Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The apartments were almost empty now. The last stragglers were burrowing underground, and silence once again returned, as if, thought Zivia, “all life was erased from the face of the earth.”

  The only Jews the Germans would encounter now—Zivia smiled at the thought—were armed Jews. There were roughly 750 of them dispersed throughout the Jewish district’s three remaining sections: five hundred from the ZOB and the balance from the JMU, whose forces were concentrated in the northernmost part of the Central Ghetto near Muranow Square. The two groups would fight separately, despite a last-ditch attempt to overcome their differences. But Zivia wasn’t thinking about that. It was too late for recriminations. Her only regret now was that the ZOB didn’t have more guns. If not for the weapons shortage, “we would have a thousand warriors rather than five hundred,” she sighed.

  Lubetkin holstered her pistol and took up her preassigned position in the predawn gloom. She was calm and completely unafraid, almost giddy with anticipation. “At last,” she thought. “The day of revenge is upon us.”

  Had Zivia seen what Simha Ratheiser was witnessing at that very moment from his forward position on the easternmost edge of the Brushmakers District, she might have felt decidedly less confident. For only the second time in his life, Ratheiser was truly scared. The scene unfolding before his eyes was terrifying. As the sun rose pink over the horizon, wave after wave of German troops were crossing Cordials Street on their way to the Central Ghetto. Ratheiser watched them in the weak morning light, dense helmeted blocs moving in robotic unison just outside the wall. They formed “an endless procession,” he recalled. “Behind them were tanks, armored vehicles, light cannons and hundreds of Waffen-SS units on motorcycles.” Further still were the ambulances, field kitchens, and communications trucks. The rumble of the approaching armada grew steadily louder, more ominous. Windowpanes began rattling from the reverberations of track treads on cobblestone. Diesel fumes permeated the still-frigid air. The bark of marching orders grew louder.

  It seemed to Simha as if the entire German army stood at the Ghetto’s gates. He tried to gauge the enemy’s strength but quickly lost count. There were too many regiments, platoons, and companies to keep track of. It looked like thousands of soldiers, maybe many thousands. At least one thing was clear. This was not like previous Aktions. Those, in comparison, had been mere police exercises. This was a full-fledged military operation; even the Latvian and Ukrainian units were sober and clean-shaven. The SS had apparently drawn its own lessons from the January revolt. This time it had come prepared for resistance.

  Simha swallowed hard and glanced at the teenage fighter crouched next to him. He was thin, ragged, and nervously clutching a cumbersome homemade grenade. The next combatant down the line was a girl barely out of high school holding a bottle filled with gasoline. Simha and his fellow fighters all looked like this: desperate undernourished kids, untrained and ill equipped. The vast majority of them had never even fired a gun. Ratheiser turned his attention to the sprawling gray-green military machine moving in lockstep formation toward the Central Ghetto. The contrast was so stark that he could draw only one conclusion: “We don’t stand a chance,” he suddenly realized. “We are going to get slaughtered.”

  The Germans struck at precisely 6:00 A.M., hitting the large Central Ghetto simultaneously from the north and south. Zivia Lubetkin was at her post at the intersection of Goose and Cordials Streets, near one of the main entrance gates through which the enemy needed to pass. These gates were artificial choke points that favored the defenders, since SS planners, in their zeal to seal off the Jewish community behind stout walls, had inadvertently limited their own assault options to a few predictable entry points. It had never occurred to the Nazis that they might actually have to fight their way into the Ghetto, but Mordechai Anielewicz immediately recognized this inherent weakness and threw his meager resources into blockading critical gaps. Strategically, it was the urban equivalent of an army having to funnel through a narrow ravine to reach the open battlefield. Jewish partisans, perched on the rooftops and upper floors of the buildings that mimicked canyon walls, could then rain fury on the exposed invaders.

  The SS approached the Ghetto in parade formation, marching six abreast and singing the Horst Wessel song, the Nazi anthem. They did not attempt to hide, cover their positions, or secure their perimeters. The assault was more theatrical than tactical: a display of force and confidence intended to dissuade potential resistance and send the message that opposition was pointless. To some extent the intimidation tactic worked, since it successfully magnified the Germans’ true strength. Contrary to what observers like Ratheiser believed, there were not thousands of soldiers descending on them. There were only 850 Waffen-SS troops, drawn more or less equally from the SS Panzer Grenadier Reserve Battalion and the SS Cavalry Reserve Division, and they were supported by 150 Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliaries—also known derisively as Askars, or Deutsch-Negers, after the African units that fought alongside whites in the Boer wars.

  The illusion of superior numbers, however, did little to stanch the determination of the defenders. If anything, it brought a knowing and expectant smile to the faces of the many young Jews lurking behind window sashes and sills, ready to pounce. The arrogant Germans were walking straight into a trap, a minefield strewn with improvised explosive devices.

  “Let them come,” said Zivia, ordering her impatient young troops to hold their fire. Fingers tightened around triggers. Everyone took a deep breath and took aim. But discipline held. No one shot early. And the Germans drew closer. Still singing as if they were on a leisurely stroll, the unsuspecting invaders were now treading on IEDs, connected with buried wires to detonators.

  “Now!” someone screamed, and in an instant, multiple explosions rocked Cordials Street. Cobblestones flew in every direction and fountains of dirt went crashing against the bordering buildings, shattering the windows of the old Bon Appétit restaurant. Debris landed as far away as the defunct Lunch Café, with German helmets smashing against walls, rifles being flung three stories high, and body parts everywhere. “I could see torn limbs flying through the air with my own eyes.” Lubetkin remembered cheering wildly.

  The singing abruptly stopped, replaced by the agonized screams of wounded soldiers, the confused and contradictory orders of stunned officers, and the clatter of jackboots on cobblestones as the proud SS ran frantically for cover. One private, whose helmet was grotesquely ablaze, kept yelling “Juden haben Waffen! Juden haben Waffen!”—The Jews have weapons! The Jews have weapons!—as if he were witnessing a military miracle. No one had anticipated that the defenders would be armed with explosives. The Nazis expected to encounter revolvers, perhaps the occasional rifle. But it had apparently not dawned on them that Jewish insurgents could manufacture incendiary bombs and grenades in vast quantities. Those crude homemade weapons didn’t require expertise to throw or drop from above. They did not need to be well aimed or carefully placed to have devastating effects, since the target areas—streets bordered by plate-glass windows—were so narrow. And the walls of the buildings served to magnify the lethal ricochet effect. For the exposed Germans there was only one real option: to turn and flee. But they had nowhere to run, because ZOB rebels had shrewdly positioned themselves on all four sides of the Cordials and Goose Street intersection, creating a deadly cross fire that cut off their retreat and gripped the Nazis in a vise of bullets.

  From the north end of Cordials, five or six hundred yards away, soon came the chaotic sounds of an almost identical battle, the faint pop and crackle of gunfire, the low concussive blasts of grenades. The Germans were trying to breach the Wall on Muranow Street near the Jewish Military Union’s heavily fortified base. At the same time, a few blocks west of there, closer to the Umschlagplatz exit, other SS units were trying to secure Zamenhof Street, the corridor of death that led to the rail terminal. They would need to clear that passage to liquidate the Ghetto’s remaining fifty thousand residents, a fact that Mordechai Aniele
wicz had counted on. He had deployed four fighting units along the route.

  The thirty fighters in Zivia’s group—led by twenty-year-old Zacharia Artstein, a hero of the January Rising—now unleashed their own hail of grenades and Molotov cocktails. Cordials Street burst into an impassable inferno as bottles filled with fuel crashed onto the road and sidewalks, erupting with a whoosh of sucked oxygen that sent black fumes streaking across the marquee of the Astor Dance Club.

  Pinned down and panicked, the Germans could barely return fire. Many pressed themselves flat against the indentations of doorways. Some tried to force their way into blocked courtyards. Others sought refuge in abandoned storefronts. All the while, their Jewish tormentors showered them with abuse, hurling every German curse word they could think of and plenty more in Yiddish. “We couldn’t help ourselves,” Lubetkin laughed. Revenge was sweeter than any of them could imagine. The elation of turning the tables on the murderous SS was so intoxicating that even the most restrained combatants found themselves screaming “Fuck you, Nazi bastards!”

  The reinforcements called in by shocked SS platoon leaders collided with reality the moment they crossed the Ghetto threshold. They ran straight into a wall of flame and fire. With more German units piling into the cauldron, forced forward by furious officers at the rear, Artstein’s brigade opened fire with their pistols and their few precious rifles. For the Nazis, the bottleneck was proving a death trap. They couldn’t advance, but their officers would not let them retreat. Zivia and the others, meanwhile, tried to pick off the cowering soldiers, using windowsills to steady their aim. Most of the shots missed their mark—the young Jews were hardly marksmen—but several more Germans fell, writhing in agony, clutching their bloodied abdomens. Every hit brought a roar from the upper floors and balconies; and the news that Anielewicz’s groups had knocked out a tank on Zamenhof Street brought the loudest cheer of all.

  From his guard post in the nearby Brushmakers District, Simha could not see the fighting in the Central Ghetto. But he could hear the shooting and shouting, could distinguish the wild staccato bursts of German submachine guns from the steady crackling of the ZOB’s revolvers. After a few hours, he began to realize that he was not listening to a massacre, but that his fellow fighters, against all odds, were holding their ground. He, too, began to cheer, especially when Germans reappeared in his sightlines, retreating toward the safety of the Aryan side. Simha couldn’t believe it. In this opening battle, at least, David had defeated Goliath.

  “We can’t get into the Ghetto,” Col. Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg conceded shortly before 8 A.M. He was half a mile from the scene of the aborted Aktion, on the top floor of the elegant Bristol Hotel in a luxurious suite reserved for Jürgen Stroop, one of the SS’s top counterinsurgency experts.

  General Stroop had made a name for himself on the Eastern Front, initially in the wild Caucasus mountains, hunting Soviet commando units, and then in the killing fields of Ukraine, rooting out and dispatching partisan groups with such brutal efficiency that Himmler had summoned him to Warsaw to watch over the inexperienced Von Sammern-Frankenegg, in case the Jews proved difficult to handle.

  “We are not in the Ghetto,” Von Sammern repeated, shaking in disbelief. “We can’t get in.”

  Stroop smoked impassively as the agitated colonel tallied the morning’s losses. Twelve men were dead or wounded, a tank was wrecked, and two armored personnel carriers were burned beyond recognition. Stroop betrayed no emotion. He knew all this. He had been working the phones to Berlin and Krakow, poisoning the bureaucratic well for the incompetent colonel. “That idiot, Von Sammern-Frankenegg, drove a tank into those narrow streets,” he complained to General Wilhelm Kruger, the ranking SS officer in occupied Poland. “It’s a disgrace,” Kruger agreed. “That Tyrolean fool, that cow, has brought dishonor to the good name of the SS and should be immediately arrested.”

  At this, Stroop allowed himself a small, self-satisfied smile. He had been rooting for Von Sammern to fail ever since he got the call from Himmler. It wasn’t solely because he was fiercely ambitious. Stroop’s ruthlessness had already won him rapid promotion. In Ukraine, where he had picked out a four-hundred-acre parcel near Lvov on which to build his estate after the war, his counterinsurgency tactics exceeded even the SS’s most brutal standards. Any village suspected of harboring “terrorists” wasn’t merely targeted for reprisal. It was entirely wiped out; every inhabitant was killed, every building was burned, all the livestock was slaughtered. This hard-line approach to quashing resistance was exactly why Himmler had tapped Stroop. For Stroop, success in Warsaw could lead to a string of high-profile assignments: in Yugoslavia and Greece, where Communist partisans were becoming a nuisance; in France and Holland, where the British were stirring up local resistance movements.

  There was another, more personal and vindictive reason Stroop wanted Von Sammern to fail. He hated his type. The man was “soft,” an effete intellectual, an aristocrat from a prominent Austrian family who owed his cushy position to influence rather than hard work. In Stroop’s view, there was no place in the meritocratic SS for well-connected “dandies” who were afraid of getting blood on their manicured fingers. They should stay in the class-conscious Wehrmacht with the rest of the old Junker nobility.

  Stroop’s background was markedly different. His father had been a humble policeman in a tiny town. While Von Sammern had the luxury of completing a doctorate in philosophy in Vienna, Stroop’s formal education ended after elementary school, and he toiled as an apprentice surveyor until the Nazi Party offered him a chance to prove himself. He didn’t have Von Sammern’s polished manners or his elaborate vocabulary, but that didn’t matter in the SS, because results counted more than lineage. Nor did Stroop share Von Sammern’s taste for “alcohol, parties, and loose women.” He had once pulled Von Sammern’s Gestapo file, which detailed the colonel’s frequent outings to the notorious Adria, one of Warsaw’s most degenerate “German-only” nightclubs. Worse still was the company Von Sammern kept there: Wehrmacht officers, arrogant Prussians who considered themselves superior to the brutish SS but didn’t have the stomach to do what was needed to ensure the Reich prevailed over its enemies. In the Third Reich, the SS was the new aristocracy, and it had no room for dilettante throwbacks like Col. Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg.

  Stroop couldn’t bear to listen to Von Sammern’s hysterical report any longer. Stubbing out his cigarette (the Simon, billed as the “finest Egyptian tobacco in the world,” was a privilege of rank, along with his new BMW and the estate he would soon build in Ukraine), the general rose from his gilded chair, waving for the china and silverware to be removed from his breakfast table. He was an imposing man, six feet tall, slim and strong with a long stern face, and his slick black hair was meticulously parted down the center, showing no signs of gray despite his nearly fifty years.

  “I’m assuming command,” he said, striding over to the suite’s panoramic window, which looked down on the cream-colored façade of the European Hotel across the street, another German-only establishment. The renamed Hitler Platz could be seen directly behind it, then the budding treetops of Saxon Gardens, and finally Cordials Street, the symbol of Jewish Warsaw, the city’s prewar commercial hub, and now the humiliating site of SS disgrace. The time for half measures was over, Stroop declared. “Mobilize all forces,” he ordered.

  CHAPTER 30

  JOANNA PRAYS

  The sprawling SS garrison next to the convent where Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak was hiding had been on high alert since early that morning, April 19. Now an endless stream of trucks and motorcycles with sidecars emerged from its black steel gates as General Stroop called up more reserves to quash the Jewish revolt. Joanna, like any nine-year-old, only vaguely comprehended the significance of the stepped-up activity. “I don’t really remember much beyond the fact that someone said there was shooting somewhere in the city,” she later recalled. Sister Wanda, however, immediately grasped that the Ghetto was under siege. She knew t
he Jews had been planning an armed revolt because she had briefly sheltered the ZOB envoy Ari Wilner.

  Sister Wanda’s main concern was for her Jewish charges. Some of the girls still had families in the Ghetto, and she wanted to shield them from unnecessary trauma. There was nothing they could do other than cry and despair, and that might betray them to nosy outside observers. So the boarders were kept in the dark about the Uprising, and she busied them with intensified preparations for their First Communion. This would not only take their minds off the fighting raging a few miles north, but, more important, it would buttress their Catholic credentials should the Gestapo later come searching for Jews who managed to escape from the Ghetto siege.

  The Germans had already come looking for Joanna once, shortly after her mother, Hanna, and her grandmother, Janine, were shaken down by the dreaded greaser blackmailers, who had extracted a princely sum to let them go and probably still tipped off the Gestapo to Joanna’s whereabouts. That had been in December 1942, the beginning of what proved to be a very difficult winter for the Mortkowicz clan. First Joanna’s mother and grandmother disappeared, leaving the anxious child alone and frightened for weeks as they tried to give the greasers the slip. How they finally managed to evade their blackmailers, Joanna did not know, but it almost certainly involved large payments and the promise of more. Then, just as her family reestablished contact in January 1943, an unimaginable relief for the grief-stricken Joanna, tragedy struck. Grandma Janine’s older brother, Ludwik Horwitz, a scientist, was arrested by the Gestapo. He had been hiding “on the surface,” that is openly, under his own name, conducting a major research project for the State Geological Institute of Warsaw. Astonishingly, no one had bothered him before now. Within days of his submitting the research paper he had been working on throughout the occupation, the Gestapo picked him up. He was shot a few weeks later, in February 1943.