Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Mark Edelman stood in the darkness outside the demolished Pleasant Street bunker and silently cursed Mordechai Anielewicz. How could Mordechai have allowed this to happen? Eighty ZOB members were dead, and when Mark discovered how they died, he could barely contain his anger. “First Anielewicz shot Mira,” his girlfriend, “then himself.” The mass suicide had occurred in the afternoon of May 8, when a large detachment of German troops had surrounded the area around one of the hideout’s hidden entrances. The huge bunker, according to Zivia, had six different escape tunnels. Historians would cite five. Surely Anielewicz could have counterattacked through one of these secondary exits, Edelman complained, as he himself had done when the SS uncovered his Franciscan Street shelter. “A leader has no right to commit suicide,” Mark growled. “He must fight to the end, especially as there was a chance of escaping from the Ghetto.” Edelman had fought his way out of a similar jam, and he held Anielewicz to the same high standard. “He took the easy way out.”

  There were a handful of survivors, as Mark and Zivia discovered. Three of them were prostitutes, who had managed to crawl out through one of the bunker’s secret passageways. They were now pleading with Edelman to take them with him. He refused. It was not a moral judgment. Prostitutes had shared bagels and other food with him in the past. In fact they had been kinder to him than most of the wealthy, morally upright wives of Jewish Council members. His refusal was based solely on a cold numerical calculation. He was going to attempt a mass escape through the sewers, and there were only so many people he could take with him. Non-ZOB members would have to fend for themselves. He couldn’t afford civilian stragglers.

  CHAPTER 33

  SIMHA THE SAVIOR

  A few miles south of Pleasant Street, Simha Ratheiser was staring at Isaac Zuckerman in disbelief. They were in a safe house outside the Ghetto, and Simha was still adjusting to his new surroundings: the frilled curtains and cushions on the sofa, the carpets and paintings on the wall, the potted plants and bookshelves filled with actual books—all the trappings of ordinary life that had long disappeared from Jewish reality.

  The apartment belonged to the Sawicki sisters, Anna and Marisa, who were Underground activists from the Socialist Party, the Bund’s traditional allies. They were Home Army but acting independently, outside the chain of command, much as Iwanski had been doing. “The welcome of the two women whom I’d just met dazzled me,” Simha recalled. “But I didn’t forget why I’d come.”

  Simha’s nerves had been so raw when he crossed over to the Aryan side at the end of April that the mere act of bathing—his first attempt at hygiene in nearly two weeks—had proven traumatic. How could he luxuriate in scented water, with fresh soap and clean towels, when his colleagues were trapped in rat-filled cellars gasping for air? The food and vodka the Sawicki sisters had generously laid out for him and Zalman Freidrich had prompted a similarly guilty reaction. He and Friedrich had no right to lounge around. They had to get back to the Ghetto, to get their friends out. They didn’t have a moment to lose. And yet they would lose an entire week sitting idle.

  This was why Ratheiser was so furious with Zuckerman. In Simha’s teenage eyes, the twenty-eight-year-old ZOB deputy commander had been a legend, a leader to be looked up to with awe. Yet now, in this tiny apartment, at the hour of need, Zuckerman seemed lost and completely out of his element. He had made no plan, no preparations to engineer a mass escape, and the prolonged frustration of waiting helplessly while his colleagues were massacred had taken a visible psychological toll on him. “I initially thought my job was to tell Isaac that the others were ready [to be evacuated] and that he would arrange the rest,” Simha recalled. “But it really hit me hard that no one was ready to help. Nothing had been done” to lay the groundwork for an organized escape.

  Three excruciatingly long days had passed since he’d delivered his message. Simha had eaten his fill, slept on a soft bed, and watched with mounting anger as smoke from the Ghetto blanched Warsaw’s hazy skyline. All the while, Isaac had paced the small apartment like a caged tiger. He was evidently troubled, exasperated to the point of a breakdown. It wasn’t his fault that he had been thrust into the role of ZOB liaison on the eve of the Uprising and that he hadn’t had time to nurture the contacts and personal relationships critical to his mission. He wasn’t to blame for the Home Army—the ZOB’s best hope—effectively turning its back on the Jews. He had pleaded with, cajoled, and finally cursed Captain Wolinski, his sympathetic but ultimately powerless Home Army counterpart.

  In desperation, and against his better judgment, Isaac had even turned to the ideologically suspect Communists, the People’s Army. The Moscow-backed group had been far more cooperative, partly because it was in the Soviet Union’s interest to stir up as much trouble as possible in Warsaw, the main transport hub for the Eastern Front. Every day, 180 trains loaded with soldiers, replacement tanks, artillery, and munitions left Warsaw for the east. Stalin wanted a citywide rising in the Polish capital because it would disrupt the flow of men and materiel to the battlefields in Russia. The People’s Army, however, could not accomplish that on its own. Its network in Poland was minuscule compared to the huge, London-backed Home Army. Nor did it enjoy popular support among the staunchly anti-Bolshevik general population. In Warsaw alone, the Home Army had 72,000 operatives. The People’s Army had barely 5,000 members across the entire country. A few Communist units had already tried to attack the artillery batteries Stroop had deployed just outside the Ghetto. The attempt neither slowed Stroop, who moved his howitzers into a crowded square nearby to deter future rebel strikes, nor incited a citywide insurrection. Despite the setback, the People’s Army had supplied Isaac with several crates of Red Army–issue rifles. The guns were a godsend, immeasurably more effective than revolvers. Unfortunately Isaac had no way of getting them into the hands of his fighters since their lines of communication had been disrupted. All in all, the past two weeks had been among the most difficult in Isaac’s life. Never before had he felt so helpless, so raging with impotence. He couldn’t do anything for his comrades, for his people, for his wife. (Zivia and Isaac had married, though the discreet ceremony would not enter the historical record.) He should be by Zivia’s side instead of being stuck on the Aryan side. Simha had reassured him that she was healthy and in good spirits the last time he’d seen her. But that was days ago. Was she still safe? Had she been captured? Had she been wounded? Was she on a train to Treblinka? Was she already dead? Isaac had no answers to the wrenching questions that mercilessly pounded his brain. He could only numb their anxious refrain with vodka.

  Finally, after a few more days of inaction—probably around May 3 or 4, while Edelman’s company was deep into its firefight with the two SS platoons—Simha erupted. “If you don’t go, I’m going to go back in myself!” he shouted at Zuckerman. “We need to do something!”

  “Fine!” Isaac yelled back, losing his temper. They would take the Russian rifles into the Ghetto through the sewers and attack the Germans, he proposed. “That’s suicide,” Simha snapped. “If you are going in to fight to the death, that’s okay,” he argued. It was Zuckerman’s business how he chose to die. But the only reason Simha would ever set foot in the Ghetto again would be to rescue his friends. “If you are going in to save them,” Ratheiser pressed his point, “we need a plan.”

  It took a few more frustrating days for the plan to be put into action, but on the night of May 8, 1943, Simha Ratheiser pushed open a manhole cover, gingerly poked his head out, and immediately ducked as the blinding beam of a searchlight swept past him. It took him a fraction of a second to get his bearings, but the towering Umschlagplatz gates were unmistakable. He was in the Ghetto, though just barely. His bungling guides had misjudged their position and led him to an opening right under the Germans’ noses. In fact, they had almost overshot the Ghetto, traversing its entire length underground. The fools were sanitation workers from the city’s sewer maintenance department. They had been approached by contacts from the Peop
le’s Army, and Simha had paid them handsomely to steer him and another ZOB member through the subterranean labyrinth. Unfortunately the terrified Gentiles had fortified themselves heavily with alcohol, and then lost their nerve shortly after descending into the canals on the Aryan side. Simha had been forced to pull a gun on them and snarl: “You can keep leading us, or you can die right here.” He kept the gun’s short muzzle pressed into the small of a worker’s back as they all staggered through the waist-deep muck.

  Now the guides would not go any farther. Richard Mozelman, the other ZOB member, would have to stay in the sewer and guard the inebriated Gentiles, or they would surely bolt. Simha would go looking for survivors. Richie had been a last-minute addition to the rescue party, replacing the Bundist Zalman Friedrich, who had pleaded not to go. He had a daughter who was being sheltered by nuns in Warsaw (at a different convent than Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak) and had begged for permission to see her. Mozelman, a member of one of the ZOB’s five Communist units, had been a logical replacement because he had participated in a similar rescue operation a week earlier. Boruch Spiegel and his girlfriend, Chaika Belchatowska, had been part of the group of forty ZOB fighters spirited out of Warsaw by Mozelman, Tuvia Sheingut of the Marxist Young Guard, and Wladislaw Gaik, a lieutenant in the People’s Army. “It took a few tries but we managed to get out of the Ghetto,” Spiegel remembered. “It was terrible down there.” They had crawled out of the sewers on Garden Street just south of the Main Shops District and stayed hidden in the nearby attic of a Communist operative while the People’s Army arranged transport. Finally, after a forty-eight-hour wait, a furniture moving truck delivered the exhausted refugees to a forest five miles north of Warsaw, where escaped Soviet POWs were forming partisan cells. Boruch’s evacuation now served as the blueprint for the larger rescue mission Simha was mounting.

  Right away, though, there was a complication. When Simha made his way through the dark ruins to Edelman’s Franciscan Street shelter, no one was there. In the week that had passed since he’d gone over to the Aryan side, Edelman must have moved, Simha reasoned. He doubled back and tried Anielewicz’s command bunker, assuming Anielewicz would know where to find Mark. But on Pleasant Street, when he whispered the password, John, there was again no answer. Simha grew worried. “I spent three hours looking for my friends.” He tried every hideout he could remember. He scoured the debris for any secret entrances he might have missed—all in pitch blackness, with only the sound of his breath and the soft scrape of his footsteps to intrude on the postapocalyptic silence. “I looked around the rubble,” he recalled, finally giving up hope and his search, “and I felt as though I was the last Jew on earth.”

  In the garbagemen’s bunker, meanwhile, only fifty yards from where Simha was searching, Zivia and Mark were debating what to do. The atmosphere in the crowded shelter was despondent. No one slept. No one ate the meager meal that had been prepared for the half dozen survivors of Pleasant Street. Some of them were injured, and moaned quietly. Others were crying. Everyone was deflated. The shocking discovery of the mass suicide at the command bunker had sapped them all of energy, of the will to fight on. Edelman and Lubetkin knew that it was now only a matter of time before the Germans uncovered this hideout as well. They had to start the evacuation immediately, Zivia decided. Her husband’s old friend Tuvia Borzykowski would lead the first group.

  Tuvia had fought alongside Zivia in the opening battle of the Uprising, and he had already tried twice to find a way out of the Ghetto through the canals. “I will never forget what I saw when I first descended into the sewer,” he recalled of his initial attempt. “Masses of refugees were huddling in the filth and stink in pipes so low and narrow that only one person could pass at a time.” Rats scurried over the semisubmerged bodies, jumping on people’s heads, scratching their scalps and necks. “Some of the elderly people and children had fainted, with no one paying attention. The stream of sewage washed away their bodies.” A bullet had grazed Tuvia’s cheek on the second try; the three other ZOB members with him that day had been caught or shot by the Germans when they reached the Aryan side. The SS had been waiting for them next to the manhole cover. He was thus not anxious to repeat the experiment and pleaded with Zivia to let him rest through the night. But she pulled rank. The Germans would probably be here in the morning, she said. He had to leave immediately. He brought eight lead scouts to start their desperate journey. “It was midnight,” Tuvia recalled. “When we lowered ourselves into the sewer and hit the cold water, the shock was so powerful that we all lost consciousness for a moment.… We felt the slime sticking to our bodies. We kept coming upon pieces of clothing, remnants of human beings who had tried, as we were now, to save themselves.”

  They moved forward, dislodging the bloated corpses that blocked many of the narrower passages. After an hour of wandering, it became apparent that they were completely lost. At forks in the channels, they had turned blindly, letting fate steer them. Now the numbing cold and the configuration of the pipes began to wear them down. The network was too low to stand in and too deep to sit and rest. They had to remain stooped, up to their necks in the freezing sludge. Eventually, hypothermia would set in, when they could faint and be swept under by the surprisingly strong current. Tuvia had already begun feeling drowsy. Then he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. “We had been walking for several hours when we received a jolt. A bright light, as if from a powerful electric torch, appeared in the distance. The only explanation could be that the Germans had entered the sewer to look for refugees. We had heard before that they were doing that, pumping in gas and throwing grenades. Instinctively we started to withdraw, but then we realized that there was no way back.”

  The light grew bigger and brighter. Tuvia began saying his farewells. He was now certain he would die in this dark, wet tomb. Strangely, the prospect did not bother him. He had accepted his fate. He was in a state of total resignation when from behind the approaching glare came a magical word: “John?”

  Simha and Tuvia ran into each other’s arms with unbridled joy. They hugged and even kissed each other like long-lost relatives, and Ratheiser had jubilant sensation of unexpectantly seeing loved ones return from the dead. He distributed the hard candy and lemons he had brought in his rucksack and watched his vitamin-deprived colleagues devour the fruit, peels and all. After they had all calmed down and exchanged stories of the battle on Franciscan Street and of the tragedy at the command bunker, Simha outlined his plan. Richie Mozelman, through his contacts in the Communist underground, had arranged for trucks to be waiting for them on the Aryan side. The rendezvous was on the corner of Straight and Hard Streets, in what had once been the southernmost part of the original 1940 Ghetto. It was now deep in Aryan territory, more than a mile away, and necessitated a grueling hike through the freezing sewage system. But the distance had its advantages: the Germans would not be guarding manholes as closely so far from the besieged enclaves. As an additional precaution, Simha had paid off a local mob boss to ensure that the greaser blackmailers that prowled the Ghetto’s perimeter would not bother them. Once in the trucks, it would be a short ride to the forest.

  The ten of them had to set out immediately, Simha insisted, because it was already 3 A.M., and the escape needed to take place under the cover of darkness. He instructed Tuvia to send two messengers to fetch Zivia, Mark, Hersh Berlinski, Zacharia Artstein, Israel Kanal, and the remaining forty fighters from the trash collectors’ bunker. The runners would lead the larger group out of the Ghetto by following the arrow signs Simha would chalk on the canal walls, and they would all meet up under the manhole on Straight Street.

  Tuvia listened to the daring plan with mounting apprehension. Simha seemed “too optimistic” for Borzykowski’s liking. “We were not accustomed to good news”; too many things could go wrong. “It all sounds too good to be true,” he thought to himself.

  It was not until 11 A.M. that Zivia’s main group from the trash collectors’ bunker reached Straight Street.
By that time, Tuvia Borzykowski’s advance party had been waiting beneath the manhole for six hours. From above, they could hear horns blaring, pedestrians crossing the road, snippets of conversations. Sunlight slanted through the perforated manhole, inviting them upward. But they couldn’t move. They had missed their window of opportunity because Zivia and Mark had taken so long. Lubetkin had not wanted to leave the bunker, had delayed the departure for as long as possible to give Zacharia Artstein’s unit time to return from their night patrol. Everyone would leave together or no one would leave at all, she had insisted. It had taken all of Edelman’s powers of persuasion to overrule her, to explain that they would all die unless they followed Simha’s precise instructions and set out immediately. Many of the civilians in the bunker had wanted to go with them, but Edelman had taken a firm stand with his hosts as well. There were only two trucks waiting on the Aryan side, with barely enough room for the fifty-odd ZOB members. No one else could come.

  Many of the fighters were injured, unable to walk on their own. “We drag[ged] them over the putrid water,” Zivia recalled, “pulling them by their arms and legs.” The journey had taken four excruciating hours, “crawling in single file in the dark, not seeing one another’s faces.” Some of the fighters contemplated suicide. Others fainted from the cold and had to be revived. When at last they reached the rendezvous, the worst part began: the waiting. “We lay in the sewage, body pressed to body, and counted the passing minutes,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “Occasionally a passerby would step on the perforated cover and cut off the bit of light penetrating the sewer. Each footfall served us as a warning that we had to keep absolute silence so as to remain undetected.”