Read Isaac's Army for Free Online Page A

Simha reluctantly stayed, glumly shuffling around the family compound just southeast of the Royal Gardens Park, where the city petered out, cabbage fields sprouted between dwindling housing tracts, and gypsy caravans camped in the low brush. There was little to do but putter around the garden—a lifelong passion of Simha’s—and listen to Warsaw Two, the less-powerful backup broadcaster, relay ominous bulletins about the approaching German army, the deployment of gas masks, how the smell of mustard and garlic could signify a chemical attack, and how the French and the English, who had declared war on the Nazis, had still not fired a shot.
    Simha felt frightened and helpless. It was the waiting that was most intolerable, and the certain knowledge that the Germans were coming.
    They struck the following day. Shortly after noon on September 8, four Panzer armored divisions stormed Warsaw’s westernmost outer suburbs. By 3 P . M . they had seized the airport, a critical installation that allowed the Luftwaffe to refuel and rearm locally rather than lose valuable time and fuel flying to and from distant airfields. At 5 P . M . the surging columns of tanks reached the inner districts of Ochota and Wola, where a thin line of defenders cowered behind the trenches that Isaac Zuckerman had helped dig.
    “Wolska Street is covered with blood,” one combatant said, describing the scene. “There are dead horses, burnt hulks, and pulverized corpses crushed by tank treads. An uninterrupted wall of fire precedes the Germans; a hurricane of bullets. The sound is deafening. They are massacring civilians, mowing down running refugees, indiscriminately clearing a path straight toward our barricade. Before our eyes, it seems as though every rule and custom of civilized warfare is being violated. They are only a hundred meters away now.…”

CHAPTER 4
    ROBERT’S PAPER AIRPLANES
    Twenty miles east of the carnage, surrounded by sunflower fields and the weathered, bucolic huts of small farming villages, Isaac Zuckerman raced to catch up to his Zionist friends on September 8, 1939. He had not slept or eaten in two days, and his pride still felt the sting of being left behind. “I don’t know why they went off and left me,” he lamented. “I think it was because of the general panic and chaos.” For Isaac, who like many charismatic men was sensitive and not immune to vanity, this was the second perceived slight in as many weeks. The first occurred when he had not been selected as a delegate to represent his He-Halutz youth group at the 21st Zionist Congress, held in Geneva just days before the invasion of Poland. His omission from that prestigious gathering had hurt. He was, after all, a professional Zionist, not merely a dabbler like hundreds of thousands of other Polish Jews who dreamed of Palestine. He was a salaried career man within the fractious movement, who opted to devote himself to preparing Polish Jews for immigration to Palestine rather than attend university and enter a traditional profession like law or medicine, as his parents had wanted.
    The evacuation traffic had thinned this far from Warsaw, though it still stretched as far as Isaac could see down the rows of telegraph poles that lined the country road. These were crowned, every few hundred feet, with giant stork’s nests, and the huge white birds served as an early warning system whenever an aircraft approached and they fled their nests. Panic would then ensue, with refugees scattering in every direction and Isaac herding the group of very young Zionists he had stumbled across into a nearby forest or ditch.
    The Germans strafed almost all the roads. Boruch Spiegel also recalled these moments of sheer terror, which punctuated hours of shuffling monotony, of aching forward movement. First came the sight and sound of a distant plane. Then a split second of uncertainty: Was it was friend or foe? Then shouts, screams, and a mad scramble for cover. The staccato of machine