The scavenging sappers often prowled the basement, looking for keepsakes. “I remember one dramatic moment when Max and Willie came up to the cupboard, both holding flashlights. We saw the light through the cracks; it wandered from face to face, and though the two men could not see us, we felt as though they were probing our hideout. Then we heard them touching the cupboard, and we braced ourselves for the long-expected moment, but all we heard was Willie saying to Max ‘There’s some grain here.’ We realized they had found a sack in the heap of rags lying around the cabinet. They took the grain and went away.”
Meanwhile the detonations around them grew louder, closer, and more intense. Soon the sappers would be finished with their work, and they would then blow up the house in which they had set up their temporary headquarters. Isaac was growing frantic with despair. By his forty-second day in the hellish tomb, he could no longer sleep. “That night was a night of horrors. I had nightmares and then woke up to discover that it wasn’t a dream at all: I dreamed that the Germans had burst in on us. We heard the banging of hammers on the wall I was lying next to. We prepared our weapons, our grenades, so that we wouldn’t be taken alive,” he recalled. Then everything went quiet. The sappers had gone on a break. “Suddenly we heard a knock at the door, and shouts of ‘Celina, Celina.’ ”
Celina was Zivia’s code name. It was the rescue party. Tuvia’s girlfriend had managed to reach Home Army operatives at a hospital in one of the satellite camps that handled the overflow from Pruszkow. She told the doctors there that some Home Army officers were trapped in Jolie Bord. “She had to be careful since she didn’t know whom she was telling it to,” Zuckerman recalled. “But it turned out that the director of the hospital was one of the Righteous Gentiles. He and his comrades formed a delegation of six volunteers who had [fake] Red Cross passes.”
The “Red Cross” delegation arrived at the perfect moment, just as the soldiers had gone to eat at a nearby mobile cantina. The rescue party was led by a young Jewish doctor, Ala Margolis, who was familiar to Edelman because she had previously worked with the Bund. Margolis stayed on the Aryan side during the Ghetto period, posing as a Gentile. She brought stretchers and white smocks with her now to give credence to the Red Cross cover story, and she ordered that Edelman and another ZOB fighter with pronounced Semitic features have their faces wrapped in gauze. These two were placed on the gurneys, while Isaac and some of the others played the role of orderlies and carried them.
“Passing Germans looked at us with curiosity,” Tuvia recalled. “We were the only civilians around. Occasionally a German soldier would ask, pointing at the stretcher, ‘Is he dead yet?’ ” Anna, a pretty blond nurse who spoke fluent German, flirted with the guards at each checkpoint, warning “Achtung, Fleckfieber,” which meant “Watch out, typhus,” which produced the intended result: The party was waved on without inspection. She even persuaded one group of friendly patrolmen to supply her with a horse-drawn wagon so the orderlies would not have to carry their heavy loads all the way to the hospital. The wagon was driven by an old Wehrmacht veteran with an eye patch. When Anna asked where he had been wounded, the old veteran cursed that it had been during the Ghetto Uprising. “Despicable Yids,” he growled. Anna shook her head sympathetically, while in the back of the wagon Isaac had to nudge Tuvia to keep him from bursting into laughter.
CHAPTER 41
MARK AND THE MOHICANS
On the night of January 16, 1945, as temperatures plunged far below freezing, the western outskirts of Warsaw groaned with the rumble of thousands of engines. Looking out the frosted window of their new hideout, a rented brick tenement in the exurban town of Grodzik, the startled members of the ZOB witnessed column after column of vehicles exiting the Polish capital. Tanks, trucks, half-tracks, Mercedes and BMWs, motorcycles, and horse-drawn wagons—all manner of conveyances clogged the roads heading toward the Reich. Mark, Isaac, and Zivia looked at one another, stunned. The Germans were pulling out.
Early the next morning, when the familiar charcoal gray of the Wehrmacht was replaced by olive-green Buicks and Fords bearing large MADE IN THE USA labels, there was momentary confusion. Only the crudely welded T-34 tanks, with their distinctively rounded turrets and ingeniously sloping deflective armor, were unmistakably Soviet. The Red Army, riding a fleet of Lend-Lease American vehicles, had rolled into Warsaw.
The jubilation was immediate. Lubetkin, Zuckerman, and Edelman threw on their threadbare boots and rushed out into Grodzik’s market square to greet the liberators. Thousands of others had already done the same, tears freezing on their sunken cheeks as they jumped and shrieked and waved at the bewildered soldiers. It was less the sight of the fur-clad Russians that filled them with glee than the sudden exhilaration of being safe at last from imminent death. All at once the specter of the SS, of torture chambers and killing squads, of concentration camps and random cruelty, had been lifted. The sudden rush of freedom was overwhelming. Many broke down and sobbed with joy.
Mark Edelman was not among them. Scanning the exuberant revelers who were hugging, kissing, singing, and passing bottles of vodka around, he was suddenly overcome by sorrow. Of the thousands of flushed faces in the ecstatic crowd, he recognized none as Jewish. This square had been inhabited almost exclusively by Jews before the war. Now only the broad blond visages of elated Slavs stared back at him, chanting the Polish national anthem—“And Poland Has Not Yet Perished.”
Mark had never felt as alone as he did at that moment, surrounded by thousands of cheering people. The enormity of what had been lost suddenly hit him. Now that he was no longer consumed with concern for his immediate survival, he realized for the first time that nothing would ever be the same. Grodzik’s town center would never again reverberate with Yiddish. Its Market Square would never again scramble to shut down before the Sabbath. In Warsaw, Cordials Street was gone. So were the Jewish cabarets, the bagel bakeries, the synagogues, Gold’s Pharmacy, the jazz bars, Haberdasher’s Row, the row of shoe stores on Frog Street.
The list of missing landmarks was endless and heartbreaking. Half a millennium of Polish-Jewish culture had been wiped out and nothing could bring back the millions of dead. In Poland, Jews now had only a past. The future had been erased. “It was the saddest day of my life,” Edelman would later say of January 17, 1945. After the liberation festivities, he crawled into bed, refused to eat, and did not reemerge for weeks.
Post-traumatic stress disorder can affect individuals in vastly different ways. Stoic Zivia, usually so self-possessed that many thought her cold, wept uncontrollably. Boruch Spiegel lost his memory. Seventy years later, he drew a blank when asked about the period preceding the Soviet entry into Warsaw and his first weeks of freedom from Nazi persecution. Tuvia Borzykowski lost the ability to feel free. He developed a claustrophobic fear of small rooms, and for months he could not enter one without feeling that he was trapped. As for Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak, she lost the most precious commodity a child can possess: the ability to laugh, smile, and feel joy.
Simha Ratheiser was not even aware that he suffered from the stress. Only years later did he learn that every night, after he fell asleep, he cried, screamed, and thrashed in bed as though he were being tortured. In the mornings he awoke refreshed, unaware of the nightmares. Like countless other Varsovians, Ratheiser had returned to the capital as soon as the Soviets swept in. “I finally realized that it was over,” he recalled of walking through the endless ocean of ruins, trying to find his bearings. Nearly 90 percent of the city had been destroyed by the time the Germans pulled out, leaving Simha with an overwhelming sense of emptiness.
“I had been too busy doing a million things before to think about anything,” he recalled. Now he and Irene understood clearly that they were looking “at a different world” from the one they had grown up in. Ratheiser, however, had still not grasped the full magnitude of the seismic political shift that Poland was undergoing. Encountering a Soviet patrol, Simha mouthed off to the rude Russian soldiers. “Are you craz
y?” Irene grabbed him by the arm. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“I was naïve,” Simha later acknowledged. “I thought the Soviets were our friends.”
It did not take long for most Poles to comprehend that they had simply traded one occupier for another, and that the Red Army was not just passing through Poland on its way to Berlin. Within a few short weeks, the country’s fate had effectively been sealed at Yalta in Crimea, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill gathered in February 1945 to decide Europe’s postwar reorganization. That the meeting was held in Stalin’s backyard, at his summer palace on the shores of the Black Sea, was a testament to the Soviet dictator’s extraordinary negotiating position. He had forced the ailing and visibly frail American president to make the taxing Atlantic crossing and then fly over dangerous German-controlled airspace to come to him. Roosevelt had done so, in the words of one U.S. negotiator, because it had been his long-standing policy to accommodate the Soviets: “Give them everything they want, for after all, they are killing Germans, they are fighting our battles for us.”
Statistics proved the statement true. Soviet losses were sixty-five times greater than America’s in World War II, and eight out of ten Germans who died in the war had fallen on the Eastern Front. Three-quarters of Hitler’s forces were engaged against the Red Army, leaving the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, the Free French, Polish, Czech, and other Allied formations to face what were often second-rate or reserve Wehrmacht divisions. The battles raging in the Western European theater were undeniably important, but the war had been fought primarily in the Soviet Union—in the slaughterhouses of Ukraine and Belarus and on the ravaged Russian steppe. More than twenty million Soviet citizens had died fending off Hitler. And now that Stalin’s T-34 tanks were within forty miles of Berlin, he was demanding a geopolitical return on his bloody investment. Although he wanted all of Eastern Europe, Poland represented the jewel in the wrested crown, the largest and most populous of the sought-after acquisitions.
It was also the biggest thorn in Soviet-U.S. relations. The “Polish question,” as the fate of a free and democratic Poland was referred to in the flurry of diplomatic communications between Washington, London, and Moscow, had been the main sticking point in preparations for the Big Three talks at Yalta. In the run-up to the conference, Churchill had been vehemently opposed to acquiescing to Stalin’s land grab, as had U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman, who bombarded Roosevelt with increasingly desperate pleas to stem “the barbarian invasion.”
Once in Yalta, the recalcitrant Churchill was largely shunned, treated as a third wheel in the negotiations. Stalin monopolized nearly all of Roosevelt’s time, and the British prime minister barely had a moment alone with the exhausted American president. Harriman, who had forged a close personal bond with Churchill from his time in London as Roosevelt’s point man on the Lend-Lease program, also found himself sidelined in Yalta. “Harriman was never included in the private talks on Poland,” his biographer bitterly noted, “although he undoubtedly realized better than any other American present how seriously Poland threatened all of Roosevelt’s postwar dreams.”
Roosevelt would subsequently come under criticism from some historians for sacrificing Eastern Europe to keep Stalin happy and to secure his pledge to enter the war against Japan. In fairness, the FDR who posed feebly next to a beaming Stalin on the shores of the Black Sea was not the same leader who twelve years earlier had rallied Americans from the depths of the Great Depression. “He is a very sick man,” Churchill’s physician commented during the Yalta Conference. “He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries in the brain in an advanced stage, so that I give him only a few months to live.” The diagnosis proved prophetic. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage exactly two months later. On April 5, 1945, one week before the U.S. president passed away, the United States formally withdrew the accreditation of Poland’s London government in exile and recognized the new Provisional Government of National Unity, the puppet pro-Communist regime installed in the eastern town of Lublin by the NKVD. In London a sorrowful Churchill informed shocked Polish officials that “his heart bled for them, but the brutal facts could not be overlooked.” The Polish question had been relegated, he sighed, to “little more than a grievance and a vast echoing cry of pain.”
Meanwhile in Warsaw, the population had rebounded to 162,000 by spring 1945, as people slowly began to return from labor and concentration camps. “I cannot believe how fortunate I am to be alive,” Hanna Mortkowicz wrote a relative in her first postwar letter. “Five and a half years of torment—of having to hide, and drift like beggars from village to suburb, of being blackmailed, and running for dear life. Two years of not seeing my child … Warsaw no longer exists. Of our family on Mama’s side only Lutek and Genia were murdered. On your side the toll is more tragic: Helen, Alex, and his wife were killed in the Lodz Ghetto; Kasia in Warsaw; Helka and Lola in the Eastern lands. I have yet to find out about Joseph and Martha’s family in Warsaw, but there’s little chance they survived.”
Hanna still had no news of Joanna’s whereabouts, though she was now frantically searching for any trace of her daughter. Simha was also still desperately looking for his parents. Last he had heard, they were hidden in a farming village outside the capital. He tracked down the peasant family that had initially sheltered his mother and father in 1943, but the family had since lost contact with them. The farmers did say they were almost certain Simha’s father was still alive and that he had worked as a laborer for the Germans. Ratheiser thought this an utter fabrication. How could his father, a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jew, survive so long right under the Germans’ noses? Maybe his mother, but never his dad. Simha reacted furiously to what he presumed to be a lie. The peasants, he was sure, were playing games with him. “I went crazy and almost killed them,” he recalled. “I kept screaming, where are my parents? What did you do with my parents?” Simha still carried a gun, and he might have used it had Irene not calmed him down.
Only later did Simha learn that the peasants had actually been telling the truth. One of the first governmental agencies established in Warsaw was a bureau of missing persons, the Office for the Search for Relatives. The office eventually found both Zvi and Miriam, who had become separated, alive and well. Once reunited with his parents, Simha heard firsthand the astonishing story of how his dad had duped the Germans by bandaging his face and pretending to be mute and had worked as a groom in the Wehrmacht stables until the day the Russians rode in.
Simha was astounded. He had never really respected his fervently religious father. He had always found him hapless and mystical, strange in dress and manner, someone from another era. But after hearing of his surprising resourcefulness, Simha saw his dad in a different light, and he never again made the mistake of underestimating him.
By the time Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak located her daughter, Hitler was dead and Nazi Germany had unconditionally surrendered. In the two years that had passed since they last saw each other, Hanna had aged tremendously. Though she was not yet forty, she looked ten years older. The poor diet, the accumulated stress, the lack of sunlight and fresh air had had a devastating effect. All this time, Hanna had wondered how Joanna had grown up: how her long dark hair would look, how her irrepressible personality and mischievous streak had evolved, whether her reading and writing had progressed, whether her smile was still as radiant as she remembered. “She thought a tearful little girl with long plaits would fall into her arms,” Joanna said, describing the tense reunion. “Instead she found a short-cropped, self-possessed, resolute person” who stared at her suspiciously. Joanna failed to recognize her own mother. “To me, she looked like a stranger.”
The Soviet takeover of Poland proved an unexpected boon for Zuckerman and the ZOB. Though Isaac was not a Communist, his decision during the first days of the Rising to join the People’s Army now began to pay lasting dividends, not only for the ZOB but for tens of thousands of surviving Polish Jews.
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p; Isaac’s earliest indication that he would enjoy an elevated status in postwar Poland occurred on the first day that the Red Army entered Warsaw. A Soviet intelligence officer came to his door, saying that a brigadier general had requested an audience with him and Zivia. Baffled at the uncharacteristically polite invitation, Zuckerman was amazed to discover that the Soviet general had arranged a banquet in his honor. Apparently Jacob Berman, head of the new Moscow-backed Polish secret police that had replaced the Gestapo, told the Russian commander about the ZOB’s exploits. Berman had spent the war in Moscow, being trained by the NKVD. But his brother Adolf had been Mordechai Anielewicz’s party boss and worked closely with Isaac after the Ghetto Uprising providing aid and shelter to Jews. That family connection now gave the ZOB a direct pipeline to Poland’s new rulers. The Russian general turned out to be Jewish. He showered Isaac and Zivia with praise, alcohol, food supplies, and, most important, special military passes that allowed them to go anywhere they wanted.
The tables had turned for Resistance groups in postwar Warsaw. The tiny People’s Army was celebrated by the new regime, while the Home Army’s leaders were hunted by the NKVD as reactionaries. Many doors were suddenly open to the ZOB, as Simha Ratheiser soon discovered. Simha was no more of a Communist than Isaac, but he was not above taking advantage of the cards that fate dealt him. When he needed a place to live where his parents could also stay, Ratheiser flashed his special Soviet-issue military pass at the housing authority. He had received the document so that he and Irene could carry messages from Isaac in Warsaw to Wladyslaw Gomulka, the newly appointed deputy prime minister of the Provisional Government in Lublin.
At the housing bureau, that government-issue pass translated into astonishingly courteous service. The agency was in Praga, across the Vistula, as were most of the makeshift government offices, because that neighborhood had been under Soviet control during most of the Rising and had suffered the least damage. In Warsaw proper, the only surviving structures were clustered in pockets of the former German-only sectors, and had been spared because Germans were living there at the time. The housing shortage was now so acute that many former Varsovians, including Hanna, Janine, and Joanna Mortkowicz, had to make new lives for themselves in places like Krakow, where many artists and writers migrated. In Warsaw it was virtually impossible to get quartered in one of the large, luxurious flats left by the Germans. These were usually reserved for Communist Party higher-ups. Yet Simha was handed the keys to a huge apartment that had once belonged to an aristocrat on Jerusalem Boulevard. (On the other hand, Boruch Spiegel, who had fought with the Home Army, had to share a room with two families in a partially destroyed tenement. “It had no electricity or running water,” he recalled.)
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