Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Another lethal incident involving the People’s Army left no such doubt. It led to the death of one of the ZOB’s top couriers, Tuvia Sheingut, and it very nearly cost Simha Ratheiser his life. Both Ratheiser and Sheingut had risen very rapidly in the ZOB’s thinning ranks, thanks in part to their role in the sewer rescue. More important, both possessed the qualities that ZOB operatives needed most at this point in the war: the ability to move freely among the general population. Simha, in particular, had benefited from his ease at playing a Gentile. Because of this ability, he had replaced Tuvia Borzykowski as Isaac’s “right-hand man.” Tuvia had been Zuckerman’s closest friend and confidant in the Ghetto. It was to Tuvia that Isaac had entrusted the care of his wife during the Uprising—though Zivia Lubetkin would doubtless have protested the idea that she needed anyone to look after her. But now Tuvia was as handicapped as Zivia, and Mark Edelman, who was also forced to stay indoors because of his Semitic looks. Tuvia’s appearance wasn’t an issue for him. He was a big strapping lad with fair Slavic features. His disqualifying barrier was linguistic. “Tuvia’s Polish wasn’t Polish,” Zuckerman noted regretfully.

  Ratheiser and Sheingut had been running guns to a ZOB cell in southern Poland for the past few months. One of Simha’s contacts, a trusted Gentile by the name of Stephen Pokropek, had a line on some weapons for sale. A friend of a friend had access to a cache and was interested in joining the Communist partisans. If Simha put the friend’s friend in touch with the right people in the Communist group, he would sell the arms to the ZOB at a discount. Ratheiser relayed the proposition to Zuckerman, who passed it along to the People’s Army.

  Isaac ordered Simha to meet with the man in question, who introduced himself only as Czarny—Black in Polish. It was risky, but the ZOB was desperate for guns. The People’s Army, meanwhile, ran a background check on Black. Word filtered back that he appeared legitimate. The Communists then tested Black with a small mission. He passed. Simha was instructed to set up the buy. The exchange was to take place at Pokropek’s Praga apartment, which Simha was using to store weapons. He already had a batch of disassembled revolvers there that he and Sheingut were in the process of stripping and cleaning. Black showed up at the appointed hour and asked if Simha and Sheingut had brought the money. They had. He would be back in an hour, he said, with the revolvers and bullets.

  “I told [Sheingut] there was no point in both of us hanging around and that he should go,” Simha recalled. Sheingut, however, was in no rush to leave. And just then a hammering at the door startled them both. “Gestapo. Open up!” Simha reacted instinctively. He leaped out the window and ran as fast as he could. “Bullets whizzed by my ear.” Sheingut and Stephen Pokropek were not as agile. Both died on the spot.

  Simha rushed back to the western side of Warsaw and reported the raid to Zuckerman. At the time they didn’t know if Sheingut and Pokropek were dead or in German custody. They also had no way of knowing whether the whole thing had been a setup or pure chance. “We were tormented by suspicion, and, naturally, it fell on Black.”

  Black disappeared, just like Lieutenant Gaik, leaving the ZOB to wonder whom they could trust. Simha’s lingering doubts were dispelled a few weeks later. “I’m walking down the street and I see this big convertible. It’s full of Gestapo agents and there’s Black sitting in the backseat. He spots me and starts shouting ‘Stop him, stop him.’ ”

  Ratheiser gave the Gestapo the slip. He could not, however, rid himself of a persistent fear: How many more Shrubs and Blacks were out there, just waiting to trip them up?

  CHAPTER 35

  ROBERT’S AMERICAN PLEDGE

  On December 15, 1943, as a blizzard lashed Warsaw and Allied bombs fell on Berlin, Joseph, Martha, and young Robert Osnos found themselves with only forty-eight hours in which to pack their belongings and leave Bombay. They were not being expelled from India, where they had comfortably settled after their harrowing flight from Poland. Their American visas, after three years of bureaucratic delays, had finally come through.

  The short notice was a security precaution, in the event that the Japanese had spies in India ports ready to tip off enemy submarines about the departure of U.S.-flagged ships. “Out of the blue my dad got a call that our papers were ready and that a troop transport was leaving for California,” Robert, who was thirteen at the time, recalled. The vessel was the USS Hermitage, a seized Italian passenger liner, and for the astounded Osnoses the question at the time had been whether to board the ship at all. Why go? Martha and many of the Osnoses’ Polish friends had argued. India had been good to European exiles. They had all found work in the booming war economy. Most had servants and spacious homes with lovely gardens and swimming pools. Joseph and Martha played bridge every weekend and Robert attended private school, where he was well on his way to becoming a proper young Englishman, albeit with a Welsh accent. Most important, he was safe. In India, there was no threat of invading forces or aerial attack. There wasn’t even rationing.

  It was easy to see why so many of the Polish émigrés, both Jewish and Gentile, felt fortunate to have landed in India. Their British hosts may not have invited them to join the top clubs, but their services were valued and they were treated fairly. Joseph had done extremely well running the small plant that made life rafts for the British navy. In fact, Martha had felt secure enough to have a second child. Robert now had a few-months-old little brother named Peter.

  India had offered its refugees a lifeline, a rare chance at stability and prosperity at a time when neither was available in Europe. It was not surprising that many thought they had a future there. Joseph Osnos was of a different mind. Just as he had instantly grasped that Poland was finished in September 1939, and that the only recourse then was flight, he now foresaw that the privileged position of Europeans in India would eventually come to an end. “I don’t know how, but my father guessed that there would be a backlash against colonialism after the war,” Robert recalled. “Somehow he knew that India would seek independence and that being white would no longer be an advantage. So he insisted that we go to America now, even though my mother had just had a baby.”

  The USS Hermitage had once been an elegant passenger liner plying the Mediterranean for its Italian proprietors. Stripped down to the bare essentials, it now ferried wounded GIs to the United States on the far more dangerous passage across the still contested Pacific. On this voyage, in addition to injured soldiers, it carried 120 civilian passengers, mostly Persian oil workers and Chinese missionaries. In the lower holds, in cargo compartments that had been converted into a large brig, there was also a group of Italian POWs. To Robert, the smiling Italian officers he occasionally saw smoking and laughing on deck seemed nothing like the icy SS men who had barged into his mother’s apartment in Warsaw, looking for antiques to requisition, in 1939. Seventy years later, that chilling experience in Warsaw would remain his most vivid memory of the war, more deeply ingrained than the bombings of September 1939, his sojourn through Berlin the following year, the earthquake in Bucharest, the deserts of Iraq, or his first brush with the great naval campaigns that raged in the Pacific theater.

  He had followed the American victories and setbacks on the Movietone newsreels that preceded the films he watched in Bombay, and knew that the Pacific was still far from safe for any U.S. ship. The Hermitage had no escort. Nor was it part of a convoy. During the day, the solitary vessel meandered unpredictably, threading an invisible slalom course to throw off the aim of any pursuing submarine. At night, it traveled under a strict lights-out policy, with the portholes blacked out and smoking forbidden on deck. One of the Osnoses’ fellow passengers was nearly clamped in irons for violating the no-smoking rule; the suspicion that he was a spy trying to betray the Hermitage’s position followed him all the way to port.

  Thinking about Japanese destroyers and aircraft carriers bearing down on their defenseless vessel, Robert enacted their tactics on the board game he had brought for the voyage. For hours each day he played Battleship D
own while Joseph played bridge and poker with the other passengers and Martha dutifully mixed the Pablum baby formula she had brought for tiny Peter. Once, in the middle of the night, when the vessel was sailing without lights, she dispatched her sleepy husband to fetch water for the powdered formula. In the dark, he groggily stumbled into the ladies’ bathroom by mistake. A scandal ensued and Joseph was hauled in front of the captain to explain himself. “He was accused of being a Peeping Tom,” Robert recalled. “We were really worried that the U.S. authorities would deny us entry because of the incident.”

  On New Year’s Eve the ship docked in Melbourne, Australia. A few weeks later, it refueled in Bora Bora, and on February 2, 1944, after almost six weeks at sea, it arrived in San Diego, California. To everyone’s relief, the customs and immigration officials knew nothing about the bathroom incident. But they were deeply troubled by Robert’s battleship game. “They thought it was some sort of codes. They made us wait for two hours while they examined it.”

  For Joseph Osnos, a journey that had begun on September 7, 1939, was now almost over. It had taken nearly four and a half years to escape from the Nazis and to find a place to start all over. By now, 95 percent of Warsaw Jews were dead. If not for Joseph’s split-second decision to run for the Romanian border on the day Stalin joined Hitler’s dismemberment of Poland, the Osnoses would have likely become part of that tragic statistic.

  Robert Osnos made two pledges to himself upon setting foot on American soil. The first was to get rid of his shorts, which had been popular in India. American boys were pointing at him and laughing, saying, “Hey buddy, you lose your pants or something?” The second was to jettison another vestige of India. “The only thing that really bothered me about our stay in Bombay is that I had to pretend I was Christian in school. I promised myself that in America I would never again lie about my religion.”

  Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak had no idea that her cousin was in California. Robert had gradually ebbed from Joanna’s thoughts. Like many nine- or ten-year-olds, she tended to forget those she had not seen in years, and her long-departed relatives had been replaced by a new group of wartime intimates: nuns, Home Army heroines like Monika Zeromska or Irene Grabowski, and the silent but strong Jewish girls who only cried in their bunks at night in the convent on Casimir Street. The other two people missing from her mental menagerie were Hanna and Janine Mortkowicz. She had not seen either of them for eight months, not since July 1943, shortly after finally making her first communion. Of the seven girls in the ceremony, five had been Jewish. “We were petrified that the Host would stick in our throats,” Joanna later wrote.

  After the rite, on Whit Sunday, Joanna had gone to see her mother and grandmother, who were hiding in the suburbs at the time. As usual, Irene Grabowska came to pick her up for the periodic visit. “On the commuter train a guy latched on to us, trying to make jokes and conversation. Irene was accustomed to men accosting her, and sent him packing with a few sharp remarks. But I was taken in by his cajoling. ‘Joanna,’ he said to me. ‘Why don’t you want to talk to me? I know your mama very well and your grandma. Her name’s Janine Mortkowicz, right? And now she’s living with your mama. And you’re going to see them, aren’t you?” Joanna was puzzled by the stranger’s familiarity. Had he been a prewar acquaintance? A family friend? Irene Grabowska suspected otherwise. She shooed Joanna away from the interloper and they disembarked at the next stop, already well out of the city. “When we got off, he waved to us and disappeared.” As usual, doubts crept in. Maybe the encounter had been an innocent coincidence after all. Perhaps Irene had been unnecessarily rude and paranoid. War could bring out the worst in people.

  “We went on our way,” Joanna recalled. “I had only just thrown my arms around my mother’s neck when he appeared in the doorway. He had followed us along the country paths. We had led him directly to his prey.”

  By the despicable standards of greasers, the man who had latched on to the Mortkowiczes was only moderately evil. Joanna did not know what payment he extracted from her mother—it would almost certainly have been in the thousands of dollars in contemporary figures. But the blackmailer thankfully did not go to the Gestapo after collecting his blood money. It still meant that her mother and grandmother’s hideout was “burned,” and Joanna felt horribly guilty for having brought a predator to their door. She was terrified they would ingest the poison many Varsovians carried with them in case of capture, and she tearfully agreed to return to the nuns only if they promised not to commit suicide. “Then I went back to the convent like a good girl, to my French and grammar lessons,” she later wrote. She did not know where her mother and grandmother moved next because it was deemed too risky for her to continue visiting them. Joanna’s sole link to her family was permanently severed when the Gestapo arrested Irene Grabowska. She was taken to Peacock Prison, tortured, and eventually executed in March 1944.

  By March, Boruch Spiegel had been back in Warsaw for six long, cold months. The Polish capital was snowed under. Burst pipes in poorly heated buildings formed crystal waterfalls on countless façades. Corpses still dangled from balconies, their anguished death masks now frozen solid. The alternating power blackouts on opposite sides of the street continued as the Germans desperately diverted more and more energy to their sputtering war machine. And the price of coal on the black market had shot so high that some residents were burning old phone books and furniture to stay warm. Despite the inclement conditions, Boruch did not own a coat, a hat, a pair of gloves or boots. He didn’t need them. During the entire winter, he and Chaika Belchatowska never left the apartment they were hiding in. Under ZOB regulations, they were not allowed to set foot outdoors. “You needed official permission to go out from your melina,” Boruch recalled, using the slang for safe house.

  Like Zivia Lubetkin and Mark Edelman, Spiegel could not live “on the surface.” Greasers would have spotted him immediately. The Slavic-style mustache he had grown did little to disguise his Semitic features. “Even my eyes were Yiddish,” he lamented. “And it wasn’t just how you looked. Your accent, your mannerisms, everything was a minus.”

  Boruch and Chaika were billeted with the family of a Home Army officer by the name of Joseph Pera, “a fantastic man,” Boruch later said, “kind, brave, and generous.” Pera was the manager of the Hotel Metropole, a German-only establishment, and had polished his impeccable manners during eight years in France. He and his family lived on the corner of Iron and Mushroom Streets, in a large sixth-floor apartment that had been inside the Ghetto until 1942. After the Gross Aktion, when the southernmost part of the Jewish district had been turned over to Gentiles, Pera, his son Mietek, and his brother-in-law had begun sheltering Jews. Boruch and Chaika lived in the attic above their flat, in a room camouflaged by a bookcase.

  Zuckerman came by every few weeks, bringing money for food. “He did everything to boost our morale. He always had a ready joke or a funny story to tell.” Isaac also brought pens and large supplies of paper. “Write down everything you know, he said.” Spiegel had little enthusiasm for this assignment. Writing had never been his strong suit. But Zuckerman was insistent. He wanted a complete record of Jewish suffering to survive, even if none of its authors did.

  What Spiegel remembered most about this period of the war was the excruciating boredom. People did what they could to pass the time. Books were devoured, regardless of the subject. Every form of card game was played. Joanna’s mother, who was hiding in an apartment near the campus of the shuttered Warsaw Polytechnic about ten blocks from Boruch, wrote a novel. Her grandmother translated Dr. Dolittle’s Return into Polish. The two women practiced languages to keep themselves from going stir-crazy. “One day they would speak only in French,” Joanna recalled, “the next day in Russian, then English, or French.” Hanna and Janine, like thousands of other hidden Jews, would do anything to keep their minds sharp and to distract themselves from the fact that they were living in a tiny storeroom whose door was hidden behind heavy bookcases from which they
were not to emerge for fourteen very long months. Some likened hiding in secret rooms or behind false walls to solitary confinement. “We had the feeling of being prisoners sentenced to an indefinite term,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “Had we at least known the waiting would end some day, the waiting would have been easier.” Many couldn’t take it. A few were driven insane. These unfortunates were popularly known as “crazy cats.”

  The ZOB had entered a new phase in its evolution. The procurement of weapons and armed resistance were no longer its raison d’être. The fighting, for the foreseeable future, was over. The Organization’s goal was now survival, not only that of its own dwindling membership, but of any and all Jews still alive in Warsaw. Fewer than twenty thousand remained in the Polish capital by March 1944, and with each passing month, greasers steadily eroded their numbers. Even the Gestapo were impressed by the blackmailers’ diligence. “You Poles are strange people,” one SS officer remarked. “Nowhere in the world is there another nation which has so many heroes and so many denouncers.”

  Isaac Zuckerman echoed that perplexing dichotomy. “Remember,” he often reminded Simha Ratheiser, “it only takes one Pole to betray a hundred Jews, but it takes ten Poles to save one Jew.” The math was exaggerated, but his point was clear. Between forty thousand and sixty thousand Varsovians were actively involved in sheltering Jews, according to the Ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum, who himself was being hidden at this time in a specially constructed bunker under a greenhouse in midtown Warsaw. Some Western historians put the number as high as ninety thousand, when so-called secondary helpers were factored in. “These noble individuals face not only German terror but also the hostility of Polish fascists,” Ringelblum noted in the report he penned while living under the greenhouse. “It is, however, the anti-Semites as a whole, infected with racialism and Nazism, who created conditions so unfavorable that it has been possible to save only a small percentage of the Polish Jews from the Teuton butchers.”