ISAAC AND BORUCH
GLIMPSE HELL
The Jewish Police came for Boruch Spiegel at almost the exact same time as they came for Isaac. As with the Zionist clubhouse raid, the police arrived just after curfew, when all Ghetto residents were required to be home. Only Boruch’s older brother Berl was not home. He had been tipped off by friends in the Bund that his name had been drawn in the labor draft, so he stayed away from his apartment. Unlike Isaac Zuckerman’s Zionist faction, the Bund had a policy of actively resisting forced labor. The two groups, though both socialist in political orientation, had vastly different philosophies about cooperating with the Judenrat. While Zuckerman and the Zionists tended to view the Judenrat as the lesser of two evils and its chairman, Adam Czerniakow, as a good man in an untenable position, the Bund was less charitable. Czerniakow was “weak,” according to Mark Edelman, someone who served “German rather than Jewish interests.” The Judenrat was rife with corruption and collaborators, claimed Bund Special Ops chief Bernard Goldstein. Czerniakow may have been honest, but he was surrounded by “scoundrels, vipers, and louses,” as he himself decried, and the fact that he “spoke Polish exclusively” rankled the Yiddish-centric Bund, as did his Zionist sympathies.
The Bund and the Judenrat had experienced an early and acrimonious rift, dating back to the first German attempt to create a ghetto in late 1939. At the time, the Bund’s ranking official in Warsaw was Arthur Ziegelbaum, a trade union leader from Lodz, who had been appointed to serve on the Jewish Council. But he resigned in disgust and organized a large civic protest when Czerniakow proposed a motion—forced on him by the SS—to create a “Jewish residential district.” The SS had had to back off, because the Wehrmacht was then still in charge of Warsaw, and the Gestapo vengefully issued an arrest warrant for Ziegelbaum. He fled Poland, with help from a socialist faction of the Polish Underground, and made his way to Belgium, where the Socialist foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak (the future secretary general of the United Nations) arranged for his passage to New York. In the spring of 1941, Ziegelbaum was back in Europe as a representative of the Bund in the Polish government in exile in London.
Boruch Spiegel, like most Bundists, viewed Ziegelbaum rather than Czerniakow as the legitimate leader of the Jewish community. Boruch was not, however, as fiercely critical of the controversial Judenrat chairman as some of his Bund colleagues. “He was in an impossible position,” Spiegel reasoned. “Maybe he should have quit. But I think he meant well, and tried to lessen Jewish suffering by going along.” Indeed, had the Bund known of the toll that governing the Ghetto was taking on its soft-spoken chairman, they might have dampened their criticism. “Vomiting at home,” Czerniakow recorded in a typically anguished diary entry. “At 2 A.M. I begin to fret. And so on until 5 or 6 in the morning when I get up,” he wrote in another.
Nonetheless, it was Czerniakow’s police force that came to Boruch’s door, looking for his brother Berl. Boruch had hidden under a bed as soon as he heard the knock. He didn’t know at first if the Order Service was after him or Berl, so he had acted on impulse. The Jewish officers hauled him out and checked his papers before resuming their search. The Spiegels’ ground-floor apartment was sufficiently cramped that it did not take long for the intruders to determine that their quarry was missing. “When they found out he wasn’t there, they said ‘we’ll take you instead.’ ” Boruch was stunned. His mother started screaming that the police couldn’t do that. His younger sister clutched him protectively. His usually tranquil father began cursing, letting loose a flurry of Yiddish invective since he spoke virtually no Polish, the preferred language of most Jewish policemen.
The protests fell on deaf ears. The Order Service had a quota to meet, and one B. Spiegel was as good as the next. An officer took Boruch aside and intimated that if the Spiegels had money, the cops could look elsewhere. Unfortunately, the family’s material situation had markedly worsened by spring 1941. The piecework carving clogs that Boruch and his father did for Stan, their Christian business partner, was becoming increasingly irregular. Stan was delivering wood supplies less and less frequently, complaining that access to the Ghetto for Gentiles was becoming too difficult. Nearly half of the district’s initial twenty-two gates had been closed to restrict traffic, and bilingual signs warned in German and Polish that Ghetto entry for Christians was Streng Verboten, or strictly prohibited. The punishment for Jews caught outside the Ghetto was growing harsher by the month and the number of exit passes issued to Judenrat officials was being drastically reduced. The steady and systematic constriction of the knot around the Jewish community had its most profound effect on the quantity, quality, and cost of basic foodstuffs. For the poorest Ghetto residents, those clustered around the crumbling tenements in the northwest section of the district where Boruch’s girlfriend lived, it meant a starvation diet that officially allotted 196 calories a day, consisting of a watery gruel distributed by aid agencies that was derisively known as a “spitter soup” because recipients were just as likely to spit it out as swallow it.
The forty to fifty thousand additional refugees who had arrived in the Ghetto throughout the harsh winter as the Nazis emptied surrounding towns of Jews fared even worse. Dumped inside the gates, the terrified latecomers had found every available accommodation already occupied. With nowhere to live and with the temperatures well below freezing, thousands crammed into unheated synagogues or deserted factories. “They remain all day on their filthy straw mattresses, with no strength to rise,” Edelman reported. “The walls are green, slimy, mildewed. The mattresses usually lie on the ground, seldom on wooden supports. A whole family often receives sleeping space for one. This is the kingdom of hunger and misery.”
Not only did the unfortunate new arrivals have nowhere to live, but the vast majority had nothing to live on. As strangers to Warsaw, they had no local support network—no former neighbors like Miriam Ratheiser’s to turn to for food, no prewar acquaintances like Boruch’s wood clog supplier through whom to earn money, no old business partners with whom to continue to trade. “Very rapidly they started to die,” Spiegel recalled. “At first, it was a few a day. Then a few hundred a week. Then by the thousands.”
For the Spiegels the clampdown meant dramatically less money in family coffers. The sum mentioned by the policeman was far beyond their financial means.
The blood on Isaac Zuckerman’s face had coagulated, forming a crusty patina on his temple and cheek. One eye was swollen shut, and his ribs throbbed with every breath. He lay in a detention cell at the bottom of a mud pit in the Kampinos labor camp, twenty miles northwest of Warsaw.
Between the iron grates of his cell, Isaac could see the long rows of wooden barracks and the emaciated Jewish workers, their damp clothes tattered and filthy with bog stains, filing out to morning roll call around the gallows in the camp’s square. Shovels and spades were stacked in neat pyramids next to wagons that would deliver the workers to the nearby swamps they would drain. Ukrainian guards, still drunk from their past evening’s revelry, lurched through the ranks, flailing haphazardly with their whips, shouting in their slurred and heavily accented Polish.
Isaac shivered uncontrollably, fighting fever and chills. He lay half-naked, immersed in the muddy water that filled the bottom of the fenced pit, water stained red with his own blood. The guards had beaten him all night, trying to get him to talk. “Who was that woman?” they demanded. “Why was she asking about a Yid?”
The woman, Isaac knew, was among the cadre of couriers that Zivia Lubetkin had trained. Her name was Lonka Kozibrodska, and she was a blond-haired former philology student at the University of Warsaw who spoke six languages fluently, including German and Ukrainian. As soon as Zuckerman was abducted at the Labor Office, Zivia dispatched Lonka to find which work colony he had been sent to, and to determine if his freedom could be bought. Lonka’s Polish disguise, however, had been too convincing. When she approached one of the guards patrolling the Kampinos barbed wire perimeter to ask about Isaac, the camp commander grew suspicious. She must be from the Polish Resistance, he reasoned. That meant that Zuckerman must somehow also be connected to the Gentile Underground.
“So, who was she?” the interrogation resumed. Isaac shrugged. The more the guards beat him, the less pain he felt. He was numb, and stuck to his story that Lonka was just an old classmate, a Christian friend. The guards finally sighed and left. “For three days his body will hang as a warning to the entire camp,” the commandant ordered, pointing to the gallows.
Waiting for the sentence to be carried out was more painful than any beating Isaac would ever endure. “I was a hundred percent sure that they were about to execute me,” he recalled. “I said farewell. I tried to stand tall with my head held high.” But the hours passed and Zuckerman did not hang. He started wavering, begging his tormentors to get it over with.
When they finally did come for him, he was shocked to find himself dragged not to the noose, but back to barracks, where other inmates gave him bread and watery soup. For three days, he was allowed to rest, and on the fourth day, the camp commander courteously informed him that he would be working as a clerk on the soft duty detail.
Zuckerman was dumbfounded by his reversal of fortune. “I have only one explanation,” he later speculated. “The Germans were keeping an eye on the Polish Underground; they suspected I had contacts with them and this wasn’t just some Jew you could execute and get rid of.”
This may have been the case. The Gestapo had tortured to death so many suspected Polish Resistance members without gleaning useful information from them that they were now adopting more subtle tactics, trying to turn people, or discreetly observing them in the hopes of uncovering their networks. For the camp’s Volksdeutsche manager and his senior Polish staff, there was likely a second motivation for treading softly with Isaac: They “were afraid of the vengeance of the Polish Underground and didn’t want to get into trouble because of a Yid,” Zuckerman speculated. The Resistance had orchestrated a series of assisted “suicides” among the nine thousand Volksdeutsche Polish-Germans working on behalf of the Nazis in Warsaw. Bogus farewell notes were left at the scenes, alleging that the victims had killed themselves out of guilt for betraying Poland, which prevented the Gestapo from executing the customary one hundred Poles in retaliation for every German murdered. For ethnic Poles collaborating with the Nazis there was no need for such subterfuge. The Resistance assassinated them in broad daylight, without fear of German reprisal, and as an example to others.
Sensing that he had been singled out for special treatment due to his suspected Polish Underground ties, Isaac decided to press his advantage. “I hinted that I would be willing to pay” to be included in a group of sick inmates who were about to be returned to the Ghetto because they were too weak to work. The Polish camp managers readily agreed, anxious to be rid of a potential source of trouble. They even permitted him to telephone Zivia to have her send money for the release of five other Zionists held at Kampinos.
The camp was about a four-mile walk from the nearest rail station, and many of the released laborers died on the way. A wagon followed the bedraggled procession, collecting the corpses of the fallen, who had literally been worked to death. Of the roughly 250 men sent to Kampinos with Zuckerman, fifty-three died in camp, and another fifty died shortly after their release. The living made such a sorrowful sight that peasants from surrounding villages, not usually known for philo-Semitism, took pity. “They behaved wonderfully toward us,” Zuckerman recalled. “They tossed us bread and bottles of milk.” The Ukrainian guards beat the generous peasants back and tried to prevent the prisoners from reaching the food. “I saw a bottle break and people ran to lick the milk from the ground.”
At the station, as the train to Warsaw pulled in, Isaac asked the commander a question that had been nagging him for days: “When you set up the gallows, and said you were going to execute me, did you mean that seriously?”
“Absolutely,” the man replied.
Unlike Isaac, Boruch Spiegel could not count on underground connections (either real or perceived) to save him from the labor camp. Isaac, after all, headed one of the largest Zionist factions in the Ghetto. He had more than a thousand members behind him and was dating his second in command. It was not surprising that Zivia had used the Zionists’ funds and their network of couriers to try to spring her lover.
Boruch had no such luck. He was only peripherally involved with the Bund. His new girlfriend, Chaika, was merely one of dozens of “fivers” and “tenners” who distributed the organization’s newsletters. Neither she nor Boruch’s big brother had direct contacts with the Bund’s inner circle, who might have been capable of mounting a rescue effort. So Spiegel was on his own, forced to spend the full three to four months in camp.
The labor colony to which he was sent was forty miles southeast of Warsaw, near a little town called Garwolin. Like Kampinos, this was a new installation. But already it had earned the dreaded nickname “Garwolin Hell.”
The place, Spiegel soon realized, had no obvious purpose other than to torment Jews. There was no factory to assemble armaments; no mine to extract mineral deposits for the war machine; no logging operations to harvest wood; no road-building crews. “I didn’t understand what we were doing there. It seemed pointless.”
The swamp draining and mound building that went on six days a week did in fact have a purpose: It was part of defensive fortifications the Germans were excavating along the entire Soviet frontier. But to Spiegel, who had no military experience, it looked largely like an exercise in cruelty, an experiment in exhaustion and malnourishment. “They fed us a bowl of soup a day and two hundred grams of bread. That’s a few slices,” Boruch explained. “And on that [sustenance] we had to work around ten hours.”
Very quickly, often within days of arriving in Garwolin Hell, people began to collapse. Since the poorest Ghetto residents tended to be drafted for forced labor, they were also the least prepared to withstand the hardships. Many arrived in camps already emaciated, their immune systems weakened, their strength long ebbed. “It was awful,” Boruch recalled. “Our clothes never had time to dry so we were wet and cold the whole time. At roll call in the morning, when we sometimes had to stand at attention for an hour, people would faint or fall to the ground. The guards would leap on them, kick them, beat them with clubs, or whip them.”
As in the Kampinos camp, the guards at Garwolin were ethnic Ukrainians. The SS began actively recruiting Ukrainian nationalists that winter and spring—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Polish Resistance members, who relayed the potentially meaningful intelligence to London. Why the Germans had developed a sudden interest in Galician natives from western Ukraine—now under Soviet occupation—was not immediately evident. But many Galician Ukrainians despised their Polish colonial masters, and the SS exploited the long-standing ethnic grievances to attract recruits. For SS chief Heinrich Himmler, this was critical because Poland was one of the only countries in occupied Europe without locally staffed SS detachments or a quisling puppet government. These existed virtually everywhere on the Continent, from Vichy France and the Balkans all the way to the Baltic, where a small and traitorous minority of Danes had formed a local SS force. In Poland, the hated Blue Police was the closest the country came to institutionalized collaboration, and the Blue Police was so corrupt and infiltrated by the Resistance that the Germans could not rely on it.
“I thought the Blue Police was bad, but they were nothing compared to the Ukrainians at Garwolin,” Spiegel remembered. “If someone fell while working they beat him. If he couldn’t get up afterward they shot him.”
Soon the makeshift cemetery next to the camp began to fill. The burial pits that Boruch and other inmates were forced to dig grew larger, from single graves to shallow holes that could accommodate a dozen corpses each.
As the weeks passed, the lack of food and merciless pace of work began to take their toll on Boruch. He had never been physically fit like Isaac Zuckerman, and even the stores of baby fat around his cheeks had long since melted away. His legs began giving him trouble. At first they just ached and cramped, but then they started swelling up. “I could barely walk.” One inflated to nearly twice its normal size. An oozing, pustulent scab formed on the shin, a scar that was visible seventy years later, and the pain became excruciating. But still Boruch mustered the strength to stand at roll call, to try to go through the motions of working. The sick bay at Garwolin was nothing more than a way station to the cemetery.
Much as he tried, Boruch could not keep up with the murderous tempo set by the Ukrainians. He felt the stinging lash of their whips on his back, and at one point, something in him snapped. “You know,” he shouted at one especially brutal guard, “when they finish with us, they’ll move on to you.” The other inmates instinctively drew away from him. “Shut up,” one whispered. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
But Boruch, who was mild-mannered by nature, like his father, had reached a breaking point. He dropped his shovel and kept shouting. The guards pounced on him, hitting him with their rifle butts, kicking him with their heavy boots. When he fell and curled up into a protective fetal position, the guard he had insulted sat astride him and began punching his face. The blows fell one after another, jerking his head from side to side with such force he thought his neck would snap. And all the while Boruch pleaded with himself, repeating over and over: “Don’t faint. You can’t faint.”
If he did, he was certain he would never get up again.