Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
The sprawling SS garrison next to the convent where Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak was hiding had been on high alert since early that morning, April 19. Now an endless stream of trucks and motorcycles with sidecars emerged from its black steel gates as General Stroop called up more reserves to quash the Jewish revolt. Joanna, like any nine-year-old, only vaguely comprehended the significance of the stepped-up activity. “
I don’t really remember much beyond the fact that someone said there was shooting somewhere in the city,” she later recalled. Sister Wanda, however, immediately grasped that the Ghetto was under siege. She knew the Jews had been planning an armed revolt because she had briefly sheltered the ZOB envoy Ari Wilner.
Sister Wanda’s main concern was for her Jewish charges. Some of the girls still had families in the Ghetto, and she wanted to shield them from unnecessary trauma. There was nothing they could do other than cry and despair, and that might betray them to nosy outside observers. So the boarders were kept in the dark about the Uprising, and she busied them with intensified preparations for their First Communion. This would not only take their minds off the fighting raging a
few miles north, but, more important, it would buttress their Catholic credentials should the Gestapo later come searching for Jews who managed to escape from the Ghetto siege.
The Germans had already come looking for Joanna once, shortly after her mother, Hanna, and her grandmother, Janine, were shaken down by the dreaded greaser blackmailers, who had extracted a princely sum to let them go and probably still tipped off the Gestapo to Joanna’s whereabouts. That had been in December 1942, the beginning of what proved to be a very difficult winter for the Mortkowicz clan. First Joanna’s mother and grandmother disappeared, leaving the anxious child alone and frightened for weeks as they tried to give the greasers the slip. How they finally managed to evade their blackmailers, Joanna did not know, but it almost certainly involved large payments and the promise of more. Then, just as her family reestablished contact in January 1943, an unimaginable relief for the grief-stricken Joanna, tragedy struck. Grandma Janine’s older brother, Ludwik Horwitz, a scientist, was arrested by the Gestapo. He had been hiding “on the surface,” that is openly, under his own name, conducting a major research project for the State Geological Institute of Warsaw. Astonishingly, no one had bothered him before now. Within days of his submitting the research paper he had been working on throughout the occupation, the Gestapo picked him up. He was shot a few weeks later, in February 1943.
Around this time, Sister Wanda informed Joanna that it was no longer safe for her to stay at the convent. The Germans had searched the place, asking for her by name, a sure sign that the Gestapo had been tipped off to her presence. “
They demanded an inspection of all the children, and had come with precise instructions to hand over the little Olczak girl, whose mother was a Jew,” one of the other boarders, a Christian, later recounted. “The three Germans started to go up the stairs. We remained on the first floor. I can still hear their heavy footsteps—I can remember that appalling fear—we knew all too well what would happen to her” if the Germans discovered Joanna hiding behind the chapel enclosure on the second floor. “Some Sisters were praying in the chapel as the footsteps approached the door of the enclosure. Then there was a moment of silence and we heard Sister Wanda calmly say: ‘I shall once again remind you that this is the enclosure.’
And again there was a silence, in which it felt as if everything around us and inside us had and gone still. And then the footsteps coming down the steps and they were gone.”
But who had sent them? Who had denounced Joanna? Could it have been the spiteful greasers, angry at having lost their lucrative prey? Or poor Uncle Ludwik, under torture? Or perhaps there was an informant in Monika Zeromska’s Home Army cell? Not knowing was the most frightening part. It meant betrayal could come at any moment from any quarter. This constant state of anxiety plagued a large segment of the city’s population—Home Army officers, Underground activists, Jews passing themselves off as Gentiles—resulting in inordinately high numbers of nervous breakdowns in wartime Warsaw. Children proved among the most psychologically resilient to prolonged stress. “
I don’t remember being especially frightened,” Joanna recalled. “There were moments of terror, sure. But it was not the norm.” Joanna would credit the nuns for their calming influence, for trying to keep the children in a protective bubble, isolated from the evils of the outside world.
Alas, she had to leave that bubble; the comforting “
smell of ersatz coffee and slightly burned porridge” in the refectory, the familiar sound of fellow boarders chasing one another down long corridors, giggling maniacally. Her one consolation was that she would rejoin her mother, Hanna, in yet another distant suburb, a miserable town called Pruszkow that was perhaps best known as Poland’s hotbed of organized crime. The family’s plight was still precarious. Hanna and Janine had been forced to split up to avoid suspicion, and they had changed safe houses three times in as many months. It took Joanna only a few days to realize that their new hideout, at the back of a grimy grocery store, was far from safe. Every few days mysterious sacks arrived at the storage room, and the deliveries were followed by frantic floor cleaning around the secret trapdoor under which the large bags disappeared. The potato sacks left a telltale silvery dust that had to be scrubbed clean in case the Germans inspected the premises. The dust was actually tiny bullet slivers, the fallout from tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition rubbing against one another.
Joanna stayed at the clandestine munitions depot for only a few months before Sister Wanda sent for her again, but she would forever
be curious as to how her family ended up in all these conspiratorial locales. “
Was it through mutual friends?” she would later ask one of her wartime hosts. “No, no one ever exchanged names in those days,” came the answer. “No questions were asked, and the reasons why people were in hiding were never revealed. They reached us through Home Army contacts. That was enough of a recommendation.”
Isaac Zuckerman was finding the Home Army far less cooperative. Throughout the morning of April 19, 1943, he tried desperately to arrange an emergency meeting with ranking Home Army representatives. But his every attempt was rebuffed. The HA high command had made its position clear and saw no reason to revisit its decision now that the actual fighting had begun. Captain Henry Wolinski, its “Jewish Affairs” officer, was apologetic and sympathetic. But while he declared his admiration for the valor being displayed in the Ghetto, there was nothing he could do. His superior officer, Major Stan Weber, had sent a terse message refusing to see Isaac.
The only assistance Wolinski was authorized to offer was to reiterate an earlier proposal from the Home Army to evacuate ZOB members from the Ghetto and redeploy them as partisans in the forests around the capital. There would be no other help because the Home Army had warned the ZOB not to revolt. The danger that the uprising would spread into the rest of the city was deemed too great. That same fear, in fact, was foremost on General Kruger’s mind when he spoke to Stroop earlier that morning and ordered that all Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe battalions stationed in Warsaw also be put on high alert and a state of emergency be declared over the entire Polish capital. Himmler had been equally concerned, expanding the order to include all armed forces in the entire General Government. “
Don’t provoke the Poles,” the Reichsführer warned Stroop. “Appease them if necessary.”
For Himmler, the prospect of subduing the 380,000-strong Home Army was far more daunting than resistance from a few hundred rebellious Jewish teenagers. Little did the SS leader know that the Home Army had issued strict orders of its own: All units were to stand down. The Poles had absolutely no intention of launching a citywide rising.
It was far too early for that, Captain Wolinski regretfully informed Zuckerman. “
Poland has to wait and gather its strength,” allowing the Soviets and the Nazis to “bleed one another until they are exhausted.” Only then would the Home Army strike and liberate Warsaw from its Nazi captors. The time, however, was not yet ripe. The Soviets had just started turning the tide on the Eastern Front. In Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht had been decimated and hundreds of thousands of German soldiers taken as prisoners of war. The Red Army had retaken Rostov and Kharkov and most of Crimea. But the Russians were still thousands of miles from Warsaw. If the Home Army joined the Jewish revolt now, it would be slaughtered. Hitler would take revenge on the whole city. “A million people would die.”
The message could not have been clearer, or more dispiriting. The Home Army was not about to risk Warsaw for the sake of the Jews. The Jews were on their own.
Unaware that they had been abandoned by the outside world, Zivia Lubetkin and the fighters on Cordials Street were still celebrating their unexpected victory later that morning. The jubilant combatants danced, played Schubert, and clapped one another on the shoulder as they surveyed the devastation around them. Cordials Street was strewn with rubble and pockmarked like a lunar landscape. It was smeared with charcoal and reeked of kerosene and cordite, utterly unrecognizable, leached of all its vibrant prewar color, of the billboards and store names that had plastered its crowded façades, of the stalls and street vendors that had spilled out onto its congested sidewalks, of the brightly painted banners proclaiming
Sprzedaz
(Sale) that used to lure shoppers from all over town.
Little remained of the avenue’s glorious past. Number 33 Cordials, the bullet-scarred edifice in which Zivia currently stood, had once housed, among its many commercial tenants, the E. Gitlin bookstore, which offered “
a wide assortment of Hebrew dictionaries, textbooks, and self-teaching guides.”
The famous Moskowicz Cheese Shop had been next door, along with Goldstein’s Laundry, on the floor above it, and the Magazinik Gramophone and Record Shop, known to music lovers from all parts of the city. Directly across the street, Sheinblum
Paints and the Fenomen Kitchen Stoves outlet were no more, and nothing but a smoke-streaked mask was left of Zonenstein Sporting Goods or its much larger neighbor, the old Rozenthal Department Store.
Zivia and her fellow insurgents did not mourn the devastation of once proud Cordials Street. At that moment, most were still flushed with the adrenaline high of the morning’s skirmish, and since the destruction had been wrought by their own hands in defense of Jewish honor, it was well worth the price. In human costs, it was a bargain. Zivia’s group had not taken a single casualty, while inflicting half a dozen on the enemy. As a bonus, they had also increased their weapons arsenal in the exchange. Lutek Rotblatt, one of the unit’s deputy commanders, proudly distributed the haul of Mausers that had been abandoned by fleeing Germans. The ZOB could now turn the Nazis’ own guns against them.
The rejoicing was abruptly cut short when a courier came running up to Zivia and Zacharia Artstein shortly after noon. German troops, the boy said, were massing once more. Hundreds of soldiers were arriving at the main southern gate, at the intersection of Zamenhof and Goose Streets, three or four hundred yards away. The SS was preparing to come at them again, this time from the west rather than the east.
The change in direction prevented Simha Ratheiser from catching an early glimpse of the approaching forces. He was still at his post on the balcony of a nearby tenement on Embankment Street, with his finger on the trigger of an improvised detonator attached through a long cable to a large mine that lay just beneath the main gate to the Brushmakers District. His enclave had thus far been spared, as had the main shops district where Boruch Spiegel’s unit was deployed, because both were part of what was known as the Productive Ghetto, where the German-owned factories were most heavily concentrated. The biggest industrialists, moreover—war millionaires like the Shultz brothers, or Walter Casper Tobbens, the richest and most influential of them all—also had their factories in the main shops district and the Brushmakers District. They had gone to considerable lengths to persuade their Wehrmacht clients to pressure the SS to stay away from those highly profitable enclaves, and their bribes had won Simha,
Boruch, Mark Edelman, and thousands of other Jews a brief reprieve from the onslaught on the Central Ghetto.
There was no singing or marching in parade formation as the Germans entered the Ghetto this time. Stroop, borrowing from the bitter experiences of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, had strung out his men in long, scattered files better suited to urban fighting. They hugged the wall on Goose Street commando-style, scurrying from doorway to doorway, seeking shelter under balconies or behind any protrusions, securing their perimeters as they advanced. There would be no simultaneous attacks on multiple fronts, either. Stroop was going to hit one position at a time, take it out, and clear a path to the next resistance hub. He intended to repeat this methodical procedure until all the rebel strongpoints were flattened. And he was starting with Zivia’s group.
Team leader Zacharia Artstein gathered Zivia and his other deputies and hurriedly issued instructions to prepare for battle. In case they were overrun, he ordered everyone to regroup at a specific fallback point, the nearby Ghetto hospital just down the block on Goose Street. “
No sooner had he finished speaking than the house shook to heavy fire coming from all sides,” recalled Tuvia Borzykowski, whom Isaac had asked to watch out for Zivia in his absence. The firing that Borzykowski referred to was likely shelling from light artillery or from a tank that Stroop kept at safe distance from ambush. As in Stalingrad, the purpose of the cannonade was to distract the defenders long enough for advance SS platoons to safely reach their forward positions.
Once that was done, they set up a makeshift barricade on the corner of Goose and Cordials. The fortification was not particularly sturdy, however, consisting of hundreds of mattresses hastily grabbed from a nearby warehouse and piled in the middle of the intersection. The stacked mattresses afforded the Germans limited protection. “
Afraid to stick their heads out, they fired blind, wasting enormous amounts of ammunition,” Tuvia recalled. The Jewish defenders returned fire, but their pistols were of limited range and accuracy. Grenades and Molotov cocktails proved far more effective, especially the kerosene-filled bottles that ZOB members heaved at the barricade. Mattresses burn, as the cowering SS men quickly discovered. They
began to flee, and one fell, hit by a lucky shot. Once again cheers erupted from the rooftops and upper windows of 33 Cordials Street. Once more it looked as though the Jews would prevail.