Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  He was interrupted in mid-sentence by the stomping of heavy boots outside the door. Someone’s pencil dropped to the floor in panic and rattled. These were the feared but familiar sounds of Nazi boots, and the teenage students in the dark room could hear now the horrible bellowing outside the window, the barked orders for the Jews to show themselves. Raus! Juden raus! The piercing scream of a child came from somewhere in a nearby building. Gunshots. Weeping.

  In an instant, the room turned to Dr. Landau. Where could they hide? What would happen? Dr. Landau tapped the blackboard again, looking at them steadily, forbidding them to move with his gaze, and kept on lecturing. Infection occurs when the feces of the Rickettsia prowazekii bacterium—

  The sounds of the boots echoed farther down the street, and only then did one of the girls in the room start shaking and sobbing. She was gasping for breath in her spasms of hysteria. Others now were starting. Irena watched, awed, as Dr. Landau turned on them fiercely.

  “Don’t you people understand yet?”

  Dozens of wide eyes turned toward the doctor. Only Ala looked calm. Irena marveled at her composure.

  “All of us, every day and every night, are on the front lines,” the doctor told them sternly. “We are the frontline troops in a war that never stops. We are soldiers, and we must be tough. There is no crying allowed here!”

  And then, with the tap of the chalk, he turned back to the blackboard and picked up his chain of thought as though there had been no second interruption. A burst of white dust hung for a moment in the air. No one dared to cough lest the doctor think they were sniffling. There was just scribbling in the dim room and the doctor’s firm voice, explaining.

  • • •

  Irena Sendler’s presence inside the ghetto—on the streets or at these secret lectures—didn’t surprise any of her old university friends who were incarcerated there. They would not have been surprised to see her colleagues from the welfare offices, Irka Schultz, Jadwiga Deneka, or Jaga Piotrowska, that day either. All four women were in and out of the ghetto sometimes two or three times daily in late 1940 and throughout 1941.

  This hadn’t started as any planned network or operation. As Irena put it, “I was a frequent visitor to the walled district.” She had been since the moment it was created. “My work in the city administration’s Department of Health and Social Services made it easy for me to get a pass,” she explained. Many of the families she had been supporting were now trapped within the confines of the ghetto, and that was one of her reasons for going. But the real reason was personal: “I knew the suffering of the people rotting away behind the walls, and I wanted to help my old friends.” There were matters of the heart, too, she admitted. She wanted to be with one old friend especially: Adam. Adam’s depression was now a furious spiral into anger and darkness, and Irena was frightened. One had to want to live to survive in the ghetto.

  A Polish physician named Dr. Juliusz Majkowski had made the ghetto passes possible. Irena had known him since her university days in Dr. Radlińska’s circles, and he was already part of the resistance cell in contact with the professor. Dr. Majkowski was also, conveniently, in charge of the Urban Sanitation Works division in the Warsaw municipality, responsible for combating the spread beyond the ghetto walls of epidemic diseases and disposing of infectious materials. He simply added the four office conspirators—Irena, Irka, Jadwiga, and Jaga—to the list of his authorized medical corps employees and provided them with legitimate epidemic control passes that allowed them to cross the checkpoints freely. The Germans were terrified of being infected with the disease now raging inside the ghetto, so they left the job of health and sanitation to more “dispensable” Polish people.

  At the gates leading in and out of the ghetto, squads of SS men with guns resting on their hips scrutinized Irena’s papers, peppering her with questions and barking out orders. She steadied her nerves each time. In theory, none of them were taking any great risks coming and going in the afternoons, once they had finished work in the welfare offices. After all, the papers were perfectly legitimate, even if the sanitation job was fiction; and, despite the armband with the Star of David that Irena always put on in solidarity with her friends now when she walked the streets of the ghetto, she was not Jewish.

  Except, of course, for that little matter of why she was moving back and forth across the border to the ghetto several times a day, coming and going from a different checkpoint in a careful rotation.

  Irena’s friends were starving inside the ghetto. Prices for smuggled food were astronomical. Jewish people, however, weren’t permitted to own more than a few thousand złotych. Then there was the increasing cruelty of their guards and captors. Shots rang out at all hours, though mostly at night now, and there were screams that echoed off the buildings when the city was quiet. “Abuses—wild, bestial ‘amusements’—are daily events,” underground newspapers in Warsaw grimly reported. In the mornings, the dead lined the streets where they were piled, naked and covered with old newsprint and stones, because the rags they wore had too much value for the living.

  Above all, Irena’s friends were watching hungry small children die each day from typhus, a disease for which a vaccination existed. Friends were often dying. The lead article in the Polish resistance newspaper Biuletyn Informacyjny—the Information Bulletin—reported that, in 1941, “the population density [inside the Jewish quarter] is unimaginable. An average of six people live in one room; sometimes, however, there are as many as twenty. . . . This increased crowding has resulted in unspeakable hygienic and sanitary conditions. Hunger and unimaginable misery are now prevalent.” The German governor of Warsaw boasted that starvation was official policy: “The Jews will die from hunger and destitution and a cemetery will remain of the Jewish question.”

  Naturally, Irena was smuggling. Each time, she could only take a little. So the only alternative was to go often. Sometimes it was food, sometimes money. Sometimes, more whimsically, she carried across the handmade children’s dolls that one of her and Adam’s former University of Warsaw professors, Dr. Witwicki, spent his days in hiding sculpting for the littlest ones at Dr. Korczak’s ghetto orphanage. Whenever she could, though, it was vials of vaccine that she hand-delivered to Ala Gołąb-Grynberg and Ewa Rechtman. The price for being caught smuggling at the start was arrest and often concentration camp deportation. By that winter, handbills posted across Warsaw announced that the Germans had upped the ante and declared that the price for helping a Jew—and for giving a Jew any food especially—was summary execution.

  • • •

  Irena’s friends inside the ghetto had organized themselves just as quickly and as surely as their friends and compatriots in the city municipal offices. They were all social-minded and idealistic young people who had long bonds of friendship and shared experiences, and they were responding to the needs of the people in front of them. The need was appalling. At a refugee center, an eight-year-old Jewish child went mad one morning. Caregivers carried him away as he screamed, “I want to steal, I want to rob, I want to eat, I want to be a German.” On her way to see Adam each afternoon, she had to step carefully over the dead bodies of children.

  On the Aryan side, the city social services gave Irena and her coworkers access to resources and a cover. Inside the ghetto, the umbrella organization that drew her friends together in a shared project was, increasingly, a Jewish-run charity for orphans called CENTOS (Centralne Towarzystwo Opieki nad Sierotami), directed by a Jewish psychology professor and attorney named Dr. Adolf Berman. Irena’s friend and classmate Ewa Rechtman was an increasingly important figure at CENTOS. She seemed to know everyone in the ghetto. Ewa ran the youth center at number 16, Sienna Street, in one of the richest and most lively parts of the Jewish quarter, where the ghetto children’s hospital and, in time, Dr. Korczak’s orphanage were both located.

  At the refugee centers and in the hospitals, staff fought a daily battle against disease and starvation. But not everyone in the ghetto was struggling, es
pecially not in the wealthy districts. While nearly half a million ghetto residents weakened from hunger, the “ghetto aristocrats”—rich industrialists, many Judenrat council leaders, Jewish police officers, profiteering smugglers, nightclub owners, high-end prostitutes, perhaps a total of ten thousand people—were dancing among the corpses. There were sixty-one cafés and nightclubs in the ghetto, and the “orgy of parties,” wrote the ghetto’s self-appointed historian Emanuel Ringelblum, “is unconfined.” The Sienna Street complex where Ewa worked housed one of those cafés, where the bands played on, accompanied to raucous singing.

  It was Ala, though, who knew better than most what those wild parties and nightclubs in the ghetto looked like. Like her husband, Arek, her mother and father were also celebrated Jewish actors and theater directors. But the famous relative in their clan was her cousin by marriage, Weronika—Wiera—Grynberg, better known in Warsaw as the sultry cabaret actress with the stage name Vera Gran. Wiera’s sexy come-hither crooning made her a prewar starlet, and in the ghetto by 1941 she was already a legendary star attraction. Gestapo officers, Judenrat elite, and SS men gathered in the smoky Café Sztuka at number 2, Leszno Street, a few yards inside the ghetto gates, to listen to Wiera belt out sad love songs. Her duets with Władysław Szpilman, the musician immortalized in Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist (based on Szpilman’s memoirs), drew huge, appreciative crowds, including nightly visits from Ala’s mentor, Dr. Hirzsfeld, and from Irena’s old friend Józef Zysman, both devoted Café Sztuka regulars. Because the café was only a stone’s throw from the relocated Czyste Hospital’s main ward, now at number 1, Leszno Street, many of the doctors and nurses went there after-hours, and entertainment and social work were not always unrelated. Entertainment put on for the ghetto rich was a primary means of charitable fund-raising inside the walled district. Teenagers at Ala’s youth center put on plays for the wealthy residents and donated the ticket revenues to buy black-market food and medicine for children. When Dr. Korczak’s orphanage needed a fund-raiser, Ala persuaded her husband’s celebrity cousin to sing at a benefit, and as always Wiera drew a huge audience with her alluring talent.

  Come with me, a grinning Ala urged Irena. Spend the night in the ghetto and see what happens at Café Sztuka. How could Irena resist? At least twice Irena took up her friend’s daring invitation to join them. And she did go to Café Sztuka. It was forbidden, of course, and she would have been shot had she been discovered. But Irena risked her life several times a day already. Risking it again to spend the evening with friends—and with Adam—hardly seemed now to make a difference. In 1941, acts of impulsive courage still felt energizing and electric. Personal danger still seemed remote and abstract to Irena.

  In the smoky darkness of the café, Wiera crooned away. It was good to see even Adam smiling. Adam did not smile often in the ghetto, although since he had started teaching at one of the youth centers much of his private darkness had lifted. From his volunteer offices at number 24, Elektoralna Street, Adam fed starving street children. He had also joined the Jewish resistance and was secretly circulating underground publications from a nearby apartment building. Both Adam and Ewa had caused Irena sleepless nights. They had each battled their way through despair. But Adam no longer said so often that he wasn’t sure life in the ghetto was worth living, and she noticed he was more careful. Now that Ewa was working again, she was better too. It was work that saved them both—teaching and work with the children.

  As Irena took it all in that night, the scene unfolding before her in the nightclub left her dumbstruck. Here in the café, the laughing waiters sloshed champagne into waiting glasses. Was it possible there was champagne flowing in the ghetto? Only with the first sip did Irena believe it. All around, in a whirl of commotion, giddy women in elegant prewar finery stumbled past small tables, and someone placed in front of her salmon hors d’oeuvres amid the brittle tinkle of drunken laughter. Somewhere in the crowd she thought she caught sight of another of their old friends, the Jewish actor Jonas Turkow, whose talented wife, Diana Blumenfeld, was another of the café’s regular star attractions. She craned her neck for a moment but then she gave up and simply listened. As Wiera sang sentimental old songs about love and longing, Irena could only look on in a kind of nightmare-world wonder. Everyone is crying, Irena thought to herself. Everyone. But they were crying for all the wrong reasons. When they left, warm fur coats on racks lined the foyer. Outside, on the doorstep in front of them, half-frozen children lay starving. When her hand touched Adam’s, he squeezed it tightly. Between them, words weren’t necessary.

  Part of Wiera’s attraction was the power of her voice, but it didn’t hurt that Wiera was also beautiful. Underneath that silky exterior, though, Irena saw only a hard-bitten and vicious woman. Wiera Grynberg was one of the ghetto’s most determined survivors. Already Irena’s friends in the resistance were hearing whispers of the starlet’s treachery. Wiera didn’t sing only in the ghetto. She was also the star attraction at Café Mocha on Marszałkowska Street, in the Aryan quarter, where she entertained enthusiastic Germans. But she was more than just a bit friendly with the Gestapo. Wiera was rumored to be part of a group of Jewish people actively collaborating with the Germans to bilk her neighbors of dwindling resources, and in time those betrayals would cost the life of one of the friends in Irena’s circle.

  • • •

  Careless debauchery might have been the order of the night in the cafés on Sienna or Leszno, but by day Irena breathed a sigh of relief and gratitude for the teenagers at the youth circles, whose spirit of fairness and justice was nothing short of inspirational. One day that winter Irena arrived breathless at Ewa’s office. Her cheeks were red from the bitter wind in that famously cold winter. In the ghetto, a big overcoat was a blessing. Greeting Ewa, Irena smiled broadly and shrugged off her jacket. Quickly she showed Ewa her treasure, and Ewa laughed when she saw what Irena was doing. She had smuggled across the checkpoint that afternoon three doses of typhus vaccine. Sometimes she carried them in a bag with a hollowed-out false bottom. Sometimes, like today, she stuffed them in a padded brassiere with small pockets. Most women had one now. It was a joke in wartime Warsaw that women’s breasts had grown dramatically everywhere in the city since the arrival of the Germans.

  Clapping her hands with pleasure, Ewa called a spontaneous group meeting and held up the three precious doses. But now they faced a serious moral dilemma. Who should get the vaccinations? Ewa asked the group of a dozen young people, most of them adolescents and children. It was a life-or-death decision for the youngsters, despite the high spirits and camaraderie at the center, but Ewa let the children make the decision. With great calm, they made their arguments and quickly decided. The doses, the children agreed, should go to two boys whose parents were dead and who were single-handedly supporting younger siblings, and to the girl in the youth circle who worked the hardest. Working hard with CENTOS meant late-night vigils nursing toddlers who were sick with typhus, and it was perilous.

  • • •

  Each day in the ghetto, Irena saw Ewa and Ala and Adam. And there were two more old friends from Dr. Radlińska’s circle who were part of this ghetto camaraderie: Rachela Rosenthal and Józef Zysman. These five fellow students and social workers and their old professor Dr. Korczak were the core of Irena’s Jewish circle.

  Rachela worked on Pawia Street, just a block south of Ala, and Irena never saw one without stopping in to say hello to the other. Rachela ran another youth circle there, and her group was one of the largest and liveliest in the ghetto. More than twenty-five thousand people lived on Pawia Street; the district had been a traditional Jewish area before the occupation. Rachela worked with several dozen young volunteers providing makeshift social services. Rachela’s charismatic charms and irrepressible sense of fun—even in the ghetto—were part of what made her association especially popular. Her family lived in one of the large apartment buildings in the area and surrounded her with love, and she had a bedrock belief in the power of chi
ldren’s laughter. The mother of a little daughter around the same age as Ala’s little Rami, Rachela organized playgroups and makeshift entertainment for the small children in the ghetto. But the street she worked on was one of the grimmest. Pawia Street lent its name to the Gestapo prison located at one of its corners, Pawiak, a veritable house of horrors.

  Józef headed up the youth association on Ogrodowa Street, the “midtown” ghetto, just a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the much-reviled Jewish police forces, and Irena also delivered smuggled supplies to her old comrade-in-arms from their days in the welfare services. Józef had been a prominent city attorney before the German occupation started, and more than once Irena had waited with him in the halls of the courthouse, each of them leaning up against the stair railings and joking. Józef defended people who were illegally evicted from their homes by unscrupulous landlords, and Irena was one of his favorite witnesses in the social services. She reveled in righting an injustice and could be, Józef told the other attorneys with a laugh, very persuasive. In between the audience with the judges, Józef would tell her about the best nightclubs in Warsaw, just as if she were the kind of girl who might be interested.

  The ghetto attorneys now filled Józef with disgust. Many members of the ghetto police were former lawyers and even judges who had taken up law enforcement with a zeal born of self-interest and financial opportunity. Elements within the Jewish police service, which reported to the Gestapo, were notoriously corrupt and brutal. Its officers patrolled the ghetto walls, conscripted residents to meet German slave-labor quotas, and often lined their pockets like thugs, extracting from fellow Jewish residents crippling bribes and ransoms.

  So Józef did instead what he could to check their growing power. Along with Adam and Arek, he threw his energies into the Jewish resistance movement slowly taking shape. With a small group of like-minded friends, Józef joined an underground socialist press that circulated newspapers and pamphlets urging citizens to action both inside and outside the ghetto.