After leaving Vilna, Zuckerman wandered Soviet-occupied Poland, trying to revive local Socialist-Zionist chapters in towns including Kovel, Lutsk, and Bialystok, before finally settling in Lvov, the largest urban center in the Carpathians. All along this geographic corridor the Russians were pressuring young, left-leaning Zionists to join Komsomol, the Leninist youth organization, and Zuckerman was fighting a rearguard action to stem the defections. “There were cases of members leaving the movement to join the communists,” he later acknowledged. “Even teachers in Hebrew schools forgot their learning overnight.”
Actively undermining Komsomol recruiters was a very dangerous undertaking. Jews, though initially less targeted by the NKVD than aristocrats or former Sanation officials, were hardly immune to arrest. Many belonged to the bourgeois capitalist class, which was equally viewed as an enemy of the people in Marxist dogma. Of the 330,000 Galician Poles sent to Siberian camps in 1940, 21 percent were Jews—twice the Jewish representation in the population. Isaac had seen enough of those bedraggled prisoner transports at rail stations to be free of delusions. “Some day they’ll probably lead me away like that too,” he thought.
But still he took unnecessary and what he would later call amateurish risks. “I was such a great conspirer that my room,” at the apartment in Lutsk where everyone knew he was staying, “was famous and people would come and go. In time,” he added, “I learned that you couldn’t behave like that.”
To his credit, Isaac was a quick study. What little he knew about conspiratorial work he had read in spy novels. But his instinct for self-preservation was strong. “I began acting increasingly through contacts. If I could avoid any trip, I didn’t travel. I withdrew … I learned not to meet with people unnecessarily, not to appear in public.” He also learned to buy train tickets directly from corrupt Soviet conductors rather than at rail stations, which were under surveillance. The silence and goodwill of doormen and building superintendents—traditional NKVD or Gestapo stooges—could be purchased with generous bribes. And thanks to his Aryan looks and cavalryman’s mustache, Zuckerman discovered that he could blend in like a chameleon—be Jewish or Gentile, depending on the circumstances.
He was learning clandestine tradecraft on the go, and his growing familiarity with subterfuge was already evident at the big conference he convened in Lvov on December 31, 1939. The date had not been chosen idly. It was New Year’s Eve, a night of parties and celebrations for Russian soldiers, when a gathering of young Jews would attract little attention. Most of the senior NKVD officers would be at a gala at the Opera House, a magnificent Austrian-built music hall whose neo-Renaissance façade was decorated with Italian sculptures and bas-reliefs and crowned with three giant winged angels. Many of the Soviet secret policemen posted in Lvov hailed from Central Asia and had never seen such European delights. Some of their giddy wives paraded in nightgowns up the marble steps of the Opera, mistaking the sleeping garments they had appropriated from Polish noblewomen for ball gowns.
Lvov’s Jewish Quarter stood just behind the Opera, at the tail end of the tree-lined pedestrian promenade that housed some of the city’s top hotels—the George, the Grand, the Napoleon—where rooms were now double- and triple-occupied and the gilded corridors crammed with the overflow cots of Jewish refugees. A third of Lvov’s residents had been Jewish before the war, but their numbers soared from 110,000 to 160,000 by year’s end, so great was the flood of refugees.
Isaac chose to stay away from the Jewish neighborhood when he got to Lvov because it sat on the slope of a small escarpment close to the bars and restaurants frequented by Lvov’s new Soviet masters. The city itself was laid out like a landlocked San Francisco, with steep and meandering cobblestone streets that snaked through topographical districts—Castle Hill, Bare Hill, Sandy Hill, St. George’s Hill, Citadel Hill, Kortum Hill—undulating through Jewish, Armenian, Catholic, Protestant, and Ukrainian neighborhoods.
Lvov, like Vilna, also lay on a volatile geopolitical fault line where empires collided and suppressed ethnic tensions erupted in bloodshed with historical regularity whenever power shifted or one side made a bid to unseat the other. Ukrainians, a minority in the city but a long-suffering majority in the countryside and surrounding regions, took up arms against the Poles as soon as the Nazis entered Poland. Partisan bands attacked and ambushed retreating columns of Polish soldiers and refugees during the September 1939 campaign, and their dreams of independence that had been brutally quashed by the Sanation regime were rekindled.
But as the province was incorporated into the Soviet Union, many dejected Ukrainians sat glumly in their Polish- and Jewish-owned apartments, reflecting bitterly that they had traded one landlord for another. With smoldering resentment, they awaited the next liberator to promise them freedom.
It was in such an unhappy Ukrainian district, on the unfashionable northern edge of Lvov, that Isaac held the conference that formally founded the Labor Zionist Underground. Since the address of the safe house was secret, participants gathered at a café and were taken to the meeting in small groups. Alcohol and snacks were laid out and dance music blared to maintain the outward appearance of a New Year’s Eve party. The fifteen “guests” in attendance represented senior organizers from the main Zionist factions that would eventually form Mapai, or the Labor Party—the dominant political force in Israel until the mid-1970s. Absent from the gathering were representatives of Hashomer Hatzair, the Marxist Zionist group, who declined Zuckerman’s invitation on the grounds that the mainstream Zionist left refused to accept the primacy of Moscow. “They had more faith in the Soviet regime,” Isaac recounted. “We didn’t.” Two other significant Zionist youth organizations, Akiva and Gordinia, both centrist and belonging to the more moderate General Zionists, also passed up invitations, much to Zuckerman’s dismay. The war, thus far, had done little to unite the notoriously quarrelsome Zionists, whose dogmatic disputes could prove baffling to outsiders, like “medieval monastic debates,” as Zuckerman would later concede.
The Lvov Conference, as the faux New Year’s Eve celebration came to be known, laid the foundation for the fragmented Labor Zionists to begin structuring a cohesive underground. Amid toasts and cheers, the Soviet zone was divided into five sectors and group leaders were appointed to run each geographical quadrant. The question of what to do about the more than two million Jews stranded in German-occupied Poland proved more problematic. Many of those present that night had escaped from Warsaw in early September, leaving colleagues behind, and there was a general sense of guilt that their organizations had been left rudderless in the largest Jewish population center—a place where Jews were now most at risk and where leadership was most needed.
That uncomfortable sentiment was prevalent throughout the refugee community and crossed all ideological lines. The young rightist Betar leader Menachem Begin, for instance, in a series of letters penned in Vilna at the time, deflected accusations from fellow right-wing Zionists that in abandoning Warsaw during the siege he had acted “like a captain who had been the first to leave his sinking ship.”
“Do you really believe that I did not have these thoughts?” the future Israeli prime minister responded in a January 1940 letter. “And that before I decided to leave Warsaw, I did not consider and question myself and my friends?” “I will return to Warsaw,” he pledged in another letter the following month, shortly before his arrest by the NKVD and deportation to Siberia.
Likewise, the Bundist Boruch Spiegel, who was still in the Soviet zone, languishing in relative safety while his family faced ever growing hardships in Warsaw, struggled with his conscience. His older brother Berl had decided to return home to Warsaw and was pressuring him to do the same, not just to participate in the Underground but to safeguard their parents and sisters. As a Bundist organizer, Berl was more exposed behind Soviet zone lines than his less active little brother and thus had a stronger incentive to leave. The NKVD was actively hunting Bund leaders on ideological grounds. The Bund was socialist but
staunchly anticommunist, and already co-chairs Victor Alter and Hersh Erlich had been arrested, destined for execution. Perhaps Berl feared arrest as well. Boruch, who was too low in the organization to worry about the NKVD, wanted to stay put. In the end Berl left for Warsaw without Boruch. “We had a fight about it and I’m not ashamed to say that I was too frightened to go.”
The idea also terrified Isaac Zuckerman. “Warsaw under the Nazis scared me to death,” he recalled. “In comparison to the information we were getting from [Warsaw] we were really living in paradise.” A courier had come in the waning days of December 1939 from the beleaguered capital, bearing horror stories of Nazi maltreatment and a plea from rank-and-file activists that someone senior return to start an underground resistance organization for the Zionist left in Warsaw.
That someone, it was decided at the Lvov Conference, would be Zivia Lubetkin, the same person who had been chosen instead of Isaac to attend the 21st Zionist Congress in Geneva the previous summer.
CHAPTER 10
ZIVIA
Zivia Lubetkin and Isaac Zuckerman could not have had more different personalities. While Isaac was gregarious, an extrovert who stood on tables and dominated most meetings he attended, Zivia was naturally shy. To strangers, she could appear “unapproachable,” cold, hard, and “tough” in the words of one old acquaintance, while Isaac played the boisterous bon vivant. But those who knew Zivia well said that her self-possessed standoffish demeanor masked a deep-seated insecurity.
“Introverted and modest” as a child, a family member would later say, she would often “blush and be embarrassed” whenever company arrived. To force young Zivia out of her shell, her family made her stand on a chair and deliver a speech whenever guests came to the house, and though she eventually got over her fear of public speaking, Zivia always preferred to sit in a quiet corner at Zionist gatherings while Isaac talked up a storm. Isaac had always been more of a political animal within the Zionist movement, launching himself into debates and squabbles that Zivia pronounced “unproductive”—the endless chattering of “do-nothings” and “squares,” as she put it.
While Isaac was flamboyant and spontaneous, Zivia was methodical and unwavering. He often changed his mind. She never did. His sense of humor was legend. Hers “bordered on skepticism.” He was a city boy; she was a small-town girl. “Zivia and Isaac only had two things in common,” one of their fellow future combatants later said. “Zionism and alcohol. Both liked to drink. But only Zivia knew how.”
Lubetkin came from a Polish shtetl with a few thousand inhabitants deep in the marshlands of what is today southwestern Belarus. The place was called Bytem, and residing there was “like living on a small Jewish island surrounded by a foreign and alien world of Gentiles.” The Gentiles worked the soggy soil and lived in huts with “straw and mud roofs.” Bytem’s Jews clustered around the only street wired for electricity and made a living as merchants, tradesmen, and legal and medical professionals, servicing the largely illiterate Christian peasantry. “In sociological terms, most of the Jews were middle class,” an Israeli historian described the economic conditions in Zivia’s hometown. “However, this term is relative.”
Like most of Bytem’s Jews, the Lubetkins were far from prosperous, even by the impoverished standards of the Ukrainian, Polish, and Belarussian peasants who subsisted on meager farms in the surrounding swamplands. But Zivia’s father owned a grocery store, and the business did well enough that he was able to send her brother to yeshivas in Vilna and Warsaw, hire a private tutor for her older sisters, and later, at Zivia’s insistence, pay for a younger sister to study in Palestine.
Zivia herself got involved in the Zionist Socialist pioneering movement as a teenager, in a kind of youthful rebellion against the stifling isolation of the shtetl and the social inequalities she witnessed growing up in rural Poland, “where Gentiles did the manual labor while Jews worked in the white-collar professions.”
Like Isaac, she became a full-time activist by her early twenties, helping prepare young Polish Jews for a life on the kibbutzes, the communal farms being established in Palestine. This role involved making public speeches, but while Zivia lacked natural oratorical skills, she possessed an inner strength that won many converts. During one such address, held around a bonfire on the outskirts of a town, a large group of Gentiles descended on the Zionist trainees gathered around Zivia. The Christians heckled the Jews, brandished sticks, and started throwing rocks. Zivia’s trainees fled, and when they gathered together at the Zionist clubhouse in the city they noticed Lubetkin was not there. Fearing that something had happened to her, a few of them went back to the field to look for her. When they reached the site of the bonfire they found Zivia sitting quietly on the same rock where they had left her. They were amazed and asked her: “Tell us, didn’t they do anything to you?” She gave them a piercing stare and said: “I sat and looked them straight in the eye … and they went away.”
Zivia’s nerves were about to be put on trial once more. Tall and imposing, with neat dark hair that she often pulled into a tight bun, she was twenty-five years old in January 1940, when she set out for Warsaw.
Her route took her to the large eastern city of Bialystok, in the Soviet sector, where she had been given the address of a professional smuggler who took groups across a forested stretch of the border in exchange for a fee. A for-profit cottage industry had sprung up there, guiding people through the Soviet-Nazi frontier. It could cost as little as a few zlotys to be rowed in a crowded dory at night across the Bug River. But some smugglers robbed their clients, leading them deep into the woods and stripping them of all their belongings at gunpoint. Though Zivia’s guide was a Gentile, he came highly recommended. The same courier who had come from Warsaw bearing the request for the Labor Zionists to send a senior emissary to the Polish capital had vouched for him.
In Bialystok, Zivia waited at a safe house for her appointed departure. The various Zionist factions were all well represented in the predominantly Jewish city. After a few days, Zivia’s guide made contact. They would leave the following morning. He was also taking a handful of university students across, and together the group boarded a rickety old commuter train to a village near the new border. The students, like many Polish Gentiles, naïvely believed they would be safer in the General Government than under the Communists. While the Poles were afraid of what would happen if the Bolsheviks caught them, Lubetkin “was terrified of what the Germans would do to me.” As they hiked through the snow and pine trees under the cover of darkness, braving temperatures of 13 degrees below zero, Zivia noticed a remarkable change in the students’ behavior. On the Soviet side, they had been polite and respectful, but as dawn approached and they crossed the forested frontier into Nazi territory, their demeanor changed. “It was as if they suddenly remembered that I was a lower being, and that as a Jewess I had to be treated accordingly.”
Lubetkin’s discomfort grew as the group made its frigid way to the first train station inside German territory. It was called Malkinia, and it was located about fifty miles northeast of Warsaw, near a branch in the line that led to a tiny logging station called Treblinka. On the platform, a large crowd was waiting for the locomotive, she recalled. “There were a few Jews cowering in one corner, hoping not to be noticed.” Suddenly a German leaped on them, screaming, kicking, and hitting them in the face. “The platform is for Aryans,” he shouted, brutally shoving them out of the station.
“She’s also a Jew,” someone pointed to Lubetkin, and her heart sank. Zivia’s dark, attractive features were distinctly Semitic; unlike Zuckerman, she would never blend into a Christian crowd. And in Poland, anti-Semitism was sufficiently widespread that in any large crowd there was almost a statistical certainty that at least one individual wished Jews ill.
Zivia gritted her teeth. But she didn’t move. She didn’t budge. She didn’t breathe. She stood her ground, much like the time she had stared down the bullies around the campfire. Just then the train arrived, the throng
pushed forward, and in the rush for seats she managed to board. Lubetkin was safe but deeply shaken, and suddenly unsure of herself now that Warsaw was the next stop. She was a proud woman, accustomed to holding her head high. But from the moment she crossed the border, she felt defeated and drained. “Do I have the strength,” she wondered, “to do this?”
CHAPTER 11
WHY DOES HITLER LIKE MRS. ZEROMSKA?
Good Friday was a national holiday in Poland. Every year, solemn processions led by white-robed altar boys would wend their way past Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak’s sixteenth-century townhouse in Old Town to kneel before the Gothic altar of St. John’s Cathedral, while large crowds bearing candles and religious banners congregated outside the towers of St. Florian’s Basilica, across the Vistula River in Praga.
On March 22, 1940, the ceremonies commemorating the crucifixion of Christ were muted, by Poland’s pious standards. Warsaw’s German masters kept factories working, and the press-gangs that snatched Poles to work as slave laborers in Germany continued, unaffected by spiritual considerations.
Around noon that day, the Bundist Mark Edelman made his way to New Linden Street from the Berson and Bauman Children’s Hospital, where he had taken a job as an orderly. It paid barely enough to buy a few dozen loaves of bread at the nearby Mirowski Market, where food prices had tripled over the harsh winter, along with the value of the U.S. dollar, now trading at thirty times its prewar exchange rate. Most days during his lunch hour Edelman walked the dozen blocks from the hospital to New Linden Street to visit the Bund’s security chief, Bernard Goldstein, a major figure in the earliest incarnations of the Jewish resistance movement.
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