Isaac's Army (27 page)

Revisionists held certain doctrinal positions that were heretical to the Zionist left. They favored heavy industry and big business over organized labor and the communal kibbutz at the heart of Labor Zionist
philosophy. And, more important, they advocated the use of force if necessary to achieve Jewish statehood in Palestine, accusing the rest of the Zionist community, which pushed for negotiated diplomatic settlements, of complicity with the British to maintain the status quo. As a result of the rift, the two wings were not on speaking terms when the Second World War broke out. Revisionists boycotted the World Zionist Congresses, and Congress chairman David Ben-Gurion labeled the hawkish Jabotinsky “
Vladimir Hitler,” declaring that “the fight against Revisionism is a fight unto the death in the strongest sense of the word.”

Betar was similarly isolated. Its members were derided by the left as “Brown Shirts” because of the color of their Scout uniforms. Just before the war, Menachem Begin had been appointed head of Betar in Poland. But the charismatic Warsaw University Law School graduate was now in Soviet custody, having been arrested by the NKVD in Vilna before he could make good on his promise to return to Warsaw. Young Betarists in the Polish capital were leaderless and eagerly looking for direction.

The Jewish Military Union provided that direction. How the groups first connected is not known. Perhaps they initiated contact through Apfelbaum’s uncle, who was chief of cardiology at the same hospital where Revisionist leader David Wdowinski worked as a neuropsychiatrist. Whatever the case, in the winter of 1941, Betarists began to flood into the ranks of the Jewish Military Union.

One of these new recruits was a young man by the name of Paul Frenkel. He almost certainly did exist, was around twenty-two years old, and “
was among the most beautiful, the most honest, the most modest people I have ever met in the course of a long political life,” David Wdowinski later wrote. “He was the personification of
hadar—
dignity.”

Frenkel was dark and delicate-featured, of slim build and refined appearance, according to Wdowinski. Already the young Betarist was establishing himself as a promising commander with an independent streak, “a rare combination of steel and silk.” Acting on his own, outside formal party structures, he had rallied a group of like-minded Betarists in late 1940 and begun to train fighting units. His teenage followers were required to leave their families as a condition for joining his band, and Frenkel demanded that all recruits live communally
and hew to near-monastic self-discipline. They practiced hand-to-hand combat, conducted seminars on partisan warfare, and adhered to a strict regimen of physical exercise. What they lacked was guns, and that was one area where the rapidly expanding Jewish Military Union could help.

“
The [Polish Underground] became aware of this influx of volunteers and wanted to take advantage of the as yet relatively unhampered access to the ghetto,” Kalmen Mendelson later explained. “They sent two combat rifles, two carbines, two machine guns, ten pistols, and dozens of hand grenades.”

The shipment was relatively insignificant by Polish Underground standards. But it represented far and away the largest single store of weapons in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1941.

By 1942, the JMU boasted nearly three hundred registered combatants, split into two companies of four platoons whose commanders had all received advanced military instruction on the “Aryan side”—that is, from the Polish Resistance. Its organizational chart was rigidly martial and modeled on that of the Polish Underground, with separate department heads responsible for information and propaganda, transport and supplies, and technical, legal, financial, medical, military, and rescue operations, as well as a chief armorer.

A three-man general command staff presided over the secretive group. At its head stood Apfelbaum, or so some claimed. He was forty-one by now, and no longer a lowly lieutenant. In recognition of the JMU’s numerical growth, his Polish Underground patrons had promoted him to captain. Despite the rise in rank, he faced a strong challenge to his leadership from twenty-two-year-old Paul Frenkel. Leon Rodal rounded out the triumvirate. Like Frenkel, he had no combat experience and had also joined the Military Union late. An independently wealthy twenty-nine-year-old journalist from Kielce, Rodal was the ranking Revisionist in the JMU. As the main editor of several Revisionist underground publications, he was the party’s chief ideologue, the man in charge of disseminating Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s founding philosophy of Jewish empowerment and self-defense. In the JMU, Rodal had found the perfect vehicle for his message, and his organizational skills and access to Revisionist Party funds gave him outsized influence.

Between them, Rodal and Frenkel started displacing the apolitical army veterans who had initially formed the JMU as a subordinate unit
of Security Corps, a nationalist faction of the Polish Underground. Though still nominally attached to Battalion V of the Security Corps, the JMU by 1942 was begining to operate quasi-independently, more under the sway of Revisionist ideology than of its Polish patrons.

Apfelbaum still relied almost exclusively on his Gentile superiors for weapons supplies. But the training of his troops took place inside the Ghetto,
in two underground shooting galleries on Cordials and Franciscan Streets which also housed clandestine gunsmith shops and grenade manufacturing facilities. The arms the JMU had acquired—a small number of large-caliber carbines and rifles, a few machine guns, perhaps as many as a hundred pistols, some in poor working order, and several hundred homemade grenades—were cached in a half dozen safe houses.

To smuggle weapons and maintain links with Security Corps officers,
the JMU’s Technical Department dug a tunnel in December 1941 on the corner of Trench and Goose Streets, in the northwestern sector of the district. Its entrance was beneath the ruins of a burned-out building next to the wall, and it ran fifty feet outside the adjacent Jewish cemetery, exiting discreetly under a morgue on the Aryan side.

The JMU thus had far less incentive to forge links with Jewish groups from across the political spectrum. Revisionists did not need to join a left-leaning coalition to gain access to Polish Resistance units or their weapons stores. They were already well supplied. For the JMU, moreover, there was substantial risk in crossing ideological lines: heightened exposure to potential Gestapo moles who might have infiltrated other underground organizations. That, more than any doctrinal disagreement, was a risk Apfelbaum, Rodal, and Frenkel were not willing to take.

Although the various Jewish underground groups were still bitterly divided in the spring of 1942, the Germans were not taking any chances. It was not a coincidence that the Gestapo rampage on Friday, April 17, 1942, followed so closely on the heels of the failed unification talks between the Bund and the Labor Zionists and the subsequent formation of the Communist-led Anti-Fascist Bloc. The Nazis wanted to ensure that the Jews remained divided.

“Bloody Friday has had strong repercussions,” the Ghetto chronicler
Emmanuel Ringelblum noted in his journal. “Since the slaughter was the result of tattling by Jewish informers, people tremble to speak a word. The illegal press has stopped publishing. There has been a significant weakening of political activity.”

Fear and paranoia gripped the Jewish community. The Germans shrewdly exploited the mounting anxiety by staging smaller raids every few nights throughout May 1942 to keep the lid on underground activity. “
I became a pariah,” Isaac Zuckerman recalled. Word spread throughout the Ghetto that the Gestapo was searching for him. “My landlord heard about it immediately and insisted we leave his apartment.” Isaac started changing flats every few days, avoiding Valiant Street headquarters, and dealing only with trusted intermediaries, just as he had once done in the Soviet zone. He was far from alone in lying low. Some formerly active conspirators quit. Others went “deep underground,” dispersing into sleeper cells that would never re-form. And others still left Warsaw altogether, vowing in disgust to search for braver Jews in other ghettos. Pinkus Kartin, the flamboyant Soviet agent behind the newly formed Anti-Fascist Bloc, also refused to bow to the Gestapo terror tactics. He was denounced by an informant and tortured to death by the SS. The short-lived Anti-Fascist Bloc that Isaac Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin had joined only a few weeks earlier died with him.

In this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, trust almost completely evaporated, wiping out any chance for competing groups to find common ground. The Underground was atomized, once more reduced to its basic elements. In its place, a paralyzing obsession with informants arose.
“There were not many,” Mark Edelman recalled. “But they did a tremendous amount of damage.”

That the Ghetto would eventually spawn a homegrown league of traitors was a statistical certainty. Any agglomeration of nearly half a million people will have its bad apples, regardless of ethnicity or religion. “
People don’t like to hear that we had Jewish prostitutes, criminals, or collaborators,” Edelman explained. “But that was the reality.”

In the Ghetto, this intrinsically human phenomenon could be seen at any of the district’s sixty-one nightclubs. “
The clientele of these places consisted principally of Jewish Gestapo agents, Jewish police officials, rich merchants who did business with the Germans, smugglers, dealers in foreign exchange,” Bernard Goldstein recalled. “The
worst nest of drunkenness and vice was the Britannia. The curfew did not apply to the habitués of this establishment. They made merry all night. Feasting, drinking, and carousing went on to the rhythm of a jazz band. At dawn, when the revelers left, the streets were already strewn with naked paper-covered corpses. The drunkards paid little attention, tripping unsteadily over the obstacles in their path. Around them hovered human shadows, swollen with hunger, who trailed after the well-fed drunks, begging for scraps. They were usually angrily pushed aside.”

The Britannia, with its champagne-and-caviar-fueled revelry, became a symbol of the excesses of this small class of morally indifferent survivalists. The once respectable four-star hotel on New Linden Street had been turned into a brothel by German officers before being taken over by Abraham Gancwajch, the most notorious Gestapo-backed gangster in the Ghetto. He headed a Nazi-sanctioned extortion ring known as the Thirteen, dabbled in all manner of smuggling and illicit affairs, and was said to be one of the richest war profiteers in all of Warsaw.

“
Gancwajch is turning into a regular Maecenas,” Ringelblum, the underground archivist and member of Po’alei Zion Left, wryly noted. “He arranges receptions for Jewish writers and artists, where there is plenty of food—nowadays the important thing. A short time ago he threw an all-night party at the El Dorado night spot.… The party was opened with the dedication of an ambulance, named Miriam (after Gancwajch’s wife at home).”

There was one other small group of Jews that earned near-universal scorn. They began arriving in Warsaw in May 1942 in American-made Pullman railcars, toting their matching leather luggage sets and dressed in expensive fur-trimmed coats. “
The new arrivals would have nothing to do with Ghetto Jews,” Goldstein derided the wealthy German Jews deported from Berlin. “
They still talk about
unser Fuehrer
[our leader, Hitler],” Ringelblum marveled in astonishment, “still certain, despite everything, that they will return to Germany.” Among them, almost certainly, were Martha Osnos’s uncle Mendel and his shallow young wife.

CHAPTER 22

SIMHA PLAYS SHEPHERD AND
EDELMAN PLAYS GOD

In June 1942, as U.S. naval forces battered the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, rumors circulated through Warsaw that the Germans were planning to deport tens of thousands of Jews to the east.

Simha Ratheiser, who had been isolated and in hiding for eight months, knew nothing of these developments: neither of the stunning American victory, which had turned the tide in the Pacific, nor of the growing anxiety in the Polish capital, where the implications of a massive resettlement campaign filled the entire Jewish community with dread.