Isaac's Army (54 page)

Since the ZOB had gained invaluable experience navigating subterranean passages during the Ghetto revolt, Simha was tapped to help chart a course through the sewage canals. “
I was placed in charge of a unit of mainly sergeants and officers who had served in the Polish Army, all of them much older than me,” he recalled. Simha’s team plotted a route north to Jolie Bord, which was still a Home Army stronghold. This meant traversing more than a mile of booby-trapped sewer pipes, all under German-held territory, with trip wires, dams, and SS troops perched over manholes, ready to drop concussion grenades. Such an arduous trek was possible for only the fittest combatants. The wounded, the civilians, and the bulk of the Old Town rebel forces would go through a shorter set of canals, heading southeast to Midtown, near the former Ghetto, which was much closer but under heavier German assault. Working feverishly, Simha’s team fixed guide ropes and disabled booby traps, clearing blockages along the labyrinth of tunnels, some of which were wide enough to drive a horse cart through, others so narrow that Simha had to crawl on his hands and knees, immersed to his neck in human excrement. He used chalk arrows to mark the way, as he had done in May 1943.

The mass escape started at midnight on September 1, 1944. For
ZOB members, descending into the sewers was a familiar sensation. “
My nostrils were assailed by a well-remembered repulsive odor,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “We were climbing down so close to one another that my feet practically touched the head of the man below me while just above my head were the feet of the man following me. Each time I heard a splash, I knew that someone had already reached the bottom, his body waist deep in the filth.”

Zuckerman, Lubetkin, and Edelman were just ahead of Borzykowski, part of an unbroken human chain that “stretched for kilometers.” Every few hundred feet, the body of someone who had drowned floated in the filth. The currents were much stronger in this part of the sewer system than they had been in the Ghetto because of its proximity to the Vistula, into which the city’s entire canal network drained. The lower elevation and increased pressure created waterfalls and treacherous whirlpools at junctures where channels merged. Simha had charted a course to avoid the most dangerous of these crosscurrents. But it required lengthy detours, adding to the exhausting journey. Already it had taken six hours to reach the halfway point, and the evacuees’ strength was visibly beginning to ebb.

Suddenly, at around 6
A.M
., an explosion rocked the canal. A trip wire had been snagged, and the Germans, alerted by the detonation, were throwing hand grenades down manholes, blocking the passage. Everyone froze, panicked. Going forward meant death, but going back meant returning to Old Town, which was tantamount to the same thing. There was only one alternative route. They would have to go through the waterfalls and whirlpools, against the raging currents.

Zivia was the first to fall.
Tuvia grabbed her and pulled her by the hair, but he also lost his balance and fell. Just as he was beginning to get up, a surge knocked him down again. Mark Edelman grabbed Tuvia, but he, too, was sucked into the vortex, and as he spun helplessly with his head submerged, Zuckerman dived in after him. While they struggled to free themselves from the grip of the swirling waters, Tuvia felt something tugging at his leg. Another person was down there, frantically trying to pull himself up. Tuvia could feel himself “being torn in two. The man below me managed to raise himself and grab hold of the strap of my rucksack. The strap broke. The man fell back and drowned.”

Zivia, meanwhile, had fainted, and Isaac carried her on his shoulders. “The water came up to my neck. I walked first and she floated as she slept. We stepped on bodies under the water.”

At noon, twelve hours after they had entered the sewers, the group emerged in Woodrow Wilson Square in Jolie Bord.
In all, some 5,200 people managed to escape Old Town through underground canals. When the Germans took the historic district and neighboring Riverside on the following day, the dreaded Dirlewanger Commando Battalion, the psychopathic SS penal unit, killed all the wounded left behind. In hospitals, “
drunken soldiers practiced Caesarean sections with bayonets,” one shocked witness reported. Thousands of civilians were rounded up, shot, burned alive, or tied to the front of tanks to act as human shields. The Russian RONA Brigade gang-raped hundreds of women literally to death.

CHAPTER 38

FOOLISH ERRANDS

By the sixth week of the insurgency, as Robert Osnos was enrolling in middle school in New York,
the death toll in the Warsaw Uprising was approaching 150,000, bringing the total number of deaths in the Polish capital to well over 700,000 since the start of the war. More Varsovians, both Jewish and Gentile, had died at the hands of the Nazis than American combatants had perished during the Civil War. Two-thirds of the city lay in ruins. And the Russians had still not crossed the Vistula.
Marshal Rokossovsky’s 3,360 tanks were now in Praga, just across the river, within sight through the Home Army’s binoculars. But they might as well have been in Moscow for all the good they would do the insurgents, as the Kremlin had made clear. The Rising, a spokesman for Stalin informed U.S. diplomats, was “
a purely adventuristic affair to which the Soviet government could not lend a hand.” The revolt, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov added in a letter to Winston Churchill, was a “provocation” launched “
without the prior knowledge of Soviet military command, undermining its operational plans.”

Neither the Americans nor the British needed to remind the Russians
that Radio Moscow had repeatedly called on Varsovians to rise up. Yet amid frantic Allied efforts to get more aid to the beleaguered Poles, it was now obvious to all parties that the revolt had been doomed from the start. While Paris had been liberated a few weeks earlier in a seamless transition, with virtually no bloodshed or destruction of property, Warsaw was being cruelly sacrificed, caught between the competing furies and territorial aspirations of Stalin and Hitler.

Home Army leaders knew by mid-September 1944 that they had no chance. By then, most Varsovians were simply praying for survival. Many, in fact, now blamed the Underground for the mass rapes, murders, and horrific destruction visited upon the population by the Nazis. The only reason they did not push for unconditional surrender was that the SS policy of massacring prisoners and civilians precluded any sort of capitulation.

Ironically, in his lust for vengeance, Himmler had unleashed a monster even he could not control. The Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Azeri auxiliaries recruited by the SS to do its dirty work had run completely amok, deserting, disregarding orders, flouting military discipline, and committing such atrocities that even the most hardened Nazis were disgusted. “
They’re pigs, not soldiers,” General Ernst Rode, Himmler’s chief of staff, said of the Dirlewanger penal battalion. The Wehrmacht, which always held its SS rival in contempt, very nearly mutinied after witnessing the barbarities of the SS’s eastern hordes. Some soldiers, racked by guilt, were said to have committed suicide. “
I’ve got used to the sight of male corpses,” one distraught private wrote his fiancée in Germany. “They are part of everyday life; but not to the remains of women’s bodies, where a life of love and innocence once grew, or when I see the bodies of children, all of whom I consider innocent whatever their mother tongue, and all of whom I love in these horrendous times. I know you will say I must not write about it.”

Anger and alcoholism were rampant in the discontented Wehrmacht ranks, while officers sometimes crossed SS cordons to rescue women and children from Ukrainian killing squads. “
He took me and my mother by the hand,” one woman remembered of her German savior. “And he walked us past the machine gunners. The SS men yelled in protest, but the Wehrmacht officer ignored them. Thanks to him, we lived. All our neighbors were shot.”

Some Wehrmacht officers apparently were so repulsed by the behavior
of the Russian RONA Brigade that they plotted the assassination of its leader, General Kaminski. According to one version of events, his motorcade was ambushed by a Wehrmacht commando unit. Historians suggest instead that the Gestapo itself secretly executed him for dishonoring the SS. Whichever the case, the consensus among scholars is that Kaminski was killed by Germans rather than by Polish partisans, as the Nazis claimed.

Himmler’s plan to annihilate the entire population was proving untenable. In Warsaw, there were too many witnesses. The Polish capital was not a remote ravine in Western Ukraine, where a hundred thousand bodies could be disposed of discreetly. Nor was the city a closed concentration camp with no bystanders. And, perhaps equally important, there was a difference—in the eyes of Germany’s regular army—between Christians and Jews. Though Slavs were also categorized as subhumans, the Wehrmacht would not stand for the slaughter of defenseless Polish women and children. It ran counter to the Prussian military code of conduct. In the end, Himmler had to scuttle his plan to kill every resident. Only men would be executed. The city of Warsaw itself, however, would still be erased from the map.

A nearly mile-long trench separated the rebel and German positions in the northern suburb of Jolie Bord. Compared to the inner city, the upper-middle-class neighborhood was thinly populated, with tree-lined streets and single-family homes.

After the twin hells of the Ghetto and Old Town, Jolie Bord seemed like a bucolic paradise to Isaac Zuckerman. The place was relatively unscathed by war. There were gardens and flowers and picket fences. Kids rode bicycles on sidewalks even as the Russians were shelling parts of the district close to the river. To Jolie Bord’s residents, the hundreds of dark, ragged figures emerging unsteadily from the sewers presented an equally astonishing sight, “
all black and splattered with mud, reeking and covered in feces, swaying on their feet, their knees bloodied and torn.” They were also ridden with lice, and Mark Edelman remembered how a kind woman brought the combatants buckets of scalding hot water. “
She ordered us to dunk our heads into it. When I immersed my hair, the entire surface of the water crawled with pests.”

The ZOB was assigned to a barricade facing the Gdansk train station, Warsaw’s northernmost rail hub, where the Wehrmacht had parked the massive 1,400-ton howitzer whose shells could pulverize an entire block. The Jewish group was mostly intact. Only Simha and Boruch Spiegel were still in the city center. Spiegel had long been separated from the others, fighting in a notoriously violent mixed unit alongside fascist ONRites in what had been the southeastern quadrant of the Ghetto. This was perhaps the most lawless and anarchic sector of Warsaw, a ten-square-block area
where half of the thirty documented murders of Jews by Gentile insurgents were committed during the Rising. Former greasers were part of fascist National Armed Forces Home Army units deployed in the sector, and they took to killing and robbing any Jews they came across. To cover their tracks, at one point they tried to frame Boruch Spiegel’s friend and patron Mietek “Frenchy” Pera. On September 21, according to official Home Army reports, Frenchy was arrested for looting. “
Part of the evidence was that Frenchy was frequently seen in the company of a Jew.” That Jew was Spiegel, and the charges, in the opinion of Polish historians, were “concocted” by an anti-Semitic officer to “muddy the waters” and protect the real culprits. In effect, Boruch was fighting not only Germans, but also murderers within his own camp.

Simha, meanwhile, had been sent by Zuckerman on what turned out to be a fool’s errand. Not realizing that their safe house on Forestry Boulevard was now in enemy territory, Isaac had dispatched Ratheiser to retrieve the ZOB’s documents and archive. Simha thought the exercise pointless and told Isaac so.
“Why endanger ourselves for papers?” he asked. “For history,” Isaac replied. The two fought bitterly, though in the end Simha reluctantly followed orders. All contact with him had since been lost.

Barricade duty afforded the ZOB a chance to recuperate from the trauma of Old Town. Much like the initial trench warfare on Bridge Street, there was a deceptive calm as each side took occasional potshots at the other but launched no real offensives. The Germans were busy mopping up Old Town and Riverside and driving a wedge into Midtown, closing the pockets of resistance in the city center. Jolie Bord was not as strategically important, and the Nazis had garrisons in Marymont, just to the north, which meant that the suburb was effectively
surrounded from three sides and hemmed in by the Vistula. The SS could deal with it at its leisure.

Several thousand Jewish refugees found their way into the enclave after the apartments they had been hiding in were destroyed or overrun by the Germans. There was no way of knowing, at this stage, how many of Warsaw’s Jews were still alive. Many had perished in the air raids, shelling, and fires—
historians estimate as many as 4,500—and some had doubtlessly been caught up in the mass executions of Gentiles. The survivors needed to be housed and fed, and Zuckerman bitterly regretted the loss of the $40,000 the ZOB had received from the Council to Aid Jews. Since there was a lull in the fighting, Isaac got in touch with Dr. Adolf Berman, his old contact from the Council. The psychiatrist and Marxist Zionist leader was in Jolie Bord, a guest of the Home Army, and was trying to billet homeless Jews. “
He immediately brought out a large sum and gave it to us,” Zuckerman recalled. “Then we started gathering Jews.”