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Polish Radio’s mobile loudspeakers were evacuating eastward because the retreating Sanation regime had ordered the 800-foot transmission mast for Warsaw One, central Europe’s tallest structure, disabled.
    The disorganized civilian horde was not limited to men of military age responding to the Sanation government’s appeal. Entire families had taken their cue from the commander in chief and were running for safety: Women, children, the elderly, and couples wrestling with strollers completely overwhelmed the columns of retreating troops, blocking all the roads leading east, bogging down military traffic, and swamping any possibility of an orderly withdrawal and redeployment. Most evacuees were on foot, like the Spiegel brothers, or on bicycles, and had brought only what they could carry, which in Boruch’s case was a spare set of clothes, toiletries, and a few apples and boiled eggs his mother had put in the backpack that now drooped from his small frame. “It was crazy, it was chaos,” he remembered. “We barely moved. Cars were constantly honking. Army drivers were screaming to clear the way. It took hours just to get through Praga [on Warsaw’s east bank].”
    Somewhere in the heaving throng around Boruch, Joseph Osnos rode in a borrowed British sports car, blaring his horn impatiently. Osnos, like Isaac Zuckerman, was big and fit and not one to sit still, and also like Zuckerman he had been trying to join the fighting ever since he signed the power of attorney for his factory over to Martha. His brother Zano, a doctor and reserve army officer, was already in the east tending to Marshal Smigly-Rydz’s wounded. Joseph, too, wanted to do his duty. “Go, I will stay with Robert,” Martha had urged, when the call for able-bodied men had gone out the night before. “Join the army. We are safe. The radio says so. We will just be a nuisance. Besides,” she added, “how can I leave my job?”
    Simha Ratheiser was too young to answer the call to arms. He had desperately wanted to go east, to continue the heroic struggle. But his father, Zvi, would not hear of it. Simha was barely fifteen. Bar mitzvah notwithstanding, he was still a child. War was no place for him to discover his manhood.
    Simha glared at his father but did not press his case. The two had a complicated relationship at times, and its strains went beyond the usual teenage rebellion against authority. The generation gap between Simha and Zvi was even wider than that of the typical father and son because they were the products of two very distinct eras—pre- and post-independence Poland. Many young Jews born or reared after 1918, when Poland reappeared on maps and Polish replaced Russian or German as the country’s official language, experienced a similar gulf—a phenomenon that was also documented among the children of immigrants in America. Simha, as a product of the new generation, was bicultural. He spoke Polish fluently, thanks to public elementary school, and looked and dressed like any Gentile. Had he lived in America, with his fair hair and athletic frame, he would have been described as a surfer kid. Zvi Ratheiser, on the other hand, wore a dark beard, a skullcap, and the black suits favored by the pious. His Polish was poor, since had come of age under tsarist colonial rule, when the Cyrillic alphabet graced street signs in Warsaw and a neo-feudal order still largely segregated Jews as a separate commercial caste self-governed by learned rabbis. Zvi was a kind and loving parent,and he did not press his religious views on his son. He knew instinctively that secular twentieth-century forces—Bundism, Zionism, Communism—were replacing faith-based isolationist movements like Chasidism as the driving cultural forces among Jewish youth. But it was also crystal clear to him that in this yawning gap between Jewish generations, he did not fully understand Simha, just as Simha found his father’s old-fashioned ways equally baffling at times.
    So