Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  She stumbled. A stranger on the street turned to look and hurried past. She was too bloodied and bruised to go far, and her half-healed bones were not sturdy enough for running. “I could not go on,” she said later of those first few moments. “I went into a nearby drugstore. The owner took me to the back room, where I washed, [and] she gave me a few pennies for the tram ticket.” The owner’s name was Helena, and she gently bathed Irena’s shattered face and found something to cover her telltale prison uniform.

  Irena admitted afterward that it was foolish—reckless and stupid, even—but she couldn’t think of anything to do except go home to her mother. She boarded the number five streetcar in the direction of Wola, stunned and frightened. Suddenly there came a cry from one of the teenagers on the streetcar, and everyone rushed for the doorways. Gestapo at the next stop! Get off quickly! The Germans were checking papers ahead. Women with shopping bags and men in limp fedoras rushed past her and disappeared into the crowds, but Irena was half-crippled and slow-moving. An old man with sad eyes turned and stopped and waited for her. She wanted to cry for gratitude when he offered her his hand to help steady her as she stepped from the platform. The intensity of his sorrowful gaze said that he knew she was in the resistance. Irena stepped from the streetcar and disappeared quietly into the crowd, trying not to stumble. Her broken leg burned with a white pain, and she willed away the darkness that nibbled at the edges of her consciousness again. How easy it would have been to faint away and let oblivion carry her. When she arrived home at last, she was hardly able to stand. The limp would stay with her forever.

  “I was so naïve,” Irena said afterward, “that I spent several nights at home, in the same apartment where the Gestapo had arrested me.” Across the city that afternoon, trucks with bullhorns blared out the names of those executed that day for crimes against Germany, and posters tacked to billboards announced her death in bold letters. Obwieszczenie! Irena Sendlerowa. 20. i. 1944. Crime: Providing Aid to Jews.

  Sooner or later someone who had seen that poster would realize that she was still living in the apartment, and the Gestapo would come looking. That realization slowly dawned on Irena. Staying was too dangerous. But leaving was impossible. Her mother, Janina, was dying. She had suffered for years from a heart condition. A daughter in Pawiak and nights of endless worry had taken a worse toll, and Irena struggled with guilt and remorse. However unwittingly, what other conclusion was there except that she was responsible?

  In the day or two after her release, another thought nagged at Irena. Why had they set her free? Was it some kind of trap? Her first worry was what would happen if one of her liaisons—nearly all of them friends—came near her now. But soon a note came from a young courier who immediately scampered off. When she saw her code name, “Jolanta,” she had her answer. Żegota had arranged it. Żegota wanted her to leave the apartment now. She knew the safe-house location.

  But Irena couldn’t go. She couldn’t leave her mother. Another message came. Julian Grobelny tried to warn her. Janka came and pleaded. Irena put it off. It meant disappearing. A cousin who had come to nurse Janina during the months of Irena’s incarceration promised to stay on; everyone urged Irena to flee. But Irena couldn’t bear to leave her mother. She moved the next night into the apartment of a neighbor one flight up, who agreed to let her stay there just for a short while. Hiding in a place so nearby meant that, for a few minutes each day, Irena could slip down the stairs to see her mother.

  Even this was a foolish gamble. She was inviting disaster, and Julian was growing impatient. One night in the last week of January, that disaster struck. Just after the eight p.m. curfew passed, when the streets were quiet and the Gestapo raids started, the tramp of heavy boots once again filled the staircase of the apartment building, and Irena heard voices with German accents shouting. Her heart froze. She knew what it meant. The Gestapo had realized she was missing. They were searching the building. Doors slammed on the first floor. Irena looked around the small apartment hopelessly. A closet? The bed? There was no point in hiding. It was stupid to die like this. Stupid. She could not believe she had been so foolish. She knew that this time it would kill her mother. The look on the face of her stricken neighbor told her that the woman understood for the first time that it was her own death sentence as well. “We died inside from fear,” Irena said simply.

  “I do not know how long it took—minutes seemed like an eternity—until we heard the sound of running shoes, moving away,” Irena said later. When the corridors were quiet again, a tap came on the neighbor’s door, and Irena’s cousin passed her a message and quickly embraced her. Good-bye. You must go, Irena. And then she turned and retreated down the hallway.

  Irena held the thin sheet of paper, and her hand was shaking. She read her mother’s heart-wrenching message: “They were looking for you again, you must not come near even to say good-bye to me. Get out as soon as possible.” The Gestapo had searched all the lower floors of the building. They had stopped just one floor below where Irena was hiding.

  Irena relented at last. What other option was there if it meant the murder of her mother? An awful knowledge crashed upon her now: she had been a terrible daughter. Julian Grobelny swiftly arranged Irena’s new identity papers, and the woman who had spirited thousands away to safety would herself now go into the deepest hiding. For a short time, while she was healing, she was allowed to stay with Julian and Halina and Adam in Otwock. But staying in one place for long was not an option for a woman who had now shot to the top of the Gestapo’s most-wanted list, and for Adam’s safety as much as her own she had to keep moving as soon as she was able. With her stunning escape came the belated realization at Szucha Avenue that she had not been a small player in the resistance. The Gestapo hunt for Irena was on.

  Irena’s new papers gave her a fresh identity, and suddenly, like the thousands of children she had helped to save, there were a dozen new details for her to learn completely. Her name now was Klara Dąbrowska. Irena dyed her hair red as a disguise, and in Home Army files on her there was a description of her as she looked then: about 160 centimeters tall, slender, with a “slightly aquiline nose,” bright blue eyes, and a short haircut. After the first few weeks Irena moved constantly. There were other safe houses in Otwock. She stayed for a time with her uncle near Nowy Sącz. When things got too hot, she spent some time back in Praga, as a hidden resident at the Warsaw zoo, where some of the Żegota leadership, including Dr. Adolf Berman, had gone underground in the autumn of Irena’s arrest. Moving was a fact of life in this dangerous evasion, but Irena missed her mother and Adam.

  • • •

  In Otwock, Irena learned at last the heroic story behind her eleventh-hour rescue. When Janka brought the news of Irena’s capture to Adam and Maria Kukulska at the apartment in Praga, all three were wildly determined to save Irena. At the safe house in Otwock with Julian, Adam’s grief and worry was a constant reminder. Julian promised that Żegota would supply any sum needed to bribe the Gestapo, if such a thing could be done. For Irena’s release, they paid the highest ransom ever in their history as an organization. No one knows quite how high the figure was, but it was something close to 35,000 złotych—the equivalent today of more than a hundred thousand dollars.

  But could it be done, at any price? Only a bribe at the highest ranks of the Gestapo could bring about such a brazen prison break, and who among them had those kinds of contacts? The obstacle was finding someone with contacts close enough to the Gestapo to make it happen. You didn’t just go up to Germans on the street and start asking—especially not if you were a Jewish man in deep hiding. What the friends needed was someone Polish and someone with connections inside the Gestapo. What they needed was someone like Irena’s office conspirator Maria Palester, with her weekly bridge games. Several years now into the German occupation, Maria amiably chatted up Gestapo informers each week and more than once had used her charms in the service of Irena’s network. She had an extensive network of contacts in the underworld, bu
t there was no way to minimize the risk Maria was taking now to save Irena. She was calling in her chips and risking the lives of her family.

  After all, Maria’s Jewish-convert husband, Henryk, was no less in danger now than when the war had started. Her teenage son, Kryštof, was in an elite resistance squadron and in constant danger. And the family was still helping to hide Jewish friends in their apartment. But Maria did not balk at a bold gamble. Irena had made it possible for her family to survive. If she could, she would now save Irena. Maria reached out to a friend, who reached out to someone else. Somewhere along the way, a bargain was struck at last with the German officer who took Irena to the crossroads on the morning of her execution. Lured by the fantastic sum, he agreed to enter in the official records that Irena Sendler had been executed.

  The drop-off was the stuff of cloak-and-dagger spy novels. Finding someone to deliver a bribe to the Gestapo was a fantastically high-risk proposition. Maria’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Małgorzata Palester, undertook the operation. She calmly carried the rolls of cash buried in the bottom of her school backpack to the rendezvous with the courage of a seasoned resistance agent. It would have been an easy thing to take the cash and shoot the girl on the street. Germans answered few questions when it came to Polish corpses. He might have taken the cash deposit even more easily and still led Irena to her execution. For whatever reason, he didn’t.

  • • •

  Adam now explained to her another secret. Żegota had gone to such lengths to free Irena—a single agent in a large and sprawling network with a hundred different cells—in largest part because of the lists of children. While Irena thought she had been keeping the lists to protect the children, it turned out that the lists had saved her life also. “Żegota sent me letters so that I would be assured that they were doing everything possible to get me out,” Irena recalled, “but all the prisoners got these letters.” Sure, Julian Grobelny and Adolf Berman, the organization leaders, cared for Irena and Adam personally. “But their great efforts to keep me alive were due to something greater than sentiment,” Irena now realized. “They knew that if I died, the only trace of the children would die too. The index was the only chance of finding the children and returning them to Jewish society. And Żegota did not know that my liaison officer hid the index. They only knew from my letters that the Germans did not find the index.”

  What to do with the lists now? It was another pressing question, as members of their cell kept falling into the clutches of the Gestapo. Janka was still hiding the tissue-paper rolls that Irena had tossed to her the morning of the arrest, but there were other parts of the list also stashed away for safekeeping. What if Irena were again arrested? What if something happened to Janka? Janka’s husband, Józef, was a resistance soldier in the Home Army, and their home was exposed and vulnerable. The lists needed to be gathered together and hidden properly. In the winter of 1944, Irena and the two sisters, Jaga and Janka, now agreed on a new location. They buried their papers in a bottle under the apple tree in Jaga’s wild backyard on Lekarska Street.

  • • •

  Irena was living on the run, and she could wait a little while longer to be with Adam, if that was how to keep him safe. But breaking her ties with her mother was impossible. Janina did not have much time left. She was dying. And the Gestapo knew it. Irena’s old Wola apartment, where Janina still lived, was under surveillance, and the trap was set to spring on Irena. She now struggled with the realization that she had risked her mother’s life at every moment, but only in hindsight did Irena see how great the danger had been. She stayed away, but it felt like a betrayal.

  Irena pushed those thoughts away. Stopping to rest now felt like failure. Within weeks after her release, despite her badly healed bones, she returned to dangerous underground work as “Klara.” She was determined to continue delivering her support funds to the families and checking in on her children. There is no record of the precise visits Irena made in the winter of 1944. Although she and Adam kept careful records of all “her” children, those account books would not survive the coming tumultuous summer of 1944 in Warsaw. But it is almost certain that she made one of her first trips to the Ochota district to visit her old friends Zofia Wędrychowska and Stanisław Papuziński and to check in on three of her Jewish children—including her favorite, Estera.

  • • •

  Ochota was still more of a village than a part of the city in the winter of 1944, and Zofia and Stanisław’s house—number 3—was the last home in the development there, before Matwicka Street gave way to fields and farmland. Stanisław worked in a medical clinic and traveled each day to the Old Town of Warsaw, but Zofia was a public librarian in the neighborhood. There was a willow tree swing in the overgrown backyard and bright flower gardens that Zofia tried to tend amid the flurry of more than a half dozen children. When Irena came up the front step, they greeted her with a chorus of happy screams, because Pani Irena was a favorite. Zofia and Stanisław had five children of their own: a son, Marek, who would turn thirteen that year; ten-year-old Eve; nine-year-old Andrzej; four-year-old Joanna; and an infant born just that year named Thomas. Often, when Irena came, Zofia was away working, and then the children’s grandmother greeted her warmly and offered her tea and cakes, the ubiquitous gesture of Polish welcome. Along with an older man in the neighborhood, Mr. Siekiery, their grandmother looked after all the children on the street when the parents were working, and there was a tribe of them, children with names like Sławek, Julia, Adam, and Hania. There were also the four or five Jewish children whom the family was hiding for Irena and for Dr. Radlińska’s network. The eldest among them was “Teresa Tucholska”—Estera—who acted the part of a little mother to baby Thomas.

  It was great luck that Irena was not visiting on the afternoon of February 22, 1944, a blustery winter Tuesday. That day tragedy struck the family. Stanisław was out of the house—perhaps at work at the clinic or perhaps, some say, at a clandestine meeting of the resistance. But Zofia was at work, and there were so many little ones underfoot that the older children on the street, mostly boys who were thirteen and fourteen, were left to their own devices. The boys went out into the barren fields behind the house to play at being resistance fighters. The children may even have had a gun. They had certainly absorbed the silent lesson from their parents that it was brave to fight the Germans. Like Irena, Zofia and Stanisław both still worked in the underground with their old professor, and their sister-in-law, Halina Kuczkowska, was a senior underground operative.

  While the neighborhood boys were playing at killing the occupiers in the fields, some actual Germans spotted the youngsters, and the boys howled with glee at the adventure. But the Germans gave chase for real, ordering them to surrender. Pursued by German soldiers, the children were too frightened to stop, and they ran for home. The first home on the street belonged to Marek’s parents, Stanisław and Zofia. The boys clattered through the front doorway. The Germans stormed the threshold behind them. Inside the house there was a fight with the soldiers. Little Eve hid under the bed crying. The Germans chased the boys in a hail of gunfire. A bullet hit one of the older boys, wounding him badly, and he fell with a cry in the stairwell. The other children jumped out of the window and fled to the fields, and the soldiers gave chase. But, of course, it was only a matter of time before they returned for the boy and his parents.

  When a frantic neighbor fetched Zofia from the library, the Germans were gone and the children were terrified. They watched wild-eyed as Zofia tried to stop the boy’s bleeding and started quickly burning sheets of papers. Zofia’s first thought was to hide the children in the attic. She knew the police would be coming soon with reinforcements from the Gestapo. Then she thought better of it. Turning to the children, Zofia put Estera in charge. You must take them to my friend’s house on Krucza Street, she told Estera. Estera knew the one. Go quickly. Do not come back; I’ll come to get you.

  Estera fled with the little ones immediately. Zofia stayed with the bleedin
g child, and found him a spot in the attic to hide in. But the stairs were covered with his blood, and she had to remove the trail that led right to him. While a neighbor tried to tidy up the ruined living room, Zofia got on her hands and knees with a pail of water and started to scrub the blood away.

  That was where the Germans found her when they stormed the house: on her knees, scrubbing and crying. She had not been able to complete the job before their arrival. A German soldier towered over her. He held a gun to Zofia’s head and told her to get the boy quickly. On the way to Pawiak, in the back of the van, she cradled the boy for as long as they would let her. But he was dead before they reached Szucha Avenue. Zofia—whom the Gestapo had on their list of those they wanted to interrogate for other reasons—was taken inside alone for questioning and torture.

  When Stanisław heard, he turned to Irena—their old friend and fellow collaborator. Not only would the Jewish children whom Zofia and Stanisław were hiding for her network need new homes, and quickly, but the Gestapo was searching for Stanisław too. He would have to go into hiding as well. But he couldn’t take his own children with him. Would Irena help him? She would, of course, without a moment’s hesitation. Irena swung into action and moved Estera to a “holiday camp” that was hiding Jewish children near the town of Garwolin, some forty miles southeast of Warsaw. She found homes for the other children in orphanages and in several cases with friends from their prewar social work network. She turned especially to old contacts from the Polish Free University, more former students of Dr. Radlińska. A number of the youngsters went to the countryside near the village of Anin. Some of Zofia’s children ultimately found homes at the camp in Garwolin and in the orphanage in Okęcie with Estera.

  Stanisław made heroic efforts to have Zofia released from the Gestapo interrogation center and later from Pawiak Prison. He reached out to every contact he knew in the Home Army. But with the children’s lives at stake and in hiding himself, it was perilous, and Halina’s work in the underground was Zofia’s death sentence. Zofia was executed at Pawiak in the spring of 1944, in the same fashion the Germans had intended for Irena. She was in her late thirties. To the end, she also kept silent.