Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The mysterious Mr. Glaser was anxious to protect his network and to wash his hands of the troublesome Mortkowicz women, who had been forced on him by Monika Zeromska’s contacts. Now that they were endangering his entire operation, they had to go. For the Mortkowiczes, this was a frightening prospect, one for which they were entirely unprepared. For young Joanna, the nocturnal flight proved a transitional moment. Until then she had largely been sheltered from the realities of Nazi occupation. While other Jewish children fought for a crumb of bread, she romped through blooming orchards, attended school with Christian kids, and reveled in “daredevil sledge rides,” innocent of the larger world around her. That carefree existence was now over, and even as an eight-year-old she sensed that her life was about to change. “So without shedding any tears I left Michael in a puddle, and along with him my childhood.”

  Joanna, Hanna, and Janine were not the only ones being hunted by the Gestapo in the spring of 1942. On the night of Friday, April 17, trucks crammed with German soldiers and SS officers stormed the Warsaw Ghetto. They poured through several gates simultaneously, fanning out through the locked-down district, which was dark and silent, no lights or movement being permitted after curfew. Within minutes the deserted cobblestone streets echoed with the clatter of jackboots, while portable searchlights scanned buildings and doors were hammered down with rifle butts. Shots soon rang out, along with the occasional staccato of machine gun fire.

  One of the tenements targeted during the raids was Isaac Zuckerman’s Valiant Street headquarters. His startled janitor-lookout barely had time to pull the makeshift alarm bell before Gestapo agents were pounding up the stairs. On the third floor, in the Young Pioneer clubhouse, panic erupted and there was a mad dash for the attic, where an emergency exit had been cut through the wall into an adjacent building. In the ensuing scramble one of Isaac’s most trusted deputies, Tuvia Borzykowski, was shot in the leg, but he still managed to escape. Two other Young Pioneers were not so fortunate. They were dragged to the ground-floor courtyard, and, with all the residents looking on in horror, each was shot in the head.

  Before executing them, the Gestapo posed only one question to the victims: Where were Isaac Zuckerman and Lonka Kozibrodska? That the SS knew about Isaac was not surprising. His involvement with the Socialist Zionist youth movement was not a secret. But Lonka was a different story. Very few outsiders were aware of the clandestine role the beautiful blonde played in linking the Young Pioneers to the outside world.

  This could only mean that the Nazis had Jewish informants, a suspicion that was borne out when the homes of almost all the Bund’s central committee members were also raided that evening. Sonya Nowogrodska, the only woman in the Bund underground leadership, narrowly cheated death, as did Bernard Goldstein by switching hiding places at the last minute. Mark Edelman and the Spiegel brothers were not targeted, perhaps because they were not senior enough to warrant Gestapo interest. Nonetheless, the Bund lost nearly a dozen operatives that night. All were shot on the spot, their bodies left to bleed out where they fell. In total, fifty-two people were killed on April 17, which became known variously as Bloody Friday, Night of Blood, or the Sabbath Massacre.

  Bloody Friday revealed a shift in Nazi tactics. Until then, the Gestapo had focused its brutal counterinsurgency measures almost exclusively on Gentiles. (Indeed, earlier that very day, the Nazis had conducted a series of separate raids in the Christian quarters of Warsaw, deporting 461 suspected Resistance members to Auschwitz.) Prior to Bloody Friday, no evidence existed to suggest that the occupation authorities either knew or cared that Jews were forming conspiratorial cells. Occasionally, the Gestapo inquired about the likes of Bernard Goldstein, since he was a well-known agitator from before the war. But there had never been mass arrests or Gestapo dragnets in the Jewish Quarter on the scale that routinely decimated the Polish Resistance. The question was: Why now? What prompted the raids? Had the Germans, through their network of spies, gotten wind of the unification talks between Zionists and Bundists? Had they heard of the intensified efforts to acquire weapons? Did they know about the newly formed youth militias and their growing chorus of calls for self-defense?

  The sad fact remained that the Bund, to date, had not managed to procure a single gun. The vaunted militias, in Boruch Spiegel’s opinion, “were not very serious.” Spiegel, after he recuperated, had demanded to join the defense unit, and he quickly became disillusioned by its lack of structure, discipline, adequate training, and, most of all, arms. Boruch had become far more militant since his father’s death and his own near-death experience. His older brother Berl, who used to nag him to become more involved with the Bund, now had to restrain him. Boruch was volunteering for every possible assignment. He joined his girlfriend Chaika Belchatowska’s “fiver” in distributing underground newsletters. He did gofer duty for Bund bosses, relaying messages and parcels from the main section of the Ghetto to what was now known as the Little Ghetto. This was the smaller, more prosperous southern part of the district, where display windows were still stocked with wines and luxury goods and the wives of the Ghetto’s new “aristocracy”—Judenrat officials and smugglers—shopped. The Little Ghetto had effectively been cut off from the northern section when the Germans extended the Cool Street corridor in January 1942. The deep Aryan incision that provided Gentile access to the municipal courthouse and several churches was elongated to cut all the way through the Ghetto, connecting Midtown to the western working-class neighborhood of Wola. A new wooden bridge was erected over the Aryan passage, providing the only tenuous link between the northern and southern parts of the divided Jewish district.

  Boruch was not content with gofering, however. What he really wanted was to learn how to fight. Physically, he was not a large man, unlike the gruff porters and coal carters from Bird Street who made up the Bund’s prewar militias. But he had survived Garwolin Hell, and he had mustered the will to withstand the beatings by its Ukrainian guards. So despite his gentle temperament, his height deficiency, his delicate features, and his love of opera, Boruch possessed a reservoir of inner strength, a hidden toughness that he had never been aware of until he was pushed to his limits. Perhaps it was only natural that he wanted to push back and, in the process, expiate the guilt of having exchanged his father’s life for his own. Boruch himself could not explain the reasons behind his newfound militancy; he only knew that it was there, and that he was frustrated about his inability to act on it. That frustration ran deep throughout the younger generation of Bundists, particularly after the failed unification talks with the Labor Zionists.

  Isaac Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin’s plan to form a joint defense force within the Ghetto encountered surprisingly stiff opposition. An initial pitch to Jewish Council leaders and relief agency heads prompted “a vehement reaction,” in Zivia’s words. “We were accused of being dangerously irresponsible” and of playing with people’s lives. “If the Germans get wind of even the barest hint of what you propose,” the Elders admonished the young Zionist hotheads, “the reprisals will be catastrophic. Are you ready to take responsibility for the massacre of tens of thousands?”

  Undaunted, Zuckerman next approached the Bund. The Bund’s elder statesmen, however, were not entertaining notions of immediate combat, as Isaac discovered to his dismay. When Isaac made his case for the establishment of a Jewish fighting force, an argument he buttressed with fresh reports of renewed atrocities in the east, Bund boss Maurice Orzech was not impressed. “You are quite young,” Isaac remembered him responding. “And your assessment of the situation appears somewhat rushed and unseasoned.” Orzech was fifty, twice Isaac’s age, and a trained economist from a very wealthy industrialist family, who carried himself with the authority of one born into money. “It’s impossible for the Germans to kill us all. Three and a half million Polish Jews!” he proclaimed. “You’re spreading panic unnecessarily, young man.”

  Jews were not the only ones dying, Orzech argued. In Auschwitz, almost all the victims were still G
entiles at this stage, and the camp’s capacity was vastly expanding with the construction of a satellite site in neighboring Birkenau. “Thousands of Poles are also being murdered,” he insisted. When the Gentiles rose up, the Bund would join in the national rebellion, Orzech declared, but not before. “Our struggle is linked with the Polish working class,” he ended the discussions. “We will not participate in any pan-Jewish organization.”

  Isaac was dumbfounded. “I was ready to kill my Bundist colleagues for their blindness,” he vented to Zivia Lubetkin and several other dejected Zionists. They had counted on the Bund’s connections with the Polish Resistance, but not on its baffling solidarity with Polish workers. Unbeknownst to Isaac, many younger Bundists like Boruch and Mark Edelman shared his view. Orzech’s rejection of a joint fighting force stirred considerable rumblings within the Bund’s lower (and less ideological) ranks. “Many of us were not happy with the decision,” Boruch recalled. “It was a mistake,” Mark Edelman agreed.

  Though rebuffed, Zuckerman would not give up. Like the Spiegel brothers, he had lost family members, and that hardened his resolve to fight. So when a charismatic Communist operative contacted another big Zionist group, the Marxist-leaning Po’alei Zion Left, and its youth arm, the Young Guard, with a proposal to forge an antifascist alliance, Isaac set aside his ideological misgivings and listened. The man’s name was Pinkus Kartin, and he was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a flamboyant Jewish adventurer who had spent years in Polish jails and Parisian exile because of his Leninist beliefs. Kartin did not promise access to the Polish Resistance, because the Polish Underground actively barred Communists. He offered something better: the backing of the Red Army. Kartin was a Soviet agent. Trained in guerrilla tactics by the NKVD, he had been parachuted into Poland in late 1941 to launch a network of Communist partisan cells that would disrupt German lines from the rear.

  While his affiliation didn’t bother the Po’alei Zion Left—its leader, Dr. Adolf Berman, had a younger brother in Moscow also being schooled by the Soviet secret police—Isaac Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin were neither Marxists nor particularly enamored of the USSR. “We had serious reservations,” Lubetkin recalled. “There was a lot of dissension at that meeting,” Isaac added. But there were very few other options. “This was after our great failure with the Bund, and we were grabbing at anything that could shape a force.”

  The offer Pinkus dangled before them was too tempting to ignore: unlimited supplies of Red Army–issue weapons, access to trained military instructors, intelligence reports—in short, everything Isaac and Zivia lacked, and desperately needed. “We feared that by the time all the other Jewish groups united in a common front, it would be too late,” Lubetkin explained. “So we joined.”

  CHAPTER 21

  THE RIGHT OPTION

  Zuckerman’s professed lack of unification options was not entirely accurate. A little-known but relatively well-armed resistance group already operated in the Ghetto in the spring of 1942. That group was the Jewish Military Union. Had Isaac bothered to inquire, he would have been astounded to discover the full extent of the JMU’s clandestine web.

  The JMU had tunnels burrowing under the Ghetto’s walls. It ran an underground railroad that smuggled people out of Nazi-occupied Poland, and it had subterranean shooting galleries for target practice. Its gunsmiths made machine guns and its headquarters had sophisticated radio equipment.

  Isaac knew none of this for the same reason the JMU would all but disappear from postwar history. The organization was politically toxic in left-leaning Jewish circles, and Zuckerman would sooner have made a deal with the devil than with right-wing Zionists.

  So great was the animosity toward the JMU across much of the Jewish political spectrum that the organization was virtually expunged from the historical record by the Labor Party in postwar Israel. Only much later, with the rise of the right in Israeli politics, were concerted efforts made to revive the JMU’s historical fortunes. But by then, it would largely be too late, because scant information survived.

  From what little is known, the JMU may have been founded in December 1939 by Lt. David Apfelbaum, a highly disputed historical figure. He was supposedly then a thirty-eight-year-old reserve army officer, a veteran of Joseph Pilsudski’s famous Legions, and a member of an elitist prewar organization called Brit Hechayal, or the Ex-Soldiers League, a secretive right-wing association of Jewish retired servicemen who tended to be supporters of the Sanation regime. Like most members of the Ex-Soldiers League, Apfelbaum, according to several narratives, hailed from an upper-middle-class background, from a “well-off” family that had achieved success both in business and within the medical community. His uncle was said to be the chief of cardiology at the Jewish General Hospital on Clean Street. Little else is known about David Apfelbaum; no photograph or physical description survives. There is no record of what he did for a living before the war, and few clues as to his personal habits, other than the fact that he was a bachelor and an admirer of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the militant founder of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement that spawned the Likud Party of Israel.

  Apfelbaum apparently fought with distinction during the siege of Warsaw, and in late 1939 he presented himself to his former superiors with the intention of going underground, like countless other Polish combat veterans who were beginning to organize resistance cells. “We don’t want to go to the Oflag,” he told his ex-battalion commander, Captain Henry Iwanski, referring to prison camps being set up at the time for Polish army officers. (Iwanski is another deeply controversial figure.)

  Three other Jewish officers—men who, like Apfelbaum, were described as “cultured and well off” and had conservative political views—attended the meeting. It was held in the infectious disease ward of St. Stanislas Hospital on Wolska Street, not far from where the first Panzer assault on Warsaw had been repulsed (and where a small square would be named in Apfelbaum’s honor by right-wing Polish politicians in 2004). The unusual location was not accidental. St. Stanislas was one of the earliest hubs of Polish resistance because typhus and tuberculosis offered protection from German inquisitiveness. Nazi officials in Warsaw were notoriously sensitive to germs. Their fear of contracting a local ailment bordered on paranoia, and the Poles eagerly exploited this phobia to hide weapons in isolation wards and to organize resistance activities from behind doors marked WARNING: CONTAMINATED MATERIAL.

  The thirty-seven-year-old Iwanski, a self-assured, formal man with blond hair and piercing blue eyes, was an equally unusual candidate to assist in the formation of a Jewish underground. Some historians would brand him a liar and he would prove a thorny embarrassment to Yad Vashem and problematic to Righteous Gentiles. A staunch nationalist, he was a National Democrat, or Endek, as Poland’s largest right-wing party was more popularly known before the war. Its philosophy could be distilled, in the words of Warsaw writer Wladyslaw Broniewski, as “Hurray patriotism combined with primitive anti-Semitism.” Under the motto, “God, Nation, State,” the party preached love of country while practicing the politics of resentment. “Anti-Semitism was not merely an addendum to the Endek program,” Alina Cala of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw would later comment. “It was a principal pillar.”

  Despite his presumptive prejudices, Iwanski said he had been deeply impressed with Apfelbaum during the 1939 siege of Warsaw. “I must confess that I had never expected to find such a brave soldier as you among the Jews,” he told him.

  “There are many like me,” Apfelbaum supposedly replied. “Thousands even better than me.”

  A bond formed between the two warriors, and trust—a very precious commodity for someone in Iwanski’s position—overrode whatever political or philosophical misgivings he may have had in dealing with outsiders from an embattled minority. So when Apfelbaum and the three Jewish officers who accompanied him sought out Iwanski’s counsel, he was receptive.

  “Help us organize the Jewish youth and train them to fight the Germans,” Apfelbaum pleaded. �
��The campaign against the Jews has already begun. We can’t just stand back and watch this oppression be imposed on us. We have to act.”

  “It’s a fact that you Jews are on the front line,” Iwanski acknowledged, according to the postwar testimony of one of Apfelbaum’s three fellow conspirators. “But before we get down to practical matters, I just want to say that whoever wants to fight the Germans is our brother. We’ll help you as much as we can.”

  The first order of business was discretion. “Forget the name Iwanski,” Apfelbaum was instructed. “From now on call me Sharp.” Everyone in the nascent Polish Underground used pseudonyms; Apfelbaum was given the code name Blacksmith, and he and his three Jewish co-conspirators each received a 9 mm semiautomatic VIS handgun and a spare ammunition clip. They were told to recruit like-minded individuals from similar backgrounds—bourgeois, militarily trained, conservative; no socialists from the ideologically suspect Bund or Zionist left—and to wait for further orders.

  Incongruous as it may have seemed, there was a historical precedent for the Judeo-Christian conservative alliance. Throughout the late 1930s, the Sanation regime helped train a radical offshoot of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar. It was known as the Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization in Hebrew, and it would later be labeled a terrorist organization by the British for its violent tactics in Palestine, including the notorious bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. In 1937, the Sanation government forged an agreement with the Irgun commander (and Polish émigré) Avraham Stern, later the leader of the Stern Gang, to provide Jewish recruits from Palestine with large arms caches, military instruction, and seminars on how to conduct guerrilla warfare. Training facilities at Polish army bases in the Carpathian Mountains near Lvov were opened to the Irgun in the hope that future Zionist military successes in Palestine might eventually encourage greater emigration. The Sanation regime’s motives were self-serving—to reduce the number of Jews in Poland. But since Revisionists also shared that ultimate goal—“it is in your interest and in ours,” as Ze’ev Jabotinsky said to convince Sanation officials—the marriage of convenience stuck. Valuable relationships between army officers and young right-wing Zionists were forged, and a precedent for wartime alliance was established.