Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
Isaac knew none of this for the same reason the JMU would all but disappear from postwar history. The organization was politically toxic in left-leaning Jewish circles, and Zuckerman would sooner have made a deal with the devil than with right-wing Zionists.
So great was the animosity toward the JMU across much of the Jewish political spectrum that the organization was virtually expunged from the historical record by the Labor Party in postwar Israel. Only much later, with the rise of the right in Israeli politics, were
concerted efforts made to revive the JMU’s historical fortunes. But by then, it would largely be too late, because scant information survived.
From what little is known, the JMU may have been founded in December 1939 by Lt. David Apfelbaum, a highly disputed historical figure. He was supposedly then a thirty-eight-year-old reserve army officer, a veteran of Joseph Pilsudski’s famous Legions, and a member of
an elitist prewar organization called
Brit Hechayal
, or the Ex-Soldiers League, a secretive right-wing association of Jewish retired servicemen who tended to be supporters of the Sanation regime. Like most members of the Ex-Soldiers League, Apfelbaum, according to several narratives, hailed from an upper-middle-class background, from a “
well-off” family that had achieved success both in business and within the medical community. His uncle was said to be the chief of cardiology at the Jewish General Hospital on Clean Street. Little else is known about David Apfelbaum; no photograph or physical description survives. There is no record of what he did for a living before the war, and few clues as to his personal habits, other than the fact that he was a bachelor and an admirer of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the militant founder of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement that spawned the Likud Party of Israel.
Apfelbaum apparently fought with distinction during the siege of Warsaw, and in late 1939 he presented himself to his former superiors with the intention of going underground, like countless other Polish combat veterans who were beginning to organize resistance cells. “
We don’t want to go to the
Oflag,”
he told his ex-battalion commander, Captain Henry Iwanski, referring to prison camps being set up at the time for Polish army officers. (Iwanski is another deeply controversial figure.)
Three other Jewish officers—men who, like Apfelbaum, were described as “cultured and well off” and had conservative political views—attended the meeting. It was held in the infectious disease ward of St. Stanislas Hospital on Wolska Street, not far from where the first Panzer assault on Warsaw had been repulsed
(and where a small square would be named in Apfelbaum’s honor by right-wing Polish politicians in 2004). The unusual location was not accidental. St. Stanislas was one of the earliest hubs of Polish resistance because typhus and tuberculosis offered protection from German inquisitiveness. Nazi officials in Warsaw were notoriously sensitive to germs. Their fear of contracting a local ailment bordered on paranoia, and
the Poles eagerly exploited this phobia to hide weapons in isolation wards and to organize resistance activities from behind doors marked
WARNING: CONTAMINATED MATERIAL
.
The thirty-seven-year-old Iwanski, a self-assured, formal man with blond hair and piercing blue eyes, was an equally unusual candidate to assist in the formation of a Jewish underground. Some historians would brand him a liar and he would prove a thorny embarrassment to Yad Vashem and problematic to Righteous Gentiles. A staunch nationalist, he was a National Democrat, or
Endek
, as Poland’s largest right-wing party was more popularly known before the war. Its philosophy could be distilled, in the words of Warsaw writer Wladyslaw Broniewski, as “
Hurray patriotism combined with primitive anti-Semitism.” Under the motto, “God, Nation, State,” the party preached love of country while practicing the politics of resentment. “
Anti-Semitism was not merely an addendum to the Endek program,” Alina Cala of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw would later comment. “It was a principal pillar.”
Despite his presumptive prejudices, Iwanski said he had been deeply impressed with Apfelbaum during the 1939 siege of Warsaw. “
I must confess that I had never expected to find such a brave soldier as you among the Jews,” he told him.
“There are many like me,” Apfelbaum supposedly replied. “Thousands even better than me.”
A bond formed between the two warriors, and trust—a very precious commodity for someone in Iwanski’s position—overrode whatever political or philosophical misgivings he may have had in dealing with outsiders from an embattled minority. So when Apfelbaum and the three Jewish officers who accompanied him sought out Iwanski’s counsel, he was receptive.
“
Help us organize the Jewish youth and train them to fight the Germans,” Apfelbaum pleaded. “The campaign against the Jews has already begun. We can’t just stand back and watch this oppression be imposed on us. We have to act.”
“It’s a fact that you Jews are on the front line,” Iwanski acknowledged, according to the postwar testimony of one of Apfelbaum’s three fellow conspirators. “But before we get down to practical matters, I just want to say that whoever wants to fight the Germans is our brother. We’ll help you as much as we can.”
The first order of business was discretion. “Forget the name Iwanski,” Apfelbaum was instructed. “From now on call me Sharp.” Everyone in the nascent Polish Underground used pseudonyms; Apfelbaum was given the code name Blacksmith, and he and his three Jewish co-conspirators each received a 9 mm semiautomatic VIS handgun and a spare ammunition clip. They were told to recruit like-minded individuals from similar backgrounds—bourgeois, militarily trained, conservative; no socialists from the ideologically suspect Bund or Zionist left—and to wait for further orders.
Incongruous as it may have seemed, there was a historical precedent for the Judeo-Christian conservative alliance. Throughout the late 1930s,
the Sanation regime helped train a radical offshoot of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar. It was known as the
Irgun Zvai Leumi
, or National Military Organization in Hebrew, and it would later be labeled a terrorist organization by the British for its violent tactics in Palestine, including the notorious bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. In 1937, the Sanation government forged an agreement with the Irgun commander (and Polish émigré) Avraham Stern, later the leader of the Stern Gang, to provide Jewish recruits from Palestine with large arms caches, military instruction, and seminars on how to conduct guerrilla warfare. Training facilities at Polish army bases in the Carpathian Mountains near Lvov were opened to the Irgun in the hope that future Zionist military successes in Palestine might eventually encourage greater emigration. The Sanation regime’s motives were self-serving—to reduce the number of Jews in Poland. But since Revisionists also shared that ultimate goal—“
it is in your interest and in ours,” as Ze’ev Jabotinsky said to convince Sanation officials—the marriage of convenience stuck. Valuable relationships between army officers and young right-wing Zionists were forged, and a precedent for wartime alliance was established.
During the siege of Warsaw, the Polish military had reaped rewards from its prewar association with the Irgun. On the eve of the Nazi invasion, the Irgun’s Warsaw representatives had received a thousand rifles and ammunition clips from Polish army arsenals intended for shipment to Palestine. When the Germans attacked, local Irgun coordinator Ila Sztrasman voluntarily turned over the weapons to the
Warsaw military district commander, who in turn distributed the guns to the capital’s defenders during the siege.
From a practical point of view, continuing the partnership made sense. Nearly a third of Poland’s urban population was Jewish, and through its right-wing Jewish allies, the Polish Underground gained eyes and ears in places that might otherwise have been off-limits to Gentiles, such as Warsaw’s large Jewish Quarter. The cooperation was very limited, however. Just as the Sanation regime kept its arrangement with the Irgun from the general public, Iwanski’s superiors did not burden the Polish Resistance’s central coordinating body with the details of the deal struck with Apfelbaum.
By the time Iwanski allegedly made contact again shortly before Christmas 1939, Apfelbaum—or Blacksmith, as he was now called—and his co-conspirators
had found thirty-nine individuals, including five women, who met Iwanski’s criteria. The group gathered at the home of an engineer named Urbach, where a formal ceremony was convened to induct the new members into the Resistance. The induction was held in a partly destroyed building on the corner of Valiant and Carmelite Streets, on the same block where Mark Edelman printed the Bund’s news bulletins. Candles burned as the new members took an oath. “
I receive thee among the soldiers of Freedom” was the standard Polish Underground wording. “Victory will be thy reward. Treason will be punished by death.” As all underground members had to swear loyalty “before God the Almighty,” a rabbi was present to bless the newly formed unit.
It was formally named the Jewish Military Union, and was
supplied with twenty-nine handguns.
The early years of the JMU’s development are not well documented, since—as the
Jerusalem Post
mourned in a 2006 headline—information about this organization was the first casualty of war. The dearth of historical documentation on the resistance group was actually a deliberate casualty of postwar politics in both Communist Poland and Labor-dominated Israel, according to the Holocaust historian Yisrael Gutman. For ideological reasons, the role of the right was ignored “
almost to the point of total omission in an effort to write rival camps out of history.”
So little is definitively known about the Jewish Military Union that the left-leaning
Haaretz
, another leading Israeli daily, asked in a skeptical 2007 article “
what to make of the story of David Moryc Apfelbaum,” noting that the only authenticated archival reference to him in either Polish or Israeli official documents is a listing in the 1938 Warsaw telephone book. The paper questioned whether or not Apfelbaum ever existed, claiming that he was an invention of the Polish and Israeli right.
Mark Edelman is equally dismissive of the JMU. “
They were smugglers and thieves backed by a bunch of [Polish] nationalists,” he angrily declared, between puffs of an unfiltered cigarette at his Lodz home in 2007. “They were never a real resistance movement.”
The bitter divisions between the right and left ran too deep in both Jewish and Gentile circles for there to be any kind of effective cooperation. This was reflected in the Jewish Military Union’s own “
elitist recruitment policies strongly weighted toward those better-off Jews who were most integrated into Polish culture and society,” according to Apfelbaum’s cousin Marian, who at the time was a toddler in Warsaw. Their members had to be “bourgeois and right-leaning,” and able to pass as Poles because the Jewish Military Union’s conservative Polish patrons, like Captain Henry Iwanski, would not have welcomed unassimilated Yiddish speakers into their midst. As a result, the organization had only expanded from roughly forty initial inductees in December 1939 to almost a hundred by the fall of 1940.
During that time, the group had not been given any missions of note by Captain Iwanski or its other Gentile overseers. It had set up an underground railroad to smuggle people into the Soviet zone, which the Polish Resistance is known to have used. And it had been charged with the rather pedestrian responsibility of monitoring foreign radio broadcasts for the Poles and producing written transcripts similar to Mark Edelman’s
Bulletin
.
Neither smuggling people nor transcribing radio broadcasts was a particularly prestigious assignment, and perhaps reflected the relatively low standing Jews held within the Polish Resistance’s fractious hierarchy. Still, the Jewish Military Union had guns: at least three dozen Polish army-issue VIS-35 9 mm semiautomatic pistols based on a Colt design. Founding member Kalmen Mendelson, a thirty-eight-year-old former second lieutenant, had set up a firing range in the
basement of a residential building at 5 Carmelite Street, a block away from Mark Edelman’s nocturnal printing press. When the Ghetto was decreed, David Apfelbaum moved to the same street, according to Mendelson, which offered good cover because it was one of the busiest through-traffic roads in the Jewish Quarter, running from bustling Forestry Street in the south to Valiant Street three blocks north, abutting the east gates of Peacock Prison.
Apfelbaum’s move into the Jewish Quarter and the closure of the Ghetto drastically altered the makeup and mission of the Jewish Military Union. Within a few months,
membership in the group soared to over 250 inductees. The influx of new candidates during the winter of 1941 was partly the result of a change in philosophy by Apfelbaum, Mendelson, and some of the other early leaders. Up until then they had largely viewed themselves as subordinate to the Polish Resistance. But the forced segregation of Jews had altered their perspective, and they began to act more like an independent Jewish combat organization, now only loosely affiliated with outside forces. This gave them far greater leeway in recruiting and led to what effectively became a merger with the Zionist right.
The Revisionist Zionist Party and its youth arm, Betar, were natural partners for the veterans from the Ex-Soldiers League who dominated the earliest incarnation of the Jewish Military Union. Betar, through its militant offshoot the Irgun, already had a long-standing association with the Polish military, having been trained and armed by the Sanation regime, and of all the Zionist groups—dozens of dogmatic factions spread along the entire political spectrum—its ideology most closely mirrored that of the Jewish Military Union.
For the Revisionists, forging an alliance with Apfelbaum’s unit made sense because they were virtually pariahs in the generally left-leaning Zionist community at this point and had nowhere else to turn. “
We became Fascists, Hitlerites,” David Wdowinski, the ranking Revisionist in Warsaw in 1941, recalled of the accusations hurled at his party from the Left in retaliation for founder Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s position that Jews “
cannot serve two gods, Zionism and Socialism.”