Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Between the iron grates of his cell, Isaac could see the long rows of wooden barracks and the emaciated Jewish workers, their damp clothes tattered and filthy with bog stains, filing out to morning roll call around the gallows in the camp’s square. Shovels and spades were stacked in neat pyramids next to wagons that would deliver the workers to the nearby swamps they would drain. Ukrainian guards, still drunk from their past evening’s revelry, lurched through the ranks, flailing haphazardly with their whips, shouting in their slurred and heavily accented Polish.

  Isaac shivered uncontrollably, fighting fever and chills. He lay half-naked, immersed in the muddy water that filled the bottom of the fenced pit, water stained red with his own blood. The guards had beaten him all night, trying to get him to talk. “Who was that woman?” they demanded. “Why was she asking about a Yid?”

  The woman, Isaac knew, was among the cadre of couriers that Zivia Lubetkin had trained. Her name was Lonka Kozibrodska, and she was a blond-haired former philology student at the University of Warsaw who spoke six languages fluently, including German and Ukrainian. As soon as Zuckerman was abducted at the Labor Office, Zivia dispatched Lonka to find which work colony he had been sent to, and to determine if his freedom could be bought. Lonka’s Polish disguise, however, had been too convincing. When she approached one of the guards patrolling the Kampinos barbed wire perimeter to ask about Isaac, the camp commander grew suspicious. She must be from the Polish Resistance, he reasoned. That meant that Zuckerman must somehow also be connected to the Gentile Underground.

  “So, who was she?” the interrogation resumed. Isaac shrugged. The more the guards beat him, the less pain he felt. He was numb, and stuck to his story that Lonka was just an old classmate, a Christian friend. The guards finally sighed and left. “For three days his body will hang as a warning to the entire camp,” the commandant ordered, pointing to the gallows.

  Waiting for the sentence to be carried out was more painful than any beating Isaac would ever endure. “I was a hundred percent sure that they were about to execute me,” he recalled. “I said farewell. I tried to stand tall with my head held high.” But the hours passed and Zuckerman did not hang. He started wavering, begging his tormentors to get it over with.

  When they finally did come for him, he was shocked to find himself dragged not to the noose, but back to barracks, where other inmates gave him bread and watery soup. For three days, he was allowed to rest, and on the fourth day, the camp commander courteously informed him that he would be working as a clerk on the soft duty detail.

  Zuckerman was dumbfounded by his reversal of fortune. “I have only one explanation,” he later speculated. “The Germans were keeping an eye on the Polish Underground; they suspected I had contacts with them and this wasn’t just some Jew you could execute and get rid of.”

  This may have been the case. The Gestapo had tortured to death so many suspected Polish Resistance members without gleaning useful information from them that they were now adopting more subtle tactics, trying to turn people, or discreetly observing them in the hopes of uncovering their networks. For the camp’s Volksdeutsche manager and his senior Polish staff, there was likely a second motivation for treading softly with Isaac: They “were afraid of the vengeance of the Polish Underground and didn’t want to get into trouble because of a Yid,” Zuckerman speculated. The Resistance had orchestrated a series of assisted “suicides” among the nine thousand Volksdeutsche Polish-Germans working on behalf of the Nazis in Warsaw. Bogus farewell notes were left at the scenes, alleging that the victims had killed themselves out of guilt for betraying Poland, which prevented the Gestapo from executing the customary one hundred Poles in retaliation for every German murdered. For ethnic Poles collaborating with the Nazis there was no need for such subterfuge. The Resistance assassinated them in broad daylight, without fear of German reprisal, and as an example to others.

  Sensing that he had been singled out for special treatment due to his suspected Polish Underground ties, Isaac decided to press his advantage. “I hinted that I would be willing to pay” to be included in a group of sick inmates who were about to be returned to the Ghetto because they were too weak to work. The Polish camp managers readily agreed, anxious to be rid of a potential source of trouble. They even permitted him to telephone Zivia to have her send money for the release of five other Zionists held at Kampinos.

  The camp was about a four-mile walk from the nearest rail station, and many of the released laborers died on the way. A wagon followed the bedraggled procession, collecting the corpses of the fallen, who had literally been worked to death. Of the roughly 250 men sent to Kampinos with Zuckerman, fifty-three died in camp, and another fifty died shortly after their release. The living made such a sorrowful sight that peasants from surrounding villages, not usually known for philo-Semitism, took pity. “They behaved wonderfully toward us,” Zuckerman recalled. “They tossed us bread and bottles of milk.” The Ukrainian guards beat the generous peasants back and tried to prevent the prisoners from reaching the food. “I saw a bottle break and people ran to lick the milk from the ground.”

  At the station, as the train to Warsaw pulled in, Isaac asked the commander a question that had been nagging him for days: “When you set up the gallows, and said you were going to execute me, did you mean that seriously?”

  “Absolutely,” the man replied.

  Unlike Isaac, Boruch Spiegel could not count on underground connections (either real or perceived) to save him from the labor camp. Isaac, after all, headed one of the largest Zionist factions in the Ghetto. He had more than a thousand members behind him and was dating his second in command. It was not surprising that Zivia had used the Zionists’ funds and their network of couriers to try to spring her lover.

  Boruch had no such luck. He was only peripherally involved with the Bund. His new girlfriend, Chaika, was merely one of dozens of “fivers” and “tenners” who distributed the organization’s newsletters. Neither she nor Boruch’s big brother had direct contacts with the Bund’s inner circle, who might have been capable of mounting a rescue effort. So Spiegel was on his own, forced to spend the full three to four months in camp.

  The labor colony to which he was sent was forty miles southeast of Warsaw, near a little town called Garwolin. Like Kampinos, this was a new installation. But already it had earned the dreaded nickname “Garwolin Hell.”

  The place, Spiegel soon realized, had no obvious purpose other than to torment Jews. There was no factory to assemble armaments; no mine to extract mineral deposits for the war machine; no logging operations to harvest wood; no road-building crews. “I didn’t understand what we were doing there. It seemed pointless.”

  The swamp draining and mound building that went on six days a week did in fact have a purpose: It was part of defensive fortifications the Germans were excavating along the entire Soviet frontier. But to Spiegel, who had no military experience, it looked largely like an exercise in cruelty, an experiment in exhaustion and malnourishment. “They fed us a bowl of soup a day and two hundred grams of bread. That’s a few slices,” Boruch explained. “And on that [sustenance] we had to work around ten hours.”

  Very quickly, often within days of arriving in Garwolin Hell, people began to collapse. Since the poorest Ghetto residents tended to be drafted for forced labor, they were also the least prepared to withstand the hardships. Many arrived in camps already emaciated, their immune systems weakened, their strength long ebbed. “It was awful,” Boruch recalled. “Our clothes never had time to dry so we were wet and cold the whole time. At roll call in the morning, when we sometimes had to stand at attention for an hour, people would faint or fall to the ground. The guards would leap on them, kick them, beat them with clubs, or whip them.”

  As in the Kampinos camp, the guards at Garwolin were ethnic Ukrainians. The SS began actively recruiting Ukrainian nationalists that winter and spring—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Polish Resistance members, who relayed the potentially meaningful intell
igence to London. Why the Germans had developed a sudden interest in Galician natives from western Ukraine—now under Soviet occupation—was not immediately evident. But many Galician Ukrainians despised their Polish colonial masters, and the SS exploited the long-standing ethnic grievances to attract recruits. For SS chief Heinrich Himmler, this was critical because Poland was one of the only countries in occupied Europe without locally staffed SS detachments or a quisling puppet government. These existed virtually everywhere on the Continent, from Vichy France and the Balkans all the way to the Baltic, where a small and traitorous minority of Danes had formed a local SS force. In Poland, the hated Blue Police was the closest the country came to institutionalized collaboration, and the Blue Police was so corrupt and infiltrated by the Resistance that the Germans could not rely on it.

  “I thought the Blue Police was bad, but they were nothing compared to the Ukrainians at Garwolin,” Spiegel remembered. “If someone fell while working they beat him. If he couldn’t get up afterward they shot him.”

  Soon the makeshift cemetery next to the camp began to fill. The burial pits that Boruch and other inmates were forced to dig grew larger, from single graves to shallow holes that could accommodate a dozen corpses each.

  As the weeks passed, the lack of food and merciless pace of work began to take their toll on Boruch. He had never been physically fit like Isaac Zuckerman, and even the stores of baby fat around his cheeks had long since melted away. His legs began giving him trouble. At first they just ached and cramped, but then they started swelling up. “I could barely walk.” One inflated to nearly twice its normal size. An oozing, pustulent scab formed on the shin, a scar that was visible seventy years later, and the pain became excruciating. But still Boruch mustered the strength to stand at roll call, to try to go through the motions of working. The sick bay at Garwolin was nothing more than a way station to the cemetery.

  Much as he tried, Boruch could not keep up with the murderous tempo set by the Ukrainians. He felt the stinging lash of their whips on his back, and at one point, something in him snapped. “You know,” he shouted at one especially brutal guard, “when they finish with us, they’ll move on to you.” The other inmates instinctively drew away from him. “Shut up,” one whispered. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  But Boruch, who was mild-mannered by nature, like his father, had reached a breaking point. He dropped his shovel and kept shouting. The guards pounced on him, hitting him with their rifle butts, kicking him with their heavy boots. When he fell and curled up into a protective fetal position, the guard he had insulted sat astride him and began punching his face. The blows fell one after another, jerking his head from side to side with such force he thought his neck would snap. And all the while Boruch pleaded with himself, repeating over and over: “Don’t faint. You can’t faint.”

  If he did, he was certain he would never get up again.

  CHAPTER 18

  THEY DIDN’T DESERVE

  SUCH A PARTING

  It took Isaac Zuckerman a week in May 1941 to recover from his brief stay in Kampinos. He lay in bed the entire time as “the pampered child of Valiant” Street, with Zivia Lubetkin and the other Zionists fussing over him and nursing him back to health.

  When his sores and scabs had healed and he was strong enough to resume command, Zuckerman convened a meeting. He’d been wrong about the camps, and about cooperating with the Judenrat, he said. “For the first time, I had seen with my own eyes what a labor camp was. Before that, we used to distinguish between labor camps and concentration camps, but now I knew it was all the same,” Isaac explained. They were both “death camps,” and Zionists throughout the General Government needed to be warned about them and instructed not to obey Judenrat orders to go.

  Couriers must be dispatched immediately to Krakow and Lublin to spread the word, Isaac directed. He himself would travel to other towns with large Jewish populations and advise local Zionist leaders that they should actively resist the labor draft. Zuckerman could have delegated the responsibility, but he was restless after being confined in bed and wanted to stretch his legs on “an extended tour.” It was May, the best time of the year in Poland, when the gray shroud of near-permanent cloud cover that descends on the country each September finally lifts and the sun makes its welcome reappearance for the summer.

  As usual, Isaac left the Ghetto through the Municipal Courthouse Building. The structure, which served the legal needs of both the Jewish and Gentile communities, straddled the border and was a favored smuggling route. Jews would enter from Forestry Boulevard, where the Courthouse had had its main entrance before the war. Inside, they would remove their armbands, pay off a guard, and exit through the back door onto tiny White Street. From there, it was a short walk through Iron Gate Square, near the Saxon Gardens, and along Marshal Boulevard, Warsaw’s busiest thoroughfare, to Central Station on Jerusalem Boulevard.

  The relative taste of freedom Zuckerman experienced whenever he left the Ghetto was always leavened by the risk of random violence that existed on the Aryan side. “I saw how the Germans beat the Poles there at the station, really beat them. By chance, I didn’t get beaten myself, but I saw the humiliation of the Poles.”

  Passenger train traffic on Isaac’s tour in early June 1941 was irregular because the Wehrmacht was requisitioning all available locomotives for military service. This, too, was dutifully communicated to London by the Polish Resistance, and British Intelligence concluded that there could be only one reason for the Wehrmacht to be massing troops and armament along the Soviet demarcation line: Germany was preparing to attack the USSR.

  The June 22, 1941, invasion of the Soviet Union surprised no one but Joseph Stalin himself. The Soviet leader had refused to heed all the early warning signs that Hitler was going to abrogate the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In his megalomania, he couldn’t believe that anyone would dare double-cross him.

  News of the huge offensive electrified the Warsaw Ghetto. “We were sure of a quick victory by the Red Army,” Zuckerman recalled. The celebrations were quickly dampened by the triumphal announcements that issued almost hourly from the “barkers,” the loudspeakers strung up across Warsaw through which the General Government communicated decrees. It was the Wehrmacht scoring victory upon victory against the Soviets. The Red Army was in full retreat, and Stalin was in a paralyzed funk, refusing to see anyone in his Kremlin apartment.

  The most distressing news was that the Germans had taken Zuckerman’s hometown of Vilna, a mere two days into the invasion. Isaac was haunted by the way he had left his family in 1939, when he had received his first assignment to set up an underground. “I left in a few minutes, and I could have stayed for another twenty-four hours to prepare my parents,” he remembered sadly. “They didn’t deserve such a parting.”

  Through his underground network, he had kept tabs on his parents and his sister Lena, always making sure couriers checked in on them. Now, as the weeks passed and communication with Vilna was cut off, Isaac became increasingly desperate. A Gentile contact told Zuckerman that the Polish Boy Scouts, known in the Underground as the Gray Ranks, were sending a messenger to Vilna to find out what had happened there. He would travel by bicycle because all train traffic had been diverted to the Eastern Front, and Zuckerman was told that if he helped finance the mission, the Boy Scout courier would carry correspondence on behalf of the Zionists.

  Summer was over by the time the Boy Scout returned. Isaac’s family, he said, was safe. But he had not been able to deliver the letters that Isaac had posted with him for the Zionist cell in Troki, an exurb of Vilna. He couldn’t find any Jews in Troki, or in neighboring Landwarowo, or in Ponar, a closer suburb of Vilna. They had all been taken to a pit in the forest and shot.

  News of the Vilna massacre spread rapidly through the Warsaw Ghetto. “We were shocked,” Zivia Lubetkin remembered. Zivia and Isaac called together young Socialist Zionists to their headquarters to discuss the troubling reports. Perhaps they were exaggerated, some
skeptics posited. “We must assume that this was an awful act of revenge,” Isaac recalled someone speculating. “We know that some Jews welcomed the Red Army and made themselves hated by their neighbors.” The Lithuanians might have been incited to violence by the Germans. Besides, others questioned, how reliable was this information? The account was, after all, secondhand, relayed by a non-Zionist and a non-Jew. Could it even be trusted?

  Zivia decided to find out for herself. She dispatched two of her most reliable couriers to Vilna, Frumka Plotnicka and Lonka Kozibrodska, the same messenger who had located Isaac at the Kampinos camp. “There was nowhere Lonka would not go. Nothing was impossible for her,” Zivia recalled admiringly. And Frumka was Zivia’s most trusted lieutenant. Hearing from them would be like seeing with her own eyes.

  The Bund also convened an emergency meeting of its central committee to discuss the situation. “The craziest rumors were circulating,” Mark Edelman recalled. Alas, Bundists had even less to go on than Isaac and Zivia’s Zionists: What was the extent of the slaughter in Lithuania? Was it a pogrom? Or had the Germans committed the killings in reprisal for some perceived offense such as supposed Jewish loyalty to the Soviets? Was it a one-off event, the tragic by-product of ethnic tensions that flared up whenever the borderlands violently changed hands, as had been the case during the First World War? Or were there larger, more ominous implications for Jews in general?

  “A lot of people refused to believe that this was anything more than an isolated incident,” Edelman recalled. He had been allowed to sit in while the central committee met, a rare honor for a twenty-two-year-old who was half the age of most other members and still “prone to childish bouts of fantasy and enthusiasm,” in the words of one superior. The privilege, however, did not extend to voicing any opinions, which proved frustrating. Perhaps it was the impatience of youth, but Edelman didn’t agree with the cautious skepticism of party elders like Maurice Orzech, Leon Feiner, Abrasha Blum, and, surprisingly, special ops chief Bernard Goldstein. While these colleagues counseled against jumping to conclusions or making any rash decisions, Edelman and some of the younger Bundists were already convinced that Hitler sought the annihilation of all Jews.