They struck at every known remaining warehouse, store, shop, medical station, bakery, and private cache in the ghetto, holding anything usable for Joint Forces. Loading rapidly under the protective guns of the Joint Fighters, they whisked off to a series of small bunkers scattered all over the ghetto.
No protest or conversation was permitted.
“Load! Move!”
And away.
Every sack of flour, every grain of food was carted off.
One of the bunkers in the central command was located almost beneath the Jewish Militia barracks, where the Fighters kept the barracks under scrutiny. Simon Eden ordered a raid to bring back a half dozen militiamen.
They were dragged off to the new command center at Mila 18 to confront Alexander Brandel, who had drawn up a list of dozens of persons suspected of collaboration, concealing wealth, and illegal operations. The captured militiamen were quick to sing out all they knew about the location of these people.
Squads of Jewish Fighters made forays, unearthing one person after another on the list. The most notorious of the collaborators were executed. The others were fined.
“You are fined ten thousand zlotys for passing information to the Germans.”
“You are fined twenty thousand zlotys for collaboration with the Jewish Militia.”
“You are fined ten thousand zlotys for failure to protect Jews taken to the Umschlagplatz within your power to warn them.”
These fines were collected on the spot, on pain of death, without argument or equivocation.
Rodel, the squat, blocklike commander of the southern area, had been a member in good standing in the Communist party most of his adult life. He deemed it ironic that his command bunker was located under the Convert’s Church with the open knowledge of Father Jakub.
Moreover, the war had compelled him to enter strange alliances with Labor Zionists holding completely diverse political views. Zionism was the drug of the Jewish people, he had said on numerous occasions. However, he worked not only with Labor Zionists but Jabotinski Revisionists, whom he considered fascists, and religious elements, whom he considered mentally inept. It was a strange war to Rodel, but no stranger than the Soviet Union and America fighting as allies.
From the moment of Warsinski’s assassination, Rodel ordered the workers in the uniform factory to sabotage the product. In the following days, uniforms left Warsaw with flies, armholes, and neckholes sewn shut, buttons with no buttonholes, and seams that would rip away under the slightest stress.
An hour after Wolf Brandel captured Brushmaker’s, Ludwig Heinz, the manager of the uniform factory, sent a message to Rodel through Father Jakub that the Lithuanian guards had fled. Heinz, an ethnic German, was one of an infinitesimal number who displayed a measure of humanity toward the slave labor under him. Within the strict limitations permitted, Heinz was credited with saving a number of lives. He walked untouched to the corner of Nowolipki and Karmelicka streets to open the main gates and allow the Jewish Fighters in.
“I’m glad my part in this is over,” Heinz said to Rodel.
Rodel shook his shiny, hairless head. “It is a strange war,” he said. “You’ve been decent within your means. Joint Forces has ordered me to see you safely through the ghetto gates.”
“I’m glad it’s over,” Ludwig Heinz repeated.
“Let’s go,” Rodel said, pointing in the direction of the Leszno Gate two blocks away.
As Ludwig Heinz turned, Rodel whipped out his pistol and struck the man across the back of the ear with the barrel. Heinz pitched forward to the street, unconscious. Rodel leaned down and ripped part of his clothing off and bloodied his face with a series of blows.
“All right,” he ordered two fighters, “take him to the Leszno Gate and dump him. I’m sorry I had to beat him up, but it’s for his own good. If he walked out unharmed, the Germans would suspect him. This way they may get the impression he barely escaped.”
As they hauled Heinz away, he shook his head again. “Strange war,” he said.
Samson Ben Horin, commander of the Jabotinski company of Revisionists, had remained outside the jurisdiction of Joint Jewish Forces, but the events of the day compelled him to look upon Eden’s army with a new respect. He dispatched a runner to Eden with an offer to keep runner contact with their bunker and join in limited cooperation.
Simon soon found an assignment much to Ben Horin’s liking.
On the last day of January, Samson Ben Horin led a combined company, half Revisionists, half Joint Forces, through the sewer pipes under the wall into the Aryan side. He picked the hour of the Vistula’s lowest tide, when the sewage was only knee-deep. Using Simon’s engineer’s map of the sewer system, he had only a mile to negotiate. Ben Horin’s party came to a stop beneath a manhole close to Bank Square near the Ministry of Finance.
Three Aryan side contacts waited. One was dressed as a sewer worker, the second sat in the driver’s seat of a parked teamster wagon, and the third watched at the corner in a position to observe the German Exchange Bank on Orla Street.
It was the day before payday for the German garrison. At precisely noon an armored truck from the ministry would stop to deposit part of the payroll at the Exchange Bank.
The watchman signaled the arrival of the armored truck.
The horse-drawn wagon moved from the curb and stopped beside the manhole. A long ladder was taken from it and set down in the sewer. Samson Ben Horin led his party out of the sewer. They scattered with startling rapidity so that both ends of the block-long Orla Street could be sealed.
A dozen German soldiers formed a guard around the armored truck before the bank. They passed the money sacks in.
Samson Ben Horin arched a homemade matzo-ball grenade. It landed at the right front tire of the truck.
Nuts and bolts flew everywhere, ripping into the bodies of the Germans.
A second grenade.
A third.
Half of the Germans were on the ground, groveling with iron in them. The truck was disabled, but guards inside fired back.
A fire bottle splattered against the side of the truck, igniting into flame and driving the defenders out.
Samson Ben Horin signaled for his men to converge. They pressed in from both ends of Orla Street. The Germans were pinned against the wall and the flaming truck. A few plunged into the bank for safety.
Half of the raiders grabbed every money sack in sight. The other half pushed into the bank and forced the vaults open. Within eight minutes of the time they had come from the sewer, they disappeared the same way with more than a million zlotys.
Simon Eden referred to the actions as practical field training to teach his army that the invulnerable enemy was indeed vulnerable.
Within a week after Andrei’s ambush at Niska and Zamenhof streets, which signaled the uprising, Joint Jewish Forces had purged the ghetto of collaborators, added millions to their treasury, controlled the streets, confiscated tons of food, wrecked the two major slave-labor factories, and freed the workers.
There were two large jobs left. The Jewish Militia, who cowered in their barracks, and the Civil Authority. The act of mere vengeance: doing away with the Jewish Militia was overruled by more practical considerations of settling with the Jewish Civil Authority.
On February 1, 1943, a hundred fifty men and women of Joint Forces surrounded the Jewish Civil Authority building at dawn. Simon Eden broke down the doors and entered with fifty more Fighters.
From his office on the third floor Boris Presser watched the scene below with Marinski, his assistant.
“Get into the outer office,” Presser said quickly. “Stall them. Keep them out of here.”