Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
On October 2, 1944, Warsaw capitulated.
After sixty-three days and nearly two hundred thousand fatalities, the longest, largest, and bloodiest uprising of the Second World War was over. The Home Army, following protracted negotiations, agreed to lay down its weapons on condition that the Wehrmacht, rather than the SS, administer the surrender. Under the terms of the armistice, civilians were not to be molested and combatants were to be treated as prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
Nazi pledges of clemency, however, would not extend to Jews, as Simha, Isaac, Boruch, and Mark knew full well. Ratheiser was the first of the ZOB fighters to confront this reality. He had spent weeks in the cellar on Forestry Boulevard, subsisting initially on rainwater collected at night from buckets placed outside, and later from a shallow hand-dug well that provided a trickle of murky liquid. Food, ironically, was less of an issue. Residents of the building had hidden stores of tinned goods in the basement—just enough to prevent starvation.
While they were in the cellar there had been talk among the handful of Jews about what to do when the Germans finally uncovered the
hideout. One older ZOB fighter, Joseph Sak, produced a vial of potassium cyanide. Snatching the poison, Simha shouted, “
You can’t do this!” The memory of Mordechai Anielewicz’s mass suicide still stung. “You don’t have the luxury” of taking the easy way out, Ratheiser admonished Sak.
In the end, it was a Ukrainian patrol that found them. “
Don’t shoot, there are women down here,” Simha called out, in a calculated gambit, when the SS men stuck their rifles through the cave entrance. Ratheiser was hoping that the Ukrainian auxiliaries would not toss grenades into the basement if it held the promise of war booty and women. The SS had routinely wiped out shelters filled with civilians. One of their favorite methods of flushing out cellars, before the water mains were all destroyed, had been
to run fire hoses through coal chutes to drown everyone inside. Parents would put children on their shoulders as the water level rose, and by the time it receded, the young were often the only ones alive.
In this case, Simha was proven correct. Greed and lechery trumped the murderous instincts of the SS auxiliaries. The thugs held their fire. In guttural, slurred shouts, they ordered everyone out. Their glassy gazes—some seemed drunk—immediately fell on Simha’s girlfriend, Irene, another Jewish girl, Stasia, and Marisa, the ZOB’s faithful Gentile advocate. Their jewelry was the first thing that caught the pillagers’ eyes, and the three women were forced to relinquish bracelets and earrings.
The group was then led through the ruins of the city, squinting in the sun, which many had not seen in nearly a month. The devastation that had occurred during the time Simha had been hiding underground was staggering. The only standing structures seemed to be chimneys and the occasional church steeple. Everything else lay in mangled heaps. Some of the jagged mounds were several stories high. Bomb craters rendered streets impassable. It was hard to find one’s bearings in the mess. “
The ruins are exceptionally photogenic,” a cameraman for the German news agency Transocean marveled. “A panoply of destruction, the signs of battle are omnipresent: spent cartridges and mortar shells split in half; enormous piles of twisted rebar; here, the burned-out shell of a tank; there, a torn parachute swaying in the wind from the top corner of a lone building.”
Simha still had enough of a sense of direction to notice that the Ukrainians were not leading them toward one of the civilian collection centers that had been set up in Midtown. They were headed for the Ukrainian SS barracks in the former Ghetto, near Peacock Prison. Ratheiser shuddered, overcome by guilt and fear for his friends. “
They were probably taking us there to rape the girls,” he realized. It appeared that Marisa, Irene, and Stasia would pay the price for his gamble, which he now regretted. After they were done with the women, the Ukrainians might kill them all anyway, so as not to leave any witnesses to their private amusements.
Fate, providence, or simply dumb luck intervened. Along the way to the Ghetto,
a Wehrmacht officer stopped the Ukrainians and asked where they were headed. Perhaps guessing what lay in store for Simha’s group, the German officer ordered that the prisoners be turned over to the Wehrmacht and taken to a transit station. These collection centers were almost all in churches, the only structures still standing. Ratheiser and the others were marched to a big church in Wola, St. Adalbert’s on Wolska Steet. Thousands had been murdered at St. Adalbert’s during the first week of the Rising, and
its cemetery had been transformed by the SS into a makeshift crematorium of huge fire pits. Refugees now crammed inside the soaring Gothic brick edifice. Wounded women rested on cots, and row after of row of baby carriages were parked beneath the stained glass windows in the nave. In packed pews, children sat on their mothers’ laps. The elderly slumped shoulder to shoulder with teens. A low, steady murmur reverberated in the vaulted chamber as anxious families pondered their future. Warsaw was being depopulated. Its residents were being dispersed to labor, concentration, and refugee camps. The hushed conversations were punctuated by the echoing click of the embedded steel in the jackboots of German guards walking up and down the marble aisles.
Relatively few men of fighting age were in the assembled crowd, which made Simha’s group stand out. Ratheiser’s fellow ZOB veteran, Joseph Sak, attracted particular attention. Sak had pronounced Semitic features, which was partly why he had favored suicide over surrender. An officer zeroed in on him and asked his name. Sak had been a professor of Polish literature before the war and rattled off the surname of a Slavic literary hero, prompting the amused German to inquire: “
And how long have you had that name?”
To Simha’s surprise, his friend was not taken away. The officer obviously suspected that Sak was Jewish, but for unknown reasons decided not to press further. Perhaps he was tired of the killing. Perhaps he was not an anti-Semite. Or maybe he was fed up with the war and no longer cared about Hitler’s plans for the master race. In any event, Sak was allowed to join one of the long queues of refugees marching toward the bombed-out train station. These lines snaked throughout the demolished city, stretching for miles, an endless procession of bedraggled citizens carrying meager belongings wrapped in bedsheets. The SS were no longer shooting at civilians, and the columns moved slowly. The panicked flights of the past few months, with women clutching children, with the elderly stumbling and being riddled with bullets, with people being slaughtered by the hundreds on the streets, were mercifully over.
Trains between Warsaw and a huge new selection camp in Pruszkow, formally known as Durchgangslager 121, ran in a continuous loop. The facility was in the industrial exurb of Pruszkow, where Joanna, Hanna, and Janine Mortkowicz had lived during the early part of the war. It was about ten miles west of the capital, and had been chosen because of the extensive rail network that had fed its factories. Now the former industrial center processed people; an endless sea of them, packed tighter than sardines. Durchgangslager 121 had to be one of the most densely populated places on the planet. A whole city was crammed into an area not much bigger than an amusement park.
A total of 650,000 people would eventually pass through its gates as Warsaw was systematically emptied.
The purpose of the new Pruszkow camp was to sort out which Poles were fit for slave labor in the Reich, which undesirables would be put on cattle cars bound for Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and which would be lucky enough to be released and relocated to undestroyed cities like Krakow. To accommodate the massive influx of refugees, the Germans hastily erected barracks within a barbed wire perimeter that spanned a dozen football fields. But these crude facilities were overwhelmed within a few days, creating a sanitary crisis that German propaganda films carefully omitted to mention. “
Three hundred thousand people are now enjoying the fresh air,” a Nazi newsreel declared on October 6, “after weeks spent in sewers and underground cellars.”
Hanna and Janine Mortkowicz were among the huddled throng at Pruszkow’s Durchgangslager 121, standing for hours to wait their turn for a cup of water from cisterns the Germans trucked in daily. Hanna, like countless other members of split-up families, had no idea where her daughter was. She had not seen Joanna in over a year and had no way of knowing if she was alive. In the Pruszkow camp, thousands of people were frantically looking for loved ones, putting up so many notices on Red Cross message boards that the paper pleas covered one another in layers. Simha, after a few days in Pruszkow, also searched for his parents. His mother, he felt certain, was still alive. He constantly scanned the crowds, hoping for a glimpse of her familiar blond mane.
Selection occurred several times a day at Durchgangslager 121. “
Hundreds of human beings had to parade in front of German officers who decided whom to release and whom to send to labor camp,” Ratheiser recalled. Since he was young and healthy, he was chosen for relocation to Germany to work as a slave laborer. So was his girlfriend, Irene,
along with 150,000 other able-bodied Varsovians. Neither was suspected of being Jewish, or they would have been sent to Auschwitz instead. Simha, however, no longer cared. “
A mood of apathy descended on me. I was fed up with the whole thing. I imagined that it would be better to be sent to Germany.” Ratheiser’s friends would not hear of it. Anything was better than a life of slavery, they argued. The war was almost over, they promised. The Germans would soon be driven out of Poland. Simha only had to hold out for a little longer. He had to find a way to escape.
On the night of Warsaw’s surrender, Isaac Zuckerman and Tuvia Borzykowski spotted two figures in the dusk approaching their camp. They were dressed in German uniforms, walking unsteadily. At first Isaac thought they were drunken soldiers celebrating the cease-fire. But as they approached, he realized one was a woman. It was Zivia! She was limping, favoring one leg. And Mark Edelman was holding her up.
Against unimaginable odds, they had survived. “
I suppose fate had dictated that we should live,” Zivia sighed. The ZOB survivors had faced everything the Nazis could throw at them: Tiger tanks,
treacherous sewer crossings, starvation, typhus, labor camps, Treblinka’s gas chambers, the Gestapo and its greasers. And they had survived it all. But their ordeal was not yet over. Unlike combatants from the Home Army, Isaac’s small group of Jewish fighters could not surrender.
The accord the Poles signed with the Germans did not cover the People’s Army, of which the ZOB was formally a member. Communist partisans had been purposefully excluded from surrender negotiations and were not afforded any of the protections of the Geneva Convention. The Home Army felt betrayed by the Soviets and therefore punished their proxy group by leaving them out of the talks.
The spiteful omission affected four hundred combatants in Jolie Bord. Despite having fought as bravely as any of the Poles, they were forsaken. The SS could shoot them on sight, torture them, or dispatch them to death camps. Although their predicament was unenviable, most veterans of the People’s Army were still in a far better position than the ZOB members. As Gentiles, veterans of the People’s Army could remove their insignias, don civilian clothing, and try to blend in with the hordes of refugees leaving the suburb. If they were lucky, and had good false documents that could withstand scrutiny, they might be able to slip through the selection process at the Pruszkow camp without being sent to Auschwitz. The ZOB had no such option. Zivia’s and Mark’s Semitic features precluded any attempt to blend in, and Tuvia’s poor Polish was equally damning. “
We didn’t know what to do,” Lubetkin recalled.
Isaac had already tried to lead a People’s Army unit across the Vistula to reach Soviet positions on the eastern bank. Unfortunately, the river had been cordoned off by German forces. Many Communist rebels were shot while entering the water and their colleagues were forced to turn back. Now there was no choice but to remain in Jolie Bord and find somewhere to hide until the Germans finished emptying the district. One ZOB member, a courier and doctor, suggested going to the home of a Gentile family that had hidden her once before. The home had not been destroyed and the family had been evacuated to the Pruszkow camp. Only the paralyzed eighty-year-old grandmother remained, along with three emaciated Jewish women, who feared leaving their hideout.
The house was one block from the Vistula, perilously close to the
German fortifications that guarded against a Red Army crossing of the river. Its elderly occupants were less than pleased when heavily armed ZOB fighters started arriving late at night in pairs. “
The women knew, and we knew, too, that our presence was not to their advantage,” Tuvia Borzykowski understood. “Without us they could hope that even if the Germans discovered them they might not bother to do any harm to four old women, none of whom looked Jewish, and none of whom could be suspected of having taken part in the revolt. Our appearance robbed them of that precarious security.”
“When we entered the basement,” he went on, “we saw all four old women sitting or lying on beds, wrapped in featherbeds. A tiny candle flickered on the table, throwing gloomy shadows on the wall. The floor was strewn with pieces of broken furniture, shoes, kitchen utensils, linen, rags. Before we could ask where there would be room for us, one of them got up and pushed away a small cupboard, revealing the entrance to a tiny room.”
The fifteen fighters squeezed into the minuscule compartment, securing the cupboard door from the inside by wrapping a wire around a nail. The space was so tight that Edelman could not turn around. Zivia was having difficulty breathing. One fighter had to perch on a shelf because there was not enough floor space. Isaac, still deaf from the blast of the antitank gun, talked far too loudly, and he had to be continually reminded to stay quiet.
He soon grew “very mad at Zivia” because “it seemed she pinched me the hardest.”