Isaac's Army

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Authors: Matthew Brzezinski

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Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Title-page photograph copyright ©
iStockphoto.com/
© Monika Lewandowska

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brzezinski, Matthew
Isaac’s army : a story of courage and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland / Matthew Brzezinski.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64530-6
1. World War, 1939–1945—Jewish resistance—Poland. 2. Jews—Persecutions—Poland. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Poland. 4. Poland—Ethnic relations. I. Title.
DS134.55.B79 2012
940.53′183209438—dc23
2012013703

Cover design: Daniel Rembert
Cover photograph: Eugeniusz Lokajski, “Polish insurgent and a group of civilians at an information point in a doorway: Warsaw Uprising, August 1944” (Warsaw Rising Museum Collection)

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v3.1

To my mother, and to my wife,
who have shown me the best
of both worlds

PREFACE

To survive the Holocaust, Polish Jews had three options. They could run. They could hide. Or they could take up arms and fight. The only other alternative—to do nothing—resulted in almost certain death.

Although death also overwhelmingly claimed those who ran, hid, or fought, many still chose these paths of resistance. They refused to submit to evil, or to give up on life, and this made them exceptional individuals—not just as Jews or Poles, but as humans. Statistically, they were the “one percent,” the very few who took their fate into their own hands and beat the odds.

I had been curious about these remarkable people ever since my first job in journalism as a lowly cub reporter at
The New York Times
’s Warsaw bureau back in the early 1990s. Warsaw then was so drab and lifeless, so devasted physically and spiritually by half a century of communism, that it was not hard to imagine what the Ghetto must have felt like. I often walked the neighborhood’s sooty streets, where not a single prewar building had survived Hitler’s wrath, and wondered what I would have done had I been one of the nearly half million people packed inside the district’s walls. Since I was a Gentile—my
mother was a native Varsovian—the exercise had always been academic, an arm’s-length inquiry without undue emotional attachment. Perhaps that was why I always pictured myself acting heroically.

As the years passed and I moved on, to reporting stints in Moscow and then Washington, thoughts of Jewish heroes receded from my mind, replaced by more mundane concerns about marriage and mortgages, twins and tuition fees. Occasionally a newspaper article or a film set during the war would rekindle my curiosity, and I would wonder about the true nature of resistance, and about what it had taken to be part of the one percent. In popular culture, resistance figures were always portrayed as if they had been forged overnight, born defiant and wielding a grenade. The real story, I suspected, was far more interesting and nuanced, and much slower in developing.

My enduring interest was enhanced by marriage. Since my wife, Roberta, was Jewish, so, too, were our three children under both rabbinical and Nuremberg laws, which made it harder to treat the Holocaust dispassionately, like something terrible that had happened to the neighbors. It became impossible to do so in 2007, when Roberta proposed moving to Poland for a three-year posting. She had been made partner in an international private equity firm that was investing heavily in Eastern Europe. Her firm’s sleek new offices were in the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto, built over the ruins of the old Jewish Council building on Mushroom Street, which was being transformed into a soaring financial district to anchor Poland’s economic rebirth.

When we settled into our rented marble McMansion in a ritzy Warsaw suburb, next door to a prewar Gothic palace with an indoor swimming pool that had belonged to a Jewish industrialist, I couldn’t help but think what would have happened to my family if it were 1939 instead of 2009. Though I no longer had the luxury of detachment, I still approached my growing obsession egoistically. The question of how I would have acted was always in the back of my mind when I set out to tell this story. For purely selfish reasons, I wanted to seek out and meet the extraordinary individuals who had defied Hitler and try to discover what made them tick. Did they share common traits? A hero gene, perhaps? Or were they ordinary people who tapped some hidden reservoir of strength and courage? I knew that to get the full picture, the complete character sketch, I had to tell the whole story—not just a fragmentary rehash of a rising, but what came before and
after. In other words, people’s stories had to be rendered from the first day of the war to the last, and in some cases beyond. Only then would it become clear who they really were, where they came from, what their motivation was, and how they had evolved into heroic figures. I also wanted to explore the different forms of resistance: collective and individual, armed and passive, conscious and subconcious. Picking up a gun was not the only way to thwart the Nazis. While running and hiding didn’t capture the public imagination in the same way as assaulting a tank, these acts of defiance also required astonishing perseverance, courage, and planning, as I discovered while researching the epic saga of the Osnos and Mortkowicz families. I came across their story by chance, in the waiting room of a decrepit Polish hospital where my son Ari was undergoing emergency surgery. I chose to write about them because they were representative of thousands of other Polish Jews who shared similar experiences, and because the related families had surviving members, one cousin living in New York, the other in Krakow.

Getting to know the protagonists personally became one of the chief determinants for selecting the main characters of the book. This was especially true in relating the tale of organized resistance, because only a handful of veterans of the Jewish Fighting Organization were still alive, scattered across continents. Some, like Mark Edelman, were well known and living nearby in Poland. Others, like Simha Ratheiser, were farther afield in Israel. I found Boruch Spiegel in Montreal, in a retirement home only a block away from the medical center where my mother had set up her family practice after immigrating to Canada in the 1960s.

I had to make one notable exception to my acquaintanceship rule. Isaac Zuckerman had passed away in Israel before I could meet him. But there was no way to tell the story of Jewish organized resistance in Poland without including him. He was too central to the narrative to omit. In fact, he was the embodiment of the underground movement, which is why his name graces the cover of this book. Fortunately, Zuckerman had written a detailed and brutally frank memoir, which he released only upon his death. The text was angry and honest, unvarnished and free of hero worship, and I found it invaluable.

The quotes in this book are drawn from a mix of interviews, memoirs, unpublished diaries, and archival materials. The data—the
death tolls, roundup numbers, execution and torture tallies, starvation rates—are drawn from Polish, Israeli, and U.S. historical surveys. Source attributions are all enumerated in the endnote section so as not to disrupt the narrative flow. That flow traces the personal journeys of the main characters while also attending to the need for historical and geographic background.

Too many accounts of the Holocaust are written in a vacuum, as if sealed from the outside world. Jews were directly affected by the larger events around them: by relations with Gentiles and by shifting alliances within the fractious Polish Underground; by military developments, both victories and defeats, on the Eastern and Western fronts and by changing policies and priorities of Poland’s Nazi occupiers; by cynical political decisions in London and Washington; and by the eventual arrival and agenda of new Soviet masters. These outside forces shaped Jewish destinies and decisions between 1939 and 1946, and I’ve tried to weave them into the plot to provide explanatory context.

I’ve also tried to re-create the physical landscape of wartime Warsaw, since the city no longer exists as it once was. Hitler literally erased it from the map, destroying 90 percent of the buildings in the metropolitan area. This made it frustratingly difficult, sitting at the sushi restaurant in my wife’s fancy office building and staring at the million-dollar condominiums being built across the street, to picture the starving children that once lined up outside that very spot, begging for bread. Nothing was left of that world but a few dwindling memories, and it seemed important to me to paint a living and breathing portrait of the place and the time, as well as the people. That is why I chose to render location names into their English translations, whenever possible. “Mushroom Street” rolls off the tongue more easily than “Ulica Grzybowska,” though both have the same meaning. Similarly, “Paul” is easier on the American ear than its Polish equivalent of “Pawel.”

But ultimately, this is a book about people, about a group of individuals who experienced and accomplished extraordinary things. Alone and together, they pushed the limits of endurance and were tested like few others on this planet of seven billion. Though their stories are inseparable from the Holocaust, their appeal, and the heights to which they elevate the human condition, are universal.

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

CHAPTER 1: HANNA’S TRIUMPH

CHAPTER 2: SIMHA’S FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

CHAPTER 3: WOLSKA STREET IS COVERED WITH BLOOD