Free Isaac's Army by Matthew Brzezinski Page A

feckless youth, a grown child without purpose or direction—the scene was transformational. “At that moment, I realized that the most important thing on earth was going to be never letting myself get pushed onto the top of that barrel. Never, by anybody.”
    The humiliation that Edelman witnessed in the fall of 1939 was repeated throughout Warsaw as the Germans set about dividing the conquered in addition to robbing them blind.
    Jews and Gentiles had closed ranks to a remarkable degree during the siege. The rapprochement that began during the buildup to the war, and that Isaac Zuckerman had witnessed while digging ditches, only strengthened once the shelling started. The two communities fought side by side, manned barricades together, and shared bomb shelters. Jewish women fed Gentile soldiers and helped tend their wounds while Christian housewives carried water to parched Jewish combatants in the trenches. Martha Osnos fondly recalled the initial shock of a Gentile co-worker, a fellow chemist, whom she brought home during a bombardment that happened to fall on Yom Kippur. “She had never even spoken to a Jewish person before she met me,” Osnos said of the woman, who for the first time in her life was exposed to Judaic rituals. “The wailing of the tallis-clad men was for her as frightening as the constant bombing.” Despite the cultural chasm,powerful bonds formed during the siege. Religious and linguistic differences were largely overridden by shared life-and-death experiences, by the personal connections forged in trenches and air raid shelters.
    Not surprisingly, the newfound unity and uncharacteristically cordial state of affairs did not sit well with the Nazis. Almost immediately, the Third Reich’s propaganda machine set out to stoke the mutual suspicions that were more typical of relations between the Catholic majority and the large Jewish minority in the Polish capital. Nazi newsreels and newspapers like the New Warsaw Courier , which began publication under German editorial control in the second week of October, began disseminating stories about Jews collaborating in the Gestapo’s hunt for hidden weapons. Varsovians woke to frontpage photographs(staged, as it turned out, by Arthur Grimm of the Waffen-SS Propaganda Company) showing individuals with distinctly Semitic features pulling heavy-caliber machine guns from unearthed coffins while others pointed to the hidden location of ammunition stores.
    Though such shots were blatantly phony, they found a receptive audience among certain segments of Polish society, as did similarly ludicrous newsreels of German police officers saving Poles from mobs of violent Talmudic students, or of Jews greeting Soviet troops with flowers, cheering as Polish soldiers were led away to Siberian camps.
    “German propaganda agencies worked ceaselessly,” Mark Edelman recalled. “We also started hearing about how Jews were turning in Poles [to the NKVD Russian secret police in the Soviet Occupation zone],” he added. “But we now know that German propaganda was behind many of these tales.”
    What was remarkable was how little effort the Nazis needed to expend to erode the goodwill that had built up between Jews and Gentiles during the siege. Driving a wedge between the two proved far easier than many Poles would later care to admit.
    Like a great many Poles, Edelman took his first step toward conspiracy during this period of propagandizing and looting, under the cover of the ghostly darkness that still permeated the Polish capital at night in December 1939.
    Electricity, gas, and water supplies had not yet been fully restoredto large swaths of the battered city. Every evening after the 9 P.M . police curfew, Warsaw plunged into a dark and barren wasteland patrolled by German gendarmes who enforced the mandated blackout by shooting at any window emitting light. Most windows were boarded up with plywood because there was no replacement glass for the hundreds of thousands of