Isaac's Army (12 page)

Lubetkin came from a Polish shtetl with a few thousand inhabitants deep in the marshlands of what is today southwestern Belarus. The place was called Bytem, and residing there was “
like living on a small Jewish island surrounded by a foreign and alien world of Gentiles.” The Gentiles worked the soggy soil and lived in huts with “straw and mud roofs.” Bytem’s Jews clustered around the only street wired for electricity and made a living as merchants, tradesmen, and legal and medical professionals, servicing the largely illiterate Christian peasantry. “
In sociological terms, most of the Jews were middle class,” an Israeli historian described the economic conditions in Zivia’s hometown. “However, this term is relative.”

Like most of Bytem’s Jews, the Lubetkins were far from prosperous, even by the impoverished standards of the Ukrainian, Polish, and Belarussian peasants who subsisted on meager farms in the surrounding swamplands. But Zivia’s father owned a grocery store, and the business did well enough that he was able to send her brother to yeshivas in Vilna and Warsaw, hire a private tutor for her older sisters, and later, at Zivia’s insistence, pay for a younger sister to study in Palestine.

Zivia herself got involved in the Zionist Socialist pioneering movement as a teenager, in a kind of youthful rebellion against the stifling isolation of the shtetl and the social inequalities she witnessed growing up in rural Poland, “
where Gentiles did the manual labor while Jews worked in the white-collar professions.”

Like Isaac, she became a full-time activist by her early twenties, helping prepare young Polish Jews for a life on the kibbutzes, the communal farms being established in Palestine. This role involved making public speeches, but while Zivia lacked natural oratorical skills, she possessed an inner strength that won many converts. During one such address, held around a bonfire on the outskirts of a town, a large group of Gentiles descended on the Zionist trainees gathered around
Zivia. The Christians heckled the Jews, brandished sticks, and started throwing rocks. Zivia’s trainees fled, and when they gathered together at the Zionist clubhouse in the city they noticed Lubetkin was not there. Fearing that something had happened to her, a few of them went back to the field to look for her. When they reached the site of the bonfire they found Zivia sitting quietly on the same rock where they had left her. They were amazed and asked her: “
Tell us, didn’t they do anything to you?” She gave them a piercing stare and said: “I sat and looked them straight in the eye … and they went away.”

Zivia’s nerves were about to be put on trial once more. Tall and imposing, with neat dark hair that she often pulled into a tight bun, she was twenty-five years old in January 1940, when she set out for Warsaw.

Her route took her to the large eastern city of Bialystok, in the Soviet sector, where she had been given the address of a professional smuggler who took groups across a forested stretch of the border in exchange for a fee. A for-profit cottage industry had sprung up there, guiding people through the Soviet-Nazi frontier. It could cost as little as a few zlotys to be rowed in a crowded dory at night across the Bug River. But some smugglers robbed their clients, leading them deep into the woods and stripping them of all their belongings at gunpoint. Though Zivia’s guide was a Gentile, he came highly recommended. The same courier who had come from Warsaw bearing the request for the Labor Zionists to send a senior emissary to the Polish capital had vouched for him.

In Bialystok, Zivia waited at a safe house for her appointed departure. The various Zionist factions were all well represented in the predominantly Jewish city. After a few days, Zivia’s guide made contact. They would leave the following morning. He was also taking a handful of university students across, and together the group boarded a rickety old commuter train to a village near the new border. The students, like many Polish Gentiles, naïvely believed they would be safer in the General Government than under the Communists. While the Poles were afraid of what would happen if the Bolsheviks caught them, Lubetkin “
was terrified of what the Germans would do to me.” As they hiked through the snow and pine trees under the cover of darkness, braving temperatures of 13 degrees below zero, Zivia noticed
a remarkable change in the students’ behavior. On the Soviet side, they had been polite and respectful, but as dawn approached and they crossed the forested frontier into Nazi territory, their demeanor changed. “It was as if they suddenly remembered that I was a lower being, and that as a Jewess I had to be treated accordingly.”

Lubetkin’s discomfort grew as the group made its frigid way to the first train station inside German territory. It was called Malkinia, and it was located about fifty miles northeast of Warsaw, near a branch in the line that led to a tiny logging station called Treblinka. On the platform, a large crowd was waiting for the locomotive, she recalled. “
There were a few Jews cowering in one corner, hoping not to be noticed.” Suddenly a German leaped on them, screaming, kicking, and hitting them in the face. “The platform is for Aryans,” he shouted, brutally shoving them out of the station.

“She’s also a Jew,” someone pointed to Lubetkin, and her heart sank. Zivia’s dark, attractive features were distinctly Semitic; unlike Zuckerman, she would never blend into a Christian crowd. And in Poland, anti-Semitism was sufficiently widespread that in any large crowd there was almost a statistical certainty that at least one individual wished Jews ill.

Zivia gritted her teeth. But she didn’t move. She didn’t budge. She didn’t breathe. She stood her ground, much like the time she had stared down the bullies around the campfire. Just then the train arrived, the throng pushed forward, and in the rush for seats she managed to board. Lubetkin was safe but deeply shaken, and suddenly unsure of herself now that Warsaw was the next stop. She was a proud woman, accustomed to holding her head high. But from the moment she crossed the border, she felt defeated and drained. “
Do I have the strength,” she wondered, “to do this?”

CHAPTER 11

WHY DOES HITLER LIKE MRS. ZEROMSKA?

Good Friday was a national holiday in Poland. Every year, solemn processions led by white-robed altar boys would wend their way past Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak’s sixteenth-century townhouse in Old Town to kneel before the Gothic altar of St. John’s Cathedral, while large crowds bearing candles and religious banners congregated outside the towers of St. Florian’s Basilica, across the Vistula River in Praga.

On March 22, 1940, the ceremonies commemorating the crucifixion of Christ were muted, by Poland’s pious standards. Warsaw’s German masters kept factories working, and the press-gangs that snatched Poles to work as slave laborers in Germany continued, unaffected by spiritual considerations.

Around noon that day, the Bundist Mark Edelman made his way to New Linden Street from the Berson and Bauman Children’s Hospital, where he had taken a job as an orderly. It paid barely enough to buy a few dozen loaves of bread at the nearby Mirowski Market, where food prices had tripled over the harsh winter, along with the value of the U.S. dollar, now trading at thirty times its prewar exchange
rate. Most days during his lunch hour Edelman walked the dozen blocks from the hospital to New Linden Street to visit the Bund’s security chief, Bernard Goldstein, a major figure in the earliest incarnations of the Jewish resistance movement.

On his way to Goldstein’s, Edelman cut through tiny False Street, which was aptly named since it zigzagged confusingly through a warren of back alleys linking the neon-lit department stores of Forestry Street to the far quieter New Linden, where he passed the elegant Hotel Britannia. The hotel had been eminently respectable before the war, hosting traveling representatives of the big textile mills in Lodz, salesmen from foundries in Radom, and metals traders from Silesia. But German officers had turned it into a brothel. The sound of their merriment carried for blocks in the evenings, as the curfew requiring Varsovians to stay indoors after 9
P
.
M
. plunged the city into an eerie silence, interrupted only by bursts of German mirth.

Each day, Edelman brought Goldstein food, cigarettes, and news, and collected messages and instructions to relay to other activists, since Goldstein had to lie low owing to his particular duties within the Jewish Labor Union, as the Bund was formally known in Yiddish.

In Bundist circles, Goldstein was an icon. He was the closest thing the Jewish Labor Union had to a defense minister, and he had run the Bund’s “black ops” before the war. It was largely because of him that the thugs from violent fascist fringe groups like the ONR, the Falanga, or the notorious Sword and Ploughmen—the prewar equivalent of skinheads—had never dared to cross Count Krasinski Park and the Saxon Gardens, the border in Warsaw between the Jewish and Gentile districts. It was Goldstein, a large and gruff forty-nine-year-old trade union boss with connections to the underworld, who organized special units of burly Jewish porters, Poland’s Teamsters, to disrupt fascist demonstrations. And it was Goldstein, a survivor of many bouts of fisticuffs, evidenced by the long scar etched on one cheek, who was said to have been behind the series of mysterious explosions that rocked the offices of anti-Semitic organizations in Warsaw in the late 1930s. He had been jailed many times for his union activities, and his escape from a Siberian prison camp had further enhanced his reputation. To young Bundists like Edelman and Spiegel he was a living legend. “We worshipped him,” Boruch said.

The Bund’s security chief rarely ventured outdoors, for fear of being spotted by the Gestapo or its henchmen in the hated Polish Blue Police, a puppet force formed by the Nazis.
Goldstein had grown a thick tangled beard to disguise his appearance, and he passed the time playing cards, often with Abrasha Blum and other Bund central committee members. Sometimes, if they were missing a fourth, the Bund bosses would invite their brash errand boy to play with them, an honor that Edelman deeply cherished since he considered himself “
a nobody and they were great men.”

Mark had known the security chief since childhood, when he had played with his son, and the two boys used to steal Goldstein’s cigarettes and smoke them on the balcony when he wasn’t around. Over the years, the admiration grew to verge on hero worship, with Mark praising Goldstein’s “
lightning reflexes and good nature” and a sense of humor “that masked steely nerves and courage.”

On Good Friday 1940, a sunny but chilly day with frost still icing much of Warsaw, Goldstein’s lunch-hour card game was interrupted by reports of disturbances two blocks east on Banker’s Square. The Square, near Saxon Gardens, at the foot of Cordials Avenue, had been a traditional demarcation line between Jewish and Gentile neighborhoods. A band of hoodlums was attacking people at random in Banker’s Square, screaming that the Jews had killed Christ. They started looting stores, smashing windows, and chasing Jewish shopkeepers, who were easy to identify because all Jewish property in Warsaw now had to be clearly marked with white hand-painted
Juden
placards. Businesses throughout the Jewish district quickly shuttered their storefronts as word of the disturbances spread. The Good Friday rampage did not set off panic at Bund headquarters, since Goldstein was no stranger to violent confrontations with anti-Semitic mobs. Before the war, his militias had developed an ingenious weapon to deal with such thugs: a series of spring-loaded small pipes that telescoped outward at the push of a button to form a long steel truncheon. The Bund’s fascist opponents also had a prewar weapon of choice—a wood board attached to the thigh just above the knee and studded with razor blades. A kick from it would slice up victims.

The following Monday it became clear that Good Friday had not been a one-off incident. The looters and rioters returned in greater
force—one eyewitness put their numbers at around a thousand—and the attacks spread to the neighboring Forestry, Mushroom, and Dragon Streets, to Iron Gate Square and Haberdasher’s Row, and as far west as Cool and Wolska Streets. Once more Jewish residents fled indoors, barricading themselves in their apartments and cellars. Stores whose front windows were not protected by retractable metal grille curtains were pillaged, as roving bands of club-wielding youths shouted “Kill the Jews” and tried to force their way into people’s homes.