Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Zuckerman quickly understood that the ZOB had the opportunity to gain much more than just spacious apartments from the new regime. He shrewdly set out to make himself as useful as possible to the new authorities. The Provisional Government was effectively starting from scratch, with little popular support and no administrative infrastructure. The ZOB’s organizational skills and extensive contacts were useful. “A lot of our misfortunes were solved after the war because they remembered what we had done for them,” Isaac said later in describing the payoff from that early assistance. Zuckerman did not conceal his agenda. He developed a close rapport with the secretary of the Communist Party in Warsaw, Alexander Kowalski. Kowalski had spent much of the war in Moscow. But he was an old ideologue, fascinated with movements like Zionism, and Isaac was frank with him. “We were firm friends,” he recalled. “I never had to hide our situation from him. And I spoke as a Kibbutznik, a Halutz, on behalf of Eretz Israel”—in other words, about emigration.

  At that time, an estimated 11,500 Warsaw Jews had survived the war. And many of those who had fled east in 1939 were beginning to trickle back from the USSR. Eventually, more than 150,000 Polish Jews returned from the Soviet Union, raising the total number of Jews in Poland to more than 200,000, peaking briefly in 1946 at nearly 300,000. The relationships Isaac Zuckerman was cultivating with Poland’s new rulers had one goal: to get those Jews to Palestine.

  Mark Edelman did not share Isaac’s vision. “Why are you cooperating with those sons of bitches?” he lectured his colleague. The two had grown so close over the past several years that Edelman supplanted Tuvia Borzykowski as Isaac’s most trusted confidant and sounding board. “They were best friends,” said Simha Ratheiser. But a serious rift developed between them over Isaac’s plan to win over the new authorities. “They really started fighting,” Ratheiser recalled. “We had differences of opinion,” Edelman curtly conceded. “Let’s leave it at that.”

  The ideological divisions that had delayed the unification of the Jewish Resistance and prevented the ZOB from being formed earlier in the war now returned. To Bundists like Edelman and Spiegel, Communists were the enemy, and Zuckerman was now trading with the enemy. That he was doing so for the benefit of tens of thousands of ordinary Jews and not for personal gain was immaterial to Mark. The Bund had sworn allegiance to Poland—der hoym—and the Communists were foreign invaders. As for Zuckerman’s Zionist goals, to Edelman, Eretz Israel was still nothing more than a pipe dream. The British had made that clear by clamping down on immigration to Palestine.

  To Mark, Palestine was an illusion. What was happening in Poland was very real. A low-grade civil war was breaking out as the Communists tried to consolidate their tenuous grip on power. Some 15,000 Communist functionaries were killed in the immediate postwar period by right-wing organizations, particularly the quasi-fascist National Armed Forces. The right itself suffered almost as many casualties in the political standoff. In the eastern parts of the country, ethnic violence between Poles and Ukrainians claimed an estimated fifty thousand lives. In the west, where boundaries were shifted as part of the war reparations and seven million Germans were expelled from newly Polish cities like Breslau and Stettin, six hundred thousand people died. Many, though not all, were murdered by the Red Army. Revenge killings were common in the lawless environment of 1945. Mass graves of German civilians, including the skeletal remains of many women and children, would continue to be unearthed for decades to come.

  The value of life in Poland was severely cheapened by the war. People had become inured to death. More than 15 percent of the population perished, the equivalent in contemporary America of almost fifty million lives. The corpses that accumulated in 1945 made little impression on hardened Poles who had seen so much death. Robbery, murder, and rape were daily occurrences during the lawless postwar period, and the situation was aggravated by the residual stores of weapons that left almost everyone armed. Simha and Mark never left home without their revolvers.

  The Soviet secret police and Jacob Berman’s newly created Security Office were busy trying to stamp out political dissent. In the first six months of 1945, sixty thousand Home Army officers were arrested by the NKVD. Among those was Henry Iwanski, who claimed to have lost most of his family fighting alongside the Jewish Military Union during the Ghetto Uprising. He was sent to prison, as were countless others who had helped Jews. Not even the intervention of Adolf Berman could prevent his brother Jacob from jailing Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, the Auschwitz survivor and future Righteous Gentile and Solidarity foreign minister, for the crime of serving in the Home Army’s Council to Aid Jews.

  The newest terror campaign was ruthlessly implemented by Jacob Berman. But it was presided over by NKVD general Ivan Serov, who later became head of the KGB. His temporary office in Praga soon replaced the old Gestapo headquarters on Szuch Avenue as the most feared address in Warsaw. It was in the same student dormitory where Menachem Begin had lived while he studied law, and Isaac went there on a few occasions to meet with the “great Berman,” as he cynically called Poland’s newest villain. (Ironically, Jacob Berman was also a graduate of the University of Warsaw law faculty, though any similarity between him and Begin ended there.)

  Edelman couldn’t stomach the fact that his best friend was associating with people he considered traitors, like Berman, who had been personally trained by Stalin’s chief butcher, Lavrenty Beria, to stamp out all opposition to the Soviet takeover of Poland. To Edelman, Zuckerman’s Zionism was blinding him to all sorts of moral traps. “Isaac and Zivia had changed,” Mark recalled. “I no longer knew what to talk to them about, they were so consumed with their burning obsession of getting people into Palestine.”

  Edelman felt betrayed. “I was alone and I didn’t know what to do. My friends were engaged in activities I did not support. My party was gone”—the Bund had been wiped out by the Holocaust—“and there were Communists and Soviets everywhere.” The few Bundists still around, people like Boruch Spiegel and Chaika Belchatowska, were not interested in reconstituting the Bund in Poland so much as “putting an ocean between them and the Russians. They wanted to run as far away as possible from Communism.”

  Indeed, Boruch and Chaika had decided not to stay in Communist Poland. “There was no future there for us,” Spiegel felt. His entire family was dead. Not even photographs of his parents, his sisters, or his big brother Berl had survived. His only living relative was an uncle in Billings, Montana. Boruch sent him a telegram, hoping he could sponsor them. But the news on immigration to America was not encouraging. “The United States did nothing for Jews during the war,” Spiegel concluded. For Boruch and Chaika, Palestine was not an option for ideological reasons, and Western Europe was teeming with refugees. That left Canada and Australia. Chaika’s father had moved to Montreal long before the war. She did not know him well; his divorce from her mother had been bitter. But finding him was their best hope.

  Edelman, on the other hand, had no intention of leaving. Poland, for all its glaring imperfections and bleak prospects, was home. Mark had no idea what he would do with his life now that the Bund was history. He did, however, still have one last duty to perform for the organization. Some Bundists had placed their children with Gentiles prior to joining the ZOB, often with nuns in convents. The money originally provided for the children’s care had long run out. Had they survived? What had become of them? Government agencies were said to be handling such matters. But due to a sense of obligation to his deceased comrades, Mark set out to track down these lost children. One case in particular weighed heavily on his conscience. During the Ghetto Uprising he had promised Zalman Friedrich that he would find his daughter if anything ever happened to him. Friedrich was the Bund courier who had first uncovered the truth about Treblinka by following the railroad tracks. Zalman had fought tenaciuosly in the Brushmakers District alongside Simha and Edelman during the Ghetto Uprising, and he had been sent along with Simha to help Zuckerman organize a rescue mission. At the last moment he had
begged not to join Ratheiser in the May 1943 sewer evacuation, because he had a premonition that he would never see his daughter again. He died senselessly a few weeks later when a German patrol stumbled on ZOB combatants hiding in the woods outside Warsaw. His daughter, Eliza, would be six years old now, if she was alive.

  It took some work, but Edelman finally found his friend’s daughter. She was with a Catholic family in a small town called Zyrardow, and like Joanna, she had forgotten about her real family and background. “Hide, hide, the Jews are coming for you,” the other kids in the village cried when Edelman and another Bundist showed up. Eliza refused to see them, and the woman of the house would not give her up. Eliza now called her “mother.” She spoke Polish rather than Yiddish. She made the sign of the cross when she prayed and considered Zyrardow her adoptive home. Edelman offered the woman a large sum of money: five hundred U.S. dollars collected in America by Jewish relief agencies. The woman was offended. Eliza was “not for sale,” she said.

  Edelman refused to give up. There were too many Elizas in postwar Poland: children who would never know who they were and where they came from, whose Jewish past had been swapped for a Catholic future. Often their identity was concealed from them for decades, and only in middle age, after the collapse of Communism in 1989, would many finally learn the truth about their real parents. Mark returned to the woman two more times, and still she would not relinquish the child. Only then did Edelman reluctantly cash in on the ZOB’s connections with the Communist authorities. He offered the woman a trade. Her sixteen-year-old son had been caught in one of the secret police roundups of Home Army operatives and was in jail. If Edelman arranged his release, would the woman give up Eliza?

  Eliza cried nonstop for two weeks while Mark made arrangements with Bundist contacts in the United States for the child to travel to America. A wealthy Jewish family in New York had agreed to adopt her. “In America she had a bicycle, a pony, a boat. She graduated from university, and got married,” Edelman recounts. “Then on October 18, 1962, two months before her twenty-sixth birthday, she locked herself in a hotel room in Manhattan and swallowed a vial of poison.” Mark did not know why Eliza killed herself. But the night before her death, she had met with another Holocaust orphan, the daughter of Michael Klepfish, the ZOB chief engineer responsible for the manufacture of homemade bombs and grenades in the Ghetto. Klepfish had died in the Brushmakers District while saving Edelman’s life.

  Every time a Jewish child was sent to the United States or Palestine by relief agencies, Edelman felt more alone, like the “last of the Mohicans,” as he would put it. Despite his increasing despair and isolation, he found some comfort from a new person in his life, Alina Margolis. She was the young doctor who had led the “Red Cross” rescue mission to Jolie Bord. They became romantically involved while in Grodzik before the liberation, and after the Soviet takeover she helped nurse Mark through his depression. They fell in love and began living together.

  Margolis wanted to leave the depressing capital. Her family was from Lodz, seventy-five miles west of Warsaw, where more Jews had lived before the war than in Berlin and Vienna combined. Only a few thousand remained, but the city was still relatively intact. Margolis had a town house in Lodz, in a prestigious enclave about a mile from the Central Station. Germans had appropriated the enclave during the war, but many budding artists and filmmakers were moving there, including Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

  Edelman agreed to go, arriving with nothing but the clothes on his back. The city in mid-1945 was still largely empty. When it had been incorporated into the Third Reich, all the Poles had been expelled. There were thousands of vacant apartments, and people from all over the country were arriving weekly to fill them: doctors, lawyers, engineers, and university professors. In Lodz everything was restarting from scratch, including institutes, universities, and factories. The Communist influence was not as prevalent as in Warsaw, and the new residents seemed freer, more energetic and hopeful. To Edelman, it seemed like a good place for a fresh start.

  CHAPTER 42

  NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM

  A year had passed since the Red Army rolled into Warsaw, and the city remained largely uninhabitable. Boruch Spiegel’s building was still without electricity or running water, and he and Chaika Belchatowska continued to wait for Canadian visas. Mark Edelman was in Lodz, finishing his first semester of medical school. After witnessing so much death, he had decided to devote himself to saving lives.

  Most of the other surviving members of the ZOB were also still in Poland in early 1946. Only Simha Ratheiser and Zivia Lubetkin had gone abroad for any extended period since the Soviet takeover. Both went to Romania to scout discreet back channels to circumvent the British blockade of Palestine. The human smuggling network they were trying to help establish became known in Hebrew as the Brikha, or Flight. The Brikha was an illegal enterprise that initially moved Jews overland from Poland through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the Romanian shores of the Black Sea. There, vessels chartered or purchased by Jewish relief agencies departed for the final and trickiest leg of the journey, trying to evade the British warships that patrolled the Mediterranean approaches to ports around Haifa. The operation was costly and complex and, in its early stages, frustratingly ineffective. In mid-1945, thousands of stranded Jews languished in Romania, which had become a refugee terminus, much as it had been for the Osnoses five years earlier. There were not enough boats. There was not enough money. And in world capitals there was not enough political will to overcome British opposition. While a steady trickle of refugees was getting through to Palestine, a far more organized method would be required to systematically move several hundred thousand people. And for that, tacit cooperation would be needed of various governments, Poland’s and Britain’s most of all.

  Although her early smuggling efforts in Romania fell short, there was one pleasure in Zivia’s return to Poland. In early 1946, Lubetkin discovered she was pregnant. Isaac wept with joy. For Holocaust survivors, every birth was a national rebirth, a rejoinder to genocide. Zuckerman immediately insisted that Zivia cease all conspiratorial activity to conserve her strength for the baby. He moved her to Lodz, where he thought she would be more comfortable, and asked Edelman to look after her.

  In the meantime, Isaac continued to sweet-talk the new Polish authorities into facilitating emigration. Already, he had won permission from the Communists to purchase fishing trawlers in Gdansk, though the distant Baltic was hardly an ideal departure point for a lengthy seaborne operation to the Mediterranean. Isaac also persuaded his friends in the government to supply him with a plane so that he and other Polish delegates could attend a pan-Zionist conference in London. The event was hosted by David Ben-Gurion, and its purpose was partly to pressure Whitehall to relax its strict immigration policies to the Holy Land. The British were not swayed. They were under intense pressure from Arab leaders to restrict Jewish entry into Palestine. In the end, the conference served mostly to expose the rift within the Zionist camp between emaciated Holocaust survivors and the tanned, muscular emissaries from Palestine. There were clearly lingering resentments among the Polish delegates, who had felt abandoned during the war by their colleagues in Palestine. “I said bitter things at the conference,” Zuckerman acknowledged, “and even then I hadn’t said everything I felt because I knew there were attentive listeners and curious journalists.” Privately, Isaac made a point of snubbing Ben-Gurion, prompting the future Israeli leader to declare ruefully, “You despise me that much.”

  Zuckerman returned from England doubly convinced that the solution to mass emigration lay not in pointless congresses abroad, but in Poland with the new regime. The Provisional Government had already expressed its willingness to allow Jews to emigrate. Throughout 1945 and early 1946, the authorities had made no effort to stop Jewish citizens from leaving Poland. Very few did so, however, because they had nowhere to go: Destination countries either were not admitting Jews, or were dragging their feet on the document
ation process and were therefore swamped with a backlog of applications. The net effect was that nearly three hundred thousand Jews were still stuck in Poland, even though a majority wanted out and the regime was willing to let them go.

  Simha Ratheiser, as usual, was not content to leave his fate to distant powers. He was determined to make his own luck. After returning from Romania in 1945, Simha had drifted away from Isaac and Zivia’s inner circle. The schism started in Bucharest, where Ratheiser met one of the founders of the Brikha, the poet-warrior Abba Kovner. Kovner was legendary in Jewish underground circles, the Mordechai Anielewicz of Vilna. He had commanded the resistance in the Vilna Ghetto and then led his followers into the forest to fight as partisans. Like Anielewicz, he was charismatic, emotional, at times rash, and far more militant than Isaac Zuckerman. In Bucharest, in addition to facilitating illegal emigration, Kovner had proposed forming Jewish revenge squads. The teams would fan out in Austria and Germany and assassinate Nazis. There was also talk of targeting ordinary civilians, poisoning wells, and planting bombs. Isaac and Zivia were vehemently opposed to such plans. There had been enough revenge killing already, Zivia argued with Kovner; their priority must be emigration. Simha, however, sided with Kovner. “I thought we still had something to do in Europe,” he later wrote: “To settle our account with the Germans.”