Isaac's Army (16 page)

But her belief in humanity was soon restored. “In the evening we went to the dining car, and when I asked for one mark worth of food for my child, they brought two full dinners, and refused even that one mark.” At the Yugoslav border, “Robert was promptly sick all over the white uniform of the customs officer.” The food and the fright had taken its toll on the boy’s digestive system. But they were safely out. “We left Germany!”

Near Zagreb, while transiting through Yugoslavia, Martha found herself once more the beneficiary of generosity. Other passengers gave Robert chocolates and cookies and bought enough snacks for them at the Zagreb station to last through the rest of the journey. The Balkan hospitality continued at the Romanian checkpoint, where Martha wanted to send Joseph a message announcing her impending arrival. “I couldn’t find a telegraph office at the frontier station so I asked one of the officials who [spoke] some French whether he could somehow send a telegram for me.” Martha had saved her last five marks for this purpose, and she was surprised when one of the border guards refused the money but agreed to wire ahead nonetheless.

Martha had no idea whether the Romanian border guard would keep his promise and cable ahead to Joe. As the train pulled into Bucharest, she scanned the crowds anxiously for her husband. Nearly ten months had passed since she had seen him last. Had he changed? Had he aged? Had he lost any of his swagger and supreme self-confidence? Robert, too, stuck his head out the third-class compartment window, straining for a glimpse of his towering father. And there he stood, tall, tanned, resplendent in a tailored suit, waving a bouquet of white roses.

The Osnoses, at long last, were together again. But their troubles were far from over. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, Martha began to realize what Joseph already knew: They were stuck in Romania—a nation flirting with joining Hitler’s cause—with nowhere to go. By autumn 1940, thousands of other Jewish refugees shared their plight, desperately trying to arrange immigration and transit visas to virtually any country that would take them: India, Brazil, Australia, Palestine, Canada.

The United States was notably not among the prime destinations, in spite of being every European refugee’s first choice. The United States in 1940 had closed its doors on immigration in general and on Jewish refugees in particular. The very month that Martha had arrived in Bucharest, Breckenridge Long, the assistant secretary of state in charge of visa policies, had issued a classified interdepartmental memo that outlined how U.S. diplomats could circumvent their own government’s immigration quotas. “
We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”

Jews were singled out by Long’s office as a potential threat to U.S. national security. “
The Department received information from reliable confidential sources indicating that the Gestapo is using the Jewish Refugee Organization HICEM in getting their agents into the United States.… It is suggested that any application for visas of persons to whom this information applies be examined in the light thereof.”

Because of Breckenridge Long’s policies, the number of Jewish immigrants to the United States
fell from 43,450 in 1939, to 23,737 in 1941, to 10,608 the following year, and 4,705 in 1943—a roughly tenfold decrease. Among those whose visa requests were “postponed and postponed” was a Dutch applicant by the name of Otto Frank. Unable to wait, he and his family were forced to go into hiding in Amsterdam, where his daughter Anne began keeping a diary.

Martha and Joseph Osnos also could not afford to wait indefinitely. Romania was rapidly changing. It was still nominally neutral in the summer of 1940, but its territory was being systematically carved up by Hitler and Stalin, and its weak monarch, King Carol II, was
under increasing pressure to join the German alliance or find his country partitioned like Poland. In July, the Soviets took most of Bessarabia and Bukovina in the east—provinces that would become modern-day Moldova. Tightening the screws, Hitler cut off half of Transylvania in the north, awarding it to Hungary, and ceded large swaths of Carol II’s southernmost territory to Bulgaria.

By September 1940, the Romanian king was forced to abdicate in favor of a pro-Nazi regime that included senior ministers from the virulently anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Martha and Joseph, still without travel documents, helplessly watched as Romania’s new fascist rulers passed decree after decree discriminating against Jews. Within a month, half a million German troops were stationed on Romanian soil. In late November 1940, Romania formally joined the Axis powers.

For Martha, Robert, and Joseph Osnos, time had run out. They either had to flee immediately or risk being trapped in Nazi-controlled Romania.

CHAPTER 14

HANNA AND JOANNA HIDE

In late fall 1940, as time was running out for the Osnoses in Bucharest, Warsaw’s Jewish community braced for the dreaded announcement that a fully enclosed ghetto would permanently separate Jews and Gentiles. In anticipation of the formal declaration, Isaac Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin, and several hundred other young Zionists huddled together in a clandestine conference.

The meeting took place at Isaac’s headquarters at 34 Valiant Street, on the other side of the Peacock prison from Boruch Spiegel’s apartment, opposite “Serbia,” the huge jail’s southwestern section reserved for female prisoners. Officially, the Valiant Street premises housed one of the soup kitchens Zivia had established. In reality, the distribution of free daily meals provided a perfect cover for conspiratorial meetings and an illegal school.

“
Nowhere else but Valiant Street could we seat forty people for classes,” Zuckerman proudly recalled. By classes, he meant high school courses complete with grades and exams and eventually graduation diplomas. Almost all of Poland had moved its educational system underground, to circumvent Nazi edicts that capped formal learning for Gentiles at the sixth grade and banned schooling entirely
for Jews. Doctorates, high school diplomas, medical degrees, law and engineering certificates were all still being issued in basements and abandoned factories. The price of this continuing education was paid with
the lives of 274 teachers and faculty members tracked down and shot by the Gestapo. But that didn’t stop Isaac from holding classes on September 1, 1940, a date that marked not only the traditional commencement of the school year but also the first anniversary of the German invasion of Poland.
Enrollment quickly grew to 120 pupils, and the entire operation was financed through the care packages sent by Labor Zionists in free Vilna—sausages, coffee, chocolate, and canned goods that were resold on the black market.

In the early evenings, before the 9
P.M
. curfew, the classrooms at Valiant Street turned into training centers for activists from Lublin, Kielce, Krakow, and smaller towns in the General Government. “
Holding a seminar next door to Peacock [prison] held an air of the romantic,” Zuckerman recalled. “Our guards were stretched out on the balcony, and informed us if Germans passed by.”

The seminars served not only to coordinate future activity between cells in various cities and towns, but also to disseminate information and establish policy. This particular meeting was important because it was the first time that the Marxist Hashomer Hatzair (“Young Guard” in Hebrew) had agreed to joint discussions with Zuckerman’s Socialist faction. The Young Guard had five hundred members in Warsaw, while Isaac had eight hundred. Together, Isaac proposed, they could be a formidable force. The unification talks were held on October 12, 1940, which fell on Yom Kippur. “Our dining room on Valiant was packed,” Zuckerman recalled. “They were sitting on top of one another and on the floor.” At a particularly contentious stage of the discussions, when German intentions were being debated, a courier burst into the room. “A ghetto,” she cried. Loudspeakers outside—the so-called Barkers affixed to lampposts—had just announced the decision. By month’s end, every Jew in Warsaw would be required to move into the walled district.

There was no longer any discussion about German intentions. “
They intend to starve us,” Zivia Lubetkin declared.

As the deadline for all Jews to relocate into the Ghetto approached, the city of Warsaw plunged into chaos. A fifth of the capital’s population—
113,000 Gentiles and 138,000 Jews—had been served with eviction notices and sent packing. The massive dislocation clogged streets and back alleys and created impassable traffic jams along all the main arteries leading in and out of the condemned Jewish district.

Every rickshaw, taxi, truck, and horse-drawn cart in the city had been hired for the mandatory move, and peasants from distant farms drove their wagons to Warsaw, lured by the exorbitant prices they could charge to transport household goods. Their fees rose daily, then hourly, as the October 31 deadline loomed. Technically, only Gentiles could remove all their belongings. For Jews, a complex set of guidelines limited what could be taken:
a fifty-kilogram suitcase for each adult and a thirty-kilo bag for each child, one woolen blanket per person, food and drink for several days, and cooking implements. Those vacating their apartments had to ensure that “
a) Open fires are to be extinguished; b) Water and gas supply is to be turned off; c) Electrical fuses are to be disconnected; and d) The keys to the apartment are to be tied together and provided with a tie-on label with the name, city, street, and number of the house of the owner.”

The trade in apartments reached such a frenzy that the Germans were forced to extend the relocation deadline to November 15. People frantically searched classified ads and notice boards for any sort of last-minute accommodations. “
Reliable, discreet mediation in the exchange of all types of apartments in the Aryan district and behind the walls,” the A.S. Consulting Company advertised in the
New Courier
, inviting customers to visit their offices at 26 New Grodzka Street, Suite 1.

All this rendered the real estate market anything but free and unfettered. For crooks and unsavory speculators—the same shady operators who had shaken down war widows and tried to swindle women whose husbands were in POW camps—opportunities for quick profits were nearly boundless.
Jews owned 40 percent of what was described as “Category A” property in Warsaw, the best buildings in the choicest locations. Now, on pain of imprisonment, they had to swap their dwellings for dingy walk-ups in the working-class sections of the ghetto being vacated by Gentiles.

Simha Ratheiser recalled the shock of seeing his new living arrangements for the first time. “
It was terrible,” he said of the apartment his father had sublet on St. George’s Street, in the northeastern quadrant of the Ghetto opposite Count Krasinski Park, which was now walled off, its chestnut trees and white gravel paths visible only through the barbed wire coils that capped the red brick dividing barrier. “It was tiny, and dark,” he remembered. “There was one room for all of us.”

Statistically, the Ratheisers fared slightly better than most Ghetto residents. There were five of them—Simha, his parents, and two sisters—sharing a bedroom, which was one and a half fewer occupants per room than the new Ghetto average. Already four hundred thousand people, and eventually nearly half a million, would be squeezed into the Ghetto’s 730 livable acres. As a comparison, in neighboring Jolie Bord, a northern middle-class enclave favored by intellectuals,
fifty thousand inhabitants were spread out over an area more than twice that size. In Wola—the big blue-collar district just west of the Ghetto—140,000 residents occupied 4,000 acres.

Simha felt angry and frustrated. He had not wanted to move in the first place. He had wanted to disregard the order, just as he had refused to wear the Magen David armband whenever possible, while his father, who always “followed the crowd,” donned the hated vestment, just as he always obeyed all the rules. His mother also balked at moving to the ghetto. Many of Miriam’s Gentile friends and neighbors—swayed perhaps by her beauty, perfect Polish, and vivacious personality—had advised her not to go. But Zvi, with his dark beard, yarmulke, and Orthodox wardrobe, could never pass for a Christian. The Ghetto, he argued, echoing a common refrain in the Jewish community, would almost certainly be open. Jews would still be able to leave the ringed district to conduct their affairs, so long as they returned by the 9
P.M
. curfew. In the end Zvi prevailed. He was the head of the family, and tradition dictated that the decision was his. Before they left, however, one of the Ratheisers’ Gentile neighbors took Miriam aside. “
If you are ever in trouble and need help,” the neighbor said, “get in touch with us.”