Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
Meanwhile
in Warsaw, the population had rebounded to 162,000 by spring 1945, as people slowly began to return from labor and concentration camps. “
I cannot believe how fortunate I am to be alive,” Hanna Mortkowicz wrote a relative in her first postwar letter. “Five and a half years of torment—of having to hide, and drift like beggars from village to suburb, of being blackmailed, and running for dear life. Two years of not seeing my child … Warsaw no longer exists. Of our family on Mama’s side only Lutek and Genia were murdered. On your side the toll is more tragic: Helen, Alex, and his wife were killed in the Lodz Ghetto; Kasia in Warsaw; Helka and Lola in the Eastern lands. I have yet to find out about Joseph and Martha’s family in Warsaw, but there’s little chance they survived.”
Hanna still had no news of Joanna’s whereabouts, though she was now frantically searching for any trace of her daughter. Simha was also still desperately looking for his parents. Last he had heard, they were hidden in a farming village outside the capital. He tracked down the peasant family that had initially sheltered his mother and father in 1943, but the family had since lost contact with them. The farmers did say they were almost certain Simha’s father was still alive and that he had worked as a laborer for the Germans. Ratheiser thought this an utter fabrication. How could his father, a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jew, survive so long right under the Germans’ noses? Maybe his mother, but never his dad. Simha reacted furiously to what he presumed to be a lie. The peasants, he was sure, were playing games with him. “
I went crazy and almost killed them,” he recalled. “I kept screaming, where are my parents? What did you do with my parents?” Simha still carried a gun, and he might have used it had Irene not calmed him down.
Only later did Simha learn that the peasants had actually been telling the truth. One of the first governmental agencies established in Warsaw was a bureau of missing persons, the Office for the Search for Relatives. The office eventually found both Zvi and Miriam, who had become separated, alive and well. Once reunited with his parents, Simha heard firsthand the astonishing story of how his dad had duped the Germans by bandaging his face and pretending to be mute and had worked as a groom in the Wehrmacht stables until the day the Russians rode in.
Simha was astounded. He had never really respected his fervently religious father. He had always found him hapless and mystical, strange in dress and manner, someone from another era. But after hearing of his surprising resourcefulness, Simha saw his dad in a different light, and he never again made the mistake of underestimating him.
By the time Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak located her daughter, Hitler was dead and Nazi Germany had unconditionally surrendered. In the two years that had passed since they last saw each other, Hanna had aged tremendously. Though she was not yet forty, she looked ten years older. The poor diet, the accumulated stress, the lack of sunlight and fresh air had had a devastating effect. All this time, Hanna had
wondered how Joanna had grown up: how her long dark hair would look, how her irrepressible personality and mischievous streak had evolved, whether her reading and writing had progressed, whether her smile was still as radiant as she remembered. “
She thought a tearful little girl with long plaits would fall into her arms,” Joanna said, describing the tense reunion. “Instead she found a short-cropped, self-possessed, resolute person” who stared at her suspiciously. Joanna failed to recognize her own mother. “To me, she looked like a stranger.”
The Soviet takeover of Poland proved an unexpected boon for Zuckerman and the ZOB. Though Isaac was not a Communist, his decision during the first days of the Rising to join the People’s Army now began to pay lasting dividends, not only for the ZOB but for tens of thousands of surviving Polish Jews.
Isaac’s earliest indication that he would enjoy an elevated status in postwar Poland occurred on the first day that the Red Army entered Warsaw. A Soviet intelligence officer came to his door, saying that a brigadier general had requested an audience with him and Zivia. Baffled at the uncharacteristically polite invitation, Zuckerman was amazed to discover that the Soviet general had arranged a banquet in his honor. Apparently Jacob Berman, head of the new Moscow-backed Polish secret police that had replaced the Gestapo, told the Russian commander about the ZOB’s exploits. Berman had spent the war in Moscow, being trained by the NKVD. But his brother Adolf had been Mordechai Anielewicz’s party boss and worked closely with Isaac after the Ghetto Uprising providing aid and shelter to Jews. That family connection now gave the ZOB a direct pipeline to Poland’s new rulers. The Russian general turned out to be Jewish. He showered Isaac and Zivia with praise, alcohol, food supplies, and, most important, special military passes that allowed them to go anywhere they wanted.
The tables had turned for Resistance groups in postwar Warsaw. The tiny People’s Army was celebrated by the new regime, while the Home Army’s leaders were hunted by the NKVD as reactionaries. Many doors were suddenly open to the ZOB, as Simha Ratheiser soon discovered. Simha was no more of a Communist than Isaac, but he
was not above taking advantage of the cards that fate dealt him. When he needed a place to live where his parents could also stay, Ratheiser flashed his special Soviet-issue military pass at the housing authority. He had received the document so that he and Irene could carry messages from Isaac in Warsaw to Wladyslaw Gomulka, the newly appointed deputy prime minister of the Provisional Government in Lublin.
At the housing bureau, that government-issue pass translated into astonishingly courteous service. The agency was in Praga, across the Vistula, as were most of the makeshift government offices, because that neighborhood had been under Soviet control during most of the Rising and had suffered the least damage. In Warsaw proper, the only surviving structures were clustered in pockets of the former German-only sectors, and had been spared because Germans were living there at the time. The housing shortage was now so acute that many former Varsovians, including Hanna, Janine, and Joanna Mortkowicz, had to make new lives for themselves in places like Krakow, where many artists and writers migrated. In Warsaw it was virtually impossible to get quartered in one of the large, luxurious flats left by the Germans. These were usually reserved for Communist Party higher-ups. Yet Simha was handed the keys to a huge apartment that had once belonged to an aristocrat on Jerusalem Boulevard. (On the other hand, Boruch Spiegel, who had fought with the Home Army, had to share a room with two families in a partially destroyed tenement. “It had no electricity or running water,” he recalled.)
Zuckerman quickly understood that the ZOB had the opportunity to gain much more than just spacious apartments from the new regime. He shrewdly set out to make himself as useful as possible to the new authorities. The Provisional Government was effectively starting from scratch, with little popular support and no administrative infrastructure. The ZOB’s organizational skills and extensive contacts were useful. “
A lot of our misfortunes were solved after the war because they remembered what we had done for them,” Isaac said later in describing the payoff from that early assistance. Zuckerman did not conceal his agenda. He developed a close rapport with the secretary of the Communist Party in Warsaw, Alexander Kowalski. Kowalski had spent much of the war in Moscow. But he was an old ideologue, fascinated
with movements like Zionism, and Isaac was frank with him. “
We were firm friends,” he recalled. “I never had to hide our situation from him. And I spoke as a Kibbutznik, a Halutz, on behalf of Eretz Israel”—in other words, about emigration.
At that time,
an estimated 11,500 Warsaw Jews had survived the war. And many of those who had fled east in 1939 were beginning to trickle back from the USSR.
Eventually, more than 150,000 Polish Jews returned from the Soviet Union,
raising the total number of Jews in Poland to more than 200,000, peaking briefly in 1946 at nearly 300,000. The relationships Isaac Zuckerman was cultivating with Poland’s new rulers had one goal: to get those Jews to Palestine.
Mark Edelman did not share Isaac’s vision. “
Why are you cooperating with those sons of bitches?” he lectured his colleague. The two had grown so close over the past several years that Edelman supplanted Tuvia Borzykowski as Isaac’s most trusted confidant and sounding board. “
They were best friends,” said Simha Ratheiser. But a serious rift developed between them over Isaac’s plan to win over the new authorities. “They really started fighting,” Ratheiser recalled. “
We had differences of opinion,” Edelman curtly conceded. “Let’s leave it at that.”
The ideological divisions that had delayed the unification of the Jewish Resistance and prevented the ZOB from being formed earlier in the war now returned. To Bundists like Edelman and Spiegel, Communists were the enemy, and Zuckerman was now trading with the enemy. That he was doing so for the benefit of tens of thousands of ordinary Jews and not for personal gain was immaterial to Mark. The Bund had sworn allegiance to Poland—
der hoym
—and the Communists were foreign invaders. As for Zuckerman’s Zionist goals, to Edelman, Eretz Israel was still nothing more than a pipe dream. The British had made that clear by clamping down on immigration to Palestine.
To Mark, Palestine was an illusion. What was happening in Poland was very real. A low-grade civil war was breaking out as the Communists tried to consolidate their tenuous grip on power.
Some 15,000 Communist functionaries were killed in the immediate postwar period by right-wing organizations, particularly the quasi-fascist
National Armed Forces. The right itself suffered almost as many casualties in the political standoff. In the eastern parts of the country, ethnic violence between Poles and Ukrainians claimed an estimated fifty thousand lives. In the west, where boundaries were shifted as part of the war reparations and seven million Germans were expelled from newly Polish cities like Breslau and Stettin,
six hundred thousand people died. Many, though not all, were murdered by the Red Army. Revenge killings were common in the lawless environment of 1945. Mass graves of German civilians, including the skeletal remains of many women and children, would continue to be unearthed for decades to come.
The value of life in Poland was severely cheapened by the war. People had become inured to death. More than 15 percent of the population perished, the equivalent in contemporary America of almost fifty million lives. The corpses that accumulated in 1945 made little impression on hardened Poles who had seen so much death. Robbery, murder, and rape were daily occurrences during the lawless postwar period, and the situation was aggravated by the residual stores of weapons that left almost everyone armed. Simha and Mark never left home without their revolvers.
The Soviet secret police and Jacob Berman’s newly created Security Office were busy trying to stamp out political dissent. In the first six months of 1945,
sixty thousand Home Army officers were arrested by the NKVD. Among those was Henry Iwanski, who claimed to have lost most of his family fighting alongside the Jewish Military Union during the Ghetto Uprising. He was sent to prison, as were countless others who had helped Jews. Not even the intervention of Adolf Berman could prevent his brother Jacob from jailing Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, the Auschwitz survivor and future Righteous Gentile and Solidarity foreign minister, for the crime of serving in the Home Army’s Council to Aid Jews.
The newest terror campaign was ruthlessly implemented by Jacob Berman. But it was presided over by NKVD general Ivan Serov, who later became head of the KGB. His temporary office in Praga soon replaced the old Gestapo headquarters on Szuch Avenue as the most feared address in Warsaw. It was in the same student dormitory where Menachem Begin had lived while he studied law, and Isaac went there
on a few occasions to meet with the “great Berman,” as he cynically called Poland’s newest villain. (Ironically, Jacob Berman was also a graduate of the University of Warsaw law faculty, though any similarity between him and Begin ended there.)
Edelman couldn’t stomach the fact that his best friend was associating with people he considered traitors, like Berman, who had been personally trained by Stalin’s chief butcher, Lavrenty Beria, to stamp out all opposition to the Soviet takeover of Poland. To Edelman, Zuckerman’s Zionism was blinding him to all sorts of moral traps. “
Isaac and Zivia had changed,” Mark recalled. “I no longer knew what to talk to them about, they were so consumed with their burning obsession of getting people into Palestine.”
Edelman felt betrayed. “
I was alone and I didn’t know what to do. My friends were engaged in activities I did not support. My party was gone”—the Bund had been wiped out by the Holocaust—“and there were Communists and Soviets everywhere.” The few Bundists still around, people like Boruch Spiegel and Chaika Belchatowska, were not interested in reconstituting the Bund in Poland so much as “putting an ocean between them and the Russians. They wanted to run as far away as possible from Communism.”
Indeed, Boruch and Chaika had decided not to stay in Communist Poland. “There was no future there for us,” Spiegel felt. His entire family was dead. Not even photographs of his parents, his sisters, or his big brother Berl had survived. His only living relative was an uncle in Billings, Montana. Boruch sent him a telegram, hoping he could sponsor them. But the news on immigration to America was not encouraging. “
The United States did nothing for Jews during the war,” Spiegel concluded. For Boruch and Chaika, Palestine was not an option for ideological reasons, and Western Europe was teeming with refugees. That left Canada and Australia. Chaika’s father had moved to Montreal long before the war. She did not know him well; his divorce from her mother had been bitter. But finding him was their best hope.
Edelman, on the other hand, had no intention of leaving. Poland, for all its glaring imperfections and bleak prospects, was home. Mark had no idea what he would do with his life now that the Bund was history. He did, however, still have one last duty to perform for the organization.
Some Bundists had placed their children with Gentiles prior to joining the ZOB, often with nuns in convents. The money originally provided for the children’s care had long run out. Had they survived? What had become of them? Government agencies were said to be handling such matters. But due to a sense of obligation to his deceased comrades, Mark set out to track down these lost children. One case in particular weighed heavily on his conscience. During the Ghetto Uprising he had promised Zalman Friedrich that he would find his daughter if anything ever happened to him. Friedrich was the Bund courier who had first uncovered the truth about Treblinka by following the railroad tracks. Zalman had fought tenaciuosly in the Brushmakers District alongside Simha and Edelman during the Ghetto Uprising, and he had been sent along with Simha to help Zuckerman organize a rescue mission. At the last moment he had begged not to join Ratheiser in the May 1943 sewer evacuation, because he had a premonition that he would never see his daughter again. He died senselessly a few weeks later when a German patrol stumbled on ZOB combatants hiding in the woods outside Warsaw. His daughter, Eliza, would be six years old now, if she was alive.