital. “We returned to Poland because my mother missed her friends and family, she missed Warsaw,” Robert recalled.

  “Voltaire,” Martha repeated. “Oh,” said one of the Germans, a flicker of sudden recognition. “Madame Imaginaire?”

  “No, that was Molière,” Martha corrected.

  “Aha,” said the SS man, losing interest.

  The disappointed Germans departed soon after, grumbling that Martha did not have a double bed, which had apparently been high on their shopping list. They took a camera and a box of chocolates, according to Robert, but left behind the bust of Voltaire. It was a priceless sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon, whose works today are exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, at the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and in countless other museums throughout the world.

  CHAPTER 7

  MARK’S VOW

  The Polish capital’s grotesque transformation was most jarring for those who had missed the siege, who had answered the Sanation regime’s misguided call to evacuate east and were now trickling back throughout October and November 1939. One of those early returnees was a young man who was to play a major role in the future Jewish resistance, along with Isaac, Simha, and Boruch. His name was Mark Edelman (or “Marek” in Polish), and like Zuckerman and the Spiegel brothers, he had left Warsaw during the September 7 evacuation and spent a fruitless month aimlessly wandering through Poland’s eastern townships before returning to the Jewish district. At age eighteen, he was rail thin, with a pronounced Adam’s apple, and he bore the pinched, pale features of someone for whom nutrition was a secondary consideration. He had been homeless and unemployed when the war broke out, living at a girlfriend’s and in no hurry to find a job. That June, he had just barely finished high school, which was no small feat given one expulsion, many prolonged absences, and a general lack of interest in formal education. An orphan, he was a transplanted “Litvak,” which meant he hailed from the far eastern borderlands, specifically from a town called Gomel near Minsk, placing him at a social disadvantage in the snobbish Polish capital. Litvaks occupied the lowest rung in Warsaw’s Jewish hierarchy, and their Yiddish was markedly different from the rapid-fire urban dialect spoken in central Poland, as out of place as a southern drawl in New York City.

  Along with the Spiegel brothers, whom he vaguely knew, Edelman was a Bundist. The Bund was pretty much the only thing he took seriously at the time, and it was partly out of gratitude, because after his mother’s death some of the Bund’s leaders had more or less adopted him. It was Bund bosses who had gotten him into good schools and used their connections to smooth over some of his academic ruffles. He played with and befriended their children, who tutored him in Polish, since he was a native Russian speaker, taught him the Polaykin Yiddish used
in Warsaw and Lodz, and afforded him access to a world that would otherwise have been denied to him.

  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.