*
Another lifelong issue for survivors was guilt.
In the summer of 1944, from the window of her hiding place in Warsaw, Zivia could see weary horses pulling farmers’ carts full of Germans fleeing for their lives. The Polish underground, controlled mainly by the Home Army, decided it was time to fight—to push away the weakened Nazis and to defend Poland from the encroaching Soviets. Though Zivia, the ZOB, and the Communist Poles did not agree with all these politics, they decided to join in—any effort to destroy the Nazis was worthwhile. Zivia put out word through the Polish underground press that all Jews should fight, no matter what affiliation, for a “free, independent, strong, and just Poland.” The uprising began on August 1. Jews, including women, from all political factions participated. During this revolt, Rivka Moscovitch was killed when a Nazi drove by and machine-gunned her on the street.
The Home Army would not fight alongside Jews, but the People’s Army welcomed the ZOB’s collaboration. Worried about Jewish casualties, they offered them behind-the-scenes roles, but Zivia and her group insisted on active combat. She defended an important and isolated post, nearly forgotten in action. The twenty-two Jews’ roles were minor, but it meant everything to Zivia that the ZOB remained alive and kicking, and working alongside Poles. The Home Army had been prepared to fight for a few days, but the Soviets held out on their involvement, and the gruesome battle lasted for two months. The magnificent city of Warsaw was razed, turned into a heap of rubble three stories high; nearly 90 percent of its buildings had now been destroyed. Eventually the Poles surrendered. The Germans drove out everyone. But what were Jews—especially those who looked it—to do?
Once again, the fighters escaped via sewage canals. This time Zivia was exhausted and nearly drowned. Antek carried her on his back while she slept.
Even with the Red Army drawing near, Zivia remained realistic, or pessimistic, warning her comrades not to get too excited. After struggling through a number of melinas, the hiding Jews’ situation was dire. Six weeks of life-threatening Soviet bombardment, of scarce food and water, of smoking leaves they picked off trees, of near suffocation in the tiny cellar where they hid—they were doomed. Especially when the Germans began digging trenches on their street, and then, in their very building.
The Nazis were breaking down the walls right near Zivia’s shelter. The Jews could hear every shovel scoop. But, as always, the Germans stopped for their routine lunch break at noon. Five minutes later, a rescue group from the Polish Red Cross arrived. Bundist couriers had contacted a leftist Polish doctor at a nearby hospital, and he’d sent a team to retrieve them under the auspices of collecting typhoid patients—which he knew would keep away the Germans. The two most Jewish looking had their faces bandaged and were carried out on stretchers. The others put on Red Cross armbands and feigned being rescuers. Zivia pretended to be an old peasant scrambling through houses. The group wandered through the demolished city and, despite several altercations, managed to escape—even convincing a Nazi who had lost an eye “to those Jewish bandits” to pull them with his horse and carriage. From the hospital, Zivia went into hiding in the suburbs.
When the Russians liberated Warsaw in January 1945, thirty-year-old Zivia felt empty. She described the day when the Soviet tanks rolled in. “A mob of people exuberantly rushed out to greet them in the town marketplace,” she wrote. “The people rejoiced and embraced their liberators. We stood by crushed and dejected, lone remnants of our people.” This was the saddest day of Zivia’s life: the world she’d known officially ceased to exist. Like many survivors who coped through hyperactivity, Zivia threw herself into helping others.
Approximately three hundred thousand Polish Jews remained alive: just 10 percent of the prewar population. These included survivors of camps, “passers,” people in hiding, forest partisans, and—the majority—the two hundred thousand Jews who had lived out the war in Soviet territory, many incarcerated in Siberian Gulags. （The “Asians,” they were called.） These Jews were returning to nothing—no family, no home. Postwar Poland was a “Wild West” with rampant antisemitism. In small towns, especially where people feared Jews would reclaim their property, Jews could be killed on the streets. Zivia worked to bring the Jews aid; she also planned escape routes. In Lublin, she connected with Abba Kovner, and though they set out to collaborate, they fell out. Zivia prioritized community building; Kovner, immediate exit from Poland—and revenge.