Stroop, in his report to Kruger, referred to the Muranow fort “as the main Jewish fighting unit” of the Ghetto, noting that it was reinforced “by a considerable number of Polish bandits.” This was an exaggeration—there were only five confirmed Gentiles in the JMU fortress at the time. But the specter of Polish partisans helped justify Stroop’s heavy losses—officially fifty-two wounded soldiers and one dead officer, in reality many more—and the embarrassing fact that the two rebel flags, though riddled with bullets, continued to stubbornly flutter for all of Warsaw to see. “Get those flags down, Stroop,” Himmler had hissed, his voice a menacing whisper. “Whatever the cost.”
Despite the Reichsführer’s chilling exhortations, Stroop fared no better when he regrouped and tried to take the Brushmakers District next. Inside the tiny eastern enclave, the smallest of the three remaining in the Ghetto, Simha Ratheiser waited impatiently. The nineteen-year-old was no longer scared or intimidated. Now that it was at hand, the moment he had daydreamed of a thousand times seemed anticlimactic. He was itching for the Germans to strike, his finger on the trigger of an IED, yet somehow he was not elated at the prospect of killing. Revenge didn’t taste as sweet as he had thought. Though he was intent on wiping out as many Germans as possible, he drew surprisingly little pleasure from the prospect.
As Stroop’s assault squad crept cautiously toward them, Simha’s commander, Hanoch Gutman, snatched the detonator from his hand and exploded the huge mine that had been buried under the enclave’s main gate. It was the biggest bomb yet made by the ZOB, and its concussive wave was so powerful that it pinned Ratheiser to a wall, knocking the air out of his lungs. By the time he regained his senses, his fellow fighters were pummeling the disoriented invaders. Many of the hundred German and Ukrainian soldiers in the assault party had been flung so high by the explosives that body parts and cobblestones had soared over upper-story balconies before falling back into the giant crater carved out of Embankment Street. At the center of this grisly shower of rubble and human entrails, a geyser of water shot straight upward: a city water main had been ruptured by the blast.
The crater and the street soon flooded in a murky, impassable mess, forcing the invaders back and preventing their ambulances from collecting the dead and wounded. The assault had failed. Once again the Ghetto resounded with the sound of Jewish cheers and German moans. Once more a visibly rattled Stroop shook his head in disbelief. Simha also couldn’t believe his eyes when a few minutes later he saw a pair of SS officers waving white flags. The Nazis wanted a truce so they could evacuate their wounded and offer a final chance for civilians to flee the combat zone. This uncharacteristic concern stemmed from the fact that most of the four thousand slave laborers hiding in cellars in the Brushmakers District belonged to the industrialist Walther Casper Tobbens. He planned on relocating many of them to his new factories near Lublin, and he desperately wanted to protect his assets. Stroop was under strict orders not to damage the goods.
Mark Edelman responded to the flag bearers in typically brusque fashion. “Shoot them,” he ordered casually. Edelman famously suffered no fools. And the SS officers were obviously taking him for one if they thought he was going to negotiate. Despite his youth and lack of military experience, he had already earned a solid reputation for his hard and unflappable demeanor as area commander. He could nap between skirmishes, astounding everyone around him, and bark out orders with the ferocity of a drill sergeant within seconds of waking. With his mustache, red angora sweater (“taken from a very rich Jew”), twin ammunition belts crisscrossed over his chest, and two holstered pistols, he was the perfect picture of a revolutionary. “Use the machine gun,” he added, for enhanced effect. It was the ZOB’s only automatic weapon in the Brushmakers District, and Edelman wanted to make a lasting impression on the Nazi commander.
The fusillade sent the SS officers scurrying back to Stroop, who was seated at a folding table a few blocks away, poring over Ghetto maps and feigning calm. It took him several more hours, long after it became obvious that no civilians were answering the evacuation call, to work up the nerve to attack again. The result was much the same. The Jewish defenders, now five fighting units strong because Edelman had redeployed all his resources to the point of attack, peppered the assault force with fragment grenades and drenched them in burning oil. “Hans, look, a woman!” Simha overheard a shocked German say, as one ZOB member hurled a Molotov cocktail at a fallen SS man. Four of the ten fighters in Simha’s group were women, and they were rapidly proving themselves to be some of the ZOB’s fiercest combatants. “These females fired pistols from both hands,” Stroop later remarked with evident awe.
The general had had enough. This was turning into a miniature Stalingrad. He would not fall for the same “rat trap” that had decimated the 6th Army Group. The ruse, also known as the “hugging” strategy, had been shrewdly used by the Soviets to deprive the Germans of their vast technological, tactical, and training advantage by luring them deep into the city of Stalingrad and forcing them into house-to-house combat that favored dug-in defenders. Denying a superior adversary room to maneuver was the military equivalent of immobilizing a karate expert in a bear hug; as long as he was trapped in close quarters, all his moves, speed, and agility would be rendered useless. Only brute force and fierce determination would matter.
Stroop ordered his men back and the artillery forward. To hell with Tobbens and the other greedy Wehrmacht contractors; they were costing SS lives. He was going to flatten the entire Brushmakers District, regardless of collateral damage.
Within minutes, the whistle of mortar, antiaircraft, and howitzer shells filled the air. The buildings around the ZOB positions began to shake and shudder, releasing large dust clouds with every impact. For Simha, the most frustrating aspect of the barrage was not the clumps of plaster falling on his head, or the brick fragments flying across rooms with decapitating speed. It was the maddening fact that he had no one to shoot back at. The Germans had withdrawn behind the wall into Count Krasinski Park, safely out of pistol range behind the elliptical gravel paths and swing sets where Jewish children had once played.
Soon Ratheiser, Edelman, and their fellow fighters could see holes the size of automobiles perforating the roofs of neighboring buildings. Balconies and façades fell away like concrete icebergs calving into an asphalt ocean. Glass flew in every direction, slicing through anything in its murderous path. It was violence on a scale that Simha had not experienced since the September 1939 siege that had killed his brother and left him with a gaping neck wound. Still, he and the other defenders refused to budge. Then, just as it had with Zivia’s group, fire broke out.
Later that evening, in the regal splendor of his new lodgings near the Royal Gardens, in the most exclusive German-only district, Stroop surveyed the dense black clouds drifting over the fifteenth floor of the Prudential Life Insurance Building and smiled. Fire! Fire was the solution. It was his salvation: the answer to his two biggest problems. In one incendiary swoop, it would deprive the rebels of their high ground and at the same time smoke out the rest of the Ghetto’s seemingly vanished inhabitants.
This latter dilemma had initially stumped Stroop. Where were all the damned Jews? He had expected to round up thousands each day. He had trains waiting to deport them to Treblinka II. But the transports had been sitting mostly empty. Only now did Stroop finally solve the mystery of the missing Jews. “During the night the fires we had started earlier forced the Jews to appear,” he cabled Kruger. They had been hiding in cellars and attics. “Masses of burning Jews—entire families—jumped from windows or tried to lower themselves using tied-together bed sheets.” Stroop’s men had dubbed the jumpers “parachutists,” and the leaping women and children were a tremendous boost for SS morale. They provided great sport for target practice, and an easy way to avenge fallen brothers. Thousands more were crawling out of basements, coughing uncontrollably, and Stroop could choose to shoot them at will or finally start to fill his lagging deportation quotas
.
Fire was also the only way to flush out the insurgents. “I have therefore decided,” Stroop cabled Kruger, requesting permission to switch tactics, “to embark on the total destruction of the Jewish quarter by burning down every residential block, including the housing blocks belonging to the armament enterprises.”
Under this new plan, he was no longer going to fight the Jews. He was not going to get sucked into Russian-style wrestling matches. He was going to incinerate them and reduce the entire Ghetto to cinders, leaving the insurgents with nowhere to hide.
Boruch Spiegel stared at the open sewer grate with dread. “I’m not going in there,” one of his fellow fighters, a tall and improbably thin young man, kept repeating. “I’m not going down there.” They stood in an alley off Forestry Boulevard at the southern edge of the flaming Main Shops District, just three blocks from the Dragon Street Gate, where the Waffen-SS had spearheaded its attack on the Productive Ghetto a week earlier. The Germans had struck from the north, from the large depopulated dead zone that separated the Main Shops District from the Central Ghetto and the smoldering ruins of the Brushmakers District. As many as eighty ZOB members had participated in the opening battle for the Main Shops District. Less than half were still alive in the waning days of April 1943, crowded around the opening to the sewage canal, overwhelmed by the putrid odor of human waste and weighing whether to enter the bowels of the earth or to stay aboveground and perish in the creeping inferno.
Boruch glanced at his girlfriend, Chaika. She was filthy, her hair matted with mud and blood, her faced bruised and streaked with charcoal. Her clothes were torn at the knees and elbows from crawling on all fours under the dense canopy of smoke that enveloped the Main Shops District. To Boruch, she had never looked more radiant—perhaps only when he had caught sight of her in the heat of battle hurling a homemade sulfuric acid grenade at a German. Boruch often relived that glorious moment in his mind, played it over and over again. What a sensation: to shoot at the Nazis! Every time he had pulled the trigger, he thought of his brother Berl, of his father, his mother, his sisters, his friends; of everyone the bastards had killed. That satisfaction was quickly replaced with concern, however, as Boruch and his fellow combatants quickly realized that their rebellion was unsustainable. “We had run out of everything,” he recalled. “We had no ammunition, grenades, or Molotov cocktails. I didn’t have a single bullet left. We were out of food and there was hardly any water. We had never planned on fighting for more than a few days. And I don’t know if anyone,” he added, referring to the ZOB leadership, “had made any real escape plans.”
The very strength of Anielewicz’s strategy—what had determined its early success—had become the ZOB’s greatest weakness after Stroop had changed tactics. Once all the buildings had been set on fire, the vast network of attic passages that the Jews had used so effectively to strike their enemy from above had become death traps. They had also been rendered militarily useless. And there was no contingency or fallback plan of the sort that Isaac Zuckerman had advocated when he argued that the ZOB should build underground bunkers. Anielewicz had prepared for one glorious, honor-redeeming battle. Alas, he had not envisioned, nor made any provisions for, survivors of that epic struggle. “We are going to die,” Mark Edelman heard him say repeatedly. “There’s no way out, we’ll die for honor, for history.”
The ZOB’s lack of a coordinated exit strategy first became obvious in the Brushmakers District, the earliest enclave put to fire. “One after another we staggered through the conflagration,” Edelman bitterly recalled. “The sea of flames flooded houses and courtyards. There was no air, only black, choking smoke, and heavy burning heat radiating from the red-hot walls, from the glowing stone stairs.” At every turn, Edelman, Simha Ratheiser, and the other ZOB fighters encountered an unbroken wall of fire. “The stench of burning bodies was everywhere. Charred corpses lay around on balconies, in window recesses, on unburned steps.” The pavement under their feet melted from the heat. Glass liquefied in window frames and dripped like white-hot rain. At night, the flames were so bright that there was no cover of darkness. In the end, all they could do was crawl away from the scorching blaze and try to seek refuge in the still largely intact Central Ghetto.
It took longer for the fires to reach Spiegel’s position in the Main Shops District, the last sector to be attacked. Eventually his unit faced the same dilemma Edelman’s had earlier. They had run out of ammunition and were running out of places to hide. They considered making one last heroic stand and attacking the Germans with rocks, clubs, and knives. But this was rejected as certain death. “We didn’t think of committing suicide,” said Boruch.
Then someone suggested the sewers. What other option did they have? Even the dead zones were being dynamited and set ablaze by Stroop’s relentless sappers and engineers. In the Central Ghetto, Edelman dispatched Simha Ratheiser and Zalman Friedrich to make contact with Isaac Zuckerman on the Aryan side so he could organize a rescue mission. They had located a promising tributary to a sewer trunk line next to the wall, and this was where Boruch now stood. He looked at Chaika, then looked down at the rusted ladder leading into the slimy canal. It ran across Forestry Boulevard, boring under the broad granite stairs of the old Municipal Courts building with its soaring six-story columns, and emerged on Garden Street on the Aryan side. This location had once been part of the notorious Cool Street corridor, the deep territorial incision that had cut into the Ghetto before the Gross Aktion. The entire area, everything south of Forestry in fact, had since been incorporated into Aryan territory to relieve Warsaw’s dire housing shortage. Tens of thousands of Gentiles lived there now, in former Jewish homes. This meant that Stroop’s inferno ended at Forestry Boulevard. Beyond that was off-limits for his flamethrowers. But the SS general had thought of the sewers, and he had ordered all the sluices in the main channels leading out of the Ghetto to be mechanically shut. This cunning precaution created subterranean dams that backed up the sludge and submerged large sections of the system, though smaller-diameter tributaries such as the one on Forestry Boulevard remained open.
It was a 450-foot crawl to safety if the passage was clear, if you didn’t drown in feces or take a wrong turn and get lost in the maze of claustrophobic tunnels and reemerge under a collapsing building in the middle of the Ghetto—worse off than when you started. And then there were the toxic fumes. Stroop was said to be pumping poison gas into the sewer network. His troops were dropping concussion grenades and specially designed “smoke candles” under every manhole cover. The sewers, in many respects, could be more lethal than the surface. But at least they offered hope, a dwindling commodity in the scorched Ghetto.
All these unappealing prospects raced through the fugitives’ minds as they stared into the putrid abyss. Rising from the dark hole, mingling with the bacterial stench of excrement, was the faint sweet odor of chemicals. “I won’t go,” the tall, malnourished youth next to Boruch kept mumbling. “I’m not going in there.”
The Jewish Military Union did have a viable escape tunnel. It was undamaged and undetected. But David Apfelbaum and Paul Frenkel, by the end of the second week of the Uprising, were reportedly refusing to use it. They were determined to fight on, to continue staging ambushes from concealed bunkers around Muranow Square. Their problem was ammunition. The JMU had nearly exhausted its stockpile by the ninth day of fighting. Apfelbaum was also wounded, as were a number of other senior leaders, including Leon Rodal and Kalmen Mendelson. They needed help and sent an urgent message to their Gentile allies requesting more bullets and grenades and medical supplies.
The call was answered by Major Henry Iwanski, the controversial Security Corps officer who had fought alongside Apfelbaum in the September 1939 siege. An unlikely hero, Iwanski, like many rabid nationalists, was not a natural admirer of minorities, least of all Jews. Nonetheless, he claimed to have been deeply impressed by the Uprising, as was almost all of Warsaw—with the notable exception of far-right groups like ONR and Falanga.
These cryptofascists and other anti-Semites were openly cheering for Stroop, bringing their children to watch his artillerymen level the Ghetto and applauding each salvo with the glee of vacationers watching fireworks. Despite such callous displays, the vast majority of Varsovians were captivated by the courage on display in the Ghetto. Even the moderate right was moved. “It is impossible not to sympathize with and admire the Jewish population, who have set aside their passivity in order to carry out their heroic struggle which has no chance of succeeding against Nazi hangmen whose forces are a hundredfold stronger,” one conservative gazette opined. “The smoke clouds over Warsaw cannot disappear without a trace,” another, more liberal underground publication declared, “for all that was considered courageous would also disappear and the horrors which cry out for vengeance would also vanish.”
To the Gestapo, such outpourings of support for the Jewish rising were worrisome. Fearful that enthusiasm for the rebellion could spark a citywide revolt, the Germans responded to the surge in philo-Semitic sentiments with a media barrage of their own. They blanketed newsreels and newspapers with coverage of a grisly discovery made by German troops on the Eastern Front. Deep in the Russian forest of Katyn, the Wehrmacht had uncovered the mass grave of nearly twenty thousand murdered Polish army officers (including Joseph Osnos’s brother Zano, who been a physician in the Polish medical corps). HORRIBLE CRIME COMMITTED BY JEWS FROM THE NKVD, the New Warsaw Courier cried in banner headlines.
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