Irena's Children Read online

  Shocked, the blackmailers stood for a moment on the doorstep, hesitating. Mrs. Zusman carried on screaming out her outrage and indignation. Confused and rattled, the szmalcowniks looked at each other. Then they turned on their heels and ran away down the driveway. Behind them echoed the shrill voice of Mrs. Zusman ordering them to come back that very instant. When Irena stepped from the shadows afterward, she and Mrs. Zusman laughed tearfully at the old woman’s brazen courage and good acting. But there was nothing funny about the situation. The hideout was “burned,” as people said in those days. As the dusk settled over Świder, Irena had to figure out now where, at a moment’s notice, she was going to relocate six Jewish people.

  • • •

  For an immediate answer, Irena turned to those closest to her that December: Maria Kukulska and Adam. Irena knew that, if necessary, Maria would find room for Roman Bazechesa too.

  Maria Kukulska was another of Dr. Radlińska’s girls, at least after a fashion. Before the war, she had been a favorite student of the celebrated educational theorist and social welfare professor Dr. Władysław Spasowski, a colleague and friend of Helena Radlińska’s, but she and Irena had known each other for years from local meetings of the Polish Socialist Party. A teacher by training, Maria led courses in the underground wartime university, but perhaps most important Maria Kukulska had an adolescent daughter named Anna, a “comely” girl with soft brown hair and a trusting and apparently unthinking disposition. Teenage impulsiveness might easily have killed both Adam and Irena that winter.

  It started so simply. Warsaw had been known before the war as the “Paris of the East,” and the small, brightly colored squares that still dotted the city in late 1942 were pretty and romantic. Anna walked arm in arm with a girlfriend, showing off their figures. As they strolled, Anna caught the eye of two handsome Polish boys named Jurek and Jerzy hanging out in the square. Jurek decided to set his cap on Anna instantly. With all the subtle charm of youth, Jurek began to stare at her until she noticed him. Soon their eyes met. Before long, the four teenagers were talking and flirting. Anna was smitten. Hoping to continue this pleasant interlude, Anna, with the unthinking confidence of an adolescent, invited both boys home with her to meet her mother and their lodgers, an attorney named Adam and a doctor named Roman. As Anna came bouncing into the apartment at number 15, Markowska Street, with the two young strangers, Jerzy saw in an instant that her mother’s look was one of raw horror. Maria hurried into the back bedroom, and now there were murmurs of a heated argument in hushed voices.

  When the door opened at last, a tiny blond woman with blazing blue eyes stepped out to meet them. Maria’s worried eyes scolded Anna, who obediently followed her angry mother down the hallway. Jurek could see that Anna was in trouble. But Jerzy’s focus was all on this small woman standing in front of them on the carpet. He could see her making an instant assessment. Perhaps, he says, more than seventy years later, Irena Sendler could tell by looking at them for a long moment that they were two Jewish boys on the run from the ghetto. They had been loitering in the square because they had nowhere else to go to. Jurek and Jerzy had narrowly escaped a Gestapo roundup at a safe house on Idzikowskiego Street; they had survived the raid only by crawling out a rooftop window and running. Perhaps Irena believed the wild story they told her now, when they hinted knowingly that they were brave young Polish resistance fighters. The boys at any rate were brazen actors. Jurek had taken to heart the advice of a wise old man who had told him that the key to survival outside the ghetto was forgetting: “Forget that you have something in common with the Jewish tribe. Act as if you are not concerned.” But if you ask Jerzy—whose name today is Yoram Gross and who lives in Australia—he will tell you that not much got past Irena Sendler. Irena listened, and then she nodded. And that was it. The boys were not only allowed to stay, but they soon became part of Irena and Adam’s extended wartime family.

  And when Adam and Roman stepped from the back bedroom to meet them, too, Jerzy understood in an instant why their arrival had caused Maria Kukulska such a panic. Jerzy could see plainly that Adam Celnikier was Jewish. So was Roman Bazechesa.

  • • •

  Jerzy and Jurek came and went often from Adam’s hideout as Jurek’s romance with Anna deepened, and there was always a risk in any new foot traffic. But the person who posed the greatest danger to Adam was Irena. Irena was a major player in the underground now, in charge of eight or nine different safe houses across the city, still moving Jewish families across the ghetto walls, and hiding hundreds upon hundreds of children. The Gestapo was already hunting for “Jolanta.” They simply did not know yet that Jolanta was Irena.

  Irena watched carefully everywhere she went, to be sure she was not being tailed, but it was impossible to be sure that no one was watching. If she misjudged, she knew that any day she might lead the Germans right to Adam. It would have been wiser to stay away from anywhere Adam was hiding—wiser to keep her love affair and her underground “business” separate. But Irena was in love. She could not bear the idea of living with this kind of grinding uncertainty and not being with Adam. And Adam could not bear to be idle.

  So Maria Kukulska’s apartment also became a regular meeting place for the Żegota cell. Maria was involved in many aspects of Irena’s secret network and was doing more than just hiding Adam and Roman. That meant they were both anxious to take every precaution. To hedge their bets the women set in place a complex system of codes and signals. On her approach to the Praga district, Irena scanned the faces of loitering strangers and watched carefully in the reflections of shop windows to see if she was being followed. The area was dangerous. In the old state mint at number 18, Markowska Street, the underground was busy forging fake German stamps and identity papers. Not far away were German barracks. Sometimes, paranoid with worry, she would change her destination at the last minute and duck into a shop or a laundry. More often, when she thought she was being followed, she would turn her steps a few blocks north and stop in to see her friends at the Warsaw zoo, Dr. Jan Żabiński and his wife, Antonia, Irena’s coworkers in the resistance. The doors to the couple’s white stucco bungalow were always open to Irena, a favorite visitor, and Irena would often see old Jewish friends passing through in hiding, or other members of Żegota. But on those days Irena would not be able to see Adam.

  On days when Irena felt certain she was alone on the streets, she watched carefully for Maria’s sign in the front window. A sign meant it was all clear on Maria’s side: that the hallways were not filled with nosy neighbors and that there had been no visits from the Gestapo or blackmailers.

  Irena tried to come by the Kukulska apartment each day, or at least that is how Jerzy remembers it. At any rate, he and Jurek visited nearly every day—by now Anna and Jurek spent a good deal of time on the couch kissing—and each time he saw Irena there with Adam. Jerzy’s memories are a window into the private love affair between Adam and Irena that flourished that winter. Despite all the dangers of Irena’s work—despite Adam’s perilous position in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw and the sense that they were snatching this time together in the midst of terror and chaos and uncertainty—it was the first time as a couple that they had ever had this complete freedom to simply revel in each other’s company while shielded from the eyes of family. Their love had the space to deepen that winter in part because their lives were hidden.

  Looking back on those afternoons in Maria Kukulska’s apartment, Jerzy remembers how Adam adored Irena, how his eyes followed her everywhere. Adam had his own small room to which they could retreat in private, and it wasn’t all work and Żegota. The two stole precious hours together behind closed doors. All anyone could hear were low murmurs and sometimes quiet laughter. But Jerzy also saw how nervous and tense Irena was becoming. Part of what made her anxious was Adam. Adam was an energetic man who couldn’t sit still, and unlike Roman Bazechesa he never doubted that he was going to survive the Germans. He was bored and sometimes defiant. Adam was angry and reckless,
even. But his strong Jewish features made it dangerous for him to so much as stand near a window. A glimpse from the street might be enough to betray them all to the blackmailers and the Gestapo. Freedom—what it meant to leave this cage—was sometimes grasped simply by walking close to a pulled curtain, and Adam could not resist the temptation to break free just for a moment. When he did, Irena panicked. Irena spent a fair bit of time behind closed doors trying to manage Adam and especially trying to prevent him from leaving the apartment. The idea of a short walk in the fresh air was his idea of heaven. The empty, open park at the Warsaw zoo seemed to beckon. Adam promised, but Irena could not trust him completely. When she was away, she worried endlessly. She began to show signs of the pressure.

  Maria, Anna, and the two teenage boys treated Irena now with kid gloves, showing her careful respect and great deference. Even the young people, who were told nothing of Żegota, knew that Irena was in charge of something important and dangerous. In private, Anna and the boys sometimes wondered aloud what it was, and Anna hinted that it had something to do, she thought, with Jewish children. Sometimes at Maria’s apartment, small boys came for their cross-dressing “makeovers,” and Maria and Irena huddled together quietly with the children in the small bathroom while the biting chemical aroma of hair dye filled the air. The “blonding” of dark-haired children told its own story.

  Jerzy observed it all, too, and for several weeks he considered. Surely he understood what he was seeing; if so, then he didn’t like to lie to Adam and Irena. Maybe they didn’t know that he, too, was Jewish? Jerzy and Adam were friends, and Adam listened sympathetically while the boys talked of their teenage angst and girl problems. At last Jerzy decided to confide in the older man: Adam, I’m Jewish, he said. Adam nodded to indicate that he understood what the boy was saying. Then Jerzy added, I know you’re Jewish too. Adam frowned, gesturing toward his dark hair and strong features, and shook his head firmly. No, he told the boy. I’m not Jewish. My mother is just Hungarian. Jerzy knew it wasn’t true but said nothing.

  • • •

  The boys needed a safe house themselves, and Irena and Adam arranged it. Irena sent Jurek and Jerzy to the safe house in the villa at Otwock. But Adam also set them to work. He needed helpers. Adam and Irena were working together in Żegota, and Adam’s role had to be behind the scenes. He could not leave the apartment. But his job now was to allocate the grant money that Irena received from the leader of Żegota, Julian Grobelny, each month, and from his bedroom office Adam kept all her documents in careful order. In coded messages sent by courier, he arranged scholarships for the older children whom Irena was now placing in secret schools run by the resistance where they could continue their Polish education. He matched false identity papers and stolen birth certificates with the appearance of children. Adam needed runners with “good” looks and fair complexions. Jurek and Jerzy were at hand, so the boys took messages across the city for him, and sometimes they delivered dangerous packets with papers.

  Danger surrounded them constantly. Irena, above all, they knew lived on the razor’s edge of disaster. But there was love in Maria Kukulska’s apartment, and sometimes there were rollicking good times with the young people. In wartime one grasped hard at small pleasures. On December 31, 1942, the streets of the Aryan side were filled with people celebrating the New Year—in Poland, the Eve of Saint Sylvester—with music and raucous laughter. Teenagers in costumes took turns playing pranks, and good-natured snowball fights left the groups of young people hollering with pleasure. Inside the ghetto, all was dark and silent. December 31 was the last day any Jew was allowed to remain free in German territory, by order from Berlin, the official end to that summer’s mass deportations, and festivities in the sealed quarter were forbidden.

  Adam and Irena, in hiding, could never have joined the throngs on the streets, but inside the Kukulska apartment half a dozen friends gathered for their own party. At the table there was warm bread in the traditional shapes of fanciful animals and sweet paczki donuts that Maria had brought home from a nearby bakery, where the windows were filled with rolls and bright candles. Someone tried his or her hand at fortune-telling, a New Year’s Eve tradition, and Irena and Adam collapsed in laughter and leaned toward each other in the way of old lovers. Jurek kissed Anna when he thought no one was watching, and Jerzy sat contentedly on the sofa.

  Before the stroke of midnight, this group, more like family than friends, posed together for a boisterous portrait, piled up alongside each other on Maria’s small living room sofa. There was no champagne in the winter of 1942, but no one needed champagne to toast the New Year. It was enough to be together and happy. As the church bells rang out at last across Warsaw in wild peals of music, Adam turned to kiss Irena and said the words of the traditional midnight toast in Polish: Do siego roku! Good wishes for the New Year! Irena leaned and for a moment rested her head on Adam’s shoulder before she replied. Perhaps she allowed herself to think for a moment about what lay ahead. It was an all-too-human weakness and cast a shadow on her pleasure. No one believed any longer that the war was going to end tomorrow. From her contacts in the resistance, Irena knew that dark things were coming. It took strength to live only in the present. It was the only way that Irena—one of the strongest of them all—kept going. She turned to Adam and whispered, Do siego roku. Irena had to believe in a different future. Together.

  CHAPTER 12

  Toward the Precipice

  Warsaw, 1943

  A knock at three a.m. never meant anything but disaster, so the quiet tapping that startled Irena from her sleep one night in the spring of 1943 set her heart racing.

  They could be betrayed at any moment to the Gestapo. As German fears grew about the strength of the Polish resistance movement taking hold in Warsaw, the efforts to ferret out the dissidents had become ferocious. When the Gestapo came, however, they would not knock discreetly. One had to remind oneself of that. Those visits came with the pounding of boots, and shouts, and the splintering of wood for the maximum terror effect. There was a precise etiquette to wartime knocks, and this was the reluctant predawn signal of a conspirator.

  That could only mean one thing: something terrible had happened on that night’s rescue operation. Pulling her robe tightly around her, Irena hesitated. She did not turn on the light. A silhouette could betray her. But even in the darkness she knew where the most recent additions to the lists and the week’s account books were. They rested on the kitchen table, under the window, as always. It was her private protocol. In one swift motion Irena silently dropped them from the window, and watched the cigarette papers on which the lists were written flutter to the ground and settle among the garbage cans and stacked refuse. There, no one would notice a scrap with a few light pencil marks. “For safety’s sake, I was the only person who kept and managed the files,” Irena said later, adding, “I practiced many times to [hide them] swiftly in the eventuality of unwelcome visitors.”

  Looking around the room quickly, Irena reassured herself that all was in order. She could hear her mother’s quiet breathing in the back bedroom and was glad that the knock had not awakened her. Irena worked carefully to keep her mother in the dark about her dangerous activities. It was the best way, when the worst came, to protect her.

  Irena slid back the lock and opened the door as quietly as the battered wood and old hinges would allow. Her heart froze with terror. She thought she could just catch a glimpse across the hall of her neighbor’s door quietly closing. Had the old woman beaten her to the knock? At Irena’s door stood a teenager with four small children. All of them were drenched in sewage.

  The teenager was a steely sixteen-year-old girl with dark eyes and a tangle of curls pulled back severely under a cap. Irena didn’t know her real name; all the Jewish couriers in her network had code names. So did Irena, of course, although the true identity of “Jolanta” had long been an open secret in the resistance. But one could only tell under torture what one knew, and so it was better not to ask any quest
ions, and Irena never asked the girls where they came from.

  Jolanta, the young woman whispered. Irena opened the door wider and urged the soggy group inside the darkened kitchen. I didn’t know where else to go. Irena nodded reassuringly. She understood without any explanation: they had been running an operation that night, moving a group of Jewish children through a secret passageway in the city’s underground sewers. The guide was meant to deliver the children to one of the guardians, and from there Irena’s network would help the children disappear into private families or one of the convents where the sisters hid hundreds of Jewish children. Irena would add each of their names secretly to the lists that she carefully guarded. She would make sure that each month some money to support the children made its way covertly to their courageous caretakers. And Irena would note down the sums and the addresses in her tissue-thin records.

  Tonight, with the Aktion, they had lost track of some of the children. The Germans had run a patrol and arrested the sewer guide and the other couriers. The couriers would face a brutal interrogation. These were the moments that gave Irena nightmares. The safe houses were compromised. There would almost certainly be executions. There was no guessing what people might tell under torture, and there was no point in blaming anyone who cracked. Everyone in Warsaw knew that the things that happened at the Gestapo centers were unspeakable.

  Irena glanced now at the children standing in her entryway, wet with filth. Her chest tightened. Someone had dressed them carefully, in their best and warmest clothing, a parent’s last loving gesture. Details like this haunted Irena. One of the children was six or maybe seven. He had “good” looks—the looks of a child who might not be Jewish. But the children all had one thing in common: the sad, frightened eyes of ghetto children.