The second group was to set fire to abandoned homes and warehouses of looted goods. The Nazis had specialists assess the deported Jews’ possessions, then forced the living to rigorously organize the valuable ones.
The third group was going to commit murder. One of their double agents, a young man named Israel Kanal who was in the resistance and also working undercover in the militia, was to gun down the chief of the Jewish police. The ZOB wanted vengeance, but also to spread fear among the militiamen who were enforcing the Nazis’ edicts.
Zivia was part of the second group. Her heart beat wildly in the dark. Her sweaty palms gripped the ladder as she climbed up rung by rung, the brick of the building brushing her side. A few more steps, and she had scaled the wall, reached her destination.
She and her comrades laid down the incendiary material. But something went wrong. The house didn’t catch fire. They decided quickly to pile up all the flammable contents and set those on fire instead. “Success!” she later noted. “The flames swept into a great blaze and crackled in the night, dancing and twisting in the air. We rejoiced as we saw the reflection of the revenge that was burning inside us, the symbol of the Jewish armed resistance that we had yearned for, for so long.”
Everyone met up at 34 Dzielna Street a few hours later, all three missions having been accomplished; even the Jewish police had been afraid to take down Kanal after he shot the chief of police but failed to kill him. Then, that night, the Russians, bombed Warsaw for the first time. For Zivia, it was a night of pure elation.
*
And then, a wonder. By late summer 1942, one leader snuck five guns and eight hand grenades from the Aryan side into the ghetto. Tosia used ZOB money to purchase several hand grenades and guns, transported in boxes of nails. Frumka, some say, was the first to bring in weapons; she blended in with a returning labor group carrying a large sack filled with potatoes—and underneath, guns. Vladka, who was approached by a fellow Bundist and asked to work on the Aryan side, became a major weapons source, eventually transporting dynamite into the ghetto’s makeshift weapons lab. The smugglers climbed over the ghetto wall themselves or paid off a Polish guard to whisper a password to a fighter on the inside who would climb up and grab the package. They also brought in weapons through the windows of the houses that lined the ghetto border. Each addition to the arsenal brought ecstasy. Next, plans began for an ambush on the Germans. They would hide in building entrances, attack the Nazis by throwing grenades and then, in the confusion, steal their guns.
The joy of success, however, was curtailed by a new series of setbacks. Instead of jumping on board with the ZOB’s accomplishments, Jewish Warsaw was frightened by its actions. So pervasive was the community’s fear and paranoia that many assumed the recent acts of rebellion were merely German ploys, and that they were being set up to be punished. Jews were pleased to learn that someone had tried to assassinate the Jewish police chief; but they attributed the attempt to the Polish resistance, not believing that their fellow Jews had the strength or courage. Zivia was horrified to see anxious Jews tearing down ZOB posters and beating up comrades who tried to put up more.
Many fighters had been sent out of the ghetto to partisan groups in the forest, where they would be better armed, but most were killed on the way. Then a Young Guard leader, Josef Kaplan, was captured at a weapons storage site and killed. Another beloved leader went to rescue him; he, too, was caught and shot to death. Despondent, the group decided to move its cache to Dzielna. Regina Schneiderman, a young female member, put their weapons in a basket and set out, only to be stopped in the street by German soldiers, who found the arms. （As Antek later reflected: “You can imagine the size of our ‘armory’ if a girl could carry it in a basket.”） This trilogy of tragedies was “a stunning blow,” Zivia said. The group lost morale, commanders, and its plans.
The ZOB continued to debate: Should they fight immediately or strategize carefully? The talk was ceaseless. Meantime, in three Aktions carried out over three months, three hundred thousand Jews were transported from Warsaw to the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp, and 99 percent of the children from the Warsaw ghetto were killed. It appeared that there would be no Jewish future. The sixty thousand people left within the ghetto walls were unable to look one another in the eye because they had remained alive, Zivia later wrote.