Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Newspaper editors around the world were asking the same question when, a few days later, Zuckerman received a call from a senior Security Office agent in Warsaw. Was Isaac free for coffee, the caller wanted to know. Two men met Zuckerman at a café. He didn’t know their real names, but he recognized one as Jewish. They wanted to discuss emigration. If Jews were to leave Poland in large numbers, was there someone from the Jewish community who would take charge of the departure, they asked. “I said I personally would take responsibility,” Zuckerman recalled. The second question was equally direct. How were Isaac’s relations with Deputy Defense Minister Marian Spychalski? They were friends from Underground days, Isaac responded. Zuckerman should go see the minister, the Security Office men suggested.

  Isaac and Adolf Berman called on Spychalski together. “We were accepted without delay. I’ll never forget Spychalski’s reaction,” Isaac recalled. “The meeting with him was warm. Like us, he was shocked at the pogrom in Kielce.” Not as shocked as he led Zuckerman and Berman to believe, however. Unbeknownst to the pair, Spychalski had issued orders during the pogrom for the military not to fire on Gentiles. He and other officials in Warsaw had feared “any action which might indicate that the authorities were siding with the Jews against ‘the people,’ ” according to the historian Jan Gross. “In lieu of rushing to the defense of imperiled citizens—the Jews of Kielce who were being murdered—the guiding concern of the authorities was to persuade the public that they were not unduly preoccupied with safeguarding the Jews.”

  Spychalski did something in that meeting that stunned Isaac. He picked up the phone and called the Soviet general responsible for securing Poland’s borders. “Do not under any circumstances use the northern borders,” Spychalski instructed the general. “Use the southern route, across the Czech border.” Zuckerman and Berman could not believe what they were hearing: The military was being conscripted in the Brikha illegal emigration campaign. The Polish government’s involvement must be kept quiet, the two were told. The Foreign Ministry, in particular, could not publicly approve the enterprise, for fear of upsetting relations with the British. Berman and Zuckerman exchanged bewildered looks. Was this possible, Isaac wondered. “Could Spychalski, who was acting as Minister of Defense, have decided such a thing on his own?” he asked himself. “Jacob Berman certainly didn’t [take such a step] without asking Moscow.” That meant the Soviets must have given their approval to the plan. “Perhaps ‘high politics’ was at work here,” Isaac speculated. In light of the brewing Cold War, “the consideration might have been to make trouble for the British” by allowing several hundred thousand left-leaning Jews, many of whom had spent years in the Soviet Union and spoke fluent Russian, to destabilize Palestine. Maybe the Kremlin was hoping to gain a foothold in the Middle East. Whatever the reason, the decision to facilitate a sudden exodus was highly uncharacteristic of a regime that went to great lengths to imprison its subjects for the next half century.

  For a few weeks, discussions of the logistics of the evacuation were kept tightly under wraps, and Zuckerman began to wonder whether the whole scheme had been just talk. Then events started moving quickly. In late July, the Polish authorities announced that they were building summer camps for Jews along the Czech border, and thousands began gathering at the “open-air resorts.” Czechoslovakia’s leader, Jan Masaryk, then declared that his country would open its border to Jewish refugees. In Washington, President Harry S Truman pronounced himself in favor of the establishment of a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine.

  The floodgates had opened. By October 1946, seventy thousand Jews left Poland for Palestine through the unguarded border. By December, the number had risen to 115,500. Isaac Zuckerman surveyed the long, orderly columns of Jewish emigrants leaving Poland and knew that his work was done. At long last, he could join Zivia and his newborn child in Palestine.

  He was going home.

  AFTERWORD

  Jerusalem, March 2009

  “Don’t be afraid,” Simha Ratheiser reassured me, as a group of young Palestinians surrounded us. “It is enough that I’m afraid for all of us.”

  Simha didn’t look particularly frightened. In fact, he looked as if he was enjoying himself. My wife, Roberta, and I, on the other hand, were somewhat rattled, bordering on terrified, and wondering with increasing anxiety what kind of a mess Simha had gotten us into.

  Our excursion had started out innocently enough. We had been sitting in Simha’s garden, sipping wine from his son’s vineyard and discussing Hillary Clinton’s first trip to Jerusalem as U.S. secretary of state—she had taken over the King David Hotel, where Roberta and I were staying—when Ratheiser suggested that we stretch our legs. He lived in a quiet residential neighborhood about a mile south of the King David and the Old City, on a leafy hilltop street along the 1949 armistice line—the pre-1967 border that once divided Jerusalem into Arab and Jewish halves.

  Simha wanted us to see the gleaming condominium complexes that had been erected over the squatters’ camps on the other side of the old demarcation line. “Don’t go far,” his wife, Dima, admonished. “It’s getting late.” She was also a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor. Now she was an accomplished artist and a supporter of Peace Now, the group that advocated returning the occuppied territories to Palestinian rule. “I’ll show you why that’s impossible,” Simha said, as he grabbed a sweater and led us out the door.

  “This is the old border,” said Simha minutes later, as we walked past a series of large new single-family homes. “I remember the shooting here.” The structures were crisp and modern, whitewashed and well tended, with dramatic views of the congested and far poorer Arab quarter that spread out below them. But aside from their intrusive vistas, staring down at the less fortunate, the big hillside homes were devoid of any outward signs of controversy. Without an old map, one could never tell that this expensive real estate perched on disputed land. “What’s that?” my wife asked, pointing to a large forested tract that undulated over the barren ravines and valleys below. “That’s a wonderful park,” said Simha. “Come. I’ll show it to you.”

  The former armistice line also ran through the sprawling park, and as we walked and talked and lost track of time, it became apparent—just after dusk—that we had crossed the pre-’67 border. You could tell because the park grounds, at first immaculate and manicured, with shiny plaques naming the American benefactors of benches and paths and lookouts, had gradually deteriorated as we headed east. Arabic graffiti appeared, then trash. The lights that had flickered brightly from ornate lampposts farther west seemed to dim, then went out completely as we went deeper into the park. I noticed that the bulbs had all been shattered, presumably by thrown rocks. There were no longer any joggers or people walking dogs now that night had fallen—just the three of us in this great big dark park. Then we heard music, pounding Arabic rap, and saw teens and young men in their early twenties milling around, smoking cigarettes and laughing loudly. They fell silent as Simha approached, Roberta and I nervously in tow. Venturing into a wooded public park after nightfall was not something we’d ever attempt back home in Washington, D.C., and it didn’t seem like a good idea in conflict-torn Israel. But Simha was oblivious to any potential danger. “Don’t worry!” he kept saying to my increasingly desperate pleas to turn around. Now in his eighties, his hair white, his frame still wiry and spry, his demeanor still mischievous, he parted the stunned crowd of Palestinian youths with the same fearless abandon he had displayed as a young man in World War II. The young Palestinians murmured what sounded like curses and glared at us with surly contempt. But they obediently stepped aside, letting us pass through the dark lane as if we were a heavily armed military patrol. “Are you hungry?” Simha cheerfully asked as we approached a United Nations compound on the Palestinian side of the park. “I know a good restaurant.”

  That walk, more than any of our conversations—about Poland, the war, the contemporary situation in Israel—showed me why Simha had beaten all the odds a
nd survived. He was genuinely—perhaps genetically—fearless. The unnerving stroll had not been for my benefit, his wife complained. “I beg him not to walk at night,” she sighed. “But he doesn’t listen.”

  While Simha’s wife had come to expect such risky behavior, she was surprised that her husband had spent so much time talking about his Holocaust experiences with me. For decades, he’d never uttered a word about the war or the Ghetto. But recently, he’d thought about those years a great deal, and even relished the opportunity to speak Polish again. This surprised Simha’s wife the most. She apologized, but the language gave her the creeps. Her parents had died at Plaszow, the Krakow camp made famous by Schindler’s List, and her one visit to Poland long after the war had made her physically ill. Simha, though, seemed to be approaching that stage of his life when he was reflecting back on his accomplishments—his marriage, his grown children, his career managing an Israeli supermarket chain—and perhaps he realized that nothing could ever surpass what he witnessed during World War II. For a long time he had suppressed those painful memories, but now, in his final years, he wanted the world to know what he saw and did as a young man.

  “For years, Isaac hounded me to write a memoir and I kept putting him off,” Simha recalled. He and Isaac had reconnected when Zuckerman finally joined Zivia in Israel in 1947, formalizing their marriage as soon he got off the boat. That same year, Isaac and Zivia started working on establishing a kibbutz to honor ZOB veterans, and they invited Simha to join. He declined because he didn’t want to live with ghosts, which Isaac effectively did when he founded the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz near Acre and the neighboring Ghetto Fighters’ Museum. For the rest of his life, Isaac dedicated himself to those twin causes. Unfortunately, keeping memories of the Shoah alive took a toll on Zuckerman. He suffered bouts of depression, and he drank. As time went on, he shied away from politics and public appearances, tending his crops and archives, and he passed away at a relatively young age in Tel Aviv in 1981. Zivia had always been psychologically stronger than Isaac, and she coped better with post-traumatic stress disorder. She bore two sons and divided her time between the kibbutz and public life. She toured Israel, giving speeches in the early 1950s, and for a brief period headed the Jewish Agency’s Aliya immigration bureau before retiring to tend chickens and raise her boys. In 1961, she was called as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Despite her inner fortitude, she died at an even younger age than her husband—sixty-four—in 1978, leaving her feminist legacy in granddaughter Roni Zuckerman, who became the first female fighter pilot in the Israeli air force in 2001. “Zivia would have liked that,” Simha said, smiling.

  Unlike Simha, Mark Edelman was tired of talking about the Holocaust when I first visited him in Lodz in 2007. He still lived in the same townhouse he had moved into in 1945, a place filled with old furniture, cigarette smoke, and haunting paintings of train tracks disappearing into misty pine forests that reminded me eerily of Treblinka. Edelman was busy getting his car fixed and seemed impatient to be rid of me, another journalist posing the same “stupid questions” he’d answered “a hundred times before.”

  Mark had a reputation for being brusque and not suffering fools, and he clearly considered me one. “You don’t understand anything” was a response I heard frequently from him. In time he softened a bit, but I always considered myself an intruder with Mark, rehashing the past when what he wanted was to be left in peace.

  He had being doing these tiresome interviews out of a sense of duty for the past twenty years, and he was clearly tired of playing the role of Poland’s last Jew. Mark had become famous following the collapse of Communism, not only as one of the country’s leading heart surgeons and a Solidarity hero who fought Communists in the 1980s, but primarly as a living link to Poland’s Jewish past, as an ambassador of history and a vanished culture. To legions of curious young Poles, Edelman was the embodiment of Judaism and the Holocaust—the only Jew they knew. His face was on billboards and on television. He had the name recognition of a major public figure, and he was the recipient of virtually all the nation’s highest awards, the Polish equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And every time a historical controversy erupted, the national media descended on his doorstep, asking him to arbitrate. (Edelman’s celebrity status did not, however, prevent someone from spray-painting a Star of David on the pillar of his front gate.)

  Mark’s health was failing, and I had to cancel several interviews because he was unwell. In 2008, a daughter of one of the Sawicki sisters took Edelman to live with her in Warsaw because he could no longer look after himself and was all alone. (Mark had married the doctor who had arranged the Red Cross rescue mission to Jolie Bord in 1944, but she had left him long ago, moving to France.)

  Edelman spent his final days with the Sawicki family, dictating one last memoir: And There Was Love in the Ghetto. He died in 2009.

  It was through Edelman that I found Boruch Spiegel, one of the least publicized veterans of the Jewish Fighting Organization. “I think he’s in Toronto,” Mark had said. Actually he was in Montreal, where he had moved with Chaika Belchatowska in the late 1940s, after a brief sojourn in Sweden. The two had married after the war, and Boruch had returned to his trade, managing a small leather goods factory until his retirement. Chaika was no longer alive when I first visited Boruch in the fall of 2007. By coincidence, his American son-in-law had been one of my professors at McGill University, though I had no idea we shared this connection. I did, however, immediately recognize the address of the assisted living facility where Spiegel was staying. It was two blocks from the medical center where my mother had established her practice after immigrating to Montreal, in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood that was one of the few places in Canada where a medical degree from the University of Warsaw meant something. Her first patients were almost all Polish Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors, and I was startled to hear so much Polish and Yiddish in the elevators and lobby of the old age home where Boruch now lived. I probably met more Polish Jews in that one high-rise than in the three years I spent living in Warsaw, which struck me as terribly sad. In fact, it was from one of Boruch’s fellow residents that I first heard the term “sound good.” We were in the cafeteria having lunch and speaking Polish, when a woman at the next table, an Auschwitz survivor, volunteered the compliment. At the time I thought she was praising my linguistic skills. Only much later did I realize that she was referring to my non-Yiddish accent, and I was amazed by how deeply ingrained her survival instincts remained even after all these years.

  Boruch had only recently moved into the facility, a converted apartment building across the street from a shopping mall, and he wasn’t happy about the move, or about having to cope with a full-time nurse. But like Edelman, his health was failing him. He got around with a walker and only with great difficulty, and he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, a condition from which I would see him deteriorating dramatically over an interval of a few short months. It was heartbreaking: Boruch, one of the kindest and gentlest men I ever met, could recall the slightest detail of events that had occurred seventy years earlier, but could not remember that we had talked the day before. His memory could be astonishingly vivid in one instant, and he could lapse into a prolonged silence the next, staring numbly at a framed photo of his granddaughter. (She looked just like Chaika, who was pictured in another framed photograph, shaking hands with Vice President Al Gore.)

  At times I had to gently nudge Boruch when he drifted off, and I felt guilty for pushing him—for ghoulishly trying to extract every last bit of information before his mind went completely blank. My parting memory is of him dozing on a couch in the lobby of his building. He had fallen asleep during one of our talks, and I had waited for half an hour for him to wake up when his nurse intervened. “It is enough,” she said. “Mr. Spiegel needs to rest.”

  The flame that Hitler had strived so maniacally to snuff out was slowly being extinguished by time.
Joseph and Martha Osnos had passed away in New York, and their son Robert was retiring after a long career as a psychiatrist when I first reached out to him in 2008. Janine and Hanna Mortkowicz had died of old age in Poland, and Joanna was now a grandmother, living in Krakow, where the family had remained after the destruction of Warsaw. She kept the Mortkowicz legacy alive as a well-regarded author and screenwriter, and her 2001 family history had won Poland’s equivalent of the National Book Award. She was finishing a biography of Janusz Korczak, the great children’s writer and martyr whose statue stands at the foot of one the many new skyscrapers now rising in the former Warsaw Ghetto, when we met at her old bookstore. Joanna had not seen her family’s former store since the war, and she was visibly astounded at its recent transformation into a high-end martini bar. “Everything is changing so quickly,” she said of the economic boom that is throwing up glass towers in once dreary Warsaw at an almost Chinese pace.

  Already all physical evidence of the Ghetto had been erased—first by hideous Communist edifices and now by shiny condominiums and office blocks that are replacing the Stalinist architecture. In a few more years the living memory of the Holocaust will also be gone. The final witnesses will pass away, closing one of the darkest chapters of human history. But the inspirational light of people like Simha and Isaac, or Boruch and Mark, or Joanna and Zivia, will burn on forever. Their courage and nobility transcend time. My life is richer for having made their acquaintance, and they have provided me with an answer to the question I posed at the outset of this tale: What would I have done in their place?