Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
Simha Ratheiser was by this time a full-fledged member of the Organization, rapidly rising through its youthful ranks. He had distinguished himself shortly after the January Rising by taking part in a brazen attack on the Jewish prison to free several jailed ZOB operatives. “
My assignment was to distract the [Jewish Police] guards by pretending to deliver a package to a prisoner. My colleagues would then rush in with guns.” The plan was inspired by a similar operation carried out on the Aryan side by the Gray Ranks, the Home Army’s Boy Scout unit. Since one hundred and forty Gentiles had been executed by the SS in reprisal for that successful jailbreak, the ZOB hoped to divert Nazi retaliation by using Simha’s Slavic features. His would be the only face unmasked. The ruse worked. Shocked Jewish policemen mistook him for a Gentile and
“word spread like wildfire that the
operation had been commanded by a fighter from the Polish Underground.”
Ratheiser’s superiors were so impressed by his cool demeanor during the breakout—“
When others became nervous or agitated I got calmer. Everything slowed down for me in such situations,” he explained about his sangfroid—that they promoted him to an elite unit led by twenty-two-year-old Hanoch Gutman. Gutman was one of the heroes of the January Rising, and his team did some of the ZOB’s dirtiest work: so-called “Exes,” which included both execution of traitors and expropriation of funds to finance weapons purchases. The unit was part hit squad, part extortion ring—but its targets hardly qualified as innocent victims. The notorious Gestapo agent Alfred Nossig, who claimed to be related to Zionist founder Theodor Herzl, was the first to be shot. He was followed by Mieczyslaw Brzezinski, the head of the Jewish Police’s hated Umschlagplatz unit. “
Isaac [Zuckerman] would tell Hanoch who had been sentenced to death,” Simha recalled, “and he would carry it out.”
The responsibility for issuing the death warrants weighed heavily on Zuckerman. “
I wanted to drink, and I drank too much,” he confessed. “It couldn’t get rid of the gnawing worm. It was the sense of responsibility for a human life.”
Boruch Spiegel, who reportedly joined an Exes group in the main shops district, refused to discuss the killing and extortion of fellow Jews. “
I’m sorry, I won’t talk about that,” he demurred. Mark Edelman was more forthcoming about the sort of victim the ZOB shook down and the mafia-style tactics employed. “
A Jewish policeman, a real son of a bitch, wouldn’t give us money,” he recalled. “We said, ‘You don’t want to pay? Fine,’ and shot him.”
The activities of the ZOB during this brief but controversial period of its evolution were in fact very similar to those of the American mob. Every underground baker in the Ghetto was forced to pay tribute to the ZOB by delivering free daily bread. Those who balked had their shops wrecked. Since the Organization needed to raise the equivalent of millions of dollars to buy arms for its members, it targeted the rich with a special “tax.” A disproportionate percentage of surviving residents were wealthy, because money, gold, and diamonds was what kept people alive in the diabolically corrupt Nazi system. There was
also no shortage of smugglers or collaborators to squeeze. “
We would kidnap their children and ransom them,” Simha explained of one tactic to secure contributions for the ZOB’s weapons fund.
It was during one of these Exes that Ratheiser acquired the pseudonym that followed him for the rest of his life—
the nickname by which his Israeli grandchildren would address him, the nom de guerre on his email address seventy years later. A rich Jew had refused to pay the ZOB “tax.” “
I put the barrel of my revolver near him,” Simha recalled. “Then Hanoch [Gutman] ordered ‘Kazik, kill him!’ Why did he call me Kazik?”—a Polish diminutive for Casimir. “When [the rich Jew] heard ‘Kazik,’ he understood he was dealing with a Gentile, and you didn’t get smart with Gentiles, especially not in those days. He broke down and gave us his contribution.”
So much money was being raised through extortion that a violent turf war nearly erupted. The rival Jewish Military Union had its own Exes program, and competition between the two groups over territory and marks eventually led to a confrontation. Zuckerman, Edelman, and Anielewicz went to meet with unnamed leaders of the JMU to try to resolve the dispute. “
They drew their guns, we also brought guns,” was all Edelman would say. “I won’t discuss it any further than that.”
Whatever the origin of the conflict, it seemed that the ideological differences between the Jewish left and the Revisionist right remained irreconcilable in the winter of 1943, precluding any military cooperation. Though Edelman would not name the individuals with whom he had clashed in the armed standoff, one was likely Paul Frenkel, the young Betarist challenging David Apfelbaum for leadership of the JMU. Frenkel, at the time, was making large weapons purchases and needed to raise significant sums. Since Apfelbaum jealously guarded his contacts in the right-wing Home Army splinter group that had provided the JMU with weapons in the past, Frenkel needed to establish his own independent supply line. He had recently done so through a libertarian Home Army faction known by the Polish acronym PLAN. One of PLAN’s Gentile underground leaders, John Ketling, recalled meeting Frenkel a few months earlier at a safe house in an industrial suburb of Warsaw: “
In a low dark room where large amounts of ammunition, hand grenades, and pistols had been stored on planks, I found some young Jews dressed in civilian clothes. Only the pistols
and hand grenades stuck in their leather belts gave away their identity as members of a military organization,” he wrote in a postwar deposition. “The purpose of the meeting was explained to me by Paul [Frenkel], the head of their delegation. I learned that they considered themselves adherents of Jabotinsky and claimed that the pre-September 1939 Polish government had come to their assistance several times.” Frenkel now wanted to extend that prewar cooperation to jointly combat the Nazis. “I liked the attitude of the Jewish fighters, their fanatical will to fight, their willingness to take a high risk for the cause … the lightheartedness and familiarity with which these young boys treated the danger that awaited them made a very strong impression on me.”
In January 1943, Ketling was invited to visit JMU headquarters on Muranow Square, on the northern edge of the Central Ghetto enclave. He entered through a tunnel, one of several dug by the JMU’s Engineering Department in the summer and fall of 1942. “
It began in the cellar of number 7 Muranow and ended across the street in number 6.” On the odd-numbered side, just next to the sidewalk, “a high wall made of red bricks and covered on top with broken glass and barbed wire” separated the Ghetto from the Aryan side. The tunnel, whose opening “was only a meter in diameter,” ran under the barrier. “After lifting the cover of the entrance”—it was camouflaged with earth to mask its whereabouts, Ketling reported—“you would enter the tunnel on all fours. It was lit with electrical light and padded with blankets.”
The fortified bunker into which the tunnel led was later described by the Ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum, one of the few left-wing Zionists who managed to maintain cordial relations with the Revisionists:
“In the command room was a first-class radio that received news from all over the world, and next to it stood a typewriter. I talked to people in command for several hours. They were armed, with revolvers stuck in their belts. Different kinds of weapons were hung in the large rooms: light machine guns, rifles, revolvers of various kinds, hand grenades, bags of ammunition, German uniforms etc.… There was great activity in the command room, as in any army headquarters. Fighters received their orders for the barrack-points where future combatants were being brought together and instructed. Reports arrived of expropriations of wealthy people carried
out by individual groups for the purpose of arming the JMU. While I was there a purchase of arms was made from a former Polish Army officer amounting to a quarter of a million zlotys. Two machine guns were bought at 40,000 zlotys each, as well as a large number of hand grenades and bombs.”
The ZOB, though far better known than its smaller and more secretive right-wing rival, had nothing to match that arsenal. And it did not have much time to play catch-up before the SS struck again.
In February 1943, the Home Army “saluted” the Organization’s courage during the January Rising by delivering fifty pistols and grenades. The shipment was only a fraction of what Zuckerman and Edelman were expecting, because General Rowecki remained skeptical of the ZOB’s political leanings and loyalties. But at least he no longer complained that weapons were wasted on Jews.
In a cable to London, the Home Army detailed how the arms were distributed among the different ZOB units being formed in the Ghetto’s three enclaves: “
Nine squadrons were concentrated in the center of the ghetto, eight in the area of the Tobbens and Schultz workshops, five in the Brushmakers District.” The deployment incorporated a tactical lesson learned during the January Rising. Because the Ghetto was divided into noncontiguous zones separated by depopulated dead zones, it had been impossible to coordinate any cohesive battle plan from one unified headquarters. Consequently, the ZOB decided to split itself into three regiments, each acting independently under its own commander. Anielewicz assumed control of the largest force in the Central Ghetto. Zuckerman was in charge of the main shops area between Forestry and New Linden Streets. And Edelman headed the smaller Brushmakers District, on the westernmost edge of the Ghetto, near New Town.
Between the three of them they had as many as five hundred fighters, all of whom were now required to leave their families and live together in platoons so as to maintain constant battle readiness. “
We did not want to be taken by surprise again,” explained Ratheiser, whose group was barracked on Franciscan Street in the Brushmakers District. The platoons were structured along party lines—Bundists were
garrisoned with Bundists, Young Guardsmen with Young Guardsman, members of Isaac’s Socialist Zionist Dror with Dror—but all were of mixed gender. Inevitably, the cramped coed living arrangements led to many pairings: Simha fell hard for a girl named Dvora, and they became an item. His team leader, Hanoch Gutman, also shared his bunk with a girlfriend, as did Anielewicz and Boruch Spiegel. And of course Isaac and Zivia were still together.
During the day, most of the would-be warriors went to work at the various German shops. At night they trained for battle by pretending to shoot at targets. “
We would aim and shout Bang, Bang,” Spiegel recalled. Bullets were far too precious to waste on practice, since the revolvers from the Home Army had arrived with inexplicably empty chambers. “
Allocating weapons without ammunition impresses us as being a bit of a mockery of our fate and confirms the assumption that the venom of anti-Semitism continues to permeate the ruling circles of Poland,” Mordechai Anielewicz angrily declared. That the unloaded pistols were all of different vintages, makes, and calibers further aggravated the ZOB’s dire munitions problems.
General Rowecki’s token “goodwill gesture” had armed barely one in ten combatants. A few additional Mausers had been liberated from dead Germans during the rising, and some rifles were bought at the illicit arms market on Jerusalem Boulevard near Central Station. The black market was proving a disappointment as a source of weapons. It was rife with rip-off artists and Gestapo informants. The ZOB could purchase only one or two guns at a time since large orders would arouse suspicion, and what it had managed to buy was “a pittance,” in Zuckerman’s frustrated words. So he sent courier Ari Wilner back to the Aryan side to press the Home Army for more guns. Though it was not widely known, Wilner had fired the first shot of the January Rising. His role was less heralded than Mordechai Anielewicz’s because it had taken place behind closed doors rather than in full view of the public. Nonetheless, having a German kill under his belt lent Wilner tremendous credibility with the Polish Underground. Even if some of the more conservative Polish army officers had misgivings about Jews, they respected Wilner personally. One of his greatest admirers was Captain Henry Wolinski, the Home Army’s Jewish Affairs liaison officer.
Wolinski had a Jewish wife hidden at home, and he was sympathetic to the ZOB. He secured a promise for a further shipment of arms: “
a machine gun, a tommy gun, twenty pistols with magazines and ammunition, 100 hand grenades, and diversion materials such as time bombs and delayed action fuses.” Wilner and Wolinski also arranged for the ZOB to receive training at the Home Army’s underground explosives laboratory, so engineer and Bundist Michael Klepfish was sent for an intensive course on bomb making.
Klepfish returned three weeks later with dynamite, two thousand liters of kerosene, and a slew of volatile recipes to set up his own laboratory. Simha Ratheiser and Boruch Spiegel both recall scouring the Ghetto for empty bottles and burned-out lightbulbs for Klepfish’s bomb factories. The bulbs were injected with sulfuric acid, while the bottles—very hard to come by—were filled with a mixture of kerosene, gasoline, sugar, and potassium cyanide to create incendiary devices whose burn rates could be controlled by altering the ingredients. The assembly of these bottle bombs had to be concealed in well-ventilated attics because “
the odor of the chemicals was overwhelming.” One such lab was on St. George’s Street in Edelman’s Brushmakers District, across from Krasinski Park in the building next to one in which the Ratheisers had lived when Simha first moved to the Ghetto. The lethal cocktails were mixed in large barrels and carefully funneled into vodka bottles that often had to be smuggled in from the Aryan side.
Since drainpipes were plentiful and could be fashioned into grenades, hundreds of bathrooms throughout the Ghetto were dismantled for their cast iron fixtures. “
We would remove the pipes with a larger than normal diameter, saw out a piece of about 30 to 40 centimeters, solder one side, and make threads for a screw on the other side. Inside the hard metal pipe, we would put a thinner tin pipe and load it with explosives. We would fill the space in between the two pipes with pieces of metal, nails and such. The effect of the explosion was not only from the pipe but also from the scraps of metal and nails. We would carve slits in the pipe, which scattered the slivers. In the screwed-on top, we would make a crack to put the wick.”