The Good Doctor of Warsaw

by Elisabeth Gifford

  ‘Oh, if you’re rich, if you’ve got deep pockets and you’re happy for the Nazis to put their hand in, there’s nothing you can’t bring in here. Brandy, furs. There are little restaurants with champagne and fancy women, all with the shutters closed, of course. You’ll hear two big names in here, Kon and Heller. Two of the biggest crooks in Warsaw.’

  ‘They’re Jewish?’

  ‘Oh, yes. They live in the ghetto but they live in style.’

  ‘That’s enough for poor Sophia and Misha for today, Father. They’ll see it all soon enough. It will all be there in the morning.’

  ‘And Dr Korczak?’ asks Misha. ‘Have you had news? How is he?’

  For the first time Mrs Rozental’s face breaks into a smile. ‘Korczak, he’s like a ray of light in the ghetto. You see him everywhere with a sack on his back, looking for food for the children.’

  ‘And are the children well? And Stefa?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, they are all here. They say his orphanage is almost like being outside the ghetto. Poor of course, but clean, the children happy. A little oasis.’

  ‘They’re down in Chlodna Street,’ adds Krystyna.

  ‘We can go and see them first thing in the morning,’ says Misha, squeezing Sophia’s hand.

  ‘First you must go to the Judenrat and register for your cards, as soon as it’s open. If you were stopped on the street . . .’

  Mrs Rozental glances at her husband. ‘Oh, Sophia, why didn’t you stay in Lvov?’

  Sophia has no words to describe what they have left behind in Lvov.

  ‘Well, you are here now and I’m so thankful to see you. All we have to do now is stay together until this is over,’ says Mr Rozental.

  The Rozentals sleep in the tiny main room, Krystyna in the kitchen. There’s just room for Sophia in the bed, the little boy in a cot next to them. Misha tries to sleep on two chairs in the small gap between the window and table but he’s too anxious and flooded with adrenalin. What terrible place has he brought them to? How can so many children be going hungry, left to beg on the street?

  Are Korczak and the children suffering in the same way?

  His long legs cramp in the small space, he sleeps fitfully. He’s ready to get up now and begin looking for some way to earn enough to survive in this unimaginable place.

  He’s walking with Sophia by the Vistula, a blue sky and endless space. He opens his eyes and the ghetto returns. It’s early but outside on the street there’s already a thin cacophony of voices echoing between the buildings. No sound of car tyres. No tram passes along here.

  He’s stiff and needs a hot shower. He washes his face and armpits at the kitchen sink, quietly. He doesn’t want to wake Sophia and Krystyna, both still deeply asleep in the bed against the wall. Marianek is sitting up, watching Misha cautiously. The child begins to cry at the sight of this tall interloper. Sophia wakes and lifts Marianek next to her, cajoles him into a smile. She crosses the room in her nightdress, kisses Misha briefly and cuts a piece of bread from the loaf in the metal bin for the little boy

  She holds up the remains of the loaf, barely enough for three, and all there is for breakfast.

  ‘We won’t eat it. We can buy more on the way to Korczak’s, perhaps. Soon as I’m dressed, we can go straight there. They’ll all be up and having breakfast at the home by now.’

  Misha smiles at how well she knows him. ‘Just to see how they are. Then we’ll get our papers sorted out at the Jewish Council offices.’

  *

  A body is lying on the pavement outside the apartment, naked and emaciated. The few sheets of newspaper covering it are lifting and blowing away.

  ‘But why is no one doing anything?’ To her horror Sophia sees more corpses along the street. People walk past, eyes averted.

  A long black handcart comes squeaking along the street, iron rims of the wooden wheels clattering against the stone cobbles, one man pushing, the other pulling between the black shafts like a horse. They stop and collect naked corpses, stacking them like firewood on the cart, the bodies juddering when the cart moves forward over the uneven cobbles.

  The cart stops in front of Sophia and Misha. The men begin lifting the body.

  ‘Why have these people been left like this?’ asks Sophia angrily.

  The man eyes her quizzically. ‘And this is news? Where are you from?’

  ‘We came here yesterday, from Lvov.’

  ‘You should have run away in the other direction while you had the chance.’ He rubs his cheek and looks embarrassed. ‘You have to pay to bury a body in the Gesia cemetery, so they leave the bodies out, may they rest in peace, on the street. People need the clothes to sell for food.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Yesterday we walked through Warsaw and there were markets and shops selling plenty of food. It’s madness.’

  He shrugs, gets back between the cart shafts and the wooden hearse rattles away, the lifeless heads bouncing against the boards of the cart.

  *

  It’s the right address but the front door has been bricked up. Children’s voices float over the wall. And laughter. Misha realizes it’s the first time he’s heard laughter since they came in through the ghetto gates. They knock on the side gate; the jalousie cover opens and Mounius with his bright red hair appears behind the grille. He lets them in, giving Misha a deep hug, yelling out that Pan Misha and Pani Sophia are here. Misha takes in the scene. The side gate opens into a yard with walls of apartment windows rising on three sides like the courtyard of a castle, the wall cutting across the back. Children are playing quietly, pale but healthy. Korczak is sitting on a bench in the afternoon sun talking with a group of children. Misha is shocked to see how the flesh has fallen away to leave his face thin with large rheumy eyes, pouches underneath. His hair completely white. He’s wearing his Polish major’s uniform, the insignia gone from the collar.

  The moment Korczak sees them he breaks into a delighted grin, stands with his arms wide open.

  ‘And so you’ve come home to us.’ He embraces them warmly.

  ‘How are you, Dr Korczak?’

  ‘Fit as a fiddle, as you can see. Oh, yes, we do very well here, very well. Not a sick child among us.’

  A band of children with familiar faces but thinner, so much taller, gather around to greet Pan Misha and Pani Sophia; Sammy, who’s now almost as tall as Misha, with his harmonica; Abrasha with his violin in his hand; little Sara who was once hit with a stone on the way home and still has a silver scar on her forehead; gentle Halinka holding her by the hand. Squealing and shouting their news, the children pull Misha and Sophia away on a tour to see their new home.

  Inside, a wistful, scrubbed-clean poverty hangs over the place, but the children’s paintings are everywhere. Korczak’s beloved brave red geraniums are growing on the windowsills. The same white duvets neatly folded, the pristine bathrooms, the library corner and the notices on the wall with the children’s news.

  ‘Pan Misha, are you back to stay?’ Erwin comes running down the stairs, now a tough wiry thirteen-year-old, with his fair hair, his small beak of a nose and round, startled eyes. He has the pugnacious stance of a little boxer. ‘Will you come and read our Saturday news out to us again?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will. But this can’t be Erwin. So tall.’

  ‘Not so tall, and I don’t live here all the time now, Pan Misha.’ He leans in. ‘I go out to smuggle bread over the wall for Pan Doctor and for Halinka.’

  ‘I’d go too,’ says Sammy, towering up behind him, ‘but what can I do?’ He covers his long and handsome nose with a hand, a habitual gesture.

  ‘Sammy, you have an emperor’s nose, like Caesar,’ Misha tells him. ‘Be proud.’

  ‘It’s killing me.’

  Pani Stefa hurries over, as ever in a brown dress and white collar. She’s gone completely grey and her face sags with age and fatigue but her beautiful smile is still the same.

  ‘It’s good to see you both again. I can’t begin to tell you.’ Stefa gives them a clea
rer picture of how serious the situation is as they walk back down to the courtyard. ‘Korczak is out all day seeing people about donations but I don’t know how he can keep it up. He’s not well. It will do him so much good to know that you are here.’

  ‘I see you have almost all female teachers here.’

  ‘After the siege, the men went east as you know. But we manage between us. Esther is here now, the student doctor. She helps a lot with Korczak’s rounds. He’s very fond of her. As is Henryk, though in a more romantic way, but what can you expect from a boy of seventeen? So you see, apart from young Henryk, we don’t have any male teachers living in the home, and some of the boys who come in from the ghetto streets, they’ve seen too much.’ She bites her lips together.

  ‘You know I’ll be back to help, as much as I can.’

  Stefa’s face breaks into a relieved smile. ‘I didn’t like to ask now you’re married but it would help so much. We can’t pay you, Misha, of course, but we have meals. If you could help with the night shift in the boy’s dormitory sometimes.’

  He glances at Sophia.

  ‘Of course, you must,’ she says.

  ‘It’s so good to have you both back. I can’t tell you.’

  They leave the children playing in the courtyard, Korczak watching over them. The sound of children’s laughter follows them for a few steps, and they are back in the world of the ghetto. Sophia draws closer to Misha and holds his arm, but it’s impossible. She has to let go as they thread their way through the crowded pavements, following close behind him.

  People are hurrying up and down the steps of the Jewish Council offices on Grzybowska Street, but Sophia carries on walking past, her feet heading towards her old apartment block, following the route that she has taken since a child. Misha takes her hand and walks with her, understanding where she is going.

  Sophia turns around, looking for a landmark from her childhood. Her apartment block is gone, an empty space leading through to the next street, any remaining bricks swept into slopes of rubble and scree. The church is still there. The people going up its steps all wear armbands with the Star of David: Christians sent into the ghetto for their Jewish parents or grandparents, some of the families not even aware of their Jewish heritage until contacted by Nazi officials.

  Yes, it’s Grzybowski Square, but it’s hard to recognize. Instead of the generous clamour of the market with its overflowing baskets of bread rolls and flowers, there’s an assortment of desperate people selling next to nothing from tiny stalls or from trays hung around their necks, kindling, scraps of meat. The cobbles are filthy with mud and straw. A tiny child with eyes too large, legs like bare bones beneath its coat, begins to do a dance in front of Sophia. Sophia empties out her purse and buys the child a large bread roll. A flock of more children gather around.

  Nothing left in her purse and a ring of hungry children’s faces. She reluctantly follows Misha to the Jewish Council buildings.

  The Jewish policemen who guard the tall double doors have the air of louche imposters. Their uniform is nothing but a police armband, a belt and cap over shabby civilian clothes, grown men playing a sinister version of a child’s dressing-up game. They look out above the crowds, uncomfortable, supercilious. They each carry a rubber truncheon.

  Inside, she and Misha begin queuing beneath a poster of a large louse with instructions in German to keep clean.

  ‘Not that you can get soap,’ mumbles the man next to them, nodding at the poster. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. ‘Sorry, my dear, it’s just that I’m a doctor and one gets tired.’

  ‘Are there many cases of typhus in here?’ said Misha. ‘We’ve just arrived.’

  ‘What do you think? Half a million underfed people crammed into a square mile, in these conditions. A quarter of the population gone, I’d say. Try not to touch anyone as you go down the street. The lice.’

  Sophia can feel herself shrinking into her jacket at the thought.

  The man looks down at Sophia’s wedding band and then fixes her with a sad look. ‘And my dear, be careful not to risk a pregnancy, not in this place.’

  When they come out, one of the Jewish policemen is beating a beggar with his rubber truncheon. The man cowers under the blows.

  After days of seeing nothing but buildings the colour of dirty sand, only a narrow channel of sky visible between the terraces of apartments, it’s a shock to come into a place where green grass and flowers grow: the cemetery. Sophia and Misha follow Krystyna beyond the rows of stone slabs towards a rough and greener acre. Young people are weeding new onions and cabbages in the sun – a farm in a graveyard.

  Far away from the entrance, at the furthest boundary wall, they find the wooden marker for Sabina’s grave. This is where the suicides are laid to rest. They stand in a half-circle, listening to birds singing, breathing the almost forgotten scent of trampled grass and wild flowers.

  Sophia closes her eyes, trying to see Sabina again, a girl sitting high in a white droshky filled with flowers on the way to her wedding, so hopeful and so beautiful.

  But Sabina’s gone. Sophia opens her eyes and gulps air arid with grief. She feels a hand creep into hers: Krystyna folds herself against Sophia’s shoulder and they weep together for their sister.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WARSAW, SEPTEMBER 1941

  Korczak sees the guard kick the boy to the ground. He winces at the steel boot in the child’s ribs, feeling every blow from the rifle butt. Runty parsnips and carrots lie scattered across the cobbles in front of the gate. When the German guard has sated his temper, when the little smuggler is no longer screaming or moving, the guard orders the vegetables to be taken to the guardhouse and then loses interest in the child. A younger guard signals to a man to come forward and remove the boy. The terrified man scoops the boy up and walks away, the child’s arms and legs dangling, head flopped back, his mouth open.

  Korczak hurries to catch up with him.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’

  ‘I don’t know. To the hospital, if they’ll have him.’

  Korczak frowns. The hospitals are full of typhus cases, a bed there is more or less a death sentence.

  ‘I’m a doctor. Bring him with me.’

  ‘Of course. Dr Korczak, isn’t it? I used to listen to you on the radio, sir.’

  At the home on Chlodna Street, the man decants the child onto a bed in the sickbay.

  The boy is barely conscious. A faint snore of breath. Korczak examines the lesions on the child’s head. A baggy jacket with the hidden inner sack ripped open. Cut-off trousers are tied with fraying rope round a skinny waist, his arms and legs like sticks. He might be around eight but it’s hard to be sure with so many children undernourished. He’s fine-boned, with small clever hands and face. He looks like a child who in another life would be destined for the Yeshiva school, have a mother who made him wear a scarf in the cold. Korczak unties the string on the boy’s too-large boots and releases a smell of damp and rotting cloth.

  The man at his side looks around the calm, clean home with wonder. ‘It’s like you’re not in the ghetto here.’

  ‘I can assure you we are,’ says Korczak, taking the boy’s pulse. ‘But that does not mean that we live like monsters.’ He holds the child’s wrist, counting faint beats with concentration. Glances up at the man’s once good coat, his white skin and grey veins standing out across his forehead, the smell of hunger on his breath. ‘Go down to the kitchen. Tell them to give you a meal. I don’t know what it will be.’

  *

  ‘You can stay here now,’ Korczak tells the child when he comes round. The boy is puzzled to find himself lying on one of the beds in the sickbay, a large bandage on his leg.

  ‘Why would I want to?’ he asks Korczak suspiciously. ‘And where’s my boots?’

  Korczak points to the boots lined up by the bed. ‘There. Quite safe. We always respect children’s property. Tell me . . .’ He pauses.

  ‘Aronek,’ the boy says. ‘My name’s Ar
onek.’

  ‘So tell me, Aronek, do you have parents in the ghetto, some family?’

  The boy’s eyes are hard and defiant, a thousand years old.

  ‘I look after me.’

  He speaks well enough, educated, yes, but the logic of the ghetto has taught him to trust no one.

  ‘Commendable. But if you do stay . . .’ A smell of lentil soup with a hint of sausage from the hallway, a loud gurgle from the boy’s stomach. ‘If you want to stay, I will need to shave off your hair, you understand. If you can be very brave.’

  The boy’s hand flies to his head.

  Korczak says he’ll make a map of Warsaw in the boy’s hair with the clippers. Marshall Street, Jerusalem Street – did Aronek know he had some very swanky shops above his left ear, a sausage shop above his right? Last of all he sits Aronek in front of the mirror and the clippers polish his head like an egg. Behind him, Sara and Abrasha and the others clap. Aronek frowns at them in the mirror. Doesn’t like them crowding around him. He leans forward with a scowl and doesn’t recognize the mean little whippet boy in the mirror. Hunger has taken every last trace of childish fat from his face. The sharp nose and jug ears protrude painfully. He touches the blue-and-red bruise that the guard’s boot has imprinted across his temple, admires his scabbed cut. It hurts.

  He looks down. He’s not been so clean since – since before the ghetto. He pushes away a memory of his mother filling a zinc tub with hot water in a room with lace curtains, a tiled stove in the corner with soup on it.

  In the dining room the chattering children pass him a large bowl of soup and a basket filled with hunks of bread, asking so many questions. Aronek ignores them all, his arm around his bowl, scooping up the lentils before anyone can swipe them from him. He’s seen the grabbers in the street who snatch the parcels from people’s hands and gobble down the contents so fast they sometimes don’t even stop to check it’s food. Who’s to say that drippy boy with the big eyes won’t do the same?