Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
Thinking about Japanese destroyers and aircraft carriers bearing down on their defenseless vessel, Robert enacted their tactics on the board game he had brought for the voyage. For hours each day he played Battleship Down while Joseph played bridge and poker with the other passengers and Martha dutifully mixed the Pablum baby formula she had brought for tiny Peter. Once, in the middle of the night, when the vessel was sailing without lights, she dispatched her sleepy husband to fetch water for the powdered formula. In the dark, he groggily stumbled into the ladies’ bathroom by mistake. A scandal ensued and Joseph was hauled in front of the captain to explain himself. “
He was accused of being a Peeping Tom,” Robert recalled. “We were really worried that the U.S. authorities would deny us entry because of the incident.”
On New Year’s Eve the ship docked in Melbourne, Australia. A few weeks later, it refueled in Bora Bora, and on February 2, 1944, after almost six weeks at sea, it arrived in San Diego, California. To everyone’s relief, the customs and immigration officials knew nothing about the bathroom incident. But they were deeply troubled by Robert’s battleship game. “
They thought it was some sort of codes. They made us wait for two hours while they examined it.”
For Joseph Osnos, a journey that had begun on September 7, 1939, was now almost over. It had taken nearly four and a half years to escape from the Nazis and to find a place to start all over. By now, 95
percent of Warsaw Jews were dead. If not for Joseph’s split-second decision to run for the Romanian border on the day Stalin joined Hitler’s dismemberment of Poland, the Osnoses would have likely become part of that tragic statistic.
Robert Osnos made two pledges to himself upon setting foot on American soil. The first was to get rid of his shorts, which had been popular in India. American boys were pointing at him and laughing, saying, “
Hey buddy, you lose your pants or something?” The second was to jettison another vestige of India. “The only thing that really bothered me about our stay in Bombay is that I had to pretend I was Christian in school. I promised myself that in America I would never again lie about my religion.”
Joanna Mortkowicz-Olczak had no idea that her cousin was in California. Robert had gradually ebbed from Joanna’s thoughts. Like many nine- or ten-year-olds, she tended to forget those she had not seen in years, and her long-departed relatives had been replaced by a new group of wartime intimates: nuns, Home Army heroines like Monika Zeromska or Irene Grabowski, and the silent but strong Jewish girls who only cried in their bunks at night in the convent on Casimir Street. The other two people missing from her mental menagerie were Hanna and Janine Mortkowicz. She had not seen either of them for eight months, not since July 1943, shortly after finally making her first communion. Of the seven girls in the ceremony, five had been Jewish.
“We were petrified that the Host would stick in our throats,” Joanna later wrote.
After the rite, on Whit Sunday, Joanna had gone to see her mother and grandmother, who were hiding in the suburbs at the time. As usual, Irene Grabowska came to pick her up for the periodic visit. “
On the commuter train a guy latched on to us, trying to make jokes and conversation. Irene was accustomed to men accosting her, and sent him packing with a few sharp remarks. But I was taken in by his cajoling. ‘Joanna,’ he said to me. ‘Why don’t you want to talk to me? I know your mama very well and your grandma. Her name’s Janine Mortkowicz, right? And now she’s living with your mama. And you’re going to see them, aren’t you?” Joanna was puzzled by the stranger’s
familiarity. Had he been a prewar acquaintance? A family friend? Irene Grabowska suspected otherwise. She shooed Joanna away from the interloper and they disembarked at the next stop, already well out of the city. “When we got off, he waved to us and disappeared.” As usual, doubts crept in. Maybe the encounter had been an innocent coincidence after all. Perhaps Irene had been unnecessarily rude and paranoid. War could bring out the worst in people.
“We went on our way,” Joanna recalled. “I had only just thrown my arms around my mother’s neck when he appeared in the doorway. He had followed us along the country paths. We had led him directly to his prey.”
By the despicable standards of greasers, the man who had latched on to the Mortkowiczes was only moderately evil. Joanna did not know what payment he extracted from her mother—it would almost certainly have been in the thousands of dollars in contemporary figures. But the blackmailer thankfully did not go to the Gestapo after collecting his blood money. It still meant that her mother and grandmother’s hideout was “burned,” and Joanna felt horribly guilty for having brought a predator to their door. She was terrified they would ingest the poison many Varsovians carried with them in case of capture, and she tearfully agreed to return to the nuns only if they promised not to commit suicide. “
Then I went back to the convent like a good girl, to my French and grammar lessons,” she later wrote. She did not know where her mother and grandmother moved next because it was deemed too risky for her to continue visiting them. Joanna’s sole link to her family was permanently severed when the Gestapo arrested Irene Grabowska. She was taken to Peacock Prison, tortured, and eventually executed in March 1944.
By March, Boruch Spiegel had been back in Warsaw for six long, cold months. The Polish capital was snowed under. Burst pipes in poorly heated buildings formed crystal waterfalls on countless façades. Corpses still dangled from balconies, their anguished death masks now frozen solid. The alternating power blackouts on opposite sides of the street continued as the Germans desperately diverted more and more energy to their sputtering war machine. And the price of coal on
the black market had shot so high that some residents were burning old phone books and furniture to stay warm. Despite the inclement conditions, Boruch did not own a coat, a hat, a pair of gloves or boots. He didn’t need them. During the entire winter, he and Chaika Belchatowska never left the apartment they were hiding in. Under ZOB regulations, they were not allowed to set foot outdoors. “
You needed official permission to go out from your
melina
,” Boruch recalled, using the slang for safe house.
Like Zivia Lubetkin and Mark Edelman, Spiegel could not live “on the surface.” Greasers would have spotted him immediately. The Slavic-style mustache he had grown did little to disguise his Semitic features. “
Even my eyes were Yiddish,” he lamented. “And it wasn’t just how you looked. Your accent, your mannerisms, everything was a minus.”
Boruch and Chaika were billeted with the family of a Home Army officer by the name of Joseph Pera, “a fantastic man,” Boruch later said, “kind, brave, and generous.” Pera was the manager of the Hotel Metropole, a German-only establishment, and had polished his impeccable manners during eight years in France. He and his family lived on the corner of Iron and Mushroom Streets, in a large sixth-floor apartment that had been inside the Ghetto until 1942. After the
Gross Aktion
, when the southernmost part of the Jewish district had been turned over to Gentiles, Pera, his son Mietek, and his brother-in-law had begun sheltering Jews. Boruch and Chaika lived in the attic above their flat, in a room camouflaged by a bookcase.
Zuckerman came by every few weeks, bringing money for food. “
He did everything to boost our morale. He always had a ready joke or a funny story to tell.” Isaac also brought pens and large supplies of paper. “Write down everything you know, he said.” Spiegel had little enthusiasm for this assignment. Writing had never been his strong suit. But Zuckerman was insistent. He wanted a complete record of Jewish suffering to survive, even if none of its authors did.
What Spiegel remembered most about this period of the war was the excruciating boredom. People did what they could to pass the time. Books were devoured, regardless of the subject. Every form of card game was played. Joanna’s mother, who was hiding in an apartment near the campus of the shuttered Warsaw Polytechnic about ten
blocks from Boruch, wrote a novel.
Her grandmother translated
Dr. Dolittle’s Return
into Polish. The two women practiced languages to keep themselves from going stir-crazy. “
One day they would speak only in French,” Joanna recalled, “the next day in Russian, then English, or French.” Hanna and Janine, like thousands of other hidden Jews, would do anything to keep their minds sharp and to distract themselves from the fact that they were living in a tiny storeroom whose door was hidden behind heavy bookcases from which they were not to emerge for fourteen very long months. Some likened hiding in secret rooms or behind false walls to solitary confinement. “
We had the feeling of being prisoners sentenced to an indefinite term,” Tuvia Borzykowski recalled. “Had we at least known the waiting would end some day, the waiting would have been easier.” Many couldn’t take it. A few were driven insane. These unfortunates were popularly known as “crazy cats.”
The ZOB had entered a new phase in its evolution. The procurement of weapons and armed resistance were no longer its raison d’être. The fighting, for the foreseeable future, was over. The Organization’s goal was now survival, not only that of its own dwindling membership, but of any and all Jews still alive in Warsaw. Fewer than twenty thousand remained in the Polish capital by March 1944, and with each passing month, greasers steadily eroded their numbers. Even the Gestapo were impressed by the blackmailers’ diligence. “
You Poles are strange people,” one SS officer remarked. “Nowhere in the world is there another nation which has so many heroes and so many denouncers.”
Isaac Zuckerman echoed that perplexing dichotomy. “Remember,” he often reminded Simha Ratheiser, “
it only takes one Pole to betray a hundred Jews, but it takes ten Poles to save one Jew.” The math was exaggerated, but his point was clear.
Between forty thousand and sixty thousand Varsovians were actively involved in sheltering Jews, according to the Ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum, who himself was being hidden at this time in a specially constructed bunker under a greenhouse in midtown Warsaw.
Some Western historians put the number as high as ninety thousand, when so-called secondary helpers were factored in. “
These noble individuals face not only German terror but also the hostility of Polish fascists,” Ringelblum
noted in the report he penned while living under the greenhouse. “It is, however, the anti-Semites as a whole, infected with racialism and Nazism, who created conditions so unfavorable that it has been possible to save only a small percentage of the Polish Jews from the Teuton butchers.”
Boruch Spiegel was more forgiving of the limited assistance from fellow countrymen. “
What a lot of people don’t realize is that the Poles had it pretty bad too. Most of them were too busy trying to survive. They had their own problems.” Ultimately, it would be the deeds of those who harmed rather than those who helped that would resonate loudest in the historical record. Yet to Simha, there was a karmic balance between betrayal and assistance. Greasers and anti-Semites were offset by people like the Sawicki sisters. “
Once I was on the run and went to Marisa [Sawicka’s] apartment. The Gestapo had just been there.” They had come to arrest her nephew, Stephen, who was later executed for helping the ZOB. “She was scared and I would have understood had she turned me away. But she still let me in. I’ll never forget that.”
The principal difference between good and evil at this point was that acting decently was punishable by death, while heinous acts carried virtually no consequences.
Not all of those rendering assistance to Jews were motivated by pure altruism, however. “Keeping cats” was a for-profit enterprise for many Varsovian landlords, the only way for cash-strapped families to make ends meet. The hyperinflation, high unemployment, and economic devastation wrought by Nazi occupation had reduced standards of living in Warsaw to levels far below the worst of the Great Depression. Food was prohibitively expensive, accounting for the bulk of most family budgets. As they had in the Ghetto, smuggling and the black market filled the cruel caloric gap left by starvation-level German rations. For homeowners with no alternative sources of income, taking in boarders became a necessity.
Warsaw also had more room at this stage of the war.
The capital’s non-Jewish population had shrunk by more than a fifth since 1939. With nearly a quarter of a million residents dead or in labor, concentration, or POW camps, the city’s perennial housing shortage had been temporarily alleviated, leaving vacancies that were eagerly filled
by refugees from the Ghetto. The monthly rents that illegal Jewish tenants paid were astronomical, often ten to twenty times the rate charged for Gentiles.
The daily rate for boarding a Jewish child, for instance, was 100 zlotys, more than Mark Edelman earned in an entire month as a hospital orderly in 1940. The premium factored in the risks for landlords, whose entire families could be shot for harboring Jews. Still, thousands engaged in this dangerous game of real estate roulette, because the Nazis had assigned the death penalty to so many mundane activities by then that the sentence had lost its meaning. “
Death threatened for bacon and gold, for weapons and false papers, for evading registration, for a radio and for Jews,” noted one Varsovian writer. “The wits said that they were afraid only of sentences higher than death; to them the death penalty was like a prewar jaywalking ticket. Over the city there hung a deadly absurdity.”
In this treacherous environment, Jews sometimes became pawns in intra-Gentile disputes. Vindictive neighbors denounced landlords for “keeping cats” for reasons that often had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. A lovers’ quarrel, a divorce, an unpaid debt, or an old score to settle could result in an anonymous letter to the Gestapo. It was in this fashion that Emmanuel Ringelblum and forty other Jews hiding under the care of a sympathetic Socialist Party activist by the name of Mieczyslaw Wolski were caught and killed by the Germans in March 1944.
Wolski’s ex-girlfriend tipped off the authorities after a particularly contentious breakup.