Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  • • •

  Bribing the Gestapo—or trying to—was becoming all too common in their network that spring. Julian and Halina Grobelny owned a small country house with a garden in Cegłów, a village not far from Mińsk Mazowiecki, and for more than a year the cottage had been used as a Jewish safe house where at-risk children could be hidden away until Irena could obtain new identity papers and make a permanent placement. It was there one day in March that the Gestapo captured Julian, whom they had pegged not as the leader of Żegota but as a minor leftist partisan. Now Julian Grobelny was taken to Pawiak and was the one in need of saving. Julian was already hopelessly ill from tuberculosis. Even if he escaped execution, the harsh and damp conditions in the prison were for him a certain death sentence. Irena turned to old friends and once again to Dr. Radlińska’s underground circles. Dr. Juliusz Majkowski, the director of the health offices at number 15, Spokojnej Street, and the man who in the beginning had given Irena, Irka, Jaga, and Jadwiga their ghetto passes, came to the rescue. Working with the medical underground at Pawiak, Dr. Majkowski smuggled extra food and supplies into the prison to try to preserve Julian’s precarious health. At last, the prison staff obtained for Julian a medical furlough and a transfer to the Warsaw hospital, where he would remain a prisoner in a care unit. But the patient never arrived at the hospital. Żegota—for another immense bribe—arranged for Julian’s escape from the ambulance as it roared across the city that morning.

  • • •

  Julian’s dramatic escape now gave Irena an idea, and she again turned to Dr. Majkowski. By March the situation with her mother’s health was critical. Janina’s strength was failing fast, and Irena could not leave her mother to die alone in her old apartment. Would Dr. Majkowski help her smuggle her mother out of Wola? Dr. Majkowski agreed, and a daring plan was made. Dr. Majkowski would come by ambulance to spirit Janina away to a local hospital on a false emergency. Janina’s Gestapo watchers would give chase, of course, but in the manufactured chaos there would be a brief window of a few precious minutes between the time of Janina’s arrival and the time it took for the Gestapo to locate her inside the hospital. As Janina was wheeled to a brightly lit room on one of the upper stories, nurses in the medical resistance stood waiting. Helping the frail woman to step out an open window, they assisted her gently down the fire escape. There, in the alley, another ambulance waited with its engine running to ferry her to a Żegota safe house at the apartment of Stefan Wichliński, the widower of Irena’s murdered coworker Stefania.

  As Irena said later of that desperate adventure, “I had to steal my dying mother from our home and take her to unknown persons until she ended life several weeks later.” When Janina died in the days that followed, on March 30, 1944, Irena was there with her. As they sat together quietly on those final days, Janina took her daughter’s hand and extracted from her child one deathbed promise. Don’t go to my funeral, Irena. They will be looking for you there. Promise.

  And Janina was right. At Janina’s funeral, the Gestapo was wild with fury. A scowling Gestapo agent accosted friends and family. “Which is the dead woman’s daughter?” he demanded. Mourners shrugged. “Her daughter is in Pawiak Prison,” they replied.

  “She certainly was [in Pawiak],” came the tight-lipped reply, “but she inexplicably isn’t any longer.”

  • • •

  By the spring of 1944, Irena was, instead, running her operations from the apartment safe house of her old friends and conspirators, Maria and Henryk Palester. From his hideout in Otwock, where Irena risked capture to see him, Adam fretted. Irena struggled that spring to set aside her grief and threw herself into work with a vengeance, but Adam could see that there was something brittle in her now. It was no wonder: Irena—still only in her early thirties—had lived on the edge of death every day for nearly five years. She had buried her mother and more than a dozen friends, and she had survived her own execution. She held in her hands the lives of thousands, and the psychic burden was unbearable. And, from his bedside retreat in Otwock, Żegota leader Julian Grobelny, too, was giving Irena greater and greater responsibility. She was the general to his field marshal. Irena would not stop. But Adam also knew that she could not go on like this forever.

  At the weekly Żegota leadership meetings, it was no longer the leadership delegating to Irena. Irena was, increasingly, setting the agenda. By July, word was coming through underground channels that the Soviet army was approaching from the east. Inside occupied Warsaw, the Gestapo nets were closing tighter and tighter around the resistance—a movement that now included a larger part of the Warsaw population than ever before. The city was on the brink of explosion. In the last days of the month, Irena learned of a group of Jewish refugees fighting for survival in the forests. “It was a desperate SOS, brought to me by someone who had managed to escape Treblinka,” Irena remembered. “I presented the problem to the entire presidium,” and the Żegota leadership instantly authorized Irena to run the dangerous mission of delivering funds for the camp survivors. As always, in Adam’s careful account books, which he pored over alone in isolation, he meticulously recorded the figures. “I knew that the friend from Treblinka (I can not recall the names) handed over the money,” Irena said, “because the next day, before the uprising started, he wanted me to let [Żegota] know.”

  Irena also still safeguarded her “indexes” of the children. She and Janka knew that a battle for Warsaw was coming. In those final days of peace, the women dug up the lists buried in Jaga’s garden, repackaged the entire archive in two glass soda bottles, and under the same apple tree reburied all the names that since 1939 their network had collected. By the time Warsaw exploded into street warfare on the first of August, the lists held the names of nearly 2,500 Jewish children.

  CHAPTER 16

  Warsaw Fighting

  Warsaw, July–December 1944

  The general uprising in Warsaw had been planned by the Home Army to begin at five p.m. on August 1, 1944, and it was based on a tragic miscalculation. The Germans were losing ground by the summer of 1944, and the Home Army gambled that, in the face of a sustained military revolt, the occupiers would retreat and Warsaw would be liberated. Soviet troops were amassing just outside the city, across the Vistula River in Praga, and they were poised as allies. The Poles assumed that the Soviets would support them, and the Soviets made noises of warm assurance. What the residents of Warsaw could not know was that the Germans, faced with the sweeping advance of the Red Army from the east, had decided to hold Warsaw as a strategic retreat at any cost. The residents did not know, either, that Himmler’s orders from Berlin instructed his troops to kill all the city’s inhabitants and to bulldoze the entire city. And they did not know—although they might have guessed—that the Soviets had their own divergent political motives, which did not include Polish independence.

  That summer in Warsaw, there were several resistance organizations ready to do battle in the city, including the remnants of Marek Edelman’s Jewish Fighting Organization and any number of small resistance cells. But the Home Army, supported by the Polish government-in-exile, was the largest and best equipped of the resistance movements, and by July it boasted a volunteer military corps nearly forty thousand strong in Warsaw alone, out of a population of about one million in the city. Among those militia recruits were as many as four thousand battle-ready young Polish women. The number would grow rapidly in the next few weeks as average civilians joined the battle. For five years the Germans had made it a capital crime for a Pole or a Jew to own a weapon. As a result, there were firearms in the corps for fewer than three thousand. But what the Poles lacked in weapons, they made up for in organization and raw courage. The army had ranks and a chain of command, and districts of the city were divided into orderly fighting units.

  With the battle for Warsaw looming and the city anticipating a siege and street fighting, Adam left the hideout in Otwock and joined Irena at last in the Palesters’ apartment on Łowicka Street, in the Mokotów distric
t, sometime in July, in a strange and bittersweet reunion. They naïvely thought they were safe there, Irena admitted later, and those days seemed like a kind of honeymoon to the young couple. But danger surrounded them, and only afterward did Irena understand that they had been extraordinarily lucky. The Germans, determined to ferret out and crush all resistance, now went from house to house in the neighborhood, searching apartments and demanding identity papers, and somehow they missed the door of the Palester family.

  The first day of the uprising, Adam and Irena shared in the euphoria that swept across the city. It looked to the residents like a victory of sorts in the beginning. That day and the next, several thousand Poles were killed, and they learned only later that Janka Grabowska’s husband, Józef, had been among them. There were Polish casualties. But the militia had also killed on the first day more than five hundred German soldiers, and that counted as success in an occupied city.

  The Home Army turned to the Soviets. With the aid of the Red Army, surely the Germans would flee Warsaw, whatever their orders. The Soviets, however, quickly made a cynical strategic decision. Although they were on the side of the Allies by 1944 and the Poles desperately needed support, the Soviets instead retreated to let the Poles and the Germans battle themselves into mutual exhaustion. Ultimately, the Soviets also refused to allow the other Allies—who were slow to act anyhow—to use the airfields outside the city to help the people of Warsaw, even for drops of food and equipment.

  It was a foolish error of judgment, and the senior leadership in the Home Army realized it quickly. In the words of one general, Władysław Anders, “You can never trust the Soviets—they are our sworn enemies. To hold an uprising whose only success depends on either the collapse of your enemy or help from another enemy is wishful thinking beyond reason.” But by then it was too late. Within days, Luftwaffe planes, marked on their underbellies with ominous black crosses, swept over the city in bombing squadrons, and the Poles had no air defense. The bombings would continue without interruption, and, to the despair of the city’s residents, on the ground the tide turned just as quickly.

  By August 5, the Germans had the upper hand, and troops rampaged through the city, perpetrating the mass murders of civilians. There were stark orders to kill every inhabitant of Warsaw, down to the smallest children. In the next two weeks no fewer than sixty-five thousand residents were executed on the streets. Soldiers entered hospital wards and, row by row, discharged single bullets into the heads of bedridden patients. Some of the worst atrocities took place in the Wola district, just beyond Irena’s now-empty apartment, where the street fighting was fierce. Buildings exploded in bomb blasts, and tanks rolled down the streets firing shells, crushing under their weight cars and fallen horses and bodies. People quickly gathered together what water and food they could find and retreated to the city’s basements to hide.

  The German governor of Warsaw, Hans Frank, recorded with satisfaction that “almost all Warsaw is a sea of flames. To set houses afire is the surest way to drive the insurgents out of their hiding places. When we crush the uprising, Warsaw will get what it deserves—complete annihilation.” As their homes burned around them and heavy beams crashed from all directions, residents who were driven from their basements were herded into the open squares at gunpoint and mowed down with machine-gun fire. “They drove us from the cellars and brought us near the Sowiński Park at Ulrychów,” said one heartbroken survivor. “They shot at us when we passed. My wife was killed on the spot: our child was wounded and cried for his mother. Soon a Ukrainian approached and killed my two-year-old child like a dog; then he approached me together with some Germans and stood on my chest to see whether I was alive or not—I shammed dead, lest I should be killed too.” Some of Irena’s hidden children and their courageous foster parents disappeared that summer, and there is little doubt that they were among those who perished—after so many had risked so much to save them—in these indiscriminate street massacres. For Irena and her friends, it was all a terrible reenactment of those last days in the ghetto, and the Poles understood at last what it meant to be, in the eyes of the occupiers, Untermenschen—subhumans.

  Soon the Germans came to the Mokotów district, where Adam and Irena were hiding with Maria and Henryk Palester, and began clearing the houses. Like the ghetto, Warsaw was being liquidated and burned, street by street, in preparation for a final cultural annihilation. Adam and Irena fled together, along with a woman from a neighboring apartment, Dr. Maria Skokowska, and a young Jewish woman named Jadzia Pesa Rozenholc, who had been hiding with the Palester family. But where should they go? Homeless, the friends anxiously debated their next step. One thing was absolutely certain: none of them were about to report, as ordered, to the German checkpoint for deportations. One did not get on trains when the Germans were directing.

  At last they hit upon a hiding place together in the ruins of a tattered construction site at numbers 51–53, Łowicka Street. Huddled in the darkness, they held a quick conference. Henryk Palester and Maria Skokowska were both physicians. Irena and Maria Palester had trained nurses and social workers. The next day they went to work setting up an emergency field hospital for wounded resistance fighters and civilians caught up in the turmoil. The hospital quickly became—like anything Irena put her hand to—a sprawling operation. The need was immense, and unsurprisingly it was well organized and efficient despite the almost complete lack of equipment or medicine.

  Adam, on the other hand, was a lawyer and a philosopher; he would be no use to them wrapping bandages, he told Irena. By that summer he had been cooped up in hiding for two years, and Irena understood. He was desperate to be out there fighting in this battle. So Adam threw in his lot with Maria and Henryk’s courageous teenage son, Kryštof, and two other youngsters, and first they battled the Germans from a nearby cemetery. Adam fought alongside the boys again in the battle for the Old Town, where they lost two of the three young men in the action. Kryštof Palester disappeared to rejoin his old “Parasol” battalion and died in a gunfight in the streets not much later. Adam’s heart broke for Kryštof’s disconsolate parents and little sister.

  On the streets of the Mokotów district, Irena was now stunned but overjoyed by a different kind of chance encounter. From behind a rubble barricade, a familiar voice called out, Over here! Over here! Startled, Irena turned, and saw before her a dusty young woman with her blond hair tucked in a cap, raising in warm welcome an arm on which Irena could plainly see the red badge of the Home Army. Rachela!

  It was Rachela Rosenthal, the Jewish friend whom Irena had thought had died in Treblinka in the summer of 1942. Irena rushed toward Rachela, and crouching behind the barricades together they embraced, laughing. Irena had counted Rachela among those lost to the Umschlagplatz, but here she was, alive and as beautiful as ever. But Rachela’s entire family, including her small daughter, had all perished; she was the last survivor. Rachela shyly looked at Irena and then turned to introduce her as well to a fair-haired Polish soldier. My husband. The man grinned, and embraced Irena like an old friend. At last Irena turned: I need to go. I’m at the field hospital. Rachela’s husband laughed and told her she had better get going. We’ll give you cover if you hurry! Irena couldn’t get over the transformation in her old friend. “She was a totally different person,” Irena remembered. “She was now a soldier, sharp, determined, fighting with a gun in her hand. Her extraordinary bravery was recognized by everyone in her group.”

  In Mokotów, if the days were hard, the nights were a time of terror. Drunken SS officers made forays into basement shelters and gang-raped Polish women and children hiding there. A German soldier ran his bayonet through Irena’s leg when she stumbled upon him, and soon Irena’s wound festered from a dangerous infection that made standing agony. Food was running out and so was water, and civil order was breaking down all around them. At night Irena lay in the shelter beside Adam, listening to the quiet breathing of Henryk and Maria and worrying endlessly about the fate of her hidden Jewish chil
dren. Many of those youngsters had been moved months earlier to orphanages or rural safe houses as the street-by-street Gestapo searches of attics and basements intensified. But some were still concealed by trusted families in Warsaw—families who, like all of them in the city, were in unremitting danger. Irena’s leg throbbed hotly. Between the pain of her wound and the perils of the streets, delivering support was impossible, and she struggled to make contact with the foster guardians and the children. They were still uniquely vulnerable. Even in the chaos of the uprising, anti-Semitic blackmailers roamed the streets, threatening to denounce anyone who might have a bit of change in their pocket and who “looked” Jewish. Irena worried about Adam and the girls who lived in hiding with them, and danger seemed to be coming at them from all directions. And it wasn’t only in Mokotów either. Across town, Irena’s old friends would later tell the same terrible stories. Stanisław Papuziński fought in the street battles as a soldier. Jaga Piotrowska rushed into burning buildings during the destruction of her street and pulled to safety unconscious survivors. The razing of Warsaw included the destruction of Jaga’s own house, where the lists of children’s names were now buried deeper under the rubble in the back garden.

  By September 9, the fate of the city was sealed. Luftwaffe planes circled slowly over Warsaw, and the residents looked up from their bomb shelters in basements to see paper leaflets falling. The leaflets fluttered onto rooftops, and people caught them in midair from their balconies. On the thin printed sheets was a final German warning. All residents were ordered to leave the city and report to German processing centers on the penalty of execution.