Only now, Kovel seemed more a terminus than a way station. To Boruch Spiegel, it was obvious that “no one knew what to do, or where to go. There was a lot of confusion and meetings and different opinions.” Once people realized that the Polish Army had no real plan, they began thinking of their own welfare. In various corners of the town, Bundists and Zionists huddled in separate circles and weighed their options. The two groups had no contact, however, and made no effort to coordinate. The war had not changed the fundamental fact that the two movements were still essentially at cross-purposes, much as they had been in peacetime. Zionists, now more than ever, were focused on finding ways out of Poland and into Palestine. Zuckerman planned to head north on horseback—since he could ride well and had somehow procured a stallion—through Lithuania. Many of his colleagues had already been dispatched to the south to look for an escape route through Romania.
For Bundists like the Spiegel brothers, however, escape was not an option. The Bund was committed to Poland and therefore duty bound to assist the Sanation regime in any way possible. That Marshal Smigly-Rydz’s largely anti-Semitic staff did not want their help, nor seemed to be in any position to help itself, only made the Bundist dilemma greater.
Boruch was not privy to the discussions at the Bund’s top level, where Victor Alter and Hersh Erlich reigned supreme. Both were in Kovel, but Boruch felt he was too “junior, and not important” enough to introduce himself to the great men, even though his brother knew some of the Bund’s “aristocracy.” Several of the group’s lesser leaders had been sent back to Warsaw once word had spread that the city was holding out. The Bund still had tens of thousands of rank-and-file members in the Polish capital, and Mayor Starzinski was amenable to working with Jews. The organization could help man the civilian defense force the mayor had cobbled together. What it could do in the eastern backwaters of Poland, far from the front, to help the war effort was a more difficult question. “I don’t think anyone had any clear ideas,” Boruch recalled.
The Bund’s dilemma was rendered moot on the morning of September 17. At dawn, planes darkened the skies over Kovel. In the panicked scramble to take shelter, only a few people initially noticed something different about these aircraft. They were green rather than gray and they had red stars rather than black crosses on their fuselages. The Soviet Union had just invaded Poland.
CHAPTER 5
HIS BROTHER’S HAND
By the time Radio Warsaw Two announced that Stalin had joined Hitler in dismembering Poland on September 17, 1939, the Red Army had deployed a million and a half soldiers and six thousand tanks across the border, and Warsaw had officially run out of coffins. Makeshift graves began appearing everywhere in the Polish capital as access to the main cemeteries was cut off by advancing Panzer divisions. Ammunition and medicine were running out. Warsaw’s predominantly Jewish physicians struggled valiantly to cope with nearly fifty thousand critically wounded patients even as hospitals were systematically leveled. Miraculously, the Jewish Quarter’s Berson and Bauman Children’s Hospital—the pediatric center built by the family foundations of banker Meyer Berson and real estate developer Solomon Bauman—stood unscathed.
Just before Radio Two was knocked off the air on September 21, Mayor Starzinski made one of the most memorable of his twice-daily addresses. “I wanted Warsaw to be great,” he said, as the sound of detonations echoed in the background. “I believed she would be great. Along with my municipal co-workers, we drew plans. We pored over blueprints. We sketched Warsaw’s future greatness. And I thought it would take fifty or a hundred years to accomplish. But as I speak to you today, looking through the window I can see in the haze of smoke and red flames that Warsaw is already great—a magnificent, indestructible, undaunted, fighting spirit. And though in places where there were supposed to be brand-new orphanages, there are now ruins, where there were supposed to be beautiful parks there are now torn barricades littered with corpses, though our libraries burn, though fires rage in our hospitals, it is not in fifty or even a hundred years, but today that Warsaw has reached the pinnacle of her greatness defending the honor and pride of the entire country.”
That speech was the last that residents of the besieged Polish capital heard from their courageous mayor. The next day, the city lost all electricity; telephone and telegraph communications went out the next day. The day after that, the main pumping station was obliterated, and water ceased running from taps. Hundreds of fires now raged uncontrolled, threatening to engulf the entire town. Simha Ratheiser’s family fled back to their suburban compound. Aside from the growing inferno, Zvi Ratheiser also worried about epidemics in the congested city center, a danger now rising exponentially with the worsening sanitary conditions. Food and medical supplies were critically low, and the drinking water people had stored in their bathtubs was dwindling. Joanna Olczak recalled a severe tongue-lashing her cousin Robert Osnos received from her Gentile nanny, Miss Anne, for playing in the tub and wasting the precious liquid. “She has the right to be stupid because she’s still little.” Miss Anne angrily pointed at Joanna. “But you?” she snapped at the eight-year-old Osnos. “Don’t you know what water means?”
Hopes of being resupplied from the east dwindled when news reached the capital that Marshal Smigly-Rydz had left Poland entirely and taken refuge in Romania, where the authorities promptly detained him. Varsovians spat in disgust; never had a Polish government fallen so low so fast in the esteem of its people.
The city was now completely on its own, surrounded by enemy forces on all sides, down to less than twenty rounds of ammunition per gun, and increasingly hungry. But still it would not yield. Mayor Starzinski’s Worker Brigades, anchored by volunteers from the Bund, threw up earthworks and toppled trams to block German access to the city center.
On September 24, Hitler’s patience ran out. He ordered the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to unleash a firestorm over Warsaw. Nine hundred howitzers and four hundred heavy bombers, mostly Junkers, pounded the Polish capital in a merciless forty-eight-hour barrage—explosives poured from the sky on what sardonic Varsovians later dubbed “Rainy Monday.”
Three of those bombs, each weighing half a ton, landed on the Ratheisers’ apartment complex south of the central park. The first hit an open field next to a neighboring warehouse that Simha’s grandfather used to store the agricultural produce he imported. The next two blasted the roof off the family’s three-story house, buckled the brick walls, and shattered floors. In the convulsive, deafening split second it took for the structure to collapse on itself, Simha was knocked unconscious. When he came to, “there was dead silence.” He found himself trapped under a pile of rubble, electrical lines tangled around his torso and neck. Dazed, he could barely breathe, and his legs were pinned under the debris. Blood and dust caked his face, and as he struggled to untangle himself, his scratched hands felt an odd object sticking out of this throat. It was a wood splinter and it had pierced his windpipe. He felt himself choking. Slowly, agonizingly, he pulled out the splinter, spitting out blood. Luckily, the wooden projectile hadn’t ruptured any arteries, and with great effort Simha was able to extricate himself from the rubble and stumble into the street, where a neighbor slung him over his shoulder and carried him to a shelter.
It was only two days later, as he lay on a stretcher recuperating, that the enormity of the devastation struck him. His apartment building was gone. His grandparents, his aunt Hanna, his aunt Zissl’s husband, a cousin, and his fourteen-year-old brother, Israel, were all dead. But his parents and two sisters survived, and they collected the parts of their relatives’ bodies they could find. There was no time for a proper funeral, so the family buried their dead temporarily in the small flower garden Simha had tended outside their now smoldering home.
Nearly twenty thousand similar graves dotted Warsaw—black, rectangular earth mounds, marked by sticks, primitive wooden crosses, or little pyramids of rock and red brick. They covered courtyards, front and back yards, patches of grass between sidewalks a
nd roads, public parks and town squares—anywhere that was not cobbled or paved over.
Once the city finally fell—it had negotiated a formal capitulation on September 28—the populace raced to unearth these temporary graves. The Nazis, according to the terms of surrender, were to make their triumphal entry into the vanquished Polish capital and hold celebrations and victory parades in the first week of October. But before then, Warsaw faced the grim task of exhuming its decaying corpses and moving them to proper resting places.
Simha found the disinterment shocking. His relatives’ remains had all been jumbled together, and some were missing limbs. “I caught sight of a hand separated from a body, and was told it was my brother’s hand. It was buried next to his grave.”
Simha Ratheiser saw a great deal more death in the years to come. In time, he even became inured to it. But the sight of his brother’s small, shriveled hand, pale and purple and blackened with dirt, would stay with him forever.
CHAPTER 6
WHERE IS YOUR HUSBAND?
On October 1, 1939, the makeshift barricades that had blocked the main arteries into Warsaw were dismantled and German troops formally took possession of the city, ceremonially cutting a white ribbon that marked the official capitulation line.
The streets of the capital were too littered with debris for the Wehrmacht to march in proper formations, so Varsovians were put to work carting away rubble and filling in craters. Jews were disproportionately selected for these cleanup crews, and Nazi newsreels aired propaganda footage of elderly men—their dark caftan frocks and beards covered with pale dust, their hands bloody from the jagged rubble—laboring to pave the way for an official victory parade that was to be held on October 5. Hitler himself was to attend the triumphal ceremony and confer medals on the worthiest field officers—many of whom did not wait for their Führer to begin celebrating.
Throughout the first night of German occupation, the sound of revelry punctuated an otherwise silent and dark city. There was still no electricity, water, gas, or heating, but pockets of light blazed from the five-star hotels—the Bristol, the European, the Hotel Vienna—where portable generators were installed and the finest wines were pried from locked cellars to toast the victory. Nightclubs and cafés that had survived the bombings were also pressed into service—with or without their owners’ consent—and these establishments resounded with song and dance and slurred toasts to the feminine qualities of Warsaw’s newly inexpensive prostitutes, Poland’s currency having lost four-fifths of its value in four weeks.
In the month since the inception of the Second World War, Warsaw—a city that compared itself to Prague, even Paris in parts—had been horribly disfigured. Seventy-eight thousand apartment units had gone up in flames. Fifteen percent of all structures and almost a quarter of the city center, where the bombing was heaviest, had been completely destroyed. Nearly every building had suffered damage. And even those few that had escaped unscathed were covered by a thick layer of pulverized brick, mortar, and stone that created a choking brown haze when whipped up by the autumn wind.
Now a great migration occurred, as some people returned to their old neighborhoods and apartments from the places they had taken shelter, while others, whose homes had been destroyed, searched in vain for new lodgings. Martha Osnos walked into her flat after leaving her brother-in-law’s to discover that in her absence, eighteen people had moved into her place. “The door was broken; a stranger was shaving on my baby grand piano.” He was a neighbor from the fourth floor, and apologetically he explained that he had been afraid his own place was too elevated and exposed. Many others, apparently, had used Martha’s more secure first floor apartment as a refuge in her absence. The toilet with filled with excrement, which could not be flushed since there was no water, and her pantry was empty of provisions. “We tried to clean up the place—the shit hidden in the rolled-up carpets we only found after the smell in the dining room became fierce.”
As more and more occupying troops poured into central Warsaw, bringing bureaucrats and civilian administrators in tow, preparations for Hitler’s October victory parade reached fever pitch, and the city began to experience a different form of transformation.
The first and unmistakable signs of this alteration were the flags. Every Polish banner, every red and white pendant, and every White Eagle that had graced any building, flagstaff, home, or business was removed. In their place, swastikas were hoisted by the hundreds. Nazi standards now flew over ministries and outside the university gates. They hung from bank porticos and from every Art Deco lamppost on Jerusalem Boulevard. They even flanked the entrance to the Julius Meinl coffee shop on New World Street—the Starbucks of its day, with more than a thousand prewar outlets throughout central Europe.
Poland itself had ceased to exist. The Soviets took the east; the Third Reich appropriated the central and western parts of the country. The new demarcation line, ironically, ran along the same geographic points that Marshal Smigly-Rydz had chosen to raise his now notorious phantom army. But Varsovians, in their gloomy soul-searching and bitter recriminations—How could we have been so ill prepared? How could we have lost so quickly? How come the British and French didn’t help us?—didn’t need to be reminded of their government’s shocking collapse. They cursed their former commander in chief, who, along with President Ignatius Moscicki, resigned in disgrace from the safety of their Romanian internment camp. A new, non-Sanation coalition government was hastily formed in Paris and recognized by the Allies, whose passivity was eagerly exploited by German propaganda.
ENGLAND! THIS IS YOUR DOING screamed Nazi-designed posters slapped up on the teetering walls of roofless buildings leaning precariously over sidewalks throughout Warsaw. In the placards, a Polish officer, bandaged and bleeding, pointed accusingly at the hulk of a burning house, while Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, formally attired in tails, aloofly crossed his arms, his back turned to the devastation.
Varsovians tried to ignore the offensive posters while two of the 1,863 people executed in the weeks following Warsaw’s capitulation were shot for ripping them down. But the Germans had touched a nerve. Poles, both Gentile and Jewish, felt let down by the English and the French. Hitler gambled that the Great Powers would not fight for Poland, and he was right.
To celebrate his conquest, the Führer flew into Warsaw on the morning of October 5, his first and only visit to the Polish capital. The entire city was locked down in anticipation of his arrival. A general curfew was announced, and the residents of every apartment building and high-rise along Hitler’s route were ordered to vacate their homes to thwart potential assassins. “Anyone approaching a window or the street will immediately be shot,” advance teams with megaphones called out, as troops with sniper rifles deployed along rooftops.
Simha Ratheiser had been locked down by his own parents, who feared that his curiosity could land him in trouble. Already he had sneaked out of his infirmary bed, face and neck covered in bandages still seeping blood, to watch German troops march into Warsaw: “They made an incredible impression on me. All those helmets, the gleaming steel, the sheer discipline. I’ll never forget it.”
Sensing that his recuperating son would not be able to resist escaping again to catch a glimpse of the Führer, Zvi did not tell him of the October 5 visit. “Really! He was there?” Ratheiser exclaimed seventy years later in Jerusalem when informed about the victory parade. “I had no idea.”
Meanwhile, the Führer’s huge six-wheeled Mercedes convertible toured the emptied city center, pausing for photo opportunities two blocks from the Jewish Quarter, at the heavily damaged Pilsudski Square. The square was named after the Polish military hero who had beaten back Joseph Stalin from the gates of Warsaw in 1920, saving Central Europe from Communist dominion in a battle known as the Miracle on the Vistula. It was now to be rechristened Adolf Hitler Platz, in recognition of the miracle that did not take place this time.
The victory parade—a flawless, endless, single-minded organism that
flowed without interruption for several straight hours—slowly wended its way through Three Crosses Square, past the mansions and Italianate palaces of tree-lined Horsebreaker Avenue, to the elegant cross section of Chopin Street, where the Führer himself stood on a platform, his ankle-length leather coat tightly buttoned, his right arm rigidly raised, his favorite filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl immortalizing the moment.
Unbeknownst to the beaming German leader, five hundred pounds of dynamite was set to rain on his parade.
The bomb that might have changed history and saved fifty million lives never detonated under Adolf Hitler’s feet. Contrary to popular belief, it was not buried beneath the Führer’s reviewing stand near Chopin Street. Security had been too tight there; no Pole was allowed within two blocks of the heavily restricted area. Instead the explosives were planted on the corner of New World Street and Jerusalem Boulevard, a busy intersection on the southern edge of Midtown that Hitler’s motorcade would have to cross on its way to the reviewing stand. Sappers had secreted TNT under paving stones and run a buried cable several hundred yards to a ruined building where a pair of demolition experts with a detonator waited for the Führer’s motorcade.
Alas, at the right moment, they thought Hitler was General von Blaskowitz, the senior Wehrmacht commander in Warsaw, who was riding in another vehicle, and did not plunge the detonator for fear of missing their intended target. “He passed right under our noses,” the man in charge of the operation would later lament, with equal measures of disgust and disbelief.
Oblivious to their leader’s narrow escape from death, Warsaw’s new masters resumed their principal activity the moment Hitler’s plane lifted off the ground: looting. The systematic theft, which netted ten thousand train-wagon loads of booty in October and November 1939 alone, was initially undertaken under the guise of a citywide hunt for hidden weapons. Jewish households and businesses were particularly subject to such searches, and Simha Ratheiser recalled the hammering on their door as a pair of German soldiers gruffly pushed his mother aside to examine the contents of their home. His family had moved across the street from the shell of their old building, and their household offered slim pickings since their valuables had all been destroyed. The Germans made a show of looking for grenades or ammunition, poking their heads inside the oven, and left cursing the Ratheisers’ lack of material possessions.
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