The Good Doctor of Warsaw

by Elisabeth Gifford

  The German land grab of Polish territories would never stretch as far east as Lvov or Pinsk. There, his sisters and Sophia would be safe.

  That was days ago and now the deliveryman is curled up under a rough brown blanket at the head of the long cart near his enormous white dray horse. Misha moves Sophia carefully and pushes a rolled-up coat under her head without waking her.

  He really has to pee. And it would be good to see if there’s any drinking water nearby. The flasks are almost emptied.

  There’s a yellow cast to the light slanting between the trees. The cloud of dust that followed the long line of refugees over the past two days has stayed with them all night, thickening the damp, turning the figures among the trees into yellow shadows in the morning light.

  By the side of a swampy pond, a group of Polish soldiers are milling around. The first soldiers he has seen on the road. At last. They will know where he should report to join up. He notices that they have no tents, sleeping in the open like everyone else. They look dishevelled and defeated. Some don’t have full uniform as if they rushed off to fight in a hurry and no one had time to give them adequate kit.

  Misha goes over. Nods. ‘So where are you men heading? Where’s your regiment based?’ he asks. ‘I heard the message on the radio. I want to report to enlist.’

  A soldier with a bandaged arm is watching a can of water set on a fire of sticks. He huffs. ‘Another one who’s heard the famous message. You tell me where my regiment is. We got mown down. This is it. We’ve been going from place to place trying to find a regiment, any regiment to join.’

  A small man with dark hair and a dark shadow of stubble on his chin looks at Misha’s eager face. He wears an army kepi pushed back on his head, a civilian jacket with a rifle holder slung across his shoulder.

  ‘Polish army’s gone, mate. In pieces.’

  ‘So where are you heading?’

  He shrugs. ‘We’ve just come from up ahead. If you’re going east, don’t go through Siedlce. Place is full of Germans looting and firing on people.’

  Misha walks back to the cart, frowning at what he has heard. A woman in an expensive fur coat and a man in a tailored suit stop him. ‘You don’t have a car, do you? We have money. Whatever you want. We need a car.’

  He shakes his head. He hears her asking the same question to the next people and the next.

  *

  By the time he gets back everyone is out of the cart, discussing something. Sophia sees him and relief breaks over her face and she runs over. ‘Where did you go? I didn’t know where you were.’ She hugs him for a long moment.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you.’

  ‘Always wake me.’

  She holds his arm as they walk back. The deliveryman is examining the horse’s hooves while the others listen to him.

  ‘This girl can’t go any further,’ he says, patting her neck. The horse is his most precious possession. ‘She’s gone lame. I’ll have to walk her over to a village to see if anyone can do something. It’s a fair way to the river, but you young people can do it on foot.’

  Misha opens the map. It’s two hundred miles from Warsaw to Lvov, a few hours by train normally, but it’s turning into an odyssey of days. The deliveryman shows the best way, tracing out invisible tracks with his thick finger.

  Their bags are too heavy. They take out all they can and leave it in the cart. A few more objects added to the discarded possessions that now grow along each side of the long road: abandoned cars out of petrol, doors left open; half-unpacked cases, clothes spilling out; an expensive fur coat now too heavy to carry that no one picks up; books that litter the roadsides like grounded birds, their pages fluttering in the breeze.

  Carrying what they can, they walk across the open fields under a flawless blue sky. Misha tries to take Sophia’s rucksack from her back but she won’t let him. There’s a rank and catty smell on their bodies but at least they are making progress towards the river. They come to a small track of sandy dirt leading through dark green woods and walk in line between the tall tree trunks beneath the canopy of dappled shade, listening to the sound of birds.

  Faint at first, there’s the sound of an engine and before they realize what it is, a motorbike with a sidecar has appeared on the track in front of them. It’s steel grey, German helmets, and it’s too late to hide. They’re standing in front of two German soldiers wearing beautiful grey tailoring with black and silver details, handsome and blond and young. Nice boys.

  One of the fresh-faced soldiers gets out of the sidecar and comes over to them. The birds carry on singing in nets of song.

  Misha’s eyes follow the man as he walks around the group, the soldier’s eyes travelling over the girls, over the suitcase that Niura grasps with two hands. It’s leather and cost far too much, a present from a Polish boyfriend with an aristocratic background.

  The soldier says something in German. He grips the case expecting Niura to let go, but inside is her precious photo of Mama in a silver frame, everything that she owns. In the same moment, she tugs back hard. The soldier stumbles forward, looking foolish.

  Everyone freezes, breath held. Red-faced, his hand goes to his gun, but the man still on the bike guffaws with laughter and shouts something in German. The soldier lifts his rifle and hits Niura in the face with the butt. She staggers back, her hand to her face where the skin has split. He gets back into the sidecar and the men roar away.

  ‘He could have shot you,’ Ryfka says crossly, dabbing at the blood.

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ says Niura. ‘He was being greedy, yes, but Germans aren’t monsters who shoot in cold blood. I was quite in the right. You just have to let them know it.’

  She picks up the case and they carry on.

  ‘I still say you should have let him take it,’ says Ryfka, following behind her, still pale with shock. ‘Tell her, Misha,’ she calls out to him.

  ‘It’s Niura who tells me what to do these days.’

  ‘Oh, you.’ But Niura doesn’t sound displeased.

  ‘All the same, you took a risk,’ Misha chides her in a low voice. ‘Don’t scare us like that again.’

  They carry on along the sandy path. The split on Niura’s cheekbone is drying over but is surrounded by a red bruise turning to violet.

  At dusk, they reach the village. It’s just as the deliveryman described, a small wooden synagogue among low peasant cottages now black silhouettes against the gloom. The ferryman’s cottage is a one-storey, tar-roofed house a little further along the riverbank.

  But there’s something going on. Across the narrow river, headlights, loud voices. They stand in the shadow of the trees and watch. They can see a jeep. Men in uniform. For a moment Misha’s heart rises, thinks he’s seeing men from the Polish army. Then he realizes the voices are Russian, loud and relaxed and confident. The headlights of a jeep show two men in green-brown uniforms.

  ‘Russian soldiers. What are they doing here?’ he whispers. ‘Why are Russian soldiers this far over the border, miles into Polish territory?’

  ‘They must have entered the war,’ says Sophia in an excited whisper. ‘On our side.’

  The gruff ferryman soon explains that their optimism is mistaken.

  ‘Where have you been? Under a stone? Don’t you know that the Ruskies have got into bed with Herr Hitler? All happened yesterday. Russians get east of the Bug River, Hitler gets the west. That’s the end of Polish Independence. A sweet twenty years and it’s over.’

  They stand on the riverbank in silence, the cold night slowly chilling them now they are motionless. Sophia and Niura are both crying. The news is like a lead weight on Misha’s chest. He’s been hurtling himself towards fighting alongside the army for the past two days, and now defeat settles over his body, draining his limbs of any strength. So his dream of finding a valiant regiment of Polish soldiers to fight alongside is just that, a dream, their hopes of finding a tranche of free Poland ended. Between the Germans and the Russians, Poland is once again entir
ely battened down under foreign rule.

  ‘Stalin’s almost as much of a monster as Hitler,’ said Rosa. ‘Perhaps we should go back.’

  ‘But at least we’re not second-class citizens under the Russians. We can walk the streets, work, study,’ says Niura.

  The ferryman coughs. ‘So what do you lot want to do?’ he asks. ‘You going on or going back?’

  ‘We don’t have a choice. We’re going on,’ says Sophia, looking at the others.

  Warning them to keep quiet the ferryman leads them towards a rough jetty where his rowing boat is tied up. He’s not going over there himself, not till the soldiers have moved on. They can take the boat over and tie it up on the other side for him to collect later.

  ‘Can you handle a boat?’ he asks, doubtful.

  ‘We boat on the Vistula all the time,’ Rosa tells him. A vision of weekend picnics with the gramophone playing rises up and fades away.

  He pulls the boat further along, away from any lights and Russian voices. There’s no jetty here, only a slippery bank, the river deep. As they climb in one by one holding their suitcases and bags, the boat rocks wildly in the darkness, the current kicking against its side. At the moment when Misha holds out his hand for Sophia and she steps forward, the boat swings wide.

  With a yelp and a splash she’s gone, vanished beneath the black water. Misha plunges his arms in, scanning his eyes over the surface, waiting to hear the gasp of her rising, the thrashing of her breaking the water. Nothing but swirls of light from Niura’s torch on the dark surface. In a moment Misha tips over the side and begins to dive into the darkness, his feet catching in the muddy weeds. Again and again he comes up without her, nothing but water and air in his arms.

  ‘There,’ calls out Rosa. ‘Misha, I see her.’

  Downstream, he glimpses the pale shape of her head and arms in the darkness, clinging to the branches of a low-slung willow in the swirling stream. He runs along to pull her up and brushes the wet weeds of hair from her face and holds her tight.

  ‘Don’t do that. Don’t ever leave me again,’ he says, his mouth on her cheek, her ear, breathing her in.

  She’s shivering violently. In the boat he sits with his arm round her, keeping contact with her body in the darkness. The others begin to pull on the oars, moving towards where the shadows are deepest.

  On the other side of the Bug River they step out onto Russian-held territory.

  They make good progress walking through the night, and at daybreak come into a hamlet of wooden cottages. Shivering with cold they share a small breakfast of salami and water in the shelter of a wood. It’s time to split up, Rosa and her husband continuing east with Niura and Ryfka towards Pinsk. Misha and Sophia will go south towards Lvov. They eat in silence then clear away the paper; they stand in a group, not wanting to have to part.

  ‘It’s time to go,’ says Rosa gently. Ryfka and Niura hold Misha in a hug for a long time. Ryfka breathes in the smell of Misha’s jacket. Then she steps back, pale and looking so much younger than eighteen.

  ‘Take care of each other. And tell Pa and the aunts, I’ll see them soon, yes?’ said Misha.

  Niura gives him one last hug and nods, biting her lip. ‘And you’ll come to Pinsk and see us as soon as you can? You promise?’

  ‘As soon as this is over.’

  The girls begin to walk away with Rosa and her husband in front. They grow small and disappear between the creaking trees.

  The road is empty. Picking up their suitcases, Misha and Sophia set out on the track south. They’ve been to Lvov once before, as part of a group of students attending a summer school where Korczak was lecturing. They fell in love with the pretty city with its Viennese cafés and red and green roofs. They had planned to return there one day, together, but never imagined it would be like this. He takes Sophia’s hand and she looks up at him, feeling small and lost among the creaking pines. It’s just the two of them now.

  Later in the day they hear a distant hubbub of voices, growing louder as they come out of the forest onto a route that leads from a bridge across the river into what has been until recently eastern Poland. The road is packed with hundreds of refugees and soldiers, people who have hurried east across the ‘green’ border into the Russian zone while they still can. A lot of the faces look Jewish.

  He takes Sophia’s hand and they merge into the procession edging slowly towards Lvov. No one knows what they will find there now under Soviet rule.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WARSAW, SEPTEMBER 1939

  Korczak comes up from the orphanage cellars holding Sara by one hand, Szymonek by the other. The rest of the children follow, Abrasha with his violin, Sammy, Erwin, Halinka, everyone grubby and blinking. Three days in the dark breathing the sooty air tinged with miasmas of burning sugar or paint, depending on which factories have been hit. Candlelight and muddy-tasting well water.

  The sudden silence makes Korczak’s ears ring. Out in the courtyard once again, the little ones are jumping to catch feathers.

  ‘Look,’ says Szymonek. An enormous cloud of feathers is undulating in the wind above the rooftops, made from the contents of thousands of burst eiderdowns and pillows.

  In the distance there’s the hoarse thrum of an engine, the roar growing louder. A military motorcycle with sidecar passes by the gates in the smoky air. Two grey steel helmets.

  ‘Stay here children, stay here.’ He joins Zalewski at the gate and they watch along the road as the motorbike comes to a halt at the top of Krochmalna Street. A soldier jumps out of the sidecar and begins to manhandle an industrial-looking machine gun into the iron trestle on the back of the bike.

  A machine-gun emplacement at the top of Krochmalna.

  Zalewski turns away, wiping his eyes.

  ‘We didn’t surrender like Vienna. They took Warsaw from us, but we’ll stay Polish in our hearts.’

  Korczak nods grimly, keeping his eyes on the two soldiers. Then he locks the gate and they take the children inside.

  The Germans rapidly bring in the Nuremberg laws with a long list of restrictions on Jewish life. It hurts to have to explain to the children that they can’t go to Saxon Park any more, can’t go to the cinema. Erwin is incensed because after waiting in the Germans’ bread queue in town, a friend has denounced him as a Jew and now Erwin’s come home empty-handed.

  It won’t be for ever, Korczak tells the children. Hitler is a sad and spiteful little fire that will burn itself out in time. Sooner or later, the Germans are going to come to their senses again and leave.

  Korczak knows how to survive a German occupation. He’s done it before in 1918 – although this spiteful mania against Jews, the insane Nazi theory of a secret Jewish conspiracy against the Reich, is something he hasn’t experienced before.

  For now, Korczak’s main problem is to keep funds coming in – not easy when Jews are not allowed bank accounts and when all those who had the money to leave have left.

  As the months pass, he makes a study of these delinquent conquerors. He notices that the German Nazis ignore anything illogical. He makes sure to be the doddery old man, possibly a little drunk, any time he runs into German bully boys in a café and they leave him muttering to himself in a corner.

  He even – and here is the miracle – he even manages to cajole the German Kommissar in charge of the area around the summer camp into letting the children spend the summer of 1940 at Little Rose. The Kommissar is so charmed by Korczak’s philosophy of childhood that he sends his own German soldiers out to repair the camp’s huts damaged by the invasion, and even – though there’s a death penalty for helping Jews under the occupation – he sends wagons of food for the children, courtesy of Wehrmacht stores.

  ‘You see, there are no more bad Germans than there are bad Jews or Poles,’ Korczak tells Stefa as they walk through the gardens around Little Rose once again, letting the summer sun soak into their skin.

  Sooner or later, they’ll have to return to occupied Warsaw. Korczak orders the gardener and co
oks to pack up every last bit of food from the kitchens and vegetable beds to take back with them.

  ‘But Pan Doctor, aren’t we leaving some of the potatoes for next year, to grow the new ones?’ asks Szymonek, who loves the garden and growing green things.

  ‘Not this year,’ says Korczak as he and Zalewski secure the tarpaulin on the cart. ‘This year they may well be needed for soup if this German occupation is anything like the last. We’ll start again with new ones when we come back next year.’

  Korczak stands at the end of Nalewki Street; the Jewish commercial district with its towering apartment blocks is packed with families and small businesses of every description, each courtyard a small city in itself. He looks up at a new wooden board hanging on one of the lamp posts. The black gothic script warns non-Jews to keep away; Jewish districts are typhus zones. Yet he knows from friends in the Warsaw hospitals that no such cases have been reported.

  The Poles are treated a little better than the Jews but not much and so far the mood has been to band together. It seems clear to Korczak that the typhoid warnings are some Nazi attempt to isolate the Jews from the Poles.

  Looking towards Dluga Street he can see one of the sections of wall that have begun to spring up all over the city, cutting across roads and through buildings and courtyards. How far would the Nazis go to isolate the Jews?

  He goes to see his old friend from teaching days, Adam Czerniakow, now head of the Jewish Council. If anyone knows what the wall is about, Czerniakow will. Korczak and he both come from the same circle of educated Varsorvians where Jews and Poles mix freely as friends and colleagues. They are both proud of the Jewish heritage they hold, but also speak Polish as their first language and treasure Polish literature and culture as their own. And like Korczak, Czerniakow’s a passionate believer in unity. Now, to his consternation, Czerniakow is the main point of connection between the Germans and the beleaguered Jewish community, passing on the orders of the conquerors to the conquered.