Isaac's Army Read Online Free Page A

housed more than half of Warsaw’s 380,000 Jews.
    When Boruch returned from his putative errand, his mind had still not settled, and his thoughts meandered from talk of war, and the probability of victory, to girls, and to the opera, his other great passion. He had inherited his love of music from his father, whose most prized possession, a violin, stood carefully wrapped in a closet. And while Boruch did not have his father’s gift with instruments, he had developed a fine ear and a keen appreciation for opera. The fall season, as always, brought Boruch mixed feelings. There would be new performances —Faust was already being advertised—but also the obligatory paid coat check that accompanied the chillier temperatures. That would add to the price of admission, an unwelcome burden on Spiegel’s very meager resources. Many years later, he would reflect with wonder how such a seemingly trivial concern competed with the German invasion in his list of worries on September 1, 1939.
    For Simha Ratheiser, and for every school-age child in Warsaw, the first day of the Second World War coincided with the commencement of classes, an unhappy date even at the best of times. In Poland, September 1 signified the traditional conclusion of the summer break, of sailing in the Mazury lake region, hiking in the Tatra Mountains, andcamping in the primeval forest of Bialowieza, where wild bison roamed among the ancient pines. September 1 meant no more visits to distant and gift-laden relatives, no more picnics in ruined castles. It brought an abrupt end to those carefree August afternoons in the sand dunes of the Hel Peninsula, with kites fluttering in the maritime breeze and the sun warming the frigid Baltic waters just enough to splash around in the waves.
    On this particular September 1, the ring of school bells competed with air raid sirens throughout the city, followed by radio announcements of “All Clear.” No doubt the more reluctant returnees cursed their bad luck that classes had not been canceled as a result of the outbreak of hostilities. Simha Ratheiser was too distracted by the sight and sound of planes buzzing over the capital to think much about school that morning. The fifteen-year-old was entering his sophomore year. He was a good and generally attentive student and an excellent athlete, a gifted striker who played soccer with Gentiles in the Christian suburb where he lived. With his pale blue-green eyes and light chestnut hair, he fit in with his Slavic neighbors.
    School was a forty-five-minute commute from Simha’s home near the Vistula River. Catholic public schools in his district were much closer. But his parents, like the parents of half the Jewish children in Poland, had insisted he attend a private Jewish academy. “My father was an observant Jew, and he wanted me to study at a Jewish institution,” Simha would later explain.
    Ratheiser’s school was in the southernmost part of the Jewish Quarter at 26 Mushroom Street, an imposing neoclassical edifice that also housed the offices of the Jewish Community Council, the modern administrative successor of the Kehila self-governing bodies that had existed in Poland since the fifteenth century. Large oil paintings of long-deceased community elders decorated the building’s cavernous halls, their gaze scrutinizing future leaders as they trudged between classes.
    Simha was popular. It was not just his good looks, or the fact that the girls, both Gentile and Jewish, thought him intriguing. He was in fact unusually cool: blessed by some inner regulating mechanism that lent him the ability to stay calm when others grew agitated. Perhaps that helped explain why his neighborhood bullies—the sheygetzes , asGentiles were called in Yiddish—didn’t bother trying to get a rise out of him. He certainly wasn’t big or intimidating. He didn’t curse, or talk tough, like some of his Polish neighbors, and other kids at school. But he carried himself in the sort of detached,