Matthew Brzezinski - Isaacs Army: A Story of Courage and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland

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Copyright 2012 by Matthew Brzezinski

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Title-page photograph copyright iStockphoto.com/ Monika Lewandowska

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION D ATA
Brzezinski, Matthew
Isaacs army : a story of courage and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland / Matthew Brzezinski.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64530-6
1. World War, 19391945Jewish resistancePoland. 2. JewsPersecutionsPoland. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945)Poland. 4. PolandEthnic relations. I. Title.
DS 134.55. B 79 2012
940.53183209438dc23
2012013703

Cover design: Daniel Rembert
Cover photograph: Eugeniusz Lokajski, Polish insurgent and a group of civilians at an information point in a doorway: Warsaw Uprising, August 1944 (Warsaw Rising Museum Collection)

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To my mother, and to my wife,
who have shown me the best
of both worlds

To survive the Holocaust, Polish Jews had three options. They could run. They could hide. Or they could take up arms and fight. The only other alternativeto do nothingresulted in almost certain death.

Although death also overwhelmingly claimed those who ran, hid, or fought, many still chose these paths of resistance. They refused to submit to evil, or to give up on life, and this made them exceptional individualsnot just as Jews or Poles, but as humans. Statistically, they were the one percent, the very few who took their fate into their own hands and beat the odds.

I had been curious about these remarkable people ever since my first job in journalism as a lowly cub reporter at The New York Timess Warsaw bureau back in the early 1990s. Warsaw then was so drab and lifeless, so devasted physically and spiritually by half a century of communism, that it was not hard to imagine what the Ghetto must have felt like. I often walked the neighborhoods sooty streets, where not a single prewar building had survived Hitlers wrath, and wondered what I would have done had I been one of the nearly half million people packed inside the districts walls. Since I was a Gentilemy mother was a native Varsovianthe exercise had always been academic, an arms-length inquiry without undue emotional attachment. Perhaps that was why I always pictured myself acting heroically.

As the years passed and I moved on, to reporting stints in Moscow and then Washington, thoughts of Jewish heroes receded from my mind, replaced by more mundane concerns about marriage and mortgages, twins and tuition fees. Occasionally a newspaper article or a film set during the war would rekindle my curiosity, and I would wonder about the true nature of resistance, and about what it had taken to be part of the one percent. In popular culture, resistance figures were always portrayed as if they had been forged overnight, born defiant and wielding a grenade. The real story, I suspected, was far more interesting and nuanced, and much slower in developing.

My enduring interest was enhanced by marriage. Since my wife, Roberta, was Jewish, so, too, were our three children under both rabbinical and Nuremberg laws, which made it harder to treat the Holocaust dispassionately, like something terrible that had happened to the neighbors. It became impossible to do so in 2007, when Roberta proposed moving to Poland for a three-year posting. She had been made partner in an international private equity firm that was investing heavily in Eastern Europe. Her firms sleek new offices were in the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto, built over the ruins of the old Jewish Council building on Mushroom Street, which was being transformed into a soaring financial district to anchor Polands economic rebirth.

When we settled into our rented marble McMansion in a ritzy Warsaw suburb, next door to a prewar Gothic palace with an indoor swimming pool that had belonged to a Jewish industrialist, I couldnt help but think what would have happened to my family if it were 1939 instead of 2009. Though I no longer had the luxury of detachment, I still approached my growing obsession egoistically. The question of how I would have acted was always in the back of my mind when I set out to tell this story. For purely selfish reasons, I wanted to seek out and meet the extraordinary individuals who had defied Hitler and try to discover what made them tick. Did they share common traits? A hero gene, perhaps? Or were they ordinary people who tapped some hidden reservoir of strength and courage? I knew that to get the full picture, the complete character sketch, I had to tell the whole storynot just a fragmentary rehash of a rising, but what came before and after. In other words, peoples stories had to be rendered from the first day of the war to the last, and in some cases beyond. Only then would it become clear who they really were, where they came from, what their motivation was, and how they had evolved into heroic figures. I also wanted to explore the different forms of resistance: collective and individual, armed and passive, conscious and subconcious. Picking up a gun was not the only way to thwart the Nazis. While running and hiding didnt capture the public imagination in the same way as assaulting a tank, these acts of defiance also required astonishing perseverance, courage, and planning, as I discovered while researching the epic saga of the Osnos and Mortkowicz families. I came across their story by chance, in the waiting room of a decrepit Polish hospital where my son Ari was undergoing emergency surgery. I chose to write about them because they were representative of thousands of other Polish Jews who shared similar experiences, and because the related families had surviving members, one cousin living in New York, the other in Krakow.

Getting to know the protagonists personally became one of the chief determinants for selecting the main characters of the book. This was especially true in relating the tale of organized resistance, because only a handful of veterans of the Jewish Fighting Organization were still alive, scattered across continents. Some, like Mark Edelman, were well known and living nearby in Poland. Others, like Simha Ratheiser, were farther afield in Israel. I found Boruch Spiegel in Montreal, in a retirement home only a block away from the medical center where my mother had set up her family practice after immigrating to Canada in the 1960s.

I had to make one notable exception to my acquaintanceship rule. Isaac Zuckerman had passed away in Israel before I could meet him. But there was no way to tell the story of Jewish organized resistance in Poland without including him. He was too central to the narrative to omit. In fact, he was the embodiment of the underground movement, which is why his name graces the cover of this book. Fortunately, Zuckerman had written a detailed and brutally frank memoir, which he released only upon his death. The text was angry and honest, unvarnished and free of hero worship, and I found it invaluable.