Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  • • •

  The Germans continued to hunt for members of Irena’s network and Żegota. Stefania Wichlińska, the woman in Irena’s office who had introduced her to Żegota, was arrested on April 4, 1943. Despite being tortured, Stefania did not betray her friend Irena. Stefania was gunned down on the streets of the ghetto in a mass execution. She left behind her husband, Stefan, and two children. Stefan, in time, would also risk his life to help save Irena.

  • • •

  But the nearest miss of all happened at the apartment of Jaga Piotrowska that spring. Jaga and her husband ran one of Irena’s most important emergency shelters, and more than fifty Jewish people passed through Jaga’s doors during the years of the occupation. Jaga was forty years old in 1943—one of the older women in Irena’s network—and her family’s house was ideal because it had two entrances, one in the front and one in the back garden. Two ways in and two ways out were crucial in an underground operation. But Lekarska Street, which the house fronted, was divided down the middle and strung with barbed wire. On one side, the Polish residents had been turned out to make room for German doctors and nurses who worked at the nearby Volksdeutsche hospital. On the other side lived Polish families like Jaga’s.

  It meant German patrols went up and down the street at all hours. But the Germans, Jaga told friends with a laugh, were such an orderly, rule-bound people that they couldn’t imagine anyone would do something as outrageously brazen as have fifty Jewish people coming and going in front of them.

  But this day the barbed wire was part of the catastrophe. A German man had been murdered in the neighborhood. The resistance was stepping up now its targeted assassinations of the occupiers, and retribution was furious. German soldiers began door-to-door searches of the Polish houses looking for their suspect. It was early on a beautiful May morning, Jaga said. Long afterward she would remember that detail clearly. The patrols blocked both ends of the street, and the goose-stepping and barked orders worked their way toward the middle, where Jaga’s house was located. She and her family were surrounded. There was no sneaking out the back exit. Jaga knew this was the end. “That morning in our apartment,” she explained simply, “were several Jewish adults and children.” They might have been Pola and Mieczysław Monar and their two children. One of the children might have been Halina Złotnicka. One of those present was, almost certainly, a teenager named Josek Buschbaum, who lived with Jaga from 1943 to 1946. Perhaps it was the Rapaczyński family, or perhaps the two sisters, Maria and Joanna Majerczy. Whoever Jaga’s hidden Jews were, they were unlucky to be in the house on Lekarska Street that beautiful morning.

  Jaga stood barefoot in the kitchen, cold with terror. Her daughter, her parents—how could she possibly save them? The shouts on the streets grew nearer, and Jaga whispered to herself the quiet words of the Hail Mary. One of the children watched, wide-eyed, and made a solemn pronouncement that rattled Jaga. It’s all because we are Jewish.

  Jaga’s faith was ardent. What would happen to these Jewish children if they died unbaptized? The thoughts came rushing in quickly. Their souls would be lost to the God she even now prayed would save them. Jaga turned to the Jews watching her. When someone was in extremis—when death was imminent—any Catholic could perform the baptism ritual. At moments like this, no priest was required. All it took was a faithful heart and some water. She turned to the water jug. She gestured to them and showed them how to put their hands together. “I did it myself,” Jaga remembered: there in the kitchen, as her mother and her daughter looked on, as the sound of marching feet came closer. “I baptized them and I said that it is done.” The Jewish child looked up at her and sighed. “So now we are just like the others?” But Jaga knew their baptism meant nothing to the Germans who were coming.

  Jaga fell to her knees to pray in front of the kitchen stove, and the Jewish refugees fell to their knees beside her as Jaga led them in a prayer while they waited together for the Germans. Jaga clutched in her hand, poised before the open fire, a bit of paper. On it were the names of some of Irena’s children. When the Germans knocked, she would toss it into the flames and would try to die bravely. Until then, Jaga would not stop praying.

  The only sound in the room was the murmur of the Polish women’s voices, and it came to Jaga suddenly. Where were the sounds of the Germans? She listened intently. They were becoming fainter now. The Germans were leaving! It was truly, Jaga knew, a miracle. The search squads had met in the middle of the block, just in front of Jaga’s home. Each believed that the other had already searched that one. The Germans left Leskarska Street without ever knocking. Others on the street were not so fortunate. Five Jewish men were discovered hiding in a neighbor’s home. The neighbors and their guests were shot dead at the crossroads.

  • • •

  As life on the Aryan side grew even more perilous, there were new children now, too—children with family ties to old friends especially. The parents of one Jewish child, Michał Głowiński, were Felicia and Henryk, and when the big Aktion started in the summer of 1942, Michał was seven. When they came for the family during the roundups, his grandfather, Laizer, refused to go and instead jumped to his death from an upstairs window. But Michał and his parents were herded to the Umschlagplatz, destined for Treblinka. At the loading docks, a Jewish policeman showed them a hole in the fence, and the family fled to the relative safety of a ruined basement. For months the Głowiński family struggled in hiding inside the ghetto, and at last, in the first days of 1943, in exchange for a large bribe, a German officer let them hide under a tarp in a military truck at a checkpoint. Michał and his parents joined his aunt in a small attic hideout in the city.

  Was this his aunt Theodora? Among Michał’s aunts and uncles were Józef and Theodora Zysman, old friends of Irena Sendler’s who had slipped out of the ghetto only a few weeks ahead of the Głowińskis. Michał’s cousin, little Piotr, was already in safe hiding at an orphanage thanks to Irena. Michał passed long days that winter as a boy in the dusty attic, playing chess and learning his Catholic prayers quietly, until at last their hideout was uncovered by the blackmailing szmalcowniks. What choice was there but to flee? Michał’s father—the hardest of them to hide and a danger to his family—fled to a nearby village. He would survive somehow, he said. And to help Michał and the women, the family, at last, turned to Irena. Irena found Felicia a position as a maid in the house of a rich Polish couple active in the resistance, people who ran one of the secret schools in Otwock and who hid some other Jewish people. Michał disappeared, first into a convent orphanage in Otwock, then to the distant Turkowice orphanage where Katarzyna Meloch was already hiding.

  Decades later, Michał Głowiński would write of his childhood years in Warsaw. “I constantly think that I have encountered a real miracle: I was bestowed the gift of life,” he said. The young woman who gave it to him and to his cousin Piotr—and to more than 2,500 other children—was “the great and wonderful Irena . . . the guardian angel of those in hiding. . . . Irena, who in the season of great dying devoted her entire life to saving Jews.”

  • • •

  Irena brushed off these kinds of statements. Irena walked instead with the ghosts of those whom were missing—with the heartbreak of losing Ewa and Dr. Korczak. With the loss of her thirty-two orphans and with the loss of the tens of thousands of other children who walked innocently, with a piece of soap in hand, into the “showers” that awaited them at Treblinka. Even surviving, she knew, “was a harrowing experience for the small heroes.” Few of the children would ever be reunited with their families. Irena always said that the real courage belonged to them and to the fearless teenage girls who, now that the ghetto passes were gone, brought these children to her. To the streetcar drivers and janitors. To the young men who parachuted money into Warsaw and to nurses like Helena and Ala. To the nuns and the foster families across the city who cared for them and hid the children. Above all, it belonged to the mothers and fathers who let them go. She was, Irena always insis
ted, the least important part of a fragile but astonishing network that spread across Warsaw in the thousands that spring of 1943, just one part of a vast fraternity of strangers.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ala Rising

  Warsaw, April–July 1943

  The Holy Week celebrations that led up to Easter Sunday took place that year in Warsaw in warm and welcoming spring weather. A funfair rose up that Palm Sunday like a gaudy spring flower in advance of the festivities, just along the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, and one of the star features was a “sky carousel.” The Ferris wheel lifted young courting Polish couples high up into the air, and from the top there were long, slow-motion glimpses into the forbidden Jewish quarter. Vendors peddled hot pastries, and long into the evening carnival music blended with the squeals of children’s laughter.

  The opening of the Holy Week festival on April 18, 1943, also coincided with the Jewish holiday of Passover eve, and secretly throughout the quarter families were preparing celebrations. But long before midnight a terrible rumor swept the ghetto of a coming Aktion. No one any longer doubted such rumors, and the scanty feast tables were abandoned. Families instead spent the next few hours packing. Not for the east. Not for desperate flight across the ghetto wall. But to the hideout shelters in hidden attic rooms and to the underground bunkers that hundreds in the ghetto had spent the spring building.

  While the children and the frail went underground, the ghetto’s young people climbed the rooftops and took up posts in the alleys. Scouts manned observation posts and reviewed the codes for passing messages. Then the ghetto waited. Just after two a.m. SS troops stepping lightly surrounded the ghetto walls. The Aryan quarter dozed on peacefully.

  But no one was sleeping in the Jewish quarter. Scouts spread the word throughout the district. It was happening. The residents knew that, when the next round of deportations came, it could only be a battle to the death this time. By two thirty a.m. the resistance had mobilized. At points along the battle line nearly 750 armed young men and women waited. Ala’s friend, Jewish underground activist Marek Edelman, was one of their leaders. Irena’s contacts at Żegota—Julian Grobelny, Adolf Berman, and Leon Feiner—were all awake as well and mobilizing support plans for the ghetto fighters. Adolf and Leon carried hand grenades and weapons for their Jewish comrades through treacherous tunnels dug underneath the ghetto walls. Julian, weaker than ever from tuberculosis, operated a bedside operational command headquarters and sent couriers here and there across the city, gathering information and passing it along. One of those first messages went out to Irena, who was en route to the front lines, ready to do anything needed. And that morning Ala Gołąb-Grynberg was also making her own preparations. Ala had survived these long, desperate last months by working as a seamstress in the Toebbens factory, but that was not her calling.

  From two a.m. until just before dawn, everything was silent. The ghetto was watching. The Germans stood quietly at their posts until the darkest hours of the night and then, at four a.m., began to creep stealthily in small groups past the gates, confident of surprising the sleeping residents. At six a.m., as the sun rose brilliantly over the far horizon, two thousand SS troops were amassed and ready on the street corners and rooftops. An hour later engines fired to life, and the tanks and motorcycle artillery units swept into the district. The signal was given and the SS surged forward. The unseen Jewish fighters, however, were one step ahead of the Germans. Sliding into position, the resistance cut off the SS’s path of retreat and opened a furious surprise fire.

  The Germans had no idea it was coming. Jewish resistance on this scale did not fit with their preconceptions of what the Untermenschen were capable of planning. The resistance fighters—armed only with revolvers, homemade bombs, and a handful of rifles—struck hard and fast, and all that first day wild jubilation swept the quarter. The Jewish fighters weren’t just doing battle. They were winning. Ala’s old friend Marek Edelman—the slight twenty-year-old who had helped Ala and Nachum save hundreds from the Umschlagplatz in the summer of 1942 and was now leading a resistance battalion—remembered how they used incendiary bottles to attack the German columns. “[We] blew up German tanks and German troops [and by] 5 p.m. the Germans, surprised and shocked by Jewish resistance, withdrew from the ghetto,” his diary entry that day boasted. Then, once again, the streets were silent.

  The dead littered the streets of the ghetto. Nearly two hundred of the resistance fighters fell in the first fighting. But so did lots more Germans, they reminded each other. Old Jewish men came out from their hiding places to kiss the cheeks of the young heroes where they lay motionless on the sidewalks, and strangers embraced on the streets. Everyone knew it was a short-lived celebration, but this moment had been years in coming. On April 20, Germans delayed their return until the early afternoon and tried to reorganize. The fighting was as fierce as ever. A cheer went up as the ghetto fighters killed a hundred Germans in one fell swoop as a strategically placed mine exploded under them. To the shock of the Germans, teenage girls, fearless and ready to die, carried hand grenades hidden “in their bloomers up to the last moment” in order to get close enough to kill more of their enemies. And their spirits were soaring on the second evening. “We were happy and laughing,” fighters remembered. “[When] we threw our grenades and saw German blood on the streets of Warsaw, which had been flooded by so much Jewish blood and tears, a great joy possessed us.” Amid the ruins of the Jewish hospital, where Ala was living in a crumbling basement at number 4, Gęsia Street, she and Nachum Remba joined forces once again with the other nurses and doctors and swiftly set up a makeshift emergency medical station to help the fighters.

  As word spread across the Aryan side of the ghetto revolt, there was also cheering from that quarter. But the cheers had a sinister undercurrent. Residents of the Aryan side now flocked to the carnival and stood in long lines to buy tickets to be lifted up to watch the fantastic battle unfolding. With picnics and in boisterous parties, Poles lined the bridges overlooking the ghetto. And it seemed to those fighting for their lives inside that those who gathered to watch were not cheering for the Jewish fighters so much as they were reveling in the welcome spectacle of the Germans losing. At rooftop parties, people said that it was “the first real entertainment the Germans had provided in all this sad time,” and their callous remarks carried on the breeze as far as the ghetto. German airplanes soon swung low over the city, dropping bombs on the walled quarter and exploding houses. As apartment buildings exploded, eager bets were laid on how long it would take the quarter to burn and on whether there would be any Jews left inside afterward.

  Irena could hardly bear it. Her ghetto pass was gone, and no Aryan was allowed any longer in and out of the ghetto. Each day she went and stood at the wall, racking her brain to imagine some action, some way, to show Ala that she was still with her. Among her prewar Jewish friends, only Ala remained inside now, fighting. But there was nothing Irena could do to help her or the other fighters.

  By Sunday, the sixth day of the insurrection, the tide inside the ghetto was turning. The Germans, furious and determined, lit fires building by building. Smoke poured from behind the walls of the ghetto, and large flakes of gray-white ash floated in the springtime air across central Warsaw. Julian Grobelny sent Irena a message and asked her now to come quickly to the secret Żurawia Street apartment that morning. As Irena stood on the threshold of the front entrance, she remembered later that at that moment the Easter church bells were ringing out across the city. Women floated past in holiday hats and flower-print dresses. From the open windows came the sounds of families sitting down to their joyous Easter breakfast. But in his small room at the back of the apartment, Julian was depressed. It was urban guerrilla warfare inside the ghetto, his contacts were reporting, and the attacks were coming at the fighters from all directions. It was not a question of winning against the Germans. It had always been impossible. Now it was only a matter of helping any survivors who could make the dangerous passage out of the infe
rno.

  “You have to help them,” Julian said. Irena’s answer was instant: What do you need? Tell me. Julian replied, “Give me some addresses where we can take people who make it to the Aryan side.” From there, Żegota could help them. Irena considered. Which addresses could she use? There was her apartment. She knew she could count on Zofia and Stanisław. She could count on Janka and her sister Jaga. We have our “emergency rooms,” Irena replied. They are open to anyone who flees the ghetto. Can Żegota transmit the addresses to the Jewish combat organization?

  Irena also considered further. She knew it was a daring risk—even more daring than some of their old operations. But if the Germans were hell-bent on destruction street by street, Irena spotted opportunity. Were the Germans distracted enough that she could perhaps get back into the ghetto? she wondered. And if she could get in, surely she could get out with some people. Irena had made it in—and out—of the ghetto that day, and brought with her a youngster. It could be done!

  She mobilized her team, and for the next few days the women were once again in and out of the ghetto. Irka Schultz fearlessly rushed into burning buildings and pulled out crying toddlers. Irena waited at sewer manholes and tunnel exits, directing refugees to safe-house addresses. At Janka’s apartment, members of the resistance came and went, depositing secret documents being ferried out of the ghetto. Shut off from her friend, Irena was desperately worried for Ala. As the blaze grew fiercer with the passing days, Irena hoped that, somehow, Ala would be one of those to make it to the shelters. Julian shared her worry for Ala. Ala was working directly with him and with the others in the Jewish resistance, and Julian knew her well as a woman of immense resourcefulness and courage. If anyone could survive, it would be Ala.