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Isaac's Army

Page 39

by Matthew Brzezinski


  Nonetheless, it was evident to all that the ancient quarter could not hold out much longer. The insurgents were losing ground and up to three hundred fighters a day. The few mechanized vehicles they possessed—so-called Bear Cubs, Chevrolet Suburbans retrofitted with camouflage-painted steel plates to form homemade armored personnel carriers—had proven ineffective in the narrow maze of winding streets. All were destroyed. The Germans had also adapted their war machines to fit Old Town’s cramped fighting conditions, but with far greater success than the rebels. To penetrate trenches, the Germans started using Goliaths—miniature remote-controlled tanks that maneuvered 500-kilogram explosive charges into tight corners and defensive ditches. To reach insurgents hiding on the top floors and rooftops of townhouses, they deployed specially constructed mine throwers that became known as “Bellowing Cows” for the panic-inducing sound of the phosphorus bomblets they flung through windows and onto balconies. “The carved oak beams in houses burned like matchsticks,” one witness recalled. “The old buildings collapsed like houses of cards, burying those who had sought shelter in their cellars. They soon became the communal graves of thousands of people who were buried alive.”

  By the last week of August, Old Town was burning without pause. The area under rebel control was reduced to the size of about five football fields. The only food left was tinned tongue and wine. Fighters were down to their last rounds. “It became clear that no one was going to survive much longer,” Simha Ratheiser recalled. The defenders had to find a way to rejoin Home Army formations in other parts of the city. Fighting their way out was impossible. German forces were too strong. Sewers offered the only viable escape route.

  Since the ZOB had gained invaluable experience navigating subterranean passages during the Ghetto revolt, Simha was tapped to help chart a course through the sewage canals. “I was placed in charge of a unit of mainly sergeants and officers who had served in the Polish Army, all of them much older than me,” he recalled. Simha’s team plotted a route north to Jolie Bord, which was still a Home Army stronghold. This meant traversing more than a mile of booby-trapped sewer pipes, all under German-held territory, with trip wires, dams, and SS troops perched over manholes, ready to drop concussion grenades. Such an arduous trek was possible for only the fittest combatants. The wounded, the civilians, and the bulk of the Old Town rebel forces would go through a shorter set of canals, heading southeast to Midtown, near the former Ghetto, which was much closer but under heavier German assault. Working feverishly, Simha’s team fixed guide ropes and disabled booby traps, clearing blockages along the labyrinth of tunnels, some of which were wide enough to drive a horse cart through, others so narrow that Simha had to crawl on his hands and knees, immersed to his neck in human excrement. He used chalk arrows to mark the way, as he had done in May 1943.

  The mass escape started at midnight on September 1, 1944. For ZOB members, descending into the sewers was a familiar sensation. “My nostrils were assailed by a well-remembered repulsive odor,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “We were climbing down so close to one another that my feet practically touched the head of the man below me while just above my head were the feet of the man following me. Each time I heard a splash, I knew that someone had already reached the bottom, his body waist deep in the filth.”

  Zuckerman, Lubetkin, and Edelman were just ahead of Borzykowski, part of an unbroken human chain that “stretched for kilometers.” Every few hundred feet, the body of someone who had drowned floated in the filth. The currents were much stronger in this part of the sewer system than they had been in the Ghetto because of its proximity to the Vistula, into which the city’s entire canal network drained. The lower elevation and increased pressure created waterfalls and treacherous whirlpools at junctures where channels merged. Simha had charted a course to avoid the most dangerous of these crosscurrents. But it required lengthy detours, adding to the exhausting journey. Already it had taken six hours to reach the halfway point, and the evacuees’ strength was visibly beginning to ebb.

  Suddenly, at around 6 A.M., an explosion rocked the canal. A trip wire had been snagged, and the Germans, alerted by the detonation, were throwing hand grenades down manholes, blocking the passage. Everyone froze, panicked. Going forward meant death, but going back meant returning to Old Town, which was tantamount to the same thing. There was only one alternative route. They would have to go through the waterfalls and whirlpools, against the raging currents.

  Zivia was the first to fall. Tuvia grabbed her and pulled her by the hair, but he also lost his balance and fell. Just as he was beginning to get up, a surge knocked him down again. Mark Edelman grabbed Tuvia, but he, too, was sucked into the vortex, and as he spun helplessly with his head submerged, Zuckerman dived in after him. While they struggled to free themselves from the grip of the swirling waters, Tuvia felt something tugging at his leg. Another person was down there, frantically trying to pull himself up. Tuvia could feel himself “being torn in two. The man below me managed to raise himself and grab hold of the strap of my rucksack. The strap broke. The man fell back and drowned.”

  Zivia, meanwhile, had fainted, and Isaac carried her on his shoulders. “The water came up to my neck. I walked first and she floated as she slept. We stepped on bodies under the water.”

  At noon, twelve hours after they had entered the sewers, the group emerged in Woodrow Wilson Square in Jolie Bord. In all, some 5,200 people managed to escape Old Town through underground canals. When the Germans took the historic district and neighboring Riverside on the following day, the dreaded Dirlewanger Commando Battalion, the psychopathic SS penal unit, killed all the wounded left behind. In hospitals, “drunken soldiers practiced Caesarean sections with bayonets,” one shocked witness reported. Thousands of civilians were rounded up, shot, burned alive, or tied to the front of tanks to act as human shields. The Russian RONA Brigade gang-raped hundreds of women literally to death.

  CHAPTER 38

  FOOLISH ERRANDS

  By the sixth week of the insurgency, as Robert Osnos was enrolling in middle school in New York, the death toll in the Warsaw Uprising was approaching 150,000, bringing the total number of deaths in the Polish capital to well over 700,000 since the start of the war. More Varsovians, both Jewish and Gentile, had died at the hands of the Nazis than American combatants had perished during the Civil War. Two-thirds of the city lay in ruins. And the Russians had still not crossed the Vistula. Marshal Rokossovsky’s 3,360 tanks were now in Praga, just across the river, within sight through the Home Army’s binoculars. But they might as well have been in Moscow for all the good they would do the insurgents, as the Kremlin had made clear. The Rising, a spokesman for Stalin informed U.S. diplomats, was “a purely adventuristic affair to which the Soviet government could not lend a hand.” The revolt, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov added in a letter to Winston Churchill, was a “provocation” launched “without the prior knowledge of Soviet military command, undermining its operational plans.”

  Neither the Americans nor the British needed to remind the Russians that Radio Moscow had repeatedly called on Varsovians to rise up. Yet amid frantic Allied efforts to get more aid to the beleaguered Poles, it was now obvious to all parties that the revolt had been doomed from the start. While Paris had been liberated a few weeks earlier in a seamless transition, with virtually no bloodshed or destruction of property, Warsaw was being cruelly sacrificed, caught between the competing furies and territorial aspirations of Stalin and Hitler.

  Home Army leaders knew by mid-September 1944 that they had no chance. By then, most Varsovians were simply praying for survival. Many, in fact, now blamed the Underground for the mass rapes, murders, and horrific destruction visited upon the population by the Nazis. The only reason they did not push for unconditional surrender was that the SS policy of massacring prisoners and civilians precluded any sort of capitulation.

  Ironically, in his lust for vengeance, Himmler had unleashed a monster even he could not control. The Russian, Kazakh, Ukrai
nian, and Azeri auxiliaries recruited by the SS to do its dirty work had run completely amok, deserting, disregarding orders, flouting military discipline, and committing such atrocities that even the most hardened Nazis were disgusted. “They’re pigs, not soldiers,” General Ernst Rode, Himmler’s chief of staff, said of the Dirlewanger penal battalion. The Wehrmacht, which always held its SS rival in contempt, very nearly mutinied after witnessing the barbarities of the SS’s eastern hordes. Some soldiers, racked by guilt, were said to have committed suicide. “I’ve got used to the sight of male corpses,” one distraught private wrote his fiancée in Germany. “They are part of everyday life; but not to the remains of women’s bodies, where a life of love and innocence once grew, or when I see the bodies of children, all of whom I consider innocent whatever their mother tongue, and all of whom I love in these horrendous times. I know you will say I must not write about it.”

  Anger and alcoholism were rampant in the discontented Wehrmacht ranks, while officers sometimes crossed SS cordons to rescue women and children from Ukrainian killing squads. “He took me and my mother by the hand,” one woman remembered of her German savior. “And he walked us past the machine gunners. The SS men yelled in protest, but the Wehrmacht officer ignored them. Thanks to him, we lived. All our neighbors were shot.”

  Some Wehrmacht officers apparently were so repulsed by the behavior of the Russian RONA Brigade that they plotted the assassination of its leader, General Kaminski. According to one version of events, his motorcade was ambushed by a Wehrmacht commando unit. Historians suggest instead that the Gestapo itself secretly executed him for dishonoring the SS. Whichever the case, the consensus among scholars is that Kaminski was killed by Germans rather than by Polish partisans, as the Nazis claimed.

  Himmler’s plan to annihilate the entire population was proving untenable. In Warsaw, there were too many witnesses. The Polish capital was not a remote ravine in Western Ukraine, where a hundred thousand bodies could be disposed of discreetly. Nor was the city a closed concentration camp with no bystanders. And, perhaps equally important, there was a difference—in the eyes of Germany’s regular army—between Christians and Jews. Though Slavs were also categorized as subhumans, the Wehrmacht would not stand for the slaughter of defenseless Polish women and children. It ran counter to the Prussian military code of conduct. In the end, Himmler had to scuttle his plan to kill every resident. Only men would be executed. The city of Warsaw itself, however, would still be erased from the map.

  A nearly mile-long trench separated the rebel and German positions in the northern suburb of Jolie Bord. Compared to the inner city, the upper-middle-class neighborhood was thinly populated, with tree-lined streets and single-family homes.

  After the twin hells of the Ghetto and Old Town, Jolie Bord seemed like a bucolic paradise to Isaac Zuckerman. The place was relatively unscathed by war. There were gardens and flowers and picket fences. Kids rode bicycles on sidewalks even as the Russians were shelling parts of the district close to the river. To Jolie Bord’s residents, the hundreds of dark, ragged figures emerging unsteadily from the sewers presented an equally astonishing sight, “all black and splattered with mud, reeking and covered in feces, swaying on their feet, their knees bloodied and torn.” They were also ridden with lice, and Mark Edelman remembered how a kind woman brought the combatants buckets of scalding hot water. “She ordered us to dunk our heads into it. When I immersed my hair, the entire surface of the water crawled with pests.”

  The ZOB was assigned to a barricade facing the Gdansk train station, Warsaw’s northernmost rail hub, where the Wehrmacht had parked the massive 1,400-ton howitzer whose shells could pulverize an entire block. The Jewish group was mostly intact. Only Simha and Boruch Spiegel were still in the city center. Spiegel had long been separated from the others, fighting in a notoriously violent mixed unit alongside fascist ONRites in what had been the southeastern quadrant of the Ghetto. This was perhaps the most lawless and anarchic sector of Warsaw, a ten-square-block area where half of the thirty documented murders of Jews by Gentile insurgents were committed during the Rising. Former greasers were part of fascist National Armed Forces Home Army units deployed in the sector, and they took to killing and robbing any Jews they came across. To cover their tracks, at one point they tried to frame Boruch Spiegel’s friend and patron Mietek “Frenchy” Pera. On September 21, according to official Home Army reports, Frenchy was arrested for looting. “Part of the evidence was that Frenchy was frequently seen in the company of a Jew.” That Jew was Spiegel, and the charges, in the opinion of Polish historians, were “concocted” by an anti-Semitic officer to “muddy the waters” and protect the real culprits. In effect, Boruch was fighting not only Germans, but also murderers within his own camp.

  Simha, meanwhile, had been sent by Zuckerman on what turned out to be a fool’s errand. Not realizing that their safe house on Forestry Boulevard was now in enemy territory, Isaac had dispatched Ratheiser to retrieve the ZOB’s documents and archive. Simha thought the exercise pointless and told Isaac so. “Why endanger ourselves for papers?” he asked. “For history,” Isaac replied. The two fought bitterly, though in the end Simha reluctantly followed orders. All contact with him had since been lost.

  Barricade duty afforded the ZOB a chance to recuperate from the trauma of Old Town. Much like the initial trench warfare on Bridge Street, there was a deceptive calm as each side took occasional potshots at the other but launched no real offensives. The Germans were busy mopping up Old Town and Riverside and driving a wedge into Midtown, closing the pockets of resistance in the city center. Jolie Bord was not as strategically important, and the Nazis had garrisons in Marymont, just to the north, which meant that the suburb was effectively surrounded from three sides and hemmed in by the Vistula. The SS could deal with it at its leisure.

  Several thousand Jewish refugees found their way into the enclave after the apartments they had been hiding in were destroyed or overrun by the Germans. There was no way of knowing, at this stage, how many of Warsaw’s Jews were still alive. Many had perished in the air raids, shelling, and fires—historians estimate as many as 4,500—and some had doubtlessly been caught up in the mass executions of Gentiles. The survivors needed to be housed and fed, and Zuckerman bitterly regretted the loss of the $40,000 the ZOB had received from the Council to Aid Jews. Since there was a lull in the fighting, Isaac got in touch with Dr. Adolf Berman, his old contact from the Council. The psychiatrist and Marxist Zionist leader was in Jolie Bord, a guest of the Home Army, and was trying to billet homeless Jews. “He immediately brought out a large sum and gave it to us,” Zuckerman recalled. “Then we started gathering Jews.”

  Isaac divided his time between his military obligations and organizing an impromptu welfare net for his destitute co-religionists. Money was not the issue. Berman appeared to have ample funds and was scrupulously honest about sharing them. The problem was that no amount of money could buy food that did not exist. The dire shortages that had plagued the inner city also reached the suburbs, where the population had swollen overnight. Civilians were worse off than combatants, since the Home Army controlled the only meager stores—grains seized from the Haberbusch and Schiele breweries and canned goods from several Wehrmacht warehouses. Isaac managed to persuade a local commander to part with some of his reserves so that no one would starve.

  The supply situation improved when an unexpected bonanza rained down from the skies on September 18, 1944. The U.S. Army Air Corps, after protracted negotiations with the Kremlin, had finally been given permission to use Soviet airspace to fly a daring daytime mission over Warsaw. Unbeknownst to most insurgents, who felt as abandoned by the outside world as their Jewish counterparts had during the Ghetto Uprising, the Home Army had a champion in Moscow: U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman. The heir to one of America’s biggest fortunes had been tirelessly pressing Stalin to lift his de facto embargo on the Poles. Harriman had long-standing ties to the country. He had co-owned Poland’s largest zinc produce
r, the Silesian-American Mining Co., until the Nazis seized it in 1939. Along with his partner Prescott Bush, father of the future U.S. president, Harriman had promoted Polish government bonds, and his investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman, had offices in Warsaw before the war.

  Harriman grasped that the future of Poland was at stake in the Rising. He also saw that the geopolitical forces that would govern postwar Eastern Europe were being shaped with little American input. His frustration was visibly mounting, and Stalin, who was receiving tens of billions of dollars of U.S. military aid under the Lend-Lease program, threw him a bone by allowing a supply flight to take off from the sprawling Poltava airfield in central Ukraine. Some one hundred and ten B-17 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 72 Mustangs, made the four-hour journey and appeared over the burning city at 1 P.M., shocking the Germans. Amazingly, only one of the giant bombers was shot down, while the agile Mustangs knocked ten Luftwaffe fighters out of the sky. Hundreds of tons of supplies filled the sky with white-and-beige-striped parachutes. Unfortunately, most of the supply pods landed in German territory. But Tuvia and Isaac managed to retrieve one, gaining Smith & Wesson revolvers as well as cigarettes, a first aid kit, and, most important, antitank guns. The American mission proved to be one of the last efforts by Poland’s Western allies to save the Home Army. Soon afterward, the British were forced to suspend their airlift because they were losing too many planes. When RAF pilots complained that much of the shooting was coming from the Russian-held bank of the Vistula, Red Army officials conceded that planes had been downed “accidentally,” adding that the Soviet Union could no longer guarantee the safety of Allied airmen who ventured over Warsaw. Henceforth, only Moscow would supply the insurgents, Stalin decreed.

  Still, stuck in Midtown, Simha Ratheiser found himself trapped in a surreal situation. Flames licked the sides of the building he was hiding in while a German military band performed in the courtyard. Simha couldn’t pry his eyes off the strange sight. He was on Forestry Boulevard in the charred ruins of the ZOB safe house, staring at trumpeters and trombonists while a flamethrower doused his hideout with jets of burning fuel. It was, he would later say, one of the weirdest experiences of the war. “Everything around going up in flames, walls caving in—and that music. Through the window I saw players blowing into their instruments and I stood still, hypnotized. Walls were collapsing, people were being killed, and there they stood and played.”

 

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