Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The trade in apartments reached such a frenzy that the Germans were forced to extend the relocation deadline to November 15. People frantically searched classified ads and notice boards for any sort of last-minute accommodations. “Reliable, discreet mediation in the exchange of all types of apartments in the Aryan district and behind the walls,” the A.S. Consulting Company advertised in the New Courier, inviting customers to visit their offices at 26 New Grodzka Street, Suite 1.

  All this rendered the real estate market anything but free and unfettered. For crooks and unsavory speculators—the same shady operators who had shaken down war widows and tried to swindle women whose husbands were in POW camps—opportunities for quick profits were nearly boundless. Jews owned 40 percent of what was described as “Category A” property in Warsaw, the best buildings in the choicest locations. Now, on pain of imprisonment, they had to swap their dwellings for dingy walk-ups in the working-class sections of the ghetto being vacated by Gentiles.

  Simha Ratheiser recalled the shock of seeing his new living arrangements for the first time. “It was terrible,” he said of the apartment his father had sublet on St. George’s Street, in the northeastern quadrant of the Ghetto opposite Count Krasinski Park, which was now walled off, its chestnut trees and white gravel paths visible only through the barbed wire coils that capped the red brick dividing barrier. “It was tiny, and dark,” he remembered. “There was one room for all of us.”

  Statistically, the Ratheisers fared slightly better than most Ghetto residents. There were five of them—Simha, his parents, and two sisters—sharing a bedroom, which was one and a half fewer occupants per room than the new Ghetto average. Already four hundred thousand people, and eventually nearly half a million, would be squeezed into the Ghetto’s 730 livable acres. As a comparison, in neighboring Jolie Bord, a northern middle-class enclave favored by intellectuals, fifty thousand inhabitants were spread out over an area more than twice that size. In Wola—the big blue-collar district just west of the Ghetto—140,000 residents occupied 4,000 acres.

  Simha felt angry and frustrated. He had not wanted to move in the first place. He had wanted to disregard the order, just as he had refused to wear the Magen David armband whenever possible, while his father, who always “followed the crowd,” donned the hated vestment, just as he always obeyed all the rules. His mother also balked at moving to the ghetto. Many of Miriam’s Gentile friends and neighbors—swayed perhaps by her beauty, perfect Polish, and vivacious personality—had advised her not to go. But Zvi, with his dark beard, yarmulke, and Orthodox wardrobe, could never pass for a Christian. The Ghetto, he argued, echoing a common refrain in the Jewish community, would almost certainly be open. Jews would still be able to leave the ringed district to conduct their affairs, so long as they returned by the 9 P.M. curfew. In the end Zvi prevailed. He was the head of the family, and tradition dictated that the decision was his. Before they left, however, one of the Ratheisers’ Gentile neighbors took Miriam aside. “If you are ever in trouble and need help,” the neighbor said, “get in touch with us.”

  Janine Mortkowicz never even contemplated moving to the Ghetto. The sixty-five-year-old matriarch had not waited for the November 15 deadline to act. The moment the Nazis announced their intention to seal off the Jewish population, she began to plan. “I don’t think it ever crossed her mind to follow the [relocation] order,” recalled Joanna. She was not alone. The Germans issued 11,130 arrest warrants for Jews who disobeyed the ghetto decree, including for twelve members of the extended Mortkowicz clan.

  “I don’t know if there had been a family-wide discussion about it. But everyone decided to stay on the Aryan side,” said Joanna, employing the widely used German nomenclature for the Christian parts of Warsaw.

  Two factors weighed heavily in favor of staying put: “We had money and we had [Gentile] friends,” both of which would be essential for survival. Joanna herself had not initially been subject to the Ghetto relocation order. But the Germans had just tightened race regulations and the criteria by which the Nuremberg Laws determined Jewish origin. Under the new restrictions, Joanna’s status as a mischling, an individual of mixed parentage still classified as Christian, had been changed to Jewish.

  Staying put, however, could not mean remaining at their current address in Old Town Square. The SS knew that Jews lived there, because they had hauled Janine Mortkowicz in for questioning in August. She had packed a toothbrush then, as everyone in Warsaw invariably did when summoned to Gestapo headquarters on Szuch Avenue, because so few people ever walked out freely again.

  Janine’s Gestapo troubles had apparently stemmed from an innocent housecleaning. Janine had ordered Vincent, their devoted caretaker, to throw out some of the old unsold inventory when they moved into the former printing facilities, and the discarded books had found their way to one of the open-air markets in the Jewish district. Unfortunately, the castoffs included 1905 volumes by Karl Marx—now considered seditious propaganda.

  “As she was entering Gestapo headquarters, the doorman insulted her with some anti-Semitic abuse,” Joanna recalled. Far from cowering, Janine opened her own interrogation by going on the offensive and berating the investigating officer for the doorman’s offensive remarks. “She stood up and in a loud voice proclaimed that she was proud of her heritage, that her father was from Vienna, that he held a doctorate, and that she was unaccustomed to such rude treatment.” Perhaps it was her fluent German, or the sight of such a tiny, gray-haired grandmother daring to admonish him, but the amused Gestapo officer was obviously taken aback. Janine was not sent to Serbia, the women’s section of the Peacock prison. She was released and returned home, more determined than ever not to bend to the will of the Nazis.

  Remaining on the “Aryan” side would not be easy for Janine, Hanna, and little Joanna. Jews in hiding needed to invent new identities and find new places to live. They required a constant source of income to support themselves. And they had to rely almost entirely on the friendship and protection of Gentiles.

  The outlines of the newly formed Ghetto formed a squat T with a large notch carved into its wide base. Its surface area covered just under a thousand acres, roughly the size of New York City’s Central Park. On the morning of November 16, 1940, its four hundred thousand inhabitants discovered to their shock and horror that the Ghetto’s twenty-two gates would not be open, as they had been led to believe. They were now permanently shut, guarded by German gendarmes and the despised Polish Blue Police, who permitted only special pass holders to exit on official business.

  Panic spread throughout the sealed district that morning, with neighbors waking one another to deliver the grim news, and word quickly reached Zivia Lubetkin and Isaac Zuckerman. Zivia was not surprised. She was by nature less hopeful than the gregarious and perennially cheerful Isaac. But even to Zuckerman, the move had not been entirely unexpected. Together, they called an emergency meeting to address the situation. In some ways, the Ghetto made clandestine life easier: There was no longer a need to post lookouts on balconies and straircases since there were no Gentiles snooping about. The expulsion of Christians had also left Zuckerman free to hire a loyal Jewish building superintendent in place of the Gentile who had previously occupied the position. Isaac no longer had to worry about being denounced to the Gestapo, who frequently kept doormen and concierges on the payroll. The new man was a Zionist. “As soon as the Poles were sent out we grabbed that job,” Zuckerman recalled. “The porter kept a list of residents so we knew everything. On the top floor,” where Isaac and Zivia lived, “was a bell attached to the concierge’s lodge by a concealed string, and a ring for me meant an alarm.”

  The new isolation and the lack of potential Gentile informants made security arrangements easier in the Ghetto, but contact with the outside world became far more difficult. “We cannot allow ourselves to be cut off,” Zuckerman warned. Until then, communicating with other Zionist cells throughout Poland had been relatively easy. Isaac himself had toured the German-occu
pied western territories extensively, and delegates from smaller towns had routinely come to Warsaw. This was no longer possible, as closed Ghettos now trapped Jews in all the major population centers.

  “We need to know what is happening to our brothers and sisters in the rest of the country,” Zivia declared. This was important not only out of concern for the fate of fellow Jews and Zionists, but for their own safety as well. Events in other cities often presaged the future in Warsaw. The capital tended to follow Lodz, because that big industrial center, now renamed Litzmannstadt, was annexed directly to the Reich, fast-tracked for Germanization. The hated Treuhandstelle had started its confiscatory work in Lodz, seizing the 2,300 mostly Jewish-owned textile mills that had given the city its nickname, the “Manchester of the East.” The Lodz ghetto had also been established and sealed months ahead of Warsaw. If one could keep abreast of events there, one could predict what lay in store for the former Polish capital.

  To stay connected, Zivia proposed forming a team of couriers who would travel surreptitiously from ghetto to ghetto maintaining links. For this purpose she would employ women almost exclusively. Women traveling alone were less likely to arouse suspicion in Nazi-occupied Poland, since so many men were now absent, having been relocated to Siberian gulags or German POW, concentration, or labor camps. And in a part of the world where most males were uncircumcised, female liaison agents could not be betrayed by the surgical cut that distinguished all Jewish men. So Zivia, who would be in charge of recruiting the “liaison women,” set out to search for potential couriers.

  “They had to have an Aryan appearance, speak Polish well, and act a certain way,” she recalled, “and we did not have many candidates that fit those criteria.”

  Few Jews “looked good,” the expression widely used in the Ghetto to denote those with Slavic appearances. And fluency posed another serious issue. In the last census conducted before the war, only 5 percent, or 19,300 out of 353,000 Warsaw Jews, classified themselves as native Polish speakers. While many of these may have been proficient, “most Polish Jews could not speak Polish well,” according to the American Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec, herself a native of Warsaw and a Holocaust survivor.

  Zivia’s recruitment difficulties were not restricted to physiognomy and language. They were also cultural, relating to a lack of familiarity with prevailing customs and mannerisms. “These differences permeated all aspects of life,” explains Tec (whose many works on the war include Defiance, the story of Polish-Jewish partisans that became a Hollywood blockbuster starring James Bond actor Daniel Craig). “For centuries Poles and Jews lived apart and in different worlds. Whatever contacts there had been between them were commercial rather than social. Partly because of this, each felt like a stranger in the world of the other.”

  Just as the Polish Underground might find it challenging to locate agents who could pass as Jewish, converse knowledgeably with a rabbi, set a kosher table, or discuss Zionist politics, Zivia struggled to find candidates able to field innocent questions about the Catholic catechism, Polish politics, or literature.

  Zivia herself was disqualified by her appearance. Her features were Semitic, her hair and skin tone too dark—unlike Isaac, who was often told by fellow Zionists, “Your Aryan face is worth its weight in gold, worth a hundred thousand zlotys.”

  Isaac’s problem was his accent. “It was terrible,” one of his fellow combatants recalled. Zuckerman’s Polish was inflected with heavy traces of both Yiddish and Vilnoese, the lilting, drawn-out dialect from his native Vilna. The Vilnoese helped mask the Yiddish, but Isaac had to be constantly vigilant, like an actor permanently onstage, since one mispronunciation, one slip of the tongue, could give him away.

  So far, the only couriers Zivia had been able to find with any experience were the Plotnicka sisters, Frumka and Hancia. It was Hancia who had been sent by her older sister Frumka to Lvov in December 1939 to plead for Zivia’s return. And it had been through Frumka as well that Isaac had learned a few months later that Zivia needed him back in Warsaw. Frumka was fair and light-haired, tall and leggy—she “looked good.” Her biggest drawback was that she didn’t “sound good.” “Her Polish wasn’t fluent,” worried Isaac.

  There was one final obstacle in Zivia’s courier plan: travel documents. Up until now, Zionists had used either no identification papers whatsoever or very crudely forged ones. For the courier plan to succeed, their amateurish operation would have to become far more professional.

  CHAPTER 15

  SIMHA AND BORUCH

  PAY THE BILLS

  The most immediate effect of sealing the Ghetto was an astonishing spike in the cost of basic foodstuffs. Overnight, the price of a kilo of potatoes tripled, coal more than doubled, and every other staple rose by at least 100 percent. “There are long queues in front of every food store, and everything is being bought out,” the historian and Ghetto archivist Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote on November 19, 1940. “On the first day after the Ghetto was closed, many Christians brought bread for their Jewish acquaintances and friends. This was a mass phenomenon,” he noted—which ended abruptly three days later, when the Germans shot a Pole for transferring a sack of flour over the wall. The message of that public execution was clear: The sealed district was to be cut off from the city’s meager food supply, just as Zivia Lubetkin had predicted.

  The Jewish community reacted instantaneously, in near-universal defiance of the food import ban. In just a few days a massive smuggling industry sprang up, incorporating thousands of people on a full-time basis on both sides of the wall. Some acted individually, others collectively. Some were organized around tightly knit family units, others in sprawling and sophisticated for-profit ventures that reached deep into the countryside and produced huge fortunes. These smuggling networks provided an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the food consumed in the Warsaw Ghetto over the next two years.

  Simha Ratheiser, like many other Jewish children and teenagers, who were naturally more adept than adults at scaling walls and squeezing through narrow openings, turned to smuggling to help his family survive. This assumption of responsibility was perhaps his first act of adulthood. Until then he had never worked—even in his father’s former store. And he had never apprenticed for a trade, like spats maker Boruch Spiegel. He had not needed to. His parents were sufficiently well off that he had received a small allowance, like many ordinary middle-class teens: new pants or shoes when his old ones wore out, pocket money for the movies, or perhaps a bike for his birthday.

  “It was not at all uncommon for ten- or twelve-year-olds to support entire families,” Ratheiser recalled of the part kids played in the burgeoning ghetto black market, where markups could be thirty-, forty-, or fiftyfold from prewar prices, and two to three times the rate charged in the rest of Warsaw.

  “Getting out of the Ghetto was not that difficult,” Simha explained—at least not initially. The district was not hermetically sealed; the wall was actually quite porous. It ran through a great many buildings, where windows and doors had been sloppily bricked up, or where the preexisting fire walls between apartments acted as makeshift boundaries, leaving gaps in cellars and attics or between structures. “At Goat Street smuggling is through a door in a wall bordering on the Aryan side,” Emmanuel Ringelblum noted in his journal. “It costs 5 zlotys to pass through. The Jewish owner of the apartment is making a fortune.” Alternatively, trams traversed the Jewish Quarter, and for a few zlotys’ bribe one could board any of the municipal lines that ran through the Ghetto. With money, the gates were effectively open.

  In the subtle generational power shift that began with the closure of the Ghetto’s twenty-two gates, it was the child smugglers who made the most significant mark early on. Often they were simply catapulted over the wall, or pushed through some narrow crack, with a shopping list and money or articles of value to trade. How parents felt about entrusting the family finances to sixth or seventh graders is hard to imagine. Most of them never went farther than a few blocks into so-ca
lled Aryan territory, but some, like Simha, traveled by commuter train far into the countryside to obtain better deals.

  Seventy to 80 percent of the food sold in Warsaw outside the Ghetto was already smuggled, with hefty risk premiums priced in—a consequence of German decrees barring the free flow of all perishable goods in occupied Poland. Poland’s role was to feed Germany, not itself, and the General Government’s colonial overseers had set ruinous requisition quotas on all farming districts. Peasants had to relinquish their crops and their dairy, pork, and poultry production to Nazi agencies for export to the Reich, and anyone caught hoarding grain or eggs faced arrest and sometimes summary execution. The delivery of food to Polish cities was strictly controlled through ration cards issued monthly, and it could fluctuate wildly. During one brief and bountiful month, for instance, Ghetto residents were allotted a daily high of 400 calories, while Gentiles were given far more generous rations equivalent to 1,377 daily calories. In other months Jews got next to nothing, while the rest of Warsaw’s 1.3 million residents received a mere 385 calories each.

  At official ration rates, the entire city would soon have starved. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Poland’s metropolitan regions, farmers proved adept at concealing food from the rapacious Germans and sneaking it into towns. Thanks to the thriving black market, food was widely available in all Polish cities. It was just incredibly expensive. A kilogram of sugar, for instance, purchased with ration cards, retailed for 1.6 zlotys at official prices. On the black market the same kilo sold for 65 zlotys. In the Ghetto—where the wall now added another level of risk, an additional transport and payoff premium, and one more set of intermediaries—it could easily cost twice that sum. Meat cost the most because animals had to be brought in alive, to conform to kosher butchering laws. This was accomplished by placing mobile ramps on either side of the wall. Cattle were walked over the wall while the Blue Police or German gendarmes were paid to look the other way. Milk was relatively cheaper, since it was pumped—by the cisternload—through reconfigured plumbing or drainage pipes in buildings that straddled the boundary. Dairy products thus benefited from both economies of scale and discretion, requiring fewer bribes.