Irena's Children Read online

  Irena debated with herself all afternoon. She debated much of the next morning too. The risks were obvious. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Stefania, but what if she and Stefania were both being led into a trap by Gestapo provocateurs? On the other hand, Irena reasoned, what were her options? Stefania said that “Trojan” could help her, and Irena desperately needed assistance. At last, she decided. She made sure her lists were well hidden, and the next day she took her coat off the rack by the door and left the office early. Her path led her to the east of the ghetto and a nondescript apartment building. The name on the bell read Eugenia Wasowska, and when she knocked on the door a woman’s voice asked to know who it was. Irena responded with the password, “Trojan.”

  A gray-haired woman with a flushed face opened the door. The apartment was spacious but dim, and the shades were drawn tightly. A man beckoned Irena to enter. Irena could see that the woman was nervous; oddly, that made her feel better. Irena later learned that her name was Halina Grobelny. Halina ushered her through a series of doorways until she came to a small room at the end of the apartment. There, Halina introduced “Jolanta” to her husband, “Trojan”—the code name of Julian Grobelny, the leader of Żegota.

  Irena kept her face stony, determined to reveal nothing. But her mind was racing. Julian Grobelny was a stocky man with a thick neck and a dark beard, and his eyes darted with an unmistakable intelligence under a pair of wild and bushy black eyebrows. She guessed that he was in his fifties, though he moved with the careful, considered step of an older man. Was this a Gestapo trap? Were they informers? It was always a gamble. Irena had no way of knowing that her office friend Stefania was a courier for the Home Army and had a second underground life in the resistance herself. Julian understood Irena’s hesitation, and he took the first risk by telling her the secret of Żegota. They were already partners with the RGO, Julian explained to Irena. Aleksandra Dargielowa was chair of their new child welfare division. They were working under the auspices of the Home Army. They were already in contact with Irena’s friend inside the ghetto: Ala. Would Irena and her cell join their network? he wanted to know. We will not interfere with your current operations. Those words to Irena were magic. Żegota received funds dropped into Warsaw by parachute from agents in London, and they knew that Irena’s cell was broke. They wanted to fund her operations.

  To hell with the risks. This was a godsend. “In the course of this unusual meeting, when I had the honor of representing the employees of the Department of Social Services of Warsaw, it was decided to form our relationship with the leaders of Żegota,” Irena explained later. But, standing there in the apartment that afternoon, Irena looked Julian Grobelny squarely in the eye and stuck her hand out to shake on it. Julian laughed. “Well, Jolanta,” he said, “we’re striking a good deal together. You have a team of trusted people, and we will have the necessary funds to help a larger number.” Money meant that Irena and her team could expand their operations. But most of all, money meant that Irena could continue to support the children in hiding with the monthly food stipends on which so many of the host families depended. An extra pound of black-market butter, or double that amount of sugar, cost nearly 500 złotych now—twice the average monthly salary in 1942 of a Polish laborer. Julian explained that there were secret “postboxes” scattered across Warsaw where she could pick up bundles of cash and messages, and of course “Jolanta” was always welcome at the Żegota safe house.

  When Aleksandra Dargielowa discovered that Irena was on board, within weeks she asked to be relieved of duty as Żegota’s child welfare division director. It wasn’t because she didn’t support Irena; Aleksandra’s nerves were shattered. She and Irena were fighting a daily war against inhumanity and depravity, and Aleksandra had reached the point of battle exhaustion. Irena understood all too well the soul-crushing pressures and the effects of living with fear as a companion. Irena was treading ever closer to that breaking point herself. Adam could see it, but Irena would not or could not listen. And for Aleksandra there was another constant worry: she was the mother of a small child. With every step that broadened the network, the risk of arrest and interrogation increased exponentially. The chances of any of them surviving this were slim, and one had to be prepared for the worst. If she were honest with herself, Aleksandra knew that, faced with the torture of her child, she would crumble. Irena had to ask herself the same question: Would she be able to risk so much if she had to consider Adam’s baby?

  But Irena was not a mother, and there were times when even the idea of being with Adam—really being with Adam—seemed like a fantasy. Aleksandra asked Irena to take over, and within weeks she did. “In the fall of 1942, I took control of the Child Welfare Division of the Polish government-in-exile’s Jewish Aid Council (Żegota),” Irena said, “and this strengthened my ties to the walled district even more. It all gave me more opportunities to help.” Anything that brought her closer to the ghetto and the plight of the families trapped inside felt like a way of being loyal to Adam. It ultimately made her one of the Second World War’s great heroines as well. Some sixty thousand Jewish people were hiding on the Aryan side of the city, constantly at risk from the Gestapo and blackmailers. Another sixty thousand Jewish families were still trapped inside the ghetto, and the noose around their necks was tightening. Many of the families living “wild” inside the ghetto had refused to go to the Umschlagplatz precisely because they had children. In the next ten months—from December 1942 to October 1943—Irena’s Żegota cell, into which her own network was quickly integrated, would take out of the ghetto and save from the streets thousands of those children. Irena would make sure that each month some money to support the children made its way covertly to their courageous guardians. And Irena would note down the sums and all their identifying information on her paper card files—an astonishing wartime archive and testament to the courage of dozens upon dozens of average men and women across Poland.

  • • •

  Żegota solved the resource problem that had been holding Irena and her friends back in their rescue operations. Now it was possible to think on a larger scale. It was possible to imagine. In the late autumn of 1942, Irena went from being the leader of a relatively closed network of old college friends, prewar political comrades, and coworkers to being a major figure in the Polish underground. It was like being promoted from army captain to general. No one who knew her doubted that this was her destiny. She was brilliant.

  Irena relied throughout on her girlfriends, who now took on larger roles in her network—although without knowing themselves in many cases that such a thing as Żegota ever existed. Irena was the only point of contact on the Aryan side with Julian Grobelny. And on the ghetto side, Irena’s comrade-in-arms was Ala. Nurse Helena Szeszko took charge of setting up a system of medical hideouts with a number of doctors, including Dr. Majkowski, the man who had given Irena her ghetto pass in the beginning. These were places where Jewish people could get aid and where sick children could be hospitalized. More than a thousand children would be placed in orphanages and care institutions across Poland, many of them thanks to Jan Dobraczyński’s signature. One of Irena’s team members personally arranged those transports, often to rural areas hundreds of miles away. More than two hundred children would go to the Father Boduen children’s home, where other team members were now the primary operatives. Collaborator Jadwiga Deneka was the hidden children’s guardian angel, and she crisscrossed Warsaw and much of central Poland in order to check on their welfare and deliver the financial support that Irena was now able to provide, thanks to Żegota. Irena’s old friends Zofia Wędrychowska and Stanisław Papuziński opened their home as an emergency shelter, at immense risk to their large family of children. Irena’s apartment was always a last resort for the network.

  And, as always, there was Adam. Adam was restless and resentful. He had fled the ghetto at Irena’s urging in the summer of 1942 only to find himself, months later, still cooped up in Maria Kukulska’s apartment and going mo
re than a little stir-crazy. Maria’s teenage daughter, Anna, had more freedom than he did, and Adam was brooding. By nature, he was a man of dark and melancholy moods. Right now he needed a job that had some meaning. It was hard for a man when his girlfriend was risking her life in an underground cell while he had to skulk around uselessly in an apartment full of women. Irena confessed later that she was always looking for ways to keep Adam busy.

  Now there was work that needed doing. Adam took charge of paperwork and finances—her bookkeeping—and it was another reason to be grateful to Julian Grobelny and Żegota. Irena was running a large, dangerous, and remarkably well-funded operation. That meant record keeping. And record keeping would be fatal if the files were discovered. But for Irena there was no other option. “Vast sums passed through my hands,” she remembered, “and it was a great relief to me when I could prove that the money reached the right place. . . . It was in my own interest to keep these receipts . . . [T]hrough my hands passed very important sums, and I wanted to be able to prove that they had been received by those for whom they were destined.” Her budget amounted to a fortune each month; sometimes she saw 250,000 złotych—approximately three-quarters of a million dollars today—come and go. The money came from sources in the Polish government-in-exile and from the Jewish-American community. Conscious of the sacred trust placed in them, she and Adam kept careful records of every złoty.

  But the money wasn’t what was exhilarating. It was the fact that, by January 1943, the names of more than a thousand children were on the lists. Every single child Irena had placed in the Warsaw convents was still alive. They had not yet lost a single precious one of them. It was nothing short of a miracle. By the end of the war, ninety percent of Poland’s Jews would perish—some three million people—but not Irena’s children.

  • • •

  But Irena was not saving children only: she was hiding anyone who needed to escape from the Germans. For Jewish teenagers—boys and girls—hiding in homes or orphanages was often impossible, and some of those teenagers joined Irena’s network as trusted couriers. As German control over the ghetto tightened, the old secret routes no longer worked, and escaping the ghetto usually meant a dangerous and frightening journey through the city’s miles of sewers. Irena’s teenage couriers acted as guides through those underground waterways, leading families out of the ghetto and delivering messages and money. In fact, resistance was heating up now on the Aryan side of Warsaw, and many of the young people were joining the partisans. Maria and Dr. Henryk Palester, whose conversion to Judaism placed them in danger, were still hiding on the Aryan side. Maria was part of Irena’s office network. Now the couple’s teenage son Kryštof also joined an elite resistance scouting squad known as the “Parasol” battalion, in which the young people carried out, among other things, assassination missions. The “special courts” of the Polish underground were taking aim at local Nazi functionaries and Gestapo collaborators, and every day brought news of three or four lethal attacks on the streets. Some of the most fearsome assassins were young women, who used their girlish charms to distract the Germans. An innocent face allowed them to get close enough to pull off point-blank executions.

  Other teenagers were helped to flee to the forests outside Warsaw, to join partisans like Ala’s husband, Arek. In addition to assisting the hidden children, Irena’s cell was soon supporting nearly a hundred teenagers and a group of resistance fighters being hunted in the woods by the Gestapo. What Irena didn’t know yet was that her lost friend Rachela Rosenthal was already living out there and fighting for survival among them. Now part of the resistance, she had new Aryan identity papers. Rachela embraced her new life completely. Anything else was unbearable. She had erased her past and lived in the woods as a Polish girl under the name “Karolina.” She had taken a new Polish lover, a handsome engineer and a fellow resistance member named Stanisław. Stanisław knew nothing of her past, and Rachela, who was still beautiful, vowed to herself that he never would. And when she fought, it was with a raw and reckless courage. She had nothing left to lose there in the forest. She had turned her back in the ghetto for a moment, and lost all her family.

  With access to new resources, Irena rented two rambling old buildings, one in her former hometown of Otwock and the second in a small hamlet just a few miles away called Świder. Jewish men and resistance organizers were terribly vulnerable, and Irena soon had a plan to help partisans like Arek and Rachela. Along with Otwock, Świder had long been a summer holiday retreat, and the countryside was dotted with drafty villas set amid forests that followed the contours of the river. Some of those forests were home to the resistance fighters and adult Jewish refugees whom Irena was supporting. In one of those small villas Irena now registered a tuberculosis “rest clinic” for a motley assortment of new “patients.”

  An elderly Jewish woman with particularly “Aryan” looks and good identity papers named Mrs. Zusman ran the day-to-day operations at the refuge in Świder. A streetcar line connected downtown Warsaw with the village and, using her cover as a city social worker, Irena visited the clinic often, bringing Mrs. Zusman money, underground doctors, or forged identity papers.

  The station at Świder was nothing more than a platform in the woods, and when Irena stepped off the train one day she wrapped her coat tightly around herself and set off for the villa on foot over the frozen winter ground. When she arrived, “Auntie” Zusman quickly shooed her, tut-tutting, into the back kitchen to sit by the fire, and over a cup of tea the women settled down to business quickly. Irena never stayed long, and soon dusk would be coming. She needed to get back to Warsaw shortly. But first Irena insisted that Mrs. Zusman tell her how each of the men was faring. There were five Jewish men with her that day, Mrs. Zusman explained. Some of them were frail from a winter in the forests, and all of them were tired of always running. From one of the rooms nearby came the sound of someone coughing. Irena raised her eyebrow. One of the residents is a doctor; we are managing, Mrs. Zusman assured her. Irena smiled her relief. Dr. Bazechesa?

  Roman Bazechesa was a sad story, and Irena worried about the Jewish doctor. He had come to Warsaw from the east, from the town of Lviv, and for months Dr. Bazechesa scrambled to hide alone on the Aryan side from the German pursuers. But the doctor had such strongly Semitic looks that it was impossible. He lived in constant terror, and only his sleepless vigilance saved him. More than once he fled a retreat in the small hours of the morning, steps ahead of Polish blackmailers and the Gestapo. At last he was broken by the strain. Better to die quietly than to live this animal existence. Just as Roman Bazechesa hoisted himself over the balustrade to throw himself into the icy river, where he would perish, Maria Palester passed him on the street and put out her hand to stop him. Maria understood all too well the doctor’s desperation. More than twenty Jewish people passed through her apartment “emergency room” during the war, and more than half of them were killed as a result of blackmail and betrayal by szmalcownik. Maria, nevertheless, led Roman home, and within hours, Irena’s network had swung into motion to help him. Irena herself had introduced him to the hideout in Świder.

  Mrs. Zusman was reassuring, and Irena could feel the warm tea relaxing her nerves for a few moments. A moment later everything was electric.

  Fists pounded furiously on the front door of the villa. Irena’s chair clattered to the floor as she reached for the identity papers. Jesus. The Gestapo? The identity papers were a death sentence. The women exchanged a horrified look, and from behind her Irena could hear the muffled sounds of feet in quiet motion. Irena lifted a finger to Mrs. Zusman and pointed her toward the front doorway. That silent gesture spoke volumes. One minute, it said. Give me one minute. Mrs. Zusman nodded and walked slowly and loudly toward the sound of the pounding. Coming, dearies, coming. Minutes were everything now. The men crouched low, waiting, and Irena smiled quickly at the doctor, trying to stay calm. As Mrs. Zusman fiddled with the lock on the front door, to the howls of the impatient men outside, Irena and the five
refugees slipped out the back door. The sharp, cold air bit at her lungs as she ran with all her might toward the waiting forest.

  They scattered in all directions, and in a quiet copse Irena stopped at last, heart pounding. The men were now far into the woods. No one would return to the house until Mrs. Zusman’s fate was settled, and Irena knew that the chances of the Jewish matron’s survival were slim. But Irena could not leave the old auntie without knowing. She hid the papers carefully among the forest leaves, then crept quietly back toward the villa.

  The scene unfolding on the front doorstep astonished her. Hands on her hips and eyes blazing with fury, Mrs. Zusman was yelling at her unwelcome visitors. Irena took in instantly that they were Polish blackmailers and not Germans. We know you are a Jewish den. Give us money. Mrs. Zusman knew perfectly well that to give the blackmailers anything was to be forever in their power. Once there was no more money, they would still call the Gestapo, and she was fighting for her life in that moment. So she drew herself up and went on a wonderfully dramatic counterattack. How dare you disturb the peace of a Polish Christian, she berated them. You foul bandits! I will have the Germans come arrest you for coming to abuse an old lady!