The fortified bunker into which the tunnel led was later described by the Ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum, one of the few left-wing Zionists who managed to maintain cordial relations with the Revisionists: “In the command room was a first-class radio that received news from all over the world, and next to it stood a typewriter. I talked to people in command for several hours. They were armed, with revolvers stuck in their belts. Different kinds of weapons were hung in the large rooms: light machine guns, rifles, revolvers of various kinds, hand grenades, bags of ammunition, German uniforms etc.… There was great activity in the command room, as in any army headquarters. Fighters received their orders for the barrack-points where future combatants were being brought together and instructed. Reports arrived of expropriations of wealthy people carried out by individual groups for the purpose of arming the JMU. While I was there a purchase of arms was made from a former Polish Army officer amounting to a quarter of a million zlotys. Two machine guns were bought at 40,000 zlotys each, as well as a large number of hand grenades and bombs.”
The ZOB, though far better known than its smaller and more secretive right-wing rival, had nothing to match that arsenal. And it did not have much time to play catch-up before the SS struck again.
In February 1943, the Home Army “saluted” the Organization’s courage during the January Rising by delivering fifty pistols and grenades. The shipment was only a fraction of what Zuckerman and Edelman were expecting, because General Rowecki remained skeptical of the ZOB’s political leanings and loyalties. But at least he no longer complained that weapons were wasted on Jews.
In a cable to London, the Home Army detailed how the arms were distributed among the different ZOB units being formed in the Ghetto’s three enclaves: “Nine squadrons were concentrated in the center of the ghetto, eight in the area of the Tobbens and Schultz workshops, five in the Brushmakers District.” The deployment incorporated a tactical lesson learned during the January Rising. Because the Ghetto was divided into noncontiguous zones separated by depopulated dead zones, it had been impossible to coordinate any cohesive battle plan from one unified headquarters. Consequently, the ZOB decided to split itself into three regiments, each acting independently under its own commander. Anielewicz assumed control of the largest force in the Central Ghetto. Zuckerman was in charge of the main shops area between Forestry and New Linden Streets. And Edelman headed the smaller Brushmakers District, on the westernmost edge of the Ghetto, near New Town.
Between the three of them they had as many as five hundred fighters, all of whom were now required to leave their families and live together in platoons so as to maintain constant battle readiness. “We did not want to be taken by surprise again,” explained Ratheiser, whose group was barracked on Franciscan Street in the Brushmakers District. The platoons were structured along party lines—Bundists were garrisoned with Bundists, Young Guardsmen with Young Guardsman, members of Isaac’s Socialist Zionist Dror with Dror—but all were of mixed gender. Inevitably, the cramped coed living arrangements led to many pairings: Simha fell hard for a girl named Dvora, and they became an item. His team leader, Hanoch Gutman, also shared his bunk with a girlfriend, as did Anielewicz and Boruch Spiegel. And of course Isaac and Zivia were still together.
During the day, most of the would-be warriors went to work at the various German shops. At night they trained for battle by pretending to shoot at targets. “We would aim and shout Bang, Bang,” Spiegel recalled. Bullets were far too precious to waste on practice, since the revolvers from the Home Army had arrived with inexplicably empty chambers. “Allocating weapons without ammunition impresses us as being a bit of a mockery of our fate and confirms the assumption that the venom of anti-Semitism continues to permeate the ruling circles of Poland,” Mordechai Anielewicz angrily declared. That the unloaded pistols were all of different vintages, makes, and calibers further aggravated the ZOB’s dire munitions problems.
General Rowecki’s token “goodwill gesture” had armed barely one in ten combatants. A few additional Mausers had been liberated from dead Germans during the rising, and some rifles were bought at the illicit arms market on Jerusalem Boulevard near Central Station. The black market was proving a disappointment as a source of weapons. It was rife with rip-off artists and Gestapo informants. The ZOB could purchase only one or two guns at a time since large orders would arouse suspicion, and what it had managed to buy was “a pittance,” in Zuckerman’s frustrated words. So he sent courier Ari Wilner back to the Aryan side to press the Home Army for more guns. Though it was not widely known, Wilner had fired the first shot of the January Rising. His role was less heralded than Mordechai Anielewicz’s because it had taken place behind closed doors rather than in full view of the public. Nonetheless, having a German kill under his belt lent Wilner tremendous credibility with the Polish Underground. Even if some of the more conservative Polish army officers had misgivings about Jews, they respected Wilner personally. One of his greatest admirers was Captain Henry Wolinski, the Home Army’s Jewish Affairs liaison officer.
Wolinski had a Jewish wife hidden at home, and he was sympathetic to the ZOB. He secured a promise for a further shipment of arms: “a machine gun, a tommy gun, twenty pistols with magazines and ammunition, 100 hand grenades, and diversion materials such as time bombs and delayed action fuses.” Wilner and Wolinski also arranged for the ZOB to receive training at the Home Army’s underground explosives laboratory, so engineer and Bundist Michael Klepfish was sent for an intensive course on bomb making.
Klepfish returned three weeks later with dynamite, two thousand liters of kerosene, and a slew of volatile recipes to set up his own laboratory. Simha Ratheiser and Boruch Spiegel both recall scouring the Ghetto for empty bottles and burned-out lightbulbs for Klepfish’s bomb factories. The bulbs were injected with sulfuric acid, while the bottles—very hard to come by—were filled with a mixture of kerosene, gasoline, sugar, and potassium cyanide to create incendiary devices whose burn rates could be controlled by altering the ingredients. The assembly of these bottle bombs had to be concealed in well-ventilated attics because “the odor of the chemicals was overwhelming.” One such lab was on St. George’s Street in Edelman’s Brushmakers District, across from Krasinski Park in the building next to one in which the Ratheisers had lived when Simha first moved to the Ghetto. The lethal cocktails were mixed in large barrels and carefully funneled into vodka bottles that often had to be smuggled in from the Aryan side.
Since drainpipes were plentiful and could be fashioned into grenades, hundreds of bathrooms throughout the Ghetto were dismantled for their cast iron fixtures. “We would remove the pipes with a larger than normal diameter, saw out a piece of about 30 to 40 centimeters, solder one side, and make threads for a screw on the other side. Inside the hard metal pipe, we would put a thinner tin pipe and load it with explosives. We would fill the space in between the two pipes with pieces of metal, nails and such. The effect of the explosion was not only from the pipe but also from the scraps of metal and nails. We would carve slits in the pipe, which scattered the slivers. In the screwed-on top, we would make a crack to put the wick.”
The work was dangerous and not without mishaps. “One morning the entire ghetto shook to a mighty explosion, which threw everyone into a panic,” senior ZOB operative Tuvia Borzykowski recounted. “Only a few knew that the bomb was our own.”
Slowly but surely, the Organization’s weapons and munitions caches grew. Every day, a few revolvers trickled in from the black markets on the Aryan side. With each passing week, the stores of homemade grenades increased. With each shift, the rows of bottled Molotov cocktails lengthened.
During the feverish preparations, the question arose of whether to follow the JMU’s lead and build fortified bunkers and tunnels. Underground hideouts were being frantically excavated in basements and cellars throughout the Ghetto in February and March 1943, in anticipation of the next Aktion. The vast majority were dug by ordinary residents and never intended as entrenched f
ighting positions. Their purpose was purely concealment. Many of these hideouts were engineering marvels, with lighting and electricity, running water, and complex ventilation systems. A thriving cottage industry of skilled contractors had sprung up to design and build shelters for those who could afford them. Others dug their own, crude crawl spaces shored up by planks ripped from the floors of abandoned apartments. Some of the more sophisticated designs could house hundreds of refugees, with stores of food and drink for several weeks. These were so well camouflaged, with false walls and entrances through the coal furnaces in boiler rooms, that even the residents of the buildings above could not find them.
Zuckerman advocated mimicking the JMU’s bunker strategy. The January Rising proved that it was impossible to fight the Germans in the open from exposed positions. And now the element of surprise was gone. The SS would be better prepared next time, expecting resistance. The ZOB, he argued, needed escape routes and fallback positions where it could regroup and hunker down.
Mordechai Anielewicz had a different view. The point of any future battle, he argued, was not survival. There would be no survivors; the only hope was to inflict the maximum possible casualties on the enemy before the inevitable demise. To accomplish this would require holding the high ground: the rooftops and attics that provided the optimum lines of sight.
Zuckerman thought “this was a mistake.” Edelman grumbled that “not all of us were in such a hurry to die.” But Anielewicz’s reasoning prevailed. He was, after all, the great hero, the living symbol of resistance who had already attained cult status within the ZOB’s largely teenage rank and file. If he wanted to reenact a modern Masada, they would follow him to their martyr’s graves.
Zuckerman and Edelman viewed their co-commander in a less hallowed light. Isaac and Mark had become close. During Zuckerman’s convalescence from his leg wound, the two spent a lot of time together. They struck up a genuine friendship that transcended their ideological differences. Not so with Anielewicz. “I had not gotten to know him well because I didn’t mix with Communists,” Edelman explained frankly. “Isaac and Zivia lived with him for a while. They used to read his journal entries in Hebrew and laugh. He’d never seen the Umschlagplatz and yet was so desperate to lead. Seeing 400,000 people go to their death changes you—you can break down. That’s certainly why the [April] uprising turned out much harder on him.”
Zuckerman, Lubetkin, and Edelman resented the implications of Anielewicz’s private diaries: that had he been in Warsaw during the Gross Aktion, he might somehow have single-handedly saved the Ghetto. They felt better prepared for the coming conflict precisely because they had already witnessed death on an unimaginable scale. In their view, Anielewicz had not yet paid his psychological dues.
Edelman’s few interactions with his commander served only to reinforce his reservations that Anielewicz was “very emotional and sometimes acted rashly.” This spontaneity caused significant friction between the ZOB leaders when Anielewicz, in late March 1943, shot two Latvian SS auxiliaries on Pleasant Street in the Central Ghetto. Edelman and Zuckerman were furious. While the ZOB had openly assassinated Jewish collaborators—at least sixty traitors, possibly more, were killed in all—it had never targeted Germans because of the risk of retaliation. The Gestapo did not care if a Jew was murdered in the Ghetto, but an SS auxiliary was a different matter. Within hours of the hit on the Latvians, more than two hundred Jews were rounded up on Pleasant Street, lined up against walls, and machine-gunned. Many ZOB leaders held Anielewicz responsible for the deaths of those innocent people. “After this incident the Coordinating Committee of the ZOB wanted to remove him from his post,” Edelman recalled.
Anielewicz’s good standing with the ZOB’s impatient teenage rank and file was unaffected by his actions, and because of his popularity he survived the no-confidence vote. The ZOB suffered another, potentially more serious blow when envoy Ari Wilner fell into German hands. His arrest prompted the Home Army to immediately suspend all contact with the ZOB. Wilner had been betrayed by a Polish informant during an arms pickup. Taken to Gestapo headquarters, he was tortured, suspended upside down, the soles of his feet burned with branding irons. The Germans had no idea he was a Jew and their interrogations focused entirely on the Home Army. He endured the questioning for several weeks before finally breaking down and confessing that he was a Jew. When the Gestapo confirmed this, they lost interest in him. They were only after information on the Home Army, so Wilner was sent to Peacock Prison in the Ghetto.
The Home Army, in the meantime, completely disappeared from the ZOB’s radar. Every effort to reach Captain Wolinski failed; every channel of communication suddenly went silent. As the weeks passed and March faded into April, the frustrated ZOB leaders became convinced that General Rowecki was using Wilner’s arrest as an excuse to suspend further aid. At the time, Mark Edelman felt the same way. Only later did he learn that “the Home Army had an iron-clad rule that if someone was burnt, all contact was ruptured for six weeks.” The underground term for this was quarantining an “infected” agent. (The security precautions were standard procedure, though hardly foolproof. In June 1943, General Rowecki himself was betrayed by an infected member. Sent to Berlin, he was subjected to months of interrogation before being shot at Sachsenhausen.)
Almost six weeks to the day after Wilner’s arrest, Captain Henry Wolinski reestablished contact. The call came on April 12, 1943, with a cryptic message stating “if you don’t want the salt to spoil the meal, you should come immediately to pick it up.” Presumably this meant the Home Army had a weapons shipment ready. But whom would the ZOB send to retrieve it? A replacement had to be found for Wilner, someone with sufficient gravitas to act as the Organization’s new ambassador on the Aryan side.
Once more the choice came down to Mordechai Anielewicz or Isaac Zuckerman. Anielewicz’s advantage was that he was a native Varsovian. “He talked and looked like a typical Warsaw Pole. He didn’t speak like the Jewish intellectuals, who, because of their fluency and literary speech, would fail and be exposed.… My disadvantage,” Zuckerman went on, “was that I came from eastern Poland, from Vilna. In normal times, Warsaw Poles mocked the Polish of Vilna, which had many Russianisms.”
Anielewicz also had the considerable advantage of having led the January Rising. The Poles would respect that. Unfortunately, though, he had no intention of playing diplomat; Mordechai wanted to stay and fight. So in the end it was Isaac who represented the Organization on the Aryan side. He packed his belongings and left the Ghetto on April 17, 1943. Little did he know that he would never again set foot in the Jewish district.
CHAPTER 29
ZIVIA LETS LOOSE
It was 2 A.M. on April 19, 1943, less than forty-eight hours after Isaac Zuckerman’s departure to the Aryan side as the ZOB’s new liaison officer with the Home Army, when a courier burst into Zivia Lubetkin’s quarters.
From the boy’s grave expression, Zivia immediately sensed something was wrong. For an agonizing instant, she thought Isaac might be in trouble: betrayed by an informant or apprehended by the Gestapo. These things usually happened quickly, at the outset of a mission, when inexperienced operatives blundered into traps. Zivia’s heart skipped a beat. Much as she tried to conceal her emotions behind the hard mask she wore in public, Lubetkin constantly worried about her lover. She couldn’t forget that the last time Zuckerman had left the Ghetto, he’d barely made it back, with a bullet lodged in his leg. And she was only too keenly aware that the man he was now replacing as ZOB envoy, Ari Wilner, had been betrayed to the Gestapo and tortured.
The runner, however, wasn’t bearing news of Isaac’s capture. The Germans, he stammered, were massing troops throughout Warsaw. Word from the Home Army was that special SS units would storm the Ghetto at first light.
Relief swept over Lubetkin. Not only was Isaac safe, but the hour she had long awaited was finally at hand. This was what the Jewish Fighting Organization had been preparing for since its inception. This was what all
the sacrifice was about: the weapons training, the Exes, the bomb making, the rip-offs and endless haggling with the uncooperative Polish Underground and unscrupulous arms dealers. Zivia had been anticipating this moment for weeks now; the entire Jewish community had been preparing for it for months. The civilians had feverishly dug their bunkers and camouflaged their hiding places; the combatants—from both the ZOB and its rival, the Jewish Military Union—had fortified their defenses and honed their strategies.
Everything that could be done had been done. The guns had been distributed. (Boruch Spiegel, who had been afraid of accidentally shooting himself when he first held a revolver, now couldn’t sleep unless he had his trusted pistol under his pillow.) Sandbags had been filled and food supplies laid in. Mines and improvised explosive devices had been buried beneath the entry gates to the Ghetto’s three remaining sections. Molotov cocktails had been strategically stored in upper-floor windows overlooking every major artery that the Germans would have to traverse. Holes had been cut in attic fire walls so that fighters could slip unseen from building to building and track their prey from above. The ZOB’s twenty-two fighting units had all been mobilized and deployed. Nine were in the Central Ghetto, eight in the main shops district, and the five battle groups under Mark Edelman’s command were positioned in the Brushmakers Area.
By 4 A.M. the Ghetto was on high alert, a hive of activity as fifty thousand residents scrambled into basements, disappearing behind false walls and trapdoors that opened onto preprovisioned hideouts. “In the bunkers, people push and shove and lie down on planks,” Zivia noted. “Suddenly a child begins wailing. It has gotten separated from its parents. Immediately, from all sides, people rush to calm the frightened child, whose cries can alert the Germans and doom them all.”
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