The Good Doctor of Warsaw

by Elisabeth Gifford

  One thing Sophia is sure of, she won’t be able to enjoy the music in the way she once did. After these long months in the ghetto, she’s become aware of a slow numbing of emotions. She wonders if she will ever be able to feel anything deeply again.

  Pola Braun enters, her hair swept up, a green satin gown. She sits down at the baby grand to play a wistful tune with her graceful hands. She begins to sing, calling for the mountain winds of faraway Zakopane to reach into the ghetto, her clear alto undulating like a soft breeze. The music hits Sophia like a sideways blow, catching her off guard. For a moment she’s left the ghetto, standing on the mountainside, the pure, cold winds stroking her face. Sudden, hot tears stream down her face and all the things her heart has forbidden her come flooding back in a rush.

  She feels ashamed, dips her head, and hides behind her hand. It’s bad manners to break down when everyone’s trying to have a moment of happiness.

  It’s a while before she dares look around the room. Misha’s face is broken with emotion, almost everyone else in the room openly crying. She moves her chair a little closer to lean in against his side and he wraps his arm around her shoulders in reply. There’s so much they don’t have in here, so much lost or threatened inside the terrible prison of the ghetto, but if they have each other, if they have love, then they have the victory over anything the Nazis believe or try to do to them.

  After Pola leaves there’s a lull. The room rustles before the most anticipated act of the evening comes on, Wladyslaw Szlengal, poet and comedian. Short and well built, wearing round American spectacles with thick tortoiseshell frames, he has the room in stitches, nothing off limits to his mordant black humour. Sophia and Misha exchange wry glances as he delivers jokes about two couples trying to share one room.

  Then Szlengal takes out a poem. ‘For those who have loved and lost Warsaw. “The Smuggler”.

  And I, when night falls . . .

  I come to the window in the dark

  And gaze, gaze with hunger in my eyes

  And I steal extinguished Warsaw.

  I steal the silhouette of the town hall.

  At my feet lies Theatre Square.

  The moon on his watch

  Turns a blind eye

  to this sentimental smuggling.

  Warsaw, answer me.

  I am waiting.’

  Silence follows, then the rupture of applause. Sophia is startled by a familiar voice close to her ear.

  ‘May I?’ A gamine girl with a frizz of strawberry-blonde hair and freckles indicates the spare chair.

  ‘Tosia!’ cries Sophia. ‘It’s been so long. Misha, you remember, Tosia and I met as students? But I didn’t know you were here in the ghetto.’

  ‘I’m not here very often.’ She leans forward, speaks almost in a whisper. ‘I travel between youth movements in different towns, finding out what’s happening in other places.’

  ‘But isn’t that terribly dangerous?’ Everyone knows what happens to Jews outside the ghetto now, instant death or torture if the Germans think there’s information to be gained.

  Tosia shrugs. ‘We have a network of places we can stay, our ways of getting out of the ghetto. And it’s important. We know so little of what’s really going on, shut up in here.’ She shakes her head and gives a defiant smile. ‘Anyway, turns out I’ve got what you call good looks these days. If you’ve got fair hair you can ride the trains without too much difficulty.’

  Misha leans forward. ‘So what is the news out there? Tosia, have you got any news from Pinsk? I’ve heard nothing from my family since the Germans invaded Russia.’

  ‘Not about Pinsk specifically – I’m sorry – but you should know that there are a lot of bad reports from the east. We think the ghetto in Vilna has been completely cleared.’

  ‘Isn’t that just a rumour? But where have they taken them?’

  Tosia doesn’t reply for a beat. Her voice barely audible. ‘Shot in Ponary Forest. Almost the whole Jewish population of Vilna.’

  Sophia gasps. ‘But there’s almost as many Jews in Vilna as in Warsaw. No, I can’t believe that.’

  ‘No one can, but it’s been verified by witnesses.’

  ‘Tosia, that just isn’t possible.’

  There’s a burst of laughter from a table by the bar. Two men in new suits are eating caviar with their overdressed girlfriends. Tosia looks at them in disgust. There’s always good money to be made in the ghetto if you work alongside the Gestapo.

  Tosia leans closer. ‘Listen, I have something to ask you. Are you going to Korczak’s lecture at the Dror commune?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then I’ll see you there.’

  Outside, the cold pinches their faces, their breath fogs in the early gloom. The ghetto takes them back in. Nothing has changed. They walk home in silence, curfew not far away.

  ‘Do you think Tosia could be right?’ asks Sophia.

  ‘I just don’t know. A new rumour every day. No one knows what to believe. I’ll ask Yitzhak at the lecture. His family are from Vilna. He must have heard something.’

  They walk on in silence, the huddled shapes of homeless people still there along the walls of the buildings.

  Up in the Ogrodowa Street flat, the Rozentals have gone to bed early, Marianek sleeping in their room tonight. A note says Krystyna is staying over at Tatiana’s flat.

  A lamp burns on the table. There are two small glasses and a remnant of plum vodka in the bottom of a bottle. There’s no fire in the stove, but tonight, the room and the falling dusk belong only to them. Misha takes Sophia’s face in his hands and covers every inch in gentle and hungry kisses. She nuzzles into the base of his neck, the place that feels like home, as their hands map out each other’s skin once again.

  There is still love in the ghetto. And if you have love then you have everything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR

  WARSAW, MARCH 1942

  It’s a bitterly cold day, a clear blue sky. Sophia hurries past the rust bricks and verdigris spire of St Augustine’s and turns into the archway of a large apartment block at 34 Dzielna Street. She always tries to make Korczak’s Monday lecture at the home but today it’s being held at the Dror commune’s building. It’s just a few doors down from the terrible shelter where Korczak is still trying to improve the conditions of a thousand children. She glances over, wondering how the building can look so respectable and municipal when inside the staff are still trying to do all they can to steal the children’s food.

  In the Dzielna commune it’s a different story. Here the young people run an illegal school under the guise of a soup kitchen, giving what they can to help feed the children and young teenagers.

  The courtyard is busy with young people, talking ten to the dozen, peeling vegetables or hanging out washing. Until war broke out the commune was secretly preparing to begin a new life in Palestine, learning to run a small farm near Warsaw in readiness. Now all their skills are used to support the 300 teenagers and young adults who live in the apartments around the courtyard.

  Sophia goes up to the large dining room on the upper floor. It’s packed, students sitting on every surface, on the floor, on cupboards.

  Misha’s at the back of the room, talking with an equally tall young man who looks the very picture of a dashing Polish pilot with a lick of curly blond hair over his forehead, a blond moustache, and bright blue eyes. Yitzhak Zuckerman is in charge of education in the commune. Today, he and Misha are talking with grave expressions.

  Sophia makes her way through the packed room towards them, wondering what they are discussing.

  Misha turns as she joins them. ‘Yitzhak says he’s had bad news about his family in Vilna.’

  Yitzhak’s eyes are seared with pain.

  ‘It’s been confirmed. My family has been murdered, along with the rest of Vilna’s Jews.’

  Her hands fly to her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘And Lublin’s been cleared. Everyone disappeared on trains. We think Warsaw could
be next.’

  ‘But how can you know that for sure? There are so many rumours.’

  ‘The Germans confiscated our farm but they still send us out as labour and the Pole in charge is a good man. He lets us get couriers out through the farm. So we’re sure. And we’ve decided to be ready to fight back if they come for us.’

  ‘So they’re going to stop the education programme,’ says Misha as he turns to her.

  ‘But why?’ says Sophia. ‘Korczak says that the school you run here is the best in the ghetto.’

  ‘We’re beginning weapons training.’

  ‘Weapons training? What do you mean? Have you spoken to the Jewish Council about this? What do they say?’

  ‘They say we’re just frightening everybody. Putting people at risk of German reprisals. They don’t want to know. But we think the Nazis are planning to eliminate the entire ghetto here. All ghettos. Nothing less than the systematic destruction of the Jews. And we have decided that we won’t go like sheep to the slaughter.’

  Tosia slips in and joins them. Her frizzy blond hair is thicker than ever, her freckles across her tomboy’s face pale against her paler skin. She looks enquiringly at Yitzhak.

  ‘I’ve told them.’

  ‘But weapons training. Have you got guns?’ asks Misha.

  ‘A pistol.’

  ‘One pistol?’

  ‘It’s a beginning.’

  Tosia turns to Sophia. ‘We got it through the Polish Workers Association. They’re short of weapons themselves so they were reluctant to pass more than one on. They want to know if it will be used well before they send any more, so we’re asking everyone affiliated and checked by the Polish workers to do the initial training and I know you were when you joined the union at college. Will you come and learn to use it, Sophia?’

  Sophia looks doubtful.

  ‘Perhaps it would be good to know how,’ Misha says. He already knows how to use a gun after many summers shooting game in the Pripyat marshes as a boy.

  Sophia’s mouth sets in a firm line. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow at four.’

  Tosia whispers an address for Nowolipie Street and slips away before the lecture begins.

  At the front of the room, Korczak stands behind the kitchen table, polishes his glasses and then closes his red-rimmed eyes as he begins.

  ‘I want to teach people how to understand and love this miraculous and creative state of “I do not know” when related to children – so full of life and dazzling surprises.’

  Sophia writes fast, trying not to think about what Yitzhak and Tosia have said, making herself concentrate on the talk. It’s a theme she knows well from the book that Misha gave her as a wedding present. Korczak’s call to respect each child represents an oasis of hope and human values in the middle of a desert of dehumanisation and cruelty. And what better protest than to carefully carry on the flame to the next generation – no matter what the Nazis do to try and exclude a class of people from humanity?

  But Yitzhak’s news refuses to leave her. Can it really be possible the Nazis have a plan to eliminate all Jews in Poland?

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FIVE

  WARSAW, APRIL 1942

  Should Sophia get involved in learning to shoot a pistol with all the risks it would entail?

  She thinks of Krystyna. Her little sister has been leaving the ghetto on a regular basis as part of a smuggling ring, taking the train out of Warsaw to bring back Jews stranded in the eastern towns now suffering terrible pogroms under the Reich.

  How can she not go?

  The address Tosia has given Sophia is for a tall and run-down building on Nowolipie Street. The stairs to the upper floors are in a barely usable state, the banisters and side treads stripped for firewood. She follows the stone steps down to the cellar, and calls out into the gloom. A door opens. Tosia is waiting inside with a handful of other people in their teens and twenties who Sophia hasn’t met before.

  They learn guerrilla tactics, street fighting, how to make bombs from bottles and petrol. Over the next two weeks Sophia becomes very familiar with the weight of the cold, dense metal in her hand, the way it smells of oil and of the metallic tang of blood on a cut lip as she learns to shoot, strip down and reassemble the pistol.

  But each time she leaves the cellar and walks back to Ogrodowa Street, the hour she has just spent seems like an overreaction. It’s warm weather now, the lilacs shedding their scent from across the wall. Recently, the Nazis decrees have become milder, curfew put back till later.

  Are Tosia and the others right in thinking that the Germans really plan to liquidate the ghetto?

  Perhaps the Jewish Council are right. It’s a mistake to stir up trouble. If they can hold on, stay alive, perhaps the best thing to do is simply keep your head down, try and make it through to the end of the war?

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX

  WARSAW, APRIL 1942

  It’s Sammy Gogol’s last night in the home. His aunt has decided to pay a bribe to leave the ghetto and take the tall teenager with her to hide away at an uncle’s farm in the south.

  ‘Don’t you think Sammy will be safest here with the other children?’ Korczak asks. ‘Surely it’s a risky journey.’

  He doesn’t state the obvious, the inescapably Jewish nose on Sammy’s face. No chance if he’s seen. The horrible consequences if he is caught.

  ‘We’ll travel by night,’ Sammy’s aunt says. ‘I’ve got enough saved up to pay off one of the guards to help us get out and then we’ll have to take our chance.’

  Korczak’s not happy but he doesn’t argue with her. In a time of peace, it’s always the best outcome for a child to have the shelter of an extended family’s watchful eye after they leave the home. And he can see that the rumours blowing through the ghetto have unsettled the aunt. Her instinct is that it’s time to head south like a homing pigeon. She’s taking Sammy with her, mind made up.

  ‘It’s your decision,’ he tells Sammy.

  ‘I’ll go with her,’ Sammy says. ‘Make sure she’s safe.’

  Up in the ballroom the boys have swept the hall and rolled out their lines of mattresses. Erwin listens gloomily to his friend Sammy playing his harmonica for the dormitory one last time before the boys go to sleep, Shalom Aleichem, peace be with you. The two boys have been in Korczak’s home together since they joined at eight years old. Abrasha joins in quietly with his violin, Chaimek on his mandolin. The rest of the boys sit up in bed, entranced and wistful, thinking of Sammy making his way through the dark forests of Poland, wondering if he will be safer, happier, than in here.

  When the music stops, Misha walks around the room, checking they are settled. It’s easy for an argument to break out between two boys with frayed nerves. But tonight the night is almost warm with distant promises of summer. They lie awake soothed by the music.

  Misha settles down in the screened-off area that serves as his room. Night is almost peaceful here at the furthest edge in the ghetto. The occasional tramp of a patrol but otherwise the streets are largely free of Germans who still clock off promptly at five like office workers and rush out of the ghetto to their nice clean apartments and the Bruhl Palace.

  Misha lowers the flame on the carbide lamp, stretches out on his bed and begins a prayer for Sophia sleeping a mile away. So much fragile air between them. He sighs and reaches out his hand to his right, where she always prefers to lie beside him.

  Three sharp shots. Misha sits up, heart hammering. The boys too sit up on their mattresses and pallets, terrified, silently listening for what might happen next. An exhalation of breath from Aronek who has been too close to guns many times in his short life.

  No further sounds of gunfire.

  ‘It’s all right, boys. Settle down,’ says Misha. Creaks and rustling sheets as the boys shuffle down, eyes wide awake into the darkness.

  A second burst of gunfire, a little further away. And then another. And another. Through the rest of the night, rifles crack and sing in the darkness.

 
; No one in the ghetto is sleeping; they’re lying awake listening to the gunfire, wondering what it can mean. The Germans never come back to the ghetto after dark unless it’s to carry out some terrible scheme.

  As soon as it’s light the next morning, Misha goes out into the deserted street. Tatiana Epstein is standing outside her shuttered café, her apron over her mouth. A few doors down, people are sluicing bloodstains from the pavement, sweeping the dark water towards the drain with long scrapes of a broom.

  ‘Oh, Misha, the old man and his son at number thirty were shot, their bodies left on the cobbles like dogs. An old man and a boy, what have they ever done? I’m not opening the café today. No one’s turned up for work. And tell Korczak that he should stay at home today too.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’ He turns to go but Tatiana calls him back. ‘You don’t think the shooting last night means it’s true, that it’s the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto being liquidated like Lublin? A man came into the café from Lublin, looked like death. He said he managed to escape just before everyone there was sent away to the east to some unknown place. I don’t know what to believe any more. A new story going round the ghetto every day, and each one worse than the last.’

  Needing to know if Sophia is safe, Misha decides to risk it and make his way to her apartment on Ogrodowa Street. A sinister air of fear hangs over the ghetto, shutters closed, the streets deserted. No one else on the wooden footbridge over Chlodna Street. But outside the courthouse on Leszno Street a handful of people are reading a notice plastered up by the Nazis. Misha joins them and scans the black ink message.