Isaac's Army (8 page)

E
NGLAND
!
THIS IS YOUR DOING
screamed Nazi-designed posters slapped up on the teetering walls of roofless buildings leaning precariously over sidewalks throughout Warsaw. In the placards, a Polish officer, bandaged and bleeding, pointed accusingly at the hulk of a burning house, while Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, formally attired in tails, aloofly crossed his arms, his back turned to the devastation.

Varsovians tried to ignore the offensive posters while two of the 1,863 people executed in the weeks following Warsaw’s capitulation were shot for ripping them down. But the Germans had touched a nerve. Poles, both Gentile and Jewish, felt let down by the English and the French. Hitler gambled that the Great Powers would not fight for Poland, and he was right.

To celebrate his conquest, the Führer flew into Warsaw on the morning of October 5, his first and only visit to the Polish capital. The entire city was locked down in anticipation of his arrival. A general
curfew was announced, and the residents of every apartment building and high-rise along Hitler’s route were ordered to vacate their homes to thwart potential assassins. “
Anyone approaching a window or the street will immediately be shot,” advance teams with megaphones called out, as troops with sniper rifles deployed along rooftops.

Simha Ratheiser had been locked down by his own parents, who feared that his curiosity could land him in trouble. Already he had sneaked out of his infirmary bed, face and neck covered in bandages still seeping blood, to watch German troops march into Warsaw: “
They made an incredible impression on me. All those helmets, the gleaming steel, the sheer discipline. I’ll never forget it.”

Sensing that his recuperating son would not be able to resist escaping again to catch a glimpse of the Führer, Zvi did not tell him of the October 5 visit. “Really! He was there?” Ratheiser exclaimed seventy years later in Jerusalem when informed about the victory parade. “I had no idea.”

Meanwhile, the Führer’s huge six-wheeled Mercedes convertible toured the emptied city center, pausing for photo opportunities two blocks from the Jewish Quarter, at the heavily damaged Pilsudski Square. The square was named after the Polish military hero who had beaten back Joseph Stalin from the gates of Warsaw in 1920, saving Central Europe from Communist dominion in a battle known as the Miracle on the Vistula. It was now to be rechristened Adolf Hitler Platz, in recognition of the miracle that did not take place this time.

The victory parade—a flawless, endless, single-minded organism that flowed without interruption for several straight hours—slowly wended its way through Three Crosses Square, past the mansions and Italianate palaces of tree-lined Horsebreaker Avenue, to the elegant cross section of Chopin Street, where the Führer himself stood on a platform, his ankle-length leather coat tightly buttoned, his right arm rigidly raised, his favorite filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl immortalizing the moment.

Unbeknownst to the beaming German leader, five hundred pounds of dynamite was set to rain on his parade.

The bomb that might have changed history and saved fifty million lives never detonated under Adolf Hitler’s feet. Contrary to popular
belief, it was not buried beneath the Führer’s reviewing stand near Chopin Street. Security had been too tight there; no Pole was allowed within two blocks of the heavily restricted area. Instead the explosives were planted on the corner of New World Street and Jerusalem Boulevard, a busy intersection on the southern edge of Midtown that Hitler’s motorcade would have to cross on its way to the reviewing stand. Sappers had secreted TNT under paving stones and run a buried cable several hundred yards to a ruined building where a pair of demolition experts with a detonator waited for the Führer’s motorcade.

Alas, at the right moment, they thought Hitler was General von Blaskowitz, the senior Wehrmacht commander in Warsaw, who was riding in another vehicle, and did not plunge the detonator for fear of missing their intended target. “
He passed right under our noses,” the man in charge of the operation would later lament, with equal measures of disgust and disbelief.

Oblivious to their leader’s narrow escape from death, Warsaw’s new masters resumed their principal activity the moment Hitler’s plane lifted off the ground: looting. The systematic theft, which netted
ten thousand train-wagon loads of booty in October and November 1939 alone, was initially undertaken under the guise of a citywide hunt for hidden weapons. Jewish households and businesses were particularly subject to such searches, and Simha Ratheiser recalled the hammering on their door as a pair of German soldiers gruffly pushed his mother aside to examine the contents of their home. His family had moved across the street from the shell of their old building, and their household offered slim pickings since their valuables had all been destroyed. The Germans made a show of looking for grenades or ammunition, poking their heads inside the oven, and left cursing the Ratheisers’ lack of material possessions.

In Martha Osnos’s case, the Nazis didn’t even bother with the weapons charade.

She ran into trouble on a visit to her pediatrician’s house in an exclusive part of the Mokotow district to pick up medication for a Gentile neighbor. She was surprised to see a large moving van parked outside the doctor’s office and two SS officers on the stairs. They were “very tall, very slick,” she recalled, and their pitch-black capes and tall, polished boots lent them an ominously “elegant” air.

“
Where are you going?” one demanded, as workers carried out
select pieces of the doctor’s furniture. Responding in German, one of six languages she spoke, Martha tried to slip past them with an innocuous comment about purchasing medicine. “Are you single?” they persisted. “Where is your husband?” This question Martha could not honestly answer, because like nearly a million other Polish women, she did not know where her husband was; whether Joe was in a POW camp, or in Siberia, or dead like his older brother Zano, who along with twenty thousand other Polish officers was murdered by the Soviet secret police in the Katyn forest. She had no way of knowing that he in fact had made it safely across the border into Romania and that a kind Jewish family in the small town of Cernauti had taken him in. Since all communication with the outside world was disrupted, Martha did not know that Joe Osnos had managed to use his business acumen to make a few desperately needed dollars trading currencies, exploiting the wild cross-border fluctuations in the crashing Polish zloty, and that he had earned enough money to pay his way to Bucharest.

SS men were always interested to learn of a lost husband. With so many Polish women home alone, an underworld fraternity of fraudsters, confidence men, and thieves, both Polish and German, had sprung up to prey on war widows and the wives of Poland’s eight hundred thousand imprisoned servicemen. “
Where do you live?” the SS officers immediately asked Martha. “You must have very good furniture. How far is your house? We will drive there with you.”

How many such “visits” took place in Warsaw in the early months of the occupation is impossible to say. But the expropriation started at the very top. The first thing Warsaw’s newly appointed district governor, Dr. Ludwig Fisher, did upon assuming his post was to go villa shopping in the resort suburb of Konstancin, Poland’s Beverly Hills.
He selected the Art Deco mansion of industrialist Gustav Wertheim, which was known as Villa Julia after Wertheim’s Jewish wife, the art collector Julia Kramsztyk. Villa Julia had been famous before the war for the concerts and charity balls held there, parties that attracted a who’s who of Warsaw’s cultural elite, including many of the bestselling writers published by Martha’s cousin Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak. Julia Kramsztyk had been a formidable social doyenne and a much-admired hostess. Her support could launch a young artist’s career, and an invitation to Villa Julia could propel ambitious guests up the social ladder. It was unheard of for Julia Kramsztyk to be turned down, and
she was not a woman who was easily intimidated. When she protested the confiscation of
her 14,000-square-foot home, Governor Fischer’s henchmen dragged her out onto the garden terrace and shot her through the head.

Homes, cars, pleasure craft—nothing was off-limits. Most of the antique furnishings and art stolen by the Nazis simply vanished, only to reappear, in rare cases, decades later in the most improbable locales. A painting looted in October 1939 from the Zacheta National Gallery, for instance,
resurfaced in 2007 at a garage sale in Lexington, Kentucky. A few months later in 2007,
a seventeenth-century canvas by the Dutch master Pieter de Grebber taken from the Cool Street shop of antiques dealer Abe Gutneyer showed up at Christie’s auction house in London, placed there by an anonymous Lithuanian seller.

Many prominent Jewish collectors did not wait for the Germans to knock on their doors. They surreptitiously donated their paintings to the Zacheta National Gallery in the hope that the art would be hidden by the Underground and not fall into German hands. (A number of pieces were indeed saved. Seventy years later, dozens of priceless paintings, along with
the impressionist collections of Jacob and Alina Glass, the Zacheta Gallery’s most prominent prewar patrons, adorn the National Museum on Jerusalem Boulevard.)

When Martha Osnos arrived at her apartment with a pair of SS officers in tow, her eight-year-old son, Robert, froze at the sight, which he never forgot. He stared in terror at the towering black figures; at their death’s-head insignias, the metallic hussar skulls that rested between the silver piping of their visor bands; at the SS eagles on their sleeves, with their extended talons embroidered in bullion wire; at the twin lightning-bolt runes on their thick wool collar patches. “
It was one of the only times during the war that I can remember being truly scared,” he later recalled.

Martha rushed to embrace her son. “
Don’t be afraid,” she soothed. “They mean no harm.” The SS men, paying no heed to the cowering child, “ran around the house making noise and a commotion not like two men but twenty.” They banged at the keys of Martha’s baby grand piano, trying their musical hand, poked around her closets, and zeroed in on a white marble bust she kept on her writing desk. “Who is this?” they asked.

It was a likeness of Voltaire. Martha had bought it in Paris, where
Robert was born, during the three years she and Joe had spent in the French capital. “We returned to Poland because my mother missed her friends and family, she missed Warsaw,” Robert recalled.

“Voltaire,” Martha repeated. “Oh,” said one of the Germans, a flicker of sudden recognition. “Madame Imaginaire?”

“No, that was Molière,” Martha corrected.

“Aha,” said the SS man, losing interest.

The disappointed Germans departed soon after, grumbling that Martha did not have a double bed, which had apparently been high on their shopping list. They took a camera and a box of chocolates, according to Robert, but left behind the bust of Voltaire. It was a priceless sculpture by
Jean-Antoine Houdon, whose works today are exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, at the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and in countless other museums throughout the world.

CHAPTER 7

MARK’S VOW

The Polish capital’s grotesque transformation was most jarring for those who had missed the siege, who had answered the Sanation regime’s misguided call to evacuate east and were now trickling back throughout October and November 1939. One of those early returnees was a young man who was to play a major role in the future Jewish resistance, along with Isaac, Simha, and Boruch. His name was Mark Edelman (or “Marek” in Polish), and like Zuckerman and the Spiegel brothers, he had left Warsaw during the September 7 evacuation and spent a fruitless month aimlessly wandering through Poland’s eastern townships before returning to the Jewish district. At age eighteen, he was rail thin, with a pronounced Adam’s apple, and he bore the pinched, pale features of someone for whom nutrition was a secondary consideration. He had been homeless and unemployed when the war broke out, living at a girlfriend’s and in no hurry to find a job. That June, he had just barely finished high school, which was no small feat given one expulsion, many prolonged absences, and a general lack of interest in formal education. An orphan, he was a transplanted “Litvak,” which meant he hailed from the far eastern borderlands,
specifically from a town called Gomel near Minsk, placing him at a social disadvantage in the snobbish Polish capital. Litvaks occupied the lowest rung in Warsaw’s Jewish hierarchy, and their Yiddish was markedly different from the rapid-fire urban dialect spoken in central Poland, as out of place as a southern drawl in New York City.

Along with the Spiegel brothers, whom he vaguely knew, Edelman was a Bundist. The Bund was pretty much the only thing he took seriously at the time, and it was partly out of gratitude, because after his mother’s death some of the Bund’s leaders had more or less adopted him. It was Bund bosses who had gotten him into good schools and used their connections to smooth over some of his academic ruffles. He played with and befriended their children, who tutored him in Polish, since he was a native Russian speaker, taught him the
Polaykin
Yiddish used in Warsaw and Lodz, and afforded him access to a world that would otherwise have been denied to him.