Isaac's Army: A Story of Courage and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland

490 Pages·2012·2.78 MB·English

by  Matthew Brzezinski

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Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Brzezinski
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Title-page photograph copyright © iStockphoto.com/© Monika Lewandowska
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brzezinski, Matthew
Isaac’s army : a story of courage and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland / Matthew Brzezinski.—
1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-67964530-6
1. World War, 1939–1945—Jewish resistance—Poland. 2. Jews—Persecutions—Poland. 3.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Poland. 4. Poland—Ethnic relations. I. Title.
DS134.55.B79 2012
940.53′183209438—dc23
2012013703
Cover design: Daniel Rembert
Cover photograph: Eugeniusz Lokajski, “Polish insurgent and a group of civilians at an
information point in a doorway: Warsaw Uprising, August 1944” (Warsaw Rising Museum
Collection)
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
To my mother, and to my wife,
who have shown me the best
of both worlds
PREFACE
To survive the Holocaust, Polish Jews had three options. They could run.
They could hide. Or they could take up arms and fight. The only other
alternative—to do nothing—resulted in almost certain death.
Although death also overwhelmingly claimed those who ran, hid, or
fought, many still chose these paths of resistance. They refused to submit
to evil, or to give up on life, and this made them exceptional individuals
—not just as Jews or Poles, but as humans. Statistically, they were the
“one percent,” the very few who took their fate into their own hands and
beat the odds.
I had been curious about these remarkable people ever since my first
job in journalism as a lowly cub reporter at The New York Times’s
Warsaw bureau back in the early 1990s. Warsaw then was so drab and
lifeless, so devasted physically and spiritually by half a century of
communism, that it was not hard to imagine what the Ghetto must have
felt like. I often walked the neighborhood’s sooty streets, where not a
single prewar building had survived Hitler’s wrath, and wondered what I
would have done had I been one of the nearly half million people packed
inside the district’s walls. Since I was a Gentile—my mother was a native
Varsovian—the exercise had always been academic, an arm’s-length
inquiry without undue emotional attachment. Perhaps that was why I
always pictured myself acting heroically.
As the years passed and I moved on, to reporting stints in Moscow and
then Washington, thoughts of Jewish heroes receded from my mind,
replaced by more mundane concerns about marriage and mortgages,
twins and tuition fees. Occasionally a newspaper article or a film set
during the war would rekindle my curiosity, and I would wonder about
the true nature of resistance, and about what it had taken to be part of
the one percent. In popular culture, resistance figures were always
portrayed as if they had been forged overnight, born defiant and
wielding a grenade. The real story, I suspected, was far more interesting
and nuanced, and much slower in developing.
My enduring interest was enhanced by marriage. Since my wife,
Roberta, was Jewish, so, too, were our three children under both
rabbinical and Nuremberg laws, which made it harder to treat the
Holocaust dispassionately, like something terrible that had happened to
the neighbors. It became impossible to do so in 2007, when Roberta
proposed moving to Poland for a three-year posting. She had been made
partner in an international private equity firm that was investing heavily
in Eastern Europe. Her firm’s sleek new offices were in the heart of the
former Warsaw Ghetto, built over the ruins of the old Jewish Council
building on Mushroom Street, which was being transformed into a
soaring financial district to anchor Poland’s economic rebirth.
When we settled into our rented marble McMansion in a ritzy Warsaw
suburb, next door to a prewar Gothic palace with an indoor swimming
pool that had belonged to a Jewish industrialist, I couldn’t help but think
what would have happened to my family if it were 1939 instead of 2009.
Though I no longer had the luxury of detachment, I still approached my
growing obsession egoistically. The question of how I would have acted
was always in the back of my mind when I set out to tell this story. For
purely selfish reasons, I wanted to seek out and meet the extraordinary
individuals who had defied Hitler and try to discover what made them
tick. Did they share common traits? A hero gene, perhaps? Or were they
ordinary people who tapped some hidden reservoir of strength and
courage? I knew that to get the full picture, the complete character
sketch, I had to tell the whole story—not just a fragmentary rehash of a
rising, but what came before and after. In other words, people’s stories
had to be rendered from the first day of the war to the last, and in some
cases beyond. Only then would it become clear who they really were,
where they came from, what their motivation was, and how they had
evolved into heroic figures. I also wanted to explore the different forms
of resistance: collective and individual, armed and passive, conscious
and subconcious. Picking up a gun was not the only way to thwart the
Nazis. While running and hiding didn’t capture the public imagination in
the same way as assaulting a tank, these acts of defiance also required
astonishing perseverance, courage, and planning, as I discovered while
researching the epic saga of the Osnos and Mortkowicz families. I came
across their story by chance, in the waiting room of a decrepit Polish
hospital where my son Ari was undergoing emergency surgery. I chose
to write about them because they were representative of thousands of
other Polish Jews who shared similar experiences, and because the
related families had surviving members, one cousin living in New York,
the other in Krakow.
Getting to know the protagonists personally became one of the chief
determinants for selecting the main characters of the book. This was
especially true in relating the tale of organized resistance, because only a
handful of veterans of the Jewish Fighting Organization were still alive,
scattered across continents. Some, like Mark Edelman, were well known
and living nearby in Poland. Others, like Simha Ratheiser, were farther
afield in Israel. I found Boruch Spiegel in Montreal, in a retirement home
only a block away from the medical center where my mother had set up
her family practice after immigrating to Canada in the 1960s.
I had to make one notable exception to my acquaintanceship rule.
Isaac Zuckerman had passed away in Israel before I could meet him. But
there was no way to tell the story of Jewish organized resistance in
Poland without including him. He was too central to the narrative to
omit. In fact, he was the embodiment of the underground movement,
which is why his name graces the cover of this book. Fortunately,
Zuckerman had written a detailed and brutally frank memoir, which he
released only upon his death. The text was angry and honest,
unvarnished and free of hero worship, and I found it invaluable.
The quotes in this book are drawn from a mix of interviews, memoirs,
unpublished diaries, and archival materials. The data—the death tolls,
roundup numbers, execution and torture tallies, starvation rates—are
drawn from Polish, Israeli, and U.S. historical surveys. Source
attributions are all enumerated in the endnote section so as not to
disrupt the narrative flow. That flow traces the personal journeys of the
main characters while also attending to the need for historical and
geographic background.
Too many accounts of the Holocaust are written in a vacuum, as if
sealed from the outside world. Jews were directly affected by the larger
events around them: by relations with Gentiles and by shifting alliances
within the fractious Polish Underground; by military developments, both
victories and defeats, on the Eastern and Western fronts and by changing
policies and priorities of Poland’s Nazi occupiers; by cynical political
decisions in London and Washington; and by the eventual arrival and
agenda of new Soviet masters. These outside forces shaped Jewish
destinies and decisions between 1939 and 1946, and I’ve tried to weave
them into the plot to provide explanatory context.
I’ve also tried to re-create the physical landscape of wartime Warsaw,
since the city no longer exists as it once was. Hitler literally erased it
from the map, destroying 90 percent of the buildings in the metropolitan
area. This made it frustratingly difficult, sitting at the sushi restaurant in
my wife’s fancy office building and staring at the million-dollar
condominiums being built across the street, to picture the starving
children that once lined up outside that very spot, begging for bread.
Nothing was left of that world but a few dwindling memories, and it
seemed important to me to paint a living and breathing portrait of the
place and the time, as well as the people. That is why I chose to render
location names into their English translations, whenever possible.
“Mushroom Street” rolls off the tongue more easily than “Ulica
Grzybowska,” though both have the same meaning. Similarly, “Paul” is
easier on the American ear than its Polish equivalent of “Pawel.”
But ultimately, this is a book about people, about a group of
individuals who experienced and accomplished extraordinary things.
Alone and together, they pushed the limits of endurance and were tested
like few others on this planet of seven billion. Though their stories are
inseparable from the Holocaust, their appeal, and the heights to which
they elevate the human condition, are universal.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Map
Cast of Characters
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 1: HANNA’S TRIUMPH
CHAPTER 2: SIMHA’S FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
CHAPTER 3: WOLSKA STREET IS COVERED WITH BLOOD
CHAPTER 4: ROBERT’S PAPER AIRPLANES
CHAPTER 5: HIS BROTHER’S HAND
CHAPTER 6: WHERE IS YOUR HUSBAND?
CHAPTER 7: MARK’S VOW
CHAPTER 8: JOANNA’S RHYME
CHAPTER 9: ISAAC ON MEMORY LANE
CHAPTER 10: ZIVIA
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 11: WHY DOES HITLER LIKE MRS. ZEROMSKA?
CHAPTER 12: AM I WILLING TO DO THIS?
CHAPTER 13: MARTHA AND ROBERT RUN
CHAPTER 14: HANNA AND JOANNA HIDE
CHAPTER 15: SIMHA AND BORUCH PAY THE BILLS
CHAPTER 16: JOANNA CAUSES TROUBLE
CHAPTER 17: ISAAC AND BORUCH GLIMPSE HELL
CHAPTER 18: THEY DIDN’T DESERVE SUCH A PARTING
CHAPTER 19: SIMHA LEAVES ZIVIA TO HER PROPHECY
CHAPTER 20: JOANNA AND THE TERRIFYING MR. GLASER