Irena's Children Read online

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  A few days after baby Bieta was taken across the ghetto walls to safety, a man sat in the darkness of the ghetto thinking about the fate of Warsaw’s Jewish children. Dr. Janusz Korczak was awake in a small room at number 16, Sienna Street, writing. He had been gripped all day with a grim sense of foreboding. The doctor was in his early sixties, and the following day, July 22, 1942, was his birthday.

  It had been a good life and a long one—although the last few years had been a terrible struggle. He had already been in and out of prison during the occupation for small acts of defiance against the Germans. His refusal to wear the armband with the Star of David had very nearly been fatal. Dr. Korczak had no illusions about the ghetto or about what his time in prison had cost him. He could tell by looking in the mirror that it had wasted him. He was a skinny old man now, bald and stooped, and he was tired.

  In another room, perhaps Stefania was sleeping already. He and Stefania Wilczyńska, one of the other orphanage directors, had been partners, making a life together for each other and hundreds of children in their schools and orphanages for years, and it had been a strange half marriage. Stefania was in love with the doctor. Everyone could see it but Janusz Korczak. All he could see was the children. The doctor couldn’t sleep. Turning to his journal, he poured out his thoughts and longings onto the paper. “It is a difficult thing,” he wrote, “to be born and to learn to live. What remains for me is a much easier task: to die. . . . I do not know what I would say to the children as a farewell. I would want to say so much. . . . [It is] ten o’clock. Shots: two, several, two, one, several. Perhaps my window is poorly darkened right now. But I will not interrupt my writing. The opposite: my thoughts take flight (a single shot).”

  The doctor’s sense of doom was sadly merited. In the morning the resettlements that the inhabitants of the ghetto had been awaiting anxiously for months started. There had been no warning. As Janusz Korczak sat awake in the small hours thinking, those outside the ghetto walls might have seen something ominous and fearful: dozens of armed men surrounding the area. In darkness the ghetto was sealed, and soldiers crept to stations on the nearby rooftops and at the checkpoints, prepared to shoot down any residents bent on escaping.

  By breakfast, the leader of the Judenrat, a man named Adam Czerniaków, had his orders. Gross-Aktion Warsaw had started. The removal of Jews from the city, he was informed, was even now beginning. Czerniaków wrote in his diary that day, “We are told that all the Jews . . . will be deported to the East. By four p.m. today a contingent of 6,000 people must be provided and this (at the minimum) will be the daily quota.” He was made personally responsible for ensuring that the Jewish police met the quota of fellow Jews boarding the trains that day at the Umschlagplatz, the loading platform for the railcars.

  Any ghetto resident who worked for the Jewish police, who was a member of the Judenrat, or who was capable of significant labor in Warsaw was exempt from the resettlement orders. The price that week of German-issued work permits doubled again, and the ghetto was instantly divided into fortunate and unfortunate. Those categorically not able to work—and thus destined for the railcars—included the sick, the half-starved, the elderly, and all the ghetto’s children.

  Irena rushed to the ghetto the instant the word of the deportations reached her. She needed to see Adam. She needed to know that he was safe; otherwise this panic in her gut would cripple her. Adam knew that she would be frantic, and when she made her way to the youth center, he was waiting to reassure her. He had not been caught up in the first day’s roundups—and he wasn’t likely to be caught up in the next day’s roundups either, he told Irena. The word in the ghetto was that only the old and the very young and those who were not capable of working would be taken. Adam was just the kind of person who might flex an arm jokingly, with a tired smile, in the kind of reassuring silent gesture that said, See, I’m young and tough. Adam could always make Irena smile. For now, Adam had a job, and a job meant safety. Rachela, Ewa, Józef, and Ala were safe, too, then. They all had jobs. Irena tried to tell herself that none of them were in immediate danger.

  But both Adam and Irena knew already that it wasn’t quite so simple. The youth center was in chaos, and there were far fewer young people than normal. Parents were keeping their children close as the word spread throughout the Jewish quarter, and the fear and uncertainty on the streets were palpable. Those who were rounded up most quickly were the orphans and the street children, who had no one to turn to. Adam’s work kept him safe. But there was a voice in Irena’s head that kept repeating an awful question. When the children were deported, there would be no need for youth centers. Then what would happen?

  On July 23, the second day of the action, the Judenrat leader, faced with delivering a new order for ten thousand bodies and knowing it meant aiding in the murder of infants and toddlers, committed suicide in a long-overdue crisis of conscience by swallowing cyanide in his office. The Germans just made other prominent Jews and the Jewish police responsible for delivering the quotas. At first, naturally, there were few volunteers for these resettlements. The scenes playing out on the streets were vicious, and most residents now preferred to stay out of sight in their apartments. When quota numbers started coming up short, police cordoned off streets, emptied buildings, and marched stricken residents under armed guard to the depot. Soon the goose steps of the Jewish police echoed through the streets of the ghetto each morning starting at eight a.m. for the roundups. To argue or resist meant instant sidewalk execution.

  At first, having work papers sometimes mattered. Lucky residents at the house roundups waved them like a magic talisman. They had cost a family’s last savings to buy them at astronomical prices. Already, though, there was growing pressure to make up the number of bodies at any cost, and all that really mattered were the German quotas. On the street the “selections” were made. To one side went those selected as fit for work gangs or slave labor in the German munitions factories. To the other stood those destined that day for “resettlement” to Treblinka. One member of the Polish underground who witnessed the roundups that first day—a man who knew Irena—wrote, “Wednesday, July 22, 1942. So this is the end of the ghetto that has been fighting desperately to stay alive for two years. . . . Jewish police have been hunting humans since noon . . . [C]rowds are led to the connection track in the square of Stawki Street . . . [W]hen a car was full, it was wired shut with barbed wire . . . It is raining and the sight of this agony is . . . unbearable.”

  Irena, with her epidemic control pass, was still going in and out of the ghetto several times a day, along with Irka, Jaga, Jadwiga, and Helena. The German strategy was to keep up the illusion for as long as possible that this was the resettlement of the unproductive sectors of the ghetto population. Medical care and epidemic control was part of that fiction. Because of their disease-control passes, they were among the relatively few Polish residents of Warsaw who were firsthand witnesses to the coming horror. And they would all risk their lives trying to stop it.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Good Fairy of the Umschlagplatz

  Warsaw, July–August 1942

  Getting children out of the ghetto now took on a terrible urgency. Irena was desperate in the first hours of the deportations to get in touch with her friend and conspirator Ala Gołąb-Grynberg. All that first afternoon she couldn’t find her anywhere. Ala wasn’t at her youth center offices. Looking around the quiet room and the tidy circle of chairs, Irena could still remember sitting there with Ala, listening to Dr. Landau’s typhus lectures. Irena tried to find Ala at home on Smocza Street, just a few doors down from the youth center. She wasn’t there either.

  The second morning in the ghetto, Irena was growing frantic with worry. Desperate, Irena tried looking for her at the medical clinics in the ghetto, where Ala was still the chief nurse for the Jewish quarter. Someone told her at last that Ala was at the Umschlagplatz already. Irena’s heart sank. She would go to the Umschlagplatz. She had to save Ala
.

  At the loading area, the barbed wire and misery of the pulsing crowds assaulted Irena’s senses and all her sensibilities. Hot tears started to her eyes, and she felt like gagging. Thousands of bodies pressed mercilessly together in the summer heat. The whiff of excrement and sweat and terror was already powerful. There were no facilities, no waiting rooms. There was just this fetid square, baking in the sun, and endless fear and misery. She stared among the crowd, craning her neck. She would never find Ala. But she had to.

  There was a sudden commotion somewhere to the right, and a flash of white. Standing on her tiptoes in the crowd, Irena searched again. Somewhere she caught a glimpse of some black frizzy hair that she was sure she recognized. It disappeared among the jostling masses. Then at last she spotted Ala. Just outside the wire boundary, at the edge of the Umschlagplatz, a makeshift medical clinic had appeared from nowhere within hours of the deportations. Around it buzzed nurses and doctors. Ala—soft-spoken, gentle Ala with her poet’s soul but fighter’s spirit . . . Irena saw instantly that Ala was already emerging that morning as one of the greatest heroines in the ghetto. She was the lead conspirator in a spectacular rescue mission, a ruse played out with riveting bravado right under the noses of the Germans.

  It hadn’t begun as a ruse, Ala explained to her friend quickly. But in the end one had to fight fire with fire. When the word of the resettlements whipped through the ghetto the day before, Ala told Irena how she had rushed to the hospital. Jewish doctors and nurses—friends and colleagues—milled about anxiously. Perhaps, the hospital staff tried to reassure themselves, these were in fact only resettlements. Ala, with her contacts in the underground, knew better. She had heard the stories about Chełmno and believed the broken man who told them. But the destination hardly mattered now. To send those who were frail or delirious on a hard journey to the east was tantamount to a death sentence, wherever the journey ended. A friend caught her arm as she was rushing past. Ala, there has to be a medical clinic at the train depot. Think of all those people. Ala turned to him. Nachum Remba was right. Ala nodded.

  Nachum Remba was not a doctor. He was a thirty-two-year-old clerk in the Judenrat offices who managed funding and paperwork for her clinics. And, like Ala and Arek, he and his wife, Henia Remba, were activists in the Jewish resistance.

  Nachum was a tall, dark-haired man and something of a jokester, always making wry cracks that had people laughing. Ala liked his dry sense of humor and stubborn optimism. But there wasn’t much to laugh about in the ghetto that morning. Nachum had a crazy idea. Would Ala join him? What if they rounded up some real doctors and nurses and set up a “medical sanitation” point and dispensary on the outside corner of the Umschlagplatz plaza? It would require, he warned her, some of her brave and brilliant acting. Nachum and Ala both came from famous and tightly knit theatrical families where inside jokes were common. Nachum couldn’t help it. Ala rolled her eyes and instantly agreed to help him.

  So they did it. Ala and Nachum pretended that they had permission to set up a clinic. They requisitioned an area near the loading docks, a space bordered by barbed wire, and opened for some urgent medical business. They would identify anyone too weak or too young to travel and insist on treatment and sometimes a hospital transfer. They would also find a way to save important members of the Jewish resistance—which included Arek, who was somewhere out in the forests with the partisans.

  Very soon a skinny twenty-year-old named Marek Edelman, the coleader of a paramilitary group known as the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ŻOB), joined their network at the square at their “official” resistance liaison. Marek had jet-black hair and a boyish air, but inside the ghetto he was already emerging as one of the two or three most important people in the ghetto resistance movement. One day, he would lead the ghetto Jews in a dramatic uprising. But in the summer of 1942 at Ala’s Umschlagplatz clinic, Marek was charged with coordinating the transfers between the trackside refuge and the ghetto hospital. Marek Edelman’s ties to the underground meant he had no illusions about where these boxcars were headed. It started out as a project to save the weakest and most vulnerable and to liberate the ghetto’s most dedicated activists. It quickly became a race to save anyone possible.

  What their “rescue brigade” accomplished was astonishing. Nachum Remba played his part to the hilt. He was acting for his life and the lives of others. He convinced the Germans that he was the chief doctor in the ghetto and Ala was the chief nurse. They played along with the German ruse that these were simply resettlements. To keep up the façade, smug Germans humored these duped and deluded Jewish doctors and nurses. Maintaining order during the liquidations was the chief objective for the occupiers, and a few Jews, more or less now, would not matter.

  Within days Nachum Remba was the most famous person at the Umschlagplatz, and his authority as the chief doctor of the ghetto—with the aid of some well-placed bribes and a white doctor’s coat—went unchallenged even by the Germans. He and Ala insisted that those who were too ill or too young to make a train voyage be released to them and saved from the trains. They commandeered a hospital ambulance and started loading up adults and children. Marek Edelman moved among the milling crowd, his pockets stuffed with documents signed by Ala certifying that the fortunate recipient of those papers was too sick to travel.

  The brigade could not save everyone. That much was obvious. Out of the three hundred thousand people deported from the railway square that summer and into the autumn, this small group saved, in the brief, three-week window that it existed, a mere two or three hundred of their neighbors. But those were hundreds of lives that mattered. They were lives that echo still in that exponential way of generations. Among those they saved were all the children from the orphanage at number 27, Twarda Street, whom the Germans had marked for deportation to Treblinka. They saved a resistance fighter named Edwin Weiss. And they saved an old friend, Jonas Turkow, the Jewish actor who knew well both Ala’s cousin, Wiera Gran, and Irena Sendler. Ala personally pulled from the crowd as well one of Jonas’s younger sisters.

  The day that he was saved, Jonas could only remember afterward being astonished by Nachum Remba’s raw courage. At the Umschlagplatz, Jonas was caught up in the crush as residents pushed and surged inside the barbed-wire corrals, on the brink of panic. In their midst, Nachum appeared with a placid smile on his face, exuding confidence and calm. Jonas knew that anyone else who approached a German in this manner would have been shot instantly. He and the others had seen it happen. On the loading docks, a bullet was the answer to a Jewish question. But Nachum didn’t ask questions so much as he gave orders. This one is too sick to make the difficult journey east, he would say, pointing and shrugging good-naturedly, as if it were of no particular interest. Nachum knew the consummate Jewish wisdom of the ghetto: no fear and no sad faces. Those whom Nachum snatched from the masses were trundled off to the infirmary. Jonas was one of them. Life or death: it was cruelly random.

  Inside the infirmary, Ala ordered the “sick” patients into beds. All around Jonas the nurses were busy putting on rolls of fresh white bandages. It seemed like a dream to Jonas. Was it possible that he was dead already? A German appeared at the door and the pace grew frenetic. Then Jonas knew that he was indeed still in the ghetto. Jonas lay very still and tried to make himself small until the German disappeared. At last, the all-clear signal came. The doors to the clinic closed. The ambulances were rolling up to move them.

  Next, the patients ran a terrible gauntlet. There was no guarantee of safety even—especially—in a clinic in the ghetto. At the door, the cool Germans and their fearsome Ukrainian lackeys made capricious inspections. A man near Jonas did not look sick enough. A rifle butt crashed down on men like this, and Jonas could hear the man’s cries of agony as he was dragged to the loading platform. Ala and Nachum looked on in horror. Ala gave her nurses the only orders she could imagine. We will have to break their legs if they look too healthy. Explain to them the choices. Anything t
o convince the Germans someone could not travel. The screams of agony were not acting. Ala could not spare the few remaining sedative doses on the fit. She needed those for the children. Her flowing white coat hung on her thin frame, and more than once Ala did something else bold and reckless. It was for this she saved the drugs in the dispensary. Fussy and frightened children, unable to feign disease, were gently helped to sleep in order to save them, because the guards treated the smallest infants the most harshly. Babies were dashed to the ground and swung by the heels against railway cars until their skulls burst as their hysterical mothers wailed in anguish. So Ala tucked the littlest ones under her coat and marched them out past the sentries, cradled beneath her armpit, and walked them into the waiting ambulances too. She and Remba had diverted an ambulance and Ala trundled patients inside. She only had to get them as far as Irena.

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  Ala and Nachum’s wild ruse continued for weeks. Irena came to Ala each day, always asking what she and her network could possibly do to help. On the loading platform mothers now thrust their babies at Ala, the woman everyone called “the good fairy.” For sixteen hours a day, Ala and Nachum worked alongside the platform. They were a constant presence, in constant motion. And on the afternoon of August 6 that meant that they were among the last unwilling witnesses to one of the ghetto’s cruelest tragedies. On that morning, as a prelude to the complete liquidation of the “little ghetto,” the SS came for the children at Dr. Korczak’s orphanage. Among the doctor’s nearly two hundred orphans were the thirty-two Jewish boys and girls whom Jan Dobraczyński had returned through a chink in the wall less than a year earlier. They were the boys and girls whom Irena already thought of as her children.