The Good Doctor of Warsaw

by Elisabeth Gifford

  There’s already a queue outside the bakery. She tips her face up to feel the warmth of the sun. A woman is leaning on the rail of a balcony, a gramophone playing.

  Suddenly the air is split by the piercing wail of a siren. The queue outside the baker’s immediately peels away, heading towards the houses. She stumbles and begins to run home, the unrelenting din clawing at her back.

  Mrs Yelenyuk stops her in the stairwell, grabs her arm.

  ‘Mrs Wasserman, such news on the radio!’ Sophia can smell her mustiness, a kitchen where the window is never opened. ‘When the Germans get here, we’ll see the Ukraine respected again.’

  Misha is already on the way down to find her. He’s wearing a vest and pyjama trousers, his hair sticking up.

  ‘We should go to the cellars,’ he shouts above the raw ululation of the siren. They clatter down as a roar of engines passes above. A series of explosions shakes the building.

  ‘It’s true then,’ says a man in a long black coat as they stand in the cellar. ‘The Germans have broken the treaty, attacked the Russians. That’s Hitler’s first mistake. The Russians will soon see Hitler off.’

  *

  The town fills with the noise of Russian trucks and jeeps pulling out, retreating east. They set explosives, burning and destroying anything that could be of use to the incoming Wehrmacht army. From the NKVD prison a few hundred yards along the street, there’s the sound of gunfire and shouting.

  By dawn the next day, a fearful silence hangs over the city in the already simmering heat.

  There’s a hammering on Sophia and Misha’s door. Mrs Yelenyuk is beside herself.

  ‘Not a word from my brother. What have the Russians done to him? We’ve been outside the prison all day, crowds of us relatives, calling up to the windows, but no one’s answering us any more. Ah, you wait till the Germans get here,’ she rages; her face is streaked with dust and tears. ‘Then we’ll see who pays. Oh, yes. We’ve suffered long enough, we true Ukrainians.’

  She grabs Misha’s arm, her hand thin and hard. ‘All I know is, better the Germans than the Russians, Mr Wasserman. I have family in east Ukraine. We know what Stalin did there in thirty-three. Sold the peasants’ grain to feed Moscow, and you never saw such sights. Millions died. People were cannibals back then, Mr Wasserman, for the hunger. I am telling you, people walking like dead bodies, and it was Stalin and his communist Jews who did that to us. Ah, yes, the Jews. You Jews.’

  She leaves them stunned. And uneasy. The heat mounts as everyone stays inside and waits for the Germans to arrive. A terrible smell begins to seep along the street from the direction of the NKVD prison.

  ‘What should we do?’ Sophia says, looking out over the deserted street below. ‘Should we pack? Where would we go?’

  The air begins to quiver with the approaching noise of heavy tank tracks, the roar of motorcycles. It’s too late.

  The German units roll into Lvov as if for a summer camp, young and tanned and healthy in pale green uniforms with black-and-silver decorations on the collars. At their head, the Ukrainian SS Nightingale regiment. They smile and sing Ukrainian anthems as they ride in on Panzer tanks, a homecoming of Lvov’s own handsome boys.

  From their window, Misha and Sophia watch women in summer dresses and old grandmothers in white headscarves hand them flowers. Men salute with emotion, thinking no doubt of happier and more civilized days under the Austrian Germans.

  And all the while a terrible stench continues to seep from inside the prison along the street. Leaning out, Misha can see crowds now gathered outside the walls. The heat mounts, the stench is becoming intolerable.

  Something terrible is waiting inside to be discovered.

  That night there’s a sudden commotion out in the stairwell. A woman crying as someone is dragged down the stairs.

  ‘It’s the Cohens,’ says Misha.

  They’re being expelled from their large apartment on the top floor and out onto the street.

  Misha gets up and checks the apartment door is locked.

  In the morning they find a hysterical Mrs Yelenyuk in the hallway, eyes red with weeping. She puts her face into Misha’s. He can feel her spittle on his cheek. ‘You should know what the Jews have done in the prison,’ she hisses. ‘Piles of bodies. A priest nailed to a wall in the shape of a cross. Thousands of innocent men murdered by those NKVD Jews. Animals. My own brother. There’s no place in Lvov for Jews now,’ she said. ‘No place.’

  When she’s gone, Sophia’s face is white. ‘Is she warning us? What does she mean?’

  ‘I don’t know but I think I should find out.’ Misha pulls on his jacket.

  ‘Don’t. It’s not safe.’

  ‘It’s not safe if we don’t know.’

  There’s an angry crowd milling along Kazimierza Street towards the Brygidki prison, people talking animatedly. Posters have appeared on the walls during the night. ‘Ukraine for the Ukrainians. Say no to Moscow, to Poles, to Armenians, and Jews.’ He reads them with incredulity. Do the Ukrainians really believe the Nazis are going to allow them to rule themselves, under a benign Nazi protection?

  Outside the prison gates, people hold handkerchiefs over their mouths. The heavily planked prison doors stand wide open. Misha covers his mouth with his sleeve to block the smell and moves forward. He can see rows of bodies lying in the courtyard under the baking sun. Women in summer dresses, men in suits, are carrying more bodies out of the prison, lifting out corpses from shallow graves in the dirt. There’s Mrs Cohen, her face terrified, brushing dirt from a dead body with a branch.

  He looks around in a daze. Groups of women in peasant headscarves stand wailing over the muddy, sunken-eyed corpses.

  SS soldiers stand in the shade, casually holding their unused rifles while a hysterical man with a blue-and-yellow armband yells at a Jewish woman. She cowers and pleads as he slaps her repeatedly. A tall, immaculately dressed man with a white embroidered tunic is beating one of the startled Jewish men, strips of flesh flying from the man’s face with the force of the rough metal rod.

  Misha backs away from the gates. The air crackles with anger. Outside, a running riot has erupted along the street. Jewish civilians outnumbered and chased by furious Ukrainian relatives baying for blood and revenge. Boys with blue-and-yellow armbands, sticks held aloft, are beating them to the ground. A woman, her clothes half torn off, is being dragged along by her hair.

  Trapped against the wall by the crowd, Misha pushes himself along, trying to get back to the apartment. People pay him no attention. They’re watching a crowd move away from a man lying motionless in the road, dark blood pooling in a grid between the cobblestones. There’s a naked teenage girl sitting on the kerb, shouting back at the jeering crowd while her mother tries to put a jacket around her. Other women are being stripped of their clothes, pushed and shoved, noses bloodied, fleeing the crowd.

  The Nazi guards stand watching, faces dispassionate.

  ‘The Jewish Bolsheviks had it coming. They say three thousand good Ukrainians were murdered in the prisons, and that’s how many Jews are going to die before this is over, you mark my words,’ a woman tells Misha, her eyes glazed.

  Misha nods politely, finally frees himself from the crowd and walks on. Once he’s out of reach of the mob, he begins to run, praying that Sophia has stayed safe inside the apartment.

  She opens the door as soon as she hears his key. He holds her tight.

  ‘What’s happened? Misha?’

  He doesn’t want to tell her, but she needs to know how things are.

  ‘They are murdering Jewish people, humiliating them in terrible ways. I can’t tell you, a woman with no clothes, her face bleeding. It’s not safe here any more. Sophia, we have to leave.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘We could only go east, but the Germans will surely follow the Russians. Perhaps south, towards Syria and Palestine, but it would be risky. I don’t know. If we go west back to Warsaw . . .’

  ‘We go home.’


  ‘We can’t go back and enter the ghetto.’

  ‘At least we can be with family in the ghetto, with Korczak and the children. I know they say the ghetto’s more or less a prison, but the walls keep people out, keep people safe. And Jews have lived in ghettoes before.’

  He shakes his head, but he knows they have no alternative. ‘We’ll try to go before it’s light, when the town is quieter. But are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  All night, the town rings with screams and shots. They hear feet running up and down the stairs of the apartment block. Misha puts a chest against the door and sits up in bed watching it. The Cohens are well off. Up on the top floor in the Cohens’ apartment, they hear crashes, heavy things being carried and dragged downstairs. Before dawn, everything finally falls quiet.

  For the next few weeks as the Germans advance eastwards and hundreds of German troops pour through the area, they lie low, trapped in a battle zone, waiting for an opportunity to return to Warsaw. As soon as the Germans begin to establish some kind of order and trains start to run again – with a possible connection running to Warsaw – they decide to make their move.

  The town is silent as they walk through the dark streets, keeping to the shadows. The station, however, is brightly lit and already crowded with people trying to get home to Krakow or Warsaw now that Lvov is part of the Reich and the border is gone.

  As the buildings flicker past in the grey dawn and they pull away from Lvov, Misha sees for a moment the blur of white skin, a woman chased by boys with sticks, blood running from her nose, hair ripped and flying, her face a mask of dazed terror.

  Nothing, nothing can be worse than the horror of Lvov.

  His seat faces east, towards the sunrise that dazzles through his closed eyelids. Father, and Ryfka and Niura, will be waking soon in Pinsk. What if the Wehrmacht’s advance reaches that far? As a boy he once saw Polish soldiers in Pinsk ducking a Jewish schoolgirl in a freezing horse trough, laughing that they were baptizing her, but he can’t believe that the horrors he’s just seen in Lvov could ever be repeated in his home town. No, something odd and isolated happened in Lvov, a specific conflagration of fury and revenge.

  As the miles between them and Lvov increase, he feels Sophia’s body lose its tension and her dark blonde head rolls against him trustingly in sleep. The train stops for hours for no reason, starts again, all day to get back home to Warsaw. He’s bone tired, but a grey apprehension of the unknown life in front of them won’t let him sleep. Again and again, Misha asks himself if he is doing the right thing. But what choice do they have? Life will be difficult inside the ghetto, he’s sure of that much, but at least there she will be safe.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WARSAW, SEPTEMBER 1941

  The sun is beginning to set, its red light flashing between the iron slats of the Kierbedzia Bridge, as Misha and Sophia cross back into Warsaw once again. In the old town people are walking briskly past the cleared bombsites and damaged buildings. Red banners with black Nazi insignia hang from the palace in Saxon Square – a new name now, Adolf Hitler Platz.

  At the ghetto gate by Krasinskich Gardens they get out their identity cards. Sophia looks up at the white-rendered walls and the plank gates over ten feet tall. A wooden board is attached to one side warning people to keep out, typhus zone. Two well-fleshed German guards with rifles over their shoulders stand next to a small brick hut on the Aryan side. She looks anxiously at Misha.

  ‘Once we go in, there’s no going back,’ he says. But the reality is that they have no choice. To survive as a Jew outside the ghetto takes contacts and an inordinate amount of money, neither of which they have to hand as they stand in the street.

  ‘We’ll be with Mother and Father, with Korczak and the children. It’s time,’ she says.

  Holding hands, her heart beating fast, she and Misha approach the guards and explain that they wish to go into the ghetto and join family.

  The German gives them an odd look as he checks their papers. He taps Misha’s forehead, and waves them in. Inside, a Polish policeman in a navy uniform also has to examine their papers before he too motions them on. Last of all, a Jewish policeman checks through their documents, staring at them with a quizzical expression. Sophia waits, noticing that no one has bothered applying white render to this side of the wall, just dried mortar oozing between the rust-coloured bricks.

  From Sophia’s mother’s letters, they expected to walk into an area of Warsaw that was enclosed, but still recognizably the old streets that they had known so well. Nothing, however, could have prepared them for what they now find inside the ghetto walls. How can this be Warsaw? The streets are so crowded, they advance with difficulty. Even the air is different here, a persistent smell made up of rotting rubbish, unwashed clothing and sewage. Along each side of the street, thin and listless people in shabby clothes stand by little piles of redundant-looking items – battered saucepans, broken bits of clocks, an armful of old underwear – hoping for a sale. A sallow woman watches over a table of stunted bread rolls guarded by a barbed-wire cage. Two haggard children bundled in rags come swaying towards Sophia on stick legs, each holding out a hand and chanting as if in a dream, ‘We are hungry, please give us bread.’ Sophia gives them a coin and stares as the children carry on past, still swaying and chanting. An emaciated teenager with a rope around his frayed coat is stretched out on the flagstones, his sunken face as grey as putty, his eyes closed. Is he alive? He groans and opens his eyes as Sophia bends down.

  There are so many beggars, wandering through the crowds or propped against the walls, their faces resigned and almost apologetic in their quietness. And there’s no end to it. The terrible bazaar stretches on as far as they can see in a loud clamour of voices and snatches of buskers’ songs.

  At 26 Ogrodowa Street Mr Rozental answers the door, his face fearful. His expression changes to joy and amazement. Mrs Rozental follows close behind.

  Sophia blinks. How they have aged.

  ‘It’s you. It’s you. Dearest Sophia. Misha.’

  ‘You can call us Mr and Mrs Wasserman, Papa. We’re married. I sent a letter.’

  Her mother takes her hand and looks at the narrow gold band. ‘But the letter never came. So you’re married and we weren’t there, didn’t even know.’

  ‘Don’t cry, Mama.’

  ‘That we should see you again. Oh, but you shouldn’t have come.’

  Krystyna squeezes through and kisses them both. She’s holding a little boy. The child hides his face in Krystyna’s shoulder.

  ‘Thank goodness,’ she says to Sophia quietly. ‘If you only knew . . .’

  Sophia holds out her arms and takes the little boy.

  ‘Sabina’s child. He’s beautiful. But Mother, I don’t understand. How could it be? What happened to Sabina?’

  The little boy struggles and goes back to Krystyna. Mr Rozental sags, deflates as if punched. ‘We should sit down.’

  Mother puts a kettle of water on to boil, concentrating on this small task, keeping her back turned to the table. Holding Misha’s hand, Sophia waits; Father nods distractedly to himself before he finds the words to begin.

  ‘Sabina and Lutek moved into their own flat, a tiny place but a godsend, given to them by a good friend. People here, you know, they’re having to crowd in six, eight, to a room.’

  ‘I should have kept her with me,’ interjects Mrs Rozental. ‘I should have seen how she was, may her soul rest in peace.’

  ‘My beautiful girl, she never got over the shame of being sacked from the couturier’s. The wrong hair, the wrong nose, the posters of ugly Jews with lice in their beards: that was the beginning. Sabina was never strong like you girls. It hasn’t been easy. Often we’re hungry. Yes, that’s the truth. I have to tell them, Mother. One night, Sabina came to us. She wanted us to sell everything, have one last good meal together and then kill ourselves. We didn’t take her seriously. Everyone here has those thoughts now and then. She seemed to calm down. The next morning
she went out to sell her watch to buy carrots for the baby, for the vitamins, but while she was in the market, someone stole her wallet. All the money from the watch was gone. That afternoon she asked us to take care of the baby. We didn’t know it then, but she went up to the roof. She took the ribbon from her hair and put it around her eyes. Then . . .’ Mr Rozental pauses.

  Sophia’s hand flies to her mouth. ‘She killed herself?’

  ‘She’s buried at the edge of the cemetery,’ says Mrs Rozental thickly. ‘A suicide. Away from everyone else. My girl.’

  They sit around a table in a shared silence. A scratchy noise of voices comes in from the street outside.

  ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. If things are so very bad, then how are you managing in here, for food?’ Sophia asks.

  ‘To begin with we sold razor blades. You remember Sammy? He was sweet on you, Sophia. He closed down his razor-blade factory before he left Warsaw and gave us the rest of his stock. It’s been like gold. Lutek’s printing firm made new envelopes for single blades and we all sat round night after night putting them in the packets. Then we sold them. They lasted a while.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Krystyna works as a waitress on Sienna Street. Lutek lives with a school friend who gives him work. You can see there’s no room here. He comes and brings some food when he can, for the little boy. We have things left to sell if we need to.’

  Mr Rozental brings out a card with neat rows of black stars and puts it on the table. ‘It’s nonsense but you’ll have to register for one of these. It allows you enough food rations so you can starve to death, two hundred calories. It’s only the smugglers bringing in food who are keeping people alive in the ghetto.’

  Mrs Rozental’s eyes fill with tears. ‘And a lot of them are only children. It’s a beating and prison if they get caught.’

  ‘But I saw some people who were well dressed, with smart clothes just like outside the walls. How do they live?’

  ‘Yes, how do they live with themselves?’ mutters Mr Rozental.