The Good Doctor of Warsaw

by Elisabeth Gifford

  ‘No one upstairs?’

  ‘No one.’

  They check through the rooms in the annexe at the back. The same disorder and signs of people leaving in a hurry, of looters turning things over.

  The building is oppressive with disaster, like a landslide that will give again, a bridge about to topple.

  ‘They’ll be back to clear the area soon. We need to leave,’ he tells the boys.

  They make their way back to the bridge at Chlodna.

  Misha is desperate to go to Sophia, but it would be too dangerous for her to turn up there so late, too risky for the boys too. And curfew is only minutes away. Too far to run the mile there and the mile back.

  ‘Will she still be there? Is she safe?’

  One thing is clear. They’ve been fooling themselves to think that anyone has a future in the ghetto. What sort of work camp in the east needs children to work there? Yitzhak was right. The ghetto is finished.

  He has to get Sophia out, and fast.

  First thing next morning Misha and the boys must report for work as usual at the Krasinskich Gate. All day he and the boys work at the barracks, listening to the trains clatter past slowly.

  Yesterday, the cattle train with the children, Korczak, Stefa and all the staff, would have travelled along these very tracks near where he and the boys were working.

  As soon as they get back that evening, Misha runs to Sophia’s apartment on Zamenhofa Street.

  If she’s not there?

  Sophia opens the door. They stand holding each other in silence, Krystyna in the shadows at the back of the room, rocking the little boy.

  ‘I saw them. I saw them going by,’ says Sophia. ‘They passed by under the window. I didn’t know if you were there too.’

  Krystyna approaches. ‘Have they really taken them?’

  Misha nods, his face twisted with pain.

  ‘Why? They’re children.’

  ‘It seems they mean to take all of us. Sophia, Krystyna, we have to leave,’ Misha says.

  Sophia nods. ‘Yes, yes. But how? It’s as dangerous outside the ghetto as inside, unless you have a lot of money, the blackmailers . . .’

  ‘We have to find a way. But you’re right, we’ll need money, a lot. And we have to decide how we get you out.’

  ‘There’s a policeman at the courthouse who takes bribes,’ says Krystyna. ‘I can find out his name through people at Tatiana’s.’

  Misha nods. ‘Yes, leaving through the courthouse is your best bet.’

  For a large enough bribe, there’s a way to walk out through the courthouse, the only building that still straddles the border, and out the other side into Warsaw.

  Sophia stands in front of him. ‘What do you mean, your best bet? But we’ll go together?’

  Misha takes Sophia’s hand.

  ‘It would be too risky. You and Krystyna are perfect Polish girls. Look at you.’ He strokes her golden hair from her face. ‘I think your husband was a Polish officer. He was killed fighting for Poland.’

  Tears well up in Sophia’s eyes.

  ‘No, Misha.’

  ‘Darling, it’s safest this way.’

  She begins to cry and shake her head.

  ‘It will take all we have to get you both out quickly with Marianek. When I’ve got enough together to pay for my documents, I’ll go back to Lvov, a workman from Belarus. I’ll find work there, keep my head down. As soon as it is safe to, I’ll come and find you.’

  ‘No, Misha. I’m not going without you.’

  ‘Darling, you have to. You know that if I come with you, it will put Marianek in danger. This is the best way.’

  ‘Misha’s right. We don’t have a choice, Sophia. I’m sorry,’ Krystyna adds.

  ‘I promise. I’ll come to you as soon as I can. But first we’ll need documents. We need to get irrefutable documents.’

  ‘Professor Kotarbinski,’ offers Sophia dully. ‘If we can get a message out to him. He’s been sending in books so I can keep up with my studies. He may be able to help us find a Polish name so I can get documents, and perhaps even somewhere to stay.’

  The next day as Misha hurries back from the gate towards Sophia’s, he meets a friend with news that falls like a hammer blow. He tells Misha that the underground sent a blond boy called Zalmen Frydrych out of the ghetto to follow the trains to Malkinia Station and find out where they were going.

  There, the villagers took Zalmen to two men they were hiding, escapees from Treblinka. They had appeared in the village square naked and bruised the day before with a harrowing story. When the trains arrive, the people are herded inside the gates with whips and told to undress for showers in readiness for transit to permanent camps, but once inside the shower blocks, they are suffocated with carbon monoxide – a slow death of over twenty minutes.

  The bodies are added to the piles of corpses waiting to be buried in the vast pits. Mounds of cases and possessions can be seen above the fences in the sorting area.

  ‘Everyone who gets on the trains, we won’t see them again,’ he tells Misha.

  Misha walks back to Sophia, stumbling under the weight of what he knows. The evil news will have to go from his lips to her ear, burning the air, burning all who hear it. He hurries on, the street distorted by his tears. Now, more than ever, he must get Sophia out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - NINE

  WARSAW, AUGUST 1942

  What I’m experiencing did happen. It happened.

  You drank and drank plenty, gentleman officers, you relished your drinking – here’s to the blood you shed – and dancing you jingled your medals to cheer the infamy which you were too blind to see, or rather pretended not to see.

  Janusz Korczak

  Finally, the reply comes back from Kotarbinski through the policeman they bribed. Sophia opens the letter. Inside are the details of a birth certificate for a Catholic Pole, Zofia Dabrowa, born in 1920. They now have the name of one female Pole in the right age group. With it, Sophia can go to the church to ask for a replacement certificate, claiming that her Aryan papers have been lost in the bombing.

  Taking all their courage, Sophia and Krystyna go back to the small ghetto to see Father Godlewski at All Saints Church. It’s eerie to cross a deserted Grzybowski Square and enter the gloomy and bomb-damaged church, shadows filling its rows of vaulted arches. A candle burns at the far end. The priest in his vestry.

  ‘My birth certificate was lost in the bombing,’ she tells Father Godlewski. If you could possibly make me a copy from the register . . .’

  He opens the parish register as if he fully believes her story. As he scans the lists of names for a Zofia Dabrowa, he pushes the register towards them so that the girls have a good view of the pages. He turns each one slowly, knowing full well that Krystyna is rapidly checking through the names for someone with a similar name and birth date, so that she too can ask for a copy of a supposedly lost Aryan birth certificate.

  She spots one.

  ‘And I’m Krystyna Kolvalska,’ she says quickly. ‘Can you possibly write out a replacement certificate for me too?’

  The priest nods and continues to read names aloud as he scans the lists, like a man thinking to himself. He’s giving them the gift of more names, to pass on to other girls so that they can also apply for Aryan birth certificates.

  Sophia watches the priest write out her new certificate, queasy as the ground shifts and Sophia Rozental Wasserman born 1918 becomes Zofia Dabrowa, born 1920.

  ‘So now I’m two years younger,’ says Sophia as they come out of the church. ‘I’ve just lost two whole years of my life.’

  The small ghetto is empty, everyone ordered to be out by the tenth. They stand for a moment at the bombsite next to the church that was once their apartment block, their home. Longing to see something familiar, they decide to brave the deserted square and the unnerving silence, and go and visit the little white Nozyk Synagogue one last time, in memory of their beautiful sister on her wedding day.

  Standing on the co
rner they can see that a wooden ramp has been placed over the white steps to the main doors. A German soldier is leading a horse in. The synagogue is being used as a stables. Sophia can feel Krystyna quivering with anger. Wishing she has not seen it, Sophia leads Krystyna quickly away.

  Shortly afterwards, Professor Kotarbinski sends Sophia details of a Polish family willing to hide Jews, a middle-aged Catholic couple who live in Kopyczynce, a quiet rural backwater to the east, the sort of secluded place where a young Polish widow can live unremarked with her child and her sister.

  It’s agony for Lutek to part with Marianek, but he knows that his slim, dark looks would instantly put his son in danger. To rub salt into the wound, Krystyna’s boyfriend in the ghetto, Bronek, with his blond hair and blue eyes, is going to travel with the girls most of the way. Then he’ll leave them and try and get to England to join the Royal Air Force.

  Above all however, Misha and Lutek are intensely grateful to the teenager. It will be a great relief to know that the girls have some protection on the journey.

  ‘Thank you, Bronek,’ says Sophia. ‘It makes it a long route to get to England.’

  ‘Of course, but it’s only natural.’

  Sophia looks blank.

  ‘So you haven’t told them yet, Krystyna?’

  ‘Bronek asked me to marry him a few weeks ago and I said yes.’

  Sophia bursts into tears. ‘No, no,’ she tells Krystyna when she begins apologizing. ‘I’m not upset. I’m happy.’

  For her new identity card, Sophia has her picture taken, a spare copy in case there’s a problem. The developing is overexposed. She looks pale and shadowy, and so skinny. She gives Misha the spare copy. ‘So that I’ll go with you,’ she tells him.

  Biting his lip, he puts it away in his wallet. How many months, years, will pass when this little picture will be all he has of Sophia? He kisses her deeply, not wanting to ever let go of her slight and soft body.

  The courthouse on the end of Leszno Street is a bravely modernist building, designed to express the spirit of a newly free Polish nation in 1920. Twenty years later it’s under Nazi jurisdiction, a place in limbo, one side opening onto the ghetto, the other side leading to Aryan Warsaw.

  It’s not so difficult to bribe a guard to let you walk through to the other side. All you need is plenty of money, and then more money to pay off the greasy palms, the Polish blackmailers who wait along the street ready to pounce on anyone Jewish-looking who comes down the courthouse steps.

  Dressed in the best clothes they can muster, a little lipstick rubbed into their cheeks, Sophia and Krystyna walk into the courthouse on the Jewish side, each holding the hand of Sabina’s little boy. Krystyna’s bag contains a brown envelope with all the money that Misha and Lutek have been able to raise.

  Sophia feels a surge of panic as they walk into the dim, efficient air of the courthouse corridor but the child’s hand in her own fills her with courage, deliberate and unstoppable. It seems miles to the waiting room on the far side of the building, bare walls and a high window letting in sounds of a summer morning from a Warsaw street. The guard does not look at them as they sit down. He waits until a man near the door leaves and then he walks over to stand next to the girls’ bench.

  ‘You have something for me?’ he says almost under his breath, his eyes on the door.

  Krystyna takes out the envelope from her handbag. The guard turns his back as he examines the contents. He slides it inside his jacket and begins to walk away towards the door. Sophia feels all hope drain away as he leaves with the money. Then he looks back and cocks his head at them to follow.

  Suppressing an impulse to run down the court steps on the other side, they find themselves suddenly out on the street. Dazed, Sophia sees trees on the far corner, green branches above a garden wall. In the ghetto, every green thing has been eaten or burned for fuel long ago. Krystyna slips her hand into her sister’s but Sophia pulls away discreetly. It’s essential now that they look like two Polish women doing their errands as they cover the few miles between here and the station in Praga.

  *

  For the first few nights Sophia, Krystyna and Marianek hide with friends of Kotarbinski in a tiny village east of Warsaw, Krystyna becoming increasingly anxious as they wait for Bronek to join them. But he appears at the back door late one afternoon as arranged.

  They board a train heading in the direction of Tarnopol in the Ukraine, dozing and playing cards or singing to Marianek. Sophia gazes out as they pass through misty fields of autumn corn. Further and further away from Misha.

  At the last town before Kopyczynce they part with Bronek. He’ll travel north towards Sweden, try and make his way to England from there. He searches inside his canvas rucksack and brings out a leather pouch. Inside is a small army knife.

  ‘Have you carried that with you all the time?’ asks Krystyna.

  ‘I wish I could come with you and look after you, but at least you should take this.’

  The train pulls away, leaving Bronek on the platform. Krystyna leans out to wave as long as she can.

  ‘Do you think I’ll see him again?’

  ‘You must never stop believing that,’ says Sophia.

  There’s a tight lump at the base of Sophia’s throat. She closes her eyes and sees again Misha’s kind eyes and his gentle smile as they parted, and something new, the knowledge of pain shadowing his gaze, his steely determination to get her out.

  Now she must do all she can to survive, to take care of the others, and to make sure that she will see Misha again one day.

  *

  They have spent hours learning by heart the rough map of Kopyczynce they were sent. They walk out of the station trying to look as if they know where they are going. Kopyczynce is a small town buried deep in the Ukraine, with wooden houses and picket fences. The trees are beginning to turn, the green already burning away.

  ‘Do you think they will still be happy to take us in, these people we’ve never met?’ Krystyna murmurs in a low voice.

  ‘If they are friends of Professor Kotarbinski then they will be good people,’ Sophia answers, feeling sick with worry.

  ‘What if they’re no longer there? Then what will we do?’

  At the end of a lane of low houses in small gardens, they come to an unremarkable house with washing in the back garden. A woman with hair in a grey bun, a retired schoolteacher perhaps, is taking in sheets.

  When the woman sees them she drops her sheet into a basket and walks over to the gate, her head down.

  ‘Sophia?’

  She nods in reply.

  ‘We’ve been waiting for you. You must be exhausted.’

  They are not Jewish any more. The girls are Catholic Polish refugees, living with their distant relatives, Josefa and Michal Wojciechowski.

  It’s clear that no one believes Sophia’s story that she’s a war widow. They all think she’s an unmarried mother, hiding away with her scandalously illegitimate son, and she’s glad to let that be her story.

  The days go by, the winter starts early, barely November but cold as ice. Krystyna’s only news of Bronek comes through newspaper reports mentioning the RAF. For Sophia too, there’s no means of contacting Misha. She knows he can’t write to her and risk compromising her cover story.

  At night she lies awake in the darkness and listens to the wind hissing through the pine trees in the vast forests that surround the town, and tries to sense some connection with Misha, some sign of hope that he is still alive.

  But the truth is that she has no way of knowing if he’s managed to leave the ghetto, no way of knowing if he’s reached Lvov alive.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  WARSAW, NOVEMBER 1942

  I cannot give you a Homeland, for you must find it in your own heart.

  Janusz Korczak

  Under a slate sky Misha walks in formation to his work at the barracks. Beneath the bridge, the river roils with yellow mud, a grey cast in the cold light. Here the numbing wind blasts in from the east, pene
trating his thin coat. Each day since Sophia’s departure, Misha has continued to go to his work detail at the gate near the Krasinskich Gardens, walking through the old town and across the bridge to the military barracks in Praga.

  Before the deportations ceased at the end of September, three hundred thousand people were taken to Treblinka. Reports have come back about what’s happening in the camp. No one left in the ghetto now doubts that Treblinka is the site of mass death.

  The ghetto is a wilderness of empty buildings with islands of prison camp. Some thirty-five thousand remaining Jews live in workshops under German guards. Lutek is barracked in one of the factories. Conditions are harsh, with little food or heating.

  And as many Jews again live ‘wild’, hiding in attics and cellars, only coming out at night to find food.

  Misha turns to look at the broken skyline of old Warsaw one last time. He doesn’t intend to return, not until he’s a free man.

  He’s finally gathered together enough money for a train ticket and for false documents. The wind hits him with a vicious blast, dry leaves scudding round his feet. It’s time to leave.

  As the afternoon turns to frost, Misha pulls up his scarf around his chin, makes an excuse about needing to pee and walks to a quiet part of the barracks. He slips off his blue-and-white armband, walks on through a side gate, and heads along the street towards the train station. He concentrates on even steps, on breathing steadily, all the time waiting for someone to call him back. But no one does. He reaches the end of November Eleven Street with relief, and turns in the direction of the station, not far away.

  A hand grabs his arm, tugs him towards a doorway.

  A small Polish man with a half-ashamed, half-resentful, expression looks up at Misha.

  ‘In a bit of a hurry? We look a bit dark for a Pole. How would you like to come with me to talk to a nice German policeman? See, I’ve got a feeling you may not want to talk to him all that much, unless you’ve got something for me.’