Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  By June, the occupiers themselves were beginning to show signs of fear. After the Allies landed in Normandy, German patrols no longer ventured into Old Town, the historic warren of narrow, winding streets perfectly suited to ambushes. Two weeks later, following the Soviet rout of several Wehrmacht armored divisions in Belarus, Warsaw’s black market was flooded with military goods. Demoralized German soldiers were selling guns, grenades, truckloads of brand-new parachutes and blankets, and, in some cases, the trucks themselves. “In the street markets,” a Home Army officer cabled London, “German military nurses are selling openly watches and cigarette cases that they purloined from wounded soldiers in field hospitals.”

  Amid all these developments, Simha raced from Home Army safe house to People’s Army hideout to catch the latest reports from the BBC and Radio Moscow. The ZOB had no radio, so Mark Edelman kept dispatching Simha on news-gathering errands. After being cooped up indoors for over a year, Mark wanted to know everything: the mood on the streets, the attitude of the Underground, the price of goods, the sight of retreating troops, the sense of impending doom sweeping the German-only parts of town, where civilian officials scurried to their cars, looking over their shoulders for the Home Army hit squads that had begun to assassinate Nazi functionaries.

  By July, the Soviets were in Vilna and Lvov, and moving vans had become a regular sight outside the luxurious apartment buildings flanking the Royal Gardens in the German-only district. Nazi officials began selling gold, jewels, diamonds, and looted art at steeply discounted prices. Stories circulated about the Gestapo executing German deserters, and of drunken SS officers going on shooting sprees, indiscriminately firing on crowds or tramcars full of passengers to vent their sodden frustration. German morale sank further when headlines in the July 21, 1944, edition of the New Warsaw Courier, the General Government’s propaganda sheet, carried the shocking news of an UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT ON ADOLF HITLER’S LIFE. Wehrmacht officers had tried to kill the Führer!

  By then, the Red Army had crossed the Bug River and was less than thirty miles from Warsaw. The advancing Soviets established a political bridgehead in the castle town of Lublin, the former Hasidic stronghold where Joe Osnos had spent the night during his September 1939 flight. A Polish Committee for National Liberation had been formed there, a Soviet puppet government in waiting, staffed with the few Polish Communists the NKVD could find in Moscow. They were so few because Stalin had killed them all during one of his periodic purges, the murderous secret police campaigns that murdered millions, including Janine Mortkowicz’s cousin Max Horowitz, who had co-founded the Polish Worker’s Party. “He played the great socialist with our bourgeois money,” Janine used to complain.

  In radio broadcasts, the Polish Committee for National Liberation already was calling the London government in exile a “usurper” and appealing for a popular revolt against both German and Polish fascists. “People of the Capital! To Arms!” it exhorted. “Assist the Red Army in their crossing of the Vistula. Send them information. Show them the way.”

  In Warsaw, meanwhile, the situation deteriorated daily. Column after column of dirty, bedraggled Wehrmacht units were shuffling across the bridges over the Vistula, retreating from the east. They looked nothing like the indestructible warriors who had paraded through the city five years earlier with their gleaming helmets and bayonets and expressions of vicious arrogance. They were almost a pathetic sight now, bandaged and limping, covered in dust and mud, supporting one another, their heads hanging. Seeing them fill the length of Jerusalem Boulevard, a once mighty army pitifully reduced, sent the terrified Volksdeutsche panicking and packing. The General Government had the same reaction. Colonial administrators started evacuating nonessential personnel and the families of all officials. Trucks and big black BMW sedans roared through the streets, all heading westward.

  Twenty thousand troops still remained in Warsaw, however, fortified by tanks and heavy-machine-gun posts hastily positioned at critical intersections. The soldiers were frightened and trigger-happy. Their nerves were so frayed that patrols on Marshall Street shot at the slightest provocation: A car backfiring could result in an entire square being riddled with bullets. It was usually the elderly, since they were not spry enough to leap for cover, who fell victim to these panicked outbursts. Even so, people began staying indoors, preparing shelters in their basements.

  At Boruch Spiegel’s apartment, Sergeant Joseph Pera and his twenty-year-old son, Mietek, who was also in the Home Army, disappeared for lengthy periods of time, returning well after curfew, and sometimes staying out all night. Mietek Pera, code name Frenchy, was in fact ferrying Sten guns from Home Army arms caches across the Vistula in a small rowboat under the cover of darkness. Though Boruch was not aware of the details, it was obvious that his hosts were plotting something. An atmosphere of pent-up anticipation gripped the Polish capital. Something big was about to happen. Everyone, including the Germans, could sense it.

  On the muggy afternoon of August 1, 1944, the city of Warsaw erupted. At precisely 5 P.M., the height of the evening rush hour, sirens and church bells rang throughout the capital, followed moments later by the sound of a thousand guns. From windows and doorways and alleys and cellars, partisans suddenly starting shooting at anything in a German uniform. Bullets riddled Nazi administrative offices and police stations. Checkpoints and guard huts were struck. Vehicles carrying officers careened wildly and smashed into lampposts or crashed through storefronts. “In the twinkling of an eye, the remaining civilians disappeared from the street,” one witness recalled. “All traffic ceased. From the entrances of houses, our partisans streamed out and rushed to the attack. In fifteen minutes an entire city of a million inhabitants was engulfed in the fight.”

  Nearly forty thousand Home Army combatants had risen up, striking simultaneously in virtually every Warsaw neighborhood. Hundreds of Jews, including Boruch, took part in the fighting. But Isaac, Zivia, Simha, and Mark did not. The ZOB leadership had been completely surprised by the Warsaw Uprising. Zuckerman was furious and his pride was seriously wounded. Thousands of people must have known about the rebellion. The logistics alone would have required weeks of intense preparation: unearthing weapons and surreptitiously transporting tons of ammunition from caches, coordinating tactics and identifying points of assault, arranging and provisioning medical teams, storing food and water, securing channels of communication—everything that the ZOB itself had done a year earlier, but this time on a scale a hundred times greater. And still, despite the colossal size of the undertaking, Isaac had not gotten wind of Operation Tempest, the code name for the revolt. Captain Wolinski, whom he trusted, whom he considered his friend, had not taken him into his confidence. That stung Isaac worse than a betrayal. Once more, in his mind, the Home Army had let him down.

  Zuckerman’s contacts in the People’s Army had not breathed a word about the rising either, because the Communists had also not known about Operation Tempest. The Home Army intentionally kept its rival in the dark. “Most Poles saw the [People’s Army] as phraseologists or as aliens,” Isaac later commented, or worse, as “Moscow’s lackeys.” Their exclusion was intentional. “It was obvious to us that the insurrection had twin goals,” Zivia Lubetkin elaborated. “Militarily it was against the Germans. Politically it was against the Soviet Union.” Varsovians had no intention of swapping occupiers. They wanted to ensure that before the Red Army crossed the Vistula, the Polish capital had already liberated itself; that it had its own armed militia in place and a functioning government—all the trappings of de facto sovereignty.

  These political machinations concerned Isaac and Zivia less than the immediate dilemma now facing the ZOB. There was no question that the Jews would fight. They had weapons and experience in guerrilla warfare. For Isaac personally, it was imperative that he take up arms. Fate had precluded his participation in the Ghetto Uprising, a fact that haunted him even as he assumed leadership of the ZOB following Anielewicz’s death. Though he never said so publicly, he m
ay have felt that being sidelined during the revolt diminished him in the eyes of his collegues. So he was doubly anxious to prove himself. The issue facing him now was whether to join the ranks of the Home Army or the People’s Army.

  It was not an easy decision. Nor did Isaac have a lot of time to make it. Warsaw, by the second day of fighting, was devolving into a patchwork of German and rebel-held territory. Some parts of the city had quickly fallen into Home Army hands. Within a few hours, most streets had been sealed off: Trams had been toppled and roads ripped up to form makeshift barricades, along which motley rebel crews—some wearing World War I uniforms, others in civilian garb—peppered German positions with an equally unorthodox assortment of weapons: Sten guns, Mausers, Enfield rifles, Soviet surplus pistols, and crudely welded homemade machine guns. The insurgents knocked out fifty tanks, seizing a huge munitions warehouse, the main power station, and the financial district. The Polish flag once again flew atop the Prudential Life Insurance Building, Warsaw’s tallest tower. But the price of these victories was high: In the first twenty-four hours of combat, the Home Army lost two thousand men, while the Wehrmacht’s losses were estimated at five hundred soldiers. The Germans were holding key sectors firmly, particularly in the western parts of the city, where they fought fiercely to control the critical highways that they would need either to escape or to get reinforcements into the capital.

  Up to this point, Isaac had not needed to choose between the rival Polish Undergrounds. He played a delicate and discreet double game, working with both. “The People’s Army knew of our contacts with the Home Army,” Simha Ratheiser recalled, “whereas the Home Army was not supposed to know that we also dealt with the People’s Army.” Now Zuckerman was forced to take sides, because his ZOB unit was too small to fight on its own. It would have to merge into an existing formation, formally entering a hierarchical military structure.

  Numerically, the Home Army had an incomparable advantage. Its forces outnumbered the People’s Army by a factor of fifty to one. The ZOB’s few dozen remaining fighters thus hardly tipped the scales, which was perhaps why no one bothered to inform Isaac of the uprising in advance. There was also the matter of Zuckerman’s bruised ego. His feelings were plainly hurt by the conspiratorial snub. What’s more, the Home Army had never offered him a commission, unlike the People’s Army, which had bestowed on him the rank of major. Isaac, like many handsome and charismatic leaders, was not above vanity. He had a surprisingly thin skin and easily took umbrage at perceived slights. Nonetheless, he swallowed his pride because joining the much bigger and better organized Home Army made the most sense from a military point of view. Isaac called Simha Ratheiser, and the two rushed over to Old Town on August 2 in the torrential rain to offer the Home Army the ZOB’s services. “They put me off with hemming and hawing.”

  For Isaac, it was the last straw. He and Simha marched straight to the People’s Army’s makeshift headquarters. It was easy to find, Ratheiser recalled, because of the big red flag. It fluttered over an ancient mustard-colored edifice, just outside the medieval brick battlements of the famous Barbakan tower gate. Today, a brass plaque on the building informs visitors that double Nobel laureate Marie Curie had once lived there. Zuckerman saluted the guard, went inside, and repeated his offer. To his shock, the Communists also declined. “It would be too great a historical responsibility to send the few survivors of the Ghetto Uprising back to war,” Zuckerman was informed. “We have to keep them in a museum to protect them.” At this Isaac burst out laughing. Try telling that to his wife or to Mark Edelman, he quipped. Both, after their yearlong seclusion, had had enough of being locked up like museum pieces.

  Indeed, Edelman had rushed outside almost as soon as he heard the first shots of the uprising. He felt euphoric, as if he had just been released from jail, and he ran straight over to Iron Street to visit his fellow Bundist prisoners Boruch Spiegel and Chaika Belchatowska. They had not seen one another since the May 1943 sewer rescue. Even though their safe houses were only ten minutes apart, they had not been permitted to interact while in hiding. They stayed up all night talking, catching up, trying to decide what to do next. Boruch wanted to join Sergeant Pera’s Home Army platoon. Edelman wanted the ZOB to form its own unit. Chaika just wanted to be a master of her own destiny after being locked away for so long, utterly reliant on others. “Finally we can start living again,” she sighed in relief.

  The heady sensation proved fleeting. The next morning, as explosions reverberated throughout Warsaw, Mark set out for Forestry Boulevard, four blocks north. He got within a few hundred yards of his safe house before he was pinned down by fire. Ukrainian SS auxiliaries from nearby Peacock Prison had cut off his path. “I hid in a store that was burning. Its ceiling looked like it was going to collapse.” Edelman waited for ten excruciating minutes inside the flaming shop before leaping back out into the street. Shots ricocheted around his feet as he dived through a courtyard gate. Cutting through back alleys, where he knew the Ukrainians were unlikely to follow, Mark ran headlong into a Home Army patrol. His relief turned into horror when he saw that they, too, had their guns trained on him. They surrounded him, yelling, “Jew, you set the building on fire. You’re a German spy.” Edelman was stunned at the absurdity of their accusation. While they debated whether to execute him on the spot, Mark wrestled himself free and bolted. His captors gave chase. Edelman and his pursuers ran into another Home Army unit, this one with officers. There was a long discussion among the officers and they eventually let Mark go.

  Shaken, he returned to Marisa Sawicki’s safe house just as Isaac Zuckerman and Simha Ratheiser were coming back from their frustrating negotiations in Old Town. A representative of the Council to Aid Jews was also there, delivering $40,000 in U.S. currency and a warning for the ZOB. His name was Alexander Kaminski, and he was the editor in chief of the Home Army’s Information Bulletin. Kaminski was sympathetic to the Jewish Underground, stemming from his prewar association with the Bund. Under his editorship, the Information Bulletin had never printed a single anti-Semitic statement, and the paper had often encouraged its readers to assist Jewish refugees. The ZOB, Kaminski now warned, should not join the Home Army. Jews would not be safe in its newly expanded ranks.

  The reason had to do with rebel realpolitik. In anticipation of the uprising, the Home Army had struck a deal with the National Armed Forces, the far-right anti-Semitic organization that until then had been ostracized by the mainstream Polish Resistance. The two factions agreed to fight under the same banner on the condition that the National Armed Forces renounce its quasi-fascist leanings. Only part of the right-wing group’s members had accepted the terms. Yet to liberal Home Army officers like Kaminski (a future Righteous Gentile), the merger represented a pact with the devil, a desperate gambit to help even out the overwhelming odds against dislodging the Wehrmacht and then fending off the Red Army. The trade-off boiled down to legitimacy in exchange for firepower. The pariah National Armed Forces, with 72,439 members nationwide, had significant stores of weapons, which the Home Army desperately needed. Only one in ten Home Army soldiers was properly armed. Worse still, the Gestapo had seized a stockpile of 78,000 grenades during a raid on an underground explosives plant just three weeks earlier. One hundred and seventy flamethrowers had also been lost in that July raid. The far right’s arsenal could potentially tip the scales toward the rebel cause. The ZOB’s contribution of twenty fighters, on the other hand, would make no difference whatsoever, other than possibly disrupting the fragile new alliance. In the cold calculus of war, the welfare of Warsaw’s few remaining Jews had not even entered the equation.

  Already, Kaminski said, some Jews had been killed by joint National Armed Forces–Home Army units under the dubious pretext that the Jewish victims were Volksdeutsche. The only choice for the ZOB, Kaminski advised, was to join the People’s Army.

  Under different circumstances, Edelman, as an anticommunist Bundist, would have recoiled at the thought. But now he didn’t hesitate. �
�I wasn’t going to fight with people trying to kill me.”

  On August 3, 1944, the ZOB formally became the third platoon of the People’s Army Second Brigade. The People’s Army took them in largely out of numerical necessity. The tiny Communist faction could not afford to reject volunteers. Isaac, Zivia, Mark, Simha, Tuvia Borzykowski, and a dozen other veterans of the Ghetto Uprising were assigned to man barricades on Bridge Street. This was one of the most strategically important arteries in Old Town, a position heavily defended by both rebel forces and the Wehrmacht. Bridge Street sloped down the escarpment along Old Town’s crenellated battlements toward the Vistula, where it connected to the river-spanning viaduct from which it took its name. For the Germans, this was a vital crossing that needed to be held at all costs to prevent Soviet tanks from entering Warsaw. The street itself was unusually wide by the standards of the cramped historic district. It was cobblestoned and lined with three- and four-story Gothic townhouses, each intricately decorated with pastel murals and glass mosaics depicting folk tales. A creamy baroque cathedral crowned the hill where Bridge Street merged into ancient Freta Street at the foot of the Barbakan tower, linking the walled quarter with New Town, its seventeenth-century suburb.

  Bridge Street was one of those natural urban choke points that leave no room for maneuvering and give adversaries no alternative but to ram straight through one another. At its foot, where it abutted the Vistula, the Germans had dug in Tiger II tanks, 68-ton behemoths that were almost twice the size of American Shermans, with nearly twice the armor and twice the firepower. The demarcation line was the forward German position, a stately burgundy edifice that became known as the Red House. It was about a hundred yards from the rebel line, a whitewashed theater dubbed the White House. A barricade was excavated there, a deep incision that acted as an antitank trench. Different units took turns manning it, exchanging fire with German machine gun nests. Isaac’s group was on duty for twenty hours at a time before returning to Old Town to rest for a day. As shifts changed, the weapons stayed on the barricade. Mark Edelman remembered how Zivia Lubetkin struggled with the oversized rifle she was lent—“It was twice her size.” But she refused to relinquish it. The shortage of rifles was so acute that two or three combatants had to share each gun. The Home Army had only one thousand rifles in all of Warsaw, and Isaac suddenly understood why the Polish Resistance leaders had been so stingy about arming the ZOB in 1943. At the time, he had ascribed the parsimony to anti-Semitism. Now he recognized that the poverty Captain Wolinski had pleaded was very real.