As they approach the ghetto gate, Misha’s stomach knots. He has enough cash to pay the bribes and he can see that the right guard is there on duty as usual but his palms sweat and slip on the reins as the German starts walking over towards him, continuing a conversation over his shoulder with the other German next to the guardhouse. They are laughing about the fat goose dangling from his belt.
He checks Misha’s papers absently, removes the notes inside and pockets them.
Misha clicks to the horse and they begin to move.
His heart lurches. Just inside the gate, seated on a stool and having his boots shone, is another German guard, Frankenstein, short and apelike, face hewn from rough pieces of wood, eyes glassy as a man without a heart. He’s vowed to shoot a Jew a day, can’t eat breakfast until he’s murdered one. He’s famous in the ghetto for his savage beatings of any smuggler children he catches and for killing people at random, through windows, on street corners. Today he’s sated, dozing with legs apart on the stool as the cart rumbles in and past him.
But Misha’s not clear yet. He has to stop a second time. The Polish policeman in his navy uniform holds up his hand, checks the papers, and looks over the refuse bound for Gesia cemetery. He hands the papers back, keeping the newly added banknotes, and waves the cart on.
A few coins to the Jewish policeman and he’s almost through, but the Jewish policeman keeps hold of the horse’s reins, beckons Misha to bend closer.
‘You tell your Korczak now. Looks like he’s going to have to move.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re shrinking the ghetto. Thousands are going to be thrown out on the street any day now. He’ll need to get a move on to find somewhere decent.’
Misha lets the heavy hessian sack slide onto the table in the kitchen but there are no smiles from Stefa today. She looks lost and worn down, examining a copy of the Jewish Gazette.
‘Oh, Misha. Have you seen this? It’s utter madness. They’re going to make us move again. Where?’
Misha reads the notice. All properties bordering the Aryan side are to be excluded from the ghetto. As he studies the new map it dawns on him what the Germans are doing. There will be no more buildings straddling the wall, just a clear strip of cobbled road around the ghetto blocks for the guards to patrol with ease, to shoot any tentative smugglers at their leisure. No more sacks of flour passed through attics and basements. It’s going to make it harder than ever for people to bring in food.
The ghetto is being squeezed in a noose of hunger.
‘And only days to find somewhere,’ Stefa continues. ‘He’s gone out already to make enquiries. I don’t know how he’ll cope. He’s not well as it is, hardly sleeps at night writing his diary, up all day tramping the streets and now this. Oh, there. There he is.’
A wan-faced Korczak, skin lined with fatigue, comes in and sinks onto the stool by the stove, his coat and muffler still on.
‘The officials at the Jewish Council say they can do nothing. It seems we must move again.’
‘But can they tell us where?’
‘No. But we do have other friends who can help us, people with influence.’
‘You haven’t been to see that gangster Gancwajch? He’s always circling, wanting you to take his money and help whitewash his reputation. The ghetto’s worst collaborator.’
‘Stefa. Please. No, our saviour is a little angel in an apron. Your sister-in-law, Misha – Krystyna. But she says we must go and see the place now.’
It sounds hopeful, an empty businessmen’s club on Sienna Street, one of Warsaw’s best addresses before the war. Here, there are still people with money left. They pass a woman in a small hat walking her dog, ignoring the new barbed-wire fence that has been rolled out down the middle of the road.
The club is on the top two floors of a grand apartment block. Krystyna is in Tatiana Epstein’s café on the floor below. She unties her apron and fetches the key from the board at the back.
‘We’ve been telling everyone it’s taken,’ says Tatiana, ‘but we can only hold them off for so long.’
The street entrance to the businessmen’s club is impressive, double doors, a balcony above the portico but inside . . . oh, dear. So run down and grubby. The first floor has a raised stage with old scenery in scuffed oil paint propped up at the back.
‘Not ideal for children,’ said Stefa, looking at the empty room, the dust-ingrained boards. ‘Perhaps the top floor will be better.’
On the floor above they walk through a mirrored ballroom with marble pillars. The tall windows let in a brisk draught through the damaged panes.
‘An architect’s school used it in the summer, but once it got cold they went elsewhere,’ Krystyna says.
‘I’m not surprised. It’s going to be impossible to heat in winter,’ says Stefa as they walk around gloomily.
‘Perhaps the older boys could sleep up here when it gets warmer.’ Korczak’s making the best of it, but anxiety grips his heart. What he sees is the kind of large unsuitable building, a synagogue, a redundant factory, used to house refugees in squalor – where you return a few weeks or days later to find that hunger and typhus have emptied the hastily constructed plank beds.
No. It’s not going to be like that. This is Stefa walking by his side. They’ll make it a home for the children, a good home.
He sits down on a dusty chair and taps the parquet floor. ‘Just needs a scrub.’
‘But one grimy lavatory for two hundred children and staff.’
‘So we’ll buy buckets, empty them each morning.’
‘The first thing we must do is give everything a good clean,’ says Stefa.
Krystyna returns with brooms and mop from the café downstairs.
Korczak takes off his coat and jacket and rolls up his sleeves, holds out his hands.
‘Oh, no, Pan Doctor. Let me,’ says Krystyna.
‘It’s what every noble thought or idea comes to in the end – how many sweeps of the broom did you give, how many potatoes did you peel?’
‘You,’ Stefa tells him, ‘will only get in the way. Go down to Tatiana’s and see about the lease. And drink something hot.’
He sets off but suddenly turns and comes back, takes Stefa’s hands in his, says unsteadily, ‘We’ll manage, Stefa, dear, won’t we?’
‘We’ll manage,’ she tells him. ‘We always do.’
CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE
WARSAW, DECEMBER 1941
Adim December afternoon in the large hall in Sienna Street. The children gather round as Halinka lights the last candle in the menorah. The small flames grow, chasing away the encroaching gloom at the edges of the high ceilings.
‘See how even a small candle is stronger than the darkness,’ Korczak tells the children. ‘Just as we must never stop believing that every act of kindness is stronger than the dark.’
Sammy plays the first line of a Hanukkah song and the children begin to sing softly. Standing at the back with Misha, Sophia slips her hand into his. Sara is holding tight to her other hand, resting her head against Sophia’s arm as she gazes across at the candles.
Korczak has always loved this season. The rhythm of the year has always been first the lighting of the candles for Hanukkah in the Jewish home and then candles on the Christmas tree in the Polish home. The Polish children would come to the Hanukkah play. The Jewish children would sing with them around a Christmas tree. Don’t the children have a right to be part of each other’s Warsaw – to know and respect each other’s traditions?
Before the war there would be special food for the Festival of Lights, fried potato cakes, fried doughnuts with jam, but it’s simply not possible this year, so little is coming into the ghetto now. It’s been all they can do to get the children safely installed in their new home and fed each day.
They are coping well enough, mostly. At night the room is packed with rows of beds and the shapes of sleeping children under the white duvets, barely enough space to walk between the rows. Screens run down
the middle of the room dividing the boys’ and the girls’ sides, giving the place the air of a hospital ward at night. The stage now serves as a dining room. The painted scenery at the back, a forest and a cottage under a moonlit sky, add to the unreal, impermanent air of the place, although the children like the feeling of living in a play. And perhaps they are living out a scripted drama: written by Nietzsche and produced by Hitler.
By day the beds are pushed back; a corner for reading, a handicrafts club, a sewing circle and the puppet workshop. The choir and drama club, the children’s court and the newspaper all carry on as before.
But it’s not as before.
It’s been weeks since he’s seen a Polish face. Now that there’s a strict death penalty for leaving the ghetto, reprisals for Poles trying to enter without a permit, the ghetto has become even more isolated. Even children caught on the Aryan side are no longer sent to prison but coldly gunned down on the spot. The steady stream of old Polish friends coming to spend the afternoon in the home has entirely stopped.
Maryna and some of the Polish teachers such as Ida and Newerly have sent what they can for Hanukkah, smuggled in by Misha, but things are hard on the Aryan side too now.
The song is finished. The children stand and watch the candles. Korczak looks round at their faces, too thin and serious for children.
From over the wall, faint sounds of a passing car. Stefa claps her hands softly and the children take their places at the tables for supper, bowls of boiled buckwheat and slices of black bread.
‘So there’s a new edict,’ she says to Korczak as they watch the children eating. ‘The Germans want us to hand over every bit of fur, on pain of death. Every coat, every boot lining.’
‘But this is good news, Stefa.’
‘He calls this good news. I have to pull the collar off my coat and he calls that good news. In this cold.’
‘Don’t you see? It means things aren’t going so well for the Führer if he needs to steal the ladies’ fur collars. The Russian winter did for Napoleon and it will do for Hitler too, you mark my words.’
CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO
WARSAW, JANUARY 1942
They can take absolutely no more children. It’s agreed.
This time it’s Stefa who’s relented, a friend of a friend’s child. The address Stefa has given Korczak is for one of the refugee shelters on Nalewki Street, a disused workshop with rows of hastily thrown-up rough wooden platforms covered in straw to serve as beds, litter scattered around them.
Of all the misery in the ghetto, the refugee shelters are the most wretched places. People arrive on trains from the surrounding villages and towns, robbed and exhausted, nothing to cook with and no tools to carry on their trades. They are lodged in synagogues, in churches or workshops, and very quickly, hunger and typhus begin to decimate the population. The building committees of various apartment blocks do their best to raise funds, Korczak has held concerts in the home in aid of the refugees, but such efforts are a drop in a bucket compared to the need.
Korczak looks around, searching for the woman. A stove made from an iron barrel burns in the middle of the room, giving off an acrid smell but little heat. It’s clear from the half-empty sleeping platforms that disease and cold have already begun to do their work here.
He finds the mother greasy with fever, her skin tinged with blue. Her child, a boy of nine, is busy trying to warm water on a trivet over a fire of kindling on the concrete floor by her bed.
If the boy is going to survive, then he needs to leave now, before he too succumbs to the fever.
When the woman sees Korczak her face relaxes into a look of peace. ‘My boy will be all right now. Thank you, Doctor. Zygmus, I want you to go with Pan Doctor.’
‘No. No.’ His face says how could she think he would leave her?
She moans, puts her hand on his hair. She’s close to death but won’t let herself be released while the child needs her. And the boy’s determined he won’t leave her while she needs him.
He won’t lie to the boy. He won’t pretend that his mother will not pass away if he goes. ‘But she will die peacefully, Zygmus, if she knows that you are well cared for. Can you be very brave and do something very difficult but beautiful for your mother?’
‘Go with Pan Doctor, my Zygmus. It’s time.’
The woman’s eyes follow them as they leave, burning like the last flames of a fire.
One child. One child saved.
On the way back to the orphanage he passes scores more, hungry, emaciated, dying. All night he listens to the whimpers out in the street, children crying for a little bread.
First thing in the morning, Korczak bursts in at the Jewish Council offices. He has a plan. A shelter. If they could just let him have a building, anywhere where the children close to death can die with someone to care for them, a little soup to save those that can still be saved. No child should die alone. It doesn’t have to cost much, a disused shop perhaps. He can put the children on the shelves for beds.
‘I’m sorry, Dr Korczak.’ They lead him out of the building. ‘We are doing what we can. There is nothing more we can do.’
He marches back to the home. He won’t give up. He’ll find a way to help at least some of these children.
A few days later, walking around the Dzielna Street children’s refuge, a thousand babies and children dying of hunger and neglect, their food stolen by the staff, he decides enough is enough. He storms back to the Jewish Council and demands that the directorship of Dzielna be given to him. He writes letters in the ghetto paper exposing the scandal – since he’s such a big rogue himself, annoys everyone he meets, he’ll fit right in with the staff there. He’s perfect to run the shelter. A few weeks later, Czerniakow gives him the Dzielna shelter to run.
‘A thousand more children!’ Stefa says, almost in tears, not sure if she’s more cross or proud. ‘You’re too old to do this. How?’
He shrugs. ‘I’ll go to war with the staff there,’ he tells her. ‘Make sure they care for the children properly. You know as well as I do, Stefa, a beautiful life is always a difficult life.’
‘Yes, yes. If you don’t kill yourself first.’
Her words are cross, her eyes worried, but there’s only ever love in Stefa. From the day he met her, a plain nineteen-year-old with a beautiful smile, dedicated to the children, there’s always been Stefa.
In the sickroom where he watches over the children Korczak is sitting at his father’s old desk. Two in the morning. The carbide lamp fizzes with a sharp, sulfurous smell, casting an uncertain circle of light. He has a pencil in his hand, his diary waits. He wants to write it all down, bear witness to what’s happening in here, but he’s exhausted by another day spent trudging from building to building with his canvas sack, asking for donations for the children. How easy it would be to give in to the pain in his chest, the anger at what he sees each day – to give in to despair.
He closes his eyes, turns his palms upwards, and lets the kindness of the world come to him, soak through his soul. He’s walking in the fields around Little Rose, a summer’s day, a concert of crickets. His heartbeat slows. The pain in his chest eases. Suffused with calm, he opens his eyes, blessed enough to bless the world again.
CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE
WARSAW, FEBRUARY 1942
Sophia comes in from the kitchen, wearing her dusky pink dress.
Misha applauds as she gives a small twirl, but fear pinches his heart. It’s the dress she wore on their wedding day, but when did her apple-like cheeks fade away to reveal the plane of her bones beneath?
She bends down to look in the small mirror on the cloth-covered chest and pins up a stray strand of hair.
‘So that’s the best I can do.’
‘You look beautiful.’ He takes her hand and she lets it rest there almost shyly. Now they’re so often apart, time together has become both precious and unsettling.
Mr Rozental is back from the street, his spare trousers still folded over his shoulde
r.
‘My, you look lovely. Is something happening?’
‘Misha’s taking me out to the Sztuka café.’
‘Ah, the Sztuka. So who’s playing? We might be short of food in here, but we’re not short of top-class musicians.’ He pulls the brown suit trousers from his shoulder and lets them fall on the table, his expression despondent. ‘Hours in the Gesia market but even the smugglers who come in to buy old clothes to sell on the Aryan side turned their noses up at these today. And look, plenty of wear left in them. Almost good as new.’
‘They don’t want to sit here talking about your old trousers.’ Mrs Rozental folds them away. She puts an arm around Sophia and begins to turn her towards the door. ‘You young people should go, make the most of your afternoon.’
Sophia pulls on a cardigan and coat, winds a scarf around her neck.
‘And Mother, remember, there’s a little of the butter left for Marianek to go with the potatoes and—’
‘Stop, stop. For once, don’t think about anything but each other for a few hours. Goodness knows you deserve it. The rest of us will all be here when you get back.’
The Sztuka Arts Café on Leszno Street keeps its shutters permanently closed against the ghetto streets. Sophia and Misha pass beneath the clock that hangs over the doorway and enter a magical space, a bubble of time from before the war. The room is packed with young people crowded around small tables. Everyone is wearing the best clothes they can muster, all the mends and substitutions hidden by the lamplight that spreads a smoky atmosphere of glamour over the room. On the raised podium, a girl in a black lace dress is singing in front of a backdrop that’s painted with a Chagall scene of floating girls dancing among stars and flowers. The singer’s arms rise and fall with the melody, as if she’s joining in with them.
The only jarring note is the white band on the arm of the violinist beside her.
Misha manages to find two empty rattan chairs at one of the little circular tables. Sophia takes off her coat and cardigan and checks her hair. The menu is shockingly expensive, and short. A small beer for Misha. When it arrives, he keeps his hand on the glass, the return of a much-missed friend. For Sophia, a coffee. She closes her eyes and first savours the smell, then slowly takes little sips. Almost real coffee. It will need to last all afternoon.
The Good Doctor of Warsaw Page 14
