Irena's Children Read online

  Irena and her mother Janina moved to a small apartment on Maja Avenue in Piotrków, the site marked with a commemorative plaque today, and she turned ten the year they arrived in the new city. The little apartment was cramped and perhaps not always perfectly tidy, but soon it was filled with friends and visitors. Janina, after all, was still a young woman, widowed before thirty, and a bit of a bohemian in spirit. She loved fun and the theater. She could be melodramatic herself, but she was a warm and caring Polish mother. In Piotrków the buildings on the square in the Old Town, where Irena and Janina went for the weekend market, were painted cheerful hues of pink and green and yellow, and on warm spring days the Scout troops would head out to the river for practice and picnics. The girls proudly showed off their first-aid drills and learned to march just like the boys in military formation. Irena’s crisp uniform, with its fleur-de-lis badge—the insignia of Scouts everywhere—looked very smart. When she moved, in time, to the local Helena Trzcińska Middle School, she also took the Scout’s pledge “to be pure in thinking, in speech, and in deeds; not to smoke; not to drink alcohol.”

  Irena was a fun-loving and high-spirited girl, though, and soon had a steady sweetheart, a high school romance. The boy’s name was Mieczysław “Mietek” Sendler. In prewar Catholic Poland, a shy teenage kiss sent pure-thinking youngsters scurrying off to an agonized confession, and by the end of high school their courting was serious. Marriage was the inevitable next step, their families agreed, just as soon as they finished college. When Irena and Mietek both earned places at the University of Warsaw for the autumn of 1927, Janina found a small apartment back in Warsaw for herself and her daughter so Irena could live at home while attending university, and the future was settled.

  • • •

  Soon, however, a little voice inside Irena’s head began to wish her future wasn’t settled. She tried hard to silence that voice. Being at the university was new and exciting. Mietek decided to study the classics, and Irena said she would study to become a lawyer. Law was a bold choice for a seventeen-year-old girl who was sharp-witted rather than dutiful or quiet, and the old-fashioned faculty in the department did not see the law at all as a woman’s profession. At every turn, the professors blocked her ambition. Irena was indignant but, resigned, changed her program to Polish cultural studies and planned instead to be a schoolteacher. Everyone around her agreed that was a far more appropriate livelihood for a well-brought-up young Polish woman.

  But it was perhaps in the law department during her first year that she reencountered Adam Celnikier, a fellow student and sensitive young man with dark flowing locks and a penchant for romantic poetry and extravagant gestures. One wonders: Did he perhaps remind her of the chivalrous black-haired knight Zawisza, the legendary Polish Scout hero? Irena was soon in a study group where she saw Adam often, and the feelings were electric. Soon they spent more and more time together. Sometimes they sat together under the swaying trees that lined the campus avenues and talked about their childhoods. More often, they debated art and politics. They talked about the law and the future of a free Poland. When their hands brushed by accident, Irena felt her cheeks burn; surely it was just the excitement of the ideas they were sharing? Talking with Adam was a heady experience. Irena’s politics were already those of her left-leaning patriotic father, but Adam was a radical. Adam was so alive, so of the moment. Mietek was of the past, a student of dead languages and a reminder of that awkward teenage self whose history Irena was busy shedding. Adam wanted to talk about the world around them, wanted to change the shape of the future.

  But it was impossible. Even if she sometimes chafed against the constraints of her teenage romance, Mietek was Irena’s sweetheart. Their lives and families were already deeply interconnected. Adam was a crush, and a sensible young woman didn’t break things off with a nice boy like Mietek just because she was all mixed-up in her feelings. Duty mattered. Besides, Adam was spoken for already, and he could sympathize with Irena’s dilemma. Sometime around 1930, bowing to the wishes of his family, Adam was married to a Jewish woman who studied at the university with them, in an Orthodox ceremony arranged by the two families. The girl was one of Irena’s friends from her classes.

  Other considerations weighed on her during sleepless nights in her small, hard bed in her mother’s apartment. Irena could wait, of course, and delay her wedding to Mietek. But to what purpose when Adam was taken? Besides, marriage was freedom. It was freedom for her mother especially. Surely Irena owed her mother that? As long as Janina had to support a daughter, she would have to continue to take money from her family when what she longed for was her own independence. Irena longed to be a good daughter. By marrying Mietek, Irena would liberate her mother. It was too late for other choices. So, at the age of twenty-one, just after graduating from college in 1931, Irena Krzyżanowska did what everyone expected of her and became Mrs. Irena Sendlerowa. In English, the name is routinely shortened to Irena Sendler.

  • • •

  The young couple began to build a life together in Warsaw, ultimately settling into a small one-room apartment, where Irena tried to brighten her surroundings and her flagging spirits with bright curtains and dutiful homemaking. But it was no good. Irena and Mietek weren’t happy. In the evenings there were more and more quarrels, and Irena started keeping more and more secrets. Mietek was a junior faculty assistant in the classics department by 1932, on his way to a university teaching career, and Irena wanted to keep studying. One day Irena boldly announced her plans for a graduate certificate in social welfare and pedagogy before starting teaching. Mietek might have guessed already that it was futile for him to ask whether his views on this mattered. He already knew his young wife was an intensely willful person. When they had children, there would have to be changes. She would surely stay home then, wouldn’t she? But Irena wasn’t in any hurry. Irena enrolled in the social welfare program at the University of Warsaw.

  Why social welfare? If anyone asked Irena, she would talk about her papa. She never stopped missing him. “My father,” she explained, “was a doctor—a humanist—and my mother loved people and helped him in his social work a great deal. I was taught since my earliest years that people are either good or bad. Their race, nationality, and religion do not matter—what matters is the person. This was one truth that was instilled into my young head.” Longing to connect with her father, she tried to become his definition of a good person.

  But Irena also wanted some adventure. She was just twenty-two, after all, and the 1930s were a thrilling decade in Poland. The Soviets had been beaten back from their borders, and Poland was free for only the second time in its history. But within, the country was torn apart by politics and poised on the brink of explosive social protest. The relatively new field of social welfare was in the thick of the action, and the curriculum was radical and energizing. Students in the program at the University of Warsaw were encouraged to get experience in the field as part of their training. Irena instantly signed up for a community internship across town sponsored by the innovative pedagogy department at the Polish Free University. She had heard marvelous things about the department’s director.

  The University of Warsaw, with its manicured campus, boasted fine, even palatial architecture and broad open spaces, and was Poland’s elite institution. The Polish Free University was another universe. There, professors worked and taught in an ugly six-story building with small, dingy windows and the air of a neglected housing project. As throngs of students rushed from the lecture rooms into the narrow corridors and up and down the stairwells, the scent of warm bodies filled the air. From below, there came the racket of clanging bicycles and the friendly voices of young women. Then the halls were again quiet. On her first visit, Irena held tightly to a piece of paper, craning her neck to read the office numbers. She was looking for a nameplate that read: Professor H. Radlińska.

  Irena had weighed the internship options carefully, agonizing over her decision. Some students in her program took their field
placements as teachers at the groundbreaking orphanage school founded by Dr. Radlińska’s colleague, the educational theorist Dr. Janusz Korczak. Other students, especially the girls who were training as nurses, worked on public health research and outreach with some of Dr. Radlińska’s affiliated faculty physicians. Dr. Radlińska came from a well-known family of scientists, and one of the most renowned program physicians was her cousin, Dr. Ludwik Hirszfeld. But it was the professor’s own grassroots clinics that drew Irena: charitable welfare centers aimed at eradicating poverty. These were places where unemployed locals could come to take free educational courses and the homeless or indigent found legal assistance.

  Although it may seem hard to imagine today, in the 1930s this was one of the most exciting intellectual and political left-wing circles anywhere in Europe, and Irena was thrilled to be part of it. Dr. Radlińska, a stout and sturdy Jewish-born woman in her early sixties who had long since converted to Catholicism, was an unlikely heroine. Her thinning white hair and matronly bosom earned her the nickname “Grandma” on campus, and she had the look of a woman who was constantly harassed and worried. But the professor also radiated fierce intelligence and resolve, and the young students who gathered around her—many of whom were also Jewish-born—were at the center of a civil rights movement that was not unlike the ardent student activism that swept across Europe and North America in the 1960s. Along with a handful of eminent psychologists, educators, and doctors, Dr. Radlińska was pioneering the field of social work in Poland. These programs would become, ultimately, the model in most Western democracies for modern social work and state-supported welfare later in the century. There is no way to understand how Irena Sendler and her conspirators came together in the way that they did during the Second World War without appreciating that long before the German occupation began, Dr. Radlińska had already connected them to one another in a tight community network.

  Drawn into Dr. Radlińska’s orbit, Irena blossomed. She longed for this kind of intellectual excitement and this sense of a vocation. And the professor quickly developed a soft spot for this earnest and passionate young woman. Irena was so clearly suited for social work—so organized, so levelheaded, so genuinely outraged by injustice and compassionate about suffering—that Dr. Radlińska quickly offered her newest acolyte not just a student internship but a regular paid job in one of her offices, at the mother-and-child branch of the Citizens’ Social Aid Committee, providing support for the city’s unwed mothers.

  When Irena woke up in the mornings, she quickly hopped from the narrow bed she and Mietek shared, and her heart felt lighter thinking of the workday ahead of her. Mietek could not have helped but notice that Irena was happier leaving home than she was returning. Home in 1932 was a modern housing complex at number 3, Ludwicka Street, in the Wola district of Warsaw, and sometimes, as Irena rattled down the stairwell, a neighbor would open a door and smile at the young woman from upstairs who was always in such a hurry. The downstairs neighbors were a friendly family called the Jankowskis, who had small children and were often awake early, too, and the building super, Mr. Przeździecki, lovingly tended the shared community gardens and waved Irena off to work each morning. Another neighbor, Basia Dietrich, ran the cooperative kindergarten for the children in the complex, and perhaps Mietek sometimes wondered if their own children would ever get to play in that courtyard. It wouldn’t happen unless they found a way to rekindle some marital passion, though, and Irena jumping out of bed was more than half of the problem. The trouble was work was all that seemed to interest her. What she was doing was so important. She didn’t have time for housekeeping. She was helping struggling families to keep their children. She wished Mietek could see why it mattered so much. Mietek just wished she would focus on their family for a change.

  The gulf between them was growing deeper, and the fire had already gone out of her youthful marriage. They were left with an awkward kind of old friendship. It wasn’t that Irena didn’t love Mietek. But he was not her passion. At the mother-and-child center, Irena felt a deep sense of purpose. “Everyone here was dedicated and true to their goals: everything that I had been taught seemed to come to use,” Irena tried to explain. She was also making interesting new friends every day among Dr. Radlińska’s other students and employees. “The work environment,” she said, “was very nice,” and so were the people.

  She saw a lot of one person in particular: Adam.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dr. Radlińska’s Girls

  1935–1940

  The lecture was over but still the professor didn’t move.

  The students on the left side of the lecture hall stood still for a moment longer, too, motionless and breathless. Irena was among them. She was twenty-five years old in the autumn of 1935 and, at less than five feet tall, was shorter than the rest of the crowd. But no one who knew her doubted that Irena had some outsize political opinions.

  Those few seconds stretched on slowly. Everyone in the lecture hall waited. A sudden movement from the right and the rush of air as body met body came like a collective exhalation. Irena saw the flash of green ribbon pinned to the young man’s jacket. The end of his raised cane shimmered in the light. Razor blades. The villains had tied razor blades to the ends of the canes they had brought to beat them! Irena realized. A scream erupted from one of the girls nearby, followed by a surge of motion and the sound of brass knuckles hitting bone. The melee once again had started.

  Now the fist and the brass were raised up in front of Irena. To her side stood a Jewish classmate, a young man with dark, curly hair and glasses, and one of the men with green badges raised the cane overhead and barked to him, “Why are you standing?” He answered steadily: “Because I am Jewish.”

  Turning to Irena, the hooligan demanded, “Why are you standing?” Irena was fearless. Friends worried about how fearless she could be. Her more hidebound professors lamented that her youthful idealism was so insistent and so defiant, but Adam loved both parts of her character. Her bold retort now was designed to infuriate the angry young man in front of her. Their eyes connected. “Because,” she snapped, “I am Polish.” The brass fist smashed into her face in retaliation. She felt warm blood and then the darkness.

  • • •

  What ignited the riots on the University of Warsaw campus in 1935, when Irena and Adam were graduate students, was the informal institution of a “bench ghetto”: a seating area in the lecture halls for Jewish students that was set apart from the area for the so-called Aryans. The far right wasn’t growing in power only in neighboring Germany. Poland also had its problems. As far as Irena and Adam were concerned, the biggest of those problems was an organization called the ONR—the Obóz Narodowo Radykalny, or National Radical Camp: an ultranationalist and right-wing political group whose violent tactics and racist rhetoric were gaining traction and intensifying ugly feelings of anti-Semitism. The ONR supporters proudly displayed their political affiliation by wearing green ribbons.

  The bench ghetto is an outrage! Irena and Adam and all their friends fumed when they said it. Jewish students and their supporters on campus staged angry and impassioned demonstrations, refusing to sit at all during lectures. Some professors ordered the rebellious students to leave the lecture halls. Other professors supported the students and delivered their lectures standing in solidarity. As Irena put it simply: “The years at the University were for me very hard and very sad. A rule was established at the University segregating the Catholics from the Jewish students. The Catholics were to sit on the chairs to the right and Jews on the chairs to the left. I always sat with Jews and, therefore, I was beaten by anti-Semites together with Jewish students.” But what mattered was that it was together with Adam. Adam was fascinated by this ferocious wisp of a woman, and, as Irena’s family later testified, “their love affair continued even though she [had] married someone else.”

  At the University of Warsaw, an old-fashioned place at heart, the majority of the campus tacitly supported this discrimination
against the Jewish students. Across town, at the Polish Free University, however, things were different. When the ONR thugs came to assault Jewish students there, the entire campus rallied and drove them off with fire hoses and catcall hisses. Dr. Radlińska and the young women in her programs—Irena included—joined the protests and the scuffles. It was exhilarating. At home, Mietek grimaced sourly. He fretted over her safety. But he also worried about whom this new person—this risk-taking activist—was that his wife was becoming.

  Irena’s new friends from Dr. Radlińska’s circle were talented and high-spirited young women, and most of them were Jewish-born—although, as left-wing activists, religion didn’t much interest any of them. One of her favorites was Ala Gołąb-Grynberg, a nurse at the Jewish hospital on Dworska Street, who worked closely with Dr. Radlińska’s cousin, Dr. Hirszfeld, in studying communicable diseases. Ala’s maiden name was Gołąb, but she was six years older than Irena and had been married for years already to a Jewish actor and school principal named Arek. Their friends were exciting people: cabaret singers, actresses, and other performers. Dr. Korczak sometimes invited Ala to speak at his lectures, because everyone knew Ala was a hands-on expert in obstetrics and sanitation. Irena found her friend inspiring and sometimes even a bit intimidating. But Ala was also a funny and fun-loving eccentric, a sharp, angular person, with a sarcastic sense of humor and a terrible fashion sense whose mannish clothes never quite seemed to fit properly and whose wiry black hair always managed to look wild and untidy.