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?
A rush to obtain legal interpretations, not to mention baptismal certificates, both genuine and forged, accompanied the promulgation of the armband law, and confusion reigned until the General Government issued clarifications to the racial code. These were based on the notorious Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, which stated unequivocally that mixed marriages were “forbidden and invalid” and subject to annulment. Wedding bands therefore offered no protection in the new German colony. The adoption of Christianity was addressed by an amendment to the Nuremberg Laws passed on November 14, 1935, which stipulated “A Jew is a person descended from at least three grandparents who are full Jews by race,” regardless of current faith. All of Hanna’s grandparents were Jewish, so in the eyes of the Nazis, her conversion was moot. Little Joanna’s case was slightly more hopeful. Legally, she was classified a Mischling in the first degree, a person of “mixed breed,” who had only two Jewish grandparents. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Mischlings could remain full citizens if they were born before September 15, 1935. Fortunately, Joanna had just celebrated her fifth birthday. She predated the Nuremberg Laws by a full year.
If this spared her, she was blissfully oblivious—too young to comprehend the implications of the new racial code or the anxiety it was causing her mother and grandmother. The three generations of Mortkowicz women had moved into Old Town after the siege. Hanna’s elegant riverside apartment, with its sweeping views of the Vistula, had been damaged during the bombardments, and the housing shortage forced her to take up residence in the historic quarter, in the musty old edifice where her late father had maintained his printing presses and bookbinding operations. The sixteenth-century structure that the Mortkowiczes owned was on the main market square, a cobbled expanse that stretched the length of several football fields and was lined on all sides by large baroque townhouses with steeply pitched tile roofs. This was Warsaw’s future tourist district, and Hanna’s building would one day house an Italian restaurant and corporate apartments. But in 1939, Old Town’s medieval charm had not yet been realized, and the cramped and crumbling neighborhood had an unsavory reputation that was eloquently captured in Sholem Asch’s Motke the Thief:
“In a corner of the great Warsaw there still stands a remnant of the medieval city. The Old Town consists of tall, narrow old houses that our ancestors built hundreds of years ago. The outer wall of each house is built into that of the next, so if you barely touch one, its neighbors will fall down. These houses have no courtyards, no windows, no light. Each one is like a labyrinth. Long dark corridors lead one along secret paths into the rooms of the houses, and only the longtime inhabitants know how to follow them. Someone who chances into such a house might think that he has gotten lost in an ancient church, the walls of which smell of the Inquisition. A terror comes over him as he regards the high rounded rafters that arch above his head, and the heavy black walls that surround him, and he stands stock still, frightened in the darkness.”
For Joanna—who, like her mother and grandmother, was tiny, almost elfin—Old Town was a wonderland. There was nothing scary about its church-steeple skyline, or the long curving shadows that the spires of its Gothic cathedrals cast in the early winter sun. She ran wild through its maze of narrow, musty streets, her raven curls spilling out of her bonnet, her little pumps slipping and scuffing on cobblestones, as she tried to keep up with the older, rougher neighborhood kids. Together, they scaled the Barbakan Gate and scampered along its crenellated brick ramparts. They played hide-and-seek along the drained and grassy moat that still encircled parts of the ancient settlement. They teased the peddlers and swiped apples from their pushcarts, and Joanna laughed loudest as they all skipped through Market Square singing “Jew, Jew, crawl under your shack. Now the shack is creaking. Now the Jew is shrieking!”
It was Vincent, the Mortkowiczes’ Gentile caretaker, who finally put an end to the fun and games. Hearing Joanna mindlessly spout the offensive singsong, he led her home by the ear and gave her a lecture. “It was then that I found out what was the real and macabre meaning of the rhyme. And that it was about us,” Joanna recalled. The revelation was shocking on many different levels.
Joanna had been raised in a secular household where the emphasis had always been on assimilation. Despite the Mortkowiczes’ rabbinical Viennese roots, religion had never played a role in their lives. “My grandfather wanted to be more Polish than the Poles,” Joanna recalled of the patriarch Jacob Mortkowicz, who in the world of Polish publishing occupied a lofty position similar to that of Alfred Knopf in New York. “He would stay up late into the night, almost each night, poring over the dictionary in search of ever more esoteric words.” These linguistic exertions were partly a matter of pride: Jacob Mortkowicz traveled in notoriously elite intellectual circles and he wanted to be the most eloquent person in the room. But the word games also reflected a deep-seated insecurity that might have been instantly recogn
izable to any American immigrant: “He practiced pronunciation,” Joanna explained. He wanted to ensure that his elocution left no trace of his own father’s heavy Yiddish accent, of “the Hebraic-German garble and the traditional mutilation of Polish speech,” as his star writer, Julian Tuwim, himself an assimilated Jew, put it, less delicately.
As with the Osnos family, Yiddish was pointedly not among the vast reservoir of languages—French, English, German, and Russian—spoken around the Mortkowicz dinner table. Nor was the Sabbath celebrated. And Joanna passed each Christmas in the Polish tradition: opening her presents under the mistletoe after supper on December 24.
So the news that she was Jewish was shattering. “It’s not true!” she shouted, running into her mother’s arms. “I’m not Jewish. I don’t want to be Jewish,” she kept repeating. Joanna wailed and pounded her little fists, until her grandmother Janine finally had enough. “And what is so terrible about being Jewish?” she snapped, wresting the startled child from her mother’s soothing embrace. Joanna trembled. She lived in fear of her grandmother. “She was a very proud and strong-willed woman. In many ways she was much stronger than my mother.”
Despite her diminutive stature and matronly appearance—even with her gray hair coiled up in a bun, she barely reached five feet—Janine had always been the power behind the Mortkowicz throne. Her husband had built the publishing empire on the strength of his relationship with writers. But his artistic and sensitive personality had not lent itself well to the harsher business side of publishing. And Hanna had inherited her father’s delicate personality, along with his corporate debts. “She was not well suited to bear the burdens after my grandfather’s suicide. In practice, my grandmother ran things.”
In her anger at that moment, Joanna recognized a tragic feature of Polish assimilation that would take her decades to understand when she was an adult. “I was so upset at being Jewish because assimilation was based on identification with Polishness, which was based in part on anti-Semitism,” she later explained. “I was being taught to hate myself.”
Ironically, Joanna’s family had spearheaded the literary assault on anti-Semitism in Poland by publishing writers like Tuwim, Antoni Slonimski, Jan Lechon, and Boleslaw Lesmian. Collectively known as the “Skamander Group,” they were mostly poets and mostly Jews, all household names in a poetry-crazed culture that built monuments to its dead bards and elevated the living to a celebrity status just shy of movie matinee idols.
The Skamanders battled bigotry through parody and allegory while laying siege to the chauvinist proponents of “Poland for Poles” by ridiculing the far right’s misguided notions of nationalism. TUWIM AND SLONIMSKI ARE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT JEWS screamed headlines in conservative newspapers, seething with outrage that Poland’s national poets, men whose works would later be required reading in every high school and who would have streets named after them in virtually every major Polish city, were neither Catholic nor Slavic.
So despite their own strong personal preference for assimilation, the Mortkowiczes professionally strove for social tolerance and did not see themselves as self-loathing Jews. In the days that followed the armband proclamation, when Joanna spotted a pair of Magen David cloth strips in the vestibule, it was once again Vincent, the old and wizened Catholic caretaker, who intervened. He had been with the Jacob Mortkowicz Publishing House for as long as anyone could remember, looking after its ink-stained presses and dusty storerooms filled with first editions. Often drunk, and always surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, he possessed a peasant wisdom and a keen devotion to his employers. The armbands were thrown to the floor, spat on, and trampled by the indignant caretaker. “I will never permit my Ladies to follow such a despicable order,” he vowed.
CHAPTER 9
ISAAC ON MEMORY LANE
While Jews in Warsaw grappled with the implications of the armband edict, Isaac Zuckerman and the leaders of the Zionist left were meeting in the waning days of 1939 in the Galician provincial capital of Lvov, which was now under Soviet occupation.
Since he fled Warsaw in the opening week of the war, Zuckerman’s wanderings had initially taken him north to Vilna, or Vilnius, as it would become known. He’d arrived there on September 19, the same day the Red Army had captured the provincial Baltic city, and he planned to hire a professional smuggler to sneak him across the nearby Polish-Lithuanian border, guarded now by trigger-happy Soviet troops. At the last moment, however, a stroke of diplomatic luck changed his plans. Moscow, for inexplicable reasons, announced that it would cede the entire Polish province of Vilna, including “321,700 Poles, 107,600 Jews, 75,200 Belarussians, 31,300 Lithuanians, 9,000 Russians, and 1,100 Germans,” to Lithuania as part of a newly signed Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression. So instead of risking a dangerous crossing, Zuckerman decided to wait for the transfer.
Many others had the same idea. In anticipation of the handover, fifteen thousand Jewish refugees flooded into Vilna, including members of virtually every Zionist faction, ranging from the Marxist Hashomer Hatzair on the far left through Betar and the Revisionists on the far right, and every shading in between.
As in Kovel, housing was problematic. Isaac roomed with relatives, for Vilna was his hometown, where his parents and siblings lived. He had gone to school there, learned to swim and ride a horse there. It was where he had picked up his Vilnoese Polish accent, as distinct as a Boston brogue, and where he had kissed a girl for the first time. It was the place he associated with the bloom of his Uncle Simon’s orchards, and the damp, comforting smell of the family flour mill. Yet it also held darker memories: of fear and fire, and of Isaac as a five-year-old trembling before the Polish troops that had seized the city from the Red Army in 1920 and stormed through the Jewish neighborhood, looting, burning, and beating. No one in Zuckerman’s family had been hurt during the rampage, but sixty-five Jews were murdered for allegedly collaborating with the Bolsheviks. The false accusations were supported by the sole U.S. military observer on the scene, Colonel William F. Godson. In his report to Washington, Godson justified the actions of the units under the command of Edward Smigly-Rydz, then a mere general, noting that “Jews constituted at least 80% of every Bolshevik organization,” murdered Polish civilians, and were “extremely dangerous.”
The experience remained “engraved” in Isaac’s heart. It had taught him that the Poles could be just as bloodthirsty as the Russians, who orchestrated many of the nineteenth-century pogroms on Polish soil. In fact they had given the world the word “pogrom,” from the Russian verb pogromit, to destroy.
Now, nineteen years later, Isaac was staying with his sister while waiting for the city’s transfer to Lithuanian hands. She had married well but was widowed. She owned a large two-story house on Ponary Street, near Old Town—in the baroque heart of what would one day be the tourist district. His parents and his ninety-year-old grandfather, whom he had not seen in some time, were staying there, too, and Isaac was taken aback at how the family patriarch had aged. “What’s new, Dyedushka?” Isaac called out in Yiddish, using the Russian diminutive for “grandpa.” “The French have entered Vilna,” his grandfather replied, confusing Stalin with Napoleon, who had liberated the Polish city from tsarist dominion in 1812.
Isaac was deeply affected by the visible deterioration of a man he had always admired as a rebel and maverick. He viewed his grandfather, Rabbi Yohanan Zuckerman, as “a rabbi who didn’t want to make a living at it,” who preferred worldly to spiritual pursuits. It was from his grandfather that his own father inherited a rebellious streak. At one point, he had run away from home, marrying without permission and apparently absconding with some family funds. It had caused quite a stir in Vilna’s tight-knit Jewish community, where a good scandal was relished. “My father had been something of a hippie,” Isaac would later write with evident pride. Zuckerman, in turn, had inherited his father’s good looks, imposing height, and penchant for defiance.
Isaac was not prone to insubordination, however, when it came t
o instructions from his Zionist superiors. And new orders soon arrived from the organization’s temporary headquarters in Kovel. Zuckerman was not to go to Lithuania to search for a northern passage to Palestine after all. It was now clear that the overwhelming majority of the more than one million Polish Jews trapped in the Soviet zone would not be able to escape. And the total was likely much higher, because no one knew how many of the 2.3 million other Jews in the German part of Poland had already crossed the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line. The boundary between the two occupying powers was still open and would remain unguarded until October 26, 1939, when the frontiers were formally set. Every day trains carrying refugees east encountered trains moving west. “Are you insane, where are you going?” the eastward-bound passengers gasped as they passed the occasional trainload of Jews returning to Warsaw. “You are insane. Where are you going?” retorted westbound travelers fleeing the Soviets, with equal astonishment.
It was presumed that many senior Zionist leaders in Soviet-occupied Poland were well known to the NKVD because the dreaded security service that had murdered millions of Russians during Stalin’s purges was hastily compiling dossiers on hundreds of thousands of potential Polish troublemakers in preparation for mass arrests. Younger, more obscure activists like Isaac, however, might still be able to operate under the NKVD’s radar and take their place. Zuckerman’s instructions were to travel deep into the Soviet occupation zone and form an underground network. What precisely that entailed, he did not know. He had no relevant experience, and only the vaguest notion of where to start. But he did not hesitate, despite his father’s admonition that leaving Vilna just as it was about to be handed over to neutral Lithuania made no sense. “He would have understood if I had gone closer to Eretz Israel. But to go further away! I couldn’t tell him that I was going to do clandestine work. Mother did not know anything. I went to the kitchen, came up from behind her, kissed her and told her I was leaving. She started weeping.” Isaac would later be haunted by his quick departure. “I didn’t know that it would be the last time I would see my parents.”
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