Isaac's Army by Matthew Brzezinski Page A

person descended from at least three grandparents who are full Jews by race,” regardless of current faith. All of Hanna’s grandparents were Jewish, so in the eyes of the Nazis, her conversion was moot. Little Joanna’s case was slightly more hopeful. Legally, she was classified a Mischling in the first degree, a person of “mixed breed,” who had only two Jewish grandparents. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Mischlings could remain full citizens if they were born before September 15, 1935. Fortunately, Joanna had just celebrated her fifth birthday. She predated the Nuremberg Laws by a full year.
    If this spared her, she was blissfully oblivious—too young to comprehend the implications of the new racial code or the anxiety it was causing her mother and grandmother. The three generations of Mortkowicz women had moved into Old Town after the siege. Hanna’s elegant riverside apartment, with its sweeping views of the Vistula, had been damaged during the bombardments, and the housing shortage forced her to take up residence in the historic quarter, in the musty old edifice where her late father had maintained his printing presses and bookbinding operations. The sixteenth-century structure that the Mortkowiczes owned was on the main market square, a cobbled expanse that stretched the length of several football fields and was lined on all sides by large baroque townhouses with steeply pitched tile roofs. This was Warsaw’s future tourist district, and Hanna’s building would one day house an Italian restaurant and corporate apartments.But in 1939, Old Town’s medieval charm had not yet been realized, and the cramped and crumbling neighborhood had an unsavory reputation that was eloquently captured in Sholem Asch’s Motke the Thief:
    “In a corner of the great Warsaw there still stands a remnant of the medieval city. The Old Town consists of tall, narrow old houses that our ancestors built hundreds of years ago. The outer wall of each house is built into that of the next, so if you barely touch one, its neighbors will fall down. These houses have no courtyards, no windows, no light. Each one is like a labyrinth. Long dark corridors lead one along secret paths into the rooms of the houses, and only the longtime inhabitants know how to follow them. Someone who chances into such a house might think that he has gotten lost in an ancient church, the walls of which smell of the Inquisition. A terror comes over him as he regards the high rounded rafters that arch above his head, and the heavy black walls that surround him, and he stands stock still, frightened in the darkness.”
    For Joanna—who, like her mother and grandmother, was tiny, almost elfin—Old Town was a wonderland. There was nothing scary about its church-steeple skyline, or the long curving shadows that the spires of its Gothic cathedrals cast in the early winter sun. She ran wild through its maze of narrow, musty streets, her raven curls spilling out of her bonnet, her little pumps slipping and scuffing on cobblestones, as she tried to keep up with the older, rougher neighborhood kids. Together, they scaled the Barbakan Gate and scampered along its crenellated brick ramparts. They played hide-and-seek along the drained and grassy moat that still encircled parts of the ancient settlement. They teased the peddlers and swiped apples from their pushcarts, and Joanna laughed loudest as they all skipped through Market Square singing “Jew, Jew, crawl under your shack. Now the shack is creaking. Now the Jew is shrieking!”
    It was Vincent, the Mortkowiczes’ Gentile caretaker, who finally put an end to the fun and games. Hearing Joanna mindlessly spout the offensive singsong, he led her home by the ear and gave her a lecture. “It was then that I found out what was the real and macabre meaning of the rhyme. And that it was about us,” Joanna recalled. The revelation was shocking on many different levels.
    Joanna had been raised in a secular household where the