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He wanted to enlist, yet no army unit would take him, although officers must have looked wistfully at the twenty-four-year-old volunteer standing before them: Isaac was a large and imposing individual, well over six feet tall and solidly built. He was rakishly handsome, with strong Slavic features, a square jaw, and the blond bushy mustache favored by the minor nobility. But each time he and a fellow Zionist presented themselves to the authorities, the answer was the same. The Polish government, the Fascist-leaning Sanation regime, which had seized power in a quasi-coup, supposedly to cleanse the republic in a sanitary sweep, was essentially a dictatorship run by generals.
Diplomatic tensions with Berlin had boiled throughout the spring and summer, with threats and counterthreats leaving little doubt that conflict was imminent. In July, state radio had begun issuing instructions on how to black out windows and use gas masks. Patriotic fund drives had been launched, urging citizens to donate to rearming the nation.
Even the anti-Semitic vitriol of the right-wing press had been suspended during the campaign, which stressed unity and a newfound tolerance toward minorities. Enlistment aside, Isaac faced an even more pressing problem on the morning of September 1. He needed to get back home to Warsaw.
He had been delivering a series of lectures at a Zionist training seminar in the town of Kleban, not far from Rovno in present-day Ukraine, when the Nazis struck. He felt certain the authorities would have a more sophisticated view of events in the capital than they did in Kleban, a shtetl of a few thousand impoverished Jews in the equivalent of the Polish Appalachians. Isaac had no intention of wasting away in this speck on the map miles southeast of Warsaw while the Germans marched on the capital.
The defense would surely be far better organized there than it was in the provinces, where the chain of command seemed diffuse, the order of battle confused, the officers visibly frustrated. In Warsaw, the largest urban center in Central Europe, the cultural and political center of world Jewry, the situation would be clearer. Whether the war was real was a topic of much discussion and little agreement in the Polish capital on the morning of September 1, The fashionable eatery was a liberal bastion in a city that had turned rightward in lockstep with Germany and so many other European nations in the s, and one of the few places in Warsaw where Jews and Gentiles still socialized outside of work.
The Landed Gentry only started filling up around eleven that morning, since its principal clientele—writers, poets, and journalists—tended to be late risers, and lived in the northernmost part of the city, in leafy Jolie Bord, an upper-middle-class enclave anchored around Woodrow Wilson Square.
The hostilities would last only a few weeks, posited the optimists. Hitler was making another limited land grab. He probably wanted the Pomeranian Corridor, the coastal landmass awarded to Poland in that cut off West Prussia from the rest of Germany. A territorial price would have to be paid.
Then peace would return. See All Customer Reviews. Shop Books. Read an excerpt of this book! Add to Wishlist. Based on first-person accounts from diaries, interviews, and surviving relatives, Isaac's Army chronicles the extraordinary triumphs and devastating setbacks that befell the Jewish underground from its earliest acts of defiance in to the exodus to Palestine in This is the remarkable true story of the Jewish resistance from the perspective of those who led it: Isaac Zuckerman, the confident and charismatic twenty-four-year-old founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization; Simha Ratheiser, Isaac's fifteen-year-old bodyguard, whose boyish good looks and seeming immunity to danger made him an ideal courier; and Zivia Lubetkin, the warrior queen of the underground who, upon hearing the first intimations of the Holocaust, declared: "We are going to defend ourselves.
Hunted by the Germans and bedeviled by the "Greasers"—roving bands of blackmailers who routinely turned in resistance fighters for profit—the movement was chronically short on firepower but long on ingenuity. Its members hatched plots in dank basements, never more than a door knock away from summary execution, and slogged through fetid sewers to escape the burning Ghetto to the forests surrounding the city.
And after the initial uprising was ruthlessly put down by the SS, they gambled everything on a bold plan for a citywide revolt—of both Jews and Gentiles—that could end only in victory or total destruction. The money they raised helped thousands hide when the Ghetto was liquidated. The documents they forged offered lifelines to families desperate to escape the horror of the Holocaust. And when the war was over, they helped found the state of Israel. A story of secret alliances, internal rivalries, and undying commitment to a cause, Isaac's Army is history at its most heart-wrenching.
Driven by an unforgettable cast of characters, it's a true-life tale with the pulse of a great novel, and a celebration of the indomitable spirit of resistance. Vitality floods its pages.
Philosophers and kings, warriors and merchants, poets and financiers come alive as the story ranges across time and the globe. Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German and, later, of German-American Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed c This historical magnum opus covers 4, years of the extraordinary history of the Jews as a people, a culture, and a nation.
Later, she is seen on a reality TV show by Teresa, a depressed, overweight and bullied teen — and the two team up. This leads him to a position at the title book shop, a magical place where the narrow space is made up for by shelves that reach three stories high. Read Next. Three years after Gitmo, Uighurs prisoners in paradise. This story has been shared , times.
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