During the siege of Warsaw, the Polish military had reaped rewards from its prewar association with the Irgun. On the eve of the Nazi invasion, the Irgun’s Warsaw representatives had received a thousand rifles and ammunition clips from Polish army arsenals intended for shipment to Palestine. When the Germans attacked, local Irgun coordinator Ila Sztrasman voluntarily turned over the weapons to the Warsaw military district commander, who in turn distributed the guns to the capital’s defenders during the siege.
From a practical point of view, continuing the partnership made sense. Nearly a third of Poland’s urban population was Jewish, and through its right-wing Jewish allies, the Polish Underground gained eyes and ears in places that might otherwise have been off-limits to Gentiles, such as Warsaw’s large Jewish Quarter. The cooperation was very limited, however. Just as the Sanation regime kept its arrangement with the Irgun from the general public, Iwanski’s superiors did not burden the Polish Resistance’s central coordinating body with the details of the deal struck with Apfelbaum.
By the time Iwanski allegedly made contact again shortly before Christmas 1939, Apfelbaum—or Blacksmith, as he was now called—and his co-conspirators had found thirty-nine individuals, including five women, who met Iwanski’s criteria. The group gathered at the home of an engineer named Urbach, where a formal ceremony was convened to induct the new members into the Resistance. The induction was held in a partly destroyed building on the corner of Valiant and Carmelite Streets, on the same block where Mark Edelman printed the Bund’s news bulletins. Candles burned as the new members took an oath. “I receive thee among the soldiers of Freedom” was the standard Polish Underground wording. “Victory will be thy reward. Treason will be punished by death.” As all underground members had to swear loyalty “before God the Almighty,” a rabbi was present to bless the newly formed unit.
It was formally named the Jewish Military Union, and was supplied with twenty-nine handguns.
The early years of the JMU’s development are not well documented, since—as the Jerusalem Post mourned in a 2006 headline—information about this organization was the first casualty of war. The dearth of historical documentation on the resistance group was actually a deliberate casualty of postwar politics in both Communist Poland and Labor-dominated Israel, according to the Holocaust historian Yisrael Gutman. For ideological reasons, the role of the right was ignored “almost to the point of total omission in an effort to write rival camps out of history.”
So little is definitively known about the Jewish Military Union that the left-leaning Haaretz, another leading Israeli daily, asked in a skeptical 2007 article “what to make of the story of David Moryc Apfelbaum,” noting that the only authenticated archival reference to him in either Polish or Israeli official documents is a listing in the 1938 Warsaw telephone book. The paper questioned whether or not Apfelbaum ever existed, claiming that he was an invention of the Polish and Israeli right.
Mark Edelman is equally dismissive of the JMU. “They were smugglers and thieves backed by a bunch of [Polish] nationalists,” he angrily declared, between puffs of an unfiltered cigarette at his Lodz home in 2007. “They were never a real resistance movement.”
The bitter divisions between the right and left ran too deep in both Jewish and Gentile circles for there to be any kind of effective cooperation. This was reflected in the Jewish Military Union’s own “elitist recruitment policies strongly weighted toward those better-off Jews who were most integrated into Polish culture and society,” according to Apfelbaum’s cousin Marian, who at the time was a toddler in Warsaw. Their members had to be “bourgeois and right-leaning,” and able to pass as Poles because the Jewish Military Union’s conservative Polish patrons, like Captain Henry Iwanski, would not have welcomed unassimilated Yiddish speakers into their midst. As a result, the organization had only expanded from roughly forty initial inductees in December 1939 to almost a hundred by the fall of 1940.
During that time, the group had not been given any missions of note by Captain Iwanski or its other Gentile overseers. It had set up an underground railroad to smuggle people into the Soviet zone, which the Polish Resistance is known to have used. And it had been charged with the rather pedestrian responsibility of monitoring foreign radio broadcasts for the Poles and producing written transcripts similar to Mark Edelman’s Bulletin.
Neither smuggling people nor transcribing radio broadcasts was a particularly prestigious assignment, and perhaps reflected the relatively low standing Jews held within the Polish Resistance’s fractious hierarchy. Still, the Jewish Military Union had guns: at least three dozen Polish army-issue VIS-35 9 mm semiautomatic pistols based on a Colt design. Founding member Kalmen Mendelson, a thirty-eight-year-old former second lieutenant, had set up a firing range in the basement of a residential building at 5 Carmelite Street, a block away from Mark Edelman’s nocturnal printing press. When the Ghetto was decreed, David Apfelbaum moved to the same street, according to Mendelson, which offered good cover because it was one of the busiest through-traffic roads in the Jewish Quarter, running from bustling Forestry Street in the south to Valiant Street three blocks north, abutting the east gates of Peacock Prison.
Apfelbaum’s move into the Jewish Quarter and the closure of the Ghetto drastically altered the makeup and mission of the Jewish Military Union. Within a few months, membership in the group soared to over 250 inductees. The influx of new candidates during the winter of 1941 was partly the result of a change in philosophy by Apfelbaum, Mendelson, and some of the other early leaders. Up until then they had largely viewed themselves as subordinate to the Polish Resistance. But the forced segregation of Jews had altered their perspective, and they began to act more like an independent Jewish combat organization, now only loosely affiliated with outside forces. This gave them far greater leeway in recruiting and led to what effectively became a merger with the Zionist right.
The Revisionist Zionist Party and its youth arm, Betar, were natural partners for the veterans from the Ex-Soldiers League who dominated the earliest incarnation of the Jewish Military Union. Betar, through its militant offshoot the Irgun, already had a long-standing association with the Polish military, having been trained and armed by the Sanation regime, and of all the Zionist groups—dozens of dogmatic factions spread along the entire political spectrum—its ideology most closely mirrored that of the Jewish Military Union.
For the Revisionists, forging an alliance with Apfelbaum’s unit made sense because they were virtually pariahs in the generally left-leaning Zionist community at this point and had nowhere else to turn. “We became Fascists, Hitlerites,” David Wdowinski, the ranking Revisionist in Warsaw in 1941, recalled of the accusations hurled at his party from the Left in retaliation for founder Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s position that Jews “cannot serve two gods, Zionism and Socialism.”
Revisionists held certain doctrinal positions that were heretical to the Zionist left. They favored heavy industry and big business over organized labor and the communal kibbutz at the heart of Labor Zionist philosophy. And, more important, they advocated the use of force if necessary to achieve Jewish statehood in Palestine, accusing the rest of the Zionist community, which pushed for negotiated diplomatic settlements, of complicity with the British to maintain the status quo. As a result of the rift, the two wings were not on speaking terms when the Second World War broke out. Revisionists boycotted the World Zionist Congresses, and Congress chairman David Ben-Gurion labeled the hawkish Jabotinsky “Vladimir Hitler,” declaring that “the fight against Revisionism is a fight unto the death in the strongest sense of the word.”
Betar was similarly isolated. Its members were derided by the left as “Brown Shirts” because of the color of their Scout uniforms. Just before the war, Menachem Begin had been appointed head of Betar in Poland. But the charismatic Warsaw University Law School graduate was now in Soviet custody, having been arrested by the NKVD in Vilna before he could make good on his promise to return to Warsaw. Young Betarists in
the Polish capital were leaderless and eagerly looking for direction.
The Jewish Military Union provided that direction. How the groups first connected is not known. Perhaps they initiated contact through Apfelbaum’s uncle, who was chief of cardiology at the same hospital where Revisionist leader David Wdowinski worked as a neuropsychiatrist. Whatever the case, in the winter of 1941, Betarists began to flood into the ranks of the Jewish Military Union.
One of these new recruits was a young man by the name of Paul Frenkel. He almost certainly did exist, was around twenty-two years old, and “was among the most beautiful, the most honest, the most modest people I have ever met in the course of a long political life,” David Wdowinski later wrote. “He was the personification of hadar—dignity.”
Frenkel was dark and delicate-featured, of slim build and refined appearance, according to Wdowinski. Already the young Betarist was establishing himself as a promising commander with an independent streak, “a rare combination of steel and silk.” Acting on his own, outside formal party structures, he had rallied a group of like-minded Betarists in late 1940 and begun to train fighting units. His teenage followers were required to leave their families as a condition for joining his band, and Frenkel demanded that all recruits live communally and hew to near-monastic self-discipline. They practiced hand-to-hand combat, conducted seminars on partisan warfare, and adhered to a strict regimen of physical exercise. What they lacked was guns, and that was one area where the rapidly expanding Jewish Military Union could help.
“The [Polish Underground] became aware of this influx of volunteers and wanted to take advantage of the as yet relatively unhampered access to the ghetto,” Kalmen Mendelson later explained. “They sent two combat rifles, two carbines, two machine guns, ten pistols, and dozens of hand grenades.”
The shipment was relatively insignificant by Polish Underground standards. But it represented far and away the largest single store of weapons in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1941.
By 1942, the JMU boasted nearly three hundred registered combatants, split into two companies of four platoons whose commanders had all received advanced military instruction on the “Aryan side”—that is, from the Polish Resistance. Its organizational chart was rigidly martial and modeled on that of the Polish Underground, with separate department heads responsible for information and propaganda, transport and supplies, and technical, legal, financial, medical, military, and rescue operations, as well as a chief armorer.
A three-man general command staff presided over the secretive group. At its head stood Apfelbaum, or so some claimed. He was forty-one by now, and no longer a lowly lieutenant. In recognition of the JMU’s numerical growth, his Polish Underground patrons had promoted him to captain. Despite the rise in rank, he faced a strong challenge to his leadership from twenty-two-year-old Paul Frenkel. Leon Rodal rounded out the triumvirate. Like Frenkel, he had no combat experience and had also joined the Military Union late. An independently wealthy twenty-nine-year-old journalist from Kielce, Rodal was the ranking Revisionist in the JMU. As the main editor of several Revisionist underground publications, he was the party’s chief ideologue, the man in charge of disseminating Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s founding philosophy of Jewish empowerment and self-defense. In the JMU, Rodal had found the perfect vehicle for his message, and his organizational skills and access to Revisionist Party funds gave him outsized influence.
Between them, Rodal and Frenkel started displacing the apolitical army veterans who had initially formed the JMU as a subordinate unit of Security Corps, a nationalist faction of the Polish Underground. Though still nominally attached to Battalion V of the Security Corps, the JMU by 1942 was begining to operate quasi-independently, more under the sway of Revisionist ideology than of its Polish patrons.
Apfelbaum still relied almost exclusively on his Gentile superiors for weapons supplies. But the training of his troops took place inside the Ghetto, in two underground shooting galleries on Cordials and Franciscan Streets which also housed clandestine gunsmith shops and grenade manufacturing facilities. The arms the JMU had acquired—a small number of large-caliber carbines and rifles, a few machine guns, perhaps as many as a hundred pistols, some in poor working order, and several hundred homemade grenades—were cached in a half dozen safe houses.
To smuggle weapons and maintain links with Security Corps officers, the JMU’s Technical Department dug a tunnel in December 1941 on the corner of Trench and Goose Streets, in the northwestern sector of the district. Its entrance was beneath the ruins of a burned-out building next to the wall, and it ran fifty feet outside the adjacent Jewish cemetery, exiting discreetly under a morgue on the Aryan side.
The JMU thus had far less incentive to forge links with Jewish groups from across the political spectrum. Revisionists did not need to join a left-leaning coalition to gain access to Polish Resistance units or their weapons stores. They were already well supplied. For the JMU, moreover, there was substantial risk in crossing ideological lines: heightened exposure to potential Gestapo moles who might have infiltrated other underground organizations. That, more than any doctrinal disagreement, was a risk Apfelbaum, Rodal, and Frenkel were not willing to take.
Although the various Jewish underground groups were still bitterly divided in the spring of 1942, the Germans were not taking any chances. It was not a coincidence that the Gestapo rampage on Friday, April 17, 1942, followed so closely on the heels of the failed unification talks between the Bund and the Labor Zionists and the subsequent formation of the Communist-led Anti-Fascist Bloc. The Nazis wanted to ensure that the Jews remained divided.
“Bloody Friday has had strong repercussions,” the Ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum noted in his journal. “Since the slaughter was the result of tattling by Jewish informers, people tremble to speak a word. The illegal press has stopped publishing. There has been a significant weakening of political activity.”
Fear and paranoia gripped the Jewish community. The Germans shrewdly exploited the mounting anxiety by staging smaller raids every few nights throughout May 1942 to keep the lid on underground activity. “I became a pariah,” Isaac Zuckerman recalled. Word spread throughout the Ghetto that the Gestapo was searching for him. “My landlord heard about it immediately and insisted we leave his apartment.” Isaac started changing flats every few days, avoiding Valiant Street headquarters, and dealing only with trusted intermediaries, just as he had once done in the Soviet zone. He was far from alone in lying low. Some formerly active conspirators quit. Others went “deep underground,” dispersing into sleeper cells that would never re-form. And others still left Warsaw altogether, vowing in disgust to search for braver Jews in other ghettos. Pinkus Kartin, the flamboyant Soviet agent behind the newly formed Anti-Fascist Bloc, also refused to bow to the Gestapo terror tactics. He was denounced by an informant and tortured to death by the SS. The short-lived Anti-Fascist Bloc that Isaac Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin had joined only a few weeks earlier died with him.
In this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, trust almost completely evaporated, wiping out any chance for competing groups to find common ground. The Underground was atomized, once more reduced to its basic elements. In its place, a paralyzing obsession with informants arose. “There were not many,” Mark Edelman recalled. “But they did a tremendous amount of damage.”
That the Ghetto would eventually spawn a homegrown league of traitors was a statistical certainty. Any agglomeration of nearly half a million people will have its bad apples, regardless of ethnicity or religion. “People don’t like to hear that we had Jewish prostitutes, criminals, or collaborators,” Edelman explained. “But that was the reality.”
In the Ghetto, this intrinsically human phenomenon could be seen at any of the district’s sixty-one nightclubs. “The clientele of these places consisted principally of Jewish Gestapo agents, Jewish police officials, rich merchants who did business with the Germans, smugglers, dealers in foreign exchange,” Bernard Goldstein recalled. “The worst nest
of drunkenness and vice was the Britannia. The curfew did not apply to the habitués of this establishment. They made merry all night. Feasting, drinking, and carousing went on to the rhythm of a jazz band. At dawn, when the revelers left, the streets were already strewn with naked paper-covered corpses. The drunkards paid little attention, tripping unsteadily over the obstacles in their path. Around them hovered human shadows, swollen with hunger, who trailed after the well-fed drunks, begging for scraps. They were usually angrily pushed aside.”
The Britannia, with its champagne-and-caviar-fueled revelry, became a symbol of the excesses of this small class of morally indifferent survivalists. The once respectable four-star hotel on New Linden Street had been turned into a brothel by German officers before being taken over by Abraham Gancwajch, the most notorious Gestapo-backed gangster in the Ghetto. He headed a Nazi-sanctioned extortion ring known as the Thirteen, dabbled in all manner of smuggling and illicit affairs, and was said to be one of the richest war profiteers in all of Warsaw.
“Gancwajch is turning into a regular Maecenas,” Ringelblum, the underground archivist and member of Po’alei Zion Left, wryly noted. “He arranges receptions for Jewish writers and artists, where there is plenty of food—nowadays the important thing. A short time ago he threw an all-night party at the El Dorado night spot.… The party was opened with the dedication of an ambulance, named Miriam (after Gancwajch’s wife at home).”
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