Irena's Children Read online

  Irena’s mind swung quickly into action. Solving problems was her strength, and doing something was the only way not to go crazy. She had other safe houses. If she needed to, she could take the children to Jaga for the time being. But they would have to scrub the children clean, somehow wash and dry their clothes, and sneak them back out of the apartment building unseen before the halls were filled with curious neighbors. There was another time pressure. In the morning, at seven a.m., one of her mother’s friends would come as always. Irena trusted her mother’s friend—the Nazis had killed her husband and she had no affection for the Germans—but not enough to share a secret like this. It was an immense risk, and Irena did not gamble with the lives of children.

  At best, they had a few hours until dawn. They would have less time if her neighbor betrayed them. Irena had no idea how her neighbor felt about the Jews, but this wasn’t the way she would have wished to discover it. Already the Gestapo might be coming for them, and, if they were caught helping these Jewish children, death for all of them was certain. But there was no help for it. The children couldn’t travel until they were clean. Neither could her courier. The muck in which they were covered was a telltale sign. And no one could travel until the nighttime curfew was lifted anyhow.

  Irena began heating water. It would have to be hot. Her father had died from typhoid helping Jewish children as a doctor almost three decades earlier, and Irena had watched the disease devastate the ghetto even before the liquidations. The sewage through which the children had traveled could be a death sentence for all of them unless she was careful. Hot water and plenty of soap were critical. As the girl and the children began undressing, Irena searched the wardrobe for old towels to wrap them in, rinsed the garments in the sink with a tiny sliver of precious soap, and then scrubbed her hands and beneath her nails carefully.

  The children huddled together, and soon the little trousers and shifts were wrung out and left to dry near the heater. They would still be damp come morning, but there was no other solution. The children were hurried off silently to the bath, Irena whispering to them to step lightly. The neighbors downstairs were friends. But others in the building would be suspicious of the sounds of footsteps at this hour. Suspicion could be lethal.

  Irena’s heart sank when she saw her mother standing feebly in the doorway, watching her. Janina, made unsteady on her legs by illness, took in the scene silently. The four little naked children and the dark-haired teenager required no explanation. In her mother’s eyes, Irena was grateful to see only acceptance and worry. The children climbed gingerly into the tub, and the first three were scrubbed quickly. As she warmed the water for the last child, Irena reached for fresh soap. Only then did she realize they had used the last of it.

  Soap was a precious wartime commodity. Made from animal fats and ashes, it was easy to come by in times of plenty. But in the winter of 1942–43 the hungriest citizens of Warsaw resorted to cooking old shoe leather for soup stock and protein. Lard and bacon drippings were gourmet treasures. Better to be dirty than hungry, if those were the only choices. Irena and her mother were lucky to be able to get small supplies of lye soap to do their laundry.

  Soap? Her mother shook her head. There was nothing left but the small half sliver in the kitchen, now a thin and flabby wafer, not enough to wash the last of the children. Lack of soap was such a little thing, but it might cost them everything.

  Irena thought for a long moment. Alternative plans, alternative scenarios? She could see none. What else could she do? There was no other option. So, going to the doorway, she slipped into the hallway. She would have to ask her neighbor. Irena drew a breath and knocked quietly.

  She knew it was an act of wild faith. She would have to gamble that her neighbor would not betray her. The door opened cautiously, and the woman’s eyes were wide with terror. Irena realized in an instant that she, too, was worried that a knock could only mean the Gestapo. Irena quickly tried to reassure her. Soap? I am doing my laundry. I can’t sleep. It was four a.m. and the old woman had not been sleeping either.

  The woman turned wordlessly, but she did not close the door behind her. Irena stood, waiting. What did it mean? Was it an offer of help or a sign of betrayal? Was she summoning the Gestapo even now? Was it an invitation? The harsh light in the hallway showed the nicks and scratches in the woodwork and the places on the stairs where years of footsteps had worn the treads. Just as Irena was about to turn away, she heard the soft footstep again, and a wrinkled hand held out a moist package quickly wrapped in a bit of paper. Touching her hand, it was warm and soft, and Irena took the offering. Thank you, she whispered. Mrs. Sendler, came the hushed reply, you are welcome.

  • • •

  Just as the sun began to light the streets of Warsaw that cool morning, an upstairs neighbor might have noticed a young woman walking out the front door of the apartment building, hand in hand with four well-turned-out small children. If Mr. Przeździecki in his garden saw them, he might have waved and wondered if they were local youngsters headed to Basia Dietrich’s little kindergarten. The morning breeze blew at their coats, and the children moved a bit more briskly. The girl with the cap pulled them closer. In a few moments, all of them turned the corner and were lost to eyesight.

  Neighbors in the building that day might have overheard a strange mid-morning conversation. Perhaps they had heard footsteps at dawn above them, a door open and shut, the creak of the staircase, the sounds last night of water running. Someone had been awake in the early hours of the morning. Now a woman was talking to Janina in a voice that drifted clearly down the stairwell. It was the old lady upstairs, and she said to someone there, commiserating, “I feel sorry for you, because your daughter is in a pretty bad way.” A listener might have heard a quiet murmur. “It’s clear she doesn’t sleep at night,” the old woman now said loudly. “Sure, [your daughter] has a husband in a camp, so crying at night over the thought of him is tough. But her getting up at three or four in the morning and doing the washing! And waking all the neighbors to borrow soap! Crazy!”

  What no one could have seen was the small, silent nod and the thin smile before the door clicked shut again quietly. The neighbor understood exactly what had really happened.

  • • •

  The names of those four children were never documented by Irena, but they could have been any of a stream of youngsters who were in and out of her apartment and in and out of the apartments of all her conspirators. They might have been, for example, a young brother-and-sister pair saved from the ghetto and given new Polish papers as Bodgen and Irena Wojdowska. One of them might have been the little girl whose false Aryan papers gave her the name Halina Złotnicka. Halina, too, was saved by Irena’s network and ultimately placed in Jaga’s safe house, where she lived alongside Jaga’s young girl, Hanna. “Jaga took care of me like her own daughter,” Halina remembered decades later. Jaga was a bookworm and passed along to Halina her passionate love of reading. Perhaps Jaga also understood that the escape into a safer world of fantasy was just what a terrorized child needed.

  The four youngsters that night in Irena’s apartment might have been, in fact, any of hundreds of children. Strange messages came at all hours now, and Irena would have to act instantly. One day it would be a message from Jaga or Ala. A desperate Jewish mother had swaddled a baby in sofa cushions and thrown the infant over the ghetto wall, crying out for the mercy of strangers; a placement was in process. Increasingly now, however, word would come directly from Julian Grobelny, at the very top of Żegota. Irena was needed in the forest outside Otwock. A woman was hiding in a garbage bin with her infant daughter. The baby was dying: Would Irena bring a doctor she trusted? A child had survived the liquidations but her family had been murdered in front of her: Would Irena travel to a village to fetch the baby?

  With thousands passing through the network, Irena and her team remembered many children best by small, heartbreaking details: the baby in the garbage can, the girl with the red bow, or the boy with the
green jacket. Other times these were the children of friends. Many of the children Irena saved had some connection to someone in the group: they were friends of friends, the neighbors of families. It was an astonishing web of trust connecting strangers.

  • • •

  The winter of 1942–43 quickly proved a mad, exhilarating, and heartbreaking season. Many in the ghetto by late autumn were also set on armed resistance. Teenage girls smuggled in dynamite and guns, and in hidden rooms the young people manufactured Molotov cocktails. The fighters fortified the rooftops of buildings for defensive positions. The winter was frigid and punishing as usual in Warsaw, and all autumn there had been whispered rumors of something terrible coming. The Germans, no one doubted, would kill all of them, and the young people were determined to go down fighting.

  On January 18, 1943, those fears were realized. That day the Germans initiated a new and long-expected mass deportation in the so-called “wild ghetto” in order to cull the weakened factory workers. But everyone feared it was the final, total liquidation—a “holocaust” of the ghetto. Few who survived the summer of 1942 were foolish enough to volunteer for this new “deportation.” Everyone in the underground knew by now where the tracks from the Umschlagplatz led and what was waiting at Treblinka, and word spread quickly to anyone who was prepared to listen. The Germans, determined to make up the numbers, and not much caring who was deported, marched at gunpoint to the loading docks anyone they could lay a hand on, regardless of their health or work situation. Among those caught that day were a group of young people in the resistance, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization and Hashomer Hatzair, the Jewish paramilitary scouting movement. The youths were armed. They were organized. In hushed voices, they agreed: they were not going. For the first time in the ghetto, there were the cracks of explosives and Jewish gunfire.

  Some of those who fired those first shots were friends of Arek and Ala’s. Caught by surprise and astonished at the idea of a Jewish resistance, the Germans were flummoxed. For four days a battle went on, pitting a small, determined group of young people against the forces of the Nazi occupiers. The young rebels could not win, of course. The Germans had far greater firepower, and the resistance in the beginning was a small group of people. Nearly all of those who resisted were killed, and more than five thousand Jews were deported. But the atmosphere in the ghetto was electric.

  Now everyone in the ghetto was looking for miraculously clever hiding places or trying to get out to the Aryan side of the city. On the Aryan side of the city Irena’s friend and collaborator Janka Grabowska now received a frantic message from Regina Mikelberg, in hiding since her bold escape from the cattle cars destined for Treblinka. Since the ghetto was first closed, Janka had supplied Regina and her family with the food and medicine they needed to survive, using her epidemic control pass to ferry supplies back and forth across the checkpoints. Regina’s parents were dead—they had never been nimble enough to jump from small train windows—but her younger sister was strong, and she had been assigned to a ghetto work detail on Bema Street since December. Regina thought she was now slave labor at the Strayer-Daimler factory. All the factory workers were herded in January to the Umschlagplatz, and Regina’s sister had escaped detection only by hiding for days underneath a pile of corpses. Would Irena and Janka help her out of the ghetto? There was no question. Irena and Janka made preparations, and it was agreed: this would be Janka’s operation.

  All the plans were in place, and Janka was on her way out the door at her home on Karolkowa Street, when she was faced with disaster. At the sounds of a gentle tapping on the back door, Janka turned and opened the garden entrance. Her husband, Józef, a soldier in the Home Army, had been out on a mission, and he lay before her now, wounded and bleeding. As Janka hauled him over the threshold and out of the view of the neighbors, she now faced an agonizing decision: Should she take her husband to the hospital or keep her appointment in the ghetto? Józef gave a painful laugh when he understood the dilemma. Wrap me up, Janka, he said before drifting into darkness. What other choice was there? Janka checked Józef as best she could and decided he would have to manage. She would rush him to the hospital tomorrow.

  That evening Janka brought the frightened Jewish girl home with her, but the situation with Józef made hiding anyone too much of a gamble. Janka did what anyone would do. She called Irena. With the aid of Żegota, the Mikelberg sisters moved to a Jewish safe house run by Janka’s mother. By spring, Adolf Berman’s account books showed that the same secret courier was supporting the Mikelberg girls, the family of Jonas Turkow, and Adam Celnikier’s mother, Leokadia. It was another curious link between the Mikelberg and Celnikier families.

  Operations like this were possible only on account of the ghetto passes still in the women’s possession. As the Germans pulled the noose around the quarter tighter in the days after the January uprising, those passes were at last canceled. Jaga and Irena would no longer be able to cross the checkpoints into the ghetto. From then on, Jews would have to get themselves out. But Irena would help them in hiding. Word had spread of underground cafés where Jews on the run could meet. Irena had postboxes—drop locations for notes—throughout the city where messages could be left if someone was in need of a safe house or an illegal doctor. She would go into the laundry and leave messages for her courier. But no one had any idea that she was anything other than a cog in a wheel. She acted like a foot soldier. No one suspected that she was the general. Her girlish looks were a great cover.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1943, disaster was looming ever closer, and there were a series of near misses with the children. One day that spring, Żegota leader Julian Grobelny sent urgent word to Irena and asked her to meet him at the train station. In the dingy railway station she scanned the crowds. Where was he? The train on the Otwock line was leaving shortly. Over the loudspeaker, a muffled voice read out track numbers and departure times, and behind her came the rattle of trains coming and going. When Irena caught sight of Julian coming at last, she was shocked. Julian’s hacking cough and brightly stained hankerchiefs were telltale signs that the tuberculosis that he already knew would kill him was gaining ground now quickly. Irena tucked her arm in his as they scanned the train for an empty carriage. As the train pulled slowly away from the Warsaw station toward the rural Wawer district, Julian explained their mission. I have a name, he said, handing her a scrap of paper. They are hiding in a village a Jewish child who witnessed her mother’s murder. They say she is hysterical. Irena understood. Moving a traumatized child was an especially high-risk operation.

  But that afternoon disaster struck almost the instant they stepped off the platform at their first connection. Irena turned to lift down her supply bag. She never knew what a child’s condition would be. By the time she turned back, the crowd was already surging forward. Someone barked orders in German, and somewhere a man cried out in pain as a baton hit him. Irena glanced at her bag. Julian’s voice was urgent. Roundup! Leave it. Irena’s eyes followed Julian as he slipped off the platform and scrambled between two carriages. Irena followed.

  When Julian stopped, he leaned back against the carriage and tried to muffle the sounds of his coughing. This was too much for an old man with tuberculosis. She couldn’t let him go on. On the platform, the voices of the roundup edged closer, and Irena and Julian crouched low beside the carriage. How long could Julian keep running? Please, let me go alone. I can get the child. You should return to the city. He looked down at her youthful face and saw her eyebrows knotted up in worry. No way was he abandoning this operation. “What is this,” he retorted indignantly, “you have me for a loser who can not escape the Germans?” Julian flashed her a grin, and Irena realized with a start that the carriage had begun moving. As the train pulled away, in the direction of Wawer at last, Julian swung himself up and stuck out his hand to grasp Irena’s.

  But it was only the beginning. Irena knew that the hardest part was still ahead of them. Without an address, they loo
ked for the girl late into the night. When they found her at last, Irena marveled at Julian. He tenderly pulled up a chair beside the weeping child and stroked her hair in silence that seemed to go on forever. At last the little girl turned to Julian and pulled herself onto his lap and clung to him. “I don’t want to be here,” she whispered into his shoulder. “Take me with you.” Julian looked at Irena quickly and squeezed the child tighter. Irena smiled. She was glad to see she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stop her eyes from watering.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1943, Irena was also still fretting over the safety of Katarzyna Meloch, the ten-year-old whom Ala and Jadwiga had led out of the ghetto the previous summer. In the ghetto, her grandmother, Michalina, and some of her family had eked out a precarious existence. In March that ended. Today, Katarzyna doesn’t remember what she was doing the day her family was killed. “I cannot recall exactly what I happened to be doing on the 21st of March, 1943,” she muses. “[Perhaps] I was seated on the school bench or running with friends through the forest. . . . [P]erhaps when shots were falling . . . I was singing with the other children in church.”

  By now, Katarzyna was in hiding at a convent orphanage in the isolated village of Turkowice, where Irena moved dozens of her children. But Katarzyna was a Jew, and there was no such thing as safety. She lived in daily terror of the other children discovering her secret. An older girl named Stasia frightened Katarzyna. Stasia looked at her strangely and was always watching her. If Katarzyna got her catechism wrong, if she mixed up matins and vespers, Stasia made a gleeful and knowing correction. When Katarzyna mentioned seeing a poster that warned residents to watch for pickpockets, Stasia pounced. “My dear, this poster is in the ghetto,” she said, delighted. “You are a Jew.”

  Then Stasia leaned in to whisper something else. “I know because I passed it one day in the ghetto with my parents. I am Jewish too. You must be more careful.” The Germans were hunting for them both, Stasia warned her. In the orphanages the children played a game: some pretended to be Germans hunting Jews, some were make-believe Jews who were hiding. For Jewish children, the games were all too real.