Isaac's Army (60 page)

It took some work, but Edelman finally found his friend’s daughter. She was with a Catholic family in a small town called Zyrardow, and like Joanna, she had forgotten about her real family and background. “
Hide, hide, the Jews are coming for you,” the other kids in the village cried when Edelman and another Bundist showed up. Eliza refused to see them, and the woman of the house would not give her up. Eliza now called her “mother.” She spoke Polish rather than Yiddish. She made the sign of the cross when she prayed and considered Zyrardow her adoptive home. Edelman offered the woman a large sum of money: five hundred U.S. dollars collected in America by Jewish relief agencies. The woman was offended.
Eliza was “not for sale,” she said.

Edelman refused to give up. There were too many Elizas in postwar Poland: children who would never know who they were and where they came from, whose Jewish past had been swapped for a Catholic future. Often their identity was concealed from them for decades, and only in middle age, after the collapse of Communism in 1989, would many finally learn the truth about their real parents. Mark returned to
the woman two more times, and still she would not relinquish the child. Only then did Edelman reluctantly cash in on the ZOB’s connections with the Communist authorities. He offered the woman a trade. Her sixteen-year-old son had been caught in one of the secret police roundups of Home Army operatives and was in jail. If Edelman arranged his release, would the woman give up Eliza?

Eliza cried nonstop for two weeks while Mark made arrangements with Bundist contacts in the United States for the child to travel to America. A wealthy Jewish family in New York had agreed to adopt her. “
In America she had a bicycle, a pony, a boat. She graduated from university, and got married,” Edelman recounts. “Then on October 18, 1962, two months before her twenty-sixth birthday, she locked herself in a hotel room in Manhattan and swallowed a vial of poison.” Mark did not know why Eliza killed herself. But the night before her death, she had met with another Holocaust orphan, the daughter of Michael Klepfish, the ZOB chief engineer responsible for the manufacture of homemade bombs and grenades in the Ghetto. Klepfish had died in the Brushmakers District while saving Edelman’s life.

Every time a Jewish child was sent to the United States or Palestine by relief agencies, Edelman felt more alone, like the “last of the Mohicans,” as he would put it. Despite his increasing despair and isolation, he found some comfort from a new person in his life, Alina Margolis. She was the young doctor who had led the “Red Cross” rescue mission to Jolie Bord. They became romantically involved while in Grodzik before the liberation, and after the Soviet takeover she helped nurse Mark through his depression. They fell in love and began living together.

Margolis wanted to leave the depressing capital. Her family was from Lodz, seventy-five miles west of Warsaw, where more Jews had lived before the war than in Berlin and Vienna combined. Only a few thousand remained, but the city was still relatively intact. Margolis had a town house in Lodz, in a prestigious enclave about a mile from the Central Station. Germans had appropriated the enclave during the war, but many budding artists and filmmakers were moving there, including Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Edelman agreed to go, arriving with nothing but the clothes on his back. The city in mid-1945 was still largely empty. When it had been
incorporated into the Third Reich, all the Poles had been expelled. There were thousands of vacant apartments, and people from all over the country were arriving weekly to fill them: doctors, lawyers, engineers, and university professors. In Lodz everything was restarting from scratch, including institutes, universities, and factories. The Communist influence was not as prevalent as in Warsaw, and the new residents seemed freer, more energetic and hopeful. To Edelman, it seemed like a good place for a fresh start.

CHAPTER 42

NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM

A year had passed since the Red Army rolled into Warsaw, and the city remained largely uninhabitable. Boruch Spiegel’s building was still without electricity or running water, and he and Chaika Belchatowska continued to wait for Canadian visas. Mark Edelman was in Lodz, finishing his first semester of medical school. After witnessing so much death, he had decided to devote himself to saving lives.

Most of the other surviving members of the ZOB were also still in Poland in early 1946. Only Simha Ratheiser and Zivia Lubetkin had gone abroad for any extended period since the Soviet takeover. Both went to Romania to scout discreet back channels to circumvent the British blockade of Palestine. The human smuggling network they were trying to help establish became known in Hebrew as the
Brikha
, or Flight. The
Brikha
was an illegal enterprise that initially moved Jews overland from Poland through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the Romanian shores of the Black Sea. There, vessels chartered or purchased by Jewish relief agencies departed for the final and trickiest leg of the journey, trying to evade the British warships that patrolled the Mediterranean approaches to ports around Haifa. The operation was
costly and complex and, in its early stages, frustratingly ineffective. In mid-1945, thousands of stranded Jews languished in Romania, which had become a refugee terminus, much as it had been for the Osnoses five years earlier. There were not enough boats. There was not enough money. And in world capitals there was not enough political will to overcome British opposition. While a steady trickle of refugees was getting through to Palestine, a far more organized method would be required to systematically move several hundred thousand people. And for that, tacit cooperation would be needed of various governments, Poland’s and Britain’s most of all.

Although her early smuggling efforts in Romania fell short, there was one pleasure in Zivia’s return to Poland. In early 1946, Lubetkin discovered she was pregnant. Isaac wept with joy. For Holocaust survivors, every birth was a national rebirth, a rejoinder to genocide. Zuckerman immediately insisted that Zivia cease all conspiratorial activity to conserve her strength for the baby. He moved her to Lodz, where he thought she would be more comfortable, and asked Edelman to look after her.

In the meantime, Isaac continued to sweet-talk the new Polish authorities into facilitating emigration. Already, he had won permission from the Communists to purchase fishing trawlers in Gdansk, though the distant Baltic was hardly an ideal departure point for a lengthy seaborne operation to the Mediterranean. Isaac also persuaded his friends in the government to supply him with a plane so that he and other Polish delegates could attend a pan-Zionist conference in London. The event was hosted by David Ben-Gurion, and its purpose was partly to pressure Whitehall to relax its strict immigration policies to the Holy Land. The British were not swayed. They were under intense pressure from Arab leaders to restrict Jewish entry into Palestine. In the end, the conference served mostly to expose the rift within the Zionist camp between emaciated Holocaust survivors and the tanned, muscular emissaries from Palestine. There were clearly lingering resentments among the Polish delegates, who had felt abandoned during the war by their colleagues in Palestine. “
I said bitter things at the conference,” Zuckerman acknowledged, “and even then I hadn’t said everything I felt because I knew there were attentive listeners and curious journalists.” Privately, Isaac made a point of snubbing Ben-Gurion,
prompting the future Israeli leader to declare ruefully, “You despise me that much.”

Zuckerman returned from England doubly convinced that the solution to mass emigration lay not in pointless congresses abroad, but in Poland with the new regime. The Provisional Government had already expressed its willingness to allow Jews to emigrate. Throughout 1945 and early 1946, the authorities had made no effort to stop Jewish citizens from leaving Poland. Very few did so, however, because they had nowhere to go: Destination countries either were not admitting Jews, or were dragging their feet on the documentation process and were therefore swamped with a backlog of applications. The net effect was that nearly three hundred thousand Jews were still stuck in Poland, even though a majority wanted out and the regime was willing to let them go.

Simha Ratheiser, as usual, was not content to leave his fate to distant powers. He was determined to make his own luck. After returning from Romania in 1945, Simha had drifted away from Isaac and Zivia’s inner circle. The schism started in Bucharest, where Ratheiser met one of the founders of the
Brikha
, the poet-warrior Abba Kovner. Kovner was legendary in Jewish underground circles, the Mordechai Anielewicz of Vilna. He had commanded the resistance in the Vilna Ghetto and then led his followers into the forest to fight as partisans. Like Anielewicz, he was charismatic, emotional, at times rash, and far more militant than Isaac Zuckerman. In Bucharest, in addition to facilitating illegal emigration, Kovner had proposed forming Jewish revenge squads. The teams would fan out in Austria and Germany and assassinate Nazis. There was also talk of targeting ordinary civilians, poisoning wells, and planting bombs. Isaac and Zivia were vehemently opposed to such plans. There had been enough revenge killing already, Zivia argued with Kovner; their priority must be emigration. Simha, however, sided with Kovner. “
I thought we still had something to do in Europe,” he later wrote: “To settle our account with the Germans.”

Whether the revenge squads were ever formed or unleashed is not completely clear. Simha himself had a change of heart along the way. At Kovner’s request, he agreed to return to Poland and then to infiltrate Germany, but while in Warsaw he changed his mind. Simha had killed in self-defense, but he was not bloodthirsty. He lacked the assassin’s
temperament. Instead of joining a revenge squad, he volunteered to take forty refugees out of the country for Kovner’s
Brikha
. This was another principal difference between Isaac and Kovner. Kovner was impatient, a man of continual action. To him, smuggling small groups was better than doing nothing. Zuckerman disdained this piecemeal approach. He wasn’t interested in evacuating forty people at a time; he wanted to move forty thousand in one shot, even if that meant waiting, and patiently working the official channels.

Isaac decided to remain in Poland as long as necessary to coordinate the mass emigration. Ratheiser worried that it could take years. He wanted out now. So did Zivia. Her pregnancy had changed her outlook. It added a sense of personal urgency to her quest to reach Palestine. She wanted to give birth in Eretz Israel.

In the late spring of 1946, Simha bade his former comrades farewell and set out for the Polish-Czech border. His plan was to cross a mountainous stretch of the frontier under the cover of darkness. Unfortunately, the group he led included children and elderly Jews. The children were noisy and the elderly were slow-footed. A patrol apprehended them almost immediately. As they were brought to a border military garrison, Simha displayed the sort of quick thinking that had gotten him through so many scrapes during the war. As soon as an officer showed up to interrogate the group, Ratheiser feigned outrage. He flashed an International Red Cross identification card that he had procured for just such purposes and began to berate the officer for the behavior of his troops. They had stolen valuables from the refugees, Ratheiser charged, and had brought dishonor to the Polish Army. Simha was an accomplished liar and actor; he had been impersonating others for years, and, in his mock indignation, he grew so animated that he knocked over an inkwell by slamming his fists onto a table. The refugees were Hungarian survivors of Auschwitz, Ratheiser angrily lectured the Poles. After all that they had suffered, they simply wanted to go home.

Simha’s performance must have been convincing, for the chastened district commander arranged for the group to be put on a train the next morning and called ahead to his Czech counterparts on the other side of the border to say that they had been precleared.

Once Simha was across the frontier, he made a rare selfish choice.
Ever since he had joined the ZOB, Ratheiser had worked for a collective good. The needs of the organization had always superseded his personal requirements. But now he decided to ditch his cumbersome followers at a
Brikha
checkpoint and continue alone. The chances of getting such a large and unwieldy group through Romania—or Austria and Italy, on a more direct route that
Brikha
was developing—were minimal. Traveling alone, he could get to Italy faster and find a boat.

The vessel that Simha eventually boarded in June 1946 was an old Greek tub called the
Biriya
. It was one of sixty-eight illegal emigration ships surreptitiously acquired and converted by the Haganah, the paramilitary self-defense force formed in the 1920s by Labor Zionist settlers in Palestine, to ferry Jews into the British Mandate. The ship was small compared to many others in the Haganah flotilla, and because of its relative stealth it was often used to make the final, most dangerous run to Palestine. When the Haganah’s bigger passenger liners approached the coastline, refugees were transferred by lifeboat to the more nimble
Biriya
to better evade British destroyers. On Simha’s voyage, unfortunately, a British corvette moved faster. He and all the other passengers were detained and shipped to the Altit Detention Camp, just south of Haifa. With its rail spur and barbed wire fences, its watchtowers and long wooden barracks, the camp looked familiar to Holocaust survivors. But peering past the fences and guard dogs, Simha saw palm trees and the future. He was not yet a free man, but he was in the Land of Israel.