Irena's Children Read online

But Jan had made his deal with the German inspector.

  The predawn hours, under cover of darkness, would have been a better time for this kind of stealth operation. But after curfew the patrols on the streets had shoot-to-kill orders. Jan knew that he would have to help the children crawl back through a breach in the wall that evening, as the last anxious residents rushed for home and cover before the streets went dangerously quiet. On the other side, Dr. Korczak assured Jan, someone from the orphanage would wait to meet them. Jan would go to the wall with the children himself. If he were honest with himself, his conscience was already nagging at him. He knew he could not expect any sympathy from Irena. Beside herself with disgust, she wanted nothing to do with Jan’s operation.

  On the street, the children edged close to him. Jan listened for every noise. Footsteps now could portend disaster. In the snow, everything seemed louder, and the children’s breath in the cold air sent up cloudy wisps of vapor. In his gloves, Jan could feel his fingertips growing cold and tried to rub them in his pockets. His head ached from listening, and when the code word that they had been waiting for came back in a young boy’s voice, Jan caught his breath involuntarily. He understood for the first time that it was, on the other side of the wall, a children’s operation. There was a little scuffle and rattle, and then a small passageway was cleared in an instant. The children did not wait for his instructions. One by one, without hesitation, the street children smiled their tired good-byes and wriggled past him into that other world. There was the girl with the bright hair ribbon. Good-bye, Mr. Dobraczyński, she whispered. There was the small boy who stumbled for an instant in the outsize shoes someone had found for him. And the cheeky pair of brothers whom he did not doubt would be back over the wall before the week was over. He waited to hear their quiet footsteps on the other side. “A few minutes before curfew,” Jan said, “I personally escorted the children to the ghetto wall. Each one went through, and thus they disappeared from the official list of young beggars.”

  The operation succeeded. When Irena checked up on them the next day at the ghetto orphanage, the old doctor assured her that the children had made it to him safely. She should have been relieved, she knew. She tried to understand the logic of Jan’s decision. But for Irena this was defeat on the deepest level. Never again would she sit by while children were returned to the ghetto. In the months to come, she would take new, bolder measures. She would smuggle more food and medicine. She would smuggle faster. She and Irka Schultz would manage to get over a thousand doses of vaccine into the walled quarter. Other friends and coworkers in her ever-growing and ever-bolder relief network—Jaga Piotrowska included—would smuggle in another five thousand. She would carry in wads of cash rolled in her undergarments and medicine in her workbag with the false bottom. Already, people throughout the Jewish quarter whispered from ear to ear that Irena—whom most knew only by her secret code name, “Jolanta”—was the woman who could manage anything.

  Irena would work now even more feverishly. And she would not tell Jan Dobraczyński what she was planning.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ghetto Juggernaut

  Warsaw, 1941–1942

  Irena’s boss Irka Schultz walked slowly away from the ghetto checkpoint. Relief flooded over her. It was always like this. Capricious, cruel things happened there at the gates, and she counted herself lucky any afternoon when she didn’t witness something that made her heart ache afterward for hours. Somewhere in the distance a gunshot rang out. A dog barked. A streetcar rattled. All the sounds of life in occupied Warsaw. But when she heard the sound of a manhole cover rattling underfoot, Irka jumped. It wasn’t that the sound was unfamiliar; she just knew heartache that afternoon was coming after all.

  The noise came again, the tinny sound of quiet scraping and a small child sniffling disconsolately. Looking quickly around her, Irka fell to her knees. She peeled off her gloves to get a better grip and lifted up the cover. The dirty ice from the street spread patches of damp on her skirt.

  Irka knew that there was only one reason anyone would be crawling along the city sewers: Jewish street children and ghetto smugglers made their treacherous commute to the Aryan side in search of food through these underground canals.

  Irka peered inside. The stench made her eyes water, and she turned away for a moment. When she looked back, a small child’s face, etched with fear and hunger, peered back up at her. The little girl had tightly combed blond hair and big blue eyes, but she was more than half-starved and now completely filthy. The child was too frail to climb out of the hole alone, and struggled. Irka tugged her up gently and hissed quietly into the sewer to see if anyone else would follow. Witaj! Czy jest tu ktoś? Hello! Is anyone there?

  But the girl was alone. Perhaps she had been left behind for moving too slowly. Irena’s heart caught when she saw a scrap of paper pinned to the girl’s dress with a thin sewing needle. On it, in a shaky hand, was written a single digit—the child’s age—a telegraphic mother’s plea for someone, some stranger, to help her daughter. That detail would stay with Irka always.

  Irka could see that the girl was weak. But she would have to walk at least a little bit of the way. Anti-Semitic hooligans and petty blackmailers prowled the areas near the ghetto, looking for anyone who looked desperate or famished enough to be Jewish. Jews on the Aryan side were hopelessly vulnerable to extortion. Stay calm, Irka urged herself. Walk slowly. Fear was the biggest tell of all. Parents who sent their children out of the ghetto reminded them urgently to wear the best disguise of all: happy faces. She smiled a bright, fake smile at the little girl and drew her fingers up along her cheeks in a silent gesture. Then she put a finger to her lips. Quiet. The child’s eyes grew wider.

  As they moved toward the shadows of a side street, Irka hurriedly considered. The girl needed a doctor. Irena could feel how hot and thin the girl’s hand was, and she tried not to hold it too tightly. Catastrophic. The word floated to mind and hung there stubbornly. That meant the orphanage on Nowogrodzka Street was the only option. There were physicians on staff.

  Irena Sendler had put a system in place already for this kind of situation. It wasn’t the first time they had done this. They discovered wasted Jewish foundlings on the wrong side of the wall with depressing regularity, and there was a code. She would clean the little girl up as best she could and get word to Irena. Then Irka would pick up the telephone and ring the Father Boduen children’s home. This time, perhaps, she would ask her friend Władysława, Can I stop by today to drop off that coat I borrowed? Today meant it was an emergency.

  • • •

  By the time Jan Dobraczyński returned the children to the ghetto, the office conspirators were almost certainly already placing Jewish children living wild on the Aryan side of the city with local Polish foster families and in citywide care institutions as the opportunity and the illegal paperwork presented itself. Sometime early in the winter of 1941–42 they started taking even more daring and organized action. This was what Irena had been planning.

  Conditions in the ghetto were deteriorating precipitously that winter. Everyone that year agreed that few winters in recent memory had ever been so cold or unforgiving. And that meant that, by the time the early spring arrived in Warsaw in 1942, Irena Sendler was no longer occasionally helping Jewish families. She and her cell were systematically helping Jews locate the paperwork that they needed to “disappear” into the city. In the autumn of 1941, a lucky break had shown them a new way to do it. The women had made contact with a local priest in the distant city of Lwów whose parish church had burned, along with all its records. The priest offered to give them his remaining cache of blank birth certificates, which now could not be cross-checked by German authorities. Irka had made the dangerous journey to fetch them and carried them back on the train, tucked in an old valise she tried to carry lightly. If the women could find a regular supply of blank documents, they had a solution. Lwów was about to have a birthrate explosion.

  That winter the women used a few of
the precious blank certificates from Lwów to save an old friend and his family. Dr. Witwicki and his family were still in hiding, and new Polish documents would take him out of constant danger. Irena was still smuggling into the ghetto the professor’s handmade dolls for the children, sculpted in a quiet room on Brzozowa Street in the Old Town. Irena had carried a new stash of dolls to Dr. Korczak’s ghetto orphanage especially, for the littlest of Jan Dobraczyński’s street children. She still fretted about those thirty-two youngsters, and by now she knew all their names and faces.

  Irena also badgered her friends in the ghetto—Adam, Ewa, Rachela, Józef, Ala—to flee and go into hiding on the Aryan side. Death stalked the ghetto. She would find them papers; she would find safe houses. She implored them all now. When they shook their heads sadly, Irena couldn’t hide her frustration and worry. It’s too risky to hide a Jew, Irena, Ewa told her over and over. Life was not so different now—not really, Ewa insisted. It was just the same work as on the Aryan side, where there were also hungry, homeless youngsters. “The children all just need a little heart and a lot of bread,” said Ewa. Irena doggedly tried to wear her down, to convince her. But Ewa would not risk the lives of her friends. Finally, Ewa was firm with her friend. “Please don’t ask me,” she pleaded with Irena, squeezing her friend’s hand kindly. “I won’t stay with you—I can’t endanger you like that.”

  With Adam the conversations were even more maddening. Adam was angry and impassioned. All around him were death and suffering. Crazed SS men used pedestrians for target practice. Bodies lined the ghetto streets like useless litter each morning. Men wept in the streets, begging. All this, and the Poles hated Jews nearly as much as the Germans. Irena wanted him to hide among them? She tried to reason with him, but everything just came out sounding defensive, and Adam retreated from her touch. Could their love survive this? The thought nagged at her. It would break her heart to lose Adam. He drew back into himself and his beloved books. He retreated to the past, trying to find answers somewhere in the dry histories of ancient empires for the nightmare present. When she tried to embrace him, tried to touch his arm or smooth his shirt collar, he turned away brusquely, and there was a small part of her that wondered, too: Was it only the ghetto standing between them? Or did he think in those moments of his Jewish wife and his mother’s sense of his failure? Would the fact that he was Jewish and she was “Aryan” divide them from each other, as the occupiers had always intended? Guilt and shame stalked every conscience inside these hellish walls. Children whimpered on the streets for a crumb of bread in front of the shops, and there was no choice if one had bread in one’s pocket but to avert one’s eyes in horror and walk on. Survival depended on it. But one knew shame in that moment.

  Besides, Adam said, he could not leave the youth center. Irena knew it was his trump card, his way of ending their argument. There was nothing she could say. Adam’s circle cared for the sickest and littlest of the ghetto orphans, and, like Ala’s colleague Dr. Landau, the lecturer at Ala’s clinic’s secret medical classes, Adam also passionately believed he was fighting on a battlefield in a war against barbarity. His safety, Adam reminded Irena gently, didn’t matter. She was risking her life daily for the street children. She was risking her life smuggling vaccines into the ghetto. If he asked her to stay at home to avoid the danger, would she? She knew she would not. So did Adam.

  So, instead, Irena and her friends on both sides of the wall threw themselves into a new and even more stunningly courageous mission. Irena would never again let a child be returned to the ghetto. They would find safe homes on the Aryan side for scores of Jewish children. In the spring of 1942, an estimated four thousand children lived alone on the streets of the Aryan side, and two thousand of them were Jewish.

  Some of the children on the Aryan side were homeless orphans trying to survive alone by begging and stealing. But desperate families were already sending well-loved but starving children across the wall—children like the little girl whom Irka Schultz discovered that afternoon in a sewer manhole. Sometimes parents came with them, and for a time families tried to hide together. More often than not, the parents perished, shot in the roundups or at the camps later. Sometimes a quiet sense of duty tore apart families sooner. Some family members were easier to save than others. It was a fact of life in the Jewish quarter. Who could abandon one’s aging parents? They could not make the dangerous passage across the walls. Children who could walk were sent out alone by stricken parents or guided out by smugglers into the hands of friends or strangers. Hundreds of children made that frightening passage through the sewers. In 1942, Wanda Ziemska was eight years old when she stepped into the murky waters. “Above the entrance to the sewer, I said good-bye to Father, who stayed behind,” she remembered. “The journey through the sewers was quite complicated. At times it looked like a dirty river. . . . I can remember how hard it was for me to climb out of the sewer—I couldn’t reach from one rung to another.” When Irena heard of children in danger and hiding on the Aryan side, she now had daring solutions.

  Soon, Irena would go one step further. What would be the fate of the children who were already orphaned inside the ghetto? Toddlers could not flee on their own initiative. There were no parents left to send them. She saw these children every day at Adam’s youth circle. And no matter how hard Adam worked to save them, he was failing. There was too much hunger and disease for small bodies.

  So Adam and Irena did the obvious. They started taking orphans out of the ghetto sometime that winter. With her epidemic control pass, it wasn’t even illegal if the child were desperately ill. Youngsters with a tuberculosis death sentence could be transported by ambulance to one of the remaining Jewish sanatoriums in Otwock. Once again she was walking in her father’s footsteps. And sometimes a cough might not be tuberculosis, and a child would disappear into a friend’s home in their old village. If she could not save Adam, together at least they could save a few of these children.

  If the false cases were discovered, the risks, of course, were colossal. Giving a Jewish child a piece of bread meant death—for both the giver and the receiver. Sending a child out of the ghetto to hide with a Polish family came at the price of a bullet to the head on a street corner. But the draconian consequences also meant, as Irena could not help but observe, that one might as well do more than just smuggle in vaccines. You could die only once, and she and Adam were united at least in action.

  • • •

  In time, there would be myriad routes in and out of the ghetto, and Irena would employ them all to smuggle out Jewish children. On the day Irka discovered the little girl in the Warsaw sewer, the women had already set up one of their first protocols in cooperation with the Father Boduen Catholic children’s home. It was a simple extension of their work in the social welfare offices, and Jaga Piotrowska and Irka Schultz were the network’s front women in this operation.

  There were two indispensable new partners by early 1942. The first was a warm and pretty young woman named Władysława—Władka—Marynowska. Friends marveled at how Władka’s upswept tumble of bright blond hair gave her the air of a romantic heroine, and in every photograph of her she is smiling. Władka was also that year the mother of a sturdy little boy, and she worked as a senior housemother and social worker at the Father Boduen children’s home for Polish infants, toddlers, and homeless mothers. Władka’s job was to vet prospective foster parents, and that meant that she knew better than anyone how to find caregivers who were willing to take in children for the customary boarding fee the city offered.

  Drawing Władka into their conspiracy was an easy decision, born of necessity. One did not draw friends lightly into this network, especially not friends with small children—not if one could help it. And Władka was an old friend already. But that winter the women were faced with a crisis: they had a Jewish child who needed a home, and there was a desperate shortage of false identity papers. In hushed and urgent tones, Irena and Irka considered. Irka fretted. She trusted Władka. More than
that, she trusted Irena’s judgment. But the Gestapo was already watching the Father Boduen children’s home, and Irka worried that the risks were too great. But will the child be safe there, Irena? The question hung in the air. Irena lived with that question always. “You can be calm about the child,” came Irena’s steady reply. “Władka Marynowska is there.” Irka nodded and reached for her coat. She would go now and make the invitation.

  It was a short walk from the social welfare office on Złota Street to the orphanage. Irka walked briskly. Her path to Nowogrodzka Street took her south only a few blocks. The ghetto checkpoint where Złota and Twarda Streets met had been sealed off with bricks and barbed wire in 1941, when the ghetto boundary was moved northward. The shifting wall was a constant presence. Like Irena and Jaga and Jadwiga, Irka was still in and out of the ghetto several times a day, and this toddler was one of “hers.” It was hard not to feel protective. The orphanage was an imposing brick building, and she was still planning what she would say as she climbed the steps, but she was saved from further agonizing when Władka greeted her with a friendly hello. Would Władka take a walk with her? Władka’s eyes narrowed intelligently. Anything was better than trying to talk in a building where they all knew Gestapo spies were planted.

  Irka knew she could trust Władka. Or she thought she could. But she still hesitated. The war placed all sorts of decent people in impossible positions. Władka waited. Irka took a deep breath. There’s a toddler . . . She faltered. There are several children. We need to place them in care . . . Władka brightened. Of course, Irka, it is no problem. Just take them to the office and—

  Irka had taken a deep breath and now interrupted: Władka, there are no papers. Then she waited. There. It was done. Only a fool could misunderstand the situation, and nothing about Władka Marynowska was foolish. An undocumented child was almost certainly Jewish. Władka considered. She kicked a bit of melting ice with her boot and then looked up to the sky. She saw the wisps of clouds. Perhaps she thought of her own little boy, Andrzej. She had to think of his safety. The Gestapo was all around her. A spy could be a wet nurse or a desperate mother. Old friends could even be provocateurs in this crazy world of the occupation. The question was not whether she wished to help but whether she could trust Irka. She turned and looked at her friend, and Irka looked back at her. Then Władka took a deep breath. Yes, I will take the child. Irka Schultz took a deep breath also. Thank you.