Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
When at last they docked in Karachi, Robert was mesmerized by the sights: the heaving mass of barefoot coolies that descended on the vessel; the sacred cows that sauntered unobstructed around the harbor, trailing garlands of flowers; the beggars, lepers, and legless invalids; the blind children, all with supplicating outstretched palms.
Amid the unofficial welcoming committee that greeted the Osnoses was a young Pole who met every boat, hoping for news from his ravaged Carpathian hometown. He was destitute, stateless, and stranded. But he knew his way around Karachi and was eager to help Polish travelers. The Osnoses had encountered helpful fellow countrymen on virtually every leg of their journey. In Baghdad, it had been a Polish linguist—whom Martha dubbed “John the Savior”—who took
the family under his wing and counseled them on the India visa loophole. Their new patron in Karachi welcomed them into his home, a cheap one-room rental that he provided with a flourish of Slavic hospitality, and advised Joseph on the lay of the land. The jobs, he said, were in Bombay. With Joseph’s manufacturing background, he should have little difficulty finding work.
Joseph’s business acumen had already served the Osnoses well. It had funded Martha and Robert’s escape from Poland and permitted the family to live during the prolonged flight. Joseph always managed to make the best of an opportunity. And whether it was a testament to his charisma and salesmenship, or a reflection of dire labor shortages, he landed a job in Bombay almost immediately. On the strength of his experience as a former owner of a small appliance factory in Warsaw, he was hired to manage a furniture plant that was being retooled to build life rafts for the British navy.
The position came with a huge, well-appointed apartment and five domestic servants. Martha’s fluency in six languages was also quickly put to use by the colonial administration. She started working for the Bureau of Censors, reading refugee mail.
Overnight, Martha, Robert, and Joseph’s lives became normal, almost to the point of banality. It was an astonishing transformation. One week they were itinerant refugees, virtually penniless, without a fixed address, destination, or means of support. Suddenly they had a cook, a maid, a driver, a laundress, and a nanny. They lived in a compound reserved for the elite and held respectable positions in society. Blessed with dual incomes—“
Money was never a problem in India,” according to Robert—they could entertain, travel, and resume the upper-middle-class lifestyle they had enjoyed in Warsaw before the war.
“
My parents were very active socially in Bombay. Mom was always going to parties and Dad played bridge all the time.” Their circles, however, were restricted to other émigrés. “My parents didn’t mix with the English. They spent all their time with fellow Poles.”
Bombay’s Polish community was tight-knit. Shunned by the class-conscious British, the Poles were uncharacteristically inclusive among themselves. In India, Polish Jews and Gentiles socialized together. Ironically, only exile brought Poles to accept American-style views on
citizenship. Abroad, one’s passport, rather than ethnicity or religion, was the sole determinant of nationality. This far from home, all Poles were expatriates, equally foreign in the eyes of the law.
While his parents spent time with their new friends, Robert was free to do as he pleased. “
My parents were borderline negligent in leaving me to my own devices,” he later laughed. He wasn’t complaining, though. “It was wonderful. For me, India was paradise.” He could ride the trams, exploring different neighborhoods. He lounged by the pool, went to cricket games, and became a fixture at the local movie theater. “I must have seen every film ever made,” he recalled:
Gone with the Wind, The Thief of Bagdad
, anything with Paul Muni, Leslie Howard, or his favorite Indian matinee idol, Sabu, who also starred in Hollywood productions such as
Jungle Boy
.
Like his parents, Robert mostly played with other Polish children. Only one of his close friends was not part of the émigré community, a half-Indian boy whose mother was English and whose father was an Indian army officer. “
He couldn’t go swimming with us because the pool was for whites only.” The schools were also segregated, and to attend the academy run by Welsh monks where his father had enrolled him, Robert had to pose as a Christian. “
Of course you’re a Jew,” his classmates taunted him. “This was the only real dark cloud for me during our stay in India,” he said of the charade. “I resented it bitterly. Not the fact that I was Jewish. But that I had to pretend that I wasn’t.”
The upside of a Jesuit education was that Robert, by the fall of 1942, spoke fluent English, albeit with a Welsh accent. The downside was that girls were emerging as a major frustration. “Because I went to an all-boys school, I had no exposure to them. They were like creatures from another planet to me.”
Osnos had the luxury of worrying about such typical adolescent preoccupations because the war no longer intruded on his world. “There were no tangible signs of war whatsoever in Bombay. There was no military presence or rationing,” he later reflected. “
What strikes me most in retrospect was how completely normal my life had become once we reached India. I remember that I worshipped Churchill and Roosevelt, like all the other kids, and played field hockey and soccer at school.”
Robert had no idea that back in Warsaw almost every Jewish child
had been exterminated, or that Cousin Joanna was practicing Gestapo raid drills in a convent. Nor did his parents have any knowledge of the developing tragedy, because the Holocaust was still virtually unpublicized outside Poland. Thus far, the sole reference to the wholesale slaughter of European Jewry in
The New York Times
, for instance, was a two-inch-long notice buried at the back of the paper’s
June 27, 1942, edition. “700,000 Jews were reported slain in Poland,” it read, stressing that the figures were unconfirmed.
The story dominating British and American newspapers in the fall of 1942 was the siege of Stalingrad. Hitler’s bid to take the city before winter was faltering. His 6th Army Group had pinned the Soviets to a tiny sliver of land on the banks of the Volga, but though they controlled 90 percent of the city, they could not dislodge the stubborn defenders. In November, the Red Army regrouped and launched a massive two-pronged counteroffensive that cut off the Germans’ supply lines. Now the vaunted Wehrmacht was pinned down and surrounded. And winter was fast approaching.
The astonishing reversal grabbed headlines worldwide and relegated the
Times
’s scanty coverage of the Holocaust that fall to another news brief. “Two million Jews have been killed and five million more face extermination,” it announced on page 20. The story, only the second reference to the Holocaust in America’s paper of record, appeared in mid-December 1942, just as Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak began to panic because Irene had failed, for the second time in a row, to pick her up from the convent for her scheduled visit with her family. Joanna knew something was wrong. What she didn’t know was that Hanna and Janine had been caught by greasers.
While Joanna and Robert studied catechism at Catholic schools, back inside the Ghetto, Boruch Spiegel was attending a different type of class. Spiegel accepted his instructor’s pistol warily, cradling it in both hands like a newborn baby. It felt hard and out of place in his small palms, making him shudder involuntarily. He turned the weapon over, weighing its heft and possibilities. He had never touched a firearm before, and the sensation was both frightening and empowering. Though guns were as much a part of the natural landscape in wartime Warsaw as snow in December, for a Jew to wield one, to feel its lethal
power and liberating potential, was such an alien and intoxicating concept that Boruch’s hands trembled.
“
I was afraid it would go off accidentally,” he remembered. He carefully handed the VIS pistol back to his ZOB instructor, watching with a mix of relief and regret as the next eager pupil accepted the gleaming black object. The oily revolver was passed around the room so that all the young trainees could feel its cold steel and grasp its import—the taking of fate into one’s own hands. Every individual who touched the pistol likely felt the same excitement, the same trepidations, the same fearful longing to fire as Boruch. Was it the weapon that had been used to kill the new Jewish police chief, Jacob Lejkin? Spiegel wondered. Or the Judenrat scoundrel Israel First? Those assassinations, the first of many carried out by the ZOB, had warned what was left of the Ghetto that a new force was emerging in the Jewish district—the unchecked reign of Gestapo stooges was over. With just one gun they had accomplished this astonishing turnaround. Imagine, Boruch and the others were told, what could be done now that the first real shipment of arms had been delivered, in the second week of December 1942, by the Home Army.
Spiegel was inflamed by the possibilities. He visualized himself shooting at Germans, and he contemplated joining one of the hit squads being formed to eliminate traitors. “
It filled me with purpose and hope,” he said of that first contact with a pistol. He didn’t realize that the old revolver might not have even worked. Nearly half the guns in the long-awaited shipment were not operational. But persuading the Home Army to part with even these surplus weapons had proven so drawn-out and deflating a process that frustrated ZOB leaders like Isaac Zuckerman doubted whether the Jewish Fighting Organization would ever arm itself.
The protracted process had begun nearly three months earlier, when Zuckerman dispatched courier Ari Wilner to the Aryan side of Warsaw to establish contact with the Polish Underground. First a meeting was arranged with an intermediary named Hubert, who was actually Alexander Kaminski, a thirty-nine-year-old scoutmaster. In addition to serving on the command staff of the Gray Ranks, he was also editor in chief of Poland’s largest Underground newspaper, the
Information Bulletin
, with a circulation of forty thousand.
Kaminski listened politely to the blond and blue-eyed ZOB emissary,
twirling his dark mustache with the detached interest of a hard-boiled newsman. At last he rose and said that someone might be in touch with Wilner in the near future. A few weeks later, Wilner received a message requesting another meeting, this time with an actual representative of the Home Army.
The representative sent by Kaminski introduced himself as Vaclav. He was in fact Captain Henry Wolinski, a forty-year-old attorney who headed the newly created Jewish Affairs department in the Home Army’s Bureau of Information and Propaganda. His job was to keep the government in exile in London apprised of “the Jewish situation” in Poland, and he had been chosen for this grim task partly because his wife was Jewish.
Wolinski didn’t know anything about Wilner or the ZOB, other than the fact that Kaminski vouched for them. But a few days earlier, he had been contacted by the Bund’s envoy on the Aryan side, Leon Feiner. Feiner, who was known from prewar days, had asked for the Home Army’s help in preparing a detailed firsthand report on the extermination of Polish Jews, which was still being viewed with extreme skepticism by the Allies. “Naïvely, we thought that if the world knew what was happening to us, they would do something,” Zivia Lubetkin recalled.
Wolinski arranged to send one of the Home Army’s top international couriers to the Ghetto and to a death camp to corroborate the accounts of genocide. The courier was a towering twenty-eight-year-old economist by the name of Jan Karski. He was blessed with a photographic memory, spoke fluent German and English, and later personally briefed President Roosevelt and British leaders on the situation in Poland, entering history as the man who told the world about the Holocaust. Mark Edelman served as one of his Ghetto guides.
“This way,” said Edelman, when they met for the first time at the Ghetto wall. Karski pulled a cap down over his eyes, and adjusted his torn parka. The six-foot-four-inch future Georgetown University professor was accustomed to wearing disguises. Sometimes he dressed as a German oil executive and took the train through France to meet the fishing boats in Normandy that regularly ferried him across the Channel. Other times he wore the double runes of an Estonian SS man and made his way through Scandinavia. But nothing in his travels as an international courier prepared him for what he saw in the Ghetto.
“
As we walked, everything became increasingly unreal,” he later noted in his report. Children appeared “with skins so taut that every bone in their skeleton showed through.” Men stared out of eyes “glazed and blank.” Corpses lay in every second doorway. “Why are they naked?” asked Karski.
“When a Jew dies,” Edelman answered matter-of-factly, “his family removes his clothing and throws his body in the street. If not, they have to pay the Germans to have the body buried.”
Karski turned pale. “I was shocked,” he recalled. Whenever he was anxious, Karski would reflexively run his tongue against the hollowed-out dentures that lined the left side of his jaw. The Gestapo had knocked out half his teeth during an interrogation in Slovakia several years earlier, unwittingly creating the perfect place to carry microfilm.
“Hurry, hurry, now you’ll see something,” said Edelman, pulling Karski up a flight of stairs to a second-story window. They watched as a car stopped in the middle of the street. Two blond boys in Hitler Youth uniforms emerged from the vehicle. “With their round rosy-cheeked faces, and their blue eyes, they were like images of health and life,” Karski recalled. “They chattered, laughed, pushed each other in spasms of merriment. At that moment, the younger one pulled a gun out of his hip pocket and then I realized what I was witnessing. He was looking for a target with the casual, gay absorption of a boy at a carnival.”
Karski was already on his way to London by the time Ari Wilner finally met a senior officer of the Home Army, in mid-November 1942. The delay had been caused by the Home Army’s reluctance to recognize the ZOB. “
They pretty much said you don’t represent the Jews since you’re nothing but members of a youth movement, and [we] do not talk with youth movements,” Zuckerman recalled. “So we told Ari Wilner to tell them he represented two institutions: the political institution, the Jewish National Committee, which united all forces in the Ghetto, and the Jewish Fighting Organization, the military arm.”