Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Selection occurred several times a day at Durchgangslager 121. “Hundreds of human beings had to parade in front of German officers who decided whom to release and whom to send to labor camp,” Ratheiser recalled. Since he was young and healthy, he was chosen for relocation to Germany to work as a slave laborer. So was his girlfriend, Irene, along with 150,000 other able-bodied Varsovians. Neither was suspected of being Jewish, or they would have been sent to Auschwitz instead. Simha, however, no longer cared. “A mood of apathy descended on me. I was fed up with the whole thing. I imagined that it would be better to be sent to Germany.” Ratheiser’s friends would not hear of it. Anything was better than a life of slavery, they argued. The war was almost over, they promised. The Germans would soon be driven out of Poland. Simha only had to hold out for a little longer. He had to find a way to escape.

  On the night of Warsaw’s surrender, Isaac Zuckerman and Tuvia Borzykowski spotted two figures in the dusk approaching their camp. They were dressed in German uniforms, walking unsteadily. At first Isaac thought they were drunken soldiers celebrating the cease-fire. But as they approached, he realized one was a woman. It was Zivia! She was limping, favoring one leg. And Mark Edelman was holding her up.

  Against unimaginable odds, they had survived. “I suppose fate had dictated that we should live,” Zivia sighed. The ZOB survivors had faced everything the Nazis could throw at them: Tiger tanks, treacherous sewer crossings, starvation, typhus, labor camps, Treblinka’s gas chambers, the Gestapo and its greasers. And they had survived it all. But their ordeal was not yet over. Unlike combatants from the Home Army, Isaac’s small group of Jewish fighters could not surrender.

  The accord the Poles signed with the Germans did not cover the People’s Army, of which the ZOB was formally a member. Communist partisans had been purposefully excluded from surrender negotiations and were not afforded any of the protections of the Geneva Convention. The Home Army felt betrayed by the Soviets and therefore punished their proxy group by leaving them out of the talks. The spiteful omission affected four hundred combatants in Jolie Bord. Despite having fought as bravely as any of the Poles, they were forsaken. The SS could shoot them on sight, torture them, or dispatch them to death camps. Although their predicament was unenviable, most veterans of the People’s Army were still in a far better position than the ZOB members. As Gentiles, veterans of the People’s Army could remove their insignias, don civilian clothing, and try to blend in with the hordes of refugees leaving the suburb. If they were lucky, and had good false documents that could withstand scrutiny, they might be able to slip through the selection process at the Pruszkow camp without being sent to Auschwitz. The ZOB had no such option. Zivia’s and Mark’s Semitic features precluded any attempt to blend in, and Tuvia’s poor Polish was equally damning. “We didn’t know what to do,” Lubetkin recalled.

  Isaac had already tried to lead a People’s Army unit across the Vistula to reach Soviet positions on the eastern bank. Unfortunately, the river had been cordoned off by German forces. Many Communist rebels were shot while entering the water and their colleagues were forced to turn back. Now there was no choice but to remain in Jolie Bord and find somewhere to hide until the Germans finished emptying the district. One ZOB member, a courier and doctor, suggested going to the home of a Gentile family that had hidden her once before. The home had not been destroyed and the family had been evacuated to the Pruszkow camp. Only the paralyzed eighty-year-old grandmother remained, along with three emaciated Jewish women, who feared leaving their hideout.

  The house was one block from the Vistula, perilously close to the German fortifications that guarded against a Red Army crossing of the river. Its elderly occupants were less than pleased when heavily armed ZOB fighters started arriving late at night in pairs. “The women knew, and we knew, too, that our presence was not to their advantage,” Tuvia Borzykowski understood. “Without us they could hope that even if the Germans discovered them they might not bother to do any harm to four old women, none of whom looked Jewish, and none of whom could be suspected of having taken part in the revolt. Our appearance robbed them of that precarious security.”

  “When we entered the basement,” he went on, “we saw all four old women sitting or lying on beds, wrapped in featherbeds. A tiny candle flickered on the table, throwing gloomy shadows on the wall. The floor was strewn with pieces of broken furniture, shoes, kitchen utensils, linen, rags. Before we could ask where there would be room for us, one of them got up and pushed away a small cupboard, revealing the entrance to a tiny room.”

  The fifteen fighters squeezed into the minuscule compartment, securing the cupboard door from the inside by wrapping a wire around a nail. The space was so tight that Edelman could not turn around. Zivia was having difficulty breathing. One fighter had to perch on a shelf because there was not enough floor space. Isaac, still deaf from the blast of the antitank gun, talked far too loudly, and he had to be continually reminded to stay quiet. He soon grew “very mad at Zivia” because “it seemed she pinched me the hardest.”

  The first night passed slowly, in excruciating discomfort. The hideout was far too small. Fifteen people simply could not fit in such conditions. In the morning, talk of relocation was interrupted by the sound of jackboots on the floor above accompanied by the all-too-familiar German screams of “Alle raus, alle raus!”—everyone out! Only Zuckerman was unable to hear the imminent danger, but all at once he felt himself pinched from every direction while unseen hands clasped his mouth.

  The old women, to their credit, kept their cool. One of them told the Germans that they had received permission from an officer to remain in their home because of their poor health. The patrolmen seemed skeptical but said they would check with their superiors. In the meantime they inquired, had the ladies seen any “armed bandits”? The women said no. The patrolmen promised to return, adding that they doubted very much that the elderly occupants could stay much longer.

  The reason for their certainty was an order issued by Heinrich Himmler shortly after the capitulation. Warsaw, the SS chief decreed, “must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.”

  The SS were taking their master’s words literally, which was why the city was being evacuated. From a prewar population of 1.35 million, only an estimated five thousand remained hidden in the rubble by the end of October 1944. They were mostly Jews, who had nowhere to run, and the stranded unfortunates became known as Robinson Crusoes. Meanwhile, demolition experts, sappers, and engineers descended on the Polish capital from throughout the Reich to launch what would prove to be the most physically destructive campaign of the entire war. By the time they were done leveling the already ravaged capital, systematically dynamiting each and every structure as they moved methodically from house to house, street to street, and neighborhood to neighborhood, the physical destruction would surpass that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

  CHAPTER 40

  DESPICABLE YIDS

  By November 1944’s first snows, Warsaw echoed with the steady blast of explosions as plumes of dust rose and fell in gaseous clusters that resembled brown mushrooms. Seen from the air, the scale of destruction was so enormous that reconnaissance pilots in the Soviet air force took to calling the former Polish capital the “cemetery.”

  “Everything beneath us lies in ruin. There is not a living soul in sight. No one is shooting at us,” one pilot reported. “The desolation is even more shocking than the hellish battles we saw the month before.”

  By this time, Simha Ratheiser was far away, as were Hanna and Janine Mortkowicz. All three were in the same refugee camp in a small village between Kielce and Krakow. Hanna and Janine’s fake documents had passed a cursory inspection at Pruszkow, and since Janine was almost seventy, they had not been deemed a potential threat. As for Simha, once he had been persuaded not to give up the struggle, it had been shockingly easy f
or him to slip out of the long line of Varsovians destined for German labor camps. He and the other ZOB fighters had melted into a disorganized queue of elderly Poles, women, and children being relocated to the south of Poland. The women helped hide them as they boarded the train, and the guards were not nearly as vigilant as they had once been. Many seemed to be simply going through the motions, as if they, too, were giving up.

  Flagging German morale was to be expected, given the bleak news from the various fronts. To the north, the Red Army had reached the banks of the Niemen in Prussia proper. To the south, Belgrade and Bucharest were in Soviet hands, and the Russians had entered Hungary. In the west, Belgium and almost all of France had been liberated. American forces had taken Aachen, the first major German city to fall into enemy hands.

  In Warsaw, no German could forget that Rokossovsky’s tank divisions still sat menacingly just across the river, biding their time. In anticipation of the eventual Soviet crossing, tens of thousands of mines were laid in the Polish capital. A specially trained Wehrmacht explosives unit, the 37th Sapper Battalion, arrived to plant booby traps throughout the ruins. Some were detonated by trip wires. Others exploded when someone turned a doorknob or a water tap. Knowing that Russian soldiers would scavenge for loot, they placed tiny charges in food cans or cigarette cases. Pens filled with a few grams of explosive, enough to remove a hand, were strategically left for the enemy to find. They were set to go off when picked up. In the end, the traps probably claimed more Jews—the “Robinson Crusoes” stranded in the ruins, scavenging at night for food—than Red Army soldiers.

  On the train out of Warsaw, it was possible that Simha passed Hanna and Janine in one of the compartments without knowing them. They were likely on the same transport because they ended up at the same depot, an abysmally overcrowded makeshift refuge, rutted in frozen mud and reeking of human excrement. It was in a former shtetl called Suchedniow, chosen partly because its Jewish inhabitants had been sent to Birkenau a few months earlier after working as slave laborers in a nearby munitions plant. Homes in the town of five thousand inhabitants were mostly vacant, reducing the need to build flimsy barracks and pitch tent cities. The Mortkowiczes were mired there for months. Simha didn’t stay more than a few days, just long enough to send a message to a contact in the area from the Council to Aid Jews, someone he knew from his travels in 1943 as a ZOB courier. He needed false documents, money, and a gun. And he needed to get to Krakow. Ratheiser was going back into the resistance business.

  Four weeks had passed since Zivia, Isaac, Tuvia, and Mark descended into their infernally cramped hideout on Promyka Street in Jolie Bord. It was the longest, most trying month of their lives. The claustrophobia, boredom, unending darkness—candles only for emergency use—and prolonged periods of silence drove one member of the group to a nervous breakdown. He tried to kill himself at one point. His whimpering at times grew so loud and put them in such danger of discovery that there was talk of suffocating him.

  They were all close to losing the psychological battle. One after another they succumbed to depression. To combat the crippling inertia, they devised activities to preoccupy themselves. They took turns giving lectures on a wide variety of topics: Zionism, fascism, American history. One ZOB member was a bacteriologist by profession, and they learned everything there was to know about germs. Every morning someone pretended to be a radio announcer, reenacting past news programs. Afternoons were for mind games: riddles and quizzes. Four o’clock was reserved for joke hour. The schedule was rigidly adhered to, thanks to the one working wristwatch among them. Isaac insisted on it to maintain morale. Mark and Zivia, who had spent a year cooped up between risings, were better prepared to endure the stifling boredom. But eventually even they showed signs of cracking.

  Nights were their only solace, when the fifteen fighters could replenish their sanity with brief excursions outside the cupboard. Once darkness fell, teams took turns leaving the hideout to go on scavenging expeditions. They wrapped rags around their feet to muffle their footsteps and crept past the German patrols in their search for provisions. Water was the overriding priority. “We budgeted the precious liquid with mathematical precision,” Tuvia recalled. “What we managed to collect during our nocturnal forays was dirty and had a bad odor.” It had to be filtered and strained through linens, and was then shared by nineteen people, including the old women. It often amounted to as little as a cup a day per person. Since there was never enough for bathing, no one had washed since the surrender. They were all infested with lice, and the stench in the hideout grew so overwhelming that it threatened to give them away. Already the smell had attracted a cat that kept scratching at their cupboard’s false door. Edelman had to strangle the creature lest it lead the Germans to them. The Wehrmacht patrolmen returned regularly to check on the four old women who were living in the house openly. The soldiers seemed to be decent and took to calling one of the elderly castaways “grandmother.” They’d leave her a few cigarettes at each visit. Once, when Tuvia’s girlfriend and another female ZOB member got caught late at night foraging for food and water in one of the neighboring houses, they told the patrolmen they were relatives of the old woman. The privates led them to a well and helped them carry pails of water back to their “grandmother.” The next day the kind Germans even brought some food.

  Toward the second week of November, the patrolmen announced that this was their last visit. Their unit was being rotated out of the sector, to be replaced by the Waffen-SS. The entire area, they also warned, was slated next for demolition. The four old women could not stay any longer. They were to be relocated the following day. A wagon was being arranged to pick them up.

  Inside the cupboard there was panic. Isaac and Zivia stared at each other in horror. What would they do? Where could they go? How would they slip past the new SS detachment? One thing was clear. Their refuge had run its course. They had another two or three days at most before sappers reached their location. “Get us some help,” Zivia pleaded before the women were carted away.

  Krakow had not been destroyed, and its medieval streets teemed with refugees and Mercedes limousines speeding in and out of Wawel Castle, the enormous Gothic fortress that perched high atop the ancient city.

  Simha Ratheiser did not know the city well and was nervous about his meeting. It had been arranged through the Council to Aid Jews, and he had followed all their instructions and given all the correct passwords. But something was amiss. His instinct told him so. Krakow was not Warsaw. The Germans had always held an iron grip over the ancient town, and not even Hitler could find fault with its architectural treasures. Legions of Nazi bureaucrats had made the old Austrian protectorate their home in Poland. The prevailing language heard around the fountains in the ornate squares was German. The signs in all the fully stocked stores and Viennese-style cafés were in German. And the Gestapo went to great lengths to protect the thousands of colonial administrators posted there, as Isaac Zuckerman had discovered in 1942 when the local ZOB cell had been infiltrated, nearly costing him his life.

  The city filled Simha with unease. “I had a feeling that Gestapo agents were everywhere,” he recalled. Already he had been stopped several times during random document checks, which seemed far more frequent than in Warsaw. His new false papers had passed muster, but he knew they were not of the highest quality. They were forgeries rather than the originals commonly used in Warsaw. Their serial numbers could be cross-checked against master lists, with disastrous consequences. Nor did Simha have a backstory to go with his new identity in case of interrogation. All this made him question the wisdom of getting involved with the Krakow resistance. Local underground activists did not inspire him with confidence. They acted like rank amateurs compared to the seasoned conspirators in Warsaw. To Simha, many of them seemed destined for Gestapo torture chambers. He started keeping his distance, and when one contact didn’t show up for a meeting, Ratheiser concluded that he was in grave danger. After everything he had been through, it made little s
ense to fall prey to a Gestapo trap this late in the game. The wisest course would be to get out of town and to return to more familiar ground. “I was sure the SS would be looking for me sooner or later. I knew I had to run and go back to Warsaw.”

  Still trapped in the cupboard in Jolie Bord, the ZOB fighters were down to ten people. They had sent out two groups to try to organize a rescue mission. The first pair got caught, forcing Isaac to send another party. Days had passed, and there was no word from them.

  Early one morning, the remaining fighters were startled from their sleep by the sound of heavy footsteps on the floorboards above them. “It seemed as if several platoons of soldiers had invaded the house,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “We lay motionless, tense with fear, afraid to make the slightest noise. The commotion above us was gaining in intensity. We could also hear them running around in nearby basements. At one point quick steps ran to our basement and approached the cupboard behind which we were hiding. I already saw in my imagination ten bodies lying in pools of blood.”

  The Germans came and went throughout the next two days, returning always in greater numbers, moving furniture, shifting gear, and delivering supplies. It dawned on Tuvia and Isaac that sappers were setting up their temporary headquarters in the house, a base from which to blow up the surrounding buildings. This kept everyone confined to the cupboard, and made venturing out for toilet breaks extremely risky. “We got to know the soldiers working around our house,” Tuvia went on. “We could recognize each by his voice and even knew some of their names. The ones I remember best were Max and Willie, both experienced looters.”