Isaac's Army (5 page)

Despite misgivings, Boruch respected his big brother’s judgment. At twenty-two, Berl was only a few years older than Boruch. But he was a bookkeeper, the first member of the Spiegel family to finish high school and to earn a living with his mind rather than his hands. Boruch himself had left school in seventh grade, the educational norm for Warsaw’s working class. In spite of his own love of opera and high culture, he viewed his older brother as his intellectual superior and an authority figure. Berl was also an active member of the Bund, one of the two competing forces that divided Polish Jewry—Zionism’s great rival and antithesis. Bundists believed that Jews had to carve out a future in Poland
—der hoym
, or “the homeland,” as they called it—and fight for their political, linguistic, and economic rights there, rather than waste time and energy on unrealistic expectations of creating a Jewish state in some distant future and far-off place. To Poland’s three hundred thousand registered Bundists, Zionism was nothing more than a fairy tale, “a utopian illusion,” in Boruch Spiegel’s words, while the Bund was a real political force. The Bund could negotiate better social and working conditions, combat fascist groups (who on occasion found their Warsaw offices mysteriously torched), sway public officials, even shut down entire cities with strikes, as the Bund had done in Warsaw in 1937 to protest anti-Semitic violence.

To Boruch,
the Bund “was about Jewish pride and dignity.” It was also the biggest Judeocentric political entity in Poland, having received an outright majority of all Jewish votes cast in the 1938 nationwide elections that the Sanation had permitted for city legislatures. That Berl was rising in the ranks of the organization conferred additional status in Boruch’s eyes, and if Berl said that the Bund’s beloved co-leaders, Hersh Erlich and Victor Alter, were evacuating east to join Smigly-Rydz, then they, too, should leave at first light.

In the early morning hours of September 7, Isaac Zuckerman had no idea that Warsaw was leaderless. He was literally mired in mud, frantically digging an antitank trench. It was 2
A.M
., and he was working along with several hundred other civilian volunteers under the glare of portable sodium lamps, desperately trying to shore up the Polish capital’s western defenses.

Four days had passed since the battered cab Isaac hired in Kleban
had finally delivered him to Warsaw, rattled, dusty, and raw. He had spent much of this time, and expended a great deal of his considerable charm, trying to mobilize the youngsters in the left-leaning Zionist youth group he led. He was bothered by their apathy, which he tried to shake by stoking anti-German resentment and appealing to Polish pride. While young Zionists were eager to defend their families, it was understandably difficult for them to rally under a patriotic banner—to overlook, as Isaac acknowledged, “
the injustices and hatred of the Polish state against the Jews.”

Yet many of his Young Pioneers were there with him that night, shovels and picks in hand, toiling alongside the Gentiles, gouging out deep troughs to impede the passage of tracked vehicles. They were in Wola, a blue-collar Catholic neighborhood flanking a major industrial zone that was home to breweries, armament factories, and the sprawling steelworks that
made Poland the world’s eighth-largest producer of steel in 1939, and a high-tech corridor where multinationals like Philips, Telefunken, and Marconi had large electronics plants.

Wola lay due west of the Jewish Quarter and was judged to be the most likely initial target of any German ground assault. All day, while he dug, Isaac saw refugees pouring into Wola from the cities of Lodz and Kielce, Kalisz and Serock, and many of them brought horrifying tales of mass executions,
of children burned alive, of Polish forces in disarray, and of an enemy that did not seem to distinguish between civilians and combatants.

By 4
A.M
., Zuckerman was filthy and exhausted. He had been digging all day, and the effects of his labors showed in his blistered hands and shredded clothes. Yet he was also elated. It felt good to see Gentiles and Jews working together in harmony. Relations between the two communities had deteriorated sharply in the decade following the Great Depression, arguably reaching a five-hundred-year low. Animosity toward Jews spiked all across the European continent during the troubled 1930s. It even breached the relatively tolerant shores of the United States, as pollster Elmo Roper reported in 1938: “Anti-Semitism has spread all over the nation, and is particularly virulent in urban centers.” But Poland had been among the worst offenders, and it was good to see mutual animosities momentarily forgotten. “
We worked hard and the Poles were nice to us,” Zuckerman recalled. “We didn’t sense a whiff of anti-Semitism.”

His spirits sank, however, when, just after daybreak, he returned to the Young Pioneers’ communal clubhouse on Goose Street, in the heart of the Jewish district. With its oversized wall maps of Palestine, dog-eared agricultural manuals, and portraits of Theodor Herzl, the clubhouse should have been full of slumbering teenagers and the stirrings of breakfast. Instead there was an unearthly silence. Where was everyone? What could have happened overnight?

By dawn a frenzied river of humanity was pushing and shoving across the three bridges that offered the only eastward passage out of the metropolis.

Some three hundred thousand people fled Warsaw on the morning of September 7, 1939, all in the space of a few hours. Traffic was so impregnably dense that Boruch Spiegel worried the groaning spans would collapse into the Vistula under the weight of the exodus. Every manner of conveyance had been pressed into service: fire trucks, police cars, taxis, ambulances. Even the distinctive blue Chevys that carried Polish Radio’s mobile loudspeakers were evacuating eastward because the retreating Sanation regime had ordered the 800-foot transmission mast for Warsaw One, central Europe’s tallest structure, disabled.

The disorganized civilian horde was not limited to men of military age responding to the Sanation government’s appeal. Entire families had taken their cue from the commander in chief and were running for safety: Women, children, the elderly, and couples wrestling with strollers completely overwhelmed the columns of retreating troops, blocking all the roads leading east, bogging down military traffic, and swamping any possibility of an orderly withdrawal and redeployment. Most evacuees were on foot, like the Spiegel brothers, or on bicycles, and had brought only what they could carry, which in Boruch’s case was a spare set of clothes, toiletries, and a few apples and boiled eggs his mother had put in the backpack that now drooped from his small frame. “
It was crazy, it was chaos,” he remembered. “We barely moved. Cars were constantly honking. Army drivers were screaming to clear the way. It took hours just to get through Praga [on Warsaw’s east bank].”

Somewhere in the heaving throng around Boruch, Joseph Osnos rode in a borrowed British sports car, blaring his horn impatiently. Osnos, like Isaac Zuckerman, was big and fit and not one to sit still, and also like Zuckerman he had been trying to join the fighting ever since he signed the power of attorney for his factory over to Martha. His brother Zano, a doctor and reserve army officer, was already in the east tending to Marshal Smigly-Rydz’s wounded. Joseph, too, wanted to do his duty. “
Go, I will stay with Robert,” Martha had urged, when the call for able-bodied men had gone out the night before. “Join the army. We are safe. The radio says so. We will just be a nuisance. Besides,” she added, “how can I leave my job?”

Simha Ratheiser was too young to answer the call to arms. He had desperately wanted to go east, to continue the heroic struggle. But his father, Zvi, would not hear of it. Simha was barely fifteen. Bar mitzvah notwithstanding, he was still a child. War was no place for him to discover his manhood.

Simha glared at his father but did not press his case. The two had a complicated relationship at times, and its strains went beyond the usual teenage rebellion against authority. The generation gap between Simha and Zvi was even wider than that of the typical father and son because they were the products of two very distinct eras—pre- and post-independence Poland. Many young Jews born or reared after 1918, when Poland reappeared on maps and Polish replaced Russian or German as the country’s official language, experienced a similar gulf—a phenomenon that was also documented among the children of immigrants in America. Simha, as a product of the new generation, was bicultural. He spoke Polish fluently, thanks to public elementary school, and looked and dressed like any Gentile. Had he lived in America, with his fair hair and athletic frame, he would have been described as a surfer kid. Zvi Ratheiser, on the other hand, wore a dark beard, a skullcap, and the black suits favored by the pious. His Polish was poor, since had come of age under tsarist colonial rule, when the Cyrillic alphabet graced street signs in Warsaw and a neo-feudal order still largely segregated Jews as a separate commercial caste self-governed by learned rabbis. Zvi was a kind and loving parent,
and he did not press his religious views on his son. He knew instinctively that secular twentieth-century forces—Bundism, Zionism, Communism—were replacing faith-based isolationist movements like Chasidism as the driving cultural forces among Jewish youth. But it was also crystal clear to him that in this yawning gap between Jewish generations, he did not fully understand Simha, just as Simha found his father’s old-fashioned ways equally baffling at times.

So Simha reluctantly stayed, glumly shuffling around the family compound just southeast of the Royal Gardens Park, where the city petered out, cabbage fields sprouted between dwindling housing tracts, and gypsy caravans camped in the low brush. There was little to do but putter around the garden—a lifelong passion of Simha’s—and listen to Warsaw Two, the less-powerful backup broadcaster, relay ominous bulletins about the approaching German army, the deployment of gas masks, how the smell of mustard and garlic could signify a chemical attack, and how the French and the English, who had declared war on the Nazis, had still not fired a shot.

Simha felt frightened and helpless. It was the waiting that was most intolerable, and the certain knowledge that the Germans were coming.

They struck the following day. Shortly after noon on September 8, four Panzer armored divisions stormed Warsaw’s westernmost outer suburbs. By 3
P
.
M
. they had seized the airport, a critical installation that allowed the Luftwaffe to refuel and rearm locally rather than lose valuable time and fuel flying to and from distant airfields. At 5
P
.
M
. the surging columns of tanks reached the inner districts of Ochota and Wola, where a thin line of defenders cowered behind the trenches that Isaac Zuckerman had helped dig.

“
Wolska Street is covered with blood,” one combatant said, describing the scene. “There are dead horses, burnt hulks, and pulverized corpses crushed by tank treads. An uninterrupted wall of fire precedes the Germans; a hurricane of bullets. The sound is deafening. They are massacring civilians, mowing down running refugees, indiscriminately clearing a path straight toward our barricade. Before our eyes, it seems as though every rule and custom of civilized warfare is being violated. They are only a hundred meters away now.…”

CHAPTER 4

ROBERT’S PAPER AIRPLANES

Twenty miles east of the carnage, surrounded by sunflower fields and the weathered, bucolic huts of small farming villages, Isaac Zuckerman raced to catch up to his Zionist friends on September 8, 1939. He had not slept or eaten in two days, and his pride still felt the sting of being left behind. “
I don’t know why they went off and left me,” he lamented. “I think it was because of the general panic and chaos.” For Isaac, who like many charismatic men was sensitive and not immune to vanity, this was the second perceived slight in as many weeks. The first occurred when he had not been selected as a delegate to represent his He-Halutz youth group at the 21st Zionist Congress, held in Geneva just days before the invasion of Poland. His omission from that prestigious gathering had hurt. He was, after all, a professional Zionist, not merely a dabbler like hundreds of thousands of other Polish Jews who dreamed of Palestine. He was a salaried career man within the fractious movement, who opted to devote himself to preparing Polish Jews for immigration to Palestine rather than attend university and enter a traditional profession like law or medicine, as his parents had wanted.

The evacuation traffic had thinned this far from Warsaw, though it still stretched as far as Isaac could see down the rows of telegraph poles that lined the country road. These were crowned, every few hundred feet, with giant stork’s nests, and the huge white birds served as an early warning system whenever an aircraft approached and they fled their nests. Panic would then ensue, with refugees scattering in every direction and Isaac herding the group of very young Zionists he had stumbled across into a nearby forest or ditch.

The Germans strafed almost all the roads. Boruch Spiegel also recalled these moments of sheer terror, which punctuated hours of shuffling monotony, of aching forward movement. First came the sight and sound of a distant plane. Then a split second of uncertainty: Was it was friend or foe? Then shouts, screams, and a mad scramble for cover. The staccato of machine gun fire and the roar of propellers drowned out all other noise. Where the bullets struck, clumps of earth and pavement burst loose, gouging a double line down the median. And then, just as quickly, it was over—except for the anguished cries of those whose loved ones had not gotten out of the way fast enough. “
There would always be a dozen bodies lying on the road,” Spiegel recalled. “You tried not to look at them as you walked past.”