Isaac's Army (44 page)

Despite his fearsome appearance and reputation, Asher had opened his doors to Anielewicz after many eminently more respectable members of the Jewish community had turned the ZOB away. The honorable mob boss ordered his henchmen to give up their private rooms and to share all their food stores. “
He and his pals treated the Fighting Organization with great respect,” Lubetkin recalled. “Everything we have is yours, he said, and we are at your disposal. We are strong, we’re skilled at undoing locks, we can move around at night, climb over fences and walls, and we know by heart every lane and crevice in the ruins of the Ghetto.”

Navigating the rubble was critical for staging nighttime ambushes and planting IEDs for the Germans to trip during the day. In the dark, amid the mountains of broken brick that had replaced once familiar landmarks, it was easy to get lost. Most of the streets didn’t exist anymore. Entire blocks were engulfed by fallen debris and ash, and the raging fires had erased all signage, making the entire neighborhood uniformly black. The footing was treacherous and one could crash through some crevice in the rubble. Or, everyone’s worst nightmare, one could be groping in the dark and suddenly feel the crisply soft tissue of a burned body. “
We feared meeting the dead more than living Germans,” Zivia recalled. Asher’s agile crew were expert at avoiding such pitfalls, and they proved instrumental in guiding ZOB patrols. On the evening of May 7, one of his cutthroats, “a notorious thief,” led Zivia, Anielewicz, and Anielewicz’s girlfriend, Mira Fuchter, to Edelman’s new hideout.

Anielewicz and Edelman had always had a slightly strained relationship. Whether their differences were ideological or personal was difficult to tell, but Mark had consistently been one of the few people to criticize Mordechai. That evening, however, Edelman was anxious to lift his commander’s flagging spirits. Anielewicz had not been himself the past few days. He had grown lethargic. Zivia had noticed it as well. “
His face sagged with worry,” she later explained. “It was as though he’d achieved his goal, an armed Jewish revolt, and didn’t know what to do next.”

Anielewicz had ample reason for concern. He no longer had the resources to launch major assaults, and in the battle of attrition the Jews were losing badly. With each passing day, there were fewer and
fewer of them. The one glimmer of hope was that he’d received a message from Isaac Zuckerman saying Simha Ratheiser had gotten through to the Aryan side. He had stumbled across the JMU’s tunnel, and after spending the night in the same tenement where Iwanski said he had lost his brother and son battling the SS, Simha had reached Isaac. They were working on a plan to get everyone out. It was that faint hope that brought Anielewicz to the trash collectors’ bunker that Edelman now shared. One of the garbagemen there apparently knew his way around the sewers and was offering to guide the ZOB out of the Ghetto.

It was well after midnight by the time the discussions ended and Anielewicz and his girlfriend returned to Pleasant Street to inform the others of the escape plan they had hatched. Zivia stayed at Franciscan Street, at Edelman’s urging. Mark wanted to spend time catching up with his friend while they waited for Anielewicz to send word the next day about his final decision on the evacuation. When the day passed and no messenger arrived from Pleasant Street, Zivia and Mark grew worried. Mordechai was probably waiting for the cover of darkness to send out his courier, they reasoned. But
by nine o’clock there was still no word and Edelman’s patience had worn thin. “We have to go to Pleasant Street,” he said, grabbing a candle to light the way. Zivia protested. Using any sort of light was strictly against the partisan code because it could attract the Germans, but Edelman didn’t care. “
Mark was always full of bravado, flouting safety regulations.” Besides, Stroop, through bitter experience, had learned to keep his men in barracks after dusk. He may have owned the Ghetto during the day, but at night it still belonged to the Jews.

Edelman, Lubetkin, and another ZOB fighter gingerly picked their way through the jagged ruins, clambering over upturned slabs and wall fragments. At one point the wind blew out the candle, and when Mark relit it, Zivia was gone.
She had fallen through a crevice, losing her pistol in the inky blackness. Bruised, bleeding, and with her pride damaged, she managed to limp the rest of the way. By the time they neared Pleasant Street, her spirits had been restored. “
We started thinking about what practical jokes we could pull.” But when they reached the bunker’s hidden entrance, Lubetkin noticed that something was off. The carefully placed debris camouflaging the door was
scattered, as if it had been cleared. With a sinking feeling, Edelman called out the password: “John.” The response, “Warsaw,” never came. Zivia, her voice rising with urgency, repeated the prearranged code word, and again there was silence. She realized that everyone inside was dead.

Mark Edelman stood in the darkness outside the demolished Pleasant Street bunker and silently cursed Mordechai Anielewicz. How could Mordechai have allowed this to happen?
Eighty ZOB members were dead, and when Mark discovered how they died, he could barely contain his anger.
“First Anielewicz shot Mira,” his girlfriend, “then himself.” The mass suicide had occurred in the afternoon of May 8, when a large detachment of German troops had surrounded the area around one of the hideout’s hidden entrances. The huge bunker, according to Zivia, had six different escape tunnels.
Historians would cite five. Surely Anielewicz could have counterattacked through one of these secondary exits, Edelman complained, as he himself had done when the SS uncovered his Franciscan Street shelter. “A leader has no right to commit suicide,” Mark growled. “He must fight to the end, especially as there was a chance of escaping from the Ghetto.” Edelman had fought his way out of a similar jam, and he held Anielewicz to the same high standard. “
He took the easy way out.”

There were a handful of survivors, as Mark and Zivia discovered. Three of them were prostitutes, who had managed to crawl out through one of the bunker’s secret passageways. They were now pleading with Edelman to take them with him. He refused. It was not a moral judgment.
Prostitutes had shared bagels and other food with him in the past. In fact they had been kinder to him than most of the wealthy, morally upright wives of Jewish Council members. His refusal was based solely on a cold numerical calculation. He was going to attempt a mass escape through the sewers, and there were only so many people he could take with him. Non-ZOB members would have to fend for themselves. He couldn’t afford civilian stragglers.

CHAPTER 33

SIMHA THE SAVIOR

A few miles south of Pleasant Street, Simha Ratheiser was staring at Isaac Zuckerman in disbelief. They were in a safe house outside the Ghetto, and Simha was still adjusting to his new surroundings: the frilled curtains and cushions on the sofa, the carpets and paintings on the wall, the potted plants and bookshelves filled with actual books—all the trappings of ordinary life that had long disappeared from Jewish reality.

The apartment belonged to the Sawicki sisters, Anna and Marisa, who were Underground activists from the Socialist Party, the Bund’s traditional allies. They were Home Army but acting independently, outside the chain of command, much as Iwanski had been doing. “
The welcome of the two women whom I’d just met dazzled me,” Simha recalled. “But I didn’t forget why I’d come.”

Simha’s nerves had been so raw when he crossed over to the Aryan side at the end of April that the mere act of bathing—his first attempt at hygiene in nearly two weeks—had proven traumatic. How could he luxuriate in scented water, with fresh soap and clean towels, when his colleagues were trapped in rat-filled cellars gasping for air? The food
and vodka the Sawicki sisters had generously laid out for him and Zalman Freidrich had prompted a similarly guilty reaction. He and Friedrich had no right to lounge around. They had to get back to the Ghetto, to get their friends out. They didn’t have a moment to lose. And yet they would lose an entire week sitting idle.

This was why Ratheiser was so furious with Zuckerman. In Simha’s teenage eyes, the twenty-eight-year-old ZOB deputy commander had been a legend, a leader to be looked up to with awe. Yet now, in this tiny apartment, at the hour of need, Zuckerman seemed lost and completely out of his element. He had made no plan, no preparations to engineer a mass escape, and the prolonged frustration of waiting helplessly while his colleagues were massacred had taken a visible psychological toll on him. “
I initially thought my job was to tell Isaac that the others were ready [to be evacuated] and that he would arrange the rest,” Simha recalled. “But it really hit me hard that no one was ready to help. Nothing had been done” to lay the groundwork for an organized escape.

Three excruciatingly long days had passed since he’d delivered his message. Simha had eaten his fill, slept on a soft bed, and watched with mounting anger as smoke from the Ghetto blanched Warsaw’s hazy skyline. All the while, Isaac had paced the small apartment like a caged tiger. He was evidently troubled, exasperated to the point of a breakdown. It wasn’t his fault that he had been thrust into the role of ZOB liaison on the eve of the Uprising and that he hadn’t had time to nurture the contacts and personal relationships critical to his mission. He wasn’t to blame for the Home Army—the ZOB’s best hope—effectively turning its back on the Jews. He had pleaded with, cajoled, and finally cursed Captain Wolinski, his sympathetic but ultimately powerless Home Army counterpart.

In desperation, and against his better judgment, Isaac had even turned to the ideologically suspect Communists, the People’s Army. The Moscow-backed group had been far more cooperative, partly because it was in the Soviet Union’s interest to stir up as much trouble as possible in Warsaw, the main transport hub for the Eastern Front.
Every day, 180 trains loaded with soldiers, replacement tanks, artillery, and munitions left Warsaw for the east. Stalin wanted a citywide rising in the Polish capital because it would disrupt the flow of men and
materiel to the battlefields in Russia. The People’s Army, however, could not accomplish that on its own. Its network in Poland was minuscule compared to the huge, London-backed Home Army. Nor did it enjoy popular support among the staunchly anti-Bolshevik general population. In Warsaw alone, the Home Army had 72,000 operatives. The People’s Army had barely 5,000 members across the entire country. A few Communist units had already tried to attack the artillery batteries Stroop had deployed just outside the Ghetto. The attempt neither slowed Stroop, who moved his howitzers into a crowded square nearby to deter future rebel strikes, nor incited a citywide insurrection. Despite the setback, the People’s Army had supplied Isaac with several crates of Red Army–issue rifles. The guns were a godsend, immeasurably more effective than revolvers. Unfortunately Isaac had no way of getting them into the hands of his fighters since their lines of communication had been disrupted. All in all, the past two weeks had been among the most difficult in Isaac’s life. Never before had he felt so helpless, so raging with impotence. He couldn’t do anything for his comrades, for his people, for his wife. (Zivia and Isaac had married, though the discreet ceremony would not enter the historical record.) He should be by Zivia’s side instead of being stuck on the Aryan side. Simha had reassured him that she was healthy and in good spirits the last time he’d seen her. But that was days ago. Was she still safe? Had she been captured? Had she been wounded? Was she on a train to Treblinka? Was she already dead? Isaac had no answers to the wrenching questions that mercilessly pounded his brain. He could only numb their anxious refrain with vodka.

Finally, after a few more days of inaction—probably around May 3 or 4, while Edelman’s company was deep into its firefight with the two SS platoons—Simha erupted. “
If you don’t go, I’m going to go back in myself!” he shouted at Zuckerman. “We need to do something!”

“
Fine!” Isaac yelled back, losing his temper. They would take the Russian rifles into the Ghetto through the sewers and attack the Germans, he proposed. “That’s suicide,” Simha snapped. “If you are going in to fight to the death, that’s okay,” he argued. It was Zuckerman’s business how he chose to die. But the only reason Simha would ever set foot in the Ghetto again would be to rescue his friends. “If you
are going in to save them,” Ratheiser pressed his point, “we need a plan.”

It took a few more frustrating days for the plan to be put into action, but on the night of May 8, 1943, Simha Ratheiser pushed open a manhole cover, gingerly poked his head out, and immediately ducked as the blinding beam of a searchlight swept past him. It took him a fraction of a second to get his bearings, but the towering Umschlagplatz gates were unmistakable. He was in the Ghetto, though just barely. His bungling guides had misjudged their position and led him to an opening right under the Germans’ noses. In fact, they had almost overshot the Ghetto, traversing its entire length underground. The fools were sanitation workers from the city’s sewer maintenance department. They had been approached by contacts from the People’s Army, and Simha had paid them handsomely to steer him and another ZOB member through the subterranean labyrinth. Unfortunately the terrified Gentiles had fortified themselves heavily with alcohol, and then lost their nerve shortly after descending into the canals on the Aryan side. Simha had been forced to pull a gun on them and snarl: “
You can keep leading us, or you can die right here.” He kept the gun’s short muzzle pressed into the small of a worker’s back as they all staggered through the waist-deep muck.