Isaac's Army by Matthew Brzezinski

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    The only publication officially permitted in Warsaw was the New Courier , which featured Nazi notices and poorly translated articles whose German authors all worked for Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry. All other forms of mass communication were banned, and their disseminators subject to arrest, interrogation, and execution. The prohibition included ownership of radios, which Varsovians had been ordered to relinquish on pain of death lest they listen to the BBC’s new Polish language service, or Radio Paris, where the Polishgovernment in exile under a new leader, General Wladislaw Sikorski, a career soldier and centrist, broadcast daily. Eighty-seven thousand of the estimated 125,000 transistor radios in the Polish capital were confiscated by late 1939, and the Germans were conducting sweeps to search for the remainder.
    The Courier itself was an unexpected publishing success.It had a daily circulation of two hundred thousand copies and was almost always sold out at newsstands. Varsovians read it mostly for its obituaries, to learn the names, for instance, of theten people sentenced to death for tearing down a German flag, or of the eighty shot for tampering with a telecommunications cable. The paper was also scoured for formal announcements like the arrest of Mayor Stephen Starzinski, the hero of the siege of Warsaw, who was sent to Dachau, where he would be executed for daring to defy Hitler.
    It was in the pages of the Courier that Edelman and the rest of the Jewish community were informed that as of December 1, 1939, “All Jews and Jewesses within the General Government who are over ten years of age are required to wear on the right sleeve of their inner and outer garment a white band at least 10cm. wide, with the Star of David on it. Jews and Jewesses must procure these armbands themselves, and provide them with the required distinguishing mark. Violations will be punished by imprisonment.”

CHAPTER 8
    JOANNA’S RHYME
    Publisher Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczak read the December 1939 armband decree with anxiety. The new regulation condemned her mother and her cousin Martha Osnos to wear the identifying mark. But as a convert to Christianity, as a Protestant, did the edict apply to her? And what of her daughter? As a five-year-old, Joanna was exempted by virtue of age. But on racial grounds, was she Semitic? Her father, Hanna’s ex-husband, was a Gentile. Hanna’s conversion had also predated Joanna’s birth. Was this sufficient to spare the child a Jewish classification?
    Such anguished questions were posed in thousands of homes throughout the Polish capital by those who had switched faith, or intermarried, or were themselves the products of mixed marriages. The list included descendants of the biggest Polish banking and industrial dynasties, the country’s Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Mellons; the Baumans, the Bersons, the Blochs, the Epsteins, Kohns, Wawelbergs, Rotwands, Nathansons, and Kronenbergs, who were among the many nineteenth-century oligarchs who adopted Christianity to circumvent tsarist restrictions. Would they, too, be affected? How far back wouldthe Nazis search for Jewish genealogy? And what of mixed marriages? Would these spare spouses? Or would there be a rash of divorces and nullifications in the coming months, as there had been in Germany in the mid-1930s?
    A rush to obtain legal interpretations, not to mention baptismal certificates, both genuine and forged, accompanied the promulgation of the armband law, and confusion reigned until the General Government issued clarifications to the racial code. These were based on the notorious Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, which stated unequivocally that mixed marriages were “forbidden and invalid” and subject to annulment. Wedding bands therefore offered no protection in the new German colony. The adoption of Christianity was addressed by an amendment to the Nuremberg Laws passed on November 14, 1935, which stipulated “A Jew is a