Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Ratheiser was so mesmerized by the band in full military regalia that he momentarily forgot how furious he was with Zuckerman for sending him into a death trap. The building was surrounded. The entire street was filled with Germans and Ukrainians, who had launched an offensive into Midtown, pushing the Home Army farther back and stranding Simha and a few other unfortunate holdouts.

  This was not the first time Ratheiser had been separated from fellow Jewish fighters or stuck in enemy territory. During the initial Old Town siege he spent a week with a Home Army unit stationed in the old Municipal Courthouse building. His temporary defection from the People’s Army had not been political. Simha had simply been restless and bored with trench duty. He could never sit still, Edelman laughed of his irrepressible younger colleague. “This river rat was always squirming his way everywhere, finding out everything.” Indeed, Simha’s clothes were so filthy from his constant forays across German positions that his Home Army unit had nicknamed him Mud.

  But this time the situation was different. There was nowhere to run, no tiny crevice to squeeze through, no breach in Nazi defenses through which to escape. The entire block was sealed and he, his girlfriend, Irene, and Marisa Sawicka were stuck. They had jumped out a second-story window only to find themselves pinned down by enemy fire, and had retreated back into the same burning edifice from which they had fled. Only its latrine was not on fire, a communal bathroom on the ground floor. It contained a large water cistern whose contents had long since been drained by parched residents. They climbed inside, momentarily safe. But after a few hours, Simha felt a stinging sensation in his eyes. The pain soon grew excruciating—it felt as if his retinas had completely dried out. His vision grew blurry and then he lost sight entirely. Exposure to smoke or noxious gasses that accumulated in the cistern was blinding Ratheiser. When it became too painful to blink, Marisa and Irene, who apparently were not affected by the fumes, took turns spitting on his eyes and licking them. All the while, the jarring thuds and reverberating clangs of objects crashing on the cistern’s steel cover kept Simha from passing out. But the structure around them was slowly collapsing.

  After twenty-four hours Ratheiser could no longer bear being trapped in the metallic tomb. His vision was gradually returning and he was desperate to get out of the water tank before it became completely buried by rubble, imprisoning them inside. It was dusk when they emerged. In the fading light, Simha could see that the streets were still swarming with Germans and their Ukrainian henchmen. They had set up a sector headquarters in an undamaged church next door, surrounding it with sandbags and machine gun nests while snipers and lookouts were posted in the belfry. Making a run for it was suicide. Simha and his two female companions had no choice but to stay put and find a place to hide. The fires set the day before were still smoldering, but Ratheiser, from his Ghetto experience, knew that the cellars had probably survived intact. The Germans realized this as well, for trucks with mobile loudspeakers were slowly prowling the streets, calling for Poles to come out and surrender. Civilians would not be harmed, the megaphones promised. They would be taken to a large DP camp outside the city for future relocation. In reality, one hundred thousand people were already crammed behind the hastily strung barbed wire around the displaced persons camp, without food, water, or any sanitary facilities.

  There were very few takers. Poles by now knew what “relocation” meant in Nazi-speak. Simha was also well aware of what would happen to Marisa and Irene if they fell into Ukrainian hands. Trying to escape with two young and attractive women in tow was out of the question. The three of them had to hide. Scouring the charred ruins, Simha found a small window to a basement filled with people. Simha was not surprised. He had witnessed similar scenes many times during the Ghetto Uprising. Inside the cellar, it was stifling hot. Row after row of terrified civilians and worn combatants lay side by side, pressing their faces to the cooler earthen floor. The building above them had burned to its rafters, and many people had wet rags spread over their backs to prevent falling cinders from searing their skin. Ratheiser recognized a few fellow Jews in the sea of pale, soot-streaked faces. He, Irene, and Marisa crawled into the crowded basement and glumly lay down next to the others.

  For the first time since the war, for the only time he could ever remember, Simha was ready to quit. He was spent, mentally and physically, and he no longer had the strength or will to fight.

  In the waning days of September 1944, as the British liberated Brussels and Antwerp and American troops reached the Siegfried Line on Germany’s western frontier, the SS finally moved on the suburb of Jolie Bord.

  Only a few pockets of resistance were left by then. The Home Army was still holding out in isolated parts of Midtown, but the large residential district of Mokotow had just fallen. In Mokotow the Nazis had changed tactics. To spur surrender negotiations, General Erich von dem Bach, the senior German commander, had permitted a two-hour cease-fire to evacuate nine thousand residents from the doomed neighborhood. The gesture was meant to reassure Home Army leaders that civilians would no longer be murdered if the rebels capitulated. After nearly two months of uninterrupted fighting and almost twenty-six thousand German casualties, including ten thousand dead, Von dem Bach was willing to make concessions to finally end the Rising.

  The Panzer division that had subdued Mokotow, meanwhile, moved north to crush Jolie Bord, the last big enclave left standing. In anticipation of a final battle, the residents of the northern suburb delivered spare clothes and food to the remaining combatants on the front lines. Platoon commanders distributed the jealously hoarded supplies. “There were shiny new automatic weapons, tinned meat and milk,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “We treated each package as a dear friend.”

  At 6 A.M. on Friday, September 29, the Germans struck, unleashing an artillery barrage on a scale not yet seen in Warsaw. Virtually every field gun and howitzer piece in the city trained on the holdout suburb. Woodrow Wilson and Lelewel Squares were pulverized. “Every house in the quarter was hit several times by shells,” Tuvia recalled. “We were deafened by the almost continuous explosions, blinded by the thick clouds of smoke and dust.”

  When at last the artillery fell silent and the dust began to settle, Tuvia and his comrades “saw all around us the long necks of tanks. They appeared suddenly out of the clouds of smoke, spitting fire. Behind them marched columns of infantry.” Tuvia, Zivia, Isaac, and Mark were scattered at different points along the defensive barricades. Zuckerman had been put in charge of a front-line Home Army unit equipped with British PIAT antitank guns that had been airdropped by the Allies. None of his soldiers had experience with the heavy weapon, which weighed nearly forty pounds and had to be fired at very close range—less than fifty yards—to be effective. But they bravely ran out in front of the advancing Panzers and discharged their bulky weapons before diving for cover. Within a few hours, most of them were dead, and the few still alive could no longer hear anything because they had not been warned that earplugs needed to be worn when using the PIAT. “The echo of that shooting made me completely deaf,” Isaac said, recalling the bizarre sensation of seeing buildings crumble, explosion flash, and bullets ricochet around him, all in total silence.

  Zivia, meanwhile, was missing in action. She had been the only woman in a People’s Army platoon in a forward base near the Gdansk train station. When the platoon’s position was overrun, no one could find her. “The whole unit had come back, except for Zivia.” Zuckerman was devastated. A search party was organized, and when it came back without her, his thoughts turned from German tanks and the war, from everything but his brave, foolhardy wife, who had insisted on fighting with the men, who had made such a fuss that they had relented and given her a rifle she could barely lift. Like Simha before him, Isaac had reached his breaking point. Paralyzed with grief, isolated in the ringing silence of his shattered eardrums, all he wanted was to curl up in a corner and seek solace in alcohol. “I asked one of the Gentiles to bring me some spirits to ease my worry,” I
saac later wrote, confessing that he was spent. At long last, his will to fight was gone.

  By Saturday, September 30, only Mark Edelman was still in the thick of it, defending a police station being stormed by a battalion of tanks. His group was taking heavy losses. An elderly man fighting alongside Mark was shooting at a Panzer from a window when the armored colossus suddenly fired back. The old man took the shell square in the chest. “Do you want to know what color a person who has taken a direct hit from a tank shell leaves on a wall?” Mark would later ask. “Lilac-pink.”

  Another fellow combatant, a young man named Carl, simply disappeared when Edelman turned around for an instant. There one moment, vanished the next. As he frantically searched the blood-spattered rooms of the police outpost, it suddenly dawned on Mark that of the twenty-one people in his unit, he was the only one alive.

  CHAPTER 39

  ZIVIA’S CUPBOARD

  On October 2, 1944, Warsaw capitulated. After sixty-three days and nearly two hundred thousand fatalities, the longest, largest, and bloodiest uprising of the Second World War was over. The Home Army, following protracted negotiations, agreed to lay down its weapons on condition that the Wehrmacht, rather than the SS, administer the surrender. Under the terms of the armistice, civilians were not to be molested and combatants were to be treated as prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

  Nazi pledges of clemency, however, would not extend to Jews, as Simha, Isaac, Boruch, and Mark knew full well. Ratheiser was the first of the ZOB fighters to confront this reality. He had spent weeks in the cellar on Forestry Boulevard, subsisting initially on rainwater collected at night from buckets placed outside, and later from a shallow hand-dug well that provided a trickle of murky liquid. Food, ironically, was less of an issue. Residents of the building had hidden stores of tinned goods in the basement—just enough to prevent starvation.

  While they were in the cellar there had been talk among the handful of Jews about what to do when the Germans finally uncovered the hideout. One older ZOB fighter, Joseph Sak, produced a vial of potassium cyanide. Snatching the poison, Simha shouted, “You can’t do this!” The memory of Mordechai Anielewicz’s mass suicide still stung. “You don’t have the luxury” of taking the easy way out, Ratheiser admonished Sak.

  In the end, it was a Ukrainian patrol that found them. “Don’t shoot, there are women down here,” Simha called out, in a calculated gambit, when the SS men stuck their rifles through the cave entrance. Ratheiser was hoping that the Ukrainian auxiliaries would not toss grenades into the basement if it held the promise of war booty and women. The SS had routinely wiped out shelters filled with civilians. One of their favorite methods of flushing out cellars, before the water mains were all destroyed, had been to run fire hoses through coal chutes to drown everyone inside. Parents would put children on their shoulders as the water level rose, and by the time it receded, the young were often the only ones alive.

  In this case, Simha was proven correct. Greed and lechery trumped the murderous instincts of the SS auxiliaries. The thugs held their fire. In guttural, slurred shouts, they ordered everyone out. Their glassy gazes—some seemed drunk—immediately fell on Simha’s girlfriend, Irene, another Jewish girl, Stasia, and Marisa, the ZOB’s faithful Gentile advocate. Their jewelry was the first thing that caught the pillagers’ eyes, and the three women were forced to relinquish bracelets and earrings.

  The group was then led through the ruins of the city, squinting in the sun, which many had not seen in nearly a month. The devastation that had occurred during the time Simha had been hiding underground was staggering. The only standing structures seemed to be chimneys and the occasional church steeple. Everything else lay in mangled heaps. Some of the jagged mounds were several stories high. Bomb craters rendered streets impassable. It was hard to find one’s bearings in the mess. “The ruins are exceptionally photogenic,” a cameraman for the German news agency Transocean marveled. “A panoply of destruction, the signs of battle are omnipresent: spent cartridges and mortar shells split in half; enormous piles of twisted rebar; here, the burned-out shell of a tank; there, a torn parachute swaying in the wind from the top corner of a lone building.”

  Simha still had enough of a sense of direction to notice that the Ukrainians were not leading them toward one of the civilian collection centers that had been set up in Midtown. They were headed for the Ukrainian SS barracks in the former Ghetto, near Peacock Prison. Ratheiser shuddered, overcome by guilt and fear for his friends. “They were probably taking us there to rape the girls,” he realized. It appeared that Marisa, Irene, and Stasia would pay the price for his gamble, which he now regretted. After they were done with the women, the Ukrainians might kill them all anyway, so as not to leave any witnesses to their private amusements.

  Fate, providence, or simply dumb luck intervened. Along the way to the Ghetto, a Wehrmacht officer stopped the Ukrainians and asked where they were headed. Perhaps guessing what lay in store for Simha’s group, the German officer ordered that the prisoners be turned over to the Wehrmacht and taken to a transit station. These collection centers were almost all in churches, the only structures still standing. Ratheiser and the others were marched to a big church in Wola, St. Adalbert’s on Wolska Steet. Thousands had been murdered at St. Adalbert’s during the first week of the Rising, and its cemetery had been transformed by the SS into a makeshift crematorium of huge fire pits. Refugees now crammed inside the soaring Gothic brick edifice. Wounded women rested on cots, and row after of row of baby carriages were parked beneath the stained glass windows in the nave. In packed pews, children sat on their mothers’ laps. The elderly slumped shoulder to shoulder with teens. A low, steady murmur reverberated in the vaulted chamber as anxious families pondered their future. Warsaw was being depopulated. Its residents were being dispersed to labor, concentration, and refugee camps. The hushed conversations were punctuated by the echoing click of the embedded steel in the jackboots of German guards walking up and down the marble aisles.

  Relatively few men of fighting age were in the assembled crowd, which made Simha’s group stand out. Ratheiser’s fellow ZOB veteran, Joseph Sak, attracted particular attention. Sak had pronounced Semitic features, which was partly why he had favored suicide over surrender. An officer zeroed in on him and asked his name. Sak had been a professor of Polish literature before the war and rattled off the surname of a Slavic literary hero, prompting the amused German to inquire: “And how long have you had that name?”

  To Simha’s surprise, his friend was not taken away. The officer obviously suspected that Sak was Jewish, but for unknown reasons decided not to press further. Perhaps he was tired of the killing. Perhaps he was not an anti-Semite. Or maybe he was fed up with the war and no longer cared about Hitler’s plans for the master race. In any event, Sak was allowed to join one of the long queues of refugees marching toward the bombed-out train station. These lines snaked throughout the demolished city, stretching for miles, an endless procession of bedraggled citizens carrying meager belongings wrapped in bedsheets. The SS were no longer shooting at civilians, and the columns moved slowly. The panicked flights of the past few months, with women clutching children, with the elderly stumbling and being riddled with bullets, with people being slaughtered by the hundreds on the streets, were mercifully over.

  Trains between Warsaw and a huge new selection camp in Pruszkow, formally known as Durchgangslager 121, ran in a continuous loop. The facility was in the industrial exurb of Pruszkow, where Joanna, Hanna, and Janine Mortkowicz had lived during the early part of the war. It was about ten miles west of the capital, and had been chosen because of the extensive rail network that had fed its factories. Now the former industrial center processed people; an endless sea of them, packed tighter than sardines. Durchgangslager 121 had to be one of the most densely populated places on the planet. A whole city was crammed into an area not much bigger than an amusement park. A total of 650,000 people would eventually pass through its gates as Wars
aw was systematically emptied.

  The purpose of the new Pruszkow camp was to sort out which Poles were fit for slave labor in the Reich, which undesirables would be put on cattle cars bound for Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and which would be lucky enough to be released and relocated to undestroyed cities like Krakow. To accommodate the massive influx of refugees, the Germans hastily erected barracks within a barbed wire perimeter that spanned a dozen football fields. But these crude facilities were overwhelmed within a few days, creating a sanitary crisis that German propaganda films carefully omitted to mention. “Three hundred thousand people are now enjoying the fresh air,” a Nazi newsreel declared on October 6, “after weeks spent in sewers and underground cellars.”

  Hanna and Janine Mortkowicz were among the huddled throng at Pruszkow’s Durchgangslager 121, standing for hours to wait their turn for a cup of water from cisterns the Germans trucked in daily. Hanna, like countless other members of split-up families, had no idea where her daughter was. She had not seen Joanna in over a year and had no way of knowing if she was alive. In the Pruszkow camp, thousands of people were frantically looking for loved ones, putting up so many notices on Red Cross message boards that the paper pleas covered one another in layers. Simha, after a few days in Pruszkow, also searched for his parents. His mother, he felt certain, was still alive. He constantly scanned the crowds, hoping for a glimpse of her familiar blond mane.