Isaac's Army (11 page)

Isaac was not prone to insubordination, however, when it came to instructions from his Zionist superiors. And new orders soon arrived from the organization’s temporary headquarters in Kovel. Zuckerman was not to go to Lithuania to search for a northern passage to Palestine after all. It was now clear that the overwhelming majority of the more than one million Polish Jews trapped in the Soviet zone would not be able to escape. And the total was likely much higher, because no one knew how many of the 2.3 million other Jews in the German part of Poland had already crossed the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line. The boundary between the two occupying powers was still open and would remain unguarded until October 26, 1939, when the frontiers were formally set. Every day trains carrying refugees east encountered trains moving west. “
Are you insane, where are you going?” the eastward-bound passengers gasped as they passed the occasional trainload of Jews returning to Warsaw. “You are insane. Where are you going?” retorted westbound travelers fleeing the Soviets, with equal astonishment.

It was presumed that many senior Zionist leaders in Soviet-occupied Poland were well known to the NKVD because the dreaded security service that had murdered millions of Russians during Stalin’s purges was hastily compiling dossiers on hundreds of thousands of potential Polish troublemakers in preparation for mass arrests. Younger, more obscure activists like Isaac, however, might still be able
to operate under the NKVD’s radar and take their place. Zuckerman’s instructions were to travel deep into the Soviet occupation zone and form an underground network. What precisely that entailed, he did not know. He had no relevant experience, and only the vaguest notion of where to start. But he did not hesitate, despite his father’s admonition that leaving Vilna just as it was about to be handed over to neutral Lithuania made no sense. “
He would have understood if I had gone closer to Eretz Israel. But to go further away! I couldn’t tell him that I was going to do clandestine work. Mother did not know anything. I went to the kitchen, came up from behind her, kissed her and told her I was leaving. She started weeping.” Isaac would later be haunted by his quick departure. “I didn’t know that it would be the last time I would see my parents.”

After leaving Vilna, Zuckerman wandered Soviet-occupied Poland, trying to revive local Socialist-Zionist chapters in towns including Kovel, Lutsk, and Bialystok, before finally settling in Lvov, the largest urban center in the Carpathians. All along this geographic corridor the Russians were pressuring young, left-leaning Zionists to join Komsomol, the Leninist youth organization, and Zuckerman was fighting a rearguard action to stem the defections. “
There were cases of members leaving the movement to join the communists,” he later acknowledged. “Even teachers in Hebrew schools forgot their learning overnight.”

Actively undermining Komsomol recruiters was a very dangerous undertaking. Jews, though initially less targeted by the NKVD than aristocrats or former Sanation officials, were hardly immune to arrest. Many belonged to the bourgeois capitalist class, which was equally viewed as an enemy of the people in Marxist dogma.
Of the 330,000 Galician Poles sent to Siberian camps in 1940, 21 percent were Jews—twice the Jewish representation in the population. Isaac had seen enough of those bedraggled prisoner transports at rail stations to be free of delusions. “
Some day they’ll probably lead me away like that too,” he thought.

But still he took unnecessary and what he would later call amateurish risks. “
I was such a great conspirer that my room,” at the apartment in Lutsk where everyone knew he was staying, “was famous and people would come and go. In time,” he added, “I learned that you couldn’t behave like that.”

To his credit, Isaac was a quick study. What little he knew about conspiratorial work he had read in spy novels. But his instinct for self-preservation was strong. “I began acting increasingly through contacts. If I could avoid any trip, I didn’t travel. I withdrew … I learned not to meet with people unnecessarily, not to appear in public.” He also learned to buy train tickets directly from corrupt Soviet conductors rather than at rail stations, which were under surveillance. The silence and goodwill of doormen and building superintendents—traditional NKVD or Gestapo stooges—could be purchased with generous bribes. And thanks to his Aryan looks and cavalryman’s mustache, Zuckerman discovered that he could blend in like a chameleon—be Jewish or Gentile, depending on the circumstances.

He was learning clandestine tradecraft on the go, and his growing familiarity with subterfuge was already evident at the big conference he convened in Lvov on December 31, 1939. The date had not been chosen idly. It was New Year’s Eve, a night of parties and celebrations for Russian soldiers, when a gathering of young Jews would attract little attention. Most of the senior NKVD officers would be at a gala at the Opera House, a magnificent Austrian-built music hall whose neo-Renaissance façade was decorated with Italian sculptures and bas-reliefs and crowned with three giant winged angels. Many of the Soviet secret policemen posted in Lvov hailed from Central Asia and had never seen such European delights. Some of their giddy wives
paraded in nightgowns up the marble steps of the Opera, mistaking the sleeping garments they had appropriated from Polish noblewomen for ball gowns.

Lvov’s Jewish Quarter stood just behind the Opera, at the tail end of the tree-lined pedestrian promenade that housed some of the city’s top hotels—the George, the Grand, the Napoleon—where rooms were now double- and triple-occupied and the gilded corridors crammed with the overflow cots of Jewish refugees. A third of Lvov’s residents had been Jewish before the war, but their numbers soared
from 110,000 to 160,000 by year’s end, so great was the flood of refugees.

Isaac chose to stay away from the Jewish neighborhood when he got to Lvov because it sat on the slope of a small escarpment close to the bars and restaurants frequented by Lvov’s new Soviet masters.
The city itself was laid out like a landlocked San Francisco, with steep and
meandering cobblestone streets that snaked through topographical districts—Castle Hill, Bare Hill, Sandy Hill, St. George’s Hill, Citadel Hill, Kortum Hill—undulating through Jewish, Armenian, Catholic, Protestant, and Ukrainian neighborhoods.

Lvov, like Vilna, also lay on a volatile geopolitical fault line where empires collided and suppressed ethnic tensions erupted in bloodshed with historical regularity whenever power shifted or one side made a bid to unseat the other. Ukrainians, a minority in the city but a long-suffering majority in the countryside and surrounding regions, took up arms against the Poles as soon as the Nazis entered Poland. Partisan bands attacked and ambushed retreating columns of Polish soldiers and refugees during the September 1939 campaign, and their dreams of independence that had been brutally quashed by the Sanation regime were rekindled.

But as the province was incorporated into the Soviet Union, many dejected Ukrainians sat glumly in their Polish- and Jewish-owned apartments, reflecting bitterly that they had traded one landlord for another. With smoldering resentment, they awaited the next liberator to promise them freedom.

It was in such an unhappy Ukrainian district, on the unfashionable northern edge of Lvov, that Isaac held the conference that formally founded the Labor Zionist Underground. Since the address of the safe house was secret, participants gathered at a café and were taken to the meeting in small groups. Alcohol and snacks were laid out and dance music blared to maintain the outward appearance of a New Year’s Eve party. The fifteen “guests” in attendance represented senior organizers from the main Zionist factions that would eventually form Mapai, or the Labor Party—the dominant political force in Israel until the mid-1970s. Absent from the gathering were representatives of Hashomer Hatzair, the Marxist Zionist group, who declined Zuckerman’s invitation on the grounds that the mainstream Zionist left refused to accept the primacy of Moscow. “
They had more faith in the Soviet regime,” Isaac recounted. “We didn’t.” Two other significant Zionist youth organizations, Akiva and Gordinia, both centrist and belonging to the more moderate General Zionists, also passed up invitations, much to Zuckerman’s dismay. The war, thus far, had done little to unite the notoriously quarrelsome Zionists, whose dogmatic
disputes could prove baffling to outsiders, like “medieval monastic debates,” as Zuckerman would later concede.

The Lvov Conference, as the faux New Year’s Eve celebration came to be known, laid the foundation for the fragmented Labor Zionists to begin structuring a cohesive underground. Amid toasts and cheers, the Soviet zone was divided into five sectors and group leaders were appointed to run each geographical quadrant. The question of what to do about the more than two million Jews stranded in German-occupied Poland proved more problematic. Many of those present that night had escaped from Warsaw in early September, leaving colleagues behind, and there was a general sense of guilt that their organizations had been left rudderless in the largest Jewish population center—a place where Jews were now most at risk and where leadership was most needed.

That uncomfortable sentiment was prevalent throughout the refugee community and crossed all ideological lines. The young rightist Betar leader Menachem Begin, for instance, in a series of letters penned in Vilna at the time, deflected accusations from fellow right-wing Zionists that in abandoning Warsaw during the siege he had acted “
like a captain who had been the first to leave his sinking ship.”

“
Do you really believe that I did not have these thoughts?” the future Israeli prime minister responded in a January 1940 letter. “And that before I decided to leave Warsaw, I did not consider and question myself and my friends?” “I will return to Warsaw,” he pledged in another letter the following month, shortly before his arrest by the NKVD and deportation to Siberia.

Likewise, the Bundist Boruch Spiegel, who was still in the Soviet zone, languishing in relative safety while his family faced ever growing hardships in Warsaw, struggled with his conscience. His older brother Berl had decided to return home to Warsaw and was pressuring him to do the same, not just to participate in the Underground but to safeguard their parents and sisters. As a Bundist organizer, Berl was more exposed behind Soviet zone lines than his less active little brother and thus had a stronger incentive to leave. The NKVD was actively hunting Bund leaders on ideological grounds. The Bund was socialist but staunchly anticommunist, and already co-chairs Victor Alter and Hersh Erlich had been arrested, destined for execution. Perhaps Berl
feared arrest as well. Boruch, who was too low in the organization to worry about the NKVD, wanted to stay put. In the end Berl left for Warsaw without Boruch. “
We had a fight about it and I’m not ashamed to say that I was too frightened to go.”

The idea also terrified Isaac Zuckerman. “
Warsaw under the Nazis scared me to death,” he recalled. “In comparison to the information we were getting from [Warsaw] we were really living in paradise.” A courier had come in the waning days of December 1939 from the beleaguered capital, bearing horror stories of Nazi maltreatment and a plea from rank-and-file activists that someone senior return to start an underground resistance organization for the Zionist left in Warsaw.

That someone, it was decided at the Lvov Conference, would be Zivia Lubetkin, the same person who had been chosen instead of Isaac to attend the 21st Zionist Congress in Geneva the previous summer.

CHAPTER 10

ZIVIA

Zivia Lubetkin and Isaac Zuckerman could not have had more different personalities. While Isaac was gregarious, an extrovert who stood on tables and dominated most meetings he attended, Zivia was naturally shy. To strangers, she could appear “
unapproachable,” cold, hard, and “tough” in the words of one old acquaintance, while Isaac played the boisterous bon vivant. But those who knew Zivia well said that her self-possessed standoffish demeanor masked a deep-seated insecurity.

“
Introverted and modest” as a child, a family member would later say, she would often “blush and be embarrassed” whenever company arrived. To force young Zivia out of her shell, her family made her stand on a chair and deliver a speech whenever guests came to the house, and though she eventually got over her fear of public speaking, Zivia always preferred to sit in a quiet corner at Zionist gatherings while Isaac talked up a storm. Isaac had always been more of a political animal within the Zionist movement, launching himself into debates and squabbles that Zivia pronounced “
unproductive”—the endless chattering of “do-nothings” and “squares,” as she put it.

While Isaac was flamboyant and spontaneous, Zivia was methodical and unwavering. He often changed his mind. She never did. His sense of humor was legend. Hers “bordered on skepticism.” He was a city boy; she was a small-town girl. “
Zivia and Isaac only had two things in common,” one of their fellow future combatants later said. “Zionism and alcohol. Both liked to drink. But only Zivia knew how.”