Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Life in the Jewish Quarter also involved the constant specter of delousing baths, and their attendant financial costs, which the Nazis now used as the latest means of shaking down the Jewish community. In the name of disease prevention Jews were routinely required to be deloused—or pay bribes not to be deloused—a humiliating process that often involved public nudity.

  So Martha had little difficulty finding willing tenants in her Gentile neighborhood. The problem was that the tenant family had moved in with the expectation that she would soon be leaving the country. But as Mephisto’s excuses became increasingly improbable, living conditions became increasingly difficult. “One kitchen, one bathroom, and all those people just waiting for me to leave.”

  Finally, Martha’s patience ran out and she went to Mephisto’s house to confront him about the lack of progress with her documentation. “[His] home was one room in an otherwise empty and bombed-out apartment: A straw sack in one corner, a string with drying socks and underwear across the room, one chair where the camel hair coat and Tyrolian hat were hanging.” Mephisto was a con man. He had no connections with the Gestapo, and had simply been pocketing Martha’s money.

  Ironically, it was Martha’s increasingly impatient tenants who turned out to have connections to the authorities. “By a miracle,” she recalled, “they discovered that a cousin of theirs was married to a German girl.” He was able to use his influence to get Martha her passport and travel permit. Now all Martha needed was two contradictory documents. To leave Poland, she needed a certificate stipulating that she had paid her emigration dues to the Jewish Community Council; and to transit through Germany, she needed written proof that she was not Jewish, since Jews could not travel on trains or enter the Reich. This Kafkaesque pair of transactions was accomplished first at the Judenrat, the German-appointed governing body in the Jewish Quarter, and then at a small private chapel, where in exchange for a few zlotys Martha was sprinkled with holy water and baptized Irene.

  By June 5, 1940, as German forces outflanked the vaunted Maginot Line and advanced on Paris, Martha Osnos had circumvented the final bureaucratic barrier to her departure. Emigrants from the General Government were permitted to take only a few clothes and ten Reichsmarks with them when they left the colony. Martha had jewelry that she would later need to sell to finance her travels, including a 1.5 carat diamond engagement ring. While she would never leave something so valuable behind, she was afraid of being searched and arrested for smuggling at the border. So she invited customs officers over to her apartment for a private viewing. Such prescreenings were common during the corrupt Nazi occupation, and always accompanied by gifts. “I prepared a lot of vodka Wyborowa [the premium brand made by the huge Konesser plant in Praga], pickles and kielbasa, set the table and packed my few possessions,” Martha recalled. “Everything went very well.” The stuffed and pickled customs men happily stamped and sealed her suitcase, obligingly leaving a narrow slit through which she slid her jewels.

  On Sunday, June 9, 1940, the day before the French government evacuated Paris and Italy declared war on Britain and France, Martha and Robert Osnos bade a tearful farewell to Janine, Hanna, and little Joanna Mortkowicz and boarded their train to Berlin.

  “Berlin was full of sunshine, flowers, decorated with flags,” Martha recalled of the German capital, so starkly confident and well kept in comparison to occupied Warsaw. Martha had an elderly uncle in Berlin who had just taken a much younger wife. He lived in the upscale district of Wilmesdorf-Charlottenburg, in the western part of the city not far from the Olympic Stadium built for the 1936 Games. Many Jews used to reside in Wilmesdorf, which was known for its cafés, cabarets, and rich cultural life. Most had fled, however, by the time Martha and Robert arrived at Uncle Mendel’s door in the summer of 1940. Mendel remained because his new bride “didn’t want to part with her lovely apartment, grand piano and oriental rugs,” Martha recalled. “Just a few weeks prior to my arrival she had had face-lifting by surgery, which was rather amazing considering the circumstances.”

  The welcome Martha and Robert received from their relatives was frosty. “I’m sorry to say that the stay in Berlin was painful and difficult mostly because of the lady of the house,” Martha would later comment in her unpublished journal. “She wanted to know if I had brought enough food with me to last through the few days I was supposed to stay.”

  That Warsaw was being starved to feed Berlin had apparently been lost on Mendel’s pampered wife, who examined the few boiled eggs Martha had packed in Poland with evident disdain. Martha was stunned by the pettiness of her relatives, but she was even more worried about the reception she would get from Romanian officials. Romania, after all, was an openly anti-Semitic state, and its government, though professing neutrality, enjoyed friendly relations with the Third Reich.

  To Martha’s surprise and relief, Romanian consular officials proved gracious and accommodating. “The Romanian consul with whom I spoke French was charming and helpful. He knew immediately that I was Jewish.”

  The promised visas were ready and issued without delay. Perhaps Joseph Osnos’s accidental brush with the foreign minister had expedited the process. The Romanian consul chivalrously announced that he would treat Martha as his “special protégée.”

  Martha and Robert’s Romanian travel documents were all in order. But to get to Bucharest they needed to cross Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav authorities were not issuing transit visas to Jews. Not a problem, Martha’s new diplomatic protector declared gallantly. He called his counterparts at the Yugoslav embassy and assured them over the phone that Martha was Catholic, winking at her “humorously at the same time.”

  Martha and Robert’s Polish passports now held Yugoslav transit stamps. All that remained was to purchase a pair of train tickets with the money Joseph had wired from Bucharest. Martha thought their troubles were over. But when she and Robert went to a Berlin travel agency to inquire about the tickets, an unexpected and potentially serious accounting problem arose: “You couldn’t have brought money from Poland for your ticket,” the German travel agent said suspiciously. All Poles, including Gentiles, were allowed to take no more than ten marks out of the General Government, and Martha feared that the travel agent suspected that she was either a runaway slave laborer, or, worse, a Jew. Either way he would call the Gestapo. “My husband deposited the money for me with the Romanian consul,” Martha lied in a panic. “I will know,” the nosy German snapped, reaching for the phone.

  “This is the end,” Martha whispered to Robert in Polish. “The consul will never say he has the money for me.” The chivalrous Romanian not only vouched for Martha, but he also offered to give the suspicious travel agent a letter to that effect and to wire the funds personally.

  Martha’s euphoria that the Romanian consul had unexpectedly backed her story soon turned to concern. She needed to reimburse him for the tickets, but she had only ten marks. Other than her smuggled jewelry, she was without means. The money Joseph Osnos had wired her from Bucharest for tickets had apparently been lost or stolen in transit. Reluctantly, Martha turned for help to her uncle Mendel, who only weeks earlier had paid for his wife’s cosmetic surgery. “There is a war on, money is scarce,” her uncle responded.

  Martha exploded. She threatened to humiliate Mendel in front of all his neighbors by screaming from the balcony that he was a miser. She would make a scene at the afternoon tea party his haughty wife was organizing. She would never let either of them live down this uncharitable moment. Uncle Mendel grudgingly lent her the fare—albeit only for the cheapest possible seats and on the condition that Joseph Osnos repay him via bank transfer the moment Martha landed in Bucharest.

  Thirty-six hours later, having bade farewell to “poor uncle,” whom they would never see again, Martha and Robert were in a crowded train compartment full of working-class Germans. Martha’s nerves were frayed, her emotions swaying between relief and resentment.

  But her belief in humanity was soon restored. “In the evening we
went to the dining car, and when I asked for one mark worth of food for my child, they brought two full dinners, and refused even that one mark.” At the Yugoslav border, “Robert was promptly sick all over the white uniform of the customs officer.” The food and the fright had taken its toll on the boy’s digestive system. But they were safely out. “We left Germany!”

  Near Zagreb, while transiting through Yugoslavia, Martha found herself once more the beneficiary of generosity. Other passengers gave Robert chocolates and cookies and bought enough snacks for them at the Zagreb station to last through the rest of the journey. The Balkan hospitality continued at the Romanian checkpoint, where Martha wanted to send Joseph a message announcing her impending arrival. “I couldn’t find a telegraph office at the frontier station so I asked one of the officials who [spoke] some French whether he could somehow send a telegram for me.” Martha had saved her last five marks for this purpose, and she was surprised when one of the border guards refused the money but agreed to wire ahead nonetheless.

  Martha had no idea whether the Romanian border guard would keep his promise and cable ahead to Joe. As the train pulled into Bucharest, she scanned the crowds anxiously for her husband. Nearly ten months had passed since she had seen him last. Had he changed? Had he aged? Had he lost any of his swagger and supreme self-confidence? Robert, too, stuck his head out the third-class compartment window, straining for a glimpse of his towering father. And there he stood, tall, tanned, resplendent in a tailored suit, waving a bouquet of white roses.

  The Osnoses, at long last, were together again. But their troubles were far from over. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, Martha began to realize what Joseph already knew: They were stuck in Romania—a nation flirting with joining Hitler’s cause—with nowhere to go. By autumn 1940, thousands of other Jewish refugees shared their plight, desperately trying to arrange immigration and transit visas to virtually any country that would take them: India, Brazil, Australia, Palestine, Canada.

  The United States was notably not among the prime destinations, in spite of being every European refugee’s first choice. The United States in 1940 had closed its doors on immigration in general and on Jewish refugees in particular. The very month that Martha had arrived in Bucharest, Breckenridge Long, the assistant secretary of state in charge of visa policies, had issued a classified interdepartmental memo that outlined how U.S. diplomats could circumvent their own government’s immigration quotas. “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”

  Jews were singled out by Long’s office as a potential threat to U.S. national security. “The Department received information from reliable confidential sources indicating that the Gestapo is using the Jewish Refugee Organization HICEM in getting their agents into the United States.… It is suggested that any application for visas of persons to whom this information applies be examined in the light thereof.”

  Because of Breckenridge Long’s policies, the number of Jewish immigrants to the United States fell from 43,450 in 1939, to 23,737 in 1941, to 10,608 the following year, and 4,705 in 1943—a roughly tenfold decrease. Among those whose visa requests were “postponed and postponed” was a Dutch applicant by the name of Otto Frank. Unable to wait, he and his family were forced to go into hiding in Amsterdam, where his daughter Anne began keeping a diary.

  Martha and Joseph Osnos also could not afford to wait indefinitely. Romania was rapidly changing. It was still nominally neutral in the summer of 1940, but its territory was being systematically carved up by Hitler and Stalin, and its weak monarch, King Carol II, was under increasing pressure to join the German alliance or find his country partitioned like Poland. In July, the Soviets took most of Bessarabia and Bukovina in the east—provinces that would become modern-day Moldova. Tightening the screws, Hitler cut off half of Transylvania in the north, awarding it to Hungary, and ceded large swaths of Carol II’s southernmost territory to Bulgaria.

  By September 1940, the Romanian king was forced to abdicate in favor of a pro-Nazi regime that included senior ministers from the virulently anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Martha and Joseph, still without travel documents, helplessly watched as Romania’s new fascist rulers passed decree after decree discriminating against Jews. Within a month, half a million German troops were stationed on Romanian soil. In late November 1940, Romania formally joined the Axis powers.

  For Martha, Robert, and Joseph Osnos, time had run out. They either had to flee immediately or risk being trapped in Nazi-controlled Romania.

  CHAPTER 14

  HANNA AND JOANNA HIDE

  In late fall 1940, as time was running out for the Osnoses in Bucharest, Warsaw’s Jewish community braced for the dreaded announcement that a fully enclosed ghetto would permanently separate Jews and Gentiles. In anticipation of the formal declaration, Isaac Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin, and several hundred other young Zionists huddled together in a clandestine conference.

  The meeting took place at Isaac’s headquarters at 34 Valiant Street, on the other side of the Peacock prison from Boruch Spiegel’s apartment, opposite “Serbia,” the huge jail’s southwestern section reserved for female prisoners. Officially, the Valiant Street premises housed one of the soup kitchens Zivia had established. In reality, the distribution of free daily meals provided a perfect cover for conspiratorial meetings and an illegal school.

  “Nowhere else but Valiant Street could we seat forty people for classes,” Zuckerman proudly recalled. By classes, he meant high school courses complete with grades and exams and eventually graduation diplomas. Almost all of Poland had moved its educational system underground, to circumvent Nazi edicts that capped formal learning for Gentiles at the sixth grade and banned schooling entirely for Jews. Doctorates, high school diplomas, medical degrees, law and engineering certificates were all still being issued in basements and abandoned factories. The price of this continuing education was paid with the lives of 274 teachers and faculty members tracked down and shot by the Gestapo. But that didn’t stop Isaac from holding classes on September 1, 1940, a date that marked not only the traditional commencement of the school year but also the first anniversary of the German invasion of Poland. Enrollment quickly grew to 120 pupils, and the entire operation was financed through the care packages sent by Labor Zionists in free Vilna—sausages, coffee, chocolate, and canned goods that were resold on the black market.

  In the early evenings, before the 9 P.M. curfew, the classrooms at Valiant Street turned into training centers for activists from Lublin, Kielce, Krakow, and smaller towns in the General Government. “Holding a seminar next door to Peacock [prison] held an air of the romantic,” Zuckerman recalled. “Our guards were stretched out on the balcony, and informed us if Germans passed by.”

  The seminars served not only to coordinate future activity between cells in various cities and towns, but also to disseminate information and establish policy. This particular meeting was important because it was the first time that the Marxist Hashomer Hatzair (“Young Guard” in Hebrew) had agreed to joint discussions with Zuckerman’s Socialist faction. The Young Guard had five hundred members in Warsaw, while Isaac had eight hundred. Together, Isaac proposed, they could be a formidable force. The unification talks were held on October 12, 1940, which fell on Yom Kippur. “Our dining room on Valiant was packed,” Zuckerman recalled. “They were sitting on top of one another and on the floor.” At a particularly contentious stage of the discussions, when German intentions were being debated, a courier burst into the room. “A ghetto,” she cried. Loudspeakers outside—the so-called Barkers affixed to lampposts—had just announced the decision. By month’s end, every Jew in Warsaw would be required to move into the walled district.

  There was no longer any discu
ssion about German intentions. “They intend to starve us,” Zivia Lubetkin declared.

  As the deadline for all Jews to relocate into the Ghetto approached, the city of Warsaw plunged into chaos. A fifth of the capital’s population—113,000 Gentiles and 138,000 Jews—had been served with eviction notices and sent packing. The massive dislocation clogged streets and back alleys and created impassable traffic jams along all the main arteries leading in and out of the condemned Jewish district.

  Every rickshaw, taxi, truck, and horse-drawn cart in the city had been hired for the mandatory move, and peasants from distant farms drove their wagons to Warsaw, lured by the exorbitant prices they could charge to transport household goods. Their fees rose daily, then hourly, as the October 31 deadline loomed. Technically, only Gentiles could remove all their belongings. For Jews, a complex set of guidelines limited what could be taken: a fifty-kilogram suitcase for each adult and a thirty-kilo bag for each child, one woolen blanket per person, food and drink for several days, and cooking implements. Those vacating their apartments had to ensure that “a) Open fires are to be extinguished; b) Water and gas supply is to be turned off; c) Electrical fuses are to be disconnected; and d) The keys to the apartment are to be tied together and provided with a tie-on label with the name, city, street, and number of the house of the owner.”