The Good Doctor of Warsaw

by Elisabeth Gifford

  Tonight he’ll go back to the factory in Wola and ask if they want him to work again. Right now though, he’s sleepy, his arms and eyes heavy. He pulls some empty sacks behind the stove and lies down.

  Korczak has two visits today, two prospective new children. Misha is coming with him. In time Korczak hopes Misha will be able to take over the visits to new children, and many other things in the home. After all, he and Stefa are not getting any younger. It’s time to start thinking about how a new generation will carry the home into the future. He and Misha got on from the beginning, perhaps because they both lost a parent early, had to tutor as teenagers to help support the family. Misha is athletic and happy to take the children ice skating or kayaking, play football in the yard, but he has an instinctive understanding that children have an inner life, and that some of them carry a deep sadness.

  It’s only a few hundred yards along Krochmalna Street but they’ve left the small factories, green lots and new apartment blocks of the street’s Polish end where the orphanage stands, and are walking through the clamour of Jewish Krochmalna, famous for its poverty, its streetwalkers and its small-time crooks. It’s teeming with ragged children playing between the low, tar-roofed houses. Two girls are singing, a clapping game in Yiddish.

  They turn into a courtyard, a babble of voices from the rows of open windows. Yiddish curses from a knife-grinder mix with prayers from a front room Yeshiva. On its doorstep, a rabbi’s wife in her wig nods at Korczak. A baker in a ripped shirt, red-faced from the heat of his basement oven, stands at the top of his cellar steps and waves to him. They all know Pan Doctor.

  Misha follows Korczak down one of the sets of worn steps to a tiny barrel-roofed cellar ripe with old damp. The only light comes from a grimy window slit, legs walking past on the pavement. There’s a single bed, a tiny iron stove that smells of frying, bowls and pans hang on nails along the wall for washing or cooking. A woman is sitting on the bed, thin, with a tubercular cough. A girl of about eight, equally wasted and pallid, sits on the bed as if she sees no one. Long, uncombed red hair in matted curls. The saddest eyes Misha has ever seen.

  ‘What can I do?’ the woman says. ‘I’m too sick to look after a child. And what should she eat? I have nothing.’

  ‘And the parents have passed away?’

  The woman gives Korczak a vinegary look, yellow and sharp. ‘Only ever a mother. She’s passed away to Paris where she thinks business will be better. Child doesn’t understand what her mother is. Doesn’t understand much at all, it seems to me.’

  Korczak crouches down in front of the child. Halinka looks out at him, then returns to her sadness. But he’s seen a flicker there. She’s intelligent, alive. If they can find her.

  The matted red hair will have to come off, crawling as it is. ‘Bring her on Friday, before the Sabbath meal. The children bathe then.’

  Then on to the next address. A coal shed behind a factory.

  It’s late afternoon when Erwin wakes behind the stove. There’s a man in the gloom, a bald head, white beard, talking with Mother. Next to him is a tall young man with a canvas bag and a notebook, writing things down as Mother talks.

  ‘They don’t go to school any more, Pan Doctor. They help me bag the coal, or they wander the streets. Three months now since their father died and we lost the rooms on Piwna Street. We only got this because a friend took pity on us.’

  Erwin goes over and listens in. The old man wears a pale dustcoat, has white hair. Mother has written him a letter. The man looks at Erwin, bright eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘So this is the little worker who does a night shift in a factory. A man already.’

  Erwin swells into the space he stands in.

  ‘So?’ he says.

  ‘Erwin, Pan Doctor has a bed for you. He can take you and Isaac.’ Mother is agitated, animated. This is important.

  ‘Take us where? To a hospital?’

  ‘To his home.’

  ‘So come and visit us next Saturday. If you like us, you can stay.’

  ‘We’ll come, Pan Doctor. Thank you.’

  But Erwin knows he won’t like this home, this hospital. He holds his mother’s hand. When the two men have gone he notices that his stomach is empty again, but the day has lots of hours left, and all of them cold and long and hungry.

  Mother makes the boys wash in a basin, the water black with coal dust. They walk along Krochmalna Street and stop at the gates outside a rich man’s house, white and tall with big windows and a balcony, children playing beneath a large chestnut tree. Inside, Erwin is dazzled by the rows of clean, white beds, by the smell of freshly baked bread, of meatballs in broth.

  The doctor is kind. His blue eyes look right into Erwin’s soul, even when he’s standing above him as he shaves off all Erwin’s hair and then weighs and measures him. Next, Isaac has his head shaved. Lastly a little girl called Halinka with thick red curls who won’t look at anyone.

  He eats five times that day. He can’t believe it. He is shocked to find that the beautiful white bed he is shown to in the dormitory is only for him. This house is where Erwin wants to live for ever. The next day he goes to school and no one beats him up for killing Jesus when he has to wait in the corridor while the priest teaches the Polish children.

  No one beats up a Korczak boy. Everyone knows who Korczak is with his famous children’s books and his radio broadcasts.

  And no one beats you up, or yells at you, or steals your stuff in the big white house. And best of all, Pan Doctor sits in the sun and listens to him, lets Erwin sit as close as a son next to a father while Pan Doctor nods and listens to whatever Erwin has to say.

  He’s not waiting any more. His life has begun. Every Saturday he goes to see Mother in her room in the big house on Sienna Street where she’s a maid now – only the two sisters are allowed to live with her there – and he tells her wonderful stories about his past week. He’s good at school. Clever, they say. Who knew?

  He has friends, lots of friends. But as he plays under the great chestnut tree, he sees the new girl, Halinka, playing with no one. She walks around the courtyard like a little shorn lamb, eyes far away, singing to herself, trying to look as if she likes being alone best of all.

  Erwin knows all about looking as if you don’t care, when you’re hungry, when you’re lonely. He tries to talk to her, but the boys laugh at him for playing with the girls. Is he in love?

  Two months, three months, the other children get tired of asking Halinka to play. They forget about her. She wanders around the edge of the yard like a small ghost while Erwin’s heart breaks a little more for her each day.

  Then a great commotion. Pan Doctor has done something terrible. He’s put Halinka on top of the big cupboard in the library and walked off. She can’t get down. How is she going to get down?

  A whole crowd of little girls stands in front of the cupboard, discussing what to do, shouting up encouraging messages. Erwin runs for Pan Misha. He’s tall enough to lift her down in one movement and Halinka is safe on the earth again. She goes off surrounded by a gaggle of clucking nurses and friends.

  Pan Doctor comes in from the hallway where, Erwin realizes, he’s been watching everything. Pan Doctor’s puzzles always have a purpose.

  Erwin sees what Pan Doctor has done and his heart swells with thanks. After that day, Halinka is never forgotten again, never lonely again. Her hair grows out in two thick, frizzy red-gold plaits, a sprinkle of freckles across her nose and forehead, and each day Erwin is a little more in love with gentle and kind Halinka.

  Of course, Pan Doctor has to go in front of the children’s court for putting a child on top of the cupboard. Eight-year-old Erwin stands up in Pan Doctor’s defence, and he speaks well, his round blue eyes indignant. The children are almost persuaded. But Pan Doctor is having none of it.

  ‘Same rules for everyone,’ he says. ‘You must give me the same punishment that you would give to any child if they did such a thing. Only fair.’

  Erw
in and his friend Sammy Gogol are standing at the window, scrubbed and combed and looking out for Pani Sophia to come through the gate. As soon as they see her they yell to Pan Misha and dash out into the courtyard to meet her.

  ‘So we’re going to the music store on Marshall Avenue?’ says Sophia as the boys crowd around her, each giving their version of the story. She glances up at Misha. He smiles as if to say, I guess I’m going to have to share you today.

  Sammy’s parents were both gifted musicians. He can wander up to the hall piano and pick out any tune. Day after day Misha has found the new boy standing at the top window of the stairwell looking out over the courtyard of the Polish apartments next door, listening to a boy playing his harmonica.

  ‘If I could,’ he’d whispered to Pan Misha at the supper table, ‘I’d buy a harmonica just like that. If I had some money.’

  ‘But you do have money,’ Erwin had pointed out. ‘Haven’t you lost two teeth since you arrived? Don’t you know that when you hand your teeth in to Pan Doctor he writes it down in his book and banks a zloty for you?’

  Sammy’s eyes had lit up. His own money. He swung round to check with Pan Misha, hope across his small face with its long nose and big ears.

  ‘Is that enough to buy a harmonica?’

  ‘I should think it is.’

  So now they set off to choose Sammy’s harmonica. The boys walk in front as they cross Saxon Park, Erwin blond and compact, beady blue eyes assessing everything. Sammy taller, a long aquiline nose and sticking-out ears, his dark hair in compact curls. Erwin has come to advise on how to get a good deal, waving his hands as Sammy listens carefully, nodding at tips on driving a hard bargain.

  On Marshall Boulevard with its grand offices and shops, they enter a music shop and buy a gleaming harmonica with a mellow, resonant tone. Sammy holds it like a holy relic. A trill of three recognizable notes emerges among some wheezing first tries as the boys march down the street. Sophia claps as she and Misha follow behind. But up ahead, a crowd of people are gathered around the news-seller, almost snatching the afternoon paper from his hand.

  Headlines are scrawled across the poster in front of the stand. Hitler has annexed Austria.

  ‘Perhaps he’ll be satisfied now,’ says Sophia as they walk back to the home in more sombre mood.

  A few weeks later, Hitler marches into Czechoslovakia and claims the Sudetenland as part of the Reich.

  ‘Why is no one in the civilized world doing anything to stop this madman? Whatever will he do next?’ says Mrs Rozental as she mends a stocking in the kitchen.

  Mr Rozental switches off the wireless. Slight and greying, he points at the room with his pipe. ‘These claims that part of Poland is German territory are going nowhere. He’d never dare cross over into Poland.’

  Sabina looks down shyly from the white droshky decorated with white roses and carnations. Her veil fits closely around her head like a princess in a medieval painting, a silk flower fastened to one side. Lutek waves his top hat and the white horse sets off. Sophia and Krystyna wave madly, Mrs Rozental dabbing her eyes. She takes her husband’s arm as they watch the carriage set off along Twarda Street to Grzybowski Square.

  Next to Sophia, Misha wears his new suit, his father’s watch in the waistcoat pocket. Both his sisters, Niura with her blonde curls and Ryfka with her plaits, are studying in Warsaw now and Mrs Rozental has decided to take them under her wing. They crowd along the pavement next to Rosa and her new husband, along with the neighbours and friends who’ve known Sabina since she was a little girl, everyone waving and cheering as the carriage sets off around the square. A band has come out of the courtyard to play, a clarinet and accordion. The carriage takes two more turns around the square to eke out the splendour of the moment, then drives along Twarda Street and turns into a side passage. Hidden away in a little square, the tiny white Nozyk Synagogue waits, pretty as a wedding cake.

  The wedding party follows in groups, arms linked, chattering and smiling. Inside the synagogue, they fall quiet, enveloped by the solemn smell of polished wood, of hot candle wax and the air of anticipation.

  The cantor is highly regarded, known for his ability to make everyone cry, the sign of a good wedding. Sabina and Lutek are married beneath the carved marble canopy. They each tread on a glass folded in a napkin, a reminder of the destruction of Jerusalem, and then they are back outside in the April sun, stopping for a photograph before Mother says they should move into the hall where the food and the band are waiting.

  Later, as the dancing begins, Sophia recalls her lace gloves, a present from Sabina. She must have left them inside the synagogue. She slips out to get them.

  The building is empty. She breathes in the peaceful air, looking around at the pretty fretwork screens and the delicate white and gold of the building. One day. In this very place. Misha will be waiting under the canopy as she walks towards him.

  She leaves the building and runs across the courtyard, unable to be away from him for a moment longer, running towards the music and singing from inside the Nozyk hall.

  A few months later, the world is shaken by a violent pogrom against Jews in Nazi Austria. There have been restrictions on Jewish life in the Reich, but this brutality is a new departure. How can people be arrested, robbed and beaten up, on the streets of civilized Vienna?

  In her new flat, Sabina has no interest in newspapers. White as a sheet, her face thin, she is throwing up constantly.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asks Krystyna, holding back Sabina’s long, black hair from the bowl on her knee.

  Mother wipes Sabina’s forehead tenderly. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ says Mother calmly. ‘This is good news.’

  Sabina goes shakily to the mirror, tries to tidy her hair.

  ‘So long as the poor baby has your blonde hair, Mother. I look like a complete witch.’

  ‘My beautiful girl. Such a thing to say. A little nap this afternoon will help you feel less down.’

  They hide the evening newspaper from Sabina with its pictures of shops in Vienna with broken windows and paint daubed across doors: ‘Jews get out’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LITTLE ROSE SUMMER CAMP, JULY 1939

  For weeks Sophia’s been looking forward to spending a month at the Little Rose summer camp: a whole month to be with Dr Korczak and the children and a chance to learn from the great man himself.

  And a whole month spent with Misha. They’ve been a couple for two years now, but since he lives at the orphanage as a teacher and she with her parents, both of them studying, it feels as though they are constantly saying goodbye, always waiting for the next time they can meet.

  But since they arrived, three days ago, it honestly feels as though Misha’s been avoiding her, distant and jumpy.

  The wooden table is warm from the afternoon sun, piled with little stacks of paper and sticks from her kite-making club. Halinka is helping Sara colour in the bows for the string of her kite. The rest of the children have gone to play in the field nearby, the grass rippled with light, the clear trebles of their voices coming and going on the breeze.

  Across the field she can see Misha towering above the boys in their vests and shorts as he supervises a football game. Her heart clenches. She’s barely spoken with him all day. She loves him so much she’s never considered for a moment that he might not always feel the same. She can’t imagine a future without Misha at its centre.

  ‘Are you sad, Pani Sophia?’ Halinka asks. Really, you can’t hide much from a child like Halinka with her gentle ability to pick up on other’s feelings.

  ‘Am I frowning? On such a lovely day.’ Sophia takes the finished kite that Sara hands to her. Beneath Sara’s straight fringe, the scar on her forehead shows silver against her summer tan.

  ‘We’ll fly them as soon as it’s windy enough.’

  She watches the girls run down the sloping field, calling out to the others.

  At least people have stopped doing that sort of thing now, gangs of boys throwing stones at the childre
n as they walk home from school.

  There’s a new feeling in the air at Warsaw. They all need to stand together. Hitler has swallowed Austria and the Sudetenland and now he’s making rumbling threats about taking a slice of Poland’s northern sea coast.

  A horrible new thought. A cold shadow passes across the day. Perhaps Misha’s moody because he’s going to tell her that he wants to enlist. Sabina’s husband has already joined up.

  But she couldn’t bear that either, if Misha had to go away and fight.

  Misha’s sister Niura joins Sophia at the picnic table.

  ‘How was chemistry club?’ asks Sophia.

  ‘My budding scientists are all still alive, I’m happy to say.’

  Niura has the same high cheekbones and slanted eyes as Misha, the same lilting eastern inflection to her Polish. She’s become a good friend over the past two years.

  Niura waves to Misha across the field but he looks away as if he doesn’t want to acknowledge the girls.

  A boy falls over in his eagerness to get the ball. Misha helps him up, examines the knee and soon the boy’s laughing.

  ‘You know,’ Niura says, ‘Father tried to do his best when Mother died, but he’s a military man. It was Misha who carried on Mother’s warmth in the house, who used to read to Ryfka and me when we were little. He was the one who listened to us when we were upset. He hasn’t got an unkind bone in his body.’

  ‘But don’t you think he seems worried about something? Something’s wrong.’

  Niura gives her a funny look. ‘Not at all. He’s never been happier.’

  They watch as Misha leads the boys away towards the long wooden dachas behind the garden of hollyhocks and lettuces. They pass Korczak in his wide-brimmed straw hat, sitting on the grass nearby with a group of children.