Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The propaganda was a bold-faced lie that fed upon the deeply entrenched myth in Poland that Jews harbored Communist sympathies. The campaign was surprisingly successful, particularly in the “patriotic” segments of Polish society that were only too eager to believe in stereotypes. “The Jews’ struggle has nothing to do with Poland, with Poland’s problems,” pronounced an outraged right-wing daily, promptly washing its hands of the Ghetto Uprising. Iwanski, however, was not swayed. He had grown fond of Apfelbaum over the years: so much so that in pushing for Apfelbaum’s recent promotion from lieutenant to captain, Iwanski had been willing to overlook the inconvenient fact that his friend had been supplanted by Paul Frenkel as JMU commander. (Frankel’s role would not be contested by historians, who over time would grow increasingly skeptical of Iwanski’s claims.)

  When Iwanski heard that his old trenchmate was hurt, he decided to personally mount a rescue mission. Eighteen members of a Security Corps extraction squad were mobilized, including Iwanski’s two brothers and his sixteen-year-old son. The heavily armed group entered the Ghetto on the morning of April 27, sneaking in through the Muranow Street tunnel, according to the U.S. historian Dan Kurzman. “With Iwanski leading the way, the men plodded along in single file, shielding their Sten guns and grenades from the sand that sifted down constantly from the ceiling and walls of the narrow rubble-strewn passage.” Each man dragged a burlap sack filled with extra ammunition and a quart of vodka for the wounded, as they emerged, one by one, inside the Ghetto and tried to get their bearings. Muranow was unrecognizable. The prewar landmarks were all gone. The street had been one of the wealthiest in the poorer northern part of the Jewish district. But there was nothing left of the Gdansk Café, Nathan Gershwin Pharmaceuticals, the Style hairdressing salon, or any of the other businesses that had occupied the buildings where the tunnel emerged, because the buildings themselves were gone, scattered in tangled heaps of twisted rebar and charred rafters.

  “Thank God you’ve come,” Apfelbaum reportedly said, embracing Iwanski, once the Gentiles had been led safely through the labyrinth of rubble. His arm was in a sling and his head was bandaged. He was limping badly, leaning on the shoulder of another JMU fighter, dressed in a stolen SS tunic. As grave as his injuries appeared, Apfelbaum would not countenance any talk of evacuation. Rescue some of the younger fighters and as many civilians as you can, he told Iwanski, but he was staying. Iwanski was taken aback, according to the Israeli historian Chaim Lazar. He had only planned on dropping off the ammunition sacks and taking Apfelbaum out. But his friend’s courage must have moved him, because the major later testified that he decided to stay and fight as well.

  That same day, Jürgen Stroop launched one of the largest “mop-up” operations in the Ghetto to date. He dispatched “a special battle unit”—three hundred and twenty German and Latvian SS troops, supported by armored personnel carriers and two Panzer tanks—to clean out the pockets of resistance in the vicinity of Muranow Square. The sector was proving frustratingly difficult to subdue. Despite being flattened beyond recognition by artillery and arson, stubborn Jewish rebels—“subhuman criminals,” in Stroop’s words—were still hiding beneath the rubble, using the mangled remnants of tenements to stage hit-and-run guerrilla raids on his patrols. The attackers, moreover, often wore SS uniforms to sneak up on their German victims. While the ambushes were not inflicting significant losses, they were bad for morale. His men constantly had to look over their shoulders and could not concentrate on unearthing bunkers where thousands of noncombatants were still holed up, often clustered around tiny air holes or telltale ventilation shafts. Stroop, therefore, decided to depart temporarily from his firebombing policy and sweep the troublesome area for insurgents.

  What happened next would become a matter of heated historical debate. According to some accounts, popularized by conservative circles in Israel and based largely on the uncorroborated testimony of Gentile participants, Iwanski’s team fought side by side with the JMU. Together the two groups reportedly managed to destroy a tank and to hold out until nightfall, when the SS withdrew. Skeptical Polish and Israeli historians, however, would later cast doubt on many of these claims, accusing Iwanski of self-aggrandizement and overinflating both Security Corps’ and the JMU’s role in the Uprising. The truth has been difficult to determine because there were virtually no Jewish survivors of the events of April 27, 1943. The one outside observer with no horse in the race, Jürgen Stroop, would shed only partial light on the dispute. In his official report that day, he made no mention of “Poles”—Gentiles, in official German parlance—participating in the skirmishes inside the Ghetto. He would, however, recommend that an SS officer be awarded the “Iron Cross 1st Class” for attacking a building “adjoining but outside the northeastern part of the Jewish Quarter”—presumably the tenement that housed the exit of the Muranow tunnel to which Iwanski and the JMU reportedly withdrew at dusk. “The assault party discovered a gang of 120 men, heavily armed with pistols, rifles, hand grenades and light machine guns, who offered resistance.” The fighting was particularly fierce, Stroop elaborated, and many of the insurgents wore German uniforms. But the SS officer in charge, First Lieutenant Diehl, “pushed ahead with great energy” and managed to overrun the rebel position. “Polish terrorists were identified with certainty among the bandits who were apprehended or killed. We even succeeded in apprehending and liquidating one of the founder-leaders of the Jewish-Polish defense formation.”

  The true sequence of events will probably forever be lost to the fog of war. The only indisputable facts are that Iwanski’s brother Edward died on April 27, 1943, and his sixteen-year-old son, Roman, was fatally wounded and died the following day. David Apfelbaum, according to some accounts, also succumbed to his injuries on April 28, 1943. Iwanski promoted him posthumously to major.

  CHAPTER 32

  FALLEN ANGEL

  By early May 1943, Stroop could see light at the end of his tunnel. The fighting in the Ghetto had ebbed. He was now suffering one or two casualties a day rather than several dozen, and the sporadic skirmishing tended to take place after dusk, when his patrols were withdrawing and the cowardly “terrorists” took potshots at them. During daylight hours he owned the Ghetto. In the morning when the sun rose over the smoldering ruins it was almost peaceful; only the squawks of the crows that swarmed the charred corpses pierced the silence, or the occasional screams of families being dragged from some rabbit hole. His daily haul of civilians had also vastly increased now that his men had experience uncovering hideouts. They used dogs, seismic echolocation devices, and, most effectively, informants, who in exchange for promises of clemency led Stroop’s sappers and engineers to some of the most cleverly camouflaged hideouts. Slowly but surely Stroop was filling his deportation quota. “The total number of Jews apprehended has risen to 40,237,” he reported to Kruger on May 2, noting that the remaining few thousand holdouts, deprived of food, water, and fresh air, would not be able to stay underground much longer. “Setting fires still remains the best and only method for destroying the Jews.”

  What still eluded Stroop, however, was the location of the rebel command bunker. His men had combed the entire Ghetto and could not find the vipers’ nest. He was certain the nocturnal raids were being directed from some central resistance hub, and he knew he could not declare victory until it had been destroyed. As a professional soldier, Stroop could not wrap his military mind around the notion that the ZOB would not have dug a massive command post. Ironically, that amateurish omission had left the Jewish insurgents scattered and largely incommunicado once the fires started raging—and thus much harder for Stroop to corral. In their scramble to find sanctuary, ZOB units had pounded on countless bunkers, only to be turned away by the noncombatants who had built them. “You couldn’t blame them,” Edelman said of the rejections. “We brought certain death to their door.” When rebel units did stumble upon civilians willing to take them in, they often lost touch with their fellow fighters, sometimes for days. I
n one of those instances, for example, Mark Edelman and Zivia Lubetkin managed to reconnect only by chance. Both of their groups had sent out reconnaissance teams dressed as Germans one night. They started shooting at one another before someone cursed in Yiddish and they realized their mistake.

  The bunker where Zivia initially holed up had been dug by wealthy members of the Judenrat to accommodate one hundred people in a stooped position. Despite its low ceiling and earthen floor, it had electricity, ventilation, a kitchen where her hosts roasted a chicken in Zivia’s honor, a radio that captured the Polish prime minister in exile’s BBC broadcast devoted to the Ghetto Uprising, and an operating room where some of her injured comrades had been patched up by a resident surgeon. “Anyone walking on top of the rubble would never have believed that only a few meters beneath the wreckage people are sitting—or rather lying—hundreds of people, living, breathing, talking, eating, dreaming.”

  The hideout where Edelman had taken refuge was just as big, an entire floor excavated under the cellar of a large apartment building on Franciscan Street. It was two hundred yards from the site of the first battle of the Rising, near the devastated intersection of Cordials and Goose Streets and bordering the no-man’s-land between the Central Ghetto and the ravaged Brushmakers District. Since he’d arrived there on April 22, Edelman had fallen into a routine of sleeping during the day and going out on missions after dusk. This was not unusual. Jews had become nocturnal creatures, only venturing out after dark. It had been days since Zivia had seen a ray of sunshine, and Edelman, in a macabre attempt at humor, joked that he felt like a vampire.

  On the afternoon of May 2, Edelman was awakened by a frantic aide. German engineers were digging in the rubble overhead. They had found one of the hidden entrances to the bunker. Panic erupted among the shelter’s terrified occupants, as stooped figures crawled in every direction through the low crowded corridors, crashing into one another, whispering of certain death. Mark tried to think of a way out. Every hideout had at least two escape routes. Some had three or four secret exits, designed for this type of eventuality. “Everyone out,” he ordered. “Prepare to attack.” Edelman’s calm had a startling effect on the frightened civilians. Though he was only a guest in the bunker, they all looked to him for leadership, even Ghetto elders like Abrasha Blum. The Bund’s ranking statesman only a few years ago viewed Edelman as a child, a shy orphan who used to fetch cigarettes for him. “Mark was very cold, but he was also very brave,” one of his bunker-mates would later recall. “He was ruthless, but you felt safe around him,” another member of his brigade would say.

  Now Blum watched with wonder as his former errand boy outlined their escape strategy with the poise of a five-star general. The Germans and Ukrainians, Edelman knew, would be too afraid to enter the bunker. They would toss smoke bombs inside and stand around the entry hole waiting for Jews to stagger out, gasping, coughing, blinded by the sudden daylight. Then they could shoot them, one by one, or round everyone up and march them to the Umschlagplatz to join the rest of the day’s haul. Mark’s plan was to send them a distraction, a pretty young ZOB member. The Ukrainian or Latvian auxiliaries would never shoot her. They would want to save such a catch for their evening entertainment. Edelman and the rest of the ZOB fighters, meanwhile, would sneak out the rear exit and attack the SS men from behind.

  The battle that ensued proved one of the longest sustained fire-fights of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It lasted, with brief pauses, nearly seventy-two hours, and when it was over, Stroop’s daily casualty rate had spiked to seven, due to precisely the sort of hand-to-hand combat that he had sought to avoid. Mark lost half his company in the three-day engagement with the two SS platoons, but not a single Jewish combatant had been taken alive, to be led in ignoble humiliation to the waiting trains.

  It wasn’t until May 6, when the enemy finally withdrew, that Edelman could search for another bunker. He found one just up the block on Franciscan Street, a cramped and foul-smelling dugout that had been excavated by Ghetto garbage collectors. The sanctuary was secure: It lay beneath a putrid heap of decaying refuse that the germ-averse Nazis were not likely to disturb. But it was small, unbearably hot, and overcrowded. Edelman had no choice but to evacuate many of his exhausted survivors to the massive shelter on Pleasant Street where Mordechai Anielewicz and a large number of fighters were holed up.

  This was the elusive “vipers’ nest” that was driving Jürgen Stroop mad. Though it had not been built by the ZOB, the sprawling bunker was now effectively serving as the Jewish Fighting Organization’s default headquarters. Zivia had fled there earlier in the week, after the Germans uncovered the Judenrat bunker she had been using. Several ZOB members had been killed fighting their way out that day, and those who managed to escape had regrouped on Pleasant Street. Pleasant Street’s subterranean population had swollen in recent days. By May 7, with the influx of Edelman’s team, it was over three hundred. At least a third of the occupants were armed members of the ZOB.

  The huge shelter had been designed for comfort, and no expense had been spared in its nearly yearlong construction. Like many bunkers, it was wired for electricity and had its own dedicated well for fresh water. But it also boasted unheard-of amenities, such as private quarters with beds, a grand reception area, separate reading and recreation rooms, and a dining hall with a fully stocked liquor cabinet. The luxuries had been fitted out by the bunker’s underworld proprietors, a smuggling and prostitution ring led by Samuel Asher, a career criminal of prewar repute. “He behaves here in the bowels of the earth like king of the roost,” Zivia recalled of her hulking and tattooed host. “He runs everything in this place: our nourishment, sleeping arrangements, and decides when it possible to go out on sorties and obtain necessities.”

  Despite his fearsome appearance and reputation, Asher had opened his doors to Anielewicz after many eminently more respectable members of the Jewish community had turned the ZOB away. The honorable mob boss ordered his henchmen to give up their private rooms and to share all their food stores. “He and his pals treated the Fighting Organization with great respect,” Lubetkin recalled. “Everything we have is yours, he said, and we are at your disposal. We are strong, we’re skilled at undoing locks, we can move around at night, climb over fences and walls, and we know by heart every lane and crevice in the ruins of the Ghetto.”

  Navigating the rubble was critical for staging nighttime ambushes and planting IEDs for the Germans to trip during the day. In the dark, amid the mountains of broken brick that had replaced once familiar landmarks, it was easy to get lost. Most of the streets didn’t exist anymore. Entire blocks were engulfed by fallen debris and ash, and the raging fires had erased all signage, making the entire neighborhood uniformly black. The footing was treacherous and one could crash through some crevice in the rubble. Or, everyone’s worst nightmare, one could be groping in the dark and suddenly feel the crisply soft tissue of a burned body. “We feared meeting the dead more than living Germans,” Zivia recalled. Asher’s agile crew were expert at avoiding such pitfalls, and they proved instrumental in guiding ZOB patrols. On the evening of May 7, one of his cutthroats, “a notorious thief,” led Zivia, Anielewicz, and Anielewicz’s girlfriend, Mira Fuchter, to Edelman’s new hideout.

  Anielewicz and Edelman had always had a slightly strained relationship. Whether their differences were ideological or personal was difficult to tell, but Mark had consistently been one of the few people to criticize Mordechai. That evening, however, Edelman was anxious to lift his commander’s flagging spirits. Anielewicz had not been himself the past few days. He had grown lethargic. Zivia had noticed it as well. “His face sagged with worry,” she later explained. “It was as though he’d achieved his goal, an armed Jewish revolt, and didn’t know what to do next.”

  Anielewicz had ample reason for concern. He no longer had the resources to launch major assaults, and in the battle of attrition the Jews were losing badly. With each passing day, there were fewer and fewer of them. The one g
limmer of hope was that he’d received a message from Isaac Zuckerman saying Simha Ratheiser had gotten through to the Aryan side. He had stumbled across the JMU’s tunnel, and after spending the night in the same tenement where Iwanski said he had lost his brother and son battling the SS, Simha had reached Isaac. They were working on a plan to get everyone out. It was that faint hope that brought Anielewicz to the trash collectors’ bunker that Edelman now shared. One of the garbagemen there apparently knew his way around the sewers and was offering to guide the ZOB out of the Ghetto.

  It was well after midnight by the time the discussions ended and Anielewicz and his girlfriend returned to Pleasant Street to inform the others of the escape plan they had hatched. Zivia stayed at Franciscan Street, at Edelman’s urging. Mark wanted to spend time catching up with his friend while they waited for Anielewicz to send word the next day about his final decision on the evacuation. When the day passed and no messenger arrived from Pleasant Street, Zivia and Mark grew worried. Mordechai was probably waiting for the cover of darkness to send out his courier, they reasoned. But by nine o’clock there was still no word and Edelman’s patience had worn thin. “We have to go to Pleasant Street,” he said, grabbing a candle to light the way. Zivia protested. Using any sort of light was strictly against the partisan code because it could attract the Germans, but Edelman didn’t care. “Mark was always full of bravado, flouting safety regulations.” Besides, Stroop, through bitter experience, had learned to keep his men in barracks after dusk. He may have owned the Ghetto during the day, but at night it still belonged to the Jews.

  Edelman, Lubetkin, and another ZOB fighter gingerly picked their way through the jagged ruins, clambering over upturned slabs and wall fragments. At one point the wind blew out the candle, and when Mark relit it, Zivia was gone. She had fallen through a crevice, losing her pistol in the inky blackness. Bruised, bleeding, and with her pride damaged, she managed to limp the rest of the way. By the time they neared Pleasant Street, her spirits had been restored. “We started thinking about what practical jokes we could pull.” But when they reached the bunker’s hidden entrance, Lubetkin noticed that something was off. The carefully placed debris camouflaging the door was scattered, as if it had been cleared. With a sinking feeling, Edelman called out the password: “John.” The response, “Warsaw,” never came. Zivia, her voice rising with urgency, repeated the prearranged code word, and again there was silence. She realized that everyone inside was dead.