Joanna’s days soon became a blur of regimented discipline. At seven she rose, washed, tidied her bed, and did gymnastics. Breakfast and prayers followed punctually at eight. Between nine o’clock and noon, classes were held. After lunch, one hour of organized games was followed by another hour of manual labor. At three thirty everyone did homework and chores until the dinner bell summoned them to the cafeteria at five thirty. After supper, the girls had half an hour of free time followed by evening prayers at seven. A half hour later the lights were turned off.
Only then, when the girls were alone in their bunks in the dark, would they let their guard down and whimper. During the day, every child hid her true emotions behind a “jester’s mask” of cheerful joviality, Joanna recalled. “This was the special skill of many occupation-era children. None of the dozen or so Jewish girls hidden at the convent, some of whom already had terrible experiences behind them, ever showed their sadness or fear about the fate of their loved ones. The crying was done at night.”
Though boarders were not supposed to discuss their personal lives, talk about their backgrounds, or use their real names, almost everyone soon knew which children were Jewish and which girls were the daughters of Home Army officers on the run. Even if the Jewish boarders looked and sounded “good,” the smallest slips, sometimes even a single word, could give them away. One blond girl was presumed to be Gentile until she referred to her torn undershirt as a lejblik, something Christians never did. Another also fooled everyone until she cried out in Yiddish in her sleep one night.
Joanna was luckier than most of the other girls in that she was able to see her mother and grandmother every second week, when Irene would come get her and take her to Piastow for the weekend. Most of the other children received occasional care packages and letters from relatives. Parental visits, however, were extremely rare. Many of the Catholic boarders were war orphans. The parents of most of the Jewish girls were also either dead or trapped in the Ghetto, while the daughters of senior Home Army officers could not see their families because of security risks. The Germans would not hesitate to use them to catch their “terrorist” fathers if their true identity was revealed.
The threat of the Gestapo loomed large over the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and not solely because the dreaded SS were their neighbors. The cassock or nun’s habit offered little protection from the Nazis. One in five Polish priests died at the hands of the Germans during the war. Nuns and monks fared slightly better, but nearly a thousand were shot for various offenses. The Germans knew well that the Polish Church had a long history of fighting foreign oppressors, whether czarist, fascist, or communist, and targeted it accordingly. In Sister Wanda’s case, the suspicion was warranted. In addition to harboring Jews and the children of Resistance leaders, the Mother Superior also allowed illegal high school and university-level courses to be conducted on convent grounds, held training seminars for Home Army chaplains, and opened her doors to Underground operatives in need.
Because of the looming threat, Joanna and the girls practiced for Gestapo raids in the way most schoolchildren participate in fire drills. “When an internal bell rang during lessons, we gathered the prewar books for Polish and history [both banned subjects] from our desks double-quick and shoved them into a special storage space,” Joanna recalled. “Sometimes the alarm was real—then the nuns hid the endangered children in the infirmary, behind the altar in the chapel, or in the enclosure.” Joanna had to stay in the altar for several hours during one such search. “By then I was already thoroughly versed in conspiracy. I knew by heart all the new facts of my [forged] identity card. My mother was called Maria Olczak, née Maliszewska, and my grandmother had become her own daughter’s mother-in-law, borrowing the name Julia Olczak, née Wagner, from my father’s late mother. My grandmother’s sister Flora, alias Emily Babicka, née Plonska, daughter of a carpenter born in Luninsk in Byelorussia, was no longer her sister, just a chance acquaintance. Flora’s husband Samuel was now Stanislav. Luckily, he was still her husband, which made his life much easier, because his daughters, Caroline and Stefanie, who had two different surnames and were not apparently related to each other or to their parents, were always making blunders and were incapable of hiding their family connections. It was all very complicated.”
CHAPTER 26
BORUCH AND ROBERT LEARN DIFFERENT LESSONS
Joanna’s cousin Robert was also posing as a Christian student in the fall semester of 1942. Only the Jesuit school Osnos attended taught in English rather than Polish and was located three thousand miles away, in Bombay.
Robert was twelve, in the first awkward stage of adolescence, and the war was so far removed from his daily life that it soon became nothing more than a distant memory. Of his days in Warsaw during the 1939 siege, all that eventually remained was a vague recollection of burying himself in Jules Verne and Mark Twain, his “escape.” Of his flight to Berlin with his mother, Martha, there was only the faintly bitter aftertaste of his great-uncle’s inhospitality. All he would remember of the flight from earthquake-ravaged Romania to Turkey was the lingering terror of a few hours when he got separated from his parents and found himself lost and alone in Istanbul. The stopover in Iraq was more memorable, but fleeting, since his parents kept moving farther east. As for the journey from Iraq to India, just one acronym stayed lodged in his mind: POSH—Port Out, Starboard Home. “Because of the sun, the elegant people were housed on the shady, port side of the ship on the way out and on the starboard side on the way in.” Robert, Joseph, and Martha Osnos were in steerage. Broke, they cobbled together funds for the trip through the sale of some jewelry, then gambled on an immigration loophole. “In Baghdad, my father had heard that if you had a transit visa, the British just let you stay in India,” Robert recalled. Joseph Osnos had obtained such a visa back in Bucharest, to the Dutch East Indies. He had thought it useless at the time. Now, armed with this facilitating document, the Osnoses booked passage to the port of Karachi, where the colonial authorities were desperate for skilled Europeans to buttress the war economy.
It was so hot in the hold of the ship that the Osnoses often slept on deck. Robert imagined himself as Sinbad the Sailor, while his parents marveled at the ocean glowing “phosphorescent like green gold fire and stars like we’d never seen them before.” Their liner languidly traversed the parched coastline, calling on Gulf ports in Persia, Oman, and Bahrain, where Robert was captivated by Arab dhows and sword-bearing local officials in ornate turbans and flowing black robes.
“We had this wonderful feeling of a suspension of time and problems,” Martha reflected on the idle weeks the family spent at sea. She did not know what awaited them in India, how they would earn a living, or whether any country would ultimately take them in. But they were together, safe, and overwhelmed by the generosity of their Arab shipmates, who gave them dates and pomegranates, offerings so exotic to Martha that she “didn’t even know what they were or how to eat them.”
When at last they docked in Karachi, Robert was mesmerized by the sights: the heaving mass of barefoot coolies that descended on the vessel; the sacred cows that sauntered unobstructed around the harbor, trailing garlands of flowers; the beggars, lepers, and legless invalids; the blind children, all with supplicating outstretched palms.
Amid the unofficial welcoming committee that greeted the Osnoses was a young Pole who met every boat, hoping for news from his ravaged Carpathian hometown. He was destitute, stateless, and stranded. But he knew his way around Karachi and was eager to help Polish travelers. The Osnoses had encountered helpful fellow countrymen on virtually every leg of their journey. In Baghdad, it had been a Polish linguist—whom Martha dubbed “John the Savior”—who took the family under his wing and counseled them on the India visa loophole. Their new patron in Karachi welcomed them into his home, a cheap one-room rental that he provided with a flourish of Slavic hospitality, and advised Joseph on the lay of the land. The jobs, he said, were in Bombay. With Joseph’s manufacturing back
ground, he should have little difficulty finding work.
Joseph’s business acumen had already served the Osnoses well. It had funded Martha and Robert’s escape from Poland and permitted the family to live during the prolonged flight. Joseph always managed to make the best of an opportunity. And whether it was a testament to his charisma and salesmenship, or a reflection of dire labor shortages, he landed a job in Bombay almost immediately. On the strength of his experience as a former owner of a small appliance factory in Warsaw, he was hired to manage a furniture plant that was being retooled to build life rafts for the British navy.
The position came with a huge, well-appointed apartment and five domestic servants. Martha’s fluency in six languages was also quickly put to use by the colonial administration. She started working for the Bureau of Censors, reading refugee mail.
Overnight, Martha, Robert, and Joseph’s lives became normal, almost to the point of banality. It was an astonishing transformation. One week they were itinerant refugees, virtually penniless, without a fixed address, destination, or means of support. Suddenly they had a cook, a maid, a driver, a laundress, and a nanny. They lived in a compound reserved for the elite and held respectable positions in society. Blessed with dual incomes—“Money was never a problem in India,” according to Robert—they could entertain, travel, and resume the upper-middle-class lifestyle they had enjoyed in Warsaw before the war.
“My parents were very active socially in Bombay. Mom was always going to parties and Dad played bridge all the time.” Their circles, however, were restricted to other émigrés. “My parents didn’t mix with the English. They spent all their time with fellow Poles.”
Bombay’s Polish community was tight-knit. Shunned by the class-conscious British, the Poles were uncharacteristically inclusive among themselves. In India, Polish Jews and Gentiles socialized together. Ironically, only exile brought Poles to accept American-style views on citizenship. Abroad, one’s passport, rather than ethnicity or religion, was the sole determinant of nationality. This far from home, all Poles were expatriates, equally foreign in the eyes of the law.
While his parents spent time with their new friends, Robert was free to do as he pleased. “My parents were borderline negligent in leaving me to my own devices,” he later laughed. He wasn’t complaining, though. “It was wonderful. For me, India was paradise.” He could ride the trams, exploring different neighborhoods. He lounged by the pool, went to cricket games, and became a fixture at the local movie theater. “I must have seen every film ever made,” he recalled: Gone with the Wind, The Thief of Bagdad, anything with Paul Muni, Leslie Howard, or his favorite Indian matinee idol, Sabu, who also starred in Hollywood productions such as Jungle Boy.
Like his parents, Robert mostly played with other Polish children. Only one of his close friends was not part of the émigré community, a half-Indian boy whose mother was English and whose father was an Indian army officer. “He couldn’t go swimming with us because the pool was for whites only.” The schools were also segregated, and to attend the academy run by Welsh monks where his father had enrolled him, Robert had to pose as a Christian. “Of course you’re a Jew,” his classmates taunted him. “This was the only real dark cloud for me during our stay in India,” he said of the charade. “I resented it bitterly. Not the fact that I was Jewish. But that I had to pretend that I wasn’t.”
The upside of a Jesuit education was that Robert, by the fall of 1942, spoke fluent English, albeit with a Welsh accent. The downside was that girls were emerging as a major frustration. “Because I went to an all-boys school, I had no exposure to them. They were like creatures from another planet to me.”
Osnos had the luxury of worrying about such typical adolescent preoccupations because the war no longer intruded on his world. “There were no tangible signs of war whatsoever in Bombay. There was no military presence or rationing,” he later reflected. “What strikes me most in retrospect was how completely normal my life had become once we reached India. I remember that I worshipped Churchill and Roosevelt, like all the other kids, and played field hockey and soccer at school.”
Robert had no idea that back in Warsaw almost every Jewish child had been exterminated, or that Cousin Joanna was practicing Gestapo raid drills in a convent. Nor did his parents have any knowledge of the developing tragedy, because the Holocaust was still virtually unpublicized outside Poland. Thus far, the sole reference to the wholesale slaughter of European Jewry in The New York Times, for instance, was a two-inch-long notice buried at the back of the paper’s June 27, 1942, edition. “700,000 Jews were reported slain in Poland,” it read, stressing that the figures were unconfirmed.
The story dominating British and American newspapers in the fall of 1942 was the siege of Stalingrad. Hitler’s bid to take the city before winter was faltering. His 6th Army Group had pinned the Soviets to a tiny sliver of land on the banks of the Volga, but though they controlled 90 percent of the city, they could not dislodge the stubborn defenders. In November, the Red Army regrouped and launched a massive two-pronged counteroffensive that cut off the Germans’ supply lines. Now the vaunted Wehrmacht was pinned down and surrounded. And winter was fast approaching.
The astonishing reversal grabbed headlines worldwide and relegated the Times’s scanty coverage of the Holocaust that fall to another news brief. “Two million Jews have been killed and five million more face extermination,” it announced on page 20. The story, only the second reference to the Holocaust in America’s paper of record, appeared in mid-December 1942, just as Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak began to panic because Irene had failed, for the second time in a row, to pick her up from the convent for her scheduled visit with her family. Joanna knew something was wrong. What she didn’t know was that Hanna and Janine had been caught by greasers.
While Joanna and Robert studied catechism at Catholic schools, back inside the Ghetto, Boruch Spiegel was attending a different type of class. Spiegel accepted his instructor’s pistol warily, cradling it in both hands like a newborn baby. It felt hard and out of place in his small palms, making him shudder involuntarily. He turned the weapon over, weighing its heft and possibilities. He had never touched a firearm before, and the sensation was both frightening and empowering. Though guns were as much a part of the natural landscape in wartime Warsaw as snow in December, for a Jew to wield one, to feel its lethal power and liberating potential, was such an alien and intoxicating concept that Boruch’s hands trembled.
“I was afraid it would go off accidentally,” he remembered. He carefully handed the VIS pistol back to his ZOB instructor, watching with a mix of relief and regret as the next eager pupil accepted the gleaming black object. The oily revolver was passed around the room so that all the young trainees could feel its cold steel and grasp its import—the taking of fate into one’s own hands. Every individual who touched the pistol likely felt the same excitement, the same trepidations, the same fearful longing to fire as Boruch. Was it the weapon that had been used to kill the new Jewish police chief, Jacob Lejkin? Spiegel wondered. Or the Judenrat scoundrel Israel First? Those assassinations, the first of many carried out by the ZOB, had warned what was left of the Ghetto that a new force was emerging in the Jewish district—the unchecked reign of Gestapo stooges was over. With just one gun they had accomplished this astonishing turnaround. Imagine, Boruch and the others were told, what could be done now that the first real shipment of arms had been delivered, in the second week of December 1942, by the Home Army.
Spiegel was inflamed by the possibilities. He visualized himself shooting at Germans, and he contemplated joining one of the hit squads being formed to eliminate traitors. “It filled me with purpose and hope,” he said of that first contact with a pistol. He didn’t realize that the old revolver might not have even worked. Nearly half the guns in the long-awaited shipment were not operational. But persuading the Home Army to part with even these surplus weapons had proven so drawn-out and deflating a process that frustrated ZOB leaders like Isaac Zuckerm
an doubted whether the Jewish Fighting Organization would ever arm itself.
The protracted process had begun nearly three months earlier, when Zuckerman dispatched courier Ari Wilner to the Aryan side of Warsaw to establish contact with the Polish Underground. First a meeting was arranged with an intermediary named Hubert, who was actually Alexander Kaminski, a thirty-nine-year-old scoutmaster. In addition to serving on the command staff of the Gray Ranks, he was also editor in chief of Poland’s largest Underground newspaper, the Information Bulletin, with a circulation of forty thousand.
Kaminski listened politely to the blond and blue-eyed ZOB emissary, twirling his dark mustache with the detached interest of a hard-boiled newsman. At last he rose and said that someone might be in touch with Wilner in the near future. A few weeks later, Wilner received a message requesting another meeting, this time with an actual representative of the Home Army.
The representative sent by Kaminski introduced himself as Vaclav. He was in fact Captain Henry Wolinski, a forty-year-old attorney who headed the newly created Jewish Affairs department in the Home Army’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda. His job was to keep the government in exile in London apprised of “the Jewish situation” in Poland, and he had been chosen for this grim task partly because his wife was Jewish.
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