Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  • • •

  Irena would later say of that summer of 1942 in the ghetto, “What was happening was as horrible as could be. The tragic summer of that year was quite simply hell. There were constant roundups in the street of ordinary passersby, famine and typhus were producing piles of corpses every day, and in addition entirely innocent people were being randomly shot all the time.” But, to the world beyond the walls, it was all largely and conveniently invisible. The Jews of Warsaw and the people of Poland who were helping them knew that their only hope now would come from abroad, and they were desperate to persuade the British and the Americans to assist them.

  That week, an agent with the code name “Witold” arrived in Warsaw on a mission from a sympathetic Polish underground organization. He was coming to meet with Ala and Nachum’s friend from the Umschlagplatz, the ghetto resistance activist Marek Edelman, and with one of Marek’s conspirators in the underground, a prominent Jewish attorney named Dr. Leon Feiner. Along with Marek Edelman, Leon Feiner was one of the leaders of the ZOB, the Jewish Combat Organization, which had grown in the summer of 1942 out of the youth circles in the ghetto where Irena’s friends had all been center leaders. Another of the ZOB leaders was someone else whom both Irena and Jan Dobraczyński knew well already: Dr. Adolf Berman.

  Witold’s mission was to tour the ghetto. From there, the underground agent would smuggle himself into the death camp at Bełżec and then travel covertly across occupied Europe to deliver to the Polish prime-minister-in-exile and to the Allies in London a firsthand account of the atrocities against the Jewish people. When that was not enough, he would travel to the United States to tell the American president in person about the horrors he witnessed. The agent’s name was Jan Karski. And Jan Karski was about to meet a courageous young Polish woman whose name he would never know, Irena Sendler.

  The last weeks of August in 1942 were agonizingly hot, and for a month Irena had been working feverishly against the tide of the ghetto deportations. At home that evening, even her lightest dress felt sticky with the weather, and her mother said she looked tired. Irena knew that the strain on her face was showing. From the kitchen, she heard the knock on the door. It was a light tap, meant to be reassuring. Irena lived in terror of the unannounced arrival of the Gestapo. But the Gestapo did not tap lightly.

  Knocks on Irena’s door were not unusual. Her apartment was a refugee point, and there were often liaisons and friends coming and going. But the fair-haired gentleman standing at her door now was not one of her teenage runners. He introduced himself gravely as “Mikołaj.” But his real name was Leon Feiner. Her own code name, “Jolanta,” was a word known throughout the ghetto, and Irena did not yet understand sufficiently that she had been under intense surveillance for months already—not by the Germans but by the resistance. They knew that she was working specifically with Dr. Radlińska.

  Irena stepped back and gestured to the stranger to come in. As Mikołaj stepped inside, Irena closed the door quietly and raised an expectant eyebrow. After all, he was on her doorstep. It wasn’t up to her to open the conversation. And the conversation was a delicate and roundabout one. Talk was a risk for both of them. Ultimately, Mikołaj came to the point of this curious visit. Would Irena agree to act as a signpost for Jan Karski on his trip into the ghetto? Would she help show the outside world what was happening in Warsaw? They needed a guide who knew all the twists and turns, every nook and cranny, of the ghetto streets. Irena didn’t ask the details of the mission. She certainly did not know that day the name of the secret agent. But turn down a request from the resistance? Never. By Irena’s standards, the operation was no special risk anyhow. She braved death every day in and outside the ghetto. Underneath the foundations of the building at number 6, Muranowska Street, on the northern edge of the ghetto, Jewish children had dug out a tunnel forty yards long and four feet high to smuggle what they needed for survival. Jan Karski and Leon Feiner slipped through that tunnel into the ghetto. On the other side, their living street sign guiding their way was Irena. Within weeks that small act of helping the Jewish resistance would have unimaginable consequences for Irena and for the children she was hiding. Soon the resistance would return the favor and help Irena.

  • • •

  And Irena needed help. By early September, the “Great Action” in the ghetto was in its final stages. The children who remained on the Umschlagplatz platform now were sick and weak, decimated by the stress and hardships of hiding, and there was no one there left to save them. By the third week of August, the Germans had ordered Ala and Nachum’s railway medical clinic closed, and Ala was banned from the Umschlagplatz by special order. So Ala carried on in her position as the head nurse at the hospital on Leszno Street, where the sick and the starving were multiplying. Her husband, Arek, was part of the inner circle of the Jewish resistance, and in her own way Ala was another of their frontline fighters. When ambulances filled with supplies and dirty linens trundled through the checkpoints, Ala made sure that there were small stowaways aboard. Often these children were sent on to Irena. But Ala had contacts in the underground with other people who were, by now, running other rescue operations.

  At the hospital, the skeleton staff called an urgent meeting early on the morning of September 6, 1942. Ala was tired. She leaned against the wall and listened. There was panic in the doctors’ voices. The day before, posters had gone up across Warsaw offering amnesty to any Poles who turned in Jews they were hiding. That day everyone in the hospital, even the sick and bedridden patients who crowded the wards, was under strict German orders to report for a final registration. No one had any illusions any longer, and Ala knew that many on the staff had deeply personal reasons for their worry. Doctors and nurses had tried to save their own elderly parents and small children by falsely registering them there as patients. They were charged with deporting their families. Ala watched as one of the nurses realized this and broke down crying.

  Ala had the beginnings of an idea that morning. What if . . . But the thought was interrupted by the clatter of heavy boots and the barking of orders in German. The hallway was suddenly in commotion, and a doctor rushed past her. Ala stood frozen. She turned to a young nurse with big, fearful eyes but could not reassure her. Oh, God, I know what is happening, thought Ala. Ala couldn’t bring herself to say the next bit aloud. It was going to be Dr. Korczak’s walk to the Umschlagplatz all over again.

  The thought energized her, and Ala swung into motion. She had witnessed the horrors of the Umschlagplatz and had not thought anything could surprise her now. But even Ala was shocked to see SS men walking calmly down the rows of beds, shooting in the head anyone who was delirious or immobile. Frightened patients in their flimsy hospital gowns were pushed at gunpoint toward the doorways, and at the front of the building the damned were herded into open trucks for transport. Nurses and doctors ran into a ward ahead of the SS men, desperate to save their children, at least, this final terror. Hands shaking, they poured precious doses of cyanide into the mouths of their family members. Ala watched in horror as a weeping doctor could not go on and turned to a nurse. He asked her to administer the fatal dose to his father. Ala knew better than anyone that it was the greatest mercy. As her friend Marek Edelman put it bluntly: “To offer one’s cyanide to somebody else is a really heroic sacrifice . . . for cyanide is now the most precious, the most irreplaceable thing.” It was the gift of dying quietly.

  Ala couldn’t bear to watch. But that kernel of an idea was growing. She raced to the children’s ward, where the bright room was already in chaos, and turned to a duty nurse and gave swift instructions: Run, tell the kitchen staff we are coming. Ala needed the kitchen workers to fill a truck with food supplies and empty vegetable boxes. Ala clapped her hands. Children! We must line up now very quickly. Daisy chains of toddlers and small children held each other’s hands, and teenage trainee nurses carried two or three infants at a time in bundles. Thirty children followed Ala swiftly down the back staircases and into the kitche
ns, where they were tucked in and among the wooden potato boxes. Ala ordered the cook to drive, and moments later Ala watched as the truck pulled away and disappeared around the street corner.

  Ala saved thirty children that morning. Hundreds in the hospital perished. After September 6, the ghetto hospital was empty. By mid-September the state of the hospital hardly mattered. The quarter had been decimated. Eighty-five percent of the original total ghetto population of 450,979 had been deported, and those who remained lived in constant fear and hunger. Some 30,000 Jews had been pulled out of the final selections after being deemed fit for slave labor in the ghetto factories. Another 30,000—many of them families with small children—escaped the roundups and were living “wild” in burnt-out ghetto ruins, basements, and attics. They were ruthlessly hunted. At the ghetto factory owned by Walter Toebbens, the workers in the fall of 1942 included Henia and Nachum Remba; baby Bieta’s mother, Henia Koppel; and Ala.

  • • •

  Soon tuberculosis and starvation would have filled Ala’s empty wards again, but by now the hospital was in ruins. There was only one good thing that came of illness. As long as disease continued in the ghetto—and how could it not under such conditions?—Irena’s epidemic control pass remained valid. And that meant that Irena and Ala could continue to work together to smuggle out children.

  Irena was not the only person in Warsaw running a covert operation to save Jewish children and their families. She wasn’t even the only underground network that Ala worked with directly. When Ala smuggled children out of the ghetto, she sometimes passed those youngsters along to another cell that had sprung up in the resistance and to a woman named Aleksandra Dargielowa. By the late fall of 1942, Aleksandra had saved the lives of more children than even Irena—more than five hundred—and the system that she used was remarkably similar. Not surprisingly, Aleksandra was also in contact with the indomitable Helena Radlińska.

  Aleksandra’s organization was called the RGO—for Rada Glówna Opiekuńcza, or the Central Welfare Council—and, like Irena, Aleksandra was a social worker. Since 1940 the RGO had operated as the official German-sanctioned relief organization, charged with managing refugees, prisoners of war, and impoverished residents. But by 1941 the underground had infiltrated the RGO and under the noses of the Germans its staff worked secretly with Jewish charities and the Polish government-in-exile to funnel aid to families in the ghetto. By early 1942, Aleksandra ran a division within the RGO that went a step further. She was hiding Jewish children in city orphanages under false papers. Some of those children were the youngsters whom Ala and Nachum whisked away from the Umschlagplatz. Some of them were children whom Ala smuggled out of the ghetto in ambulances and under boxes.

  • • •

  Ala could see that Aleksandra was on the brink of exhaustion that fall, although she did not know all the reasons. Ala was on the brink of exhaustion herself. But Aleksandra wasn’t only running a rescue operation for Jewish children through the RGO. She had also just become the head of the children’s welfare division in a new secret resistance organization code-named “Żegota.” At first the founders of this underground action group called their network the “Aid Committee for Jews.” As the RGO resistance was folded into the group, it became the “Jewish Relief Council.” Soon, the organizers decided that the word “Jew” was too dangerous to use in any communication, even in coded messages. So, instead, members pretended they were talking about an imaginary person named Konrad Żegota—a “man” who very soon shot to the top of the Gestapo’s list of Poland’s most wanted.

  Żegota was a latecomer to the Polish underground. Established as a working group only on September 27, 1942, its founders were two women who came from different sides of the political spectrum. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was, like Jan Dobraczyński, a conservative author and far-right Catholic nationalist; like Jan, her outrage at the crimes against the Jewish people came not from liking Jews but from her conviction that genocide was un-Christian. “Our feelings toward Jews have not changed,” she wrote in a political pamphlet to the Polish people, published in Warsaw in the summer of 1942. “We do not stop thinking of them as political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland.” But, she went on, “we are required by God to protest . . . We are required by our Christian consciousness.” Zofia Kossak-Szczucka’s cofounder in Żegota, on the other hand, was Wanda Krahelska-Filipowiczowa. Wanda was also a Catholic and the wife of Poland’s former ambassador to the United States, but she was a liberal-leaning socialist like Ala and Irena. The two women imagined a collaboration that would bring together the Catholic left and the Catholic right in charitable aid of the Jewish people.

  Within weeks, Żegota outgrew the mission of its founders. On December 4, 1942, the “committee” was reorganized again, and group activists argued passionately for the inclusion of representatives from a far broader range of political perspectives. In particular, some of the members wanted to include on the committee representatives from the Jewish political community. That didn’t sit well with everyone. And although Irena didn’t know it yet, she knew many of Żegota’s earliest members. A man named Julian Grobelny, whom Irena knew from meetings of the Polish Socialist Party, was nominated to be the new general chairman. Dr. Adolf Berman, the wartime director of the Jewish charity CENTOS and one of the youth circle activists who had worked with Ala and Adam, represented the Zionist party on the leadership council. Dr. Leon Feiner—the man who, during the secret visit of Jan Karski, had asked Irena to act as their ghetto signpost—was the Jewish Bund representative.

  But Żegota’s chief link to the Polish underground was a man named Aleksander Kamiński, a renowned educational theorist and the editor of the Home Army’s underground newspaper, the Biuletyn Informacyjny—the Information Bulletin. Kamiński was a major player in the Home Army, the largest branch of the resistance. The Home Army—an offshoot of that underground state that had existed in Warsaw since the first days of the occupation and that Dr. Radlińska had helped to fashion—would eventually absorb most of the smaller military resistance units forming. In late 1942 the Home Army was already one hundred thousand strong in Poland. By 1944 there would be at least three hundred thousand Home Army members. And Żegota’s chief link to Irena Sendler was her old school friend and another of Dr. Radlińska’s “girls,” Izabela Kuczkowska.

  Iza was a dark horse, and even Irena wasn’t privy to all her friend’s secrets. Sharing secrets was too dangerous. In the Home Army, no one knew the name of his or her superior. Many in Irena’s network knew each other by code names only. According to secret wartime intelligence files in the Home Army records, Aleksander Kamiński and Izabela were close wartime collaborators. And, like Irena, Iza was working directly with Dr. Radlińska.

  But Irena was linked to the founders of Żegota in at least half a dozen different directions and at the closest levels. After all, she had been part of the underground state since the beginning, and Irena was passionately political. Many of these men already knew her personally, and, despite her guarded secrecy and her careful cryptograms, word was out in the underground that Irena was running an astonishing operation to save children. They knew because for months she had been under constant surveillance.

  They would soon reach out to Irena. She had earned their trust when she helped guide the secret agent Jan Karski through the ghetto so he could carry word to the world of the atrocities being perpetrated by the Germans. Now it was Żegota’s turn to help Irena. What none of them knew was that it would quickly place Irena in the sights of another organization dedicated to surveillance: the Gestapo.

  CHAPTER 11

  Żegota

  Warsaw, September 1942–January 1943

  Irena’s old metal desk was scattered with notes and bits of paper, and there was hardly room to move her chair around in the small office where she spent her days jammed in among the file cabinets. In the corridor of the welfare office, the tap-tap-tap of someone’s sturdy heels came and went, and Irena thought that whoever it
was hestitated outside her doorway for a moment. She realized she was biting on her pencil again. She was stressed. It had been three or four days since she had seen Adam, who was still in hiding at Maria Kukulska’s apartment, and she missed him. The wind outside was rattling the window, and Irena pulled her sweater closer around her and closed her eyes for a moment. Where she wanted to be that afternoon wasn’t there in her cramped office, slogging through paperwork. She wanted to be curled up somewhere quiet and warm next to Adam.

  But when she opened her eyes, she was still in her office. And the same hard lump was sitting in her stomach. What she was looking at, on the papers in front of her, was a disaster.

  Irena kept her lists—those flimsy bits of cigarette paper with the names and addresses of hundreds of hidden children—buried in her satchel. There were no hidden bottles yet, for the simple reason that Irena did not yet comprehend the scale of her danger. But she would never work on those lists of the children in the office. Not in the open. But she couldn’t help trying to work out some troubling sums on a piece of scrap paper.

  When Irena looked down at the figures she had scratched out, there was no way to make it all add up. She could see everything they had worked so hard to accomplish unraveling. The Germans had cut off the funds to the social welfare office. It was the beginning of December in 1942, and Irena was out of money, pure and simple.

  Irena heard the tap-tap-tap coming down the hallway again, and this time the shoes definitely stopped outside her door. She slid the scrap of paper into a budget file and waited. When a moment later her friend and colleague Stefania Wichlińska popped her head around the corner, Irena was relieved. Stefania looked sympathetically at the scattered paperwork on Irena’s desk. Do you have a moment? she asked. Irena raised her hands in mock despair at the files in front of her and smiled, and Stefania threw herself into the rickety little chair across from her. Ireeeennna, Stefania began slowly. Irena raised an eyebrow. A friend beating around the bush was never a great start to a conversation. Irena steadied herself for what she knew must be coming: she thought grimly that she didn’t need any more bad news this morning. The figures were depressing enough. Stefania plunged ahead, and Irena was mildly surprised when her topic was welfare and money. Stefania, of course, was in on the office secret. Everyone in the office knew about the scheme to funnel cash to Jewish families, but the German crackdown had ended that program. Now Irena was startled when Stefania starting talking about hiding Jewish children and someone who perhaps could help her. Stefania was a friend, but some secrets were too dangerous. Irena started to protest, but Stefania stopped her quickly. Irena. Will you go to 24, Żurawia Street, apartment 4, on the third floor? Ask for “Trojan.”