Wolinski didn’t know anything about Wilner or the ZOB, other than the fact that Kaminski vouched for them. But a few days earlier, he had been contacted by the Bund’s envoy on the Aryan side, Leon Feiner. Feiner, who was known from prewar days, had asked for the Home Army’s help in preparing a detailed firsthand report on the extermination of Polish Jews, which was still being viewed with extreme skepticism by the Allies. “Naïvely, we thought that if the world knew what was happening to us, they would do something,” Zivia Lubetkin recalled.
Wolinski arranged to send one of the Home Army’s top international couriers to the Ghetto and to a death camp to corroborate the accounts of genocide. The courier was a towering twenty-eight-year-old economist by the name of Jan Karski. He was blessed with a photographic memory, spoke fluent German and English, and later personally briefed President Roosevelt and British leaders on the situation in Poland, entering history as the man who told the world about the Holocaust. Mark Edelman served as one of his Ghetto guides.
“This way,” said Edelman, when they met for the first time at the Ghetto wall. Karski pulled a cap down over his eyes, and adjusted his torn parka. The six-foot-four-inch future Georgetown University professor was accustomed to wearing disguises. Sometimes he dressed as a German oil executive and took the train through France to meet the fishing boats in Normandy that regularly ferried him across the Channel. Other times he wore the double runes of an Estonian SS man and made his way through Scandinavia. But nothing in his travels as an international courier prepared him for what he saw in the Ghetto.
“As we walked, everything became increasingly unreal,” he later noted in his report. Children appeared “with skins so taut that every bone in their skeleton showed through.” Men stared out of eyes “glazed and blank.” Corpses lay in every second doorway. “Why are they naked?” asked Karski.
“When a Jew dies,” Edelman answered matter-of-factly, “his family removes his clothing and throws his body in the street. If not, they have to pay the Germans to have the body buried.”
Karski turned pale. “I was shocked,” he recalled. Whenever he was anxious, Karski would reflexively run his tongue against the hollowed-out dentures that lined the left side of his jaw. The Gestapo had knocked out half his teeth during an interrogation in Slovakia several years earlier, unwittingly creating the perfect place to carry microfilm.
“Hurry, hurry, now you’ll see something,” said Edelman, pulling Karski up a flight of stairs to a second-story window. They watched as a car stopped in the middle of the street. Two blond boys in Hitler Youth uniforms emerged from the vehicle. “With their round rosy-cheeked faces, and their blue eyes, they were like images of health and life,” Karski recalled. “They chattered, laughed, pushed each other in spasms of merriment. At that moment, the younger one pulled a gun out of his hip pocket and then I realized what I was witnessing. He was looking for a target with the casual, gay absorption of a boy at a carnival.”
Karski was already on his way to London by the time Ari Wilner finally met a senior officer of the Home Army, in mid-November 1942. The delay had been caused by the Home Army’s reluctance to recognize the ZOB. “They pretty much said you don’t represent the Jews since you’re nothing but members of a youth movement, and [we] do not talk with youth movements,” Zuckerman recalled. “So we told Ari Wilner to tell them he represented two institutions: the political institution, the Jewish National Committee, which united all forces in the Ghetto, and the Jewish Fighting Organization, the military arm.”
There was no such thing as a Jewish National Committee, but it sounded good and lent the youthful ZOB the illusion of having gray-haired supervision. The bureaucratic Home Army bought the hierarchical charade, and Zuckerman had to scramble to create the heretofore fictitious body. Unfortunately, the Bund refused to join any national committee that included Communists. So Zuckerman invented a second putative civilian body, a Communist-free Coordinating Committee under the National Committee that oversaw the activities of the ZOB. The Bund accepted the convoluted compromise, and it was on this somewhat confusing basis that the Home Army was hoodwinked into formally recognizing the ZOB on November 11, 1942.
The following day, Captain Wolinski took Wilner to see his superior, a man who was introduced as Surgeon. “What do you need—money?” Surgeon asked. His real name was Major Stanislaw Weber. “No,” Wilner replied. “We can get money by squeezing the rich in the Ghetto. We need arms and ammunition, grenades, explosives, combat training, and specialists to build bunkers.”
His request was passed up the chain of command until it reached General Stephen Rowecki. As the Home Army’s leader, Rowecki was the most wanted man in Nazi-occupied Poland. He went by the code name Grot, and his mustachioed photo hung in every Gestapo office along with the caption “Enemy Number One of the Third Reich.” Like many career army officers in prewar Poland, Rowecki held deeply conservative views that did not make him a natural ally of Jews. Left to his own devices, he might simply have ignored Wilner’s request. But his commander in chief, General Wladislaw Sikorski—the head of the London government in exile—was cut from different cloth. Sikorski’s prewar criticisms of the fascist-sympathizing Sanation regime had been so vocal that he was forced into exile in the late 1930s, and he taught at a war college in Paris before moving to London. He was very close to Winston Churchill, who endearingly referred to him as his “First Ally.” Sikorski was demanding better treatment of Jews in the name of democracy—and political expediency. “We must remember,” he cabled Grot in September 1942, “that the position of the Anglo-Saxon world concerning anti-Semitism is unequivocal. The best means of assuring full support for our interests is by showing and granting equal rights.” “I therefore plead with you,” Sikorski added in another cable on October 19, 1942, condemning anti-Semitism, “that in Poland the principles of democracy come broadly to the fore. We must remember that the war is carried on precisely for these ideals.”
General Rowecki was thus under pressure from his superiors in London to give the Jewish resistance a fair hearing. Nonetheless, he was deeply skeptical of both the ZOB’s fighting abilities and the organization’s loyalty to Poland because of the Marxist leanings of some of its member groups. As a precondition for providing any help, he demanded written assurances that the Jews would commit themselves to fighting the Soviet Union if and when the time came to take up arms against the Red Army. Zuckerman and Edelman had no problems with issuing such a blanket declaration, but Mordechai Anielewicz and some of the others did. In the end, the ZOB penned a vague, watered-down compromise letter. “Since we are citizens of Poland,” it reassured General Rowecki, “the decisions of the Polish government are binding on us.”
Rowecki was not entirely convinced. He declared the ZOB a “partly Polish” resistance group, an equally vague classification which meant that it was not automatically entitled to aid. “Jews from all sorts of communist groups,” he cabled London to cover his tracks, “are asking us for guns. As an experiment I gave them some pistols … but this could be a Soviet provocation.”
When the shipment finally arrived in mid-December, Isaac Zuckerman flew into a rage. All that trouble, those months of negotiations, of jumping through committee hoops—for ten measly handguns. Four of them were not even in proper working order. To Isaac, this was not about trust, or loyalty. It was pure and simple anti-Semitism: “Instead of saying ‘I hate you’ it was easier for them to say ‘I don’t believe in you.’ ”
The hell with the Poles, Zuckerman decided. If they wouldn’t help, he would procure weapons another way. He would steal them from the Germans.
CHAPTER 27
ISAAC’S NOT-SO-
MERRY CHRISTMAS
The gun heist Isaac planned was to take place in December 1942 in Krakow, the beautiful medieval city that had been turned into the administrative center of the General Government. The Germans were less guarded in the turreted shadow of Wawel Castle, from which Hans Frank ruled occupied Poland like a person
al fief. His grip on the walled town was so firm, his bureaucrats so numerous and comfortably ensconced in the luxurious apartments and villas seized from Jews and wealthy political prisoners, that few took the extreme security precautions used by their counterparts in the “terrorist” swamp that Nazi officials labeled Warsaw. “Nothing but trouble ever comes from that forsaken city,” Frank famously quipped.
The ZOB planned to take advantage of the relative complacency in Krakow. Shortly before Christmas, when German officials were busy feting the holidays, Zuckerman boarded a train bound for the ancient capital, seat of King Kazimierz the Great, the fourteenth-century monarch who first invited Jews to settle in Poland in 1334.
Isaac traveled with a new courier, Havka Folman. She had been promoted when Lonka Kozibrodzka was caught and killed by the Gestapo while on a mission to Bialystok in April. “We were traveling openly. I looked like a rural Polish nobleman,” Isaac recalled of his journey with Havka. “I wore a three-quarter-length coat, a hat, jodhpurs stuffed into boots, a mustache. Havka also looked Aryan. My looks and my clothing, which was like a uniform, were those of a person in a specific military formation in the internal government in Krakow.”
Disguised as Germans, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization’s Krakow branch were told to launch diversionary attacks on drinking establishments frequented by off-duty German officials: the Esplanade, the Bohemian Café (a favored haunt of the businessman Oskar Schindler), and several other locales. The idea was to seize as many weapons as possible and then raid an armory in the ensuing chaos.
The attack was coordinated by local ZOB leader Abraham Leibowicz, a General Zionist from the youth group Akiva. In Zionist circles Leibowicz was already a legend. “He could keep his cool in any situation,” Zivia recalled. “He used to walk around [the Aryan side of] Krakow dressed as a Polish policeman. He then promoted himself to a German army officer and went around town loaded down with guns.” Despite the fact that Leibowicz, or Laban, as he was more commonly known, looked nothing like a Gentile, he managed to pull off the charade for months through sheer chutzpah.
At the appointed hour, when Christmas parties were in full swing, Laban’s partisans struck. They lobbed grenades into the bars and restaurants and stormed in, firing pistols. Isaac was part of the team that hit the upscale Bohemian Café, where several Mausers were pried from the hands of a tableful of dead Gestapo agents.
The Germans were so stunned by the brazen assault—the first major rebellion in their otherwise tranquil stronghold—that all the assailants got away safely. “That night we got together to toast the success of the operation,” Zuckerman jubilantly recalled. The weapons haul was smaller than anticipated, but that didn’t dampen their spirits. Thirteen Germans were dead and a dozen more were in the hospital. It was revenge, pure and simple, and unburdened by moral dilemmas. There were no innocent bystanders in a place like the Bohemian Café—from the waiters to the women of loose virtue who trolled for German clients, everyone there was complicit in the Occupation in one way or another.
To throw the vengeful Gestapo off track in the aftermath, the ZOB raiders left behind leaflets implicating the Home Army. This, they hoped, would prevent reprisals by the angry SS on innocent Jewish residents of the Krakow ghetto. The shirking of responsibility was a risky gambit that could have provoked the wrath of the Polish Resistance had the Germans retaliated against the Gentile population instead. The Nazis, however, knew full well who was behind the “terrorist” actions because they had two informants in the Krakow branch of the ZOB. The collaborators tipped off the Gestapo to the location of a deserted hospital where Zuckerman was supposed to rendezvous with Leibowicz the following day. The SS was waiting for him when he arrived. “Halt, Hande Rauf,” he heard someone bark, followed by shots. Isaac bolted. “After five steps, I began to feel warmth and a sharp pain in my leg.” He was hit. Havka Folman and Abraham Leibowicz had been caught. Their capture allowed Isaac to slip away, but he was now bleeding profusely with nowhere to run. His only option was to hide in plain sight. “I took out a cigar, lit it, and very slowly walked.” His long coat masked his wound, and the blood pooled in his boot without leaving a trail. He willed himself not to limp and frantically searched for the closest refuge. The city was being locked down, and with loudspeakers announcing that curfew had been moved up, he could no longer wander the cobblestoned streets without attracting attention. Zuckerman ducked into a church, but the frightened priest insisted he leave. Back in the open, with only minutes to curfew, Isaac saw a doctor’s office.
The sign outside the office was exclusively in Polish, which Zuckerman took as a good omen: In Germanized Krakow, where signage was bilingual, it heralded the physician’s patriotism. The doctor, alas, was not in. Isaac was going into shock. He felt cold and dizzy, shivering and sweating wildly. He crumpled to the floor in the waiting room and lost consciousness. He wouldn’t remember how long he was out, but perhaps he had mumbled in Yiddish in his sleep, because two young men shook him awake and offered to take him in a cab to the ghetto. “I said they could take me to the Gestapo in a cab, but I wasn’t moving.” The men conferred, left, and returned a few minutes later with some bandages to crudely dress Isaac’s throbbing bullet wound. They moved him out of the doctor’s office into the staircase hall. “Let him stay till morning,” Isaac overheard one of them say. “He’s lost a lot of blood and isn’t getting medical aid. He’ll die anyway.”
In the morning Zuckerman was still alive. The steps on which he’d slept were covered with blood, Christmas cookies, and all sorts of holiday treats left during the night by children who lived in the building. The sight of the stricken Jew abandoned by adults and left to the care of those still too young to discriminate shamed the building’s elderly doorwoman. “Hard times!” she burst into tears. “We are turning into wolves.” The old woman brought Isaac into her tiny apartment and fed him something hot. She tried to dress his wound, but his leg had swollen so much that she could not remove his boot. The effort was so excruciating that Isaac passed out from the pain. When he awoke, it was evening and the old lady tearfully apologized that he had to leave. Her son was due any moment and he would make a scene. Apparently, he would not approve of harboring a Jew.
Zuckerman somehow mustered the strength to drag himself back into the snowy streets. It was already dark, and the cold winter air helped clear his thoughts. Instinctively, Isaac grasped that his only real option was to return to Warsaw. If he didn’t get medical attention soon, the wound would start festering and gangrene would set in. Sooner or later, someone would catch him if he kept stumbling blindly around Krakow. He could not risk going to a local ZOB safe house since the entire network in the city was blown; in addition to the informants, Leibowicz and Havka would almost certainly talk under Gestapo interrogation. In the end, everyone did. His only chance, Isaac decided, was to go straight to the railway station with his last reserves of strength and board the next train to Warsaw.
Fortunately, it was Christmas Eve, when Poles and many German Catholics held their celebratory feasts and opened gifts. There would be fewer passengers on the train, Isaac reasoned, and a smaller chance of running into a patrol. He was wrong on both counts. “The station was full of Germans. I sat down right across from a cripple with crutches, and dreamed of pulling the crutches away from him. As I sat meditating, Germans appeared and began snatching people for work. They snatched me too.”
In the ensuing tumult, as all the able-bodied men were herded onto a different train bound for the slave labor mills in the Reich, Isaac managed to escape. His heavy limp saved him. “Since I didn’t have the strength to walk, I lagged behind.” Zuckerman continued falling back until he reached a point where the Nazi press-gang no longer noticed him. He then reboarded the train to Warsaw. “Fortunately it was dark and empty,” since most of its intended passengers were now on their way to Germany.
On Christmas morning, Zuckerman, pale as snow, his pants leg red as a Santa suit, stumbled into ZOB headquar
ters in the Warsaw Ghetto. “Until the moment I entered the building I held up,” he recalled. “As soon as I saw Zivia, I managed only to say ‘It’s all lost’ and fainted.”
Zuckerman was still laid up in bed recuperating on January 18, 1943, when the SS launched the second wave of mass expulsions to “resettle” the remaining fifty-odd thousand Jews in Warsaw.
This constituted the first major assault on the Ghetto since the summer Gross Aktion. Throughout the fall, the Germans conducted only occasional minor raids, grabbing a few hundred people every few weeks in order to sow terror and keep the population compliant. The factory where Boruch Spiegel worked had been targeted during one of these sporadic dragnets, and his girlfriend, Chaika Belchatowska, was caught hiding on one of the plant’s upper floors. “They found us,” she recalled. “An SS man, he had a whip, a leather whip. And he hit us over the head. And he hit and hit and hit. Then he took us out in a corridor, which was maybe one meter wide. And there was a window, on the fourth floor. And he opened the window and he said, ‘You see, I’m going to throw you out.’ ”
Instead, Chaika and sixty other slave laborers from the Rorich shop were marched to the Umschlagplatz and forced into a crammed cattle car. None of them had any illusions about its destination. As soon as the train started moving, “this boy, he pushed towards the window.” Each freight car was fitted with a narrow grate for air circulation. “In his shoe, in the sole of his shoe, he had a little saw. And we picked him up, and he sawed this grate off. Next to me stood a man who owned a drugstore across the road from my house. He said ‘What are you doing? You are going to get us killed.’ ”
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