Free Isaac's Army by Matthew Brzezinski Page B

panes that had been shattered during the siege; Warsaw was quite possibly the darkest metropolis on the planet.
    That suited Edelman just fine, for almost every night he crept out to his old school on Carmelite Street, in the heart of the badly damaged Jewish Quarter, where a hand-cranked mimeograph machine was hidden in the basement. There, the Bund printed pamphlets and newsletters in defiance of the German media monopoly.
    The underground press was the first manifestation of organized resistance in occupied Poland. Virtually every prewar group, ranging from the Boy Scouts to major political parties, set up small printing operations designed to counter German propaganda, disseminate accurate information, and boost morale.
    Edelman had eagerly signed up to help print the Bund’s clandestine pamphlet largely for that reason. He and his Bundist friends needed to do something, anything, “to overcome our own terrifying apathy. To force ourselves to the smallest spark of activity, to fight against our own acceptance of the generally prevailing feeling of panic.”
    This sensation was unnatural to Edelman, who unlike the humble and self-effacing Boruch Spiegel did not usually suffer from self-doubt. Edelman, before the war, might well have been an underachiever—“lazy” in his own words. His sloth, however, had been of his own choosing. Now, under the Nazis, no Jew was master of his own destiny, thanks to the stream of ever more restrictive anti-Semitic edicts issued by the General Gouvernment —the new colonial administrative body that had been given the mandate to rule central Poland. It was led by Hans Frank, Hitler’s longtime legal adviser and personal attorney. From his headquarters atop a massive medieval castle in Krakow, Frank already issued a torrent of decrees freezing all Jewish bank accounts, barring Jews from many industries and trades, and subjecting them to daily humiliations and onerous forced labor requirements.
    So for the free-spirited eighteen-year-old orphan, participation inthe underground press was as much about exercising control over at least one aspect of his life as it was about lifting the sinking spirits of his fellow Bundists. “Considerable effort went into the publication of these papers,” Edelman recalled. Printing supplies were not easy to come by. Paper and ink had to be acquired on the burgeoning black market and discreetly delivered to the school, which like all other educational facilities in Warsaw had been closed by the Nazis.
    The printing was done with a cumbersome hand crank by the harsh light of homemade carbide lamps, which were used because of the kerosene shortage.They consisted of two small metal pots mounted over each other. Lumps of calcium carbide were placed in the lower container, while water dripped through a pinhole in the upper chamber. When the drops came into contact with the carbide, they released acetylene gas, which fueled a flame. “Working by carbide light proved extremely strenuous,” Edelman remembered. By 2 A.M . everyone’s eyes burned, but the printing went on until seven in the morning, when the exhausted printing crews had to go to their day jobs. “We averaged two or three sleepless nights a week,” he recalled.
    The riskiest aspect of the process also started in the morning, when the five hundred copies Edelman had printed overnight were sent out for distribution. To lessen the potential for capture, a system of “fivers and tenners” was instituted, whereby activities were divided among different groups—cells—comprised of no more than five or ten individuals. Mark Edelman’s nocturnal printing operation was one such fiver. It received its materials—the essays, articles, and proclamations—from another fiver, and then handed off the finished copies to the leader of a tenner, who distributed them to ten others, stratifying the process in such a way that if someone was caught with an illegal pamphlet, the entire chain was not at