Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  There was one other small group of Jews that earned near-universal scorn. They began arriving in Warsaw in May 1942 in American-made Pullman railcars, toting their matching leather luggage sets and dressed in expensive fur-trimmed coats. “The new arrivals would have nothing to do with Ghetto Jews,” Goldstein derided the wealthy German Jews deported from Berlin. “They still talk about unser Fuehrer [our leader, Hitler],” Ringelblum marveled in astonishment, “still certain, despite everything, that they will return to Germany.” Among them, almost certainly, were Martha Osnos’s uncle Mendel and his shallow young wife.

  CHAPTER 22

  SIMHA PLAYS SHEPHERD AND

  EDELMAN PLAYS GOD

  In June 1942, as U.S. naval forces battered the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, rumors circulated through Warsaw that the Germans were planning to deport tens of thousands of Jews to the east.

  Simha Ratheiser, who had been isolated and in hiding for eight months, knew nothing of these developments: neither of the stunning American victory, which had turned the tide in the Pacific, nor of the growing anxiety in the Polish capital, where the implications of a massive resettlement campaign filled the entire Jewish community with dread.

  For Ratheiser, the known universe had shrunk considerably since he had fled the Ghetto the previous fall. Very little information filtered through the dense forests enveloping the secluded hamlet where his mother, Miriam, sent him to stay with distant relatives. The little town was roughly halfway between Warsaw and Krakow, a two-hour walk through wooded trails from the nearest train station. It was called Klvov, and it derived its unusual name from its medieval status as a feed station for horses on a long-abandoned trading route to Lvov. Several hundred families still lived there, in old, dilapidated log cabins with earthen floors, amid their geese and goats.

  Many teenagers accustomed to the bustle of the big city might have balked at getting stuck in a town whose twenty Jewish households clustered around the only street. But Ratheiser, who was almost eighteen by now, his boyish Slavic features still brimming with innocent mischief, welcomed the tranquillity. “It was heaven on earth” to him.

  Klvov was too small and too far off the beaten path for a ghetto or a permanent German garrison. Its one-hundred-odd Jews were required to wear identifying yellow stars on their outer clothing, in accordance with Nazi law, but were otherwise free to come and go as they pleased. Occasionally, a German patrol passed through the village, but mostly the people of Klvov were left to their own devices.

  Simha had never worn the Magen David armband in Warsaw, and he refused to heed his relatives’ stern admonition that he sew one on now. His cousins were even less pleased when Ratheiser announced that he wanted to find work outside the tightly knit Jewish community. “My relatives were religious Jews and didn’t like the idea of a Jew working for a Gentile,” he recalled

  Simha, however, instinctively grasped that even in isolated Klvov he would find greater safety among the Christian majority. Perhaps he was also eager to exercise his newfound freedom from parental control. Legally, he was almost an adult, and no doubt wished to make his own decisions. Simha overrode the objections of his relatives and asked them to introduce him to any local peasants in need of farmhands.

  One agreed to take him on. “The peasant knew that my relatives were Jewish and concluded that I was a Jew too. Nevertheless, I was hired to herd cows, even though Jews usually didn’t do such work.”

  Simha’s new position was certainly unusual. According to prewar surveys, only 4 percent of Polish Jews made their living off the land, mostly in milling and food processing. Sixty percent of Poland’s non-Jewish workforce, on the other hand, engaged directly in farming. Ratheiser’s new employer either had not heard of the death penalty decree for assisting Jews, or, just as likely, didn’t care. Polish peasants had a long-standing reputation for stubbornness and defiance.

  The job had some significant perks: “Every morning I would go to the peasant’s house, where I ate my fill of bread, potatoes, and lard, and drank milk,” Simha recalled. He would then corral half a dozen cows from the barn and lead them out into the open fields, where they grazed until evening. “I’d lie in the meadow all day long, with the summer sky above me, listening to the birds singing,” he recalled of his undemanding cowboy duties.

  After the horrors of Warsaw, the abundance and serenity of Klvov were almost intoxicating. Simha’s strength and carefree spirit quickly returned. His frame regained its athletic form, and the sun bleached his hair wheat-field gold. Only thoughts of home intruded on his bucolic paradise: “I was haunted by the idea that people in the Ghetto were suffering from hunger and disease while I lay between the green grass and blue sky.”

  This nagging remorse was compounded by the fact that Simha had not heard from his parents or sisters in the more than eight months since he’d left Warsaw. Not a scrap of news from the Polish capital had reached rural Klvov that entire summer. The isolated village had no radios, no access to newspapers, virtually no links to the outside world. Simha thus had no inkling that on July 22, 1942, the dreaded deportation order to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto had finally been issued.

  “All Jewish persons living in Warsaw, regardless of age and sex, will be resettled in the East,” the decree read. “Evacuees” were instructed to prepare a three-day supply of food, and pack no more than thirty pounds of luggage, including, notably, “all valuables such as gold, jewelry, money, etc.”

  They were not told where they would be taken.

  During the next seven weeks, through the course of what became known as the Gross Aktion, or Great Deportation, Mark Edelman emerged as a leading figure in the underground. The brash Belorussian orphan had until then played a peripheral role in the Bund, running errands and hanging around bosses like Abrasha Blum and Bernard Goldstein, who appreciated his cocky attitude and entrusted him with minor missions. The Gross Aktion changed everything, however, turning the Ghetto’s power structures upside down.

  Twenty-two-year-old Edelman was the Bund’s gatekeeper, tasked with rescuing the doomed during the deportations. His role as a savior was unwittingly made possible by Nazi duplicity and his job as a hospital orderly. To maintain the fiction that all “evacuees” needed to be in good health in order to resettle in the new labor colonies, a field hospital had been set up at a large railroad siding where freight trains arrived each day. The new clinic was staffed with doctors, nurses, and orderlies from the Ghetto hospital where Edelman worked. Mark was among the medical personnel in crisp white frocks who were posted at this transfer station to further the illusion that deportees were being sent east to work. He saw his duties differently, however: to liberate members of the Underground before they were crammed into the cattle cars that departed the transfer station every morning and late afternoon.

  The station, or Umschlagplatz in German, was the Ghetto’s main cargo terminal and rail depot, where food and raw materials were legally imported from the “Aryan side” and where finished products from Ghetto factories were exported, mainly from German military contractors who had set up shop in the Jewish district to exploit cheap skilled labor.

  To accommodate the new human traffic, the Umschlagplatz had been expanded to incorporate four large buildings off Zamenhof Street, the large diagonal avenue that slashed across Pleasant, Goose, Peacock, Valiant, and New Linden Streets, forming one of the Ghetto’s main north-south arteries.

  Deportees were led to the station along Zamenhof, a dense corridor of four- and five-story buildings whose upper floors had traditionally housed dentists and denture manufacturers. Edelman’s job was to screen them when they arrived. “My task was to stand at the gateway to the Umschlagplatz and select out ‘sick’ people,” he recalled. On the first day of the deportations it rained, he remembered, and a large crowd of onlookers lined the narrow sidewalks on Zamenhof in front of Teperman and Morgensztern’s bakery to watch the Jewish Police shepherd the first batch of evacuees to the Umschlagplatz. They formed a heart-wre
nching parade: skeletal survivors from the typhus quarantines, ragged refugees from homeless shelters and poorhouses, emaciated inmates from the Goose Street jail, the Ghetto’s relatively small but hardened group of convicted criminals—all shuffling unsteadily on their feet, their skin pale as parchment, their bony limbs poking through torn clothes.

  The staggering procession moved in an orderly silence that astounded Edelman, until he overheard some of the whispered conversations. “If they intended to kill us, they wouldn’t feed us so much,” the usually cynical thieves reasoned. “When will we be given the bread?” asked a child of about five, too weak to walk, perched on his father’s thin shoulder. “Soon,” the father promised, as they approached the gates. “It is already very, very near.”

  A promised travel ration was eliciting the extraordinary compliance. The Germans had offered six pounds of bread and two pounds of jam to every volunteer for relocation. This was more food than most had seen in weeks. “Do you have any idea what bread meant at the time?” Edelman asked. “In this way, even the most rebellious elements in the Ghetto, the hard cases, the pimps, thieves, and gangsters from Krochmalna Street, this whole underworld segment, lined up meekly at the ramps, saying that if they’re feeding us we must be going to work.”

  Edelman soon realized that the transports were not departing on lengthy journeys to distant labor colonies. The locomotives were numbered, and the same engines, often driven by the same engineers, returned on a daily basis. “We didn’t know where people were being taken, but we knew it could not have been very far.” To find out, the Bund dispatched one of its most daring couriers, Zalman Friedrich. “He was a strong, well-built, athletic, handsome young man,” Bernard Goldstein, who employed him frequently, recalled. “He looked like the German propagandist’s dream of the blond Aryan.” Goldstein arranged for him to make contact with a Socialist Party acquaintance in the Polish Resistance. Within the Resistance, the Socialists specialized in sabotaging trains because their trade unions had controlled maintenance and rail yards before the war. Inside knowledge allowed them to launch diversionary operations that ultimately damaged 6,930 locomotives and 19,058 railcars, disrupting raw material shipments and Wehrmacht supply schedules. Their derailing activities had vastly increased in the summer of 1942, but the heightened sabotage had nothing to do with the Gross Aktion. They were acting on British orders to hamper munitions deliveries to German troops attacking Stalingrad, where Hitler, on July 17, 1942, had launched one of the biggest offensives of the war.

  The Socialists were dragging their feet on their earlier pledge to arm the Bund, but they promised to help uncover the destination of the Ghetto transports. Disguised as a mechanic from the Danzig station, Zalman rode the Warsaw–Malkinia line some fifty miles northeast of the capital, near where Isaac and Zivia had crossed back into Poland in 1941. There, the track branched onto a newly built spur, where trains from the Ghetto were diverted. The spur traveled through boggy fields and disappeared into a thick pine forest. Since the new line was closed to all other traffic, this was as far as the Polish railway-men could take him. He observed, however, that the trains entering the forested area would reemerge a few hours later, empty. No food was ever carried into the woods. All Friedrich could learn initially was that the Germans had opened a small but particularly brutal detention facility in the vicinity for Polish political prisoners in the summer of 1941. It was called Treblinka I, and thousands of Gentiles had already lost their lives there.

  Back in Warsaw, the Ghetto split into two distinct communities by early August: those who held Dienstausweis identity papers listing them as “productive” members of society, and those who did not. Holders of the so-called “life-tickets,” which had been distributed to employees of the German-owned factories and to Judenrat and Sanitation Department officials, relief agency staff, medical personnel, and the Jewish Police, were exempt from initial deportation. All others—some sixty to seventy thousand people—were deemed nonproductive and subject to expulsion.

  Edelman, meanwhile, continued his lonely vigil at the Umschlagplatz gates, trying to save fellow conspirators. “I had a hard rule. I only rescued those I knew personally from the Underground,” he recalled. It was painful, and felt like playing God, but only a few dozen of the six to seven thousand evacuees that passed through the Umschlagplatz each day could be saved. Friends, neighbors, and former schoolmates had to be sacrificed. When they filed by him, Mark looked away. He pretended not to see them, pretended he didn’t know what awaited them. “I was merciless,” he said. “I had to be, because if I wavered I would not have saved a single soul.”

  Those he did select, he discreetly redirected to the field hospital emergency room. “In order to pull someone out of the lines it was necessary to prove to the Germans that the person was seriously ill.” This was part of the cynical German charade that played out daily at the Umschlagplatz. “Only a healthy person could work, right? So these girls from the emergency room, those nurses, would break the legs of those people who had to be saved. They would wedge a leg up with a wooden block and smash it with another block.”

  Edelman tried not to resort to such incapacitating measures. He kept extra lab coats hidden in the field hospital and he would smuggle out Bundists dressed as hospital staff after the transports had departed. Sometimes Jewish Police officers helped him. “They weren’t all sons of bitches,” Edelman recalled. But every Jewish policeman, no matter how well intentioned, had a deportation quota to fill, and if the day’s allocation was not met, the shortfall had to be made up from within his own family. This was a powerful incentive that explained the zeal with which some members of the Jewish Police performed their duties, snatching pedestrians from the street and hauling people from their homes.

  “People—your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, your family—just disappeared,” Boruch Spiegel recalled. “Every day someone you knew was taken.” For Boruch, it was his older brother Berl. “He had gotten into an argument, a fight, with a Jewish policeman, the son of a rich man who had owned printing presses before the war. I don’t know the details, but a few days later he went out and didn’t return. I never saw Berl again.”

  Boruch had no time to mourn. He himself had been caught twice in roundups. It was only by sheer luck that he managed to escape: once when a fellow Bundist intervened with a friendly Jewish policeman, and a second time when the Germans waved him off because they had just filled their daily quota. “Mostly I was hiding on the roof now in case they raided our building,” Boruch explained. “My hands and pants were so blackened and torn from sliding on the tin that Chaika joked that she wouldn’t be seen with me.”

  The popular theory that the expulsions would end after the seventy thousand “nonproductive” residents had been resettled was proving disastrously false. “Street by street, building by building, they were emptying the Ghetto,” Spiegel said.

  The dragnets became particularly savage after courier Zalman Friedrich returned in mid-August with an eyewitness who had escaped from the newly opened camp at Treblinka II. The Bund began to paper the Ghetto with handbills describing Treblinka’s gas chambers. “Do not be deceived! You are being taken to death and extermination. Do not let them destroy you! Do not give yourselves voluntarily into the hands of your executioners.”

  At the Umschlagplatz, heavily armed Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian units were called in by the SS to control increasingly uncooperative and hysterical crowds. “Everybody’s eyes have a wild, crazy, fearful look,” Edelman later described the scene in his memoir. “People beg for water and mothers cry for their separated children. The stench is unbearable. There are no latrines, and people must lie in their own feces for hours on end. The Ukrainians and Latvians rob and kill at will. In this crowded square,” Edelman continued, “all the continually nursed illusions collapse. This is the moment of revelation that soon the worst, the unthinkable, the thing one would not believe to the very last moment is about to happen. A nightmare settles in one’s ches
t, grips one’s throat, shoves one’s eyes out of their sockets, opens one’s mouth to a soundless cry. One wants to yell but there is no one to yell to; to implore, to argue—there is no one to argue with; one is alone, completely alone in this multitude of people.”

  Edelman, too, wanted to yell with helpless rage as he watched “six, maybe eight” Ukrainian guards rape a young girl. “They held her by the hands and legs, suspended in the air. She hung there, bleeding as they took turns. This was in front of hundreds of people,” he said. “What did I do? Nothing. What could I do?”

  CHAPTER 23

  ONE GUN

  Whether it was horror or helpless rage, disbelief or despondent resignation, the mass deportations of June and July 1942 affected each Ghetto resident in a different way. The relief of having been spared each day was accompanied by the grief for lost friends and relatives and the terrifying realization that tomorrow would bring another roundup, another forced march up Zamenhof, past Edelman and the other white-frocked angels of death who stood vigil by the gates of the Umschlagplatz.

  Fear and fury mixed equally in the minds of surviving Ghetto residents, and if Bundists like Mark or Boruch harbored any fantasies of revenge, these were tempered by the fact that the Bund still had no weapons, despite repeated promises from their Socialist allies that a shipment was expected any day. The lack of guns was the main reason Bund boss Maurice Orzech refused another entreaty from Isaac Zuckerman and the Zionist left to form a fighting alliance. The idea was proposed at an emergency meeting of Ghetto leaders in the opening days of the expulsions. Edelman was present at the high-level discussions, though more by accident than by invitation. “I was accompanying Abraham Schneidmel,” the head of the Bund’s self-defense militia. “Suddenly some Ukrainians started shooting at us. Abraham, a former [Polish army] officer, immediately sized up the situation and bolted. I stayed and went to the meeting in his place,” Edelman recalled. “It surprised me that such a great figure would run away. But I was a kid. Abraham didn’t believe in the organized resistance that we young people so desperately wanted because he was an adult. As a professional soldier, he knew that realistically we had no chance.”