Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  “You can’t shoot from two fingers,” Maurice Orzech lectured Zuckerman in a similar vein. Isaac countered by suggesting that they attack the unarmed Jewish Police while waiting for the weapons the Communists had promised him. At least they would be doing something, he insisted. His bearing and forceful manner made an impression on Edelman, who had never seen Zuckerman before. “He looked like a nobleman,” Mark recalled, “tall and handsome, and self-assured.” But that didn’t alter the fact that Bundists “didn’t know the Zionists, didn’t trust the Communists, and saw no point in cooperating until we had something to shoot with anyway.”

  So once more no agreement was reached on a common Jewish defense force. What Orzech did not tell Zuckerman during the meeting, however, was that the Bund was on the cusp of acquiring a large batch of weapons, perhaps because they did not want to share it. After months of frustrating delay, the Socialists were finally about to deliver. Through a trusted prewar contact, Orzech had been informed that a Wehrmacht freight car loaded with rifles destined for the Eastern Front had been diverted by the Polish Underground to one of hundreds of sidings at the busy Eastern Cargo Terminal Station. It could sit there for a maximum of two days before the Germans would notice it was missing, so the Bund needed to act fast. “I don’t believe [it will be] a whole wagonload, but we’ll get something out of this,” Orzech promised Edelman before setting out for the Aryan side. “He said that I should wait by a phone at eight A.M. for his call,” Mark recalled. By then, very few telephones were still operational in the Ghetto. Fortunately, Sonia Nowogrodzka, the only woman in the Bund leadership, had a working line in her apartment on New Linden Street. Almost seventy years later, Edelman could still remember the number: 11-92-28.

  At the appointed hour, Mark arrived at Nowogrodzka’s apartment above a coffee shop. He climbed the five flights of stairs to Sonia’s spacious top-floor flat and waited. “I sat by the phone,” staring at the blank spots on the wall where paintings by Mane Katz, a contemporary of Picasso, had hung before the war. The hours passed. Mark chain-smoked to ward away hunger, eyeing the jars of marmalade in the kitchen. Nowogrodzka had probably bought them from Sztykgold’s, the famous preserves shop a few doors down across the street. But she was gone on an errand and he could not help himself without permission. By midafternoon, she hadn’t returned, and Orzech still hadn’t called. Edelman grew worried. Something was wrong.

  “Suddenly I saw a large mob on the street below being driven toward the Umschlagplatz,” Edelman recalled. The screaming and shouting was deafening. Commands of Raus! Weg! Los! were accompanied by curses in Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Polish and the retort of the occasional shot. Among the panicked faces, he recognized Sonia Nowogrodzka’s dark, elegant features.

  “It was four o’clock P.M. There was nothing one could do. At that hour you couldn’t get anyone out of the Umschlagplatz because people were loaded directly into trains.” New Linden Street was cordoned off. Front doors had all been sealed shut by the Jewish Police, so Edelman was trapped in Sonia’s building. The Ukrainians and Germans were checking for anyone left in emptied apartments—and, more important, for anything of value left to steal. Edelman crouched in a corner of the kitchen, shuddering involuntarily. Soon he heard German voices barking in the stairwell. Would they ransack the apartment and find him? It was late, and that may have saved him. The Germans, in a hurry to make the last deportation train at 6 P.M., could not loot at leisure. Just in case they returned, Edelman spent that night hidden in the back of a closet. Orzech never called. The guns never materialized. And Edelman finished off all the marmalade.

  When the Ghetto’s elder statesmen rebuffed Isaac Zuckerman for a second time, the Zionist youth leader decided to go it alone. Isaac and Zivia Lubetkin convened a meeting at their Valiant Street headquarters on July 28 and founded the Jewish Fighting Organization, or ZOB, as it became more popularly known by its Polish acronym.

  At first, only the Marxist Young Guard joined, as well as one representative from the centrist Akiva, a youth arm of the General Zionists. The lone Akiva recruit was disproportionally important, however, because he was an officer of the Jewish Police, and Isaac had decided that the ZOB’s first objective would be to assassinate the chief of that traitorous force.

  The mission was heartily endorsed by Joseph Kaplan and Samuel Braslaw, the co-leaders of the Young Guard, and it was entrusted to Israel Kanal, the Akivist cop. Kanal was twenty-two years old and hailed from a good family in western Poland. He had signed up for police duty thinking he would be in a position to help Jews. But like many others, he had become disillusioned by the corruption and complicity that pervaded the force. The deportations were the tipping point for Kanal, and he had resigned. Isaac, however, persuaded him to don the hated Ordungsdienst police cap one last time because only a member of the Order Service could get close to their target, Joseph Szerynski.

  Szerynski was a career law enforcement officer, a careful man and fastidious dresser who seemed to have let power, money, and women go to his head after the occupation began. He had been a district police commander before the war, and it was largely because of his reputation as a stickler for detail and for doing things by the book that Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniakow had appointed him head of the Ghetto police. A Catholic convert who had polonized his surname from Shinkman in order to win promotion in the Polish civil service, Szerynski had no particular affinity for his abandoned faith. In that regard, he proved himself an ideal choice to do the Nazis’ bidding, unlike Czerniakow, who committed suicide on the first day of the Aktion rather than sign the deportation order presented to him by the SS.

  The decision to kill Szerynski was both symbolic and politically expedient. It was a way for Zuckerman to buy time, because his fledgling fighting organization faced the same problem as the Bund: It had no weapons with which to launch an uprising, and a slew of impatient young members itching to attack the SS with nothing more than switchblades. Zuckerman talked to the rash and rebellious teenagers in much the same way Orzech had spoken to him. A Ghetto-wide revolt, he explained, could not be accomplished with the one gun that currently constituted the ZOB’s whole arsenal. But one pistol was sufficient to kill Szerynski and send a message to the entire Jewish Police.

  The hit was planned for the night of August 20, a Thursday. It turned out to be a blistering day, with thermometers at the Umschlagplatz registering 80 degrees even after dark. Nearly two hundred thousand Varsovian Jews, over half the Ghetto’s inhabitants, had been sent to Treblinka by then. Valiant Street, like many other large sections of the district, was completely empty, a ghost town of ransacked apartments, where white feathers from shredded pillows and mattresses swirled in the deserted courtyards like summer snow. “There wasn’t a single Jew on Valiant,” Zuckerman recalled. Ironically, that made it safer for the ZOB to operate out of the Dror clubhouse, since the danger of unexpected raids had decreased dramatically. The Germans and Ukrainians had already pillaged the vacant buildings and were now focused on the remaining, inhabited parts of the Ghetto.

  Szerynski was with his mistress in one of the populated areas that evening, guarded by a pair of Jewish Police officers posted outside his luxurious apartment building. Israel Kanal rode up to the edifice on a motorcycle and breathlessly informed the guards that he had an urgent message from police headquarters. They may or may not have recognized Kanal—the Order Service had two thousand members—but they let him pass. A woman answered the door when Kanal knocked. While she fetched Szerynski, the young Akivist removed the revolver from his waistband. The gun had been supplied by the Young Guard, one of two they had received from the Polish Boy Scouts.

  When Szerynski’s large frame filled the doorway, Kanal pulled the trigger. The pistol jammed. Frantically, he cocked the firing pin again, and this time a shot rang out. Szerynski must have been so stunned that his jaw literally dropped, because the bullet entered one cheek, grazed his tongue, and exited the other cheek without so much as dislodging a molar. Kanal was too st
unned to fire again and fled into the night.

  Word of the assassination attempt spread rapidly through the Ghetto, but to Zuckerman’s frustration, it was widely presumed to be the work of Gentiles from a Socialist faction of the Polish Resistance. “It didn’t occur to a Jew that Jews would use weapons, that they had weapons.”

  Acquiring those weapons now became the ZOB’s overriding priority. To that end, Zivia Lubetkin dispatched courier Frumka Plotnicka to join the Young Guard’s top runner, Ari Wilner, on the Aryan side. Wilner, a veteran of the Vilna ghetto, was blond and blue-eyed, and he looked like a regular sheygetz, in the pejorative parlance of one contemporary. He was apparently so convincing at playing the sheygetz that the Mother Superior of a Dominican convent where he took refuge during the 1941 massacres in Vilna rechristened him George in honor of her late brother, who she swore was his spitting image. The name had stuck, and in the waning days of August 1942, Frumka Plotnicka sent a message to Zivia that she and “George” were returning to the Ghetto with a package.

  The package consisted of eight hand grenades and five handguns that Wilner procured through fellow Marxists. It was hardly the Red Army arsenal that the Communist underground had promised, and Isaac was disappointed. Smuggling the meager weapons haul into the Ghetto was Zivia Lubetkin’s responsibility, since she was formally in charge of couriers. She would use the same method Simha Ratheiser had employed to sneak back into the Ghetto after his shopping expeditions: try to blend into a column of forced laborers returning after a day’s work on the Aryan side. These labor details still operated, despite the expulsions. The danger was that now, whenever the Germans were behind on their daily deportation quota, the captive laborers were marched straight to the Umschlagplatz instead of being released.

  Forced laborers often bought food while on the Aryan side, so Frumka packed the hand grenades and pistols in the bottom of a sack of potatoes. When the labor details returned in late afternoon, she and Wilner donned Magen David armbands and slipped into the long formations. “The guards at the gates were checking everyone carefully,” Lubetkin recalled. “They had dumped out the potatoes of the man in front of Frumka, and they were rolling around on the road.” Frumka kept her cool. She was exceedingly pretty, a prerequisite for the job, and said something flirtatious to the Polish and Ukrainian guards, who waved her through with a cursory pat-down.

  “I’ll never forget the drinks in honor of that event,” Isaac Zuckerman said of the celebration that evening at Valiant Street. “We were thrilled. There was genuine joy.”

  Alas, it proved short-lived. On September 3, 1942, the Gestapo arrested ZOB co-founder Joseph Kaplan. A few hours later, they shot his colleague Samuel Braslaw. The two Young Guard leaders had formed half of the ZOB’s command staff. Isaac had no time to mourn. As soon as he heard that Kaplan was in the hands of SS interrogators, his thoughts raced to the ZOB’s weapons cache. The arms had been stored at a Young Guard safe house on Cordials Street. “I gave orders to bring the weapons to us,” Zuckerman recalled. While a courier was transporting the grenades and guns, she stumbled across a German patrol. “This, then, was the sum of our day,” Isaac recalled glumly. “Kaplan arrested, Braslaw killed, and our weapons captured.”

  CHAPTER 24

  LITTLE ANGEL

  Simha Ratheiser forced himself to smile and shifted in the late summer sun, which still blazed brightly in September 1942. He tried his best to feign amusement, since his life depended on it. The Germans were watching him, expecting him to share in their mirth. They were clearly enjoying themselves, these tall and dashing cavalrymen, with their polished boots and riding crops, as a trembling, elderly Jewish man urinated in his pants. The cavalrymen pointed at the dark stain spreading down the terrified man’s trousers, and made jovial remarks that Simha was meant to appreciate as well. He willed himself to smile and thrust his hands in his pockets, partly to conceal their trembling and largely because he feared he, too, would “wet myself, I was so frightened.”

  Operation Reinhart, the SS code name for the liquidation of Polish Jewry, had reached Klvov. In the waning days of August 1942, the hamlet’s twenty Jewish families were herded into a makeshift ghetto of roped-off walls and were told they could not cross the staked-out lines on pain of death. A group of Waffen-SS cavalry officers rode into town a few days later, intent on using the captive Jewish villagers for sport.

  “Come here,” they had ordered the elderly man. When he did as he was told, crossing the putative ghetto boundary in the process, they screamed, “You are outside the area!” in feigned outrage. The startled old man was accused of committing a capital crime and was tossed against a barn wall. “I was standing ten feet away,” Simha recalled. “The Germans had no idea I was Jewish too.” They were busy conducting a mock trial, doubled over with laughter, debating with exaggerated gravity whether to execute their victim. Ratheiser couldn’t bring himself to look into the old man’s pleading eyes. He knew the man vaguely. He was one of his relatives’ neighbors, and he, in turn, knew Simha’s true identity.

  Since Simha had never worn the yellow star and had chosen to work for Gentiles, the Germans presumed he was a simple farmhand, an eager spectator to their sport. Perhaps his strong Aryan features led the cavalrymen to assume that he appreciated the service the SS was rendering Klvov by ridding it of Jews.

  Ratheiser nodded with all the enthusiasm his pounding heart could muster and the soldiers roared in approval. Simha felt shame for playing their cruel game. But his urge to live outweighed his instinct to flee, or to shout indignantly that he, too, was Jewish and that the cavalrymen were murderous scum. So he remained rooted to the spot, praying that the old man would not address him in Yiddish.

  Just then, to Simha’s astonishment, the leader of Klvov’s minuscule Jewish community stepped in front of the firing squad to plead the condemned man’s case. At first the Germans were amused. But when the Judenrat chairman gently tried to push one of the rifle muzzles down, the cavalrymen were nonplussed by his defiance. Their grins faded, and their faces took on a uniformly hard look. In unison, they raised their rifles and shot the chairman at point-blank range. “I remember the blood pooling on the ground near my feet,” Ratheiser recalled. “I was so frightened I wanted to run. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t show any emotion. The Germans were watching my reaction.”

  For Simha, the execution “was the first time that I really understood what was happening to my people.” He realized that while he could continue to hide among the Gentiles, the notion of passively observing genocide filled him with a deep sense of shame. Then and there, Ratheiser decided to return to Warsaw to rescue his family before it was too late.

  In the Polish capital, a collective guilt also gripped the Jewish community as shell-shocked survivors of the Gross Aktion struggled to come to terms with the full enormity of the deportations. “So many of our comrades were gone, and we were too ashamed to look one another in the eye,” Zivia Lubetkin recalled.

  The “resettlement” program was officially over. The last transport to Treblinka had departed on September 21, 1942—Yom Kippur—carrying two thousand Jewish policemen. Their services were no longer needed, now that the seven-week extermination campaign had reduced Warsaw’s Jewish population by over three hundred thousand.

  The Ghetto itself had become a ghost town. On street after street, block after block, buildings stood hauntingly empty. Other than the still-functioning Peacock Prison, the central core of the district was completely deserted. Every tenement south of Forestry Boulevard was vacant. All the residents along the Cool Street corridor were dead, as was every inhabitant south of Mushroom Street.

  Throughout the abandoned areas, doors to thousands of apartments were left eerily ajar. Inside, the moldy remnants of interrupted meals and half-smoked cigarettes stood testament to the savage urgency of the final phase of the Gross Aktion, when entire blocks had been emptied in the space of a few hours. The looting that followed had transformed these deserted sections into posta
pocalyptic landscapes where nothing stirred save for the strips of torn clothing that flapped from bits of broken furniture.

  At street level, the billboards advertising chewing gum, shampoo, and travel agencies still beckoned, but all the storefronts had been shattered, the shelves stripped of anything of value, the lighting and toilet fixtures carted off by bands of scavengers. In ransacked apartments, prewar electricity and phone bills, family letters and postcards lay scattered on bare floors, the desks and bureaus that had contained them having been chopped up for firewood or hauled off for resale. Mice and rats scoured the debris for leftover crumbs.

  It was only at dusk that the depopulated parts of the Ghetto began to show faint signs of life: a moving shadow here and there; a bent figure scurrying from a courtyard; the crunch of glass underfoot; the echo of a can being kicked inadvertently in the dark. Occasionally, the red ember of a cigarette might glow in the distance, or a whispered greeting might be heard. But otherwise, blackness and silence stretched in every direction—until an abrupt explosion of life and light: the shops.

  The shops housed the 34,969 Jewish slave laborers who had been spared deportation so they could toil in German-owned factories that supplied the Wehrmacht with everything from winter coats to camouflage netting. Clustered in four separate enclaves, each barricaded with barbed wire and wooden fencing, the shops comprised some four hundred converted apartment buildings and were now the only places in Warsaw where Jews had a right to live. Anyone outside the four cordoned industrial sectors was considered an “illegal,” subject to summary execution, and had to hide in the “wild,” in the vast depopulated dead zones that now comprised most of the empty Ghetto.