Isaac's Army (29 page)

The dragnets became particularly savage after courier Zalman
Friedrich returned in mid-August with an eyewitness who had escaped from the newly opened camp at Treblinka II. The Bund began to paper the Ghetto with handbills describing Treblinka’s gas chambers. “
Do not be deceived! You are being taken to death and extermination. Do not let them destroy you! Do not give yourselves voluntarily into the hands of your executioners.”

At the Umschlagplatz, heavily armed Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian units were called in by the SS to control increasingly uncooperative and hysterical crowds. “
Everybody’s eyes have a wild, crazy, fearful look,” Edelman later described the scene in his memoir. “People beg for water and mothers cry for their separated children. The stench is unbearable. There are no latrines, and people must lie in their own feces for hours on end. The Ukrainians and Latvians rob and kill at will. In this crowded square,” Edelman continued, “all the continually nursed illusions collapse. This is the moment of revelation that soon the worst, the unthinkable, the thing one would not believe to the very last moment is about to happen. A nightmare settles in one’s chest, grips one’s throat, shoves one’s eyes out of their sockets, opens one’s mouth to a soundless cry. One wants to yell but there is no one to yell to; to implore, to argue—there is no one to argue with; one is alone, completely alone in this multitude of people.”

Edelman, too, wanted to yell with helpless rage as he watched “six, maybe eight” Ukrainian guards rape a young girl. “
They held her by the hands and legs, suspended in the air. She hung there, bleeding as they took turns. This was in front of hundreds of people,” he said. “What did I do? Nothing. What could I do?”

CHAPTER 23

ONE GUN

Whether it was horror or helpless rage, disbelief or despondent resignation, the mass deportations of June and July 1942 affected each Ghetto resident in a different way. The relief of having been spared each day was accompanied by the grief for lost friends and relatives and the terrifying realization that tomorrow would bring another roundup, another forced march up Zamenhof, past Edelman and the other white-frocked angels of death who stood vigil by the gates of the Umschlagplatz.

Fear and fury mixed equally in the minds of surviving Ghetto residents, and if Bundists like Mark or Boruch harbored any fantasies of revenge, these were tempered by the fact that the Bund still had no weapons, despite repeated promises from their Socialist allies that a shipment was expected any day. The lack of guns was the main reason Bund boss Maurice Orzech refused another entreaty from Isaac Zuckerman and the Zionist left to form a fighting alliance. The idea was proposed at an emergency meeting of Ghetto leaders in the opening days of the expulsions. Edelman was present at the high-level discussions, though more by accident than by invitation.
“I was accompanying
Abraham Schneidmel,” the head of the Bund’s self-defense militia. “Suddenly some Ukrainians started shooting at us. Abraham, a former [Polish army] officer, immediately sized up the situation and bolted. I stayed and went to the meeting in his place,” Edelman recalled. “It surprised me that such a great figure would run away. But I was a kid. Abraham didn’t believe in the organized resistance that we young people so desperately wanted because he was an adult. As a professional soldier, he knew that realistically we had no chance.”

“
You can’t shoot from two fingers,” Maurice Orzech lectured Zuckerman in a similar vein. Isaac countered by suggesting that they attack the unarmed Jewish Police while waiting for the weapons the Communists had promised him. At least they would be doing something, he insisted. His bearing and forceful manner made an impression on Edelman, who had never seen Zuckerman before. “
He looked like a nobleman,” Mark recalled, “tall and handsome, and self-assured.” But that didn’t alter the fact that Bundists “
didn’t know the Zionists, didn’t trust the Communists, and saw no point in cooperating until we had something to shoot with anyway.”

So once more no agreement was reached on a common Jewish defense force. What Orzech did not tell Zuckerman during the meeting, however, was that the Bund was on the cusp of acquiring a large batch of weapons, perhaps because they did not want to share it. After months of frustrating delay, the Socialists were finally about to deliver. Through a trusted prewar contact, Orzech had been informed that a Wehrmacht freight car loaded with rifles destined for the Eastern Front had been diverted by the Polish Underground to one of hundreds of sidings at the busy Eastern Cargo Terminal Station. It could sit there for a maximum of two days before the Germans would notice it was missing, so the Bund needed to act fast. “
I don’t believe [it will be] a whole wagonload, but we’ll get something out of this,” Orzech promised Edelman before setting out for the Aryan side. “
He said that I should wait by a phone at eight
A.M
. for his call,” Mark recalled. By then, very few telephones were still operational in the Ghetto. Fortunately, Sonia Nowogrodzka, the only woman in the Bund leadership, had a working line in her apartment on New Linden Street. Almost seventy years later, Edelman could still remember the number:
11-92-28.

At the appointed hour, Mark arrived at Nowogrodzka’s apartment above a coffee shop. He climbed the five flights of stairs to Sonia’s spacious top-floor flat and waited. “I sat by the phone,” staring at the blank spots on the wall where paintings by Mane Katz, a contemporary of Picasso, had hung before the war. The hours passed. Mark chain-smoked to ward away hunger, eyeing the jars of marmalade in the kitchen. Nowogrodzka had probably bought them from Sztykgold’s, the famous preserves shop a few doors down across the street. But she was gone on an errand and he could not help himself without permission. By midafternoon, she hadn’t returned, and Orzech still hadn’t called. Edelman grew worried. Something was wrong.

“
Suddenly I saw a large mob on the street below being driven toward the Umschlagplatz,” Edelman recalled. The screaming and shouting was deafening. Commands of
Raus! Weg! Los!
were accompanied by curses in Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Polish and the retort of the occasional shot. Among the panicked faces, he recognized Sonia Nowogrodzka’s dark, elegant features.

“It was four o’clock
P.M
. There was nothing one could do. At that hour you couldn’t get anyone out of the Umschlagplatz because people were loaded directly into trains.” New Linden Street was cordoned off. Front doors had all been sealed shut by the Jewish Police, so Edelman was trapped in Sonia’s building. The Ukrainians and Germans were checking for anyone left in emptied apartments—and, more important, for anything of value left to steal. Edelman crouched in a corner of the kitchen, shuddering involuntarily. Soon he heard German voices barking in the stairwell. Would they ransack the apartment and find him? It was late, and that may have saved him. The Germans, in a hurry to make the last deportation train at 6
P.M
., could not loot at leisure. Just in case they returned, Edelman spent that night hidden in the back of a closet. Orzech never called. The guns never materialized. And Edelman finished off all the marmalade.

When the Ghetto’s elder statesmen rebuffed Isaac Zuckerman for a second time, the Zionist youth leader decided to go it alone. Isaac and Zivia Lubetkin convened a meeting at their Valiant Street headquarters
on July 28 and founded the Jewish Fighting Organization, or ZOB, as it became more popularly known by its Polish acronym.

At first, only the Marxist Young Guard joined, as well as one representative from the centrist Akiva, a youth arm of the General Zionists. The lone Akiva recruit was disproportionally important, however, because he was an officer of the Jewish Police, and Isaac had decided that the ZOB’s first objective would be to assassinate the chief of that traitorous force.

The mission was heartily endorsed by Joseph Kaplan and Samuel Braslaw, the co-leaders of the Young Guard, and it was entrusted to Israel Kanal, the Akivist cop. Kanal was twenty-two years old and hailed from a good family in western Poland. He had signed up for police duty thinking he would be in a position to help Jews. But like many others, he had become disillusioned by the corruption and complicity that pervaded the force. The deportations were the tipping point for Kanal, and he had resigned. Isaac, however, persuaded him to don the hated
Ordungsdienst
police cap one last time because only a member of the Order Service could get close to their target, Joseph Szerynski.

Szerynski was a career law enforcement officer, a careful man and fastidious dresser who seemed to have let power, money, and women go to his head after the occupation began. He had been a district police commander before the war, and it was largely because of his reputation as a stickler for detail and for doing things by the book that Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniakow had appointed him head of the Ghetto police. A Catholic convert who had polonized his surname from Shinkman in order to win promotion in the Polish civil service, Szerynski had no particular affinity for his abandoned faith. In that regard, he proved himself an ideal choice to do the Nazis’ bidding, unlike Czerniakow, who committed suicide on the first day of the
Aktion
rather than sign the deportation order presented to him by the SS.

The decision to kill Szerynski was both symbolic and politically expedient. It was a way for Zuckerman to buy time, because his fledgling fighting organization faced the same problem as the Bund: It had no weapons with which to launch an uprising, and a slew of impatient young members itching to attack the SS with nothing more than switchblades. Zuckerman talked to the rash and rebellious teenagers
in much the same way Orzech had spoken to him. A Ghetto-wide revolt, he explained, could not be accomplished with the one gun that currently constituted the ZOB’s whole arsenal. But one pistol was sufficient to kill Szerynski and send a message to the entire Jewish Police.

The hit was planned for the night of August 20, a Thursday. It turned out to be a blistering day, with thermometers at the Umschlagplatz registering
80 degrees even after dark. Nearly two hundred thousand Varsovian Jews, over half the Ghetto’s inhabitants, had been sent to Treblinka by then. Valiant Street, like many other large sections of the district, was completely empty, a ghost town of ransacked apartments, where white feathers from shredded pillows and mattresses swirled in the deserted courtyards like summer snow. “
There wasn’t a single Jew on Valiant,” Zuckerman recalled. Ironically, that made it safer for the ZOB to operate out of the Dror clubhouse, since the danger of unexpected raids had decreased dramatically. The Germans and Ukrainians had already pillaged the vacant buildings and were now focused on the remaining, inhabited parts of the Ghetto.

Szerynski was with his mistress in one of the populated areas that evening, guarded by a pair of Jewish Police officers posted outside his luxurious apartment building. Israel Kanal rode up to the edifice on a motorcycle and breathlessly informed the guards that he had an urgent message from police headquarters. They may or may not have recognized Kanal—the Order Service had two thousand members—but they let him pass. A woman answered the door when Kanal knocked. While she fetched Szerynski, the young Akivist removed the revolver from his waistband. The gun had been supplied by the Young Guard, one of two they had received from the Polish Boy Scouts.

When Szerynski’s large frame filled the doorway, Kanal pulled the trigger. The pistol jammed. Frantically, he cocked the firing pin again, and this time a shot rang out. Szerynski must have been so stunned that his jaw literally dropped, because
the bullet entered one cheek, grazed his tongue, and exited the other cheek without so much as dislodging a molar. Kanal was too stunned to fire again and fled into the night.

Word of the assassination attempt spread rapidly through the Ghetto, but to Zuckerman’s frustration, it was widely presumed to be the work of Gentiles from a Socialist faction of the Polish Resistance.
“
It didn’t occur to a Jew that Jews would use weapons, that they had weapons.”

Acquiring those weapons now became the ZOB’s overriding priority. To that end, Zivia Lubetkin dispatched courier Frumka Plotnicka to join the Young Guard’s top runner, Ari Wilner, on the Aryan side. Wilner, a veteran of the Vilna ghetto, was blond and blue-eyed, and
he looked like a regular
sheygetz
, in the pejorative parlance of one contemporary. He was apparently so convincing at playing the
sheygetz
that the Mother Superior of a Dominican convent where he took refuge during the 1941 massacres in Vilna rechristened him George in honor of her late brother, who she swore was his spitting image. The name had stuck, and in the waning days of August 1942, Frumka Plotnicka sent a message to Zivia that she and “George” were returning to the Ghetto with a package.

The package consisted of
eight hand grenades and five handguns that Wilner procured through fellow Marxists. It was hardly the Red Army arsenal that the Communist underground had promised, and Isaac was disappointed. Smuggling the meager weapons haul into the Ghetto was Zivia Lubetkin’s responsibility, since she was formally in charge of couriers. She would use the same method Simha Ratheiser had employed to sneak back into the Ghetto after his shopping expeditions: try to blend into a column of forced laborers returning after a day’s work on the Aryan side. These labor details still operated, despite the expulsions. The danger was that now, whenever the Germans were behind on their daily deportation quota, the captive laborers were marched straight to the Umschlagplatz instead of being released.