On his way to Goldstein’s, Edelman cut through tiny False Street, which was aptly named since it zigzagged confusingly through a warren of back alleys linking the neon-lit department stores of Forestry Street to the far quieter New Linden, where he passed the elegant Hotel Britannia. The hotel had been eminently respectable before the war, hosting traveling representatives of the big textile mills in Lodz, salesmen from foundries in Radom, and metals traders from Silesia. But German officers had turned it into a brothel. The sound of their merriment carried for blocks in the evenings, as the curfew requiring Varsovians to stay indoors after 9 P.M. plunged the city into an eerie silence, interrupted only by bursts of German mirth.
Each day, Edelman brought Goldstein food, cigarettes, and news, and collected messages and instructions to relay to other activists, since Goldstein had to lie low owing to his particular duties within the Jewish Labor Union, as the Bund was formally known in Yiddish.
In Bundist circles, Goldstein was an icon. He was the closest thing the Jewish Labor Union had to a defense minister, and he had run the Bund’s “black ops” before the war. It was largely because of him that the thugs from violent fascist fringe groups like the ONR, the Falanga, or the notorious Sword and Ploughmen—the prewar equivalent of skinheads—had never dared to cross Count Krasinski Park and the Saxon Gardens, the border in Warsaw between the Jewish and Gentile districts. It was Goldstein, a large and gruff forty-nine-year-old trade union boss with connections to the underworld, who organized special units of burly Jewish porters, Poland’s Teamsters, to disrupt fascist demonstrations. And it was Goldstein, a survivor of many bouts of fisticuffs, evidenced by the long scar etched on one cheek, who was said to have been behind the series of mysterious explosions that rocked the offices of anti-Semitic organizations in Warsaw in the late 1930s. He had been jailed many times for his union activities, and his escape from a Siberian prison camp had further enhanced his reputation. To young Bundists like Edelman and Spiegel he was a living legend. “We worshipped him,” Boruch said.
The Bund’s security chief rarely ventured outdoors, for fear of being spotted by the Gestapo or its henchmen in the hated Polish Blue Police, a puppet force formed by the Nazis. Goldstein had grown a thick tangled beard to disguise his appearance, and he passed the time playing cards, often with Abrasha Blum and other Bund central committee members. Sometimes, if they were missing a fourth, the Bund bosses would invite their brash errand boy to play with them, an honor that Edelman deeply cherished since he considered himself “a nobody and they were great men.”
Mark had known the security chief since childhood, when he had played with his son, and the two boys used to steal Goldstein’s cigarettes and smoke them on the balcony when he wasn’t around. Over the years, the admiration grew to verge on hero worship, with Mark praising Goldstein’s “lightning reflexes and good nature” and a sense of humor “that masked steely nerves and courage.”
On Good Friday 1940, a sunny but chilly day with frost still icing much of Warsaw, Goldstein’s lunch-hour card game was interrupted by reports of disturbances two blocks east on Banker’s Square. The Square, near Saxon Gardens, at the foot of Cordials Avenue, had been a traditional demarcation line between Jewish and Gentile neighborhoods. A band of hoodlums was attacking people at random in Banker’s Square, screaming that the Jews had killed Christ. They started looting stores, smashing windows, and chasing Jewish shopkeepers, who were easy to identify because all Jewish property in Warsaw now had to be clearly marked with white hand-painted Juden placards. Businesses throughout the Jewish district quickly shuttered their storefronts as word of the disturbances spread. The Good Friday rampage did not set off panic at Bund headquarters, since Goldstein was no stranger to violent confrontations with anti-Semitic mobs. Before the war, his militias had developed an ingenious weapon to deal with such thugs: a series of spring-loaded small pipes that telescoped outward at the push of a button to form a long steel truncheon. The Bund’s fascist opponents also had a prewar weapon of choice—a wood board attached to the thigh just above the knee and studded with razor blades. A kick from it would slice up victims.
The following Monday it became clear that Good Friday had not been a one-off incident. The looters and rioters returned in greater force—one eyewitness put their numbers at around a thousand—and the attacks spread to the neighboring Forestry, Mushroom, and Dragon Streets, to Iron Gate Square and Haberdasher’s Row, and as far west as Cool and Wolska Streets. Once more Jewish residents fled indoors, barricading themselves in their apartments and cellars. Stores whose front windows were not protected by retractable metal grille curtains were pillaged, as roving bands of club-wielding youths shouted “Kill the Jews” and tried to force their way into people’s homes.
The Blue Police stood passively by while the attacks gained momentum, intervening only when a Jewish victim got the upper hand on his Gentile assailant. Most Varsovians also turned a blind eye to the brutality, with the notable exception of Polish intellectuals, who, according to the historian Yisrael Gutman, were “enraged by the pogrom in March, and especially by the fact that it was perpetrated by a mob of Poles.”
Exactly who made up this mob became more evident when German army buses were seen delivering large groups of ruffians to the edge of the Jewish Quarter, many of whom were later spotted lining up to receive money from laughing men in Luftwaffe uniforms. Edelman quickly deduced that Germans were recruiting thugs from “the fringe elements of Polish society,” busing them into Banker’s Square, and paying them four or five zlotys to beat up Jews.
Once the Bund learned that it was dealing with many of its old prewar skinhead adversaries, Bernard Goldstein sprang into action and quickly rounded up his former militiamen. “The guys in the Bund’s Self-Defense Force were not shrinking violets,” Mark recalled. “They were strong, strapping lads: porters and water carriers, and the coal men from Bird Street. Armed with long pikes from their hand wagons and stout clubs, they had been more than a match for the ONRites before the war.”
The acronym stood for Oboz Narodowo-Radykalny, or the Radical Nationalist Camp. The extremist group had been founded at the height of the Great Depression, on a platform of eliminating all Jews, liberals, communists, and homosexuals from Slavic society. Their message was so hateful that Joseph Pilsudski, the centrist war hero who had defeated Stalin, had banned the nascent fascist party and thrown its leaders in jail when he seized power. After Pilsudski’s death in 1935, when the Sanation regime shifted dramatically rightward, the ONR’s founders were quietly released from prison, and their activities had been tolerated as an outlet for social unrest among disaffected urban youth. It was the young and mostly unemployed ONRites, predominantly poor and poorly educated, who had attacked Jewish students at the University of Warsaw in 1937 and thrown bricks through Jewish-owned storefronts in 1938, threatening shoppers who dared enter. It was the Falangists and other ONR bully-boys, with their distinctive green armbands depicting a truncated swastika pierced by a sword, that Goldstein’s teamsters had beaten to a pulp in a famous 1938 brawl on Banker’s Square. And now they were back, spoiling for revenge.
The Bund’s Self-Defense Force started to prepare. “We decided to fight back with ‘cold weapons’—iron pipes and brass knuckles, but not with knives and firearms,” Goldstein recalled, since any deaths resulting from the defenders’ actions would almost certainly bring collective punishment on the Jewish community. “Every fighting contingent was mobilized—slaughterhouse workers, transport workers, party members. We organized them into three groups.”
Just before curfew, the detachments were discreetly deployed to different spots, a tactic Goldstein had used successfully in the past to make his units seem more numerous and omnipresent. Boruch Spiegel’s older brother Berl, who had returned to Warsaw from the Soviet zone following their dispute in December, was among those lying in wait for the Polish thugs.
“When the pogromists appeared in these sections on the following morning, they were su
rprised to find our comrades waiting for them. A bloody battle broke out immediately. Ambulances rushed to carry off wounded pogromists. Our own wounded were hidden and cared for in private homes to avoid their arrest by Polish or German police,” Goldstein recalled. “The battle kept shifting to various parts of the city. Our organized groups were joined spontaneously by other workers. In the Wola district, our comrades received help from non-Jewish Socialist workers to whom we had appealed for aid. Many Christians tried to persuade the pogromists to stop,” Goldstein added. “Many Jews, afraid of the dangers of ‘collective responsibility,’ tried to keep us from hitting back.”
Fighting that day lasted until just before curfew and resumed the next morning, though the Polish fascists appeared less numerous and seemed to have lost some of their enthusiasm now that someone was striking back. Four or five zlotys apparently were not worth the risk of having one’s head split open by a burly slaughterhouse worker, and by 1 P.M. the Blue Police, perhaps sensing the shifting tide of battle, dispersed the combatants. The pogrom ended on March 29, as abruptly as it had begun.
Miraculously, no one was reported killed during the weeklong assault on the Jewish district, and the feared German retaliation for this first act of physical Jewish resistance never materialized.
The Osnoses, their cousins the Mortkowiczes, and Simha Ratheiser’s family had not been affected by the Easter pogrom, since they all lived in predominantly Catholic neighborhoods. But they were all subject to another, equally perfidious form of German persecution during the winter and spring of 1940.
Ratheiser’s facial wounds had healed by then, and only a small scar remained from the wood splinter that had pierced his neck when his apartment building collapsed. Fortunately for the Ratheisers, Zvi’s store had been unscathed during the siege, and the family could still earn a living. Warsaw’s economy had been devastated, contracting by an estimated 40 percent as a result of the war. Some 270,000 men and 63,470 women had lost their jobs. Electricity, when it was finally restored, was available only on alternating days, so that one side of the street had it on Monday while the other side received it on Tuesday, because the Germans had cut Warsaw’s coal deliveries in half in order to power their own industries. Hyperinflation raged and “young men of land-owning families,” as one observer noted, “were sweeping the streets in fox-fur caps and bearskin fur coats reaching down to their ankles,” while society women worked as waitresses and students stood on street corners selling used clothes.
Simha’s family had thus far escaped the worst of this economic cataclysm, thanks to his father’s store. It occupied a small stand-alone structure only a few yards from the ruins of their former home, near the elegant military stables where officers kept their parade horses, and Zvi had been able to reopen it in October. The shop was what was known in Polish as a mylnia, a type of general hardware store popular before the war, where people could buy all manner of household goods: paraffin lamps and kerosene, small ladders and lightbulbs, cleaning solvents and shaving cream. The store itself was not big, less than a thousand square feet, and Zvi Ratheiser ran it alone. Until the invasion, Simha’s mother, Miriam, a beautiful blue-eyed blonde, had her own business arranging credit lines and layaway plans for the wives of the senior Polish officers who lived in a nearby colony of luxurious villas reserved for colonels and generals. She was quite successful, Simha recalled: “I think she made more money than Father.”
Simha was much closer to his mother, from whom he had inherited his fair good looks. She was more of a free spirit than his remote, orthodox dad. She was also far more integrated into the wider Polish society, with many Gentile friends in the neighborhood, and she spoke accent-free Polish. In fact, on occasions when she relieved Simha’s father behind the cash register, customers would sometimes lower their voice and ask how such an attractive Polish girl could have married an Orthodox Jew. Miriam’s response, that she, too, was Jewish, would astonish the customers, who remained fond of her nonetheless. It was possibly largely due to Miriam’s high standing in the community that Zvi’s store was never looted or harassed by the likes of the ONR.
“We were not rich, but we were comfortable,” Simha recalled. The family employed a Gentile housekeeper, and they managed to hold on to a semblance of their prewar middle-class existence. Everything changed, however, the day a Volksdeutsche walked into the store. The Volksdeutsche were ethnic Germans living outside the Third Reich. They were scattered throughout central Europe and the Baltic states, and as far east as central Asia. In Poland there were several million individuals of German descent, residing mostly in the western territories that Germany annexed directly in 1939. Most had been Polonized and considered themselves Polish patriots, but a small minority had signed a loyalty oath to Hitler after the Nazi invasion, volunteering to act as the spearhead of a larger German colonization program in the captured lands. Some hundred thousand Polish Volksdeutsche were now doing the bidding of the Nazis within the boundaries of the General Government, and one of them was at Zvi Ratheiser’s door. “He was a Treuhander,” Simha said of the ethnic German.
The Treuhandstelle Ost, or Main Economic Trustee Office East, as the institution was formally known, was the invention of Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, and its stated purpose was to confiscate Polish property. The Nazi agency was already fully operational in the western part of Poland, where it had seized 112,000 small businesses, 9,120 large enterprises, 76,000 small artisan shops, 9,000 medium-sized factories, and 216 large industrial concerns such as power plants, steel mills, and coal mines.
The Treuhandstelle was now setting up shop in the General Government, and Simha’s father’s store was about to become another statistical entry in its bloated ledgers. “The Volksdeutsche demanded the keys, and that was that.” Ratheiser shrugged. In an instant, the business his father had built up over the years was taken away by a complete stranger. Shock set in first, then resignation, then fear. How would the Ratheiser family live? Where would money for food, clothes, rent, and heating coal come from?
The same anguished questions were being posed by owners of thousands of expropriated businesses across Warsaw. According to prewar commercial records, 57.5 percent of all medium-sized and small enterprises and 40 percent of large industrial concerns in the capital were Jewish-owned, including the city’s largest employer, automotive giant and GM licensee Lilpop, Rau & Lowenstein. Its Chevrolet plant, one of the largest in Europe, was now officially rechristened Hermann Goering Works in honor of the architect of the mass theft.
Publisher Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak’s bookstore also bore a new German name: A. Zeromski Buchhandlung und Antiquariat. But the shop had not really changed hands. Hanna had refused to give it up and had shrewdly exploited a provision in the Treuhandstelle regulations that allowed Gentiles to keep their businesses. At the behest of Janine, her strong-willed mother, she had arranged to put the store in the name of a trusted friend, the widow of Poland’s most popular writer, Stephen Zeromski. Jacob Mortkowicz had discovered him, nurtured his talent, and helped turn him into a Polish Hemingway. Along the way, the two families became very close, and now Zeromski’s widow volunteered to repay those former acts of kindness.
Five-year-old Joanna, however, didn’t understand her mother and grandmother’s subterfuge and reacted furiously. “I didn’t realize that Mrs. Zeromska was really saving our lives, ensuring that we would have money to survive,” she recalled seventy years later, sitting at a table in her family’s old bookstore, now a high-end martini bar filled with yuppies and leggy waitresses. “At the time I kept screaming, ‘It’s our store, give it back! Why does Hitler like Mrs. Zeromska better than Grandma?’ ”
Joanna’s cousin Robert would not remember what happened to his father’s appliance factory. But it did not matter, because his mother, Martha, had finally heard from his father. Joe Osnos was safe in Bucharest, Romania. And he was arranging exit visas for his son and wife. All at once, it dawned on Robert that his father had not abandoned them in September 1
939, as he had recently begun to fear. Robert, like Joanna, had been too young to comprehend adult machinations. “I didn’t understand why he left us behind,” he recalled. “And I had been hurt by it.” But all along, Joe Osnos had had a plan.
“We are going to get out,” he recalled his mother’s joyful shout after receiving the doubly good news. “We are going to leave Poland.”
CHAPTER 12
AM I WILLING TO DO THIS?
On the morning of April 1, 1940, workers began excavating a series of long trenches around the Jewish Quarter. Large poster boards were erected along these earthworks, warning Seuchensperrgebeit, or Area Threatened by Typhus. The signs depicted a skeletal image of an old and stereotypically Semitic face crawling with hairy, oversized lice.
The new trench excavations were foundations for a series of walls “to protect Jews against Polish excesses,” like the Good Friday riots, the Germans explained to stunned Jewish officials. Christians were given another explanation for the need to wall off the Jewish neighborhood. Jews were “spreaders of diseases,” Warsaw’s chief Nazi physician, Dr. Kurt Schrempf, announced. “For sanitary reasons, their district has to be cut off from the rest of the city.”
The first cases of typhus in Warsaw were reported in December 1939: 88 among Jews and 5 among non-Jews. By February the numbers had increased to 214 among Jews while remaining steady at 5 among non-Jews. By April 1940, 407 Jews had contracted typhus versus 28 cases among Christians, who constituted 72 percent of the city’s population and historically had a life expectancy that ranged between 7.5 years and a full decade less than their traditionally healthier Jewish neighbors.
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