Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The flood of new names and faces and divergent political orientations within the ZOB violated one of the cardinal rules of clandestine activity. In any underground organization, Edelman explained, “you didn’t bring anyone in unless you knew them from childhood and could personally vouch for them.” Yet he was now sitting next to complete strangers on the organization’s five-man command council. The only thing Edelman knew about most of his fellow commanders—Anielewicz, Hersh Berlinski from Po’alei Zion Left, and the Polish Workers Party delegate Michael Roisenfeld—was that they were all Marxists. And that did not fill him with confidence.

  The ZOB needed a leader who would bring the disparate forces together. Isaac Zuckerman was a natural choice, since the Jewish Fighting Organization had been his brainchild. Mordechai Anielewicz, however, coveted the post. It was not clear how Zuckerman felt about a relative outsider parachuting in at the last minute to steal center stage in the organization he had founded. Isaac was not without ego, and he was almost certainly not pleased by this unexpected development. Publicly he would only say: “Mordechai Anielewicz wanted to be commander of the Organization and was fit for it in every respect. He believed in his own strength and he was ambitious. He proposed himself for the job and I gladly accepted it even though there had been talk about me being commander.”

  Not everyone agreed that the brash newcomer had the right temperament for the post. “What is there to say?” Edelman later chose his words carefully. “Anielewicz really wanted to be leader. It was very important to him and not so important to us. So he became leader.”

  CHAPTER 25

  SIMHA RETURNS AND

  JOANNA FLEES

  By the fall of ’42, Simha Ratheiser had returned to the outskirts of Warsaw. His trip from Klvov was uneventful. He traveled on false documents bought from a Gentile. They identified him as a Catholic farmhand, and since he looked the part after eight months in the country sun, no one bothered him.

  Simha still had no idea when he arrived in the Polish capital that 90 percent of Warsaw’s Jews had been exterminated. At this stage in the war, most Poles outside Warsaw were either unaware of the Holocaust or, in some cases, indifferent to it. The Polish Underground press was only belatedly waking up to the tragedy, and the horrifying stories it printed were initially dismissed by many as wild exaggerations. The Jews may have been deported, but it was inconceivable they had all been killed.

  Simha’s ignorance spared him the agony of presuming his parents and sisters were dead. “I had a lot of confidence in my mother. I knew she could take care of herself. It was my father I worried about.” Ratheiser remembered that his mother, Miriam, had planned to get the rest of the family out of the Ghetto. He also knew that she had stayed in regular contact with their former Gentile neighbors, who had provided her with food on many occasions, and who might now know of her whereabouts. So he headed to his old neighborhood, Czerniakow, on Warsaw’s leafy southern flank, hoping to track down his family.

  He did not have to look far, as it turned out. Miraculously, Miriam and his father, Zvi, were alive and well, living on a huge suburban estate on the eastern banks of the Vistula. The rambling property was similar to the Polish Underground base that had sheltered Joanna, Hanna, and Janine Mortkowicz until recently. It spanned several hundred acres, contained dozens of outbuildings, had orchards and its own artificial lake, and belonged to a sympathetic aristocrat who turned a blind eye to the clandestine activities conducted on his premises. The principal difference was that the Zatwarnicki estate in Czerniakow was run by the ZOB rather than the Polish Resistance.

  Isaac Zuckerman had found the place in 1940, when he and Zivia Lubetkin were looking for land to farm on the outskirts of Warsaw. Despite growing hunger in the city, the estate’s fields had been left fallow as a result of labor shortages caused by the mass deportations of Polish workers to the Reich. With some trepidation, Isaac approached Zatwarnicki about setting up a kibbutz on his property. It would help feed Dror members in Warsaw and provide the aristocrat with an income. Zuckerman wasn’t sure what to expect. Many Polish nobles resented Jews for surpassing them in wealth and influence following the Industrial Revolution, when Poland’s nobility had stubbornly and disastrously chosen to remain agriculturally based. When power predictably shifted from the land to factories and urban financial centers, many aristocrats were left behind, angry, impoverished, and looking for scapegoats for their own mistakes. But not Zatwarnicki. “He wasn’t an anti-Semite, quite the opposite,” Zuckerman found.

  The two struck a deal, and Zatwarnicki proved to be a very obliging landlord over the years. Food grown at the estate was continuously smuggled into the Ghetto. Couriers came at night and left at dawn. Underground pamphlets were stored in the barns for distribution to other cities. During the deportations, the Czerniakow farm became a refuge for hundreds of Zionists, ZOB members, and even some nonaffiliated Jews. “We wanted to save the people,” Zuckerman explained. “But we didn’t know what to do with them in Warsaw. We sent them to Czerniakow.”

  Somehow, Simha’s mother, Miriam, had talked her way into this group of refugees, and Ratheiser found his family living at the far end of the fields in a tent near the banks of the Vistula. (The farm’s outbuildings were so overcrowded that people slept in bunks stacked three high.)

  The estate, by November 1942, had morphed from a Dror outpost into the ZOB’s first base of operations. The organization’s archives were kept there, along with a small weapons cache consisting of several rifles and a crate of grenades. ZOB deputy commanders Mordechai (Mort) Tennenbaum and Tuvia Borzykowski used the premises to train defense units in combat tactics.

  Simha’s parents, as nonaffiliated outsiders, were not privy to the estate’s secrets. He himself had to keep a low profile because he had sneaked onto the farm unannounced and was sleeping surreptitiously in the guard hut where his father worked as a night watchman. Unless someone in the ZOB vouched for him, his presence would be viewed with suspicion by the farm’s underground leaders.

  It was a few weeks before he recognized a familiar face: Rivka Pasmanik. She was twenty-two and a member of Akiva, the centrist Zionist youth group Ratheiser had flirted with joining before the war. Akiva was now part of the ZOB and Pasmanik was involved in running couriers for the organization. She took one look at Simha—at his sunburned Aryan features and innocently boyish expression that had already fooled countless policemen, anti-Semites, and German gendarmes—took in his accent-free Polish and carefree demeanor, and knew exactly how to use him. “Would you go on a mission to the Ghetto?” she asked.

  Six months had passed since Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak left her doll, along with her childhood, in the muddy fields of the Zbikow estate. By October 1942, her life had changed so drastically that she was literally a different person. She had a new identity and a new family tree, with every Jewish limb carefully pruned. She was on her own now, living apart from her doting mother and strict grandmother for the first time in her life. And although she was only eight, she had already learned that the slightest indiscretion on her part could result in many deaths.

  Joanna’s leap into adulthood started a few days after the Gestapo raid on Zbikow. No longer under the protection of their Resistance hosts, Hanna had begun the arduous process of finding a new place to stay. Returning to Warsaw was ruled out. The Mortkowiczes were well-known in the Polish capital, so the risk of running into an indiscreet acquaintance, or an informant, blackmailer, or anti-Semite, was too high. They were safer in the exurbs, where there was less of a police presence, and fewer permanently posted Germans, and where the Polish Resistance operated more openly.

  The closest town to Zbikow was called Piastow. It was nine miles west of Warsaw, and heavily industrial. The smokestacks of Poland’s largest tire factory, the Piastow Rubber Works, which had 1,070 employees, dominated the skyline. The nation’s second-largest battery maker, Tudor Accumulator Systems, stood next door, spilling out 450 workers after each shift. Both plants had been expropr
iated from their Jewish founders: Tudor now produced batteries for the U-boats wreaking havoc on American convoys in the Atlantic, while the rubber works made most of the tires on which the Wehrmacht was rolling across the Eastern Front.

  Hanna knew the grimy town reasonably well. Her old country house had been in the same region, and she used to go to Piastow occasionally for groceries and garden supplies before the war. Now she began wandering its familiar streets looking for rooms to let, an inherently risky proposition. A random patrol and routine document check could mean disaster, since Hanna, despite her impeccable Polish, did not “look good.” Her dark features were not typically Slavic, and she did not have false papers to rely on in case her appearance aroused suspicion. What’s more, it was not just the Germans she had to worry about. Professional blackmailers—derisively known as szmaltzowniki, or greasers, because they fed off human fat—were a growing phenomenon in Poland. Their numbers had exploded as the systematic liquidation of ghettos across the country created ever more lucrative extortion opportunities. Tens of thousands of Jews had gone into hiding rather than face deportation, and every one was a potential mark. Some of Hanna’s cousins had already had an expensive run-in with shakedown artists in Warsaw, and she was anxious to avoid the same fate.

  Though Hanna may have had misgivings about asking strangers for help, she hid her apprehensions as best she could. Fear betrayed people. It was noticeable. It attracted attention, and often the wrong sort of attention. But she had little choice in the matter at this point: They needed to live somewhere, and soon. At one shop, when she casually inquired about lodgings in the vicinity, Hanna was told that a woman named Grabowska had a big home nearby and sometimes took in boarders. This was not unusual. Many Poles let out rooms during the war, both to offset the housing shortage and to cushion the blow of spiraling food prices.

  Grabowska’s building was on Rej Street in the very center of town, a few blocks from the busy train station. It was indeed quite large, rising above the neighboring stores and gabled townhouses. Hanna mustered her courage and rang the doorbell. Her first impression was that Mrs. Grabowska seemed cultured and kind. Hanna also must have passed muster. She was, after all, a ranking member of the prewar cultural elite—one of central Europe’s biggest publishers, a Ph.D., and someone accustomed to moving in notoriously snobby literary circles. In a blue-collar town like Piastow, her mannerisms would have been instantly identifiable as educated and upper-crust. As for her Semitic appearance, Mrs. Grabowska showed no hint of either recognition or concern. “We moved in at dusk,” Joanna recalled.

  Within a few weeks, it became apparent that Mrs. Grabowska was aware of the provenance of her new tenants. Their status as outlaws under the Nazis may even have played a role in her decision to take them into her home—and into her confidence. Mrs. Grabowska, like the Mortkowiczes, had secrets that needed keeping, and the benefit of Jewish boarders was that they could never go to the authorities.

  “At first we found the heavy traffic that passed through the house on Rej Street worrying,” Joanna remembered. “There was a never-ending stream of young people dropping in and out, bringing in and taking out all sorts of packages, and sometimes staying overnight.” Mrs. Grabowska’s daughter Irene appeared to be directing this nocturnal traffic. She often disappeared for days at a time, only to return “bringing strange, quite evidently frightened people to stay the night. It was not hard to guess that they were wanted by the Gestapo.”

  The Mortkowiczes had stumbled upon yet another conspiratorial cell. “Miss Irene was in the A.K.,” Joanna later explained. A.K. was the Polish acronym for the Home Army, the new name of the unified Polish Resistance, which, like the ZOB, had finally succumbed to intense pressure to unite under one umbrella organization. Much of that pressure had come from British Intelligence, which helped fund the A.K. and was growing tired of the incessant bickering and maneuvering between competing Polish Underground factions and their representatives abroad. So much backstabbing plagued Poland’s government in exile that frustrated British officials thought the Poles seemed more intent on fighting one another than the Germans. The creation of the Home Army was meant to redress this shortcoming. Under the new arrangement, sworn enemies such as Socialists and Nationalists would work together under a single commander in chief and subordinate themselves to a central military hierarchy. Virtually every splinter group in the political spectrum was being incorporated into the amalgamated Home Army, which eventually grew into the largest resistance movement in Europe and launched the biggest and bloodiest uprising of the Second World War. The one notable exception to the Home Army’s inclusive policy was the Communist Workers’ Party. The ZOB ally was rejected as a Stalinist puppet and forced to form its own small militia, the Popular Army, or A.L. in Polish.

  Irene’s duties in the Home Army were not immediately clear to the Mortkowiczes, but she seemed to play a role similar to that of the mysterious Monika Zeromska. That both young women were exceedingly attractive was not a coincidence. Much like the Jewish couriers selected by Zivia, they were chosen at least in part for their looks.

  Hanna quickly developed a deep respect for their landlady’s courageous daughter. “If Irene sped off somewhere with a bag, she was sure to be taking supplies or clothes to someone in desperate need. If she was running off to the train station at an odd hour, her eyes red with tears, she was sure to be hurrying to save someone in trouble or to assist the family of someone arrested.” Irene, Hanna later wrote, “was like a breath of life, like a wave of hope, fragrant, dashing, and fair.”

  It was the bold and beautiful Irene who took Joanna away from her mother and grandmother in the fall of 1942 and brought her to live under an assumed identity in a convent in Warsaw. The family did not have much choice. The approaching school year had created a potentially serious security problem. Since the Germans allowed elementary schools up to the sixth grade to operate legally in Poland (no further education was deemed necessary to train future generations of slave laborers), keeping Joanna home from school would have aroused suspicion. Sending her to school, on the other hand, posed a different set of risks. The environment at public school was difficult to control. There were hundreds of students from different backgrounds. All it took was for one of them to come from an anti-Semitic home, and Joanna could be denounced as a Jew. Anti-Semitism was sufficiently widespread that it was almost a statistical certainty that someone would eventually tip off the Germans. The Gestapo would then take Joanna away and execute everyone at Irene Grabowska’s house.

  The solution to Joanna’s pedagogic dilemma came from a seemingly unlikely savior: the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This was the same order of Dominican nuns that had sheltered the Mortkowiczes at the Zbikow estate and helped ZOB courier Ari Wilner in Vilna. The sisters had a boarding school for girls in Warsaw that was ideally suited to Joanna’s particular needs. It was within the confines of a walled convent, away from prying eyes and in an environment strictly controlled by the local Mother Superior. Joanna would be welcomed there and protected from both Germans and blackmailing greasers. The school was already providing sanctuary to a dozen other Jewish girls, her mother and grandmother were informed by Irene.

  The offer was not easily spurned. Nor was it widely extended by the combative Roman Catholic Church in Poland. After centuries of relatively peaceful cohabitation, the Church had recently become increasingly hostile toward Judaism. The belligerence was partly the result of the same late-nineteenth-century socioeconomic forces that had embittered the rural aristocrats left behind by the Industrial Revolution. In rapidly growing cities, as once modest synagogues morphed into soaring edifices that rivaled cathedrals, the Church, like the agriculturally based nobility, suddenly felt threatened. It fought back by aligning itself with the nationalist forces that spearheaded the wave of political anti-Semitism that swept Poland after independence. During the Depression, Catholic publications had been among the loudest critics of perce
ived Jewish economic dominance. During the Holocaust, the Church distinguished itself largely by its silence.

  Fortunately for Joanna, individual members of the Polish clergy were willing to buck papal indifference and risk their lives to save Jews. Nuns in particular were free to act on their own conscience because each convent operated independently from the hierarchy during the Nazi occupation. The temporary autonomy afforded to the Nazarene, Ursuline, Albertine, Franciscan, and Carmelite orders would result in the rescue of at least twelve hundred Jewish children.

  At the convent where Joanna was to live, the Mother Superior had taken the unusually democratic step of putting her admission to a vote. “Sister Wanda called us together,” a young nun, Maria Ena, recalled. “She began by reading the Gospel of St. John 15:13–17,” in which it is written that there is no greater love than laying down one’s life for another. “She explained that she did not wish to jeopardize the house, the sisters, the community. She knew what could be awaiting us.” Two nuns from their order had just been executed in the town of Slonim for hiding Jews. “Was it prudent to risk it for a few Jewesses?” Sister Wanda asked. “It was our decision.”

  Heightening the risk was the fact—which Joanna’s mother did not know—that an entire SS battalion was garrisoned in a fortified complex directly across the street from the convent. The barbed wire barricades, guardhouses, and snarling German shepherds were a frightful sight for new pupils. Once inside, however, an entirely different atmosphere reigned. “I clearly remember my first encounter with that place,” Joanna later wrote. “I am standing on the threshold of a huge gymnasium, holding Irene’s hand tightly. The shining floor smells of fresh polish. By the wall a large group of girls are sitting cross-legged, all staring curiously at the new girl. I am dying of embarrassment and fear. For the first time in my life I must remain alone in a new place, with strange people. I want to tear away from Irene and run home crying, but I know it is not possible. There is no home and if I ‘make a scene’—my grandmother’s most abusive definition of hysterical behavior—I shall compromise myself in the eyes of these girls forever, and that will not help me at all. So I make the first conscious decision of my entire life; I let go of Irene’s hand, and, on that shining floor, in defiance of fate, I do a somersault, then a second, and third, and keep rolling until I end up at the other end of the room. The girls clap and the nuns laugh. I know I have won their hearts; I feel accepted and thus safe.”