Chaika ignored her former neighbor. She and seven others jumped. By luck, the train had been lumbering over a sandy embankment that cushioned the landing. Chaika rolled to a stop in a ditch and began searching for her friends. The Germans, luckily, had not posted rooftop sentries to shoot at escapees. There had been virtually no breakout attempts before.
“We started marching,” Belchatowska recalled. “We didn’t know where we were.” The train, they guessed, had traveled about thirty miles by the time they jumped. So they were not far from the city. More important, they had money. “There was one girl with us whose parents were quite well off. She had sewn in her coat American dollars. So she ripped this out and gave us each a banknote. One got a twenty-dollar bill, another got ten dollars, whatever she had.”
Chaika and the escapees headed for the nearest village. With their highly prized foreign currency, which was valued next to gold, they might be able to buy shelter and transport back to Warsaw. Or they might be robbed, raped, killed, or sold to the Germans. There were plenty of terrifying tales of Polish peasants preying on lonely Jews in forests, attacking them and turning them over to the Nazis for an easy profit. Chaika and her friends had all removed their armbands. Nonetheless, it was with some trepidation that they approached two men and offered to pay to be smuggled to Warsaw. The men agreed. “They recognized that we were Jews,” she recalled. “They were nice enough that they didn’t take us to the Gestapo.”
When Belchatowska returned to the Ghetto several days later, Boruch thought he was seeing a ghost. He had given her up for dead. “She had been taken on her birthday,” November 11, the same day the Home Army recognized the ZOB. “But in reality she was born again that day. Her birthday present was the gift of life.”
Boruch, like most Warsaw Jews, had come to accept the small raids as a fact of life in the Ghetto. But the scale and timing of the next major Aktion, which took place on January 18, caught everyone by surprise. “We felt certain the Germans were too busy with their roundups on the Aryan side to bother with us,” Zivia Lubetkin recalled. Just prior to the Aktion, twelve thousand Varsovian Gentiles were arrested in one of the single largest crackdowns on the Polish capital up to that point. Peacock Prison alone now held seven thousand detainees, and to make room for more, eleven hundred inmates were sent to the Majdanek death camp near Lublin. The Gestapo wave of terror was partly a response to the increased activities of the Home Army. Emboldened by the Wehrmacht’s astonishing setbacks in Stalingrad, Boy Scouts had erased virtually every German street name in Midtown during the night of January 14 and papered walls with forty thousand insurgent leaflets. At daybreak, the Home Army staged a series of spectacular bank robberies and conducted several high-profile assassinations while bombs rocked German-only hangouts such as Helgoland, Mitropa, and the Apollo Theater.
The SS reaction was so swift and brutal that Lubetkin recalled her couriers from the Aryan side, reasoning that they would be safer in the Ghetto until the storm passed. “Even some Poles from the underground sought refuge in the abandoned sections of the Ghetto,” she said. Zivia didn’t think the Germans had the manpower to go after both Jews and Gentiles simultaneously. But that was precisely what they did.
It was still dark and minus twenty degrees Celsius at 6 A.M. on January 18 when trucks carrying two hundred SS troops and eight hundred Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliaries roared into the Central Ghetto. This was the largest of the Ghetto’s remaining four sections, spanning Goose Street and the Umschlagplatz rail terminal and housing the majority of the Ghetto’s surviving thirty-five thousand slave laborers—those classified as “productive” with valid work permits or so-called life tickets.
Six A.M. was rush hour in the Central Ghetto, when the day shift at a dozen factories started, and the SS timed its assault in order to corral the maximum number of people out on the streets. Life tickets no longer afforded Jews protection. The identity cards that had provided so much comfort, that cost thousands of dollars to obtain, were simply torn up or ignored by enraged Ukrainians and Latvians, who began firing indiscriminately at the crowds.
Zivia and Zuckerman were awakened by the shots and screams that inaugurated the second Gross Aktion. They were at their new fourth-floor safe house on the corner of Zamenhof and Low Streets, fifty yards from the dreaded Umschlagplatz, and they had an unimpeded view of the carnage below. They had chosen the location precisely because of this strategic vantage point, which they thought would provide ample warning of any German movements. Isaac was still laid up with his bullet wound. Nonetheless, he was furious that the Jewish Fighting Organization had been caught completely off guard. He had no idea where Anielewicz was. He didn’t know if Mark Edelman and the rest of the Bundists in the Brushmakers District were also being rounded up. How was the ZOB going to launch any kind of coordinated defense when it could not even maintain basic lines of communication?
Runners were frantically dispatched, and one of the breathless messengers was Simha Ratheiser. Ratheiser had been in the Jewish Fighting Organization for several months. Initially he had joined an Akiva unit, but as the lines between the disparate groups within the ZOB slowly began to blur, he was exposed to leaders outside his immediate circle. “I don’t think Isaac, at this stage, even knew who I was,” Simha recalled. “Naturally, I knew who he was.”
Simha was assigned to lookout duty, while Zuckerman and some of the other more senior ZOB members broke out their weapons stash. “We had three pistols and three grenades,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “Those who had no weapons armed themselves with lengths of iron pipe, sticks, bottles, whatever could serve to attack the enemy.” This time there would be no hiding. This time they would not let themselves be taken. This time they would fight with their bare hands if necessary.
Already, hundreds of Jews were being herded to the train depot in a repeat of the Gross Aktion. The same guttural shouts and screams and slurred Ukrainian and German invectives reverberated up and down Zamenhof. “My God, that’s Angel.” Simha beckoned Zivia to the window as the procession passed beneath them on the way to the Umschlagplatz. “We’ve got to help him,” cried Zivia, spotting the boyishly handsome ZOB commander. “We must do something,” she repeated moments later, mostly out of frustration as she realized that they were essentially helpless.
Mordechai Anielewicz—Angel—had almost all their guns in his possession. He had needed them for his hit squads. And now he and a dozen Young Guardsmen were caught in the middle of a rapidly growing throng of horrified Jews being frog-marched down Low Street. But what was he doing? Zivia and Simha could see Anielewicz’s team dispersing in the mob, positioning themselves near the Ukrainian and German guards. Angel was right behind one now. He was reaching into his pocket.
All at once shots rang out, and complete pandemonium erupted on Low Street.
CHAPTER 28
THE ORGANIZATION
When Mordechai Anielewicz launched what would become known as the January Rising, Isaac, Zivia, and Simha barely had time to cheer. Just as Anielewicz’s dozen fighters opened fire on the stunned German guards, another unit of SS troops stormed the building on Zamenhof Street where Zuckerman and forty ZOB members were holed up.
“The doors suddenly burst open and in flew a band of Germans,” Lubetkin recalled. But this time the ZOB was prepared. Two young Zionists from Lodz were posted in the foyer of the apartment at the time. They pretended to be deeply immersed in reading and did not react to the violent intrusion. The Nazis ignored them and pressed forward with their search. As soon as their backs were turned, one of the Zionists pulled out a revolver and shot two of the intruders from behind. Shocked, the Germans retreated down the staircase, tripping over themselves to get away. Several other ZOB members pursued the fleeing Germans and managed to wound another intruder before the rest of the shocked SS men fell back.
Although only a few hundred rounds were exchanged on January 18, 1943, the shots reverberated throughout Warsaw. At Gestapo headquarters on Szuch Avenue, there was con
sternation. Faced with their first encounter of armed resistance, the Germans were forced to halt their Aktion after liquidating a mere five thousand Jews—a fraction of the intended haul. This was the first major failure of any Aktion anywhere in the General Government since the campaign to liquidate Polish Jewry began. Even more worrisome from the Gestapo’s point of view were the mini-rebellion’s ramifications outside the Ghetto. With resistance activity—“terrorist acts”—already on the rise in Warsaw, German counterintelligence now feared that the example set by the Jews could incite a citywide revolt by the Home Army, the prospect that most alarmed Occupation authorities. The Home Army counted 380,000 registered members across Poland. Though lightly armed and mostly civilians, their sheer numbers—greater than the French Resistance or any other insurgent group in Europe—made them a potentially formidable guerrilla force.
And there was little doubt that the Home Army was impressed by the actions in the Ghetto. Virtually every Underground publication lauded the January Rising with superlatives not often associated with Jews in the traditionally anti-Semitic Polish press. The Information Bulletin praised Jewish “bravery” and “sense of honor,” in a frontpage dispatch headlined HOW THE WARSAW GHETTO IS DEFENDING ITSELF. “The street was in the hands of Jewish fighters for fifteen to twenty minutes,” the Bulletin reported. “Only large reinforcements enabled Germans to gain control of the situation.… The organized points of resistance defended themselves on Monday and Tuesday. They only retreated when faced by two SS squadrons that had been brought into the Ghetto on Wednesday in full combat readiness with machine guns, mortars and ambulances. A bloodbath ensued among the population, which, incited by the events of the previous days, offered active resistance with the aid of the most primitive of means such as iron rods, bars and stones. The German losses were ten dead police and SS troops.”
As for the Home Army high command, General Rowecki was forced to reverse his position that firearms would be wasted on traditionally pacifist Jews. “I doubt they will use them,” he had cabled London only days before the January Rising. Now he had his answer. Not only were Jews capable of using weapons, but they proved they could put them to good use against insurmountable odds. Rowecki no longer had an excuse to avoid supplying the ZOB with more guns.
The January 18 mini-rebellion, however, made its greatest impact within the Ghetto. “It changed everything,” Boruch Spiegel recalled. Overnight, Mordechai Anielewicz became a household name. Outside ZOB circles, he had been relatively unknown before the Rising. Now his name fell from the lips of virtually every Jew in Warsaw. That he was the sole survivor of the heroic firefight on Low Street only increased his near-mythical status among Ghetto residents.
The ZOB as an organization won instant recognition as the dominant political and policing force within the Jewish district. “We are no longer in charge. A new authority now rules the Ghetto,” conceded the chairman of the previously all-powerful Judenrat. “The Jewish Fighting Organization.” Ghetto elders and skeptical residents could no longer claim that armed resistance was irresponsible and would result in wholesale slaughter. The revolt demonstrated that tens of thousands of lives could be saved by opposing the Germans—at least temporarily, for no one doubted that the SS would eventually be back to finish the aborted Aktion. But at least the ZOB had bought itself some time to prepare, and, just as important, it had won the support of the remaining Jewish masses, who began referring to the group with awe simply as the Organizacja—or the Organization.
Simha Ratheiser was by this time a full-fledged member of the Organization, rapidly rising through its youthful ranks. He had distinguished himself shortly after the January Rising by taking part in a brazen attack on the Jewish prison to free several jailed ZOB operatives. “My assignment was to distract the [Jewish Police] guards by pretending to deliver a package to a prisoner. My colleagues would then rush in with guns.” The plan was inspired by a similar operation carried out on the Aryan side by the Gray Ranks, the Home Army’s Boy Scout unit. Since one hundred and forty Gentiles had been executed by the SS in reprisal for that successful jailbreak, the ZOB hoped to divert Nazi retaliation by using Simha’s Slavic features. His would be the only face unmasked. The ruse worked. Shocked Jewish policemen mistook him for a Gentile and “word spread like wildfire that the operation had been commanded by a fighter from the Polish Underground.”
Ratheiser’s superiors were so impressed by his cool demeanor during the breakout—“When others became nervous or agitated I got calmer. Everything slowed down for me in such situations,” he explained about his sangfroid—that they promoted him to an elite unit led by twenty-two-year-old Hanoch Gutman. Gutman was one of the heroes of the January Rising, and his team did some of the ZOB’s dirtiest work: so-called “Exes,” which included both execution of traitors and expropriation of funds to finance weapons purchases. The unit was part hit squad, part extortion ring—but its targets hardly qualified as innocent victims. The notorious Gestapo agent Alfred Nossig, who claimed to be related to Zionist founder Theodor Herzl, was the first to be shot. He was followed by Mieczyslaw Brzezinski, the head of the Jewish Police’s hated Umschlagplatz unit. “Isaac [Zuckerman] would tell Hanoch who had been sentenced to death,” Simha recalled, “and he would carry it out.”
The responsibility for issuing the death warrants weighed heavily on Zuckerman. “I wanted to drink, and I drank too much,” he confessed. “It couldn’t get rid of the gnawing worm. It was the sense of responsibility for a human life.”
Boruch Spiegel, who reportedly joined an Exes group in the main shops district, refused to discuss the killing and extortion of fellow Jews. “I’m sorry, I won’t talk about that,” he demurred. Mark Edelman was more forthcoming about the sort of victim the ZOB shook down and the mafia-style tactics employed. “A Jewish policeman, a real son of a bitch, wouldn’t give us money,” he recalled. “We said, ‘You don’t want to pay? Fine,’ and shot him.”
The activities of the ZOB during this brief but controversial period of its evolution were in fact very similar to those of the American mob. Every underground baker in the Ghetto was forced to pay tribute to the ZOB by delivering free daily bread. Those who balked had their shops wrecked. Since the Organization needed to raise the equivalent of millions of dollars to buy arms for its members, it targeted the rich with a special “tax.” A disproportionate percentage of surviving residents were wealthy, because money, gold, and diamonds was what kept people alive in the diabolically corrupt Nazi system. There was also no shortage of smugglers or collaborators to squeeze. “We would kidnap their children and ransom them,” Simha explained of one tactic to secure contributions for the ZOB’s weapons fund.
It was during one of these Exes that Ratheiser acquired the pseudonym that followed him for the rest of his life—the nickname by which his Israeli grandchildren would address him, the nom de guerre on his email address seventy years later. A rich Jew had refused to pay the ZOB “tax.” “I put the barrel of my revolver near him,” Simha recalled. “Then Hanoch [Gutman] ordered ‘Kazik, kill him!’ Why did he call me Kazik?”—a Polish diminutive for Casimir. “When [the rich Jew] heard ‘Kazik,’ he understood he was dealing with a Gentile, and you didn’t get smart with Gentiles, especially not in those days. He broke down and gave us his contribution.”
So much money was being raised through extortion that a violent turf war nearly erupted. The rival Jewish Military Union had its own Exes program, and competition between the two groups over territory and marks eventually led to a confrontation. Zuckerman, Edelman, and Anielewicz went to meet with unnamed leaders of the JMU to try to resolve the dispute. “They drew their guns, we also brought guns,” was all Edelman would say. “I won’t discuss it any further than that.”
Whatever the origin of the conflict, it seemed that the ideological differences between the Jewish left and the Revisionist right remained irreconcilable in the winter of 1943, precluding any military cooperation. Though Edelman would not name the individua
ls with whom he had clashed in the armed standoff, one was likely Paul Frenkel, the young Betarist challenging David Apfelbaum for leadership of the JMU. Frenkel, at the time, was making large weapons purchases and needed to raise significant sums. Since Apfelbaum jealously guarded his contacts in the right-wing Home Army splinter group that had provided the JMU with weapons in the past, Frenkel needed to establish his own independent supply line. He had recently done so through a libertarian Home Army faction known by the Polish acronym PLAN. One of PLAN’s Gentile underground leaders, John Ketling, recalled meeting Frenkel a few months earlier at a safe house in an industrial suburb of Warsaw: “In a low dark room where large amounts of ammunition, hand grenades, and pistols had been stored on planks, I found some young Jews dressed in civilian clothes. Only the pistols and hand grenades stuck in their leather belts gave away their identity as members of a military organization,” he wrote in a postwar deposition. “The purpose of the meeting was explained to me by Paul [Frenkel], the head of their delegation. I learned that they considered themselves adherents of Jabotinsky and claimed that the pre-September 1939 Polish government had come to their assistance several times.” Frenkel now wanted to extend that prewar cooperation to jointly combat the Nazis. “I liked the attitude of the Jewish fighters, their fanatical will to fight, their willingness to take a high risk for the cause … the lightheartedness and familiarity with which these young boys treated the danger that awaited them made a very strong impression on me.”
In January 1943, Ketling was invited to visit JMU headquarters on Muranow Square, on the northern edge of the Central Ghetto enclave. He entered through a tunnel, one of several dug by the JMU’s Engineering Department in the summer and fall of 1942. “It began in the cellar of number 7 Muranow and ended across the street in number 6.” On the odd-numbered side, just next to the sidewalk, “a high wall made of red bricks and covered on top with broken glass and barbed wire” separated the Ghetto from the Aryan side. The tunnel, whose opening “was only a meter in diameter,” ran under the barrier. “After lifting the cover of the entrance”—it was camouflaged with earth to mask its whereabouts, Ketling reported—“you would enter the tunnel on all fours. It was lit with electrical light and padded with blankets.”
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