Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  While clashes flared across the rest of the city, with buildings, blocks, and entire districts changing hands daily, a deadlock evolved on Bridge Street. The two sides hurled insults at each other more often than grenades, and neither appeared anxious to leave their defensive fortifications. Ironically, it was safer on the ZOB front line than in the rear, because the barricade was too close to the Tiger tanks for German artillery to shell. Farther up the hill, Old Town was mercilessly pounded by canons and strafed by Messerschmitt fighter planes. This was where most people died, crushed by collapsing medieval buildings or buried alive in cellars. The ZOB unit had enough experience with German tactics to know it should stay away from old stone structures. Fighting alongside the Home Army proved less hazardous than Zuckerman had feared. “As we went from the barricade to the rear and back, all the Gentiles knew that this was a Jewish unit,” he later recalled. “We didn’t feel a trace of anti-Semitism.”

  On the Bridge Street barricade, the fighting differed from the battles the ZOB had experienced in the Ghetto. It was more akin to the trench warfare of World War I. The Wehrmacht garrison made no attempt to attack, because its primary focus was defending the bridge to Praga. The Germans kept the insurgents at bay with snipers, machine gun bursts, and the occasional mortars while keeping a lookout for the Soviet T-34 tanks that were expected to storm Praga from the east. The Red Army, however, was nowhere to be seen. After racing through Ukraine and much of Poland, the Soviet offensive mysteriously ground to a halt only miles outside the Polish capital. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky said his eight hundred thousand troops were exhausted. Supply lines had been stretched too thin by the rapid advance. His armored divisions, which enjoyed a seven-to-one numerical advantage over the retreating Germans, needed a breather.

  Historians debate whether the ill-timed pause was intentional. Some say Stalin decided to let Hitler do his dirty work by giving the Germans time to wipe out the Home Army. And even if the Soviets did not intentionally double-cross the Poles by inciting them to revolt and then sitting on the sidelines as the Germans killed them off, the suspended Soviet campaign had dramatic consequences for the Uprising. The revolt was supposed to last a few days before the Red Army rolled in. The planners of Operation Tempest, General Bor and Colonel Monter, both career military men, had budgeted ammunition and supplies for a brief battle. They expected the Germans to retreat, ceding the Polish capital in order to concentrate their defenses around Berlin. But Bor and Monter had not counted on Stalin’s sudden reluctance to push forward, or on Hilter’s resolve with regard to Warsaw.

  They should have known better. The Führer had always hated Warsaw. He made no secret of his contempt for the Polish capital, its Russified architecture, its slovenly Jews, its unruly horde of Slavic inhabitants. His rage was only magnified by the recent attempt on his life by his own officers. In Berlin, Jürgen Stroop was stringing up hundreds of Wehrmacht officers with piano wire to uncover the depth of German army disloyalty while his boss, Heinrich Himmler, was demanding that Warsaw be erased from European maps. “Mein Führer,” the SS chief pleaded, “the action of the Poles is a blessing. We shall finish them off. Warsaw will be liquidated and this city … that has blocked our path to the east for seven hundred years, ever since the first battle of Tannenberg, will have ceased to exist.” The Reichsführer was not speaking figuratively. “No prisoners to be taken,” he subsequently instructed his generals. “Every inhabitant to be killed, every single house to be blown up and burned.” Warsaw dared to defy his beloved Führer; for that Himmler intended to wipe if off the face of the earth.

  CHAPTER 37

  SIMHA’S SECOND

  SEWER RESCUE

  On August 5, 1944, a Saturday, fifty thousand German troops poured into Warsaw. They were spearheaded by the dregs of the SS, the most brutal and least disciplined of the auxiliary forces that Himmler managed to recruit during the Wehrmacht’s conquest of the Soviet Union: the infamous RONA Brigade from the renegade Russian National Liberation Army. The reinforcements also included two Cossack battalions; an Azerbaijani regiment of irregulars; the Oriental Muslim Regiment, comprised of Kazaks and recruits from the Caucasus; the dreaded Vlassov Division of Russians and Ukrainians, many of whom had served in the notorious Einsatzgruppen Holocaust killing squads; and, perhaps worst of all, the Dirlewanger Commando Battalion, a penal unit composed of convicted murderers and rapists who had been released from German jails.

  These special counterinsurgency units were supported by the regular Waffen-SS, a Wehrmacht Panzer division, Luftwaffe guard regiments (both in the air and on the ground), and an artillery brigade redeployed from Russian lines “thanks to the improved situation” caused by Marshal Rokossovsky’s unexpected pause. They struck, as in 1939, from the west, sweeping into the industrial neighborhoods of Ochota and Wola, on the other side of Warsaw from the ZOB’s relatively tranquil position near the banks of the Vistula. It was a campaign rarely seen in the annals of modern warfare. The SS all but ignored the Home Army defenders and made straight for the civilian population of the two unfortunate districts. That Saturday they murdered twenty thousand residents in Wola alone. Over the next few days, they slaughtered at least thirty-five thousand and perhaps as many as fifty thousand people in an orgy of bloodletting so violent that Zuckerman remarked “If I changed the Polish names, it would sound like a Jewish story.”

  At 10 A.M. on August 5, 1944, one witness later testified to a Polish war crimes tribunal, a detachment of SS men and Ukrainian irregulars entered his building. “They drove us from the cellars and brought us near the Sowinski Park. They shot at us when we passed. My wife was killed on the spot; our child was wounded and cried for his mother. Soon a Ukrainian approached and killed my two-year-old child like a dog; then he approached me together with some Germans and stood on my chest to see whether I was alive or not. I lay thus from 10 A.M. until 9 P.M. pretending to be dead. During that time I saw further groups being driven out and shot near the place where I lay. The huge heap of corpses grew still bigger. Those who gave any sign of life were shot. I was buried under other corpses and nearly suffocated. The executions lasted until 5 P.M.”

  Similar massacres were carried out in virtually every block. “Between 11 and 12 noon,” another woman later testified, “the Germans ordered all of us to get out, and marched us to Wolska Street. This march was carried out in dreadful haste and panic. My husband was absent, taking an active part in the Rising, and I was alone with my three children, aged 4, 6, and 12, and in the last month of pregnancy. I delayed my departure, hoping they would allow me to remain, and left the cellar at the very last moment. All the inhabitants of our house had already been escorted to the ‘Ursus’ [tractor factory] works in Wolska Street. I went alone, accompanied only by my three children. It was difficult to pass, the road being full of wire, cable, remains of barricades, corpses, and rubble. Houses were burning on both sides of the street; I reached the ‘Ursus’ works with great difficulty. Shots, cries, supplications and groans could be heard from the factory yard. The people who stood at the entrance were led, no, pushed in, not all at once but in groups of 20. A boy of twelve, seeing the bodies of his parents and of his little brother through the half-open entrance door, fell in a fit and began to shriek. The Germans and Vlassov’s [Ukrainian] men beat him and pushed him back, while he was endeavouring to get inside. He called for his father and his mother. We all knew what awaited us here. I came last and kept in the background, continuing to let the others pass, in the hope that they would not kill a pregnant woman, but I was driven in with the last lot. In the yard I saw heaps of corpses 3 feet high, in several places. The whole right and left side of the big yard was strewn with bodies. We were led through the second yard. There were about 20 people in our group, mostly children of 10 to 12. There were children without parents, and also a paralyzed old woman whose son-in-law had been carrying her all the time on his back. At her side was her daughter with two children of 4 and 7. They were all killed. The old woman was lite
rally killed on her son-in-law’s back, and he along with her. We were called out in groups of four and led to the end of the second yard to a pile of bodies. When the four reached this point, the Germans shot them through the backs of their heads with revolvers. The victims fell on the heap, and others came. Seeing what was to be their fate, some attempted to escape; they cried, begged, and prayed for mercy. I was in the last group of four. I begged the Vlassov’s men around me to save me and the children, and they asked if I had anything with which to buy my life. I had a large amount of gold with me and gave it them. They took it all and wanted to lead me away, but the German supervising the execution would not allow them to do so, and when I begged him to let me go he pushed me off, shouting ‘Quicker!’ I fell when he pushed me. He also hit and pushed my elder boy, shouting ‘Hurry up, you Polish bandit.’ Thus I came to the place of execution, in the last group of four, with my three children. I held my two younger children by one hand, and my elder boy by the other. The children were crying and praying. My elder son, seeing the mass of bodies, cried out: ‘They are going to kill us’ and called for his father. The first shot hit him, the second me; the next two killed my two younger children. I fell on my right side. The shot was not fatal. The bullet penetrated the back of my head from the right side and went out through my cheek. I spat out several teeth; I felt the left side of my body growing numb, but I was still conscious and saw everything that was going on around me.”

  Boruch Spiegel experienced the full fury of the SS as the Nazis pushed eastward from Wola into the city center. He had gotten separated from the ZOB and had joined Sergeant Pera’s unit, which was supposed to be fighting in the 6th District, third region, as platoon number 693. That was in Praga. But amid the chaos and confusion, the platoon ended up on Sienna Street, in what had once been the most elegant avenue in the southern, most prosperous part of the former Ghetto. The entire area was now unrecognizable, a sea of flames and rubble, after intensive German shelling. As for Pera’s unit, it, too, had been transformed. It had become a disorganized jumble of Jews, Gentiles, Home Army, and People’s Army combatants and fighters from the quasi-fascist National Armed Forces. They were pitted against the RONA Brigade, the rogue Russian SS division commanded by Miechislav Kaminski, whose brutality had already become legendary. Even hardened Gestapo officers were repulsed by the excesses of his troops, half of whom had deserted to form their own criminal bands, intent on rape and pillage. Pera was fatally wounded in the battle with the Russian SS, but the Poles held their ground because Boruch and the other defenders were not merely fighting for their lives. They knew that defeat meant death for their wives and children, their parents and neighbors. By then it was evident that the Warsaw Uprising could end only in victory or complete destruction. That was a powerful motivator.

  The savage German counteroffensive finally reached the ZOB barricade in Old Town on August 19, 1944. The huge Tiger tanks that had been pointing their turrets across the river at the phantom Soviet menace swiveled around to face the insurgents. The smell of diesel filled the air as their engines roared to life, and with a shudder that scattered clouds of accumulated dust, they lurched forward. Bridge Street trembled with the clatter of steel on cobblestone as the 68-ton monsters bore down on the Jewish and Gentile defenders. “To the credit of the Poles,” Zuckerman recalled, “they were brave people who stuck to their guns. I didn’t see any panic or running away.”

  Only one boy, Mark Edelman remembered, a twelve-year-old courier, succumbed to fear and bolted. He was shot by a People’s Army officer. But no one had time to be stunned or outraged. The Tigers were too close. They opened fire with their heavy machine guns, their massive treads now only yards away from Isaac, Zivia, Simha, and Mark. “I have been scared many times in my life,” Isaac later wrote. “But those moments on the barricade were beyond fear.”

  By the end of August 1944, the Uprising death toll exceeded one hundred thousand. With each passing day, the Home Army’s Information Bulletin was receiving over one thousand new missing persons reports, and the Germans were stepping up their artillery barrages. To punish the Polish capital, Himmler ordered the deployment of one of the biggest howitzers ever built, a locomotive-drawn mammoth whose seven-foot-long shells could take out an entire city block.

  The Home Army had long run out of bullets by then, and it was only thanks to two million rounds of ammunition airlifted to Warsaw by converted RAF bombers that pockets of resistance were managing to hold out. Most of the city—or what was left of it—was back in German hands, a lunar landscape of craters and mangled rubble, the Warsaw Ghetto writ large. Fires raged uncontrollably, and the heat they generated created microclimates of howling winds and flaming dust devils that could set a person ablaze. “Cinders were flying everywhere. You couldn’t see the sun for all the ashes,” one witness recalled. “I had to urinate on my handkerchief and cover [my wife’s] head with it to keep her hair from burning.”

  The ZOB’s $40,000 had gone up in flames in the conflagration, which spread unchecked because all the capital’s water mains burst during the daily German bombardments. The Luftwaffe flew sorties every half hour, pinning hundreds of thousands of civilians down in shelters. Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak’s convent was flattened, as were a number of houses of worship, including the Holy Sacrament Monastery in New Town, where a thousand people who had taken shelter all perished. Fortunately, Joanna and the other girls in her convent had been safely evacuated to the countryside a few days prior to the Rising by Sister Wanda, their well-connected Mother Superior. Joanna’s mother and grandmother, however, were trapped in a cellar on Mokotow Street, in the middle of the target zone, where they would remain with virtually no food or water for six weeks.

  While Stuka dive-bombers pummeled the city during the day, British B-24 Liberators flew their vital supply missions at night, aiming their precious loads of Sten guns and grenades, Spam and Philip Morris cigarettes at the dwindling dark spots that indicated rebel territory in the sea of flames drowning Eastern Europe’s biggest metropolis. The largest of these drop zones were the Jewish cemetery and the area around the landmark Prudential Life Insurance skyscraper in Napoleon Square. Unfortunately, more than half of the green six-foot-long supply canisters dropped by the RAF fell into German-controlled sectors. Some of the parachutes got tangled on church spires and had to be cut down. Others touched down in so-called Swiss zones, no-man’s-lands where Germans would also try to retrieve them, anxious to get at the cigarettes and Hershey bars. The Wehrmacht, meanwhile, lit up the sky with powerful spotlights and peppered the low-flying B-24s with AA antiaircraft batteries. One stricken plane came screaming down over Zivia and Isaac’s heads near Bridge Street, erupting in a fireball on the banks of the Vistula.

  Zuckerman and Lubetkin were still alive, and Old Town, after nearly a month of shelling, still held. But gunboats, two armored trains, 75 mm field guns, a tank battalion, and several howitzer batteries were raining hell on the one-square-mile district. Ten SS infantry battalions were closing in from the west, while the Tiger tanks had sealed off the Vistula corridor. Gradually the two German forces were closing in on the five thousand defenders caught in the middle. As the gap narrowed, the fighting became increasingly ferocious, more and more reminiscent of the street battles of Stalingrad. “A single house could change hands several times a day,” Mark Edelman recalled, and sometimes territory was contested floor by floor, room by room in hand-to-hand combat. German losses during the latest push exceeded 1,570 men, but the tide was slowly and inexorably turning against the rebels. The historic district was now completely surrounded by enemy forces, cut off from food and water. Its 130,000 trapped residents, most of whom were civilians, were starving. People traded jewelry and fur coats for loaves of bread, and a kilo of butter soared in cost to a staggering 2,400 zlotys, equivalent to several years of the average prewar salary.

  The lack of medical supplies was also becoming dire, condemning the estimated 7,500 seriously wounded combatants and civilians in the be
sieged Old Quarter to a slow and painful death. In makeshift hospital wards in dark brick cellars built during the late Middle Ages, the stench of gangrene was overwhelming. Outside, scattered amid the ruins of Gothic arches and baroque altars, innumerable corpses were putrefying in the summer heat. The dead included the People’s Army’s entire command staff, leaving Isaac Zuckerman as a ranking officer of the four-hundred-strong organization. Isaac had narrowly escaped the showdown with the Tiger tanks, retreating to higher ground after his position on the barricade had been overrun. It was now up to him to coordinate an emergency evacuation plan with the Home Army. The rival rebel groups had buried the hatchet during the Rising. The People’s Army had agreed to subordinate itself to the larger London-backed force, and the feared anti-Semitic attacks had not materialized. In fact, “the opposite was true,” Zuckerman found. “The Home Army showed us camaraderie.” Zivia Lubetkin was also pleasantly surprised. “I have to say that everyone, including the civilians, treated us cordially.”