Isaac's Army: A Story of Courage and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland

From Booklist Much has been made of supposed Jewish passivity in the face of escalating Nazi terror. This ignores the thousands of Jews who fought the Nazis as members of various broader resistance groups across occupied Europe. But in Poland, the locus of genocide, Jews created their own resistance group. Brzezinski, a gentile of Polish ancestry with a Jewish wife and children, tells the story of these heroic men and women in an unvarnished, often grim, but inspiring chronicle. At the center of the narrative is Isaac Zuckerman, who with his blond hair and powerful physique could have been mistaken for an Aryan poster boy. Only 24 when Hitler invaded Poland, Zuckerman was both a Polish patriot and a dedicated Zionist. As head of the Jewish Fighting Organization, he led a mostly young group of Jews as they smuggled others to safety, gathered arms, plotted attacks, and eventually helped create the nation of Israel. This is not a tale of romantic glory. To survive, these fighters had to be ruthless and sometimes brutal, since torture and execution were guaranteed if they were caught. Still, this is an outstanding tribute to these men and women who chose to resist a monstrous tyranny. --Jay Freeman Review “ Isaac’s Army unfolds like a novel, with a thriller’s feel for pacing and intrigue, and generous supplies of gasping suspense. The characters are vividly rendered within a surreal environment that makes The Hunger Games look like survivor Little League.”— The Washington Post “Their stories of resistance gathered in meticulous detail give Isaac’s Army texture and context that is especially compelling as the last of the Holocaust generation passes away. . . . As a prodigious reporter and skilled writer, Brzezinski’s account gives greater depth and insight to their saga of ingenuity and luck, as he does throughout for the stories of those whose courageous choice was to resist.”— The Atlantic “[An] admirable study of the Jewish resistance movement in Warsaw . . . compellingly [conveys] Poland’s wartime agony and the ordeals of those caught between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.”— The Wall Street Journal “Told with care and compassion, Matthew Brzezinski’s Isaac’s Army is a riveting account of the Jewish resistance in wartime Poland. This is an intense story that transcends the horror of the time and finds real inspiration in the bravery of those who fought back—some of whom lived to tell their stories. Highly recommended.”—Alan Furst, author of Mission to Paris “In every chapter and on every page, Isaac’s Army vindicates the adage that truth is stranger—and more harrowing—than fiction. Matthew Brzezinski’s often painful, always riveting account of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Poland is unsparing in its details and epic in scope, offering the kind of sweeping narrative that this subject has long deserved.”—Andrew Nagorski, author of Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power “In Isaac’s Army, Brzezinski brings us a sweeping, finely researched history of a band of Jewish heroes battling to drive the Nazis from their city and save their people. The stir to rebellion, the labyrinth of intrigue, the courageous long struggle, and the freedom found in the fight itself—these are but parts of this tremendous tale.”—Neal Bascomb, author of Hunting Eichmann and The Perfect Mile About the Author After working for The New York Times in Warsaw in the early 1990s, Matthew Brzezinski served as Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal . Following the September 11th attacks, he covered homeland security as a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine . He is also the author of Casino Moscow, Fortress America, and Red Moon Rising . He lives in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Book One Anti-Semitism is a protest against a level playing field—a protest against talent. —Martin Amis Chapter 1 Hanna’s Triumph On the first morning of the Second World War the city of Warsaw slept. A willful calm reigned over the Polish capital, as if the early German incursions in the north and west of the country were minor irritants, not entirely unexpected, and best ignored. September 1, 1939, fell on a Friday, which partly explained the initial insouciance, the reluctance to rouse to a threat that would ultimately destroy 90 percent of the city and kill nearly half its inhabitants. It was date night, and the jazz clubs, movie houses, and restaurants were packed. A comedy by the up-and-coming playwright Maria Pawlowska was premiering that evening at the New Theatre. At the Ali Baba, an encore presentation of the hit political satire Facts and Pacts played to a full house. Despite the Nazi invasion, the racetrack stayed open. W. Kruk Jewelers did not cancel their autumn sale. The confectioners Fuchs, Wedel, and Blikle continued their century-old rivalry. And despite the wail of air raid sirens, the window grilles at the Jablkowski Brothers department store stood defiantly retracted, exposing the delicate stained glass landscapes that beckoned customers inside the four-floor kingdom, the Harrod’s of prewar Warsaw, where the liveried staff staged puppet and fashion shows and addressed clients as “Your Excellency,” regardless of age. In Napoleon Square, at the heart of the financial district, under the shadow of the Eisenstadt & Rotberg Building and the Prudential Life Insurance Tower, billed by its architect, Marcin Weinfeld, as central Europe’s tallest skyscraper, banks and brokerages awaited the latest stock market results almost as eagerly as news from the nascent front. On Marshal and Jerusalem Boulevards, it was petite robes floues, not panic, that were on display at the Hersh Fashion House and in the neo-Renaissance shopping arcades built by developers Karol Fritsche, Jacob Lowenberg, and Pinkus Loth, the Trumps of prewar Poland. Outside the luxurious boutiques, near the Aliyev Turkish Sweets shop and the Elite kosher restaurant next door, traffic was no heavier than usual on September 1—sparse, in fact, for a city that in 1939 was almost twice as big as Boston and nearly the size of metropolitan Los Angeles. Photos taken that day show Packards, Oldsmobiles, Fords, and Fiats idling under an enormous Chevrolet billboard, while farther uptown, near the medieval battlements and Baroque basilicas of the historic district, patrons outside the five-star Bristol Hotel could be seen reclining in elegant wicker chairs, refreshments in hand. But there were also signs, to be sure, that all was not business as usual on that Friday. Outside the PKO State Savings Bank, depositors lined up to withdraw cash. Greengrocers, butchers, and pharmacists witnessed a spike in sales as many Varsovians stocked up on food and medical supplies. The municipal government canceled all vacation leaves, and general mobilization notices began appearing on poster columns, papering over the fall Opera schedule. And all the while, from the outlying suburbs, the distant and distressing rumble of antiaircraft batteries could be heard. Isaac Zuckerman needed no prompting to volunteer to fight for his country—a nation that he loved as a patriot but whose leaders he loathed as a Jew, a country he was willing to defend with his life but ultimately wanted to leave. His dilemma was not unusual within the Zionist community, a vibrant, fractious, restless agglomeration of dreamers, loafers, activists, firebrand intellectuals, and sober realists who knew from bitter historical experience that Europe, and especially Eastern Europe, was not an American-style melting pot, and that Jews would always be treated as outsiders there, as second-class citizens, or “resident aliens” as some Polish politicians liked to say. On the morning of September 1, 1939, Isaac Zuckerman’s dilemma was particularly acute, and it had nothing to do with his hopes for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He wanted to enlist, yet no army unit would take him, although officers must have looked wistfully at the twenty-four-year-old volunteer standing before them: Isaac was a large and imposing individual, well over six feet tall and solidly built. He was rakishly handsome, with strong Slavic features, a square jaw, and the blond bushy mustache favored by the minor nobility. He looked like a recruiting poster for the Polish cavalry, a career he had briefly contemplated, since he could ride well, a legacy of equestrian summers at a rich uncle’s estate near Vilna. But each time he and a fellow Zionist presented themselves to the authorities, the answer was the same. “We reported to the officer, a pleasant young man,” Isaac later wrote, describing their second attempt to enlist, “who told us he wished he knew what to do with his own soldiers, let alone civilians.” That Poland’s armed forces were in such disarray astonished Zuckerman. The Polish government, the Fascist-leaning Sanation regime, which had seized power in a quasi-coup, supposedly to cleanse the republic in a sanitary sweep, was essentially a dictatorship run by generals. Diplomatic tensions with Berlin had boiled throughout the spring and summer, with threats and counterthreats leaving little doubt that conflict was imminent. In July, state radio had begun issuing instructions on how to black out windows and use gas masks. Patriotic fund drives had been launched, urging citizens to donate to rearming the nation. Even the anti-Semitic vitriol of the right-wing press had been suspended during the campaign, which stressed unity and a newfound tolerance toward minorities. Newspapers praised Jewish entrepreneurs for their generous contributions toward the purchase of tanks and artillery pieces, and the entire country feted the “wonderful news” that students at Public School Number 166 in upper Warka had raised 11.75 zlotys, or roughly $2.00, for ammunition. The war did not come as a surprise to anyone, it seemed, other than Poland’s authoritarian military leaders. Enlistment aside, Isaac faced an even more pressing problem on the morning of September 1. He needed to get back home to Warsaw. He had been delivering a series of lectures at a Zionist training seminar in the town of Kleban, not far from Rovno in present-day Ukraine, when the Nazis struck. He felt certain the authorities would have a more sophisticated view of events in the capital than they did in Kleban, a shtetl of a few thousand impoverished Jews in the equivalent of the Polish Appalachians. Isaac had no intention of wasting away in this speck on the map 220 miles southeast of Warsaw while the Germans marched on the capital. The defense would surely be far better organized there than it was in the provinces, where the chain of command seemed diffuse, the order of battle confused, the officers visibly frustrated. In Warsaw, the largest urban center in Central Europe, the cultural and political center of world Jewry, the situation would be clearer. Just before dawn on September 1, Adolf Hitler had staged a Polish invasion of Germany. German convicts dressed in Polish uniforms were forced to “storm” a Reich border post. Photos of the convicts’ bullet-riddled bodies served as evidence of Polish aggression and were the official pretext for the war Hitler had just launched in response. The ruse was so blatantly farcical that many Poles doubted that the accompanying campaign would be any more serious, that the whole thing would be regarded as anything but staged theater, a few shots fired in another of the Führer’s famous antics. “Not everyone understood what war with the Germans meant,” Zuckerman would later say. Whether the war was real was a topic of much discussion and little agreement in the Polish capital on the morning of September 1, 1939. At the Landed Gentry Café, outdoor tables buzzed with speculation. The fashionable eatery was a liberal bastion in a city that had turned rightward in lockstep with Germany and so many other European nations in the 1930s, and one of the few places in Warsaw where Jews and Gentiles still socialized outside of work. The Landed Gentry only started filling up around eleven that morning, since its principal clientele—writers, poets, and journalists—tended to be late risers, and lived in the northernmost part of the city, in leafy Jolie Bord, an upper-middle-class enclave anchored around Woodrow Wilson Square. But already heated debate raged, and that morning’s newspapers were thrust from hand to hand like intellectual batons amid a breathless relay of theories and conjecture. The hostilities would last only a few weeks, posited the optimists. Hitler was making another limited land grab. He probably wanted the Pomeranian Corridor, the coastal landmass awarded to Poland in 1918 that cut off West Prussia from the rest of Germany. Naturally, he’d demand Danzig—the disputed Baltic port that President Wilson’s League of Nations had declared a Free City following World War I, when Poland reemerged on world maps after more than a century of foreign dominion. Maybe the Führer would also seek some of the Silesian lands that Berlin had lost in the Versailles Treaty. A territorial price would have to be paid. Then peace would return. Read more