Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The elder and younger members of the Bund did agree on one thing, however—to delay action until they had gathered reliable information of their own. Asking the rival Zionists to share the report they had received from the Polish Boy Scouts was out of the question. Even the more impatient and impetuous Edelman, who, at the time, lived on the same street as Isaac and Zivia, never contemplated knocking on their clubhouse door to ask for help. “We were ideological rivals.” Instead the Bund chose to duplicate the Zionists’ efforts to try to get a clearer picture of what was happening in the east. Non-Jews were free to travel into the newly seized territories being incorporated into the General Government, so Bernard Goldstein reached out to a former trade union colleague, a man by the name of Runge, who had served as head of the Polish Federation of Labor before the war and was now active in the Polish Underground. In the past, Edelman would have acted as a go-between for this sort of message. His job at the Jewish hospital gave him a coveted Ghetto exit pass so he could deliver contaminated blood samples to laboratories on the Aryan side. This made him an ideal courier for the Bund, despite his pronounced Semitic features. He could legally leave the sealed district, and because he carried typhus samples, no one dared approach him on the streets of Warsaw for fear of infection—not even the police or anti-Semitic thugs; “I was like a leper.” Unfortunately his hospital pass had been recently revoked, and he had been relegated to cleaning up after autopsies of typhus victims. The disease had reached epidemic proportions by the fall of 1941, spreading from the horrifically overcrowded refugee shelters to the rest of the Ghetto. It would claim 14,449 lives by year’s end. Overwhelmed hospitals gave up on treating the ill and could only helplessly study the dead. “Their organs were translucent,” Edelman recalled. “My job was to sew up body cavities and dispose of the corpses.”

  So with Edelman sidelined, the Bund had to find other ways of getting its message out. Leaving the Ghetto without a pass beame infinitely more perilous on October 10, 1941, when Warsaw district governor Ludwig Fisher announced that henceforth any Jew caught outside the walls would be summarily executed. The death penalty, Fisher added in a statement published in the New Warsaw Courier two days later, would also apply to any Gentile harboring or lending assistance to Jews. “I instruct the entire population of the Warsaw District to draw careful attention to this latest decree because it will be administered with merciless severity,” he warned.

  Despite the new death threat, Goldstein’s trade union friend agreed to gather the requested information and deliver his report in person. “Runge was smuggled into the ghetto with great care,” Goldstein recalled, and a meeting was arranged on Goose Street, near the district’s newly opened Jewish prison. Goldstein was hiding out in a safe house because the Gestapo had recently raided his apartment building on New Linden Avenue. While the two labor leaders talked, shots rang out from the nearby prison. Jews caught outside the Ghetto were being executed.

  The rumors of widespread atrocities in the east, Runge reported, were true. In Vilna, a special pogrom unit of Lithuanians called the Ipatingas, or the Elect, had been created by the Germans. It was staffed with relatives of victims of Soviet repression, many of whom were told by the Germans that Jewish Bolsheviks were responsible for their family’s sufferings. In “revenge,” they killed, or helped the Germans kill, nearly a third of Vilna’s sixty thousand Jews. In other Lithuanian towns, the SS released violent criminals from jails and put them to work murdering Jews. In the Lithuanian capital of Kaunas, or Kovno as it was then also known in Polish, meting out “rightful punishment to collaborators and traitors” had become a spectator sport, according to eyewitnesses, complete with large crowds, “cheering and clapping.” Lithuanian children were lifted onto the shoulders of their parents to catch a glimpse of the famous “Death-dealer of Kovno,” a sight that one German regular army officer later described as the most frightful event he’d witnessed in the course of two world wars.

  “On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting,” the disgusted officer, a colonel in the Wehrmacht’s Army Group North, recounted. “The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead or dying people. Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away into the drainage gully. Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience.”

  Once the mound of Jewish bodies at his feet had reached fifty, the Death-dealer fetched an accordion, climbed to the top of the pile of corpses, and played the Lithuanian national anthem.

  The wave of brutality was not confined to Lithuania. It ran the length of the old Pale of Settlement, the historically volatile borderlands between Poland and Russia, where Himmler had ordered local killing squads to be recruited “from the reliable non-Communist elements among Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Byelorussians.” In Galicia, leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the partisan group that had been long repressed by Polish authorities, went on Radio Berlin to declare “Death to Jews, death to Communists, death to Commissars, exactly in that sequence.” Then they went on a rampage, murdering seven thousand Jews in Lvov, 1,100 in Lutsk, 600 in Ternopol, and progressively spreading the terror to ever smaller towns until blood had been spilled throughout all of western Ukraine.

  The absence of Poles from Himmler’s recruiting directive did not mean that the SS couldn’t count on Polish pogromists. In the town of Radzilow, Germans incited Polish peasants to murder eight hundred Jewish inhabitants on the worn pretext that Jews had denounced Gentiles to the Soviet secret police. In nearby Jedwabne, the same ploy was used to drive the hamlet’s entire Jewish population into its lone synagogue, which was then set ablaze.

  For Edelman, who had already convinced himself that a wider campaign against the Jews was afoot, confirmation of the mass killings “was not shocking.” Runge’s report did not, however, conclusively answer the question that still racked senior Bundists: Was this orgy of violence fundamentally different from past waves of pogroms, which had flared in the east with tragic regularity for centuries? “That was part of the German genius,” Edelman later noted ruefully.

  The Bund decided to form and begin training a five-hundred-member militia in the event that the Nazis tried to incite another, more lethal pogrom in Warsaw. Both Edelman and Berl Spiegel eagerly joined the fledgling self-defense organization. The unit was “mostly theoretical” at this early stage, Boruch Spiegel recalled; a list of names, a few lecture meetings, no real training to speak of. The only arms at the Bund’s disposal were truncheons and knives. These had always kept petty local thugs from the fascist Falanga and ONR at bay, but they clearly no longer sufficed.

  In light of the scale and barbarity of the eastern atrocities, Bernard Goldstein had one additional request for his Gentile trade union colleague. Could he help the Bund get guns?

  Boruch Spiegel wanted to join the Bund’s newly formed militia, but he was in no condition to do so. When he finally returned to the Ghetto after nearly four months in the Garwolin camp, his mother barely recognized him.

  His face and neck were covered in boils. His hair was falling out in clumps. His body was so bloated that it stretched his worn-out clothes to the ripping point. He could hardly walk and barely had the strength to speak. By all statistical measures, he should not have been alive. He should not have survived the beatings at the hands of the Ukrainian guards. And he should not have been capable of returning to work in his injured and starving state. But somehow he had mustered hidden reserves of energy and tapped into an inner strength he had not known he possessed—just enough to get him through his mandatory ninety-day stay in “Garwolin Hell.” Once safely back ho
me, he completely collapsed.

  “I didn’t get out of bed for a month,” he recalled. He slept almost the entire time, and the period of convalescence became a hazy blur. Only the occasional distorted image lodged in his memory: his mother applying cream to his blistered lips; his brother Berl playing the violin by his bedside; his girlfriend Chaika blowing him a kiss; his sisters arguing and being shushed by his father.

  At first he was unable to eat. His depleted organs could process only tiny amounts of food because Boruch was suffering from ascites, or the “wet form” of severe malnutrition—fluid in the abdominal cavity bloating him like a balloon. His mother had to be very careful feeding him, as any sudden caloric surge could overwhelm Spiegel’s metabolism. It would go into overdrive, causing his weakened heart to go into cardiac arrest, laboring to pump the extra blood various organs needed to process increased digestive activity.

  Because malnutrition was becoming so prevalent in the Ghetto, Boruch’s mother probably heard many cautionary tales of starving people dropping dead after eating a single large meal. Once Boruch’s system started responding to food, his body began jettisoning excess fluid. This was known as the diuretic phase of starvation treatment, a critical excretion period, when the balance of minerals and electrolytes in the body must be kept in check or death becomes a possibility once again. Boruch’s mother probably understood little about biochemical ratios and could not have monitored her son’s sodium, potassium, and calcium levels even if she was aware of the delicate equilibrium her patient needed to maintain. Instead, she trusted a higher order. “For her, everything was ‘God’s will, God’s will,’ ” Spiegel explained. “She was very religious.”

  Slipping in and out of consciousness, Boruch was blissfully unaware of his continued danger. Once the excess fluids had flushed themselves from his system and the swelling subsided, Spiegel, like all starving patients, underwent a startling transformation. Like a deflated balloon, he instantly shrank, his bluish, stretched, almost transparent skin hanging grotesquely from what must have seemed an impossibly frail frame. He was literally skin and bones: almost no subcutaneous tissue was left.

  For the Spiegel family, Boruch’s skeletal condition presented a serious financial burden. They desperately needed to fatten him up but had no money to buy food on the black market. Stan had stopped smuggling materials for clogs in and out of the Ghetto. It had simply become too dangerous. The October 10 announcement setting the death penalty as punishment for leaving the district or harboring Jews wreaked havoc on the underground economy. For many Gentiles, the price of doing business with Jews became too high. Moreover, many of the corrupt Polish Blue Police officers who had facilitated the illicit trade were being replaced with Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries. These new Ghetto guards immediately distinguished themselves with acts of shocking brutality. They showed particular zeal in a cracking down on illegal trade. The Ghetto’s lifeline, the all-pervasive smuggling operations that kept food flowing and tens of thousands of residents employed, was severed. In November 1941, the Nazis dealt a final blow to the underground economy: They shut off almost all electricity to the Ghetto. Lights flickered only in the wealthy southernmost quadrant of the district, near the elegant townhouses of Sienna Street, where thanks to bribes “in the evening you could see well-dressed women, wearing lipstick and rouge, strolling calmly down the street with their dogs, as if there was no war,” the Ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum recalled. Meanwhile, hundreds of clandestine factories and mills that had formed the backbone of illicit trade shut down.

  To feed Boruch, Berl sold the one item of value the family still possessed: their father’s prized violin. “He had had it for eight or nine years,” Boruch recalled. “He played beautifully. Our house was so full of life and love and music even though we were poor.”

  Now their apartment, like countless others, was virtually empty, stripped of everything that could be traded for a meal: furniture, kitchen appliances, floor coverings, clothes. When Boruch eventually learned that the food he ate had come from the sale of the treasured violin, he was struck by guilt. “I didn’t know if I could bring myself to swallow that bread.” What Boruch also didn’t realize was that his father had stopped eating so that Boruch could recover. “There was not enough food, so he started giving his share to me and to my sisters.” By the time Spiegel understood what was happening, it was too late. “I watched him fade, day by day. It was terrible,” he said, the guilt still overwhelming him to tears seventy years later. “Starvation is the worst possible death.”

  CHAPTER 19

  SIMHA LEAVES ZIVIA TO HER PROPHECY

  When Boruch’s father passed away, the family carried his naked body out onto the street. They covered him with newspapers weighted by rocks—because “bedsheets could be traded for half a kilo of bread” and would immediately be stolen, as would any clothing on a corpse—and left him there. Eventually the sanitation department would collect him in a wheelbarrow and bury him in a communal grave at the Jewish Cemetery, along the far western wall of the Ghetto. Paying the exorbitant fees charged by undertakers like Model Pienkert or Nathan Wittenberg’s Final Journey Funeral Parlor was only possible for the very rich. By the end of 1941, forty-three thousand people had died of hunger and disease in the Ghetto and the streets were littered with decaying corpses. “Dead bodies had become part of the landscape. At first it was shocking. But soon there were so many that you stopped paying any attention to them,” explained Simha.

  Like the Spiegels, the Ratheiser family was faring progressively worse. Simha’s mother, Miriam, could no longer venture outside the Ghetto to collect food from her Catholic friends and former neighbors. She was still a head turner, blond and statuesque, but she smiled less now. Her features were grayer and worry lines creased her once flawless skin. It was as if she had aged a decade in the course of one year.

  Her husband Zvi’s dark beard had also grayed prematurely, and he had visibly lost weight. But Simha’s pious father was in reasonably good spirits. He prayed a great deal, even more than before the war, and seemed content to entrust his family’s fate to God. Miriam was of a different mind. She felt the situation was spiraling out of control and that the Ratheisers needed to do something.

  Miriam worried most about Simha, who often sneaked out of the Ghetto to trade for food. Smuggling had become mortally dangerous even before the October death penalty decree. German and Ukrainian guards took to shooting smugglers for sport, and one guard earned the nickname Frankenstein because he developed a lethal routine of killing two or three Jews with his morning coffee. Child smugglers were particularly vulnerable to German cruelty. One such child was walking across the bridge from the farmer’s market in Praga when he encountered an SS patrol. “I could only guess that this was a Jewish boy. He was around ten years old, very thin, and dark haired,” a witness, who was also Jewish and posing as a Christian, recounted. “The little boy was now nearer the SS man, who suddenly without uttering a word, without asking the boy any questions, seized him by the collar and threw him into the dark and turbulent waters of the Vistula.”

  Another Jewish witness reported seeing a child from the Ghetto begging on bustling Jerusalem Boulevard. “A little skeleton, four or five years old, as in India. People wouldn’t give him money, but would put a bun in his hand. An elegant German came by, opened a sewer grating, took the child, and threw him into the sewer.”

  Given the rising dangers associated with smuggling, Miriam had forbidden Simha to go to the countryside to buy food anymore. He wasn’t pleased, but he did not rebel against his parents’ decision. For a while, he tried to earn money by hiring himself out as a replacement forced day laborer, taking the place of older Ghetto residents willing to pay to avoid cleaning Warsaw streets. “I was almost seventeen and strong, so substituting was a good way to make a few zlotys,” he explained. But that, too, had its inherent dangers. At any time, Simha could be snatched and taken to a labor camp. “My parents didn’t like it. They were scared
of what might happen and looked for something else for me.”

  Simha’s life was still largely dictated by his mother and father, even though many other boys his age had effectively become heads of their households, supporting extended families through smuggling. As with any teen, part of Simha longed to break free of the parental cocoon. Although his father increasingly took a backseat as a provider, in the evolving family dynamic, Miriam emerged as more of the authority figure, and Simha still deferred to her on major decisions. “We were very close.”

  Miriam was the one who thought of sending Simha out of the Ghetto for good. Since he could pass for a Gentile, she reasoned, he would be safer on the Aryan side, away from the typhus, the snatchings, the starvation. “My mom had relatives who lived in a tiny village deep in the countryside,” Simha recalled. The place was near Radom, about three hours south of Warsaw by train. Its principal appeal was isolation; it was small enough not to figure on any map, and there were no Germans permanently posted there. It was also a farming community, which meant food was plentiful and strong hands were always welcome to toil in the fields, especially given the chronic labor shortages. In short, it was the perfect hideout to stash Simha while Miriam figured out what to do with his sisters and her Orthodox husband. “I was very eager to leave,” Ratheiser recalled. And not just because he would be out of harm’s way. More important, he would be on his own, an adult fending for himself. In fact, this would be the last decision his parents would ever make on his behalf.