Irena's Children Page 9

  Józef’s secret cell met for weekly organizational meetings in a garden-tool shed on Leszno Street, out behind the old rectory at St. Mary’s. The Catholic church grounds straddled the ghetto wall, and secret passageways led from one side to the other. At the end of the long garden, sitting on overturned garden pots and wistfully fingering cigarettes that could not be lit for fear of detection, the conspirators plotted distribution points and debated the finer aspects of how to carry papers undetected by the Germans. Among their company most days was a small and fearless Polish woman—a woman whom those who knew her best suspected had her finger in everything good that happened in the ghetto. It made Józef’s heart light to have his old friend Irena Sendler sitting there with them in the shadows.

  CHAPTER 5

  Calling Dr. Korczak

  Warsaw, January 1942

  By the winter of 1941–42—the beginning of the second year in the ghetto—Irena had another, even more daring project brewing quietly.

  When the women in the social services offices on the Aryan side met that winter at Irena’s apartment and huddled around the kitchen table, they talked in low, quiet voices while her mother dozed in the bedroom, and were not quite so lighthearted as formerly. They had seen enough by now to know what would happen if they were discovered. Already there had been Gestapo purges inside the welfare offices, and one supervisor had been deported to a concentration camp in the east called Auschwitz. Their urgent evening conversations were increasingly about safety measures. Beyond this room they each used code names now as the network expanded. Jadwiga Deneka chose the name “Kasia.” Irena chose “Jolanta.” The risks of detection grew with every additional person they drew into the circle, and there were now more than a dozen collaborators. There in the innermost sanctum the old friends and conspirators could at least be frank and honest. But that didn’t mean there weren’t tensions.

  The core group on the Aryan side was still the same small circle of Dr. Radlińska’s girls too, all of them sometime smugglers now: Irena Sendler, Irka Schultz, Jadwiga Deneka, Jaga Piotrowska, and her sister Janka Grabowska. Forging requisition orders and ferrying food and medicine into the ghetto were dangerous enough, but the women were making plans for a new kind of covert action, too—action in which the stakes were even higher. The trouble was it would take more than six of them to do it. They would need to bring more people into the network. They would once again have to decide whom they could trust. They would have to decide, especially, about Jan Dobraczyński.

  On the question of Jan, there was a brewing disagreement.

  • • •

  Jan Dobraczyński was a senior administrator in one of the offices of the Warsaw welfare department, and his family pedigree should have made him a key partner. His father, Walery, was one of the pioneers of the Warsaw social services movement, right along with Dr. Radlińska and other professors at the Polish Free University. In fact, Jan’s father had been the director of the city welfare programs until his retirement in 1932, and after forty years on the job Walery still knew everyone in the social services sector.

  His son, though, was rumored to be a different kind of character. Jan had followed in his father’s footsteps, joining social services the year after his father’s retirement, but his real passions were writing and religion. Jan was not part of any left-wing circles, and he certainly didn’t go in for socialism. Unlike the conspirators, he wasn’t an acolyte of Dr. Radlińska. Jan was a few months younger than Irena, but he acted middle-aged already: an old-fashioned sort, proud of his traditional values and a devout Catholic. What bothered Irena, though, was Jan’s repulsive politics. Jan had been an active member of the far-right ultranationalist party for years—the party behind the odious bench ghetto.

  That meant Jan was also anti-Semitic. He believed in Poland for the Poles—and in his mind Poles were, by definition, Catholic. When it came to the “Jewish question,” Jan liked to think he was fair-minded. But the fact was, Jan didn’t mind saying that anyone could see that there should be some restrictions on those people. The Jews just had too much power. They controlled some entire sections of the economy, shutting out Poles, and as far as Jan could see, it had been bound to cause conflict sooner or later. What had the Jews expected?

  Although Jan was secretly active in resistance movements, too—because resistance alone united the left and the right in wartime Poland—his German supervisors found him cooperative and reliable. After the first office purges, Jan was promoted to director of the Adult and Child Protective Care Unit, with oversight of more than a dozen different institutions and several thousand welfare recipients. And that was the root of the dilemma. Jan was in a position, Jaga insisted, to be helpful to them. Jaga’s work brought her into regular contact with Jan, and they had to think of the possibilities. Irena nodded. That was true. Jan’s position was an advantage.

  His politics, however, told against him. Irena wasn’t sure she could trust him further than they already did with their secrets. Jan knew that they were manipulating the paperwork to thwart German regulations. He even helped them cover their tracks—not because he cared about helping Jewish families but because it was resistance. But Irena and her cell needed something more than Jan looking the other way tactfully. And the question remained: Was Jan Dobraczyński seriously going to risk his own neck to help Jewish people? It was hard for Irena to resist making a little moue of distaste every time she thought of Jan Dobraczyński. But she also noticed the sudden blush that crept up Jaga’s cheeks when she defended Jan from these aspersions on his character. Irena studied her friend closely. Was Jaga in love with Jan? It occurred to Irena that the chemistry was obvious. Irena, whose own family described her as “an agnostic with an unruly love life,” a married woman in love with a married man, took a relaxed view of these things. There was no judgment. But Jan Dobraczyński?

  • • •

  For weeks Irena debated silently about Jan. She didn’t trust him. But she did trust Jaga, and her friend’s passionate endorsement meant something. She certainly didn’t want to quarrel. In January, things came to a point of crisis.

  The chief of the German police called Jan one morning with some typically imperious orders. The chief wanted a roundup of street children on the Aryan side of the city. The social services divisions could either get these urchins off the streets permanently, or the police would see the verminous youth exterminated. Typhus was decimating the ghetto, and it was only a matter of time before the epidemic spread farther, beyond the walled quarter. These little lice-covered beggars were likely carriers. The disease was already killing more than a few Germans. Delouse the children and get them off my streets once and for all: those were the chief’s instructions. Otherwise, the chief would see to it that the Germans handled it. Jan didn’t like to think about how the Nazis handled things.

  Jan’s job was to oversee the placement of Polish orphans and Polish street children in local institutions. His office completed intake interviews and, most important, reviewed birth certificates and baptismal records to document their family histories. Children with the correct paperwork came and went in a tidy fashion, sent onward to safe places across the city. Jewish children had no business being outside the ghetto and were not eligible for services.

  The frontline task of locating and caring for Warsaw’s children, however, fell to social workers in the field offices—and especially to young women like Jaga Piotrowska and Jadwiga Deneka. Jan, in fact, spent a good part of his day far from the welfare offices, working surreptitiously for the Polish resistance. Officially the Germans insisted that he work long hours. “For an absurdly low salary you had to be stuck in the office ten hours,” he complained. But Jan quickly found a way around it. “Of course I was sitting not there for ten hours: I tried to be in the office at the beginning and at the end of the work day.” What he did in between, the Germans never seemed to notice.

  Jan passed the job along to the field offices, and Jaga swiftly got word back to Irena and the other
s. Together their team swept the city and rounded up the child beggars. Street urchins were taken in truckloads to one of the city shelters, and the women’s plan was to clean them up, get them checked over by the doctors, and send them along—with Jan’s stamp of approval as orphan placement director—to one of the care homes where they maintained regular contacts as social workers.

  Across Warsaw, the streets were filled with hungry children. Deprivation was not confined to the ghetto. Orphans and starvation were part of the grim reality of wartime. Since the start of the occupation, the number of abandoned or orphaned youngsters they were placing in the city’s care institutions had doubled. Whereas they used to send six hundred youngsters a year to the Father Boduen children’s home, one of the charitable church institutions Jaga worked with most closely, the number was now more than twelve hundred. Not all of those extra six hundred children, though, were strictly speaking Catholic.

  There were, one might say, periodic “irregularities”—times when the paperwork might get a bit inventive. Faking the welfare files to get social benefits for poor Jewish families, the original plan of Irena and her office coworkers, was substantially harder once the Jewish families were trapped inside the ghetto and any aid had to be smuggled across the checkpoints. Increasingly, Irena’s team of conspirators was working on new ways to find the elusive documents needed to “complete” those false files and to help the Jewish people who were brave enough to risk living on the Aryan side of the city create a “Polish” identity. That mostly meant locating blank or forged birth certificates, and there were different inventive approaches. One of the simplest methods was also the saddest. When a Christian child died in one of the orphanages, the key thing was to make sure that the death was never reported. The name and registry number were passed along instead, to give a new identity and a place to a Jewish foundling.

  Chances to make a ghoulish swap like this required timing and patience. Now, on this winter afternoon, dozens of skinny little children’s bodies filled the room, boys and girls caught up in the sweep of street beggars. In wartime, children didn’t giggle or scream with laughter, especially not these children. Homeless orphans lived and died wild on the streets of Warsaw’s Aryan district, too, and these were the hardy survivors.

  Irena moved among them with her calm and quiet voice, reassuring. She was a tiny and trim person, hardly bigger than some of the boys herself. But she was an organizational wonder. The women had a smooth system operating: one by one the girls in the office would cut the children’s hair, collect their clothes, and send them off for a good lye-soap washing. The smell of the harsh soap stung painfully, and the room was bitterly cold, but the children were eerily quiet.

  Jaga and Irena knew that they would find among these children some boys whose naked, shivering bodies betrayed their dangerous secret. Circumcision was a death sentence. Blackmailers and thugs stopped on the street any men or boys they guessed might be Jewish and ordered them to reveal their penises for inspection, often with sadistic consequences. There would naturally be a handful of Jewish children in a roundup of street waifs. The most desperate ghetto children risked their lives to cross the wall, hoping to beg or smuggle enough to feed themselves and often their families. What the women hadn’t been prepared for was the fact that nearly half of the dozens of street children that day were Jewish. Jaga’s stricken face told the whole story: this was a disaster.

  The children arrived in streams all day, one truckload after another, and when the German police arrived unannounced to “supervise” the baths and delousing of the first arrivals, Irena and Jaga exchanged frantic glances. Jaga gestured toward the back door and smoothed her dress to calmly greet the German arrivals. Irena swiftly nodded. Two little circumcised boys were quickly helped to disappear out through the service entrance. Jaga ran interference with soft smiles and devout protestations. Take them to my parents’ house, she whispered urgently before turning. Are you certain? Jaga shrugged. It was a gesture that said: What’s the other option?

  The two frightened children, without family left to care for them, would pass the night in a house on Lekarska Street where Jaga lived with her parents, Marian and Celina; her sister Wanda; her husband, Janusz; and their small daughter, Hana. It was unthinkably brazen. Jaga’s house—just a stone’s throw from the German war hospital and the Volksdeutsche medical housing—was on a street that swarmed night and day with sentries.

  But they couldn’t take all these children home. Not any of them could risk that. When the trucks stopped coming that afternoon, the final tally included thirty-two unmistakably Jewish children. What were they going to do with them? They couldn’t turn them over to the Germans. Should they tell Jan the truth? It’s come to this, Irena realized grimly. Jaga seemed so certain that Jan’s heart was in the right place. Still Irena hesitated. She knew that her friend didn’t understand this suspicion.

  In the end, what was the alternative? They would have to find these children safe places to disappear, and that depended on Jan, as section director, helping. Thirty-two youngsters were too many to disappear through a back entrance in an occupied city. Finding dozens of forged Kennkarte—the all-important German-issued identity cards—at a moment’s notice was impossible. Saving these children would mean doing it without official documents, and that meant they would need Jan’s silence and cooperation. There was no way around it. They would have to tell Jan, and they agreed that Jaga would do the talking.

  Jan was in torment when he understood what Jaga wanted. There was nothing he wanted more than to please Jaga. He also understood clearly enough what it would mean if the Germans came and picked up the urchins. Jan crossly thought to himself that he didn’t need Irena to explain it to him. The penalty for leaving the ghetto was execution, and these children had been found on the Aryan side of the city. Yes, he knew that. But it was also summary execution for any gentile who helped them. And this, in his opinion, was a pretty harebrained operation.

  Ultimately, it was up to Jan to make the final decision. He was the one to whom the police chief had given the orders. The chief would ask for a report from him. If there had just been one or two children, it might have been different, Jan told himself. That he might have risked, but this was too many. Surely the women could see that? He implored Jaga to understand. He wasn’t willing to authorize thirty-two doomed orphanage transfers, not when the Germans were holding him responsible for this operation. He wasn’t willing to ask the orphanage directors—old friends of his father and his family—to take on so many children without Aryan papers.

  When he made the telephone call, he told the German supervisor the truth. Yes, there were Jewish children. Dozens of them. When he set the receiver down afterward, there was every reason for his hands to be shaking. The German was a bastard. Even as Germans went, he was a bastard. He might still come and shoot them all dead in the street just for the hell of it too. But Jan had done the best he could. In theory, they had come to an arrangement. It had not come cheaply. Jan kept quiet about that part of things. But there were no free passes with the Germans. Jan had twenty-four hours. He would have to pull some strings and he would have to call the old doctor. He already knew that Irena was going to be furious. They had to smuggle the children back into the ghetto.

  • • •

  Jan’s aging father was a friend of the “old doctor,” Dr. Janusz Korczak, the legendary educator and children’s rights activist in Poland, who was now the director of the crowded ghetto orphanage set up next door to Ewa Rechtman’s youth circle. But Ewa wasn’t the only one in their circle with a soft spot for the kindly doctor. All of Dr. Radlińska’s girls had admired the doctor since their early days on the campus of the Polish Free University, where Dr. Korczak lectured alongside the professor. Jadwiga Deneka had trained in one of his innovative schools before the war and thought of him as her dearest mentor. Ala Gołąb-Grynberg pulled family strings and even tolerated her cousin Wiera to raise money for the doctor’s children. And Irena loved both th
e doctor and the eager little people who crowded around her excitedly when, on her daily trips in and out of the ghetto, she smuggled across for them small presents of candy or the whimsical Jewish dolls that Dr. Witwicki made for them according to the children’s elaborate orders. Dr. Korczak was no stranger to any of them. But for Irena that would never make what happened any better.

  In the winter of 1941–42, entering the ghetto wasn’t strictly necessary to get a message to the doctor. Telephones in and out of the ghetto still worked in a few places—an astonishing but fortuitous oversight that allowed for more than one daring rescue operation. Jan could only hope the doctor would help him. He needed someplace to send the children. “[At] my request,” Jan said, “my father telephoned him.” If Jan could get the children back over the wall without the guards shooting them all, would the doctor agree to take the orphans? Dr. Korczak consented. The ghetto was not a place of choices either.

  They had just a few hours to plan the perilous operation. There was a breach in the wall that week in the Muranów district, unless the Germans had already closed it. If they had, no matter: there would be another. The ghetto orphans knew exactly where the holes were: the would-be rescuers simply had to ask the children.

  Irena could not believe what Jan was telling her. She cursed herself silently. She should have found another solution. He was going to send children back into the ghetto? She was in and out of that hellhole three, four times daily, and she would never agree to this. Only someone who had no idea what happened there would jump at such a cowardly, pathetic nonsolution. There were hard, bitter recriminations. Irena confessed later that it was a terrible quarrel. Jan was reeling. She had not minced words with him in her anger.