Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The peculiarities of the underground agro-economy quickly became apparent to Simha. To cut out the middlemen, he started traveling to outlying villages and buying directly from farmers. “I’d jump on and off moving trains to get there,” he recalled. His parents opposed this activity, especially since his mother was getting food from her old neighborhood friends. Like hundreds of others, she bribed guards at the gates to let her out and then back in. Simha’s smuggling route was riskier, but it saved the cost of the bribe. “I’d wait for the forced labor gangs to march in or out of the ghetto,” he recalled. Every day hundreds of Jews were taken out to clean streets, clear snow, fill in potholes, or work at construction sites on the other side. Simha would wait for the right moment, when the guards were distracted, and melt into the moving groups. His Slavic appearance, ironically, often worked against him in these instances. “The other Jews would think I was a Polish smuggler, and threaten to denounce me to the police. I would have to recite a prayer in Hebrew to prove I was one of them.”

  Taking trains was also far riskier than shopping in Warsaw, but Simha felt comfortable in the now exclusively Gentile milieu. “I don’t remember being frightened or nervous. I was used to being among Poles. It was not a big deal to me.”

  Though he did not fear being exposed as a Jew, there was still the constant danger of being robbed or caught up in one of the Arbeitsamt’s forced labor roundups, which often targeted trains whenever the Labor Office fell short of its human export quota. By the end of 1940, 798,000 Poles—all Christians—were already working as slave laborers in Germany, in conditions resulting in ever greater death tolls. To slow the brutal deportations, the Polish Underground launched a concerted campaign against the Arbeitsamt. Labor offices across the General Government were torched at night. The agency’s headquarters in the former Land Credit Bank building across the street from the Mortkowiczes’ bookstore was firebombed in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the central labor registry records. Huge billboards enticing labor draftees to COME WITH US TO GERMANY were defaced to read DON’T COME WITH US TO GERMANY. And tens of thousands of false identity papers were issued to people dodging the draft.

  The rebellion led the Nazis to redouble their efforts to catch evaders, and every time Simha boarded a train, he faced the prospect of being herded into a cattle car. Still, the rewards outweighed the risks. Going to the source of food saved considerable sums. “I remember the smell of the huge round loaves, freshly baked,” he recalled of the bread he bought from peasant bakers, which was fresh, free of the sawdust often found in Warsaw’s bread, and a hefty two feet in diameter. “One [loaf] was enough to feed a whole family.” What Simha’s family did not eat could be resold inside the walls at a substantial profit, which could finance further trips to the country and put more food on the table.

  “Apparently I was rather successful,” Ratheiser recalled of his smuggling expeditions. “Friends and relatives used to come to our apartment for a bowl of soup, a sign that there was at least some food in our house.”

  Simha did not give much thought to his trips to the “other side.” He was just doing what he could to help his family. The handsome sixteen-year-old did not realize that he had become the man of the house and that he was gaining invaluable training that would soon serve a greater Jewish cause.

  A deceptive calm reigned in the newly isolated Jewish Quarter as the winter of 1941 set in. Jews, for the first time since the invasion, were left relatively unmolested. Germans had little reason to enter the sealed district, other than to deliver inmates to Peacock Prison, trips they used as opportunities to run down pedestrians with their trucks. But the random beatings, the petty harassments and daily humiliations, had significantly decreased now that Jews were being left largely to themselves. The community was even policing itself, thanks to a newly created law enforcement agency staffed entirely by Jewish police officers.

  Smuggling continued in ever more sophisticated forms, and the underground economy rapidly grew to encompass virtually every branch of commerce that operated outside the Ghetto walls. Christian entrepreneurs smuggled raw materials—leather, textiles, dyes, tobacco leaves, sheet metal, cocoa—into the ghetto, and smuggled out finished products—chocolate, shirts, shoes, cigarettes and cigarette lighters, canned goods, watches, even jewelry—for resale on the black market. The scale of these illicit enterprises soon became mind-boggling, involving not only mom-and-pop shops but entire tanneries and canneries and factories with delivery trucks and hundreds of employees. Insurance companies offered policies on the safe delivery of goods, with premiums based on distance covered and delivery location and depending on the degree of bribability of the relevant officials. These indispensable payoffs lubricated every stage of the operation, and bribes were earning corrupt German overseers the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly.

  For Boruch Spiegel and his family, the clandestine work offered a lifeline. They had been in desperate straits when the market for spats dried up following the 1939 invasion. While Boruch and his older brother were in the Soviet zone, his father had survived by selling everything of value—the Singer sewing machine, the Persian carpets—everything but his most prized possession: his violin. Upon the brothers’ return to Warsaw, the Bund had helped feed the Spiegel family through its network of soup kitchens. These were open only to Bundists, Boruch explained. “The Zionists had theirs. We had ours. All the groups looked after their own.”

  Around the time of the creation of the Ghetto, Boruch’s father was contacted by a prewar business acquaintance, a Gentile by the name of Stasiek, the Polish equivalent of “Stan.” Stan had a proposal. He would provide Boruch and his father with wood blocks, which they would carve into clogs that Stan would smuggle out and sell on the black market. Clogs were in high demand in Warsaw because they were the only form of footwear, other than the knee-high military boots worn by the rich, being produced under Nazi occupation.

  The pay Spiegel and his father received for each pair of clogs was small, but it was enough to buy a small piece of chicken once every few weeks, a kilo or two of kasza gryczana, the buckwheat cereal that was the staple of the Varsovian wartime diet, and occasionally a little lard to fatten the thin soups they ate as most main courses. The items they bought were almost all smuggled, as was nearly 90 percent of all the food in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a result, the average Ghetto resident, according to Judenrat (Jewish Council) calculations, actually consumed 1,125 daily calories in early 1941 instead of the allotted 184. Middle-class Jews had an average intake of 1,400 calories a day. The poorest subsisted on only 785.

  It was hardly a time of plenty, but Boruch, like many others, would remember this early ghetto period with melancholy fondness; in Isaac Zuckerman’s words, it was a time “of flourishing autonomy.” The phones worked. Mail was delivered. Shops were open. And prewar billboards, advertising shampoo, floor wax, “Carmel” Palestinian wines, and Wrigley’s spearmint gum, lent the district an air of normalcy. “The innumerable confectionery stores that have sprung up lately,” the resident historian Emmanuel Ringelblum remarked in early 1941, “give a distorted picture of the Ghetto.”

  The crowds on the streets were now denser, and more shabbily dressed. But people seemed more relaxed, more willing to linger at a shop window or stop and converse with a neighbor. The change in attitude in the Ghetto could even be heard. The Yiddish that reverberated throughout the district was no longer hushed and halting, but louder, brasher, more confident and rapid-fire—impenetrable to outsiders once more, as it had so famously been before the war. “It would take even a fluent Yiddish speaker coming from the more distant parts of Poland to Warsaw quite a bit of time to get acquainted with the extremely fast and economical way of speech in which sentences were reduced to single words, single words to syllables and syllables to phenomes,” Ewa Geller, a philologist at the University of Warsaw, explained. “Their speech reflected the pitch and marrow of Jewish Warsaw, its very busy, hasty and pragmatic way of life.”
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  Warsaw’s Jews were trapped, and yet many felt paradoxically freer within their walls, within their “Garden City,” as the wits had sardonically dubbed the district because not a blade of grass grew inside the walls. “Things were better,” Boruch recalled. “We even thought that perhaps the worst was behind us, that we would be left alone.”

  Boruch was unusually upbeat during this period, in large part because he had met someone who would play a major role in his life. Her name was Chaika Belchatowska, and she was exceedingly pretty, with dark bangs, high cheekbones, and almond eyes. She lived on Dragon Street in the poorer northwest quadrant of the Ghetto, closer to the main Jewish cemetery and the Skra Stadium. Chaika was twenty-one, the same age as Boruch, and also a Bundist, though she was more active in the organization than he was. She was part of a “fiver,” a cell that distributed underground newsletters like the Bulletin, printed by Mark Edelman.

  “Dating in the Ghetto was different,” Spiegel recalled. “I obviously couldn’t afford to go to dinner and a movie. But we had a very rich cultural life.” Many of the theater district’s two dozen prewar playhouses, almost all located inside the Ghetto, had reopened to cater to the newly rich smugglers and other well-off residents. On Valiant Street, not far from Isaac Zuckerman’s headquarters, the Eldorado featured a musical comedy called The Rabbi’s Little Rebecca, starring Regina Sugar, or Cukier, as she was known in Polish. The twelve-hundred-seat Yiddish Artistic Theater, built in 1913 by the legendary stage star Ester Rachel Kaminski with money she earned from an American tour, put on some subsidized Molière plays and a dramatic adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, also at cut-rate prices. The Azazel on New Linden Street premiered a new play, Got Fun Nerume, directed by and starring Adam Samberg.

  But what Boruch, the lifelong music lover, looked forward to most were the free concerts. More than eighty former members of the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Opera Chamber Orchestra, and the Polish Radio Orchestra were in the Ghetto, accompanied by some of Poland’s most celebrated prewar composers and conductors, two winners of the Chopin prize, awarded annually to the nation’s top pianist, and solo violinists like Ludwig Holtzman, twice recognized as Polish concertmaster of the year. The musicians formed the Jewish Philharmonic Orchestra, under the patronage of Jewish Council chairman Adam Czerniakow, and staged concerts at venues such as the Femina movie theater on Forestry Street, the Melody Palace on Rymar Street, and the Great Hall, near the Children’s Hospital on Sienna Street. “At those concerts, you temporarily forget that there was a war, a ghetto,” Spiegel recalled. “To me they were an escape.”

  CHAPTER 16

  JOANNA CAUSES TROUBLE

  Resistance, like crime, tends to capture the public imagination when it is organized. But in Warsaw in the winter of 1941, individual acts of defiance best defined the fighting spirit of the Jewish community. Within the eleven miles of walls that ringed the Ghetto, tens of thousands of people participated in the massive underground economy, actively undermining Gestapo attempts to deprive them of a livelihood. They educated their children in secret schools, printed and distributed clandestine newspapers, and thwarted Nazi efforts to starve them by engaging in near-universal smuggling.

  Beyond the walls, thousands more sabotaged the German master plan; some, like the Osnoses, ran as far and as fast as providence would allow; others, like the three generations of Mortkowicz women, refused to submit to Ghetto decrees.

  Hanna, Joanna, and Janine had gone into hiding at the suburban estate of a family friend. It was unobtrusively located about ten miles west of Warsaw, in what was then the sparsely populated countryside. The property was large, spanning several hundred acres, with a main manor house, many outbuildings and dependencies, a large barn, animal pens, apple orchards, and a small church whose belfry dominated the rolling bucolic terrain. Joanna, who was now almost seven years old, vividly remembers sledding on those hills throughout the long winter and running through wildflowers when the snow finally melted in the spring of 1941 and the marshy land came to life. She remembers the nuns who rented part of the estate, and going to church for the sake of blending in, saying grace and reciting daily prayers that soon became as natural to her as to any Catholic child in Poland. Seventy years later, she could still recite them all from memory.

  The hideout had been arranged by Monika Zeromska, the daughter of Poland’s Hemingway, who along with her mother now ran the renamed Mortkowicz bookstore, fronting for Hanna and Janine. Every few weeks Monika brought money from the store, which was doing shockingly well. Varsovians were traditionally big readers, but during the war, with curfews, no radio, and precious little outside entertainment, books became one of the sole means of escape. People pooled their money to purchase copies they then shared among friends or neighbors, and the Mortkowicz bookstore flourished. (It helped that its biggest prewar competitor, Gebetner & Wolff, had been Germanized and served Nazi and colonial officials, selling only German-language books.)

  Monika Zeromska resembled Hedy Lamarr, with dark doe eyes that hinted at innocent mischief. This was fitting because Zeromska, like many Poles, led a double life, as Joanna eventually discovered. The dawning realization that there was more to Monika and to the estate where the Mortkowiczes were hiding occurred over many months and a series of small incidents. Joanna, like most kids her age, was insatiably curious and prone to exploration, which brought her into conflict with the estate’s severe caretaker, Thaddeus Glaser. “I was mortally afraid of Mr. Glaser,” she recalled. “He was often angry with me, especially when I peeped into the barn.”

  The ill-tempered caretaker kept chasing Joanna away from the barn because a series of tunnels and secret chambers ran underneath it. “Conspirators, underground agents, and saboteurs used it,” Joanna later learned. “So it was not surprising that he got mad when I was jumping around above their heads, or when I romped through the attic, where clandestine documents were stored.” The estate, as it turned out, was a major hub of the Polish Resistance, which like its Jewish counterparts was slowly coalescing in 1941, still fractious and divided along prewar political lines but making strides toward centralization and unification. One joint body, the Foreign Affairs Department, met regularly at the estate to coordinate policy with the government in exile in London, and there were enough weapons cached about the property to arm a battalion.

  “Not bad for a hideout,” Joanna would later laugh about the place she called home for the next year.

  Luck, like resistance, takes many forms. A chance encounter, an unconscious decision, a reflexive motion or misperception could spell doom or deliverance.

  For Joanna’s cousins, salvation came in the unlikely form of an earthquake. The Osnoses had been stranded in Romania with no real prospects for emigration, fighting a losing battle against time and the looming anti-Semitic crackdowns promised by the pro-Hitler authorities. Like thousands of other Polish Jews in Bucharest, they were ready to go anywhere.

  All roads, however, seemed to lead through Turkey. Every other potential escape route was controlled by either Berlin or Moscow. The Turks were still nominally neutral, theoretically in a position to grant Jews transit visas through their sovereign territory. But they weren’t particularly inclined to do so—at least not at a price that Joseph could afford. He had tried repeatedly to get an audience with Turkish consular officials and had been rebuffed on every occasion. Not easily put off, Joseph came up with a different strategy. He rented a room in a villa next to the Turkish embassy and moved there with Martha and Robert. The proximity, he hoped, might lead to a chance encounter: bumping into a diplomat on the street, or in the garden—any opportunity to strike up a neighborly conversation and to achieve socially what could not be done officially. To a large degree, Joseph made his own luck. But his plan did benefit from a little “help from God himself,” in Martha’s opinion.

  At 3:30 in the morning on November 10, Joseph, Martha, and Robert were rocked from their beds by an earthquake that measured 7.7 on the Richter scale. The quak
e lasted five terrifying minutes, leveling large parts of Bucharest, and its shock waves were felt as far east as Kiev and as far west as Marseilles. The city’s tallest building, the thirteen-story Carlton Hotel, collapsed, killing 267 guests, as did the roof of the Royal Palace, home of Romania’s recently deposed monarch. Fires from oil reservoirs and burst pipelines raged uncontrollably, while soldiers raced to extract thousands of injured residents trapped in the rubble.

  The Osnoses escaped unhurt, running out into the street in their pajamas, where the disheveled Turkish ambassador had also fled, wearing little more than a bathrobe. In the dusty chaos, with gas explosions echoing in the background, Joseph shrewdly made sure that the traumatized Turkish envoy was well attended to in his time of need. “Two days later we had a transit visa,” Martha said.

  They departed from the Romanian port city of Constanta, on the shores of the Black Sea, southwest of Odessa. The tramp steamer that ferried them to Istanbul was crammed with Polish refugees, both Jewish and Gentile. The weather was torrid, the waves high, and the choppy twenty-four-hour crossing felt endless to the seasick passengers. In Istanbul, a boat carrying a group of illegal Jewish refugees had sunk in the harbor, and irate port officials were searching the stormy waters for survivors to arrest. When the ship carrying the Osnoses docked, angry customs officers checked for illegal Jews. Joseph and Martha had legitimate papers, but their transit visa was valid for only twenty-four hours. If they remained in Turkey any longer, they were told, they would be deported back to Romania. “It seemed impossible to accomplish in a few hours all we had to do,” Martha recalled. “We wanted to go to Palestine or be able to stay in Istanbul, but everything had to be arranged immediately.”