Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The grizzled partisan leader would almost certainly have shot Simha had he realized that he was being duped by a blond Jew half his age. But Simha was convincing. Spiegel and the others would be spared. Boruch, however, had had enough. That close call was the last straw for him. He was not cut out for partisan life, he decided. What’s more, fall would soon be upon them, and living in the cold, and eventually in the snow, would become immeasurably harder. Some of the ZOB fighters were electing to stay. But he and Chaika would return to the city and take their chances in Warsaw.

  By the time the first frosts glazed the Polish capital in early October 1943, Zivia Lubetkin and Mark Edelman had changed safe houses four times. Their hiding places, homes of sympathetic Gentiles, kept getting “burned” (exposed) with maddening regularity.

  Although Warsaw had been declared Judenrein—Clean of Jews—by a triumphant Jürgen Stroop when he completed the Ghetto liquidation on May 16 by symbolically blowing up the Great Synagogue near Banker’s Square, there were still an estimated twenty-eight thousand Jews hiding in and around the city. Many, like Joanna, Hanna, and Janine Mortkowicz, had been on the Aryan side all along, having never set foot in the Ghetto. Some, like Simha’s parents, Miriam and Zvi, had escaped before the 1942 Gross Aktion, when the Ghetto’s walls had been more porous. Others still had made it out after the January rising and during the twenty-eight days of the main Uprising, through the sewers or the JMU’s two tunnels. Keeping these people alive and out of the clutches of the Gestapo and their greaser accomplices had become the primary function of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

  It was a daunting task. Already, in the few short months since the final liquidation of the Ghetto, the Gestapo had snared thirty-five hundred Jews with a single fiendishly clever trap. The affair was known as the Hotel Polski, and it had claimed two deputy commanders of the ZOB, Israel Kanal and Eliezer Geller, who had been in charge of all forces in the Main Shops District. It had very nearly claimed Zivia as well. The sting was orchestrated by Warsaw Gestapo chief Ludwig Hahn, who spotted an opportunity to lure Jews out of hiding by promoting a little-known international exchange program that traded Jewish refugees for German POWS. For years, the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland had been securing visas and passports for Jews to Latin American countries by arranging diplomatic promessas of the sort that Martha and Robert Osnos had used to leave Poland. To receive the promessas, the World Jewish Congress bought small parcels of land in South America in the name of the refugees, which entitled the owners to citizenship. The Nazis had largely ignored the promessa requests, and thousands of the unused Latin American visas had accumulated while their intended recipients had been exterminated. Colonel Hahn, in the summer of 1943, let it be known that these precious documents could now be bought, and that the identity of the purchasers was of no interest to him because Berlin intended to swap refugees for German soldiers imprisoned by the Allies.

  The initial response was muted. Jews were understandably leery of German largesse. So Hahn arranged for a group of Jewish prisoners to be released from Peacock Prison—the only institution still operating in the former Ghetto. The inmates were transferred to Warsaw’s Hotel Royal, fed, clothed, and eventually sent to the spa town of Vittel in France to await the ship that would take them to South America. Postcards from picturesque Vittel soon flooded Warsaw, igniting a stampede for promessas.

  The astronomical sums the Germans charged for the travel documents lent the scheme an air of corrupt credibility. In time, so many Jews were buying the visas that the operation was moved to the much larger Hotel Polski on Long Street, a few blocks south of the defunct Brushmakers District. When prominent figures in the Jewish community signed up for the plan, including the poet Yitzhak Katznelson and David Guzik, the widely respected head of the American Joint Distribution Committee in Warsaw, Isaac Zuckerman started thinking about sending Zivia.

  Lubetkin was bitterly unhappy. Unlike her husband, she could not live “on the surface” in Warsaw because her Semitic features and poor Polish would instantly betray her as Jewish. Zivia had to remain indoors cooped up in a tiny apartment. She could not go to the store or down to her courtyard to smoke a cigarette. She could not lean out the window to catch a fleeting glimpse of the sun. She could not even raise her voice or walk too loudly, for fear of alerting the neighbors. Lubetkin was going stir-crazy. She was now useless to her husband and the ZOB, entirely reliant on others for everything from food to reading material, which she needed to ward off the debilitating boredom. And the boredom promised to be endless. Her confinement would not be a matter of weeks or months. It would be a permanent condition until the war was over. If the Nazis won, it could be indefinite. Isaac didn’t think Zivia would make it. Her depression and drinking were only getting worse. Sooner or later, he worried, the inaction would break her.

  Yet Zuckerman also had serious misgivings about the visa scheme. It seemed too good to be true. When he decided to visit the Hotel Polski to see for himself, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The lobby was teeming. A beautiful flower arrangement sprouted at the center of the gleaming marble floor. Porters carried suitcases, and the concierge behind the mahogany reception desk handed out keys to the Jewish guests. A pair of smiling Germans stood by the main door, opening it with polite expressions of “Bitte. Welcome.” Isaac watched in amazement. The Gestapo was warmly greeting Jews, courteously helping them with the paperwork for their South American visas. It all looked aboveboard, and Zuckerman started to waver. Maybe it was for real. After all, several thousand Varsovian Jews had already taken advantage of the program. They had departed for France in fancy Pullman railcars. Perhaps the Nazis were coming to their senses. The war had been going badly for Hitler lately. His ally, Mussolini, was finished. The Americans had taken Sicily and were climbing up the boot of Italy. In the Atlantic, his vaunted U-boats were being decimated thanks to improved antisubmarine tactics. The North African campaign was lost, and the victorious British had landed in Greece. Worst of all, his tanks had just been defeated in the Battle of Kursk on the Eastern Front, the biggest armored clash in the history of warfare. And the triumphant Soviets were marching westward and had reached the outskirts of Kiev. So perhaps the Germans were getting nervous and hedging their bets, Isaac mused.

  Still, something did not feel right. The sight of so many well-dressed Jews lounging in the hotel bar, ordering cocktails and acting as if there was no war—smiling, laughing, excitedly making plans for a new life—struck Isaac as dangerously surreal. His every instinct told him to flee. “It was hard to rationalize that while some Jews were getting caught in the street, others were sitting comfortably in the Hotel Polski,” he reasoned. To him, there was only one explanation for this: “It was a trap.”

  Indeed, of the thirty-five hundred visa applicants who registered to stay in the luxurious hotel during the three-month sting operation, not one survived. From Vittel, France, the refugees were shipped to Bergen-Belsen instead of Brazil and gassed to death. Trains bearing the final group of would-be emigrants dispensed with the French charade altogether and were routed directly to Auschwitz.

  Isaac’s suspicions intensified the moment he left the Hotel Polski. Crossing Long Street, he noticed a group of unsavory characters following him. He jumped on a passing tram, but his pursuers were nimble and quickly boarded as well. Usually, Zuckerman avoided trams at all costs, since the risk of getting caught in a forced labor roundup was too high. But this time he had little choice. The men who had followed him were greasers, and they were on his trail. “I rode inside the tram and they stood on the platform constantly chanting ‘Jew, Jew, Jew!’ They stuck to me only because I came out of the Hotel Polski.”

  Unlike Simha, who was always armed, Isaac preferred not to carry a weapon. The likelihood of a random search was too high. So instead of confronting his current pursuers, he tried to shake them. Changing trams, he rode all the way across the river to Praga, the blue-collar neighborhood on the eastern banks of the Vistula. And still he coul
d not escape the whispering taunts of “Jew, Jew.”

  The greasers—smaltzowniki, as they were derisively known in both Polish and Yiddish—were now arguably the single greatest threat to Jewish survival in Nazi-occupied Poland. The Gestapo had only a few dozen officers hunting Jews on a full-time basis in Warsaw. They relied heavily on local collaborators to do their dirty work for them, to be their eyes and ears on the street, to ferret out which apartment buildings had received mysterious new tenants, to uncover which landlord was buying inordinate amounts of food or why certain tenants never received mail or visitors—to look, in other words, for any of the telltale signs that someone was “keeping cats,” the popular euphemism for harboring Jews. Greasers provided the Gestapo with an invaluable for-profit intelligence network. But who were these traitors? Precious little is known about the composition of this underworld group of violent shakedown artists. While reams of books would be written in Poland about so-called Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to help Jews, virtually nothing would appear in print detailing the evildoings of the greasers—as if the subject was best swept under the historical carpet. In one of the very few frank examinations of their shameful activities ever to be published in Poland, the Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski later estimated the total number of greasers in wartime Warsaw to be between five and ten thousand—a staggering number that by the fall of 1943 translated into at least one greaser for every four Jews. “The extent of their criminal behavior is difficult to measure,” Grabowski would write, “but the scale was wide-ranging; from blackmail and denunciation to robbery, rape, and murder.”

  For every individual they turned in, greasers received a bounty from the Gestapo, typically 20 percent of the assets seized from the victim. Most greasers, however, were not content with such a small slice and took it upon themselves to steal or extort everything their prey possessed. Only then would they sell their catch to the Nazis—or occasionally, out of pure malice, slit their victims’ throats. The most damning aspect of the greaser phenomenon was that the extortionists plied their brutal trade more or less openly. This was possible, according to Grabowski, because society at large viewed their crimes merely with “disapproving indifference rather than widespread condemnation.”

  Tolerance of the greasers cut to the heart of prewar Jewish-Gentile relations, exposing the core belief in Poland that Jews, as non-Christians, were outside society’s moral and legal sphere of obligations. Technically, greasers who targeted Jews were not even committing a crime under the Code of Conduct, the body of Underground laws that governed the rights and behavior of citizens during Nazi occupation. “The problem was that the authors of the document had defined nationality on the basis of ethnicity rather than citizenship,” Grabowski explained. Since the first point of the first section of the Code stipulated that “Polish is your mother tongue,” 95 percent of Warsaw Jews, who were native Yiddish—or in a few cases Hebrew—speakers, were effectively disenfranchised and afforded no protections under the Code. The wording gave greasers license to prey on Jews and to commit acts that would have earned them a death sentence from Underground courts if the victims had been Gentiles.

  Isaac Zuckerman complained bitterly about this travesty of justice to his Home Army liaison, Captain Henry Wolinski, who had served as a state prosecutor before the war. Isaac also penned a scathing letter to Wolinski’s superiors detailing the wanton murder of Jews in the forests as well as the city. His letter was so harsh and incriminating that Wolinski advised him to keep a low profile for a few weeks after sending it, for his own safety. Apparently, powerful people had been offended, and there were rumblings in Home Army headquarters that Zuckerman needed to be taught a lesson in civility.

  Isaac’s angry pleas, however, did not fall entirely on deaf ears. Shortly after Isaac sent his reproachful letter, in September 1943, the Home Army executed its first greaser. His name was Jan Pilnik, and he appeared eighth on a list of ten individuals sentenced to death by Underground courts. Their various crimes were enumerated in leaflets pasted around the city to serve as an example to other would-be traitors. Over the course of the next year, a dozen of the two hundred executions carried out by the Resistance in Warsaw would be for blackmailing Jews. As far as Zuckerman was concerned, it was too little, too late. By the time the Home Army started cracking down on the greasers, the extortionists had already done most of their damage.

  The men tailing him now certainly had not been discouraged by the Home Army executions. Isaac had purposefully led his pursuers to Praga, which was less crowded than Midtown and had a smaller police presence. “When I got off the tram, they surrounded me,” he recalled. “What do you want?” Isaac asked.

  “Why did you run from us?” one of the greasers demanded.

  “What do you want?” Zuckerman repeated.

  “What you’ve got,” the thug leaned forward menacingly.

  Just then a voice startled the blackmailers. “Gentlemen!”

  Simha Ratheiser stood a few paces behind the group of assailants. He routinely shadowed Zuckerman, acting as his discreet bodyguard. And like some gunslinger in an American Western, he was now brandishing a pair of pistols, one in each hand.

  It was not only greasers that the ZOB had to worry about in the fall of 1943. That October, the Gestapo launched a terror campaign in Poland that was almost certainly tied to the Reich’s reversals of fortunes on distant battlefields. The repression was particularly brutal in Warsaw, the center of perceived or potential resistance.

  On October 13, massive street raids began in the city center. Thousands of people were arrested, and 1,400 men and 487 women, all Gentiles, were sent to Auschwitz on the first day alone. The roundups were accompanied by a new sight in the Polish capital: The Germans inaugurated the practice of street executions. In the past, the Gestapo had conducted their killings in the Palmiry forest north of Warsaw. Now, in order to spread maximum fear, public firing squads were convened daily in different locations throughout the city. On October 16, for instance, twenty people were shot on Independence Street in the upscale neighborhood of Mokotow. The next day another twenty were lined up against the wall of the main telephone switching station in working-class Wola, while sixty more were murdered the day after that near Woodrow Wilson Square in Jolie Bord. On October 21, another sixty were shot in Praga, almost exactly where Zuckerman had led his greaser pursuers. The mobile killing squads then moved on to Jerusalem Boulevard and New World Street, in the heart of the Midtown shopping and restaurant district. Then they moved north again, lining up victims outside the Gdansk train station, the Grand Theater, Krasinski Square. This went on for six straight weeks until thousands had been murdered in plain sight. Megaphones announced every execution, warning, “You’ve brought this on yourselves. Why do you provoke us?”

  As Varsovians became inured to the daily street shootings, the Gestapo upped the psychological ante in November 1943 by switching to public hangings. This method of killing was deemed more effective because the hanging corpses left a lasting impression. They dangled from ornate Art Deco lampposts, left to slowly decompose instead of being removed and buried like the firing squad victims. Some swung suspended by the neck from the wrought iron balconies of residential buildings, so pedestrians were forced to walk beneath their urine-soaked trousers.

  In addition to the public executions, the SS redoubled its efforts to penetrate the various resistance movements, which were growing bolder with every Allied victory. This was most effectively accomplished by using families as hostages to turn agents. The Home Army was badly hit by the wave of informants: General Rowecki, the Warsaw commander who had issued the order not to participate in the Ghetto Uprising, was dead, as were several other senior leaders who had been betrayed, arrested, tortured, and eventually killed.

  Isaac’s frequent dealings with the People’s Army and the fractious Home Army left him exposed to the treachery of Gestapo agents who infiltrated virtually every Gentile insurgent group. Already he had begun to suspe
ct Shrub, the code name for Lieutenant Gaik, the People’s Army officer who arranged transport for the sewer escapees to Lomianki. Shrub’s bona fides were rock solid: he had saved eighty ZOB members, and he had been the driving force behind the establishment of the partisan cell in Wyszkow. But he had recently begun to behave strangely. Visiting Wyszkow, he insisted on leading a mission to attack a police station that ended disastrously. Virtually everyone except for Shrub died in the botched assault. German troops had been waiting for the partisans, as if they had been expecting them. This of course could have been just bad luck. But it made Isaac think about how the second half of the May 10 sewer rescue mission had also ended in a similar slaughter. The moving truck that Simha sent back to collect the remaining ZOB fighters from the sewers had been ambushed on the way to the city. Richie Mozelman and several other ZOB members died before ever reaching their colleagues, as if the Germans had been expecting them, too. This could also have been a coincidence. But then a third incident convinced Zuckerman otherwise.

  Late in the summer of 1943, Gaik helped transfer another group of Jews to the partisan cell in Wyszkow. They had been carrying a large sum of money, hundreds of thousands of zlotys and thousands of dollars. Gaik inexplicably ordered the funds to be turned over to him. Furious at the robbery, Isaac went to Shrub’s commander and ordered an inquiry, which resulted in the People’s Army issuing a death warrant against Gaik for theft. Gaik disappeared. A year later he was shot by the Germans while trying to rescue two Jews. Had Shrub been a collaborator, or merely a thief? Had he played double agent? Or had the People’s Army tried to take the money for its own uses, with Shrub just a victim of the paranoia that pervaded the Underground?