Free Isaac's Army by Matthew Brzezinski

fruitless month aimlessly wandering through Poland’s eastern townships before returning to the Jewish district. At age eighteen, he was rail thin, with a pronounced Adam’s apple, and he bore the pinched, pale features of someone for whom nutrition was a secondary consideration. He had been homeless and unemployed when the war broke out, living at a girlfriend’s and in no hurry to find a job. That June, he had just barely finished high school, which was no small feat given one expulsion, many prolonged absences, and a general lack of interest in formal education. An orphan, he was a transplanted “Litvak,” which meant he hailed from the far eastern borderlands,specifically from a town called Gomel near Minsk, placing him at a social disadvantage in the snobbish Polish capital. Litvaks occupied the lowest rung in Warsaw’s Jewish hierarchy, and their Yiddish was markedly different from the rapid-fire urban dialect spoken in central Poland, as out of place as a southern drawl in New York City.
    Along with the Spiegel brothers, whom he vaguely knew, Edelman was a Bundist. The Bund was pretty much the only thing he took seriously at the time, and it was partly out of gratitude, because after his mother’s death some of the Bund’s leaders had more or less adopted him. It was Bund bosses who had gotten him into good schools and used their connections to smooth over some of his academic ruffles. He played with and befriended their children, who tutored him in Polish, since he was a native Russian speaker, taught him the Polaykin Yiddish used in Warsaw and Lodz, and afforded him access to a world that would otherwise have been denied to him.
    Edelman had not gotten very far east during the evacuation, and he was one of the first to make his way back home. He was shocked at how his adopted city had changed. “It was terrible,” he said, describing the once prosperous Jerusalem Boulevard, a street that only weeks earlier had teemed with French fashion boutiques and Martini umbrellas shading diners at expensive restaurants. “Now it was full of soup kitchens with long lines, and people on the sidewalk selling anything they could—pots, pans, bed sheets, household appliances—anything to raise a few [pennies] so they could eat.”
    Nazi newsreel crews filmed the crowds waiting for free soup and bread. The handouts had been supplied bythe Hilfzug Bayern “help trains” that arrived as part of the capitulation agreement to alleviate food and medical shortages. And though the trains supplied only a small fraction of the capital’s needs, footage of the Wehrmacht dispensing aid to Poles made good propaganda. Many of the shots, alas,were marred by the grim faces of the recipients of German largesse, and frustrated camera operators had to resort to snatching back the bread to elicit forced smiles.
    But for Edelman, it was a sight in the Jewish Quarter, where, outside the benevolent spotlight, drunken soldiers accosted pedestrians demanding “Sind Sie ein Jid?” (Are you a kike?), that left the most lasting impression. “I saw a crowd on Iron Street. People were swarmingaround this barrel—a simple wooden barrel with a Jew on top of it. He was old and short and he had a long beard,” Edelman recalled of the scene, one of the seminal moments in his life. “Next to him were two German officers. Two beautiful, tall men next to this small bowed Jew. And those Germans, tuft by tuft, were chopping this Jew’s long beard with huge tailor’s shears, splitting their sides with laughter all the while.”
    The surrounding crowd was also laughing, despite the fact that many of them were also Jews. “Objectively, it was really funny: a little man on wooden a barrel with his beard growing shorter by the moment. Just like a movie gag,” Edelman explained. “After all, nothing really horrible was happening to that Jew. Only that it was now possible to put him on a barrel with impunity.”
    For Mark Edelman—up until then a