gun fire and the roar of propellers drowned out all other noise. Where the bullets struck, clumps of earth and pavement burst loose, gouging a double line down the median. And then, just as quickly, it was over—except for the anguished cries of those whose loved ones had not gotten out of the way fast enough. “There would always be a dozen bodies lying on the road,” Spiegel recalled. “You tried not to look at them as you walked past.”
The German pilots didn’t distinguish between Jew and Gentile, adult and child, civilian and combatant. “They flew so low you could sometimes see their smiling faces,” said Boruch.
That the Luftwaffe, by September 8, had near total control over Poland’s skies was partly a result of Marshal Smigly-Rydz’s order to withdraw all squadrons to the rear, behind the Bug River, where he was raising what some skeptics were already calling a “phantom army.” Fighter pilots had been particularly furious at the relocation order and had argued against abandoning the capital, which they had defended with remarkable success up until then. Though their rickety P-11sflew at only half the speed of the far more advanced Messerschmitts and Junkers, carried only one-quarter of their armaments, and could climb only half as high,the Warsaw Fighter Brigade had knocked out 72 German craft while losing 38 of their own planes in the first week of the war.
All told, the Luftwaffe had lost six hundred planes that week, a quarter of all its squadrons, and now that it no longer had the peskyP-11s to contend with, it seemed intent on exacting retribution by strafing civilians.
Country roads provided little cover for the Spiegels, Joseph Osnos, Isaac Zuckerman, and the tens of thousands of other refugees. Even forests offered little refuge from the vengeful German airmen, as Zuckerman discovered on the night of September 9, when he and his followers camped next to a Polish military unit.“They began bombing the woods. Trees fell right before my eyes,” he recalled. “It went on for hours, and it was extraordinary luck that we weren’t hit. The Polish army group was hit.”
Zuckerman’s Zionists suffered their first casualty the following day—from friendly fire. The youths he was leading were German refugees. They belonged to the Berlin chapter of Zuckerman’s Young Pioneers, and their parents had arranged for them to go to Poland to escape Nazi persecution. Since they spoke only German and Yiddish, Isaac ordered to them to keep their mouths shut and stay close to him. “I didn’t know whether to walk at the head of the line or bring up the rear,” he recalled of shepherding the group. “These were youngsters and you had to watch them.”
One of the lads wandered off and was stopped by a Polish military patrol. Because he could only respond in German, and because it was widely known that Germany had agents on the ground equipped with radios to call in the location of military targets for air strikes, a soldier mistook him for a spy and shot him on the spot.
While Isaac and Boruch dodged German planes, an astonishing development fifty miles to the west was styming Hitler’s plan for the rapid conquest of Poland. After a week of virtually unimpeded progress, the vaunted Wehrmacht had run into a solid wall of unexpected resistance in Warsaw. “No one gave any thought to serious fighting,” General Eric Hoepner, commander of the 16th Panzer Corps, later recalled of the assault on the Polish capital. “Many [tank crews] already envisioned themselves in the best hotel rooms, lords of the city.”
But Warsaw mayor Stephen Starzinski apparently had not understood that his beloved town was supposed to surrender without a fight. The youthful former banker (who, unlike his Sanation superiors,had never engaged in baiting Jews or any other form of populist politics) could not stomach the notion of capitulation. During the desperate days when Poland seemed devoid of national leaders and the