Isaac's Army (55 page)

Isaac divided his time between his military obligations and organizing an impromptu welfare net for his destitute co-religionists. Money was not the issue. Berman appeared to have ample funds and was scrupulously honest about sharing them. The problem was that no amount of money could buy food that did not exist. The dire shortages that had plagued the inner city also reached the suburbs, where the population had swollen overnight. Civilians were worse off than combatants, since the Home Army controlled the only meager stores—
grains seized from the Haberbusch and Schiele breweries and canned goods from several Wehrmacht warehouses. Isaac managed to persuade a local commander to part with some of his reserves so that no one would starve.

The supply situation improved when an unexpected bonanza rained down from the skies on September 18, 1944. The U.S. Army Air Corps, after protracted negotiations with the Kremlin, had finally been given permission to use Soviet airspace to fly a daring daytime mission over Warsaw. Unbeknownst to most insurgents, who felt as abandoned by the outside world as their Jewish counterparts had during the Ghetto Uprising, the Home Army had a champion in Moscow: U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman. The heir to one of America’s biggest fortunes had been tirelessly pressing Stalin to lift his de facto embargo
on the Poles. Harriman had long-standing ties to the country. He had co-owned Poland’s largest zinc producer, the Silesian-American Mining Co., until the Nazis seized it in 1939. Along with his partner Prescott Bush, father of the future U.S. president, Harriman had promoted Polish government bonds, and his investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman, had offices in Warsaw before the war.

Harriman grasped that the future of Poland was at stake in the Rising. He also saw that the geopolitical forces that would govern postwar Eastern Europe were being shaped with little American input. His frustration was visibly mounting, and Stalin, who was receiving tens of billions of dollars of U.S. military aid under the Lend-Lease program, threw him a bone by allowing a supply flight to take off from the sprawling Poltava airfield in central Ukraine. Some
one hundred and ten B-17 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 72 Mustangs, made the four-hour journey and appeared over the burning city at 1
P.M
., shocking the Germans. Amazingly, only one of the giant bombers was shot down, while the agile Mustangs knocked ten Luftwaffe fighters out of the sky. Hundreds of tons of supplies filled the sky with white-and-beige-striped parachutes. Unfortunately, most of the supply pods landed in German territory. But Tuvia and Isaac managed to retrieve one, gaining Smith & Wesson revolvers as well as cigarettes, a first aid kit, and, most important, antitank guns. The American mission proved to be one of the last efforts by Poland’s Western allies to save the Home Army. Soon afterward, the British were forced to suspend their airlift because they were losing too many planes. When RAF pilots complained that much of the shooting was coming from the Russian-held bank of the Vistula, Red Army officials conceded that planes had been downed “accidentally,” adding that the Soviet Union could no longer guarantee the safety of Allied airmen who ventured over Warsaw. Henceforth, only Moscow would supply the insurgents, Stalin decreed.

Still, stuck in Midtown, Simha Ratheiser found himself trapped in a surreal situation. Flames licked the sides of the building he was hiding in while a German military band performed in the courtyard. Simha couldn’t pry his eyes off the strange sight. He was on Forestry Boulevard
in the charred ruins of the ZOB safe house, staring at trumpeters and trombonists while a flamethrower doused his hideout with jets of burning fuel. It was, he would later say, one of the weirdest experiences of the war. “
Everything around going up in flames, walls caving in—and that music. Through the window I saw players blowing into their instruments and I stood still, hypnotized. Walls were collapsing, people were being killed, and there they stood and played.”

Ratheiser was so mesmerized by the band in full military regalia that he momentarily forgot how furious he was with Zuckerman for sending him into a death trap. The building was surrounded. The entire street was filled with Germans and Ukrainians, who had launched an offensive into Midtown, pushing the Home Army farther back and stranding Simha and a few other unfortunate holdouts.

This was not the first time Ratheiser had been separated from fellow Jewish fighters or stuck in enemy territory. During the initial Old Town siege he spent a week with a Home Army unit stationed in the old Municipal Courthouse building. His temporary defection from the People’s Army had not been political. Simha had simply been restless and bored with trench duty. He could never sit still, Edelman laughed of his irrepressible younger colleague. “
This river rat was always squirming his way everywhere, finding out everything.” Indeed, Simha’s clothes were so filthy from his constant forays across German positions that his Home Army unit had nicknamed him Mud.

But this time the situation was different. There was nowhere to run, no tiny crevice to squeeze through, no breach in Nazi defenses through which to escape. The entire block was sealed and he, his girlfriend, Irene, and Marisa Sawicka were stuck. They had jumped out a second-story window only to find themselves pinned down by enemy fire, and had retreated back into the same burning edifice from which they had fled. Only its latrine was not on fire, a communal bathroom on the ground floor. It contained a large water cistern whose contents had long since been drained by parched residents.
They climbed inside, momentarily safe. But after a few hours, Simha felt a stinging sensation in his eyes. The pain soon grew excruciating—it felt as if his retinas had completely dried out. His vision grew blurry and then he
lost sight entirely. Exposure to smoke or noxious gasses that accumulated in the cistern was blinding Ratheiser. When it became too painful to blink, Marisa and Irene, who apparently were not affected by the fumes, took turns spitting on his eyes and licking them. All the while, the jarring thuds and reverberating clangs of objects crashing on the cistern’s steel cover kept Simha from passing out. But the structure around them was slowly collapsing.

After twenty-four hours Ratheiser could no longer bear being trapped in the metallic tomb. His vision was gradually returning and he was desperate to get out of the water tank before it became completely buried by rubble, imprisoning them inside. It was dusk when they emerged. In the fading light, Simha could see that the streets were still swarming with Germans and their Ukrainian henchmen. They had set up a sector headquarters in an undamaged church next door, surrounding it with sandbags and machine gun nests while snipers and lookouts were posted in the belfry. Making a run for it was suicide. Simha and his two female companions had no choice but to stay put and find a place to hide. The fires set the day before were still smoldering, but Ratheiser, from his Ghetto experience, knew that the cellars had probably survived intact. The Germans realized this as well, for trucks with mobile loudspeakers were slowly prowling the streets, calling for Poles to come out and surrender. Civilians would not be harmed, the megaphones promised. They would be taken to a large DP camp outside the city for future relocation. In reality,
one hundred thousand people were already crammed behind the hastily strung barbed wire around the displaced persons camp, without food, water, or any sanitary facilities.

There were very few takers. Poles by now knew what “relocation” meant in Nazi-speak. Simha was also well aware of what would happen to Marisa and Irene if they fell into Ukrainian hands. Trying to escape with two young and attractive women in tow was out of the question. The three of them had to hide. Scouring the charred ruins, Simha found a small window to a basement filled with people. Simha was not surprised. He had witnessed similar scenes many times during the Ghetto Uprising. Inside the cellar, it was stifling hot. Row after row of terrified civilians and worn combatants lay side by side, pressing their faces to the cooler earthen floor. The building above them
had burned to its rafters, and many people had wet rags spread over their backs to prevent falling cinders from searing their skin. Ratheiser recognized a few fellow Jews in the sea of pale, soot-streaked faces. He, Irene, and Marisa crawled into the crowded basement and glumly lay down next to the others.

For the first time since the war, for the only time he could ever remember, Simha was ready to quit. He was spent, mentally and physically, and he no longer had the strength or will to fight.

In the waning days of September 1944, as the British liberated Brussels and Antwerp and American troops reached the Siegfried Line on Germany’s western frontier, the SS finally moved on the suburb of Jolie Bord.

Only a few pockets of resistance were left by then. The Home Army was still holding out in isolated parts of Midtown, but the large residential district of Mokotow had just fallen. In Mokotow the Nazis had changed tactics. To spur surrender negotiations, General Erich von dem Bach, the senior German commander,
had permitted a two-hour cease-fire to evacuate nine thousand residents from the doomed neighborhood. The gesture was meant to reassure Home Army leaders that civilians would no longer be murdered if the rebels capitulated. After nearly two months of uninterrupted fighting and
almost twenty-six thousand German casualties, including ten thousand dead, Von dem Bach was willing to make concessions to finally end the Rising.

The Panzer division that had subdued Mokotow, meanwhile, moved north to crush Jolie Bord, the last big enclave left standing. In anticipation of a final battle, the residents of the northern suburb delivered spare clothes and food to the remaining combatants on the front lines. Platoon commanders distributed the jealously hoarded supplies. “
There were shiny new automatic weapons, tinned meat and milk,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “We treated each package as a dear friend.”

At 6
A.M
. on Friday, September 29, the Germans struck, unleashing an artillery barrage on a scale not yet seen in Warsaw. Virtually every field gun and howitzer piece in the city trained on the holdout
suburb. Woodrow Wilson and Lelewel Squares were pulverized. “
Every house in the quarter was hit several times by shells,” Tuvia recalled. “We were deafened by the almost continuous explosions, blinded by the thick clouds of smoke and dust.”

When at last the artillery fell silent and the dust began to settle, Tuvia and his comrades “saw all around us the long necks of tanks. They appeared suddenly out of the clouds of smoke, spitting fire. Behind them marched columns of infantry.” Tuvia, Zivia, Isaac, and Mark were scattered at different points along the defensive barricades. Zuckerman had been put in charge of a front-line Home Army unit equipped with British PIAT antitank guns that had been airdropped by the Allies. None of his soldiers had experience with the heavy weapon, which weighed nearly forty pounds and
had to be fired at very close range—less than fifty yards—to be effective. But they bravely ran out in front of the advancing Panzers and discharged their bulky weapons before diving for cover. Within a few hours, most of them were dead, and the few still alive could no longer hear anything because they had not been warned that earplugs needed to be worn when using the PIAT. “
The echo of that shooting made me completely deaf,” Isaac said, recalling the bizarre sensation of seeing buildings crumble, explosion flash, and bullets ricochet around him, all in total silence.

Zivia, meanwhile, was missing in action. She had been the only woman in a People’s Army platoon in a forward base near the Gdansk train station. When the platoon’s position was overrun, no one could find her. “
The whole unit had come back, except for Zivia.” Zuckerman was devastated. A search party was organized, and when it came back without her, his thoughts turned from German tanks and the war, from everything but his brave, foolhardy wife, who had insisted on fighting with the men, who had made such a fuss that they had relented and given her a rifle she could barely lift. Like Simha before him, Isaac had reached his breaking point. Paralyzed with grief, isolated in the ringing silence of his shattered eardrums, all he wanted was to curl up in a corner and seek solace in alcohol. “
I asked one of the Gentiles to bring me some spirits to ease my worry,” Isaac later wrote, confessing that he was spent. At long last, his will to fight was gone.

By Saturday, September 30, only Mark Edelman was still in the thick of it, defending a police station being stormed by a battalion of tanks. His group was taking heavy losses. An elderly man fighting alongside Mark was shooting at a Panzer from a window when the armored colossus suddenly fired back. The old man took the shell square in the chest. “
Do you want to know what color a person who has taken a direct hit from a tank shell leaves on a wall?” Mark would later ask. “Lilac-pink.”

Another fellow combatant, a young man named Carl, simply disappeared when Edelman turned around for an instant. There one moment, vanished the next. As he frantically searched the blood-spattered rooms of the police outpost, it suddenly dawned on Mark that
of the twenty-one people in his unit, he was the only one alive.

CHAPTER 39

ZIVIA’S CUPBOARD