Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Simha Ratheiser’s December 1941 departure from Warsaw coincided with a distant event that had immediate ramifications for the roughly 430,000 Jews trapped inside the city. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor finally pushed the United States to declare war on Germany and Japan, and the news was greeted with great joy followed by deep consternation in the Ghetto. At first, people rejoiced at the prospect of Hitler’s facing such a formidable adversary, an industrial giant with seemingly endless reserves of manpower and armament. But within days, the care packages that arrived regularly via Switzerland from relief organizations in New York stopped coming. The Germans were no longer letting them through, and another critical food source had dried up.

  On hearing of the U.S. entry into the war, Zivia Lubetkin shuddered. Far from making her hopeful, it immediately reminded her of a speech that Hitler had given, warning, “If international Jewry, in Europe and outside of Europe, once again pushes nations to world war, the result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.”

  When she first heard that declaration, Zivia had dismissed it as the “barking of a mad dog.” Only now, with America mobilizing, did it fill her with dread, like a dark premonition she could not shake. She suddenly had an uncontrollable urge to hear from Lonka and Frumka and prayed that her prized couriers would return with tidings from the east.

  When some news finally reached her, shortly after New Year’s Eve—which was celebrated with abandon by smugglers and gangsters at the Eldorado, the Melody Palace, the Arizona, and other champagne-soaked nightclubs frequented by the new Ghetto elite—the reports were far worse than she had imagined. They were all the more terrifying because they came not from the wild and pogrom-prone east, but from the west, from the orderly industrialized territories long incorporated into the Reich. There, on the very day that Japanese aircraft had struck the American fleet in Hawaii, the Germans had opened what could only be called an extermination camp. It occupied an abandoned castle near Chelmno, forty miles northwest of Lodz. The following day, December 8, Jews from surrounding villages were brought to the camp, according to a terrified eyewitness who described the scene to Lubetkin. “A fat German officer greeted them politely,” the witness recalled. “We have treated you unfairly and would like to make amends,” the corpulent SS officer said in a soothing voice. “You have suffered,” he continued, puffing on a cigar, and he assured the gathered families that their torments were over. “You will all go to work, but first you must wash yourselves. Here’s a place for women and here for men,” he waved nonchalantly to separate entrances with his cigar. “Undress and go take a shower and you will be issued new clothes.”

  Once the Jews were inside the building, the tone and demeanor of the Germans changed abruptly. Instead of being led to showers, the naked and unsuspecting victims were crammed in groups of fifty to sixty into large trucks. The doors were sealed, the engines were started, and carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were vented into the sealed rear cabins while the trucks drove to a nearby wood. When the screaming and pounding ceased, the doors were opened and the bodies of victims, some still alive and writhing in agony, were buried in huge pits, according to the eyewitness, a Jewish prisoner who had managed to escape while digging the mass graves and made his way to Warsaw.

  “Nobody believed him,” Lubetkin recalled. “Nobody wanted to believe him.” His story was entirely outside the Jewish experience. Pogroms, Jews could understand. They had ample historic precedent: the Cossack Rebellion of 1648, which claimed a hundred thousand lives; the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, whose aftermath left ten thousand dead; the 1903 and 1905 outbursts in Kishinev, Edelman’s hometown of Gomel, and Zhitomir that resulted in nearly a thousand murders; and the awful wave of killings during the Bolshevik Revolution, where in Ukraine and Belarus alone, fifteen thousand Jews lost their lives.

  What the grave digger described was not a pogrom. It was far more sinister, cold and clinical in its lack of emotion and reliance on technology. “People were unable to believe that they could be killed like that,” Edelman remembered.

  The grave digger was brought before an assembly of skeptical Ghetto elders, Judenrat members, and senior relief agency managers to relate his tale. “Impossible,” Zivia recalled one indignant speaker declaring, dismissing the account. “Something like this could never happen in the heart of Europe, in Warsaw.” Even if the story was true, others said, Warsaw was not some insignificant shtetl that could be made to disappear without a trace. It was central Europe’s largest urban agglomeration, the biggest city east of Berlin—still considered by its residents as the cultural and economic heart of world Jewry, despite New York City’s recent gains. The Wehrmacht didn’t have enough trucks to kill all of the Jews in Warsaw. They would never dare.

  Zivia listened to the cacophony of raised voices as, all at once, the Ghetto elders began shouting one another down, arguing, denouncing, denying what to her was glaringly obvious. “I closed my eyes,” she recalled, “and I saw all these people as corpses.”

  Zivia realized then and there what her Zionist faction, Dror, had to do. “We are going to defend ourselves,” she resolved. Isaac Zuckerman and the other Dror leaders were in agreement. “There was only one question: How and with what?”

  Weeks passed before the answer to that question became clear. In the interim, the abnormally cold 1942 winter claimed thousands more lives, littering the unheated Ghetto with frozen cadavers whose torsos had to be pried from the pavement with shovels in the mornings, while at night street urchins with pliers pulled out gold fillings to trade for bread.

  Another miraculous escape from Chelmno corroborated the grave digger’s account the following month. The camp not only existed; it was being expanded. In mid-January 1942, Chelmno began “processing” Jews from the Lodz ghetto, and not merely by the hundreds, as before, but by the thousands.

  The couriers Lonka and Frumka, meanwhile, returned from their mission to Vilna. The news they brought was horrifying. Three-quarters of Vilna’s Jews were now dead, buried in the Ponary pits on the outskirts of town. The toll included Isaac Zuckerman’s entire family. “I remember sitting in silence,” stunned, he recalled. Zuckerman thought of his parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, in-laws. “The whole clan” was gone. He couldn’t believe it.

  The couriers had one other significant development to relay, but Isaac wasn’t listening. He was numb, racked with guilt and regret. For months, ever since the Nazi invasion of the USSR and the first whispered mentions of Ponary, Zuckerman had feared that his family—his mother, his sister, his father, his beloved granddad—would not survive the war. Many times he reproached himself for leaving them so abruptly to begin his conspiratorial journey back in October 1939. He could have spent a few more days at home: hugged his mom, Rivka, some more, stayed up late talking to his dad, Simon, and humored his gentle and senile old grandfather. But he had been in such a rush to start his underground activity, to do his own thing, that he had put his own selfish needs above those of his relatives. And now he would never get a chance to make amends.

  “Those were the hardest weeks of my life,” Zuckerman recalled of the deep funk he fell into after hearing of his loved ones’ death. “A depression that went on all day and all night. Thoughts of the end. Isolation.” The charismatic extrovert withdrew into himself and into successive bottles of vodka. Isaac had always been an enthusiastic social drinker—already unusual within the generally abstemious Jewish community. But now alcohol became a crutch he would lean on with increasing regularity.

  For a time, the anguished Zionist leader contemplated leaving the movement that he blamed for causing him to abandon his family. At one low point, he thought of running away to Switzerland to tell the world what was happening in Poland. He even talked to Lonka about enlisting her help. She had befriended a German officer, a common ruse among female Polish Underground operatives, who often slept with the enemy to elicit information or assistance. Lonka was fairly certain that “her German” could get
Isaac across the border.

  Zuckerman eventually found an outlet to expiate his guilt: revenge. As Zivia kept reminding Isaac, a template already existed for a Jewish fighting force. Lonka and Frumka had told them about it when they returned from Vilna. In response to the Vilna carnage, Jewish youth groups of all political stripes had joined together and pooled their resources to form one cohesive combat unit. It was called the United Partisan Organization, and although it was anchored by Zionists from the Marxist Young Guard, it included virulently anticommunist Bundists and Betarists from the Revisionist Zionist far right, General Zionists from the center, and moderate Socialists from Zuckerman’s own left-leaning Dror Young Pioneer faction. Together these ideologically disparate groups had issued a common manifesto, penned by the partisan poet Abba Kovner. “Brothers,” it exhorted all Jews. “It is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of murderers. Arise! Arise with your last breath!”

  “Let’s face facts,” Zivia declared at a February party meeting that included Mordechai Tennenbaum and Tuvia Borzykowski, newly arrived Dror leaders from Vilna. “We have no weapons, no instructors that could teach us how to use them, and we know nothing about military tactics.”

  The Polish Resistance, on the other hand, had access to guns, as well as experienced army officers. But they almost certainly would not help or trust strangers. “We are completely unknown to them,” Lubetkin acknowledged. “We have no contacts.” That was not the case, she said, for other Jewish groups. The Young Guard, despite its dogged atheism, had a surprisingly good prewar relationship with the devoutly Catholic Boy Scouts, with whom they had often shared summer campgrounds, and whose underground arm, the Gray Ranks, had become a highly successful sabotage unit. The Bund, for its part, had close and long-established ties to the Polish Socialist Party, the only mainstream political organization in Poland that could even remotely be called philo-Semitic. The Socialists and the Bund had adjoining headquarters on Long Street before the war. The Socialists had backed the Bund in prewar strikes to protest rising anti-Semitism and had joined in some street battles against fascist thugs. They had been helpful during the 1940 Easter pogrom attempt, and some of their leaders now occupied prominent positions within the Polish Resistance.

  “We must make contact with other Jewish groups at all costs,” Zivia concluded. “We are all sentenced to the same fate. Today, it’s Chelmno and Ponary—tomorrow, Warsaw and the rest of Poland.”

  CHAPTER 20

  JOANNA AND THE

  TERRIFYING MR. GLASER

  By the time Zivia and Isaac realized that Jewish groups needed to unite in March 1942, Joanna, Hanna, and Janine Mortkowicz had passed a year in their idyllic suburban refuge without seeing a fellow Jew. Though the sprawling estate in which they were hiding was only ten miles west of Warsaw, its tranquillity seemed far removed from the death and disease of the Ghetto and the Gestapo roundups that terrorized the rest of the city.

  For the three generations of Mortkowicz women, time beat to a different rhythm; one marked hourly by the gentle peal of church bells, and seasonally by the gradually changing landscape. For Joanna, the winter of 1942 passed in a snowy blur of sled rides and wild tobogganing runs—the pursuits of a childhood not yet interrupted by the horrors of war.

  Joanna was now almost eight, an intensely curious and stubborn child, and an avid reader who showed every sign of following in the family’s literary footsteps. She was still short for her age, but, like her equally diminutive grandmother Janine, a tiny bundle of hyperactive energy. Throughout her stay at the Zbikow estate, Joanna had remained blissfully ignorant of Ponary, and Chelmno, and the mounting human catastrophe inside the Ghetto. She wasn’t even fully cognizant of the conspiratorial activity taking place under her feet, in the estate’s labyrinth of secret tunnels crammed with guns and sophisticated long-range radios provided by British Intelligence. She remained terrified of the mean and mysterious caretaker who always shooed her away from the big main barn, where strangers would sometimes materialize as if out of thin air.

  Janine and Hanna both knew better. They made it a point never to ask any questions of their hosts, to stay away from certain parts of the property, and to keep to the grounds subleased by the nuns from the Order of the Immaculate Conception who were responsible for their care. Though Hanna and Janine had not left the estate for over a year, they managed to stay reasonably well informed about the war. From Underground newspapers they knew that the first American troops had arrived in Europe, landing in Northern Ireland; that the RAF had launched an ambitious new bombing campaign on German industrial targets; and that the Red Army, under a new commander, General Zhukov, had launched a massive counteroffensive in the east against the Wehrmacht. From German propaganda, they also learned that General Rommel was still holding off the British in Libya, that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, and that General Douglas MacArthur had been ordered by President Roosevelt to abandon the besieged Philippines.

  Joanna’s mother and grandmother were not aware of the massacres of Jews taking place in Vilna, Lvov, and elsewhere, but events in the Ghetto were harder for the Germans to hide from ordinary Varsovians. From their friend and protector, the beautiful Underground operative Monika Zeromska, they heard horror stories of starvation and disease, of hundreds of Jews dying daily—and this only reinforced Hanna’s determination to stay among Gentiles.

  That the Polish Resistance kept tabs on developments in the sealed Jewish district was not unusual. Useful intelligence could be gleaned there. For instance, when the Germans ordered Jews to relinquish all fur coats remaining in the Ghetto during one of the coldest spells of the 1942 winter, the cruel requisition was relayed to London. British Intelligence was interested in the military rather than the humanitarian aspects of the seizure, since the furs were needed to line the uniforms of Wehrmacht soldiers fighting on the frigid Eastern Front. To the British, who were increasingly funding the Polish Resistance, the report on fur requisitions hinted at materials shortages and deteriorating conditions on the German front lines—both important pieces of the war puzzle.

  Monika Zeromska’s specific role in the Polish Underground was unknown to the Mortkowicz women. “My mother and grandmother would not have asked about it,” Joanna said. Their beautiful benefactor, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the pinup queen Hedy Lamarr, came to see them every few weeks, bringing news from the outside world and money from their bookstore, which continued to flourish under the famous Zeromski cover name. (The publishing arm of the firm had ceased operating when the Nazis confiscated all the printing presses in Poland.) Hanna, ever the businesswoman, kept careful tabs on their daily expenses and biweekly receipts in a little black ledger dotted with dates and balances. There was always enough left over at the end of the month to send to their cousins, the Beylins, who were hiding under false identities on the “Aryan side” in Warsaw.

  As for their other relatives, Hanna and Janine could only hope that they were alive and well. They had no way of knowing what had become of the Osnoses. All contact had been severed after Martha’s 1940 departure for Berlin. Sometimes Joanna asked after Robert, whom she had always looked up to, since he was a few years older. The answers she received were comfortingly vague: “He’s far away, traveling.”

  Joanna’s recollections of her yearlong stay at the Zbikow estate were equally vague and nostalgic, until the day in early April 1942 when she vividly remembers being rousted from bed by her frightened mother.

  “In my next memory we are slogging through mud in the middle of the night, running in panic, God knows where.” In the rush to escape, Joanna’s favorite doll, Michael, fell from her arms, and there was no time to retrieve it in the darkness. “Dragged along, I kept running. We had to hurry or they would catch us.”

  It was the Gestapo. The Germans had been tipped off that Jews were hiding at the estate, and the Resistance managed to warn the nuns housing Joanna, Janine, and Hanna that a raiding party was on its way.

  In
later years, Joanna often wondered who betrayed them and why. “Was it for money? Out of servile loyalty to the occupiers? Or because of anti-Semitic dogma?” she would reflect. That night, though, she blamed herself. She thought the nasty caretaker, Mr. Glaser from the Polish Underground, had driven them out because she had recently bitten his daughter during an argument and he was cross with her. So Joanna’s eight-year-old mind reeled with irrational guilt as she and her family fled. It was her fault that her stern grandmother, who was nearly seventy, was now gasping for breath, lugging a hastily packed suitcase through dark, marshy fields.

  Where they ran and for how long, Joanna would not remember. “In my hazy recollection of events, we knocked at the lighted window of a cottage we chanced upon in a side road, and someone invited us in without any questions or hesitation,” she later recalled. “But that is impossible. The good Sisters would not have driven us out into the dark night without anyone to look after us. They must have sorted out a place for us to go, our arrival must have been prearranged, someone must have agreed on that address with someone in case of misfortune, and someone must have escorted us,” Joanna speculated. “The terrifying Mr. Glaser may have been our go-between for that hiding place, and maybe one of his liaison officers escorted us through the muddy darkness.”

  Glaser, of course, would have had his own reasons for helping the Mortkowiczes escape. The presence of Jews at the estate risked compromising his clandestine operation. That Hanna, Janine, and Joanna had been brought there at all was a serious breach of security protocol, an amateurish mistake. If the Gestapo, while searching for them, stumbled upon any of the weapons, archives, communications equipment, or saboteurs that also hid at the estate, it would spell disaster: torture and the dreaded gas chambers at Auschwitz, which by 1942 had already claimed the lives of sixty thousand suspected Gentile rebels, many of them murdered with an experimental new cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon-B.