Boruch Spiegel was more forgiving of the limited assistance from fellow countrymen. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that the Poles had it pretty bad too. Most of them were too busy trying to survive. They had their own problems.” Ultimately, it would be the deeds of those who harmed rather than those who helped that would resonate loudest in the historical record. Yet to Simha, there was a karmic balance between betrayal and assistance. Greasers and anti-Semites were offset by people like the Sawicki sisters. “Once I was on the run and went to Marisa [Sawicka’s] apartment. The Gestapo had just been there.” They had come to arrest her nephew, Stephen, who was later executed for helping the ZOB. “She was scared and I would have understood had she turned me away. But she still let me in. I’ll never forget that.”
The principal difference between good and evil at this point was that acting decently was punishable by death, while heinous acts carried virtually no consequences.
Not all of those rendering assistance to Jews were motivated by pure altruism, however. “Keeping cats” was a for-profit enterprise for many Varsovian landlords, the only way for cash-strapped families to make ends meet. The hyperinflation, high unemployment, and economic devastation wrought by Nazi occupation had reduced standards of living in Warsaw to levels far below the worst of the Great Depression. Food was prohibitively expensive, accounting for the bulk of most family budgets. As they had in the Ghetto, smuggling and the black market filled the cruel caloric gap left by starvation-level German rations. For homeowners with no alternative sources of income, taking in boarders became a necessity.
Warsaw also had more room at this stage of the war. The capital’s non-Jewish population had shrunk by more than a fifth since 1939. With nearly a quarter of a million residents dead or in labor, concentration, or POW camps, the city’s perennial housing shortage had been temporarily alleviated, leaving vacancies that were eagerly filled by refugees from the Ghetto. The monthly rents that illegal Jewish tenants paid were astronomical, often ten to twenty times the rate charged for Gentiles. The daily rate for boarding a Jewish child, for instance, was 100 zlotys, more than Mark Edelman earned in an entire month as a hospital orderly in 1940. The premium factored in the risks for landlords, whose entire families could be shot for harboring Jews. Still, thousands engaged in this dangerous game of real estate roulette, because the Nazis had assigned the death penalty to so many mundane activities by then that the sentence had lost its meaning. “Death threatened for bacon and gold, for weapons and false papers, for evading registration, for a radio and for Jews,” noted one Varsovian writer. “The wits said that they were afraid only of sentences higher than death; to them the death penalty was like a prewar jaywalking ticket. Over the city there hung a deadly absurdity.”
In this treacherous environment, Jews sometimes became pawns in intra-Gentile disputes. Vindictive neighbors denounced landlords for “keeping cats” for reasons that often had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. A lovers’ quarrel, a divorce, an unpaid debt, or an old score to settle could result in an anonymous letter to the Gestapo. It was in this fashion that Emmanuel Ringelblum and forty other Jews hiding under the care of a sympathetic Socialist Party activist by the name of Mieczyslaw Wolski were caught and killed by the Germans in March 1944. Wolski’s ex-girlfriend tipped off the authorities after a particularly contentious breakup.
The capture of Ringelblum hit the Zionist community hard. He had been one of its most prominent and respected members in the Ghetto, and Isaac Zuckerman was especially dispirited by the senseless loss. During the day, when he made his rounds visiting the various ZOB melinas, Isaac put on a brave face, dispensing his usual quips and anecdotes. At night, when he was alone with Zivia and Mark Edelman, the mask of good humor faded and his despondency showed through. Attrition was decimating the remnants of Polish Jewry. If the war dragged on for a few more years, none of them would be left. Isaac consoled himself with vodka. He had started drinking in 1941 to numb the guilt he felt when he found out that his entire family had been murdered in Vilna, to ease the nagging remorse that he should have been with them. Now his alcohol consumption became a regular coping mechanism. It did not, however, appear to interfere with his work.
Part of the ZOB’s newly expanded brief was to act as a de facto underground welfare agency, to arrange false documents and melina safe houses, to help defray the high cost of rents and to distribute money collected abroad to Jews in hiding. For this, Zuckerman turned to the Jewish National Committee, the Ghetto-era civilian body that he had created to help get the ZOB formally recognized by the Home Army. The Jewish National Committee had already been working with a Home Army civilian agency known as the Council to Aid Jews. This underground organization, founded in late 1942, was loosely connected to the Home Army and funded by the government in exile. To its paymasters in London, it was partly an instrument to expiate guilt, and partly a cynical exercise in political correctness to appease Poland’s British and American allies, who themselves had done little to ease the plight of European Jews. In Warsaw, on the other hand, the Council was staffed by a small group of idealists and romantics, many of whom paid dearly for their humanitarian efforts. Most hailed from intellectual liberal backgrounds, the traditional provenance of Poland’s small philo-Semitic community. But not all. Ironically, one of the Council’s co-founders, Sofia Kossak, had been a rabid nationalist and prewar anti-Semite. A successful historical novelist—a translation of her book about Saint Francis of Assisi, Blessed Are the Meek, was a bestseller in the United States in 1944—she had published tract after tract demanding that Jews emigrate from Poland before 1939. But after being shocked by the Holocaust, she turned full circle in 1942, devoting herself to the preservation of Polish Jewry. Kossak was in Auschwitz in the winter of 1944, while her book was climbing The New York Times bestseller list, but the Council by then had a staff of several hundred dedicated clandestine workers. Among them were individuals like Wladislaw Bartoszewski, a twenty-year-old Auschwitz survivor who became Poland’s foreign minister in 2001, and Irene Sendler, who rescued three thousand Jewish children during the Ghetto liquidation and whose 2008 funeral in Warsaw was attended by Israeli heads of state.
Two Jewish representatives sat on the Council’s executive committee, the Bundist attorney Leon Feiner and Adolf Berman, a psychiatrist who headed the Warsaw branch of Po’alei Zion Left. It was through them that Isaac Zuckerman tapped into this small but invaluable network of future Righteous Gentiles committed to saving Jews. Their organization worked on multiple levels. For Jewish refugees who looked and sounded “good,” they facilitated the procurement of false identities through the Home Army’s forgery department so that escapees from the Ghetto could “live on the surface,” which was far cheaper and in some ways safer than hiding. Simha Ratheiser was one of the earliest ZOB beneficiaries of such manufactured identities. His papers—an Arbeitskarte work card and the all-important Kennkarte identity card, with his photo, fingerprint, and serial number—were virtually foolproof because they were genuine, issued by the General Government itself. Simha had applied for them in person, armed with the birth certificate of a recently deceased aristocrat. The Germans had no idea that the real nobleman had passed away because deaths were rarely reported to the authorities in wartime Warsaw. Instead, the Underground resurrected their identities. Recipients of such recycled documents were ghoulishly known as the living dead, and there were tens of thousands of them roaming the Polish capital.
Simha had additional papers that said he worked for a German organization that sent Polish slave laborers to the Reich. This extra identification allowed him to travel all over occupied Poland, and he had once used the fake ID to go to the Plaszow concentration camp outside Krakow to try to foment rebellion there. The SS had stopped him. “I was so sure of myself, and the guard looks at my pass and says ‘Where did you buy it?’ ”
Ratheiser hadn’t panicked. “I was always calmest whenever I was in the most danger. I looked the guard in the eye and smiled.�
�� The SS hauled Ratheiser over to a General Government registry office in Krakow to see if his papers were genuine. While there, Simha shamelessly flirted with the pretty young German secretaries on duty. It did not hurt that he was rather handsome himself. “When the guards had gone into one of the back rooms where they kept the files, one of the secretaries winked at me to escape.”
In addition to forged documents, the Council also provided Polish lessons and religious instruction to those who looked Slavic but had linguistic or cultural limitations. One such school in Warsaw operated out of a beauty parlor. “It was filled with women wearing all kinds of creams, curlers, sitting under heating lamps and dryers,” according to one participant. While the students received manicures they were given instruction in the Catholic faith, knowledge of which was often used by greasers, the Gestapo, and the Blue Police to test suspected Jews. Not knowing one’s Name Day, for instance, was the equivalent of a death sentence because Christians in Poland celebrated the birthday of their patron saint instead of their own birthday. Similarly, a policeman might ask a suspect to recite a certain prayer, or to name their parish priest. Something as simple as tram schedules could trip someone up. The public transport system had changed routes and lines since the inception of the Ghetto. Not knowing which tram number ran on which street was a dead giveaway that someone had been out of circulation for a long time.
The Council’s greatest contribution was financial. At its peak in 1944, its budget exceeded two million zlotys a month. Funds from the government in exile were parachuted into Poland by RAF airdrops. The Home Army and the British air force had a long-standing association. It was through Home Army spies, for instance, that the British eventually located and destroyed the Baltic coast rocketry installation at Peenemunde that produced the V-1 Flying Bombs that terrorized London. The Home Army scored an even greater intelligence coup by stealing an entire V-2 rocket, the far more powerful successor to the Flying Bomb, when one of the missiles misfired and landed more or less intact in a bog. Polish agents disassembled it and transported the pieces to a secret landing strip where British engineers retrieved it for analysis in English laboratories.
The money flown in from the Polish government in exile was arguably the most important lifeline for the few remaining Warsaw Jews at this stage of the war. By 1944, after nearly five years without income, most had depleted their resources. Without external support, they could not afford the skyrocketing costs of staying hidden on the Aryan side. The five-hundred-zloty monthly subsidy from the Council prevented eviction for many of the twelve thousand recipients of the Council’s stipends. Isaac Zuckerman and the ZOB became key cogs in the underground distribution machine. Master lists were kept with names, addresses, and tallies of recipients. These documents, some of which still survive, were among the best-guarded secrets in Warsaw. Had they fallen into German hands, the Gestapo would have had a blueprint, literally a road map, to annihilation. “I had a list of three thousand names,” Zuckerman recalled. Unlike the Council, he did not include the addresses of those in his care. Isaac demanded that they be committed to memory by his couriers. “I contrived a system for myself for finding streets and people, and to this day I can’t get away from it,” Simha Ratheiser recalled.
Simha’s parents were not on any of the lists. He had lost touch with them, and while he suspected that Miriam, his blond, Polish-speaking mother, had managed to fend for herself, he was sure his father, Zvi, was doomed. “I was certain he had no chance.” As a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jew, Zvi had no hope of living on the surface. Yet in reality that was precisely what he was doing. Simha underestimated his father’s resilience and resourcefulness. Zvi Ratheiser proved far tougher than his son had imagined. He had selflessly separated from his wife, knowing that Miriam was better off on her own, and he took a job as a stable hand for the Germans. “He bandaged his face and pretended to be mute,” Simha later remarked with evident pride. The turnover of Germans was sufficiently high that no one noticed that Zvi’s facial wounds never seemed to heal. As for the stuttering grunts he uttered, these, too, seemed to render him invisible to the arrogant occupiers: just another example of a subhuman Slav.
Simha knew none of this. At the time, he was focused on helping strangers by delivering money on his rounds through the city. Zuckerman was in charge of collecting the funds from Home Army intermediaries who retrieved the parachuted cash drops. Some came from Jewish sources in Switzerland and America and were in foreign currency—dollars, pounds, and Swiss francs—which led to disputes with the Home Army over exchange rates. Isaac bitterly complained to Captain Wolinski that he was being shortchanged in many of the transactions. Wolinski himself was above reproach: He personally headed a cell that was sheltering 280 Jews. But Home Army couriers did appear to be taking a very large cut for smuggling the cash into Poland, and the currency was often delivered late. Simha was not privy to these heated negotiations. “I can testify only that a lot of money did arrive,” he noted.
Carrying such vast sums posed problems of its own. The Blue Police were notoriously corrupt. The currency traders who hung around Saxon Gardens or across from Central Station were often on Gestapo payrolls. Greasers and common thieves killed for far less than Zuckerman regularly had strapped to his chest. This was why Ratheiser, armed with two pistols and a grenade, shadowed him wherever he went. “I was a bodyguard. And a couple of times it was a good thing [for Zuckerman] that I was there.”
Zivia Lubetkin, who did much of the accounting—the only way she could be helpful to the ZOB while in enforced seclusion—was scrupulous about not wasting the precious funds. The equivalent of millions of dollars passed through Isaac’s hands during the course of the war. In just one October 1943 cable to London, he acknowledges receipt of $10,000 and £10,000, complaining that he was still awaiting the promised delivery of another $15,000 and £9,000. Isaac and Zivia were keenly aware that the money was not intended for their personal consumption. Some of it had to be spent on clothes for couriers like Simha. But this was a necessity to ensure their cover. For themselves, they kept only a minimal allowance for food. “The only luxury on the menu was a glass of vodka,” Simha recalled. “And we insisted firmly on that.”
CHAPTER 36
ZIVIA GETS HER GUN
On April 19, 1944, Isaac, Simha, Zivia, Mark Edelman, Tuvia Borzykowski, and other ZOB leaders gathered at an apartment on Forestry Boulevard. The second-floor safe house had been rented by Marisa Sawicka, their Gentile patron saint. It had a false wall built of brick and plaster and stood next to a Protestant church one block east of the old Main Shops District, where not a single building remained standing.
In the year since the Ghetto Uprising, the Germans had made no effort to clean up the demolished Jewish district. It had been left a heap of rubble stretching as far as the eye could see, a permanent reminder to Varsovians of the price of resistance. Here and there a church steeple rose from the ruins, undamaged, like a solitary monument to Nazi religious restraint.
In the rest of the city, church bells pealed in anticipation of the Easter holiday. The weather had warmed after the brutal winter, and buds were forming on the chestnut trees in the Saxon Gardens and Count Krasinski Park, the former playgrounds of generations of Jewish children. Seeds from the parks were carried by birds and winds into the nearby Ghetto, where Nature had begun her own reclamation project. Weeds were sprouting in the rubble of the Brushmakers District, while farther west, at the far end of the former Ghetto, saplings were already poking through the untended graves of the abandoned Jewish cemetery. These would eventually grow into a dense, dark forest.
The ZOB’s remaining leaders, on that first anniversary of the Rising, gathered to pay tribute to the dead and raise a toast to Mordechai Anielewicz and all their other fallen comrades. How many had died no one knew for sure. Of the original five hundred ZOB members, probably no more than thirty were left in Warsaw. A few were still fighting in the Wyszkow forest near the Bug River. Several had left to lead cells in o
ther towns. What was certain was that the ZOB’s ranks had been severely thinned. Mere survival, a tightrope balance of treachery and trust, had preoccupied ZOB commanders for much of the past year. But in the spring and early summer of 1944, their thoughts turned once more to armed rebellion.
The war was now going very badly for the Germans, so badly that, for the first time since September 1939, Boruch Spiegel became convinced that Hitler was going to lose. Spiegel devoured news reports from distant fronts. He eagerly snatched every issue of the Information Bulletin, the Home Army’s press organ, that his host, Joseph Pera, brought home. The paper was distributed almost openly in May 1944. Its illicit print run had reached an astounding forty-seven thousand copies a day, a circulation that exceeded that of some legitimate publications, signaling that the Gestapo was losing its iron hold on the Polish capital.
There were other, even more telling signs. In mid-May, German bureaucrats were issued handguns after a wave of assassination attempts. At airfields around the capital, Junker bombers began to explode mysteriously. In the city center, several police stations were attacked in broad daylight. Desertions began to plague the Polish Blue Police. After the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht to the fringes of eastern Poland, nervous cops started turning in their uniforms or offering to betray their German masters. The hated Volksdeutsche also underwent a dramatic transformation. Their haughty demeanor began to change perceptibly in late May 1944, when, after six months and nearly a hundred thousand Allied casualties, Polish troops under General Anders finally took the Italian redoubt of Monte Cassino, paving the way for U.S. forces to conquer Rome.
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