Irena's Children Read online

  One day in 1942 a Jewish man in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw took the risk of making an unannounced visit to Jan Dobraczyński’s office. The man was a community leader. He explained to the astonished welfare office boss that he was a doctor. Although the name of this mysterious visitor was never recorded, the Jewish envoy was almost certainly Dr. Adolf Berman, the wartime director of CENTOS, the orphan care organization in charge of the ghetto’s youth circles. Dr. Berman knew Irena well and admired her work. About Jan Dobraczyński he had a different perspective.

  I have come to speak to you about the issue of baptizing Jewish children, Dr. Berman said bluntly. He had thrown aside concerns about denunciations and blackmailers. He was risking arrest in coming. But the doctor demanded, on behalf of the Jewish community, a frank conversation and some kind of explanation. Everyone in underground circles knew that there were anonymous social workers scrambling to hide Jewish children in church orphanages. But now the word had spread that those children were being baptized as Catholics. Why, the doctor wanted to know, were these children being initiated into another faith? What was Jan’s agenda? All the children needed were the documents and a safe place to stay until their families could reclaim them from this terror.

  For their safety, came Jan’s blasé answer. Surely that’s obvious. Jan shrugged his shoulders and gave the doctor a thin smile. Jan had no interest in debating philosophy. Baptism was the price of his assistance, and the Jewish community could take it or leave it. The doctor was indignant. Paperwork was one thing, of course. Yes, the children needed papers. Give the children baptism papers, by all means. But did the children have to be alienated spiritually from their families by ritual? Did they have to speak the words of conversion? Jan was firm—rigid, even—on this point. If children and their parents want them to return to the Jewish faith when the war is over, Jan said coolly, this will be the child’s decision. Until then, the children in the convent homes, he insisted, would be raised as Catholics. They would be raised—for such were Jan’s blinders—as what he understood to be Polish. “Those are tough terms,” the doctor snapped. Jan shrugged. Jewish parents were not in a position to argue.

  • • •

  Irena was caught in the middle. She accepted that there were certain practical realities of wartime. But she was also the one who stood in broken-down, ruined apartments in the ghetto and begged Jewish families to trust her with the lives of their children. She was the one who had to tell Bieta Koppel’s family that the infant would be baptized. Henia Koppel never stopped longing for her missing baby. The young mother was still alive in the ghetto at the end of the summer, thanks to the Toebbens factory work papers, and Henia would sometimes find some way from inside the ghetto to telephone Stanisława Bussold, at whose home Bieta was still in hiding. Henia asked nothing of Stanisława in those moments except that she might hold the telephone close so she could listen for a few moments to Bieta coo and babble. On the distant end of the line Henia wept quietly. Once or twice Henia was driven to wild risks and slipped out of the ghetto for a few hours to see her baby. There was no part of Henia that did not ache for her daughter. Bieta’s father, Józef, was dead already. He was shot on the platform of the Umschlagplatz when, with his characteristic clear understanding, he refused to board the cattle cars to Treblinka.

  Aron Rochman, baby Bieta’s grandfather and Henia’s father, somehow survived the summer, and Irena knew that he left the ghetto working as German slave labor sometimes in the early mornings. When Irena learned that autumn that Bieta would be baptized, she knew she would have to be the one to tell him. How could she live with herself if she dodged that responsibility now? Irena knew that Aron and Henia would feel this loss deeply. One crisp morning that fall, Irena stood outside the ghetto checkpoints and waited until Aron’s gang passed the street corner, eyes down, marching. There on the street, despite orders that Poles and Jews not communicate even, she spoke to him for a moment and the words came rushing out too quickly. I had to tell you. Aron looked away. There on the street, amid the footsteps of strangers and the ruin of war, Irena watched, thinking her own heart would break as the older man broke down and cried for his family’s spiritual loss of his infant granddaughter. Irena stood helplessly. She longed to reach out for Aron’s hand, but anything more and it would be Aron who was in danger. She turned and walked away slowly.

  A few days later, Irena was the one crying. A package had come for little Bieta. Inside, carefully wrapped, was an exquisite lace christening gown and a bright golden crucifix for the baby, wrapped carefully in tissue paper. There was no note. There didn’t need to be, because the message was clear: it was a family’s good-bye to a desperately loved child, and it had come, Irena knew, at the cost of everything they must have saved inside the ghetto.

  And this was the difference between Jan and Irena, finally. Irena saw the agony of these Jewish parents who were compelled to consent to the erasure of their children’s identity. Jan did not take children out of the ghetto. Irena was a witness to it, sometimes more than once daily. She called the scenes she saw that summer “hellish.” There, in cramped apartments, families would splinter and fracture in their despair. Fathers would say yes. Grandparents would say no. Mothers wept disconsolately. The choices were too appalling. Irena made her peace with it in the only way she knew how. She made a solemn promise to those parents who would trust her with their children. Despite the dangers it created, her list of the children’s real names and families kept growing.

  Irena’s “list,” however, was never the stuff of Hollywood movies, and in the beginning she did not even bury them. Irena called them her card files, and they were just a cryptic collection of names and addresses, scrawled in code in a stubby hand on bits of tissue-thin cigarette paper and rolled up tightly for safekeeping. All the women in her network kept these lists, Jaga and Władysława especially; each saw dozens of children come and go. Irena gathered them together to reduce the security risks to the children and their guardians, and at home each night she had a plan for what to do if the Gestapo made a nighttime visit. She carefully laid the lists nightly on the kitchen table by the window and practiced quickly tossing the tiny scroll into the lower garden. The real card file—the complete one—was lodged firmly in Irena’s mind anyhow. Although dozens of friends could fill in pieces, Irena was the only one who knew either the big picture or the small details. Through the summer of 1942, keeping track of the children in this haphazard fashion wasn’t impossible. At that point, despite heroic efforts and almost unthinkable risks, Irena and the women in the welfare office network had hidden only a couple of hundred Jewish children.

  Keeping the lists was, in part, just good accounting. Money was always part of the equation, and money—or the lack of it—increasingly preoccupied Irena. Finding ways to requisition welfare supplies and funds in the city offices had been how all this started. Sometimes, if Irena could finesse the paperwork, municipal resources paid for the cost of taking care of these children. But that was becoming harder and harder as the city coffers dwindled and the need grew enormous. More and more often now, wealthy Jewish ghetto parents paid for the support of their children a year in advance and trusted Irena with the money. Irena felt morally obliged to keep a record for the family to show she had been honest.

  That summer, just as the need was greatest, when Irena was still racing against time and against the timetable of those railcars rumbling away from the Umschlagplatz, crisis struck in that quarter. The Germans grew suspicious of irregularities in the welfare office files. Irena and Irka survived undetected, but a friend, the director of welfare services in their division, was shipped off to Auschwitz in the crackdown. Irena was under more and more careful scrutiny daily—and in even greater danger. With thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—being sent to the Umschlagplatz every morning and with thousands of others hiding, suddenly the network was collapsing beneath her, and she ran out of money. Time was running out, and Irena had no solution. She knew that soon, no matt
er how brave any of them were, saving more children would be impossible.

  CHAPTER 10

  Agents of the Resistance

  Warsaw, August–September 1942

  The four-year-old boy and his aunt stood in the shadows waiting for the signal. His aunt held his hand firmly, but all her attention was focused on the empty street in front of them and on the German soldiers in the distance. Their guns swung when they walked, and they were the only ones in the ghetto who were not frightened. In her other arm, his aunt held his baby cousin. The soldiers turned in the other direction at the end of the street, and Piotr felt a hand on his shoulder. His father? The boy couldn’t remember afterward. But his father was not coming with them, and neither was his mother. The boy had never been away from his parents before, and even now he didn’t understand what was happening. Someone hissed, Run! Piotr ran as fast as his little legs could take him, toward the trees where the hole was waiting.

  A man he had never seen before helped Piotr and his aunt and his cousin Elżbieta down into the cavern. His aunt coughed at the smell of the place. It was dark and terrible. “Be quiet,” the strange man said to them. “And you must not cry,” he told Piotr. In the tunnel, the noises came from a long way away, and there was a small, greasy trickle of water that filled their shoes. The water ran for miles underneath the city, but Piotr was too small to have any idea of distance. But this was not a place to get left behind. He watched the man’s back carefully as they trudged for a long time through the underground river.

  Sometimes the man stopped suddenly to listen. From above sometimes came the sounds of rattles and distant voices, but they kept walking. At last the man stopped and waited carefully before he drew aside the grate and urged Piotr quickly up the ladder. When they looked back, the man was gone, and ahead of them was another stranger, a small woman with a friendly smile. Come, she said. And they followed.

  Was that woman Irena Sendler?

  • • •

  Piotr was the four-year-old Piotrus Zysman, the only child of Irena’s friend Józef and his wife, Theodora. The parents were heartbroken. Józef understood the stakes clearly in the summer of 1942 and was among the hundreds of Jewish parents who trusted Irena to save their children. “To this day, I can see the look in his kind and wise eyes, when he gave me his son,” Irena said of that moment. Józef did not think he would live to see his little boy again. It was hard to reassure him. At the height of the deportations, they no longer had any expectation of survival. It would take a miracle to save his parents.

  When he speaks of that escape in newspaper interviews and lectures to schoolchildren studying the Holocaust, what Piotr remembers today is only that passage out of the ghetto. And perhaps it was Irena who met him in his first dangerous moments on the Aryan side. Of all the moments in an escape, the first minutes on either side of the checkpoints were the most perilous. And if it was not Irena that day, it was one of her collaborators. It was Irena’s network that saved Piotr.

  A plan was already in place for the boy’s safety, a relief for both Irena and Józef. A Polish couple named Wacław and Irena Szyszkowski—friends of Józef and Theodora—agreed to care for the boy in their apartment. Wacław had been a law student at the University of Warsaw in the 1930s along with Adam and Józef, and in 1942 Wacław and his wife had three small children.

  Would Wacław take their son? It was an immense thing to ask. Wacław was a big-boned and jolly-looking man with a shock of blond hair, and he was already a senior member of the Polish resistance. It mattered hugely that little Piotr had “good” looks—the looks of a child who might not be Jewish, who might belong in a blond-haired family. Wacław worried about the danger to his own children, but he could not refuse his friend Józef this life-or-death favor.

  The protocol was to take children instantly to an emergency shelter. It’s not known who fetched the little boy in those first minutes outside the ghetto, but Piotr went home to Irena’s apartment that night. For as long as it took to prepare the toddler, he would stay with Irena and her mother. Piotr learned his Catholic prayers and his new Polish name. Never talk about your mama or papa, Irena told the little boy earnestly. You must always say, Piotr, that your house was bombed. Remember, never say you are Jewish. It was a wretched thing to teach a child to recite, but Irena knew there was no other option. Then, when the time came, there was a rendezvous with a liaison, and Piotr was passed to the kind care of Wacław and Irena Szyszkowski. “They treated me,” Piotr says, “like their own child,” with love and affection.

  That might have been the end of Piotr’s story of friendship and survival. But in 1942 in Warsaw, nothing was ever so easy. Wacław quickly realized that adding another child to their family was not as easy to keep a secret as they had imagined. The neighbors suddenly grew nosy and suspicious. With strange looks and whispers they hinted to Wacław’s wife over cake and coffee that the child they were hiding was Jewish. Wacław got word to Irena. At any moment the Gestapo might come search the apartment. Piotr had to be moved instantly, but Irena didn’t have a foster home prepared for him. He was moved from one safe house to another for several weeks. Moves like this were common and took an immense toll on small children. One little boy, in despair, begged Irena to tell him that year: Please, how many mothers can you have? I am on my third already. Irena could not keep the boy. She suspected that her apartment was already under surveillance. There was no other option. Piotr disappeared into one of the Catholic orphanages in her network, along with the rest of “her” children.

  • • •

  The risks to them all were growing daily. Sooner or later it could only end in disaster. Irena knew it. So did the women in her network. Jaga Piotrowska, though, was fearless. Jaga and her husband lived on Lekarska Street, and their home was one of Irena’s most important “emergency rooms,” where people came and went at all hours. That was dangerous enough. But Jaga, perhaps because of her devout Catholic faith, was one of the network’s most daring liaisons, responsible for guiding children out of the ghetto and across “Aryan” Warsaw. Caring for youngsters who were three or four years old—too young to censor themselves—was like handling explosives, and Jaga was taking a young Jewish boy to a safe house on the city streetcar on a mission one day when the long-feared “explosion” finally happened.

  The boy was a small and skinny child, and he looked around nervously. As the streetcar clanked to each stop, he grew more skittish, and Jaga was starting to get seriously worried. The streetcar was busy, and people swayed together as it rolled along its tracks along the city streets, creaking and humming. They were sitting close to the front of the car, and Jaga hoped that the view would distract him. But suddenly the little boy gasped. Something had frightened him. Perhaps it was a glimpse of the ghetto wall with barbed wire. Perhaps it was a mother walking, hand in hand with her children. Jaga never knew for sure. But the small boy began to cry and—catastrophically—call in heartbroken Yiddish for his mother. Jaga’s heart froze too. The other passengers on the streetcar fell instantly silent. Jaga registered the startled looks in her direction and then the dawning horror of those jammed in the streetcar with her. Yiddish. That child is Jewish. She could see from the faces around her the thought registering. And that meant that everyone in the streetcar was in danger. Jaga could see from the driver’s quick look over his shoulder that he understood what was happening, and she could see the growing fury of the woman sitting next to her.

  Jaga’s mind raced. With the rush of fear, the world narrowed to one question: Would someone betray them at the next stop to the police? It was too likely. Anti-Semitic feeling still ran strong in Warsaw. The streets were filled with blackmailers looking for just this kind of opportunity for life-or-death extortion. Jaga felt panic rise. She had to be brave, she told herself. And she had to act quickly. “I hid my fear,” she said, “in my pocket.” She turned to the streetcar driver. She needed to get off the streetcar this instant. Please, help me, she implored him in a hissed whisper. When he
turned away without a word, back to the track rolling in front of him, Jaga’s heart sank. It was futile. As she held the crying child, she felt her own tears well up. She had a daughter. As the streetcar lurched a few times and came to a jolting stop, Jaga reached to stop herself from falling. Shopping bags clattered to the floor, and a piece of bruised fruit rolled under the benches. Someone swore quietly and turned to help an older lady.

  In the midst of the chaos, the driver bellowed: “Okay, everyone out! The tram is broken, we’re returning to the depot.” He opened the doors and waved the passengers out brusquely. People scattered. Jaga gathered up her things and the child, preparing to step down into the street and take their chances. The odds were not with them, she knew. The driver shook his head. “Not you. You stay.” He gestured to her to get down, and she obeyed wordlessly. Then he calmly put the empty train into slow forward motion. “Where do you want me to drive to?” They rolled along until they reached a quiet area surrounded by houses with small gardens, where the streets were quiet, and the nameless driver stopped the streetcar. You’ll have to get off here. Good luck. Jaga turned to the man. Thank you. The man just shook his head and gave her a sad smile as she and the little boy descended.