Isaac's Army (48 page)

The men tailing him now certainly had not been discouraged by the Home Army executions. Isaac had purposefully led his pursuers to Praga, which was less crowded than Midtown and had a smaller police presence. “
When I got off the tram, they surrounded me,” he recalled. “What do you want?” Isaac asked.

“Why did you run from us?” one of the greasers demanded.

“What do you want?” Zuckerman repeated.

“What you’ve got,” the thug leaned forward menacingly.

Just then a voice startled the blackmailers. “Gentlemen!”

Simha Ratheiser stood a few paces behind the group of assailants. He routinely shadowed Zuckerman, acting as his discreet bodyguard. And like some gunslinger in an American Western, he was now brandishing a pair of pistols, one in each hand.

It was not only greasers that the ZOB had to worry about in the fall of 1943. That October, the Gestapo launched a terror campaign in Poland that was almost certainly tied to the Reich’s reversals of fortunes on distant battlefields. The repression was particularly brutal in Warsaw, the center of perceived or potential resistance.

On October 13, massive street raids began in the city center. Thousands of people were arrested, and
1,400 men and 487 women, all Gentiles, were sent to Auschwitz on the first day alone. The roundups were accompanied by a new sight in the Polish capital: The Germans inaugurated the practice of street executions. In the past, the Gestapo had conducted their killings in the Palmiry forest north of Warsaw. Now, in order to spread maximum fear, public firing squads were convened daily in different locations throughout the city.
On October 16, for instance, twenty people were shot on Independence Street in the upscale neighborhood of Mokotow. The next day another twenty were lined up against the wall of the main telephone switching station in working-class Wola, while sixty more were murdered the day after that near Woodrow Wilson Square in Jolie Bord. On October 21, another sixty were shot in Praga, almost exactly where Zuckerman had led his greaser pursuers. The mobile killing squads then moved on to Jerusalem Boulevard and New World Street, in the heart of the Midtown shopping and restaurant district. Then they moved north again, lining up victims outside the Gdansk train station, the Grand Theater, Krasinski Square. This went on for six straight weeks until thousands had been murdered in plain sight. Megaphones announced every execution, warning, “
You’ve brought this on yourselves. Why do you provoke us?”

As Varsovians became inured to the daily street shootings, the Gestapo upped the psychological ante in November 1943 by switching to public hangings. This method of killing was deemed more effective because the hanging corpses left a lasting impression. They dangled from ornate Art Deco lampposts, left to slowly decompose instead of being removed and buried like the firing squad victims. Some swung suspended by the neck from the wrought iron balconies of residential buildings, so pedestrians were forced to walk beneath their urine-soaked trousers.

In addition to the public executions, the SS redoubled its efforts to penetrate the various resistance movements, which were growing bolder with every Allied victory. This was most effectively accomplished by using families as hostages to turn agents. The Home Army was badly hit by the wave of informants: General Rowecki, the Warsaw commander who had issued the order not to participate in the Ghetto Uprising, was dead, as were several other senior leaders who had been betrayed, arrested, tortured, and eventually killed.

Isaac’s frequent dealings with the People’s Army and the fractious Home Army left him exposed to the treachery of Gestapo agents who infiltrated virtually every Gentile insurgent group. Already he had begun to suspect Shrub, the code name for Lieutenant Gaik, the People’s Army officer who arranged transport for the sewer escapees to Lomianki. Shrub’s bona fides were rock solid: he had saved eighty ZOB members, and he had been the driving force behind the establishment of the partisan cell in Wyszkow. But he had recently begun to behave strangely. Visiting Wyszkow, he insisted on leading a mission to attack a police station that ended disastrously. Virtually everyone except for Shrub died in the botched assault. German troops had been waiting for the partisans, as if they had been expecting them. This of course could have been just bad luck. But it made Isaac think about how the second half of the May 10 sewer rescue mission had also ended in a similar slaughter. The moving truck that Simha sent back to collect the remaining ZOB fighters from the sewers had been ambushed on the way to the city. Richie Mozelman and several other ZOB members died before ever reaching their colleagues, as if the Germans had been expecting them, too. This could also have been a coincidence. But then a third incident convinced Zuckerman otherwise.

Late in the summer of 1943, Gaik helped transfer another group of Jews to the partisan cell in Wyszkow. They had been carrying a large sum of money, hundreds of thousands of zlotys and thousands of dollars. Gaik inexplicably ordered the funds to be turned over to him. Furious at the robbery, Isaac went to Shrub’s commander and ordered an inquiry, which resulted in the People’s Army issuing a death warrant against Gaik for theft. Gaik disappeared. A year later he was shot by the Germans while trying to rescue two Jews. Had Shrub been a collaborator, or merely a thief? Had he played double agent? Or had the People’s Army tried to take the money for its own uses, with Shrub just a victim of the paranoia that pervaded the Underground?

Another lethal incident involving the People’s Army left no such doubt. It led to the death of one of the ZOB’s top couriers, Tuvia Sheingut, and it very nearly cost Simha Ratheiser his life. Both Ratheiser and Sheingut had risen very rapidly in the ZOB’s thinning ranks, thanks in part to their role in the sewer rescue. More important, both possessed the qualities that ZOB operatives needed most at this point in the war: the ability to move freely among the general population. Simha, in particular, had benefited from his ease at playing a Gentile. Because of this ability, he had replaced Tuvia Borzykowski
as Isaac’s “right-hand man.” Tuvia had been Zuckerman’s closest friend and confidant in the Ghetto. It was to Tuvia that Isaac had entrusted the care of his wife during the Uprising—though Zivia Lubetkin would doubtless have protested the idea that she needed anyone to look after her. But now Tuvia was as handicapped as Zivia, and Mark Edelman, who was also forced to stay indoors because of his Semitic looks. Tuvia’s appearance wasn’t an issue for him. He was a big strapping lad with fair Slavic features. His disqualifying barrier was linguistic. “
Tuvia’s Polish wasn’t Polish,” Zuckerman noted regretfully.

Ratheiser and Sheingut had been running guns to a ZOB cell in southern Poland for the past few months. One of Simha’s contacts,
a trusted Gentile by the name of Stephen Pokropek, had a line on some weapons for sale. A friend of a friend had access to a cache and was interested in joining the Communist partisans. If Simha put the friend’s friend in touch with the right people in the Communist group, he would sell the arms to the ZOB at a discount. Ratheiser relayed the proposition to Zuckerman, who passed it along to the People’s Army.

Isaac ordered Simha to meet with the man in question, who introduced himself only as Czarny—Black in Polish. It was risky, but the ZOB was desperate for guns. The People’s Army, meanwhile, ran a background check on Black. Word filtered back that he appeared legitimate. The Communists then tested Black with a small mission. He passed. Simha was instructed to set up the buy. The exchange was to take place at Pokropek’s Praga apartment, which Simha was using to store weapons. He already had a batch of disassembled revolvers there that he and Sheingut were in the process of stripping and cleaning. Black showed up at the appointed hour and asked if Simha and Sheingut had brought the money. They had. He would be back in an hour, he said, with the revolvers and bullets.

“
I told [Sheingut] there was no point in both of us hanging around and that he should go,” Simha recalled. Sheingut, however, was in no rush to leave. And just then a hammering at the door startled them both. “Gestapo. Open up!” Simha reacted instinctively. He leaped out the window and ran as fast as he could. “
Bullets whizzed by my ear.” Sheingut and Stephen Pokropek were not as agile. Both died on the spot.

Simha rushed back to the western side of Warsaw and reported the raid to Zuckerman. At the time they didn’t know if Sheingut and Pokropek were dead or in German custody. They also had no way of knowing whether the whole thing had been a setup or pure chance. “
We were tormented by suspicion, and, naturally, it fell on Black.”

Black disappeared, just like Lieutenant Gaik, leaving the ZOB to wonder whom they could trust. Simha’s lingering doubts were dispelled a few weeks later. “
I’m walking down the street and I see this big convertible. It’s full of Gestapo agents and there’s Black sitting in the backseat. He spots me and starts shouting ‘Stop him, stop him.’ ”

Ratheiser gave the Gestapo the slip. He could not, however, rid himself of a persistent fear: How many more Shrubs and Blacks were out there, just waiting to trip them up?

CHAPTER 35

ROBERT’S AMERICAN PLEDGE

On December 15, 1943, as a blizzard lashed Warsaw and Allied bombs fell on Berlin, Joseph, Martha, and young Robert Osnos found themselves with only forty-eight hours in which to pack their belongings and leave Bombay. They were not being expelled from India, where they had comfortably settled after their harrowing flight from Poland. Their American visas, after three years of bureaucratic delays, had finally come through.

The short notice was a security precaution, in the event that the Japanese had spies in India ports ready to tip off enemy submarines about the departure of U.S.-flagged ships. “
Out of the blue my dad got a call that our papers were ready and that a troop transport was leaving for California,” Robert, who was thirteen at the time, recalled. The vessel was the USS
Hermitage
, a seized Italian passenger liner, and for the astounded Osnoses the question at the time had been whether to board the ship at all.
Why go?
Martha and many of the Osnoses’ Polish friends had argued. India had been good to European exiles. They had all found work in the booming war economy. Most had servants and spacious homes with lovely gardens and swimming
pools. Joseph and Martha played bridge every weekend and Robert attended private school, where he was well on his way to becoming a proper young Englishman, albeit with a Welsh accent. Most important, he was safe. In India, there was no threat of invading forces or aerial attack. There wasn’t even rationing.

It was easy to see why so many of the Polish émigrés, both Jewish and Gentile, felt fortunate to have landed in India. Their British hosts may not have invited them to join the top clubs, but their services were valued and they were treated fairly. Joseph had done extremely well running the small plant that made life rafts for the British navy. In fact, Martha had felt secure enough to have a second child. Robert now had a few-months-old little brother named Peter.

India had offered its refugees a lifeline, a rare chance at stability and prosperity at a time when neither was available in Europe. It was not surprising that many thought they had a future there. Joseph Osnos was of a different mind. Just as he had instantly grasped that Poland was finished in September 1939, and that the only recourse then was flight, he now foresaw that the privileged position of Europeans in India would eventually come to an end. “
I don’t know how, but my father guessed that there would be a backlash against colonialism after the war,” Robert recalled. “Somehow he knew that India would seek independence and that being white would no longer be an advantage. So he insisted that we go to America now, even though my mother had just had a baby.”

The USS
Hermitage
had once been an elegant passenger liner plying the Mediterranean for its Italian proprietors. Stripped down to the bare essentials, it now ferried wounded GIs to the United States on the far more dangerous passage across the still contested Pacific. On this voyage, in addition to injured soldiers, it carried 120 civilian passengers, mostly Persian oil workers and Chinese missionaries. In the lower holds, in cargo compartments that had been converted into a large brig, there was also a group of Italian POWs. To Robert, the smiling Italian officers he occasionally saw smoking and laughing on deck seemed nothing like the icy SS men who had barged into his mother’s apartment in Warsaw, looking for antiques to requisition, in 1939. Seventy years later, that chilling experience in Warsaw would remain his most vivid memory of the war, more deeply ingrained than the
bombings of September 1939, his sojourn through Berlin the following year, the earthquake in Bucharest, the deserts of Iraq, or his first brush with the great naval campaigns that raged in the Pacific theater.

He had followed the American victories and setbacks on the Movietone newsreels that preceded the films he watched in Bombay, and knew that the Pacific was still far from safe for any U.S. ship. The
Hermitage
had no escort. Nor was it part of a convoy. During the day, the solitary vessel meandered unpredictably, threading an invisible slalom course to throw off the aim of any pursuing submarine. At night, it traveled under a strict lights-out policy, with the portholes blacked out and smoking forbidden on deck. One of the Osnoses’ fellow passengers was nearly clamped in irons for violating the no-smoking rule; the suspicion that he was a spy trying to betray the
Hermitage
’s position followed him all the way to port.