The destitution, growing malnutrition, and resulting health problems among Jews were incremental and therefore not very noticeable for those who had been in Warsaw since the September siege. But for Bundist Boruch Spiegel, who had finally succumbed to his older brother’s pleading letters and returned from the Soviet zone at the beginning of April, the deterioration of the Jewish community was shocking. “I could not face Mama,” he recalled. “My mother was not the same person.” In just over six months, she had gone completely gray. She was listless and stared out the window for hours on end. Boruch’s father had fared only slightly better. He no longer made spats because felt could not be found in Poland. It used to be imported from England, but with the war, the large rolls of material that were shipped from Manchester through the Baltic port of Gdynia became virtually unobtainable. For a while, Boruch’s father had been able to purchase the remaining stocks that wholesalers from Franciscan Street had hoarded, but at prices that became less and less economically viable. He then managed to find alternate suppliers: top hat makers, who also used felt but who no longer had customers since formal wear was not needed under German occupation. By winter’s end, the market for spats had withered as well, as Poles no longer had discretionary income to spend on a relative luxury like shoe covering. Shoes, in fact, had all but disappeared from store shelves because the Germans had appropriated Poland’s entire rubber supply for their military plants. Those sold had wooden soles.
Eventually, Boruch’s father was forced to sell his prized Singer sewing machine, and it was from the proceeds of that machine and from his very meager savings that he was supporting his family. “We could now only afford to eat one decent meal a day. Meat maybe once a week,” Boruch recalled.
For Zionist Zivia Lubetkin, the situation was equally horrifying. Since returning from the Soviet zone in January, Isaac Zuckerman’s fellow activist had focused almost exclusively on promoting the physical well-being of young left-leaning Zionists. “We had to first and foremost provide the hungry with bread and a hot meal,” she recalled. Printing underground newsletters and organizing rallies were not priorities when the teenagers in Zionist youth clubs lacked basic food staples. Poland’s agricultural output, like its coal, was being diverted to Germany, and the official daily food ration allotted to Varsovians totaled 669 calories for “Poles,” 184 calories for Jews, and 2,613 calories for German colonial administrators and their Volksdeutsche collaborators.
Much of the city was subsisting thanks to charitable soup kitchens, and Zivia, with money she had raised in part from the American Joint Distribution Committee, set up a network of free cantinas, where any member of her movement could get a bowl of borscht, some boiled potatoes with a little shmaletz (chicken fat), and, as the weather improved, vegetables she started growing on a large scale in window-ledge planters on rooftops and balconies.
Lubetkin was also deeply shaken by the increasingly violent nature of the German occupation. Labor Zionists had no self-defense force, unlike the Bund or the right-wing Zionists, who had also participated in the street fighting during the Easter pogrom. Realizing she needed able-bodied men to lead such a force, Zivia sent word for Isaac to join her in Warsaw. By then, the Zionist left had refined a system of smuggling people across borders and no longer had to rely exclusively on paid and potentially untrustworthy Gentiles.
Zuckerman’s guide, Yehuda Mankuta, lived in the border town of Zaromb, between Bialystok and Malkinia, where Zivia had crossed over. He specialized in taking refugees from the General Government to the Soviet zone and then to free Lithuania. But this was his first trip going in the opposite direction.
Like Zivia before him, Isaac and his young guide trudged by moonlight through the dense, dark forest, still heavy with the winter’s wet, melting snow. Though Isaac was strong and fit, he could barely keep up with his guide. “I was amazed at Yehuda’s senses: how he would bend down over the ground to listen to rustling; how he knew every tree, every bush. He was shorter and thinner than me. I wanted to stop and rest. But he didn’t let me … I begged him to let me sit down for a minute and he absolutely refused. He kept moving constantly, indefatigably toward the border.”
Barbed wire demarcated the frontier, and Yehuda found a small hole in the fence. “Now the German danger began,” Zuckerman recalled. As they walked on, every house near the boundary lay in charred ruins, as if the Nazis had depopulated the area with flamethrowers.
At the Malkinia train station, Yehuda decided that it would be too dangerous to wait at the platform as Zivia had done. The risk of running into an army patrol or gendarmes was too great. Instead, they asked a Gentile to buy their tickets, and they planned to jump on the moving train as it pulled out of the station from a spot a few hundred yards away on a curve in the track. The only problem was that the Gestapo had its local headquarters at that very spot, which Isaac and Yehuda only discovered as they rounded the corner in pursuit of the moving train. Sure enough, they were spotted. Shots rang out as Isaac grabbed the door handle of the railcar. A Polish railroad worker called out “Throw away your bundle.”
Isaac dropped his bag and pulled himself up into the carriage, lying flat on the floor as more shots were fired. Looking back, he saw bullet holes at the spot where Yehuda’s head had been. His guide was gone. (Yehuda Mankuta would survive the war, emigrate to Israel, and change his surname to Manor.)
As Zuckerman picked himself up off the floor, his heart pounding, sweat running down the small of his back, he asked himself once more the question that had been nagging him ever since he received Zivia’s summons: “Am I willing to do this?”
Isaac Zuckerman’s return to Warsaw was eclipsed by much larger and more significant events. Just before dawn on April 9, 1940, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark. The unprepared Danes surrendered after two hours. The Norwegian forces, after suffering devastating casualties in the opening day of the Blitzkrieg, regrouped in the sparsely populated north of the country and held out for a month, by which time German armored brigades, on May 10, 1940, had rolled into Holland, Belgium, and France.
The Second World War had now begun in earnest. In Warsaw the news was greeted with joy and great hope. Now that the British and French had finally entered the fray, the belief was widespread that Germany would not be able to match the combined firepower of these two military giants. One measure of the growing optimism was the black market value of the dollar. After climbing to 150 zlotys during the harsh winter, it plunged to 90 zlotys in late May on rumors that the first British bombing missions had struck German soil.
Emboldened by the prospects of an Allied victory, the Polish Underground stepped up its sabotage activities, targeting the transport trains that hauled fuel from the Soviet Union to the Third Reich. These crude oil shipments, part of Stalin’s pact with Hitler, transited through the General Government, and the Polish resistance developed an ingenious method of disrupting the deliveries without exposing the Polish public to mass retaliation. A specially prepared chemical was added to the lubricating oil in the grease and gearboxes of locomotives. This was done by Polish workers in rail yards during stops to reload coal. When the trains later broke down, the Germans blamed what they believed was mechanical failure owing to the shoddy design and construction of the Polish- and Soviet-built locomotives. Several hundred trains were disabled in this manner before the Germans caught on to the sabotage and retaliated with a flurry of executions. At the same time, the first Underground courts and execution squads were being created to sentence and eliminate known Polish informers, and a nonviolent campaign to thin the ranks of the equally traitorous Volksdeutsche was launched by sending forged letters to Wehrmacht recruiting offices. “The Führer has awakened in me the consciousness of the German community,” the bogus letters, signed in the name of individual Volksdeutsche, would state. “I cannot continue any longer to stand by while German brothers are heroically dying. I wish to contribute my services to the glorious German army and herewith solicit the privilege of immediate inducti
on into the Wehrmacht.”
As the quality of underground activity improved, a newfound pride and swagger could be perceived in the demeanor of some clandestine operatives. “Their gait and their whole appearance seemed to proclaim to all and sundry, ‘Look, I’m a conspirator,’ ” one partisan recalled. There was a noticeable spike in the defacement of German proclamation posters, particularly of the dreaded red-bordered wanted notices for fugitive conspirators, and walls boasted a proliferation of painted Zs, the Polish first initial of the Union of Armed Struggle, the central underground organization. As for Jewish and Gentile clandestine publications like Mark Edelman’s Bulletin, their total numbers skyrocketed to sixty separate titles by the spring of 1940. The largest of these, Poland Lives, saw its print run soar from six thousand weekly copies in December 1939 to forty thousand by the time the Gestapo arrested its editor in late May 1940.
The rise in resistance activity had not gone unnoticed in Wawel Castle, the towering medieval fortress perched high atop Krakow where Governor General Hans Frank issued orders for an Extraordinary Pacification Action, Nazi newspeak for a terror campaign intended to crush the rebellious spirit of the Poles.
The crackdown coincided with a massive increase in demand for forced laborers. Now that the fighting had resumed in Western Europe, munitions plants, steel mills, and factories producing tanks, aircraft, and all manner of weapons were operating at full tilt and were in constant need of workers. Since racial laws prohibited the shipment of Jews into the Third Reich, labor quotas had to be filled from the ranks of Gentiles. The Arbeitsamt Labor Office, which occupied the former headquarters of the Agricultural Land Credit Bank across the street from Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak’s bookstore, became one of the most feared addresses in Warsaw. It would process some three hundred thousand Varsovian slave laborers in the coming years, most ripped from their families, shaved bald, affixed with a purple P sewn onto their clothes, and sent without warning to distant factories in a foreign country. The German war machine’s appetite for workers was so insatiable that the Nazis took to randomly stopping trains and trams and grabbing every able-bodied man on board from the ages of fourteen to sixty. “Horrifying night,” the Zionist historian Emmanuel Ringelblum noted in his diary on May 8. “At twilight Poles were seized in every street. Jews had their papers checked to make sure they weren’t Christians.”
“Some Poles are beginning to wear Jewish armbands” to avoid deportation to the Reich, another diarist wrote in his journal a few days later. So many Christians were suddenly trying to pass themselves off as Jews that German gendarmes began demanding that anyone wearing a Magen David armband speak Yiddish to prove they were not Gentiles.
The far more feared Gestapo, meanwhile, launched its greatest dragnet to date, arresting tens of thousands of potential resistance members over a six-week period. They targeted lawyers, doctors, journalists—all educated “thought leaders.” In one day alone in May 1940, sixty-five hundred were snatched from their Warsaw homes and places of work. On another single spring day in 1940, the toll in Warsaw alone was three thousand. Fifteen hundred of those unfortunate detainees were herded into the Light Horse Regiment Barracks and Stables near Simha Ratheiser’s house, just south of the Royal Gardens. “Hundreds were lying in the sawdust,” one underground member recalled. “SS men marched up and down with whips in their hands, which they used unsparingly.”
Boruch Spiegel had a prime window, literally, on the wave of terror. His family’s apartment in the Jewish Quarter faced the notorious Peacock Prison, a sprawling tsarist edifice designed in 1835 by Henry Marconi, the same architect who had built Warsaw’s most ornate merchant palaces and bank headquarters during the gilded age of the mid-nineteenth century. The Russians had used the huge structure to lock up rebels and political prisoners, and publisher Jacob Mortkowicz had been among the thousands of pro-independence protesters jailed there prior to World War I. After Poland won its independence, Peacock Prison housed common criminals. Now the Gestapo had taken it over, and an endless stream of black vans and tarpaulin-covered gray trucks raced in and out of its gates delivering suspected resistance members. Outside its barbed wire walls, which spanned an entire city block, Boruch saw huge crowds staring desperately at the six-story prison’s barred windows, hoping to catch a last glimpse of their relatives. “You could hear them calling. ‘I see you, I see you.’ Or ‘I have the papers.’ And from the cell windows, you could hear back, ‘Don’t stay here. Keep moving. I love you.’ ”
It was usually a last glimpse. Of the hundred thousand Poles imprisoned at Peacock (almost all of them Christians), thirty-seven thousand were shot on the spot or at Palmiry, the old ammunition depot just north of Warsaw that had been turned into a killing field, while sixty thousand were shipped to various concentration camps, where half of these also perished.
To deal with the growing flow of political prisoners being funneled through Peacock and other detention centers throughout the General Government, a large new camp two hundred miles south of Warsaw opened in May 1940. It occupied a former military base originally built to quarter Austro-Hungarian troops and stood just outside a small town of twelve thousand inhabitants from which it took its name. The town, like many in southern Poland, was one-third Jewish and had two synagogues, the oldest of which had been built shortly after the arrival of the first Jews to settle there in 1564. The place was called Oswiecim, or in its new, Germanized appellation, Auschwitz.
CHAPTER 13
MARTHA AND ROBERT RUN
In the late spring of 1940, as construction on the walls around the Jewish Quarter quickened, Martha Osnos prepared to be baptized. The Christian cleansing ritual was the final step in obtaining the Gentile travel documents that she and nine-year-old Robert needed for their imminent departure from Poland. Martha had thought of nothing else since her husband, Joseph, contacted her from Bucharest with word that he had arranged a promessa from the Romanian government. A promessa was a diplomatic promissory note guaranteeing the recipient a permanent visa—if the recipient was allowed to get to the issuing country’s nearest embassy. Since Poland no longer legally existed, the nearest Romanian consulate was in Berlin. The promessa thus amounted to a request that German authorities allow the bearer of the note to transit through the Third Reich.
Promessas were rarely granted, and were usually reserved for VIPs or the very rich. Martha had no idea how Joseph had managed to obtain one. In fact, it was through a combination of dumb luck and brazen chutzpah. Since arriving in Bucharest in October 1939, Joe Osnos had focused on earning the money he would need to get his family out of Poland. Just as he had initially made a few dollars trading currencies with evacuees along the Polish-Romanian frontier, he used his salesman’s talent and gift of gab to go into the used car business in Bucharest, where refugees were selling their vehicles to raise funds.
Joe did well enough trading automobiles that with his first big payout, he was able to hire a tailor to make him an expensive suit of high-quality fabric. Osnos had always been a smart dresser in Warsaw, perhaps even somewhat vain about his appearance. Now he had a plan, and for that plan to succeed, he needed to make a strong first impression.
Looking like an oligarch in his new suit, Joseph marched confidently into the Polish embassy in Bucharest and managed to procure (perhaps through a discreet donation) a difficult-to-obtain note verbale formally recommending that the Romanian Foreign Ministry assist him in obtaining exit visas for his family. Armed with the all-important note verbale, his fluent French, and a determined, arrogant attitude that matched his finely tailored clothing, Joe Osnos then bluffed his way into the Romanian Foreign Ministry, past gruff security guards and through several layers of protective secretaries, into what he thought was the office of the head of the visa department. But in fact Joe had been too convincing in his displays of self-importance, and he found himself face-to-face with the foreign minister himself. Taken aback by the intrusion, Romania’s top diplomat politely but coolly informed Joseph that he wa
s in the wrong office, and called an assistant to remove him. “Another elegant secretary took Joseph to the right place and explained that ‘Monsieur le Ministre’ was sending Mr. Osnos,” Martha later explained in her unpublished journal. “That was understood as ‘Mr. Osnos is recommended by Monsieur le Ministre,’ and the visas were granted at once. No place in the world thrived on bribery like prewar Romania,” she added. “No friends, no fellow refugees in Bucharest would believe that only sheer luck helped in this endeavor.”
Joe’s unexpected coup, however, still obliged Martha to procure a passport and emigration permits from the German authorities, a nerve-racking process that took months and required large sums of money. A shadowy network of intermediaries and charlatans occupied this fraud-ridden niche, and Martha fell prey to one particularly odious document fixer in Warsw who claimed to have connections with the Gestapo. “He looked like Mephisto himself,” she recalled. “Tremendous black eyebrows, everlasting little smile, very well dressed in Tyrolean hat and camel hair coat. He would come every few days assuring me that everything is proceeding fine.”
To pay for Mephisto’s services, Martha rented her apartment to a prosperous family of assimilated Jews who had fled from Western Poland. The influx of refugees from Western Poland, which had been incorporated directly into the Reich and was being systematically depopulated, had swollen Warsaw’s Jewish population from 357,000 in October 1939 to just under 400,000 by mid-1940, and many of the new Jewish arrivals sought out flats in predominantly Gentile neighborhoods, which seemed safer than the Jewish Quarter. For one, there was a far smaller chance of being attacked by pogromists. And the labyrinth of walls being erected around the Quarter made daily life there increasingly inconvenient. By June 1940, after several months of construction, twenty sections of the ten-foot-high barrier had been completed. Some parts were only strung in wire; some were still theoretical, plans on paper. At other points, like the area between New Linden and Forestry Boulevard, the wall meandered unpredictably so that going to a store directly across the street now required a five-block detour. Traversing from Mushroom Street, where Simha Ratheiser had attended high school, to neighboring Electoral Avenue necessitated exiting through one gate and reentering through another, adding twenty minutes to what was otherwise a few minutes’ walk.
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