Isaac's Army

September 3, 2012
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April–May 1943 was the largest Jewish revolt during WWII. As Brzezinski (Red Moon Rising) relates in this revisionist history of the uprising, the Jewish Fighting Organization, comprising young Polish Jews of disparate political affiliations, played a dominant role. Isaac Zuckerman, a charismatic prewar Zionist youth leader, was the organization’s cofounder and driving force. When the uprising erupted, Zuckerman was on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw procuring weapons, and organized the escape of the surviving fighters through the sewers. Zivia Lubetkin—shy but methodical—ran a network of couriers to maintain links among various ghettos. Significantly, the organization’s 23-year-old leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, now widely viewed as the uprising’s hero, is disparaged by Brzezinski as a dangerous hothead who returned to Warsaw at the last minute to steal center stage in the organization and who, according to other fighters, took the easy way out with his suicide in a bunker together with 80 comrades in arms. Drawing on Zuckerman’s memoir and interviews with some survivors, this is overall a taut and worthy retelling of the uprising with welcome backgrounds on its significant members, including the less known Jewish Military Union of right-wing Zionists. Brzezinski’s treatment of Anielewicz will be controversial Agent: Scott Waxman, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency.

Starred review from September 1, 2012
The history of Polish Jews who fought Nazi brutality, retold in the stories of some truly remarkable young men and women. Journalist Brzezinski (Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age, 2007, etc.) presents a meticulous, harrowing account of resistance, humanized with personal tales of individual combatants. As he writes, from the day the Germans set foot in the Polish capital, the brutality mounted. The Jewish quarter was walled off, and the inhumanely crowded ghetto was established. Naked bodies were soon found throughout the quarter, which was infected with typhus as well as blackmailers and profiteers. But there were partisans, too. As deportation to death camps increased, there was frantic organizing and smuggling. Travel to the "Aryan" side was forbidden yet accomplished through disguised tunnels. Finally, in the spring of 1943, after 400,000 Jews were dead, the uprising exploded. In the lead-up to the Uprising, the resistance had established lines of communication and financing for a few guns, and leaders stepped up to organize the logistics and tactics. Escape, through fetid sewers or inhospitable forests, was rare. Aided by anti-Semites, the Wehrmacht and the particularly brutal SS were powerful and efficient. However, as recalled by survivors, there was support by some righteous gentiles. In his valuable text, Brzezinski impartially describes the political interplay of factions of resistance fighters, even when the city of Warsaw was utterly destroyed on orders from Berlin. The struggle continued as survivors fought their way to Israel. "In Poland," writes the author, "Jews now had only a past. The future had been erased." A well-told, direct story of endurance and courage in the face of death and destruction on an apocalyptic scale, as moving and powerful as any novel.

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October 15, 2012

While Poland's Jewish community was being exterminated by the German and Soviet occupiers, a network of Jews resisted. Isaac Zuckerman, who survived to settle in Israel after the war, left a detailed memoir of the experience. Brzezinski (Red Moon Rising) found other survivors and interviewed them to produce a detailed record of much of the daily life of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and other parts of Poland that had become Germany's eastern Reich. He discusses the policy changes, social situation, and strategic environment that resistance workers had to deal with, and humanizes the extremely difficult situations these young men and women faced, including the "trade-craft" involved in operating in a rigidly controlled and murderous state. VERDICT Although the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto has been covered before, the author successfully integrates personal and societal elements into a compelling narrative that greatly supplements existing works.--EBB

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2012
Much has been made of supposed Jewish passivity in the face of escalating Nazi terror. This ignores the thousands of Jews who fought the Nazis as members of various broader resistance groups across occupied Europe. But in Poland, the locus of genocide, Jews created their own resistance group. Brzezinski, a gentile of Polish ancestry with a Jewish wife and children, tells the story of these heroic men and women in an unvarnished, often grim, but inspiring chronicle. At the center of the narrative is Isaac Zuckerman, who with his blond hair and powerful physique could have been mistaken for an Aryan poster boy. Only 24 when Hitler invaded Poland, Zuckerman was both a Polish patriot and a dedicated Zionist. As head of the Jewish Fighting Organization, he led a mostly young group of Jews as they smuggled others to safety, gathered arms, plotted attacks, and eventually helped create the nation of Israel. This is not a tale of romantic glory. To survive, these fighters had to be ruthless and sometimes brutal, since torture and execution were guaranteed if they were caught. Still, this is an outstanding tribute to these men and women who chose to resist a monstrous tyranny.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)