Irena's Children Read online

  There was one terrible flaw in the plan to protect Henia with a work permit. The Toebbens factory didn’t let mothers bring children with them during their crushingly long hours. Elżbieta—baby “Bieta”—was six months old and breastfeeding. So the family turned to their friend Ewa Rechtman. Elżbieta’s older cousin was already safely in hiding on the Aryan side, thanks to Ewa’s intervention and the raw courage of Irena. Irena had smuggled Bieta’s cousin across the checkpoints.

  When Irena Sendler knocked on the family’s door, she knew her proposal was audacious. But she also knew that for the Koppel family and for all the families in the ghetto, the options were disappearing quickly. Would Henia and Josel let her try to save their baby? Saving the infant was also the only lifeline, Josel knew, for Henia. His greatest strength of character was a clearsighted understanding.

  Always, families asked Irena the same agonizing question: What guarantee can you give of our baby’s safety? Josel Koppel asked it now of her earnestly and urgently. Irena could only answer these anxious worries honestly. I can promise you nothing except that I will risk my life today trying, she told them. She could not even promise that she and Bieta would make it out alive from the ghetto that day out. Death was waiting for them both if they were discovered at the checkpoint. They might be shot at random on the doorstep while leaving, for that matter. People were shot every day in the ghetto for the most trivial reasons. Josel sighed and nodded. He knew that this was true. It didn’t make the family’s decision any easier, but the ghetto was already a death sentence for a baby. Henia and Josel agreed to give their daughter to this small, determined stranger.

  Irena witnessed scenes like this over and over, and these were the moments that left her sleepless when she woke from dreams of it later. The nightmares came and went, and Adam held her close when she told him afterward and whispered to her that she was just getting worn-out and tired. Now she looked on as Henia held the sleeping baby close to her chest, breathing in the scent of her infant, and Irena saw a face wet with tears that did not stop coming. There was no choice now but to act quickly. Soon the family would not be able to finish what they had started. Some days Irena didn’t know if she would be able to either.

  Irena reached out and began to take the infant. Henia’s green eyes pleaded with Irena. The tears welled up in Irena’s eyes, and the two women gazed at each other for a moment. Henia rocked Bieta softly and then just a little bit more firmly. The infant kept on sleeping. It was good. Irena set her hand for a moment on the small chest, just to make sure her breath wasn’t too shallow, then nodded. The tranquilizer was working. Henia Koppel let go of her baby.

  Irena promised again. Yes, she would send them word to let them know that they had made it out safely. Yes, she assured Henia, she would make sure, no matter what, that the silver baby spoon engraved with the child’s birthdate went everywhere with Elżbieta. But now Irena and the young builder assisting her on this mission, Henryk, the stepson of one of her collaborators, had to act quickly. They were about to risk all their lives to smuggle the six-month-old Elżbieta out of the ghetto.

  Irena laid the baby into a wooden toolbox and tucked the blanket around her firmly, making sure they didn’t block the little girl’s air passages. Irena shut the lid, and the hasp clicked into place. On the street, Henryk deftly tucked the box among the piles of bricks in the back of a flatbed truck and gave Irena a quick, tense smile. His contractor’s work pass let him come in and out of the ghetto, and he was yet another new addition to Irena’s network. Irena pulled herself up into the passenger’s seat, and the truck lurched into motion as Henryk manipulated the old clutch. Irena turned sharply, praying that none of the bricks had shifted or fallen.

  They drove in silence toward Nalewki Street, past the closed bakeries and rusted street signs. Past the narrow apartment buildings, and past the ragged and starving people who littered the street corners of the busy avenue. When they reached the Nalewki Street gate, Irena groaned. Damn. She wanted this part to be over, but there was a long line this afternoon. Crossing the checkpoint was the most dangerous part of any day. Minutes ticked by, and the waiting was agony. Irena’s hands were cold with sweat and slippery as she fingered the door handle. As if they could escape now anyhow, she reminded herself. There was no turning back from the checkpoint. At last a soldier gestured them forward, and Henryk handed over their ghetto passes with cool self-possession that impressed Irena. The guard looked hard at Irena, then at Henryk. What’s in the back? His eyes narrowed, and this time Henryk stumbled with the answers. So they wouldn’t make it out of the ghetto today alive after all. It was always a possibility. Henryk stepped slowly from the truck and moved as he was ordered. Irena waited.

  From the back now, she could hear the sounds of the flaps opening and shutting. The soldier knocked his heavy boots against the bricks and poked under the canvases and in corners. Irena held her breath. And then, a moment later, Henryk was climbing back in beside her, and the guards waved them through the gates to freedom. On the Aryan side, Irena grasped Henryk’s arm in relief as the truck slowed at a street corner. Are you fine the rest of the way alone, Henryk? It will look better. Henryk nodded. Irena slid from the seat and waved to Henryk as the truck moved on, and then she turned her footsteps in the other direction. All Henryk had to do from there was take the baby home in the toolbox to his stepmother. Irena knew that, if anyone were being watched, she herself was the greatest danger to this mission.

  Henryk’s stepmother, a middle-aged midwife named Stanisława Bussold, was one of Irena’s trusted “emergency room” operatives, one of the liaisons who worked closely in the medical underground with Ala Gołąb-Grynberg and Helena Szeszko. Irena called places like this, somewhat bureaucratically, her “protective readiness distribution points,” and they were risky operations. In their first hours and days outside the ghetto, someone had to clean the smuggled children, feed them, and get them medical care, which they often needed urgently after months of starvation. If they had “bad” looks, there would be makeovers to lighten their hair color, and circumcised little Jewish boys were often transformed into little Polish girls for their own protection. If the children were old enough, the “emergency room” guardians would also teach them Catholic prayers and how to speak Polish. Catechism drills were a favorite German “test” to catch out Jews, and knowing one’s childhood prayers by heart was the most basic tool of wartime survival. In their first weeks on the Aryan side, the children had to learn how to erase any hint of being Jewish.

  • • •

  Smuggling children out in toolboxes was a high-risk operation, and Irena was searching feverishly in 1942 for better options—options that would let them move not just one child but dozens. “It became necessary to take the children to the Aryan side” that spring, Irena said bluntly, “because it was hell inside the Ghetto. Under Hitler’s and Himmler’s orders, children were dying on the streets with the consent of the entire world.” And Irena did what she always did when she was troubled for answers. She turned to her friends and to Dr. Radlińska.

  Helena Radlińska had not left the convent on Gęsia Street since the autumn of 1939, but there was nothing reclusive about the way the old professor was living. Her small rooms were the heart of a daring salon where the underground gathered. When Irena tapped on the small doorway now, she was met with people coming and going. Some were students clutching notebooks, part of the professor’s secret classroom. Others had faces her age. A few she recognized from bygone days at the Polish Free University. Sometime in the winter of 1941–42, three of those faces belonged to her old college friends Stanisław Papuziński; his partner Zofia Wędrychowska; and their sister-in-law, Izabela Kuczkowska—Iza. Together, the professor’s three former students had formed a daring group running another of the resistance cells that Dr. Radlińska was coordinating from her convent offices. By the spring of 1942, Dr. Radlińska was at the hub of several networks helping to save Jewish children.

  For months Iza had be
en in charge of a smuggling operation, ferrying food and medicine into the ghetto through the basement corridors of the courthouse on Leszno Street. Now, Stanisław, Zofia, and Iza were all about to give Irena one part of the solution that she so desperately needed. Leszno Street straddled the ghetto, and there were doors that opened in both directions if one could just get past the checkpoints on the main floors. If Iza and a helpful janitor in the building could get supplies in, they could surely take children out in the other direction, they reasoned—as long as Irena could find a place to hide them safely. And, for that, Irena had an entire secret social welfare network. Dozens of school-aged children left the ghetto that spring, guided through the courthouse.

  But that wasn’t the only route that Irena used now. Leon Szeszko, whose wife, Helena, was one of Irena’s team nurses and most dedicated collaborators, hit upon another daring idea. Leon worked in the civil transportation office, and every day he knew of a streetcar on the Muranów line that ran in—and out—of the ghetto. Overnight, empty cars were parked in the grubby depot on the northern edge of the ghetto. Who would notice a forgotten package or a weathered old bag tucked under a seat on the first quiet run of the morning? Irena instantly saw the possibilities there too. Sleeping babies fitted snugly inside briefcases. Someone would have to brave the streets of the ghetto in the hours before dawn to make the drop-off in the empty railyard, of course—someone with rare permission to travel after curfew. It was permission given only to a handful of people in the Jewish quarter, but, by great fortune, the chief nurse in the ghetto, Ala Gołąb-Grynberg, had it. And she also had the experience needed to administer just the right dose of sedative to a tiny body.

  Soon, when the Muranów streetcar rattled empty down the tracks at daybreak, unnoticed packages rattled southward along with them, waved on unseen by guards at the barbed-wire checkpoints. At the first stop on the Aryan side, Irena climbed aboard swiftly, just another city resident anxious to get on with her morning. Beneath her feet a bag rested, quietly waiting. She rode a long way, quietly looking out the window, until the last passenger who had seen her board alighted. Then Irena would smooth her hair and gather up her packages.

  And there were other ways too. There was another small underground cell that had gathered around the All Saints Catholic Church that straddled the boundary of the ghetto. The boundary followed the curves and turns of Twarda Street, and the All Saints Church had doors that faced in both directions. Dr. Radlińska’s cousin, Dr. Ludwik Hirszfeld, worked there in secret with Ala’s contacts to smuggle medical supplies through tunnels dug out in the church’s crypts and basements. And Irena herself still slipped off to the meetings of the underground press that took place in the old rectory potting shed, where her friend, the attorney Józef Zysman, proposed another route that Irena could use to save children. In hushed tones, Józef explained how the junior priest, Father Czarnecki, was with them in the resistance. The senior priest, Father Marceli Godlewski, he said, was willing to provide new birth certificates. Any child with “good” looks who would learn prayers well enough and was a fearless actor could walk out the front door on the Aryan side.

  For months Ala had been on the front lines, helping Irena and her coworkers transport children to the Aryan side. As chief nurse of the ghetto hospitals and as a Judenrat liaison with the Jewish Society for the Protection of Health, Ala still had a ghetto pass. For months she had been using the pass to guide children out of the Jewish quarter, delivering them to the apartment of another new conspirator in Irena’s office network, a fellow social worker named Róża Zawadzka. The orphaned toddler in Ala’s charge, Dahlia, was three, and Ala had already spirited Dahlia to safety, passing her into the steady hands of Irena and her network. But Ala’s daughter, Rami, was six, and she could not bear to part with her little girl. So she had waited. Ala now made an agonizing decision. She knew she couldn’t wait any longer.

  What worried Ala in the spring of 1942, as she watched the noose that was the ghetto tighten around them, was how much longer ghetto passes would be permitted. Rumors swirled through the ghetto of coming deportations. Irena begged Ala to act quickly to save both herself and Rami. I will find a place for you both, Ala. Ala shook her head sadly. Ala wasn’t leaving either. But she agreed at last to part with her daughter. One day in 1942—Rami does not remember the month or what gate they passed through on their way out of the ghetto—Ala took Rami with her to visit Róża. It wasn’t the first time they had gone there together, and so at first, nothing seemed unusual. For a long while Ala and Róża talked in quiet voices, and then when it was time to go her mother kissed her gently and shut the door of the apartment behind her. “One day she left me with Róża,” Rami says simply. “She visited me once after. Then I never again saw her.”

  At first Irena shuttled Ala’s little girl from one orphanage to another, but Rami was one of the difficult children to place. She did not look like what a German thought of a typical Polish child. Róża and Irena finally found a foster family for the little girl, in the home of two Polish aristocrats and underground activists, Jadwiga and Janusz Strzałecka, who had a daughter of their own named Elżbieta. But Rami wanted her mother.

  • • •

  The children numbered in the hundreds, and getting children out of the ghetto was not the hardest part of this operation. Placing them safely on the Aryan side was soon where Irena was running into logistical complications. Irena had run out of other options. She needed Jan Dobraczyński’s assistance.

  She and Jan were not natural political allies, and she had not forgotten their fierce argument about the fate of those thirty-two street children. But by now the conspirators numbered as many as twenty-five people on the Aryan side of the city and at least as many again inside the ghetto. Ten of her Polish collaborators—all four of the original conspirators included—were actively smuggling children out of the ghetto, along with Ala, Helena, Iza, and some of the teenage Jewish girls in Ala’s youth circle. The growing numbers were unmanageable without someone higher up in the orphanage division helping with placements and paperwork. Jaga was sure that Jan would not disappoint them this time. Irena at last took Jan Dobraczyński into her secret.

  Irena called together a meeting of women in his division, and a group of a half dozen of them—Irena and Jaga at the lead—marched into Jan’s office together. “One day, my staff, namely social workers in the Department, came to me about this matter,” Jan explained. “That whole group . . . had for some time, of their own volition, been running operations extracting Jewish children from the ghetto and placing them into one or another of the Section’s care centers on the basis of falsified records and interviews, after arranging the entire matter directly with the heads of the different centers. However, possibilities there had now been exhausted.”

  And Jan did not refuse them. By the spring of 1942, to refuse to help the resistance was its own kind of danger. Those who collaborated with the Germans were already facing justice in secret Polish courts, which brought down its own death sentences. Jan didn’t agree for that reason, though. He was already in the Polish resistance on the political right, and no one questioned his patriotism. Jan agreed because his faith and his conscience nagged at him. He remembered the children he had returned to the ghetto, too, and it had troubled him afterward.

  Jan freely acknowledged in the years that followed that his involvement in the office network was nothing compared to the risks Irena and her friends were taking. He did what Irena asked of him. “[But] I did not look for these children. I did not transport them. I did not create the false papers,” he admitted. What Jan could do, Irena explained, was use his contacts to come to an understanding with the nuns at the Father Boduen children’s home and at institutions across Poland about the transfer of Jewish “orphans.” And Jan agreed that he would make this happen. “Very quickly,” Irena reported, Jan followed through on the promise, reaching out to his contacts in the resistance to find reliable partners. “Jan Dobraczyński came to an underst
anding with the underground,” she explained, “which agreed to guide the Jewish children to centers.” With the nuns who ran the homes, Jan made another standing arrangement. Anytime Irena needed to transfer a Jewish child secretly, he would personally sign the request. “Normally,” Jaga explained, “the section manager would not sign these papers. Jan’s signature was a code, [a signal] that we were dealing with a child, as we said then, requiring special care and attention.” From then on, Ala was in contact with Jan Dobraczyński nearly constantly as Irena’s ghetto liaison. It was increasingly Ala who coordinated advance logistics with the Catholic charities when a ghetto child needed to be saved.

  • • •

  Where Bieta Koppel would end up, no one yet knew for certain, but successes like this meant everything to Irena. For the moment, the infant would stay hidden at the home of Stanisława Bussold, who would have to find some story to explain to nosy Volksdeutsche neighbors how a woman in her late fifties happened to suddenly have a crying six-month-old baby at home. Soon, in the normal course of things, Bieta would move on from the “emergency room” to permanent shelter. When she did, only Irena would know where she was going and that Henia and Josel Koppel were her parents. It was a chain of knowing as fragile as Irena’s life and the flimsy bits of tissue paper on which that truth was written, but it was for Bieta’s safety. Irena added one more name to the list of children. “What we had on those lists,” Irena revealed in her typical matter-of-fact fashion, “was the real first and last name of the child . . . based on their birth certificate, as well as their current address. This data was necessary in order to be able to provide them with money, clothing, medicine, and also . . . so that we could find them after the war.” On that scrap of paper, next to the entry “Elżbieta Koppel,” was penciled in the name of her new identity, “Stefcia Rumkowski.”