Isaac's Army Read Online Free Page B

casual manner that suggested he belonged in whatever environment he found himself in.
    Like Isaac Zuckerman and so many other young Polish Jews, Simha Ratheiser had been captivated for a time by Zionism’s dream of a Jewish homeland. The previous summer he had gone to a camp run by Akiva, one of the dozens of Zionist youth organizations in Poland, and he had been captivated by stories of daring kibbutzniks, of camels and exotic Bedouins, of fearless settlers turning parched desert into blooming orchards. But the fervor had passed. Simha, by his own admission, “was never overly political.” And there was a monastic, cultlike atmosphere in some Zionist groups that left him cold. In the meantime, the usual teenage interests—soccer, girls, the movies—had replaced Palestine.
    Those teenage preoccupations kept Simha from cracking the books on September 1. The sound of sirens and airplanes were distracting him, and he and his schoolmates stared at the cloudless sky, trying to guess whether the unsettling aircraft circling overhead were Polish or German. They were not alone. Most of Warsaw was gazing skyward. “Those are our planes,” people on the streets said, pointing excitedly. “No, they are not,” others countered. “Those are exercises,” some reassured. “No, they aren’t.” The debates raged. The planes were in fact antiquated Polish P-6s retrofitted with British Vickers engines, and ungainly P-11s, or Bumblebees, as the slow and bulbous machines would become known, part of a squadron of fighters that had been redeployed to defend the Polish capital. But like most Varsovians, Ratheiser could not yet distinguish the distinctive sound and silhouette of enemy bombers. Nonetheless, he was intensely curious about them. Much like any fifteen-year-old, he had longed to see a dogfight—the real-life, swooping version of the World War I duels shown in the American movies that played at the Napoleon Theater in Three Crosses Square.
    His wish would be granted shortly after the lunch bell.

    At 3:30 that afternoon, steam whistles sounded throughout Praga, the smokestack district on the eastern, unfashionable bank of the Vistula River—a tough, mixed neighborhoodwhere 40 percent of the residents were Jewish. The day shift had ended, and3,870 workers streamed out of the Lilpop, Rau & Lowenstein plant. The forty-acre facility assembled Buicks, Chevrolets, and Opel Kadetts under license from General Motors, as well as locomotives, trams, heavy trucks, and armored vehicles. It was one of Warsaw’s largest industrial concerns, a joint venture between Belgian Jews and ethnic Germans who founded the conglomerate in the mid-nineteenth century to build rail ties for the tsar, after Poland’s annexation into the Russian empire had opened vast new markets and attracted great sums of foreign investment.
    Next door, thick pale fumes billowed from the vents of the Schicht-Lever soap and laundry detergent plant, an Anglo-Dutch concern that would morph into global giant Unilever, whilethe three hundred workers of Samuel and Sender Ginsburg’s BRAGE Rubber Works poured out onto November 11 Street, a road that commemorated the date of a failed uprising against tsarist dominion.
    Nearby, Joseph Osnos, Martha’s tall and elegant thirty-five-year-old husband—an urbane businessman and fastidious dresser who bore a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn—was also letting his employees out for the weekend. He had raised his start-up capital as a diamond broker in France and Belgium, and now his plant, Karolyt Incorporated, produced toasters, electric irons, and kettles. During the long run-up to the invasion, he had introduced a new line of hermetically sealed food containers to protect against the mustard gas attacks that figured prominently in every newspaper report about German arsenals and tactics. Sales shot through the roof, and the plant operated at full capacity throughout the summer of 1939 to meet the media-driven demand. Gas