Isaac's Army (45 page)

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.”

The hours passed, with the rays slanting through the manhole acting as an inverted sundial. Soon they were gone, and the manhole well was plunged into darkness. Where the hell was Simha? Where were the trucks? Didn’t he realize that they were dying down there? “
Our despair grew from moment to moment,” Tuvia remembered. Just then, a note came down through the manhole. No rescue could be attempted that evening, it said; too many German patrols. “We were crushed. It
meant waiting another twenty-four hours. Such a long time in the sewer meant slow and certain death to all of us.”

That night proved to be one of the longest any of them had ever endured: the cold, the hunger, the swarms of rats that mercilessly assaulted their heads and necks. Their thirst grew so severe that Zivia saw the fighter next to her drink sewer water, the brownish slime dripping from his parched lips. By dawn, they had reached the limits of their considerable endurance. Edelman and Lubetkin pushed their way to the front of the long queue under the manhole well and conferred with Borzykowski. They would not last much longer. Even if it meant a street fight with the Germans, they had to attempt a breakout this very morning. A note was scribbled to that effect and slid through the sewer grille.
It’s now or never
, it said.

Simha read the soggy plea and very nearly panicked. He had spent the night at the local mob boss’s hangout with Lieutenant Gaik, the People’s Army operative, better known by his code name, Shrub, and Tuvia Sheingut, the blond, blue-eyed professional actor who served as one of the ZOB’s most convincing couriers.
Their paid-off gangster host, who called himself the King, had been told that he was facilitating a Home Army operation. But he was beginning to suspect that Jews might be involved. If this was the case, he intimated, all bets were off. His boys made a good living extorting money from Jews. This could be a bonanza for them. Simha, Sheingut, and Gaik, who was in fact a Gentile, had done everything they could to throw the King off the scent. But they were running out of time. The trucks Gaik had organized would not come until nightfall because his superiors were refusing to sanction a risky daylight rescue. By then, the King’s men, the greasers, might be on them. It was true that they could not afford to wait any longer. But what to do?

In the end, it was Sheingut who came up with a plan. Why not order the trucks from a private moving company? Tell the movers there is a load of furniture to be picked up and then hijack the vehicles. Amazed by the simplicity of the solution, Sheingut and Gaik rushed off to find a telephone directory.

At around 10
A.M
. a large tarpaulin-covered lorry with the logo of a freight forwarder painted across its worn canvas rack rumbled onto Straight Street. Lieutenant Gaik calmly walked over to the idling vehicle,
jumped into the cab, and put a gun to the driver’s head. “
Drink this.” He thrust a flask of vodka at the trembling mover.

Stunned pedestrians on Straight Street then witnessed the sight of a truck parked in the middle of the road, its opened flaps straddling a manhole from which a stream of filthy figures were emerging. Inside the sewer, Zivia and Edelman were directing traffic.
“Move, move,” they exhorted their colleagues, who slowly, painfully slowly, tried to pull themselves up the ladder in the manhole well. Many were too weak from their ordeal to muster the strength to pull themselves up. Pushed from below and tugged from above, their limp bodies were forced through the opening and heaved into the waiting truck. The second truck had failed to arrive. Simha realized there would not be room for everyone. “Hurry, hurry,” he beckoned.