Isaac's Army (52 page)

The heady sensation proved fleeting. The next morning, as explosions reverberated throughout Warsaw, Mark set out for Forestry Boulevard, four blocks north. He got within a few hundred yards of his safe house before he was pinned down by fire. Ukrainian SS auxiliaries from nearby Peacock Prison had cut off his path. “
I hid in a store that was burning. Its ceiling looked like it was going to collapse.” Edelman waited for ten excruciating minutes inside the flaming shop before leaping back out into the street. Shots ricocheted around his feet as he
dived through a courtyard gate. Cutting through back alleys, where he knew the Ukrainians were unlikely to follow, Mark ran headlong into a Home Army patrol. His relief turned into horror when he saw that they, too, had their guns trained on him. They surrounded him, yelling,
“Jew, you set the building on fire. You’re a German spy.” Edelman was stunned at the absurdity of their accusation. While they debated whether to execute him on the spot, Mark wrestled himself free and bolted. His captors gave chase. Edelman and his pursuers ran into another Home Army unit, this one with officers. There was a long discussion among the officers and they eventually let Mark go.

Shaken, he returned to Marisa Sawicki’s safe house just as Isaac Zuckerman and Simha Ratheiser were coming back from their frustrating negotiations in Old Town. A representative of the Council to Aid Jews was also there,
delivering $40,000 in U.S. currency and a warning for the ZOB. His name was Alexander Kaminski, and he was the editor in chief of the Home Army’s
Information Bulletin
. Kaminski was sympathetic to the Jewish Underground, stemming from his prewar association with the Bund. Under his editorship, the
Information Bulletin
had never printed a single anti-Semitic statement, and the paper had often encouraged its readers to assist Jewish refugees. The ZOB, Kaminski now warned, should not join the Home Army. Jews would not be safe in its newly expanded ranks.

The reason had to do with rebel realpolitik. In anticipation of the uprising, the Home Army had struck a deal with the National Armed Forces, the far-right anti-Semitic organization that until then had been ostracized by the mainstream Polish Resistance. The two factions agreed to fight under the same banner on the condition that the National Armed Forces renounce its quasi-fascist leanings. Only part of the right-wing group’s members had accepted the terms. Yet to liberal Home Army officers like Kaminski (a future Righteous Gentile), the merger represented a pact with the devil, a desperate gambit to help even out the overwhelming odds against dislodging the Wehrmacht and then fending off the Red Army. The trade-off boiled down to legitimacy in exchange for firepower.
The pariah National Armed Forces, with 72,439 members nationwide, had significant stores of weapons, which the Home Army desperately needed.
Only one in ten Home Army soldiers was properly armed. Worse still, the Gestapo
had seized a stockpile of 78,000 grenades during a raid on an underground explosives plant just three weeks earlier. One hundred and seventy flamethrowers had also been lost in that July raid. The far right’s arsenal could potentially tip the scales toward the rebel cause. The ZOB’s contribution of twenty fighters, on the other hand, would make no difference whatsoever, other than possibly disrupting the fragile new alliance. In the cold calculus of war, the welfare of Warsaw’s few remaining Jews had not even entered the equation.

Already, Kaminski said, some Jews had been killed by joint National Armed Forces–Home Army units under the dubious pretext that the Jewish victims were Volksdeutsche. The only choice for the ZOB, Kaminski advised, was to join the People’s Army.

Under different circumstances, Edelman, as an anticommunist Bundist, would have recoiled at the thought. But now he didn’t hesitate. “
I wasn’t going to fight with people trying to kill me.”

On August 3, 1944, the ZOB formally became the third platoon of the People’s Army Second Brigade. The People’s Army took them in largely out of numerical necessity. The tiny Communist faction could not afford to reject volunteers. Isaac, Zivia, Mark, Simha, Tuvia Borzykowski, and a dozen other veterans of the Ghetto Uprising were assigned to man barricades on Bridge Street. This was one of the most strategically important arteries in Old Town, a position heavily defended by both rebel forces and the Wehrmacht. Bridge Street sloped down the escarpment along Old Town’s crenellated battlements toward the Vistula, where it connected to the river-spanning viaduct from which it took its name. For the Germans, this was a vital crossing that needed to be held at all costs to prevent Soviet tanks from entering Warsaw. The street itself was unusually wide by the standards of the cramped historic district. It was cobblestoned and lined with three- and four-story Gothic townhouses,
each intricately decorated with pastel murals and glass mosaics depicting folk tales. A creamy baroque cathedral crowned the hill where Bridge Street merged into ancient Freta Street at the foot of the Barbakan tower, linking the walled quarter with New Town, its seventeenth-century suburb.

Bridge Street was one of those natural urban choke points that
leave no room for maneuvering and give adversaries no alternative but to ram straight through one another. At its foot, where it abutted the Vistula, the Germans had dug in Tiger II tanks, 68-ton behemoths that were almost twice the size of American Shermans, with nearly twice the armor and twice the firepower. The demarcation line was the forward German position, a stately burgundy edifice that became known as the Red House. It was about a hundred yards from the rebel line, a whitewashed theater dubbed the White House. A barricade was excavated there, a deep incision that acted as an antitank trench. Different units took turns manning it, exchanging fire with German machine gun nests. Isaac’s group was on duty for twenty hours at a time before returning to Old Town to rest for a day. As shifts changed, the weapons stayed on the barricade. Mark Edelman remembered how Zivia Lubetkin struggled with the oversized rifle she was lent—“
It was twice her size.” But she refused to relinquish it. The shortage of rifles was so acute that two or three combatants had to share each gun.
The Home Army had only one thousand rifles in all of Warsaw, and Isaac suddenly understood why the Polish Resistance leaders had been so stingy about arming the ZOB in 1943. At the time, he had ascribed the parsimony to anti-Semitism. Now he recognized that the poverty Captain Wolinski had pleaded was very real.

While clashes flared across the rest of the city, with buildings, blocks, and entire districts changing hands daily, a deadlock evolved on Bridge Street. The two sides hurled insults at each other more often than grenades, and neither appeared anxious to leave their defensive fortifications. Ironically, it was safer on the ZOB front line than in the rear, because the barricade was too close to the Tiger tanks for German artillery to shell. Farther up the hill, Old Town was mercilessly pounded by canons and strafed by Messerschmitt fighter planes. This was where most people died, crushed by collapsing medieval buildings or buried alive in cellars. The ZOB unit had enough experience with German tactics to know it should stay away from old stone structures. Fighting alongside the Home Army proved less hazardous than Zuckerman had feared. “As we went from the barricade to the rear and back,
all the Gentiles knew that this was a Jewish unit,” he later recalled. “We didn’t feel a trace of anti-Semitism.”

On the Bridge Street barricade, the fighting differed from the battles
the ZOB had experienced in the Ghetto. It was more akin to the trench warfare of World War I. The Wehrmacht garrison made no attempt to attack, because its primary focus was defending the bridge to Praga. The Germans kept the insurgents at bay with snipers, machine gun bursts, and the occasional mortars while keeping a lookout for the Soviet T-34 tanks that were expected to storm Praga from the east. The Red Army, however, was nowhere to be seen. After racing through Ukraine and much of Poland, the Soviet offensive mysteriously ground to a halt only miles outside the Polish capital. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky said his eight hundred thousand troops were exhausted. Supply lines had been stretched too thin by the rapid advance. His armored divisions,
which enjoyed a seven-to-one numerical advantage over the retreating Germans, needed a breather.

Historians debate whether the ill-timed pause was intentional. Some say Stalin decided to let Hitler do his dirty work by giving the Germans time to wipe out the Home Army. And even if the Soviets did not intentionally double-cross the Poles by inciting them to revolt and then sitting on the sidelines as the Germans killed them off, the suspended Soviet campaign had dramatic consequences for the Uprising. The revolt was supposed to last a few days before the Red Army rolled in. The planners of Operation Tempest, General Bor and Colonel Monter, both career military men, had budgeted ammunition and supplies for a brief battle. They expected the Germans to retreat, ceding the Polish capital in order to concentrate their defenses around Berlin. But Bor and Monter had not counted on Stalin’s sudden reluctance to push forward, or on Hilter’s resolve with regard to Warsaw.

They should have known better. The Führer had always hated Warsaw. He made no secret of his contempt for the Polish capital, its Russified architecture, its slovenly Jews, its unruly horde of Slavic inhabitants. His rage was only magnified by the recent attempt on his life by his own officers. In Berlin, Jürgen Stroop was stringing up hundreds of Wehrmacht officers with piano wire to uncover the depth of German army disloyalty while his boss, Heinrich Himmler, was demanding that Warsaw be erased from European maps.
“Mein Führer,” the SS chief pleaded, “the action of the Poles is a blessing. We shall finish them off. Warsaw will be liquidated and this city … that has blocked our path to the east for seven hundred years, ever since the
first battle of Tannenberg, will have ceased to exist.” The Reichsführer was not speaking figuratively. “No prisoners to be taken,” he subsequently instructed his generals. “Every inhabitant to be killed, every single house to be blown up and burned.” Warsaw dared to defy his beloved Führer; for that Himmler intended to wipe if off the face of the earth.

CHAPTER 37

SIMHA’S SECOND
SEWER RESCUE

On August 5, 1944, a Saturday, fifty thousand German troops poured into Warsaw. They were spearheaded by the dregs of the SS, the most brutal and least disciplined of the auxiliary forces that Himmler managed to recruit during the Wehrmacht’s conquest of the Soviet Union: the infamous RONA Brigade from the renegade Russian National Liberation Army. The reinforcements also included two Cossack battalions; an Azerbaijani regiment of irregulars; the Oriental Muslim Regiment, comprised of Kazaks and recruits from the Caucasus; the dreaded Vlassov Division of Russians and Ukrainians, many of whom had served in the notorious
Einsatzgruppen
Holocaust killing squads; and, perhaps worst of all, the Dirlewanger Commando Battalion, a penal unit composed of convicted murderers and rapists who had been released from German jails.

These special counterinsurgency units were supported by the regular Waffen-SS, a Wehrmacht Panzer division, Luftwaffe guard regiments (both in the air and on the ground), and an artillery brigade redeployed from Russian lines “thanks to the improved situation” caused by Marshal Rokossovsky’s unexpected pause. They struck, as
in 1939, from the west, sweeping into the industrial neighborhoods of Ochota and Wola, on the other side of Warsaw from the ZOB’s relatively tranquil position near the banks of the Vistula. It was a campaign rarely seen in the annals of modern warfare. The SS all but ignored the Home Army defenders and made straight for the civilian population of the two unfortunate districts.
That Saturday they murdered twenty thousand residents in Wola alone. Over the next few days, they slaughtered at least thirty-five thousand and perhaps as many as fifty thousand people in an orgy of bloodletting so violent that Zuckerman remarked “
If I changed the Polish names, it would sound like a Jewish story.”