Resistance (39 page)

The mothers taught the children to fall to the ground as soon as they heard shooting. Afterwards, they were all moved from the courtyard to the hallway and from there taken away in groups of five. Irka went with her mother, holding her hand. Behind her there was the rumbling sound of shots; she fell, someone pressed down on her with their entire body, and blood flowed over her face. She did not know whether she was wounded or dying. Her heart was pounding. Her eyes dimmed and there was a buzzing in her ears. And whatever was pressing down on her troubled her so.

Germans passed by and kicked them. Whoever moved or shouted would be a target for their revolvers. Irka held her breath and lay still as she could. Then she heard them leaving and marching off singing. She lay awhile longer and then pushed aside the body lying on top of her. And then she discovered that the corpse lying on top of her—was her mother. "It's my mother," she cried out and burst into tears. "It was her blood that was flowing over me." Irka kissed her and started to search among the dead; perhaps her sister had survived. But they all lay still without showing any sign of life.

By chance, she stepped on Halinka Eizenstadt's foot and the foot moved. She felt her pulse—her heart was still beating. She pushed aside the corpse covering her—it was Halinka's mother. She removed Halinka's blindfold, took some water from the bunker and brought her to life. Suddenly she heard footsteps. The two little girls returned to the dead bodies and lay among them as dead. They thought that the murderers had returned and held their breath. "We lay still and listened—perhaps there would be some more shooting. Suddenly, I heard someone speaking Yiddish, and I knew it was one of us!"

 

In reports on other days, Neiberg describes the Jews' weapons and their armed clashes with the Germans, as well as the constant alert maintained by all the groups in the remaining bunkers. On June 14, Neiberg wrote in his notebook:

 

For some days, there has been no water in no-mans-land. However, there have been heavy rains. Until now, we only exploited the rains for "showers," but now we collected it for drinking water. We took planks from Greenbaum's shelter and made a small roof with a tiny gutter from burnt tin, beyond the nearby balcony to the "malina" [shelter], where we set down a series of broken pots to collect the rainwater. When this experiment succeeded, the enthusiasm was tremendous, and people vied with one another in coming up with all sorts of innovations. Whenever there was rain in the days that followed, we would accumulate the water and keep it in whatever containers were at hand.

 

On September 25, 1943, the day before he moved to the Aryan side, Neiberg described the survivors:

 

Out of the original 45 who made up the group—four remained alive. Zamsz' wife is bloated from hunger and utterly despondent. Czarno-Czapka is feeble and indifferent. Shorshan prays to God and awaits a miracle. My body is swelling too. I think we ought to go up on the wall and escape to the Polish side. And if this does not succeed—a bullet will solve everything.

 

The time had come to escape. In September forced laborers, accompanied by armed guards, were sent to demolish the burned framework of the walls still standing in the ghetto. The ruins had been the site of executions of Polish prisoners, as well as of many Jews who had tried to live on the Aryan side, among them Emmanuel Ringelblum. Later, Polish workers and prisoners were sent into the ruins to collect bricks and scrap iron.

On April 19, 1944, exactly one year after the final expulsion began, Dr. Hans Kammler, the SS man responsible for planning and construction, reported 22.5 million bricks had been collected from the ruins and that 4,675 people had been engaged in the effort.

Missions were launched to rescue the fighters after the Uprising had passed its climax. But there was no prearranged plan with the Polish underground. The Jewish Fighting Organization had worried that setting down rescue scenarios would undermine the fighters' resolve to resist until the very end. The Poles, however, had been interested in transferring the fighters from the ghetto to regions far from Warsaw before the Uprising even began—a proposal that was categorically rejected.

After the fighting was over, there were no contacts with the Polish underground, which made no offers to rescue the remaining fighters. The little documentation that survived suggests that contacts and plans of this sort were worked out with the ZZW, which evidently supported the idea of a bout of serious fighting followed by escape to the Aryan side. The tunnel that linked Muranow Square to the Polish side, apart from its use as a pipeline for arms and materials, was intended to serve this purpose.

But the ZZW did not have contact with Polish underground leaders, and the elements of the AK with whom they were in contact did not have sufficient influence with the organization's command. Nonetheless, ZZW members tried to escape to the Aryan side, and a number of such sorties were carried out. Unfortunately, because the ZZW did not have many contacts there, several of these attempts ended tragically. None of the higher-ranking ZZW members, nor those familiar with its organizational problems, nor activists of the organization in contact with the Polish underground, survived.

One of the successful escapes took place on April 30, when a large company of ZOB fighters, including its commander, Eliezer Geller, left the workshop area and moved through the sewerage tunnels. The courier leading them was Reginka Fuden, one of the oldest and most experienced couriers in the ZOB. In addition to the fighters, the group of forty people also included bunker dwellers and other civilians.

Some of those who escaped in this fashion managed to stay alive, and provided detailed descriptions of the hazardous journey via the tunnels to the Polish side. The fighter Aaron Carmi, who was part of this group, described the moment they reached the neck of the tunnel on the Aryan side of town:

 

We went out one by one, helping one another to ascend to the street. The picture as we had imagined it the previous day when we learned that we were leaving was quite different from the situation we found ourselves in...! Yesterday, we visualized being met by many people coming to our aid, armed to the teeth, keeping an eye on our exit point, bringing us food, and a large truck would be awaiting us to take us to the forest.

But what we actually saw was so paltry and disappointing—there was not a soul to be seen, the night was misty, hunger gnawed at our insides, and we are in the middle of the street. Not far from us, standing at the corner at Zelazna and Ogrodowa streets, was a German check-post, but they did not even notice us.

 

Reginka Fuden did not stay with the fighters but returned through the tunnels to the large workshop area in order to free the remaining fighters. She evidently succeeded in gathering together a group for departure, but while leading them through the tunnel, she was hit by a German bullet and the mission failed. Only a few fighters' groups managed to make their way through on their own. The first group was taken through with the aid of an AL member, Vladislav Gaik, and the courier of the ZOB, Tuvia Scheingut (Tadek). They reached the Lomanki woods near Warsaw and became the nucleus of a partisan group of former fighters which bore the name of Mordecai Anielewicz.

During this period, Zalman Friedrich (Zigmund) and Simha Ratajzer-Rotem (Kazik) were sent from the central ghetto in order to renew contact with Yitzhak Zuckerman and to inform him of the rescue efforts. Organizing this campaign advanced very slowly and encountered many problems. Only on May 9 did two members of the ZOB, Ratajzer-Rotem and Rysiek Moselman, together with some Polish sanitary workers, set out for the central ghetto. Going through the tunnels was difficult and tiring, and after the group started to go back without anything to show for it, they encountered a group of some ten ZOB fighters who had tried to get through on their own. From what they said, it became clear that the rescue mission had started too late—a day after the main force and command heads of the ZOB had fallen in the bunker at Mila 18.

Two fighters returned to the central ghetto in order to locate the last of the ZOB fighters still in the area. Dozens of people, among them Tosia Altman and Zivia Lubetkin, were spotted and brought together, and they made their way through the runnels and reached the opening in Prosta Street. They were to be picked up from there, but the promised vehicle did not arrive. Then Gaik finally turned up with a vehicle. Although the day was already at its peak, the leaders of the rescue were urged to let the others in the stifling tunnel escape, and they too were rescued despite the extreme danger involved. But there was a tragic setback. Perhaps because of the lateness of the hour and the weariness of the travelers, or perhaps owing to the appearance of a suspicious individual who appeared in the tunnel, which added to the tension, some of those in the tunnel were not saved. After replacing the cover on the tunnel, the escapees realized that some fifteen people had been left behind.

The attempt to rescue them was thwarted because the Germans had been informed of the rescue mission and placed the area under siege. According to Borzykowski, one of those who succeeded in getting through, "Afterwards we received news that they had tried to get out of the tunnel on their own but had encountered some Germans and all of them perished in the ensuing skirmish."

Conditions on the Aryan side did not permit an effort to rescue all ZOB survivors and their relatives. There were many obstacles to rescue. Survivors were not concentrated in one place, and the daily struggle to stay alive depleted almost all of their energy. Yitzhak Zuckerman represented the organization among the few survivors who lived among the Poles. But various groups and individuals, among them such outstanding personalities as Israel Kanal and Eliezer Geller, were active independently. The group that concentrated in the forests around Vishkov also did not enjoy the protection of the Polish underground, despite all of Zuckerman's efforts, and many Jews died in very questionable circumstances.

Zuckerman and his immediate circle, together with the group from the Bund, managed to provide financial aid from abroad from money received through the Polish underground. Some fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Jews are estimated to have gone into hiding or lived with borrowed or fictitious papers in Polish Warsaw and its environs after the Uprising and the wiping out of the ghetto. This remnant would have been unable to find a refuge and shelter had it not been for the honorable Poles who offered them help, at times endangering themselves and their families in the process.

The help rendered by the Zegota to those in hiding also carried considerable weight. However, there were still gangs of blackmailers and informers who betrayed many of those who had escaped from the ghetto. No one knows with certainty how many Jews who escaped to the Polish side survived until the end of the war. It is known, however, that at the height of the Polish rebellion in Warsaw in August 1944, a company of Jews under Zuckerman's command, among them former members of the ZOB, actively participated in the campaign.

In his reports, Stroop frequently stressed that the German authorities were unaware of what was happening in the ghetto, that they were unprepared for the Uprising and knew nothing of the maze of bunkers and the extent of the tunnels. During his interrogation in a Polish prison, Stroop claimed that his predecessor, von Sammern, the man who planned and prepared the last evacuation from the ghetto, "did not take into account even the slightest opposition." He assumed, Stroop said, that the final expulsion would go as smoothly as former actions of this kind.

According to Stroop, it was only on the eve of the nineteenth that von Sammern received news of the impending opposition, and the forces he recruited for this purpose seem to indicate as much. But he did not ascribe any importance to this revelation. Perhaps he thought that armed Jewish opposition within the ghetto could be interpreted as insanity and also could undermine the status of the governor under whose rule this curious phenomenon had developed. Obviously, von Sammern had not imagined the trial awaiting his troops, nor the extent of the network of bunkers and tunnels that had been prepared.

The campaign in the ghetto was a source of embarrassment to the Germans, who feared that the Jewish example would be emulated by the Poles, who were only too anxious to fight. As with many other matters, the eradication of the ghetto and the Uprising were not mentioned in the German press and official media. News reached officials and others in the Third Reich via secret channels. The Polish underground press, however, gave wide coverage to the Uprising, its progress, and significance. While the Polish government-in-exile distributed considerable information on the expulsion, only limited news of the Jewish Uprising was passed on to the free world.

The Uprising was also used as a weapon in the power struggle between the Germans responsible for Poland. Himmler, who wrote frequent letters and issued orders about the liquidation of the ghetto, did not mention the Uprising in his correspondence. One can assume that Himmler, who was responsible for security and order in occupied Poland, preferred to be silent about events in the Warsaw ghetto. On the other hand, Himmler's rival, Hans Frank, hastened to inform Hans Lammers, head of Hitler's office, of the "well-organized uprising in the ghetto," on the assumption that Lammers would bring the matter to Hitler's attention.

On April 23, Himmler pressed Krüger not to worry about the effect on the munitions industry and to use whatever means were necessary to destroy the ghetto, although he had earlier demanded that the property be safeguarded. Stroop also claimed that he had received the order from Cracow to destroy the synagogue.

Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary a few days after the beginning of the Uprising that