Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The hours passed, with the rays slanting through the manhole acting as an inverted sundial. Soon they were gone, and the manhole well was plunged into darkness. Where the hell was Simha? Where were the trucks? Didn’t he realize that they were dying down there? “Our despair grew from moment to moment,” Tuvia remembered. Just then, a note came down through the manhole. No rescue could be attempted that evening, it said; too many German patrols. “We were crushed. It meant waiting another twenty-four hours. Such a long time in the sewer meant slow and certain death to all of us.”

  That night proved to be one of the longest any of them had ever endured: the cold, the hunger, the swarms of rats that mercilessly assaulted their heads and necks. Their thirst grew so severe that Zivia saw the fighter next to her drink sewer water, the brownish slime dripping from his parched lips. By dawn, they had reached the limits of their considerable endurance. Edelman and Lubetkin pushed their way to the front of the long queue under the manhole well and conferred with Borzykowski. They would not last much longer. Even if it meant a street fight with the Germans, they had to attempt a breakout this very morning. A note was scribbled to that effect and slid through the sewer grille. It’s now or never, it said.

  Simha read the soggy plea and very nearly panicked. He had spent the night at the local mob boss’s hangout with Lieutenant Gaik, the People’s Army operative, better known by his code name, Shrub, and Tuvia Sheingut, the blond, blue-eyed professional actor who served as one of the ZOB’s most convincing couriers. Their paid-off gangster host, who called himself the King, had been told that he was facilitating a Home Army operation. But he was beginning to suspect that Jews might be involved. If this was the case, he intimated, all bets were off. His boys made a good living extorting money from Jews. This could be a bonanza for them. Simha, Sheingut, and Gaik, who was in fact a Gentile, had done everything they could to throw the King off the scent. But they were running out of time. The trucks Gaik had organized would not come until nightfall because his superiors were refusing to sanction a risky daylight rescue. By then, the King’s men, the greasers, might be on them. It was true that they could not afford to wait any longer. But what to do?

  In the end, it was Sheingut who came up with a plan. Why not order the trucks from a private moving company? Tell the movers there is a load of furniture to be picked up and then hijack the vehicles. Amazed by the simplicity of the solution, Sheingut and Gaik rushed off to find a telephone directory.

  At around 10 A.M. a large tarpaulin-covered lorry with the logo of a freight forwarder painted across its worn canvas rack rumbled onto Straight Street. Lieutenant Gaik calmly walked over to the idling vehicle, jumped into the cab, and put a gun to the driver’s head. “Drink this.” He thrust a flask of vodka at the trembling mover.

  Stunned pedestrians on Straight Street then witnessed the sight of a truck parked in the middle of the road, its opened flaps straddling a manhole from which a stream of filthy figures were emerging. Inside the sewer, Zivia and Edelman were directing traffic. “Move, move,” they exhorted their colleagues, who slowly, painfully slowly, tried to pull themselves up the ladder in the manhole well. Many were too weak from their ordeal to muster the strength to pull themselves up. Pushed from below and tugged from above, their limp bodies were forced through the opening and heaved into the waiting truck. The second truck had failed to arrive. Simha realized there would not be room for everyone. “Hurry, hurry,” he beckoned.

  Already a crowd had gathered, gaping at the astounding spectacle. Five, ten, then fifteen minutes elapsed, and still the sewer disgorged its human cargo. To Simha, the operation seemed to be moving in slow motion. At the rate they were going, a German patrol was sure to detect them. Another five horrifyingly long minutes passed. Then Simha spotted a Blue Policeman. The Pole had noticed them and Simha raced over to cut him off. “I told him this was a Home Army mission, and made sure he saw the bulge of my pistol.” The cop nodded and turned away. But Simha knew they had pushed their luck long enough. “We have to go,” he said, pulling Zivia out. “There are a lot of people down there,” she protested, pointing at the manhole. Nearly twenty ZOB fighters were still in the sewer. “We can’t leave them.”

  “We’ll come back for them,” Simha promised. Lubetkin wasn’t having it. “No!” she yelled, shoving Ratheiser and insisting they had to wait for everyone. They were not budging unless every one of their comrades was on board. “The truck is full,” Simha finally snapped. “I’m in charge, and we are leaving now.”

  “Stop! Stop!” Zivia screamed as the lorry pulled away.

  By the time Boruch Spiegel spotted the approaching truck, he, Chaika Belchatowska, and the forty other ZOB survivors from the Main Shops District had been in the Lomianki forest for over a week. They had set up a makeshift camp with the People’s Army in the dense woods, chopping down a few of the towering pines, with their peeling rust-colored trunks, to erect primitive lean-tos in the sandy, moss-covered soil.

  Though Lomianki was close to the city, it was part of the Kampi-now National Forest Preserve and teemed with wildlife. Boars rooted for mushrooms. Deer grazed on the low ferns, and badgers and foxes and other small predators roamed about. Germans, however, rarely ventured into the woods. It was too dangerous. The Nazis had effectively ceded the massive tracts of wooded land that surrounded the Polish capital to the Home Army and other partisan groups while retaining control of the city. The trade-off, for the General Government, was that the Gestapo could focus on keeping the urban population docile, while the partisans were freed to be a nuisance in the countryside: to launch occasional diversionary attacks on rail lines or to engage in other acts of minor sabotage. Hundreds of rebel camps ringed Warsaw: some with only a few dozen guerrillas, others large and sophisticated operations with underground communications bunkers equipped with long-range radios supplied by British Intelligence. The Resistance cells came from dozens of semi-independent organizations that fought under the broad Home Army umbrella. Unfortunately for the ZOB, they included the virulently anti-Semitic National Armed Forces. The group was rabidly anticommunist and comprised of large numbers of prewar fascists who were as likely to attack People’s Army outposts and Jewish refugees as German garrisons.

  The woods, luckily, were big enough that renegade groups rarely met. For Boruch, the virgin forest, so verdant with vegetation, exploding with the green hues of the spring bloom, had come as a shock after years in the monochromatic Ghetto, where not a single blade of grass grew. He and Chaika had walked in the woods, gaping at the wildflowers that poked through the moss, very nearly stupefied by the sensory overload. It was a sight neither had thought they would ever see again, and the contrast for them was as surreal as the gleaming white tiles of the bathroom where Simha had showered after tunneling his way to the Sawicki sisters’ safe house.

  Psychologically, the departure from the Ghetto had touched almost all the ZOB fighters, though in different ways. Mark Edelman seemed most affected. When the truck bearing him and the rest of the evacuees from Straight Street arrived in Lomianki, he did not participate in the joyful reunion, or the meal that was hastily cooked over an open fire to feed the exhausted new arrivals. Even on the way to the forest, in the truck, Edelman had started acting strangely. It was the sight of the city, he later explained, that set him off: of children, neatly dressed, playing in playgrounds; of stores with goods in their windows catering to shoppers; of crowds walking openly in the streets, of cars and traffic lights. “I could not believe that only a few hundred yards from the Ghetto ordinary life went on.”

  Something inside him snapped. Edelman began moaning and tugging at his nose, at his “Jewish nose,” as if he wanted to rip off his Semitic features. In the Ghetto he had been unflappable, fearless and cold-blooded to the point of ruthlessness. Now the prospect of survival on the Aryan side seemed to fill him with paralyzing dread. “Mark has had a breakdown,” some of the other fighters whispered. (More likely, he was exhibiting symptoms of what psychiatrists would la
ter label post-traumatic stress disorder.)

  Zivia Lubetkin also did not celebrate their escape from the Ghetto. As soon as the truck had slowed to a stop in Lomianki, she leaped off, unholstered her pistol, and made straight for Simha Ratheiser, shouting that she would kill him for abandoning their comrades. Simha pulled out his own revolver and leveled it at Zivia’s head. “Go ahead,” he said, “pull the trigger, and we both die.” The standoff lasted for a few tense seconds before Zivia lowered her gun and burst into tears. Simha tried to console her. He had had no choice, he explained. Staying any longer would have meant sacrificing the entire group. Edelman, who had made many similarly difficult decisions, would later support Simha. Zivia, however, would never entirely forgive him, even though Simha turned the truck around, as he had promised he would, and sent Richie Mozelman and a few other ZOB fighters to collect the remaining evacuees from Straight Street. None of them ever returned, a fact that would weigh heavily on Simha’s conscience for the rest of his life: “Those people died because of me,” he would say, unprompted, after a few vodkas nearly seven decades later. “But we would have all died had I acted differently.”

  They were alive. They were safe. And they were together. But for the eighty survivors of the Jewish Fighting Organization’s original five hundred members, a burning question presented itself: What would they do now?

  CHAPTER 34

  HOTEL POLAND

  By August 1943, the surviving members of the Jewish Fighting Organization had split into two groups. The more senior combatants, including Zivia Lubetkin and Mark Edelman, returned to Warsaw, while the bulk of the force went deeper into the woods.

  Boruch Spiegel and Chaika Belchatowska reluctantly remained with the rank and file. Since both occupied lower rungs in the ZOB hierarchy, they had little choice but to obey Isaac Zuckerman’s order to relocate farther east, to a remote forest near the Bug River on the old Soviet-Nazi demarcation line. The People’s Army was forming a partisan cell there, composed largely of escaped Soviet POWs, and Zuckerman, not knowing where else to stash his fighters, had arranged for Spiegel’s group to join them.

  It was far from an ideal arrangement. Not only did Bundists like Boruch bristle at the notion of teaming up with Communists, but virtually all the Jews, as urbanites, had no idea how to live off the land. That the rules of survival were vastly different from those in the city quickly became apparent, as ZOB fighters started dying within days of arriving in the new staging area. The region was boggy and mosquito-infested, and it boasted more wolves and wild boars than human inhabitants. It was also completely lawless, a dumping ground for brigands and renegade Resistance brigades. Marauding bands robbed, raped, and murdered at will. Women who strayed from camp were particularly vulnerable in the harsh anarchic landscape, and it was not unheard-of for rival gangs to raid one another’s encampments, especially when food was in short supply.

  “Life in the world of partisans in eastern Poland was extremely cruel, perhaps the worst of any place in Europe,” the historian Richard C. Lukas later remarked. “Human life had no value and incidents of barbarity and betrayal were commonplace.”

  The camps themselves were not permanent settlements with fixed wooden structures, but rather a collection of camouflaged dugouts with low earthen ceilings reinforced by tree limbs and covered in transplanted shrubs. Inside the muddy trench residences “it was dark and damp, like lying in a grave,” according to one partisan. Larger dugouts had planks on the floor and little tin stoves for heat, but the poorly ventilated smoke left their occupants with a hacking cough. Water was carried in buckets from a stream. The lack of latrines turned the nearby field into a minefield of human excrement.

  About a hundred and fifty partisans formed the People’s Army cells in the forest of Wyszkow. Their numbers were roughly divided between the ZOB contingent, Gentile Communists who were mostly Belorussians, and crude Soviet soldiers, who eyed the dozen or so Jewish women in the camp with undisguised longing. Uncouth and undisciplined as the Russian soldiers may have been, they were fierce fighters, brave and bold and capable of enduring great hardship. With the Russians at the helm, the cells sabotaged rail lines and cut telegraph wires. They attacked convoys and police stations in the closest towns and harassed Wehrmacht units whenever the opportunity arose. Boruch carried a rifle on these missions, a weapon he sorely wished he’d possessed during the Uprising. The gun had been part of the arms shipment Zuckerman received earlier from the People’s Army. Twenty-eight of the Soviet-made rifles had been distributed to the Jewish partisans, a significant increase in firepower over the revolvers they had used in the Ghetto.

  Over the summer, the cells wreaked enough havoc to attract the attention of the local Gestapo, which began sending heavily armed patrols into the woods to search for the disruptive guerrillas. The ZOB soon began to suffer serious losses from the patrols. “From fifty people in our original group [from the Main Shops District], we were down to around fifteen,” Boruch recalled. Tragically, a significant portion of the casualties had not come at the hands of the Nazis. The group had also been set upon by rogue units of the National Armed Forces, the ultraviolent resistance movement whose ranks included many former Falangists and ONR fascists—the same thugs who had preyed on Jewish students before the war and had spearheaded the failed Easter pogrom in 1940. This rabidly right-wing organization was not subordinated to the Home Army or to the London government in exile in 1943. It operated outside established Underground laws, and its members followed their own code of conduct, which equated Jews and Communists with enemies of Poland. Already they had wiped out several ZOB and JMU partisan units in other parts of Poland, and in Wyszkow, they had been responsible for the death of at least ten of Boruch’s brothers and sisters in arms.

  Spiegel himself had narrowly avoided a similar fate, thanks to the intervention of Simha Ratheiser. Simha frequently visited the Wyszkow forest in his capacity as Isaac Zuckerman’s new lead courier. Usually he carried instructions and medications, small arms and ammunition. At times he was called upon to solve minor emergencies, such as arranging for a doctor to perform an abortion by candlelight on one of the girls in the camp. But mostly he brought his isolated colleagues news from the outside world. It was through Simha, for instance, that Boruch and his fellow Bundists learned that their representative in the Polish government in exile, Arthur Ziegelbaum, had committed suicide in London to protest the intransigence of the British, Polish, and American authorities. Spiegel was shattered by Zeigelbaum’s death, which came on the heels of a conference in Bermuda devoted to aiding European Jews. The United States and Great Britain had jointly announced after the bilateral talks that nothing could be done because “the problem is too great for solution by the two governments here represented.”

  In late summer, Simha traveled to Wyszkow to defuse a mutiny by some of the Bundists who wanted to return to Warsaw. While there, he was also supposed to meet a local forest ranger who had proven himself useful to the ZOB. The ranger lived in another part of the forest, deep in the woods. It was pouring rain by the time Simha and six other ZOB members reached his hut. They were warming themselves by the fire when shots suddenly rang out, seemingly from all directions. Everyone hit the dirt, assuming the Germans had spotted them. Peering out from one of the log cabin’s rustic windows, Simha could see that partisans had surrounded the hut. He had no idea who they were or what faction they belonged to. The forest ranger’s elderly wife soon grasped what was happening. Someone had spotted strangers roaming their neck of the woods and called in reinforcements to defend their territory. Braving the volleys of bullets that peppered the cabin’s log walls, the old woman flung open the door and started shouting “Stop it, they’re our people!” The firing abruptly ceased and their attackers melted away into the dripping underbrush like a flash storm.

  Though the immediate danger had passed, Simha knew that the peace wouldn’t last. If the trigger-happy partisans were in fact from one of the anti-Semitic or fascist factions, they would
eventually realize their error and return in full force. And even if they were ideologically more benign, they still posed a serious threat, since they clearly had a policy of shooting first and asking questions later. Simha decided he had to find out who this other partisan band was and try to broker a modus vivendi. He returned to Warsaw and asked Isaac Zuckerman to make inquiries with his Home Army contacts. The group, Zuckerman reported a few days later, was undisciplined, violent, and prone to banditry. But it was not part of the murderous National Armed Forces. Relieved, Simha went back to Wyszkow and prevailed on the forest ranger to arrange a meeting. “I pretended I was a big shot in the Underground.”

  The partisans of Wyszkow apparently did not receive many high-ranking envoys from Home Army headquarters, for when Simha arrived, the rugged woodsmen had dressed in their Sunday best in his honor. “Miraculously, one of them had even gotten hold of a starched collar, cuffs, and tie. He looked elegant and formal, even though he didn’t have a shirt on his back.”

  Their leader treated Simha with deference, offering him home-distilled vodka and ceremonial toasts. He intimated, after a few courteous rounds of moonshine, that he had been planning to attack the Jewish camp. But before he acted he wanted to make sure they were not affiliated with any of his sister organizations. If they were, they would be left in peace. If they were just random Jews, on the other hand, they would be destroyed. Simha nodded knowingly, pretending to see the soundness of such logic. Unfortunately, Simha sighed, his superiors felt differently in this particular case. “I told him that the ZOB had to be left alone,” Ratheiser recalled. “That it was orders from Warsaw.”