• • •
Over the next days and weeks, there were more trips to Szucha, just as her German interrogator had promised. Some mornings when the rolls were read after breakfast, calling forward those destined for transport and torture, Irena’s heart clenched to hear her name among them. Before long, the bones of Irena’s legs and feet were broken, and there were scars and ugly open wounds running in jagged strips across her body that would mark her forever.
All that saved Irena from being beaten to death on those days was the fact that the Germans didn’t have any idea whom they had captured. The Gestapo thought Irena was a small player, a foolish young woman dabbling at the periphery of the Polish resistance. They had no inkling yet that they had captured one of its most senior leaders or a woman responsible for hiding thousands of Jewish children across the city. But they would not be ignorant of this fact forever. Through the pain, Irena reasoned with herself silently. Some days the torture seemed bearable, and with enough concentration she could sometimes float away from her poor, miserable body. Other times the beatings were fierce, and the darkness lapped at the edges of her consciousness. Was she prepared to die to save the others? She knew she had it in her power to bring about the deaths of thousands. She repeated over and over her story. She was just a social worker. She knew nothing. She refused to let herself think of Adam. To even think of Adam might mean his name would slip out unbidden as she fell to the floor under the blows.
Twice a day, at noon and in the evening, the vans carted the broken bodies back to Pawiak. “One could have an impression that this was an ambulance carrying victims of a disaster,” one of the doctors remembered. “Their faces were pale and covered in blood, with black eyes, clothes crumpled and soiled, often with sleeves and pockets torn off.” Some days Irena was among them. Other days she worked in the prison laundry, standing long hours on fractured and painful limbs that were healing badly, scrubbing feces from stained German underwear in between the torture. She limped painfully now, and the daily walks around the prison courtyard were an agony. When the job in the laundry was not done to the Germans’ satisfaction, the punishments were sadistic. One afternoon a furious guard lined the laundry women up against the wall and, walking down the row, put a bullet through the head of every other person. Irena, that day, was one of the survivors.
• • •
On the morning of Irena’s arrest, as word spread, there was panic. Julian Grobelny and the leadership at Żegota faced one set of concerns, the most important of which was the lists and the addresses of the children. If Irena were executed, the information about the lists would perish with her. Thousands of children, many of whom were too young to remember their own identities, would be lost forever to their families and to the Jewish nation. But there was also a far bigger risk that Irena posed to those children. Irena put it bluntly: “They weren’t just worried about me . . . they didn’t know whether I could stand the torture. After all, I knew where all the children were.” If Irena broke, it would be an unparalleled disaster. But saving her was an immense challenge. It would mean bribing someone at the very highest levels of the Gestapo.
At Maria Kukulska’s house in Praga, the problems were different. And the residents were asking themselves the same questions: Could Irena withstand the torture? What did the Germans know already? Janka Grabowska passed word of the arrest to Maria and Adam, but she could only advise them to be prepared for what might happen.
Jurek was still courting Maria Kukulska’s daughter, Anna, and, the moment he stepped through the door of the apartment that day, he knew something was terribly wrong. Maria’s home was usually a place of laughter and a warm welcome. But Adam sat slumped in a chair staring ahead blankly. Jurek wasn’t sure that he even saw him. Adam did not turn. He said nothing. Jurek knew in a flash that it was Irena.
Anna quickly signaled for Jurek to follow her. Irena? he asked. Anna nodded. “She’s at Szucha, and perhaps already in Pawiak,” she told him. “There are efforts to get her out.” Jurek felt close to collapsing. Irena had guided everything, kept all of them safe. What now?
When Adam roused himself at last, it was to insist against all reason that they would save Irena: We will get her out. That’s all there is to it. Head in his hands, he said it over and over. Maria didn’t dare to tell him that it was surely hopeless. People didn’t leave Pawiak. Not in the way that Adam wanted.
Gently, Maria broached at last an even more painful problem, a more urgent question that she needed Adam to consider. Would Irena betray them under torture? How much did the Gestapo know already? The apartment here was “burnt”—no longer safe for hiding. Adam would have to flee now to another hiding place. Adam, we need to go now. Worried about Adam and unwilling to leave him alone anywhere, Maria could see only one solution. Adam would need to travel to the safe house on Akacjowa Street in Otwock, where Żegota leader Julian Grobelny and his wife Halina were hiding. The boy, Jerzy, would stay with them also.
Moving a man who looked as strongly Jewish as Adam was perilous. It was risky for him to be seen too close to the window. Now he was going to walk through the streets of Warsaw? Take a streetcar to the suburbs unnoticed? There was no option. That autumn afternoon, for the first time in more than a year, Adam Celnikier walked with Maria Kukulska down the stairs of the apartment and onto the streets of a changed Warsaw. Maria insisted on traveling with Adam personally on the journey to Otwock. The streets of Praga were quiet, but as they neared the depot the crowds grew thicker, and Maria felt only rage when at her side two Polish men blocked their way forward. A Jew. Here’s a Jew. One of the men held out a hand for money. I hope you are rich, Pani. Otherwise it’s the Gestapo.
Maria turned on the man with wild fury. Leave us alone, she hissed. Or I will have the Home Army execute you. It was not an idle threat in the autumn of 1943, although admitting that one had contacts in the resistance was also an immense danger. The Polish underground state had a mirror justice system that was running at full tilt now, and judicial executions of collaborators and blackmailers were common. The blackmailers exchanged a quick look and slid away in search of easier targets. Maria’s bluster, astonishingly, had succeeded.
At the safe house in Otwock, Julian and Halina Grobelny welcomed Adam as an old friend, and at the hideout people were always coming and going in secret. Julian was quiet in the eye of the storm, but around him constantly were movement and urgent whispers. By now Julian was bedridden and struggled for words. His cheeks had been hollowed out by tuberculosis. Halina tended him carefully, with a cheerful smile, but he was dying.
• • •
Beyond Pawiak, things were changing quickly for the others in Irena’s network at the end of October, too, and it would not take long for word of this to reach Julian Grobelny. Southeast of Warsaw, at the slave labor camp at Poniatowa, where fifteen thousand prisoners struggled for survival, the prison resistance movement was growing stronger. Baby Bieta’s mother, Henia Koppel, was still alive and laboring as a seamstress. So was the indefatigable Ala Gołąb-Grynberg. Ala was already part of a small camp cell working in direct contact with Marek Edelman’s fighting organization and Żegota. The ringleaders were carefully planning a daring escape. Camp uprisings were now plaguing the Germans. In August the arrivals at Treblinka revolted, and there were incursions even at Auschwitz that autumn. The revolts were put down with brutal force, but by the fall of 1943 things were not going so well for the Germans in the war, and Berlin was nervous.
At the end of the month, their attention turned to Poniatowa. Suddenly a couple of hundred laborers were pulled from the textile factories and set to work in the fields building deep zigzagging defensive trenches, two meters deep, to fortify the compound. Work went on for days, and word was that the next detail would be the construction of air raid towers. Ala and those in her cell, however, grew increasingly suspicious and watchful.
Ala and her cell already had a small arsenal of weapons, smuggled into the camp with the help of Żegota, and when th
e Germans ordered a dawn roll call of all the prisoners on the morning of November 4, Ala knew with a sinking heart that something terrible was coming. The cell leaders—men and women who had fought together in the ghetto uprising and members of the Jewish resistance—huddled together and quickly made a bold decision. The fighters would not report for the roll call. They gathered instead in one of the barracks and set up the barricades, ready for defensive military action. The cache of weapons was tiny, but these were already men and women who had seen firsthand what was possible.
Along the trenches, in freezing November morning temperatures, the Germans now called the prisoners forward in groups of fifty. At gunpoint they stripped off their clothing and placed their valuables in small baskets. Then nearly fifteen thousand slave laborers lay down together, amid machine-gun fire and barking dogs, in the trenches and were executed in mass graves in an action the Germans had code-named “Erntefest”—the Harvest Festival. The executions went on for days. Henia Koppel was twenty-four when she died in the “harvest.” Bieta was now an orphan.
Ala, however, did not die in the trenches. She was thirty-nine that year and yearned to live. She was fierce and fearless. She and the others who had fought in the Jewish uprising that spring banded together inside their barracks, and when the Germans came for them with the dogs, they opened fire on the SS. Guards fell to the ground. The casualties first stunned the German officers, and then they turned murderously furious. There was nowhere to run inside the barbed wire of Poniatowa. The Jewish fighters weren’t interested in running anyhow. The Germans set fire to the building and torched the barracks. Ala and her friends died inside, trapped in the blaze but still resisting. In those final hellish moments, as the world exploded in flames around her, she surely thought of her husband, Arek, perhaps still somewhere out there fighting, and of her precious little daughter in hiding.
• • •
For Irena’s circle of friends, the winter of 1943–44 was a killing season. There was no way to look on the bright side during those months. It was loss after loss. That the children were safe was the only possible consolation.
By the second week of November, as the ripple effects of the laundress’s denunciation of Irena spread throughout the network, there was more bad news. Now, in the cells at Pawiak, Irena caught sight of a beaten and brutalized Helena Szesko. Helena’s role as a nurse and courier in the network was a crucial one. Helena was, Irena always said, “full of initiatives,” and she brought to their underground network dozens of contacts in hospitals and “clandestine circles” across Warsaw. Would Helena be strong enough to stay silent too? Like Irena, Helena held in her hands the lives of Irka Schultz, Jadwiga Deneka, and Władysława Marynowska—and the lives of hundreds of children in the orphanages. The women were herded together each day to the courtyard for daily walks at Pawiak, and sometimes she and Helena exchanged a careful glance, a look of solidarity and determination. However, Helena’s husband and their collaborator, Leon—the man who had arranged for children to be smuggled out through the Muranów streetcar and saved so many—was beyond reach already. He was shot in a public execution by firing squad on November 17.
The next to fall was Jadwiga Deneka. The network was unraveling. On November 25, Jadwiga was checking in on some Jewish refugees hiding out in a basement safe house and underground press distribution point on Świętojerska Street, in the Żoliborz district, when the Gestapo raided. Jadwiga was twenty-four that year, and it was only because she did not break during the torturous interrogations at Pawiak, where she now joined her comrades-in-arms in the cells, that Katarzyna Meloch and dozens of other children were not discovered. Like Ala and Irena, Jadwiga also would not be broken.
All the women did their best to keep their spirits up in prison, despite the constant aching hunger and daily abuses of mind and spirit, and despite capricious executions and beatings. Death could come to each of them any morning at roll call. They lived with that knowledge at Pawiak. They also lived with boredom and sorrow. In Irena’s cell, some of the women secretly crafted playing cards from scraps of bread and paper, and in the evenings, when the guards retreated and left them all in darkness, the cells often resounded with the sound of sad Polish music—sweet women’s voices echoing off the concrete chambers, singing children’s lullabies and old folk tunes. Irena and Basia, assigned to the same cell, slept crammed together, along with a dozen or more others, in the small, dank room. But when Basia sang, it felt like freedom. She was one of the most beautiful of all the singers.
One night in early December, Basia leaned against the cool cell wall and turned her face away from Irena. Irena was sure her friend was crying. Basia, what’s the matter? Shall we sing something? she suggested. Basia shook her head slowly and said, No, I can’t sing. She paused. Irena, they are going to execute me tomorrow. I have a feeling. Irena whispered quiet words of reassurance, but Basia stopped her. No. We saw Zbigniew Łapiński today. Coming out of the chapel. He had been beaten. Zbigniew was eighteen, only a boy, and a courier in the children’s underground. Basia and Helena Pechin watched the guards drag him, limp and broken, along the corridor after interrogation, and Basia berated the young German lieutenant. I gave away that we knew him, Irena.
All that night Irena lay quietly and traced over and over with her eyes the patterns on the ceiling, thinking. Next to her, she knew that Basia was also awake. As they left the cell for roll call at dawn, Basia grasped Irena’s hand and squeezed hard. Irena tried not to cry at the roll call. When the names were read out for the morning execution, as Basia had known would happen, she was among them. Basia and Zbigniew were executed that day in a public firing squad at the corner of Ordynacka and Foksal Streets. Irena went carefully through Basia’s possessions in the cell that night, and her hand fell upon a small keepsake. It was a small handmade portrait of Christ, with the words “I trust in Jesus.” Irena held it to her and did not try to stop crying now. For the rest of her life, Irena would guard that small treasure.
There were deadly roll calls every morning. On January 6 they called the name of Jadwiga Deneka. Jadwiga was executed in the ruins of the ghetto, just beyond the prison gates, alongside the eleven Jewish women she had been caught hiding. She had divulged nothing.
Irena knew that her turn was coming.
In January, Irena was once again called in the morning lineup to the dentist’s office, and in the chair, as the drill whirled, Anna Sipowicz handed Irena a last message from Żegota. It no longer spoke of escape or freedom. It read, “Be strong. We love you.” In a matter of just another few weeks, it would be too late to get any prison messages to Irena. “One day, I heard my name,” Irena said. It was January 20, 1944, the day of her execution.
CHAPTER 15
Irena’s Execution
Warsaw, January 1944
They took her to Szucha.
The inmates called the death van “the hood,” and the sturdy canvas cover that left the prisoners unable to look out added to the mounting sense of terror. There were twenty, perhaps thirty women that morning, herded by Polish prison guards with green caps and sympathetic looks into the waiting truck for their final destination. Many at Pawiak were summarily executed outside the prison gates, in the ghetto ruins, perhaps on flimsy boards above that gaping pit of ruined basement foundations. This truckload was destined for the firing squads at Szucha. And although the women were in the dark, they were not spared the knowledge of what was coming. Irena knew this was her final hour.
The women were led into a waiting room with doorways on all sides, and most were crying. One by one a woman’s name was called, and she was led to a door on the left that led to a courtyard. One by one came the sound of shots. The sobs in the room grew louder. Irena heard her name called, and that short walk across the room felt like falling. The clock ticking off the seconds seemed strangely loud, and the world narrowed down to footsteps and thoughts of her mother and Adam. She walked left. But the guard signaled to her to take the door on the right. Further interr
ogation. Irena’s heart sank. She wanted the torture to be over. She had no doubts about how this would end. Inside the room was a Gestapo agent in his tall black boots, a florid-looking German. Come, he instructed her. Irena followed. He led her out into the thin winter sunlight. Irena wished for cyanide to end this gently. Would he shoot her at the crossroads, like so many others? He led her now away from Pawiak, toward the parliament buildings, and at the intersection of Aleja Wyzwolenia and Aleja Szucha, he turned to her.
“You are free. Save yourself fast.” Irena’s mind stumbled to process the information. Free? She couldn’t register at first the word’s meaning. All she could think next was that there was no way to live in occupied Poland without identity papers. “My Kennkarte,” Irena insisted. “I need my Kennkarte. Give me my papers!” Rage flashed in the German’s eyes. “You lousy thug, get lost,” he snarled, and he pounded his fist into her mouth with fury. Irena’s mouth filled with blood, and she staggered away, dizzy. When she looked back, the German was gone.
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