Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Together in Mokotów, the friends delayed. By now thirty refugees were hiding in the makeshift medical clinic with Irena and Adam and the Palester family, among them two young Jewish children. The Umschlagplatz loomed large in Irena’s unsettled dreams. She wanted nothing to do with German processing centers. But on September 11 the Germans arrived on their street with flamethrowers and incendiary devices, intent on burning to the ground every last structure, and there was no longer any option. The air was thick with smoke and dust, and when soldiers discovered them crowded in the basement refuge, the Germans were angry and impatient. Had the resistance fought this long and this hard to be sent now to the concentration camps? They were forced to join a bedraggled convoy of other civilians being marched at gunpoint to the deportation center.

  They were all in bad shape by this point, but Adam and Henryk were increasingly worried about Irena, who was limping and struggled to keep up. The bayonet wound to her leg had still not healed. It oozed pus, and Henryk worried about sepsis. But Irena wasn’t focused on her leg. She was focused on what to do about the young Jewish child traveling with them, a girl named Anna, and how to get them all out of this death procession.

  In the end, the friends agreed that the best solution was the most expedient. They turned out their pockets quietly and offered a bribe to a German guard if he would send their entourage in another direction. The German considered. There were empty army barracks in Okęcie, out by the abandoned airfields, where Soviet POWs and Jews used to be incarcerated, he finally offered, placing the roll of bills carefully in an inside pocket. It will be better if you head in that direction, out of the city. With a jerk of his head and a shrug of his shoulders, he ambled on in another direction.

  Maria, Małgorzata, and Henryk Palester, along with Dr. Maria Rudolfowa, Irena, Adam, and the girl Anna, made the dangerous trek south out of the city as Warsaw burned around them. “She treated me like a daughter,” Anna said of Irena later. Lice and bedbugs chewed them in their sleep, and they combed the ruins for something to eat and for water. Then, undeterred, they threw themselves into starting up their hospital again.

  • • •

  Mokotów was among the last districts in Warsaw to fall, and Adam and Irena left behind them fighting that continued for several weeks. By October 4, 1944, it was all over in Warsaw. The uprising had been defeated. The final death toll was catastrophic: 200,000 residents, most of them civilians, were killed. As the German occupation continued into the winter, another 150,000 were ultimately transported as slave labor to camps in Germany, and the concentration camps claimed another 55,000. Some historians say that the total number of Jews to survive the war in Warsaw was fewer than 11,000. Adam and Anna were among them. Henryk Palester, struck down by a German truck in December, did not make it. And by winter, just as Hitler had wanted, Warsaw lay in ruins.

  The Soviet and Polish armies at last entered the wasted city on January 17, 1945. By then eighty percent of Warsaw was stone and rubble. All that winter, Irena and Adam—living under false papers still as Klara Dabrowską and Stefan Zgrembski—stayed on at the hospital station in Okęcie, and from her southern outpost Irena carried on working for Żegota up until the final moment. That winter, at last, Irena’s leg wound healed, one of the injuries treated at the hospital station, although she was still limping from the damage to her legs inflicted by her Gestapo torturers.

  Despite the Soviet “liberation” of Warsaw, the war, of course, would go on for months across Europe. But in Warsaw all that was left was to count the losses and fear what would come next. Hundreds of thousands were in labor camps and prisoner-of-war compounds far from home. A staggering fifteen percent of Poland’s prewar population—six million people—had perished. So had ninety percent of the country’s Jewish population. In late 1944, Dr. Adolf Berman’s wife, Basia, wrote in her diary about what it meant to understand at last the scale of that destruction: “Even after the final liquidation [of the ghetto], we clung to fairy tales about underground bunkers and sophisticated shelters in which thousands of people are supposedly living. Then we deluded ourselves that they were in the camps and when the nightmare ends will return with a fanfare of victory to the ruins.” There were perilously few survivors. Many of the victims had been the children. At the start of the war, there were an estimated 3.4 million Jews in Poland, one million of whom were children. According to Yad Vashem, only five thousand children out of that million survived the war in Poland and the final massacres of the uprising. The number may be low, historians quibble. Double it. Triple it, then. The numbers are still shatteringly small.

  And there was, in fact, one very “sophisticated shelter” in which thousands of Jewish boys and girls were still living: a shelter, staffed by dozens of volunteers who were often nothing more than immensely decent and brave people, that spread across the city and safeguarded Irena’s children. Of those youngsters who survived in Warsaw, Irena and her network saved the greatest proportion.

  • • •

  In the first weeks after the Soviet liberation, Irena once again encountered Rachela by chance on a street in Warsaw. It was a moment that afterward defined something essential for Irena about what it meant to try to piece together a life in the decades that followed as witnesses and survivors. When they met in the midst of the wasteland that had become Warsaw, the two women embraced for a long moment on the street. We survived that hell, they said to each other, laughing. Then Irena saw that Rachela was crying. “I’d never seen Rachela cry before,” Irena remembered. She reached for her friend, and Rachela looked at her sadly. My name now, she explained to Irena, is Karolina. Only Karolina. Rachela died in the ghetto, Irena. Stanisław knows nothing of her existence. Irena nodded gravely. She understood. Part of her had died in the ghetto too. So had part of all the surviving fighters.

  Now, Rachela told her, she and Stanisław had a baby—a little girl—and all there was to do was try to make a future. Dwelling on the past could only mean reliving the intense sorrow. Rachela was a vibrant young woman, and the hardships and deprivations had not destroyed her spirit. She was by nature cheerful and resilient. But, like so many in Warsaw, Rachela buried that other life completely. “She never talked about those things again,” Irena said later. But, as the women parted on the street, hands touching lightly, her friend turned to her. Sometimes, Irena, will you remember Rachela? Irena promised she would.

  CHAPTER 17

  How the Stories Ended

  Warsaw, 1945–1947

  Adam and Irena stayed on in Okęcie with Maria Palester and Dr. Rudolfowa until the spring of 1945. It would be months before the war in Europe finally ended, but by March the mission at the barracks was changing. What was needed now was not a field hospital but a home for the thousands of war orphans. Maria and Dr. Rudolfowa opened the doors of the facility to homeless youngsters and stayed on as the new directors.

  In March, Adam and Irena went home to Warsaw together. For them the end of the war was—after so many false starts and interruptions—the real beginning of their life together and their long-awaited love story. That love story had been untidy and chaotic. The human heart is not symmetrical or neat, either, but turns back on itself in folds and knots. And the ties that connected Adam and Irena and the passion that still burned between them were as strong as ever. There were challenges ahead. War had left its scars and traumas, some of which marked the mind and some of which marked her body. And there was the question of what she was going to tell Mietek if he made it home to Warsaw. But Irena loved Adam, and this was what she wanted. So, in making a home together at last, their life began anew. Adam—who would never again go by that name but would instead call himself Stefan, the name in the false identity papers that Irena had found to save him—returned to work in earnest on his doctoral thesis and immersed himself in his books and the study of ancient history. Irena, in contrast, directed her energies outward. She returned to her job at the city welfare office and devoted herself to rebuilding it from the ruins. She was qu
ickly appointed director of the citywide welfare services. One of her first acts as director was to establish a formal bond of cooperation with the orphanage in Okęcie and with Maria Palester.

  After a long, dark season, there was good news at last. The losses were behind them, and Adam and Irena could now rejoice together in stories of survival. Helena Szeszko was alive when the Ravensbrück camp was finally liberated, and she made it home to Warsaw. Dr. Hirzsfeld and Dr. Radlińska were survivors. Izabela Kuczkowska, Irka Schultz, Władysława Marynowska, Janka Grabowska, Stanisław Papuziński—they all lived to see the liberation of Poland. Stanisław reclaimed his motherless children from the foster homes and orphanages and reconstituted his family. Marek Edelman—the young man who worked beside Ala and Nachum at the Umschlagplatz medical clinic and who led a heroic uprising in the ghetto—was lauded as a hero. He went on to become a doctor. One likes to imagine that, in doing so, he was remembering Ala and Nachum.

  Irena and Adam now added to their new family two Jewish foster daughters, including Irena’s favorite, Estera. It made for a full house, and they had a small apartment, but Irena now wanted desperately to be a mother. Estera stayed on with them for several years, and she remembers of her adolescence that Irena and Adam were affectionate and protective. Adam spent hours with Estera, coaching her on her homework and acting as a tutor. He had always loved teaching.

  • • •

  What of Irena’s other “children”? Theodora, the wife of Irena’s old friend Józef Zysman, retrieved little Piotr from the orphanage where he had been safely hidden. Irena never forgot Józef’s words when he gave her Piotr to save: “Let him grow up to be a good man and a good Pole.” Theodora kept that promise for Irena. Piotr’s cousin, Michał Głowiński, was another small survivor, and his mother also found him at the orphanage where Irena had protected him.

  Stanisława Bussold and her husband had grown to love fiercely baby Bieta—now a toddler—and adopted her. “My birth certificate is a small silver spoon engraved with my name and birth date, a salvaged accessory of a salvaged child,” she says. But she today honors, too, the beautiful childhood her foster parents gave her. Bieta has searched for but never found that numbered bank account in Switzerland where the Koppel family fortune may still be waiting.

  Katarzyna Meloch, the ten-year-old girl whom Julian Grobelny and the old priest passed into the care of Irena, lost her mother and her father long before the war was over. But after the war an aunt found her. “If the aunt had not seen the address on a package sent to me to the care center,” Katarzyna says, “she would not have found me so easily.” Many decades later, Katarzyna remains haunted by memories of the ghetto. After the war, Katarzyna made her career as a journalist. “[But] I am still unable to write about my stay in the Warsaw ghetto,” she says. “I saw bodies covered with sheets of paper. They were a permanent part of the landscape.” And she always remembers the heroism and the tragic loss of her wartime “guardian,” Jadwiga Deneka.

  After the war, Ala’s small child, Rami Gołąb-Grynberg, was reunited with her uncle, Sam Gołąb (Golomb), and his wife, Ana, and went on to become both a nurse and a mother too. Today she is a grandmother. She remains friends with Elżbieta, the daughter of her wartime protectors, Jadwiga and Janusz Strzałecka, who helped Irena in her children’s network.

  • • •

  These were a handful among thousands. And while many, like Rachela, coped by burying the past, there was one thing that Irena knew had to be excavated. In the spring of 1945, not long after Adam and Irena returned to Warsaw together, Irena and Janka met on a warm sunny afternoon in the ruins of Jaga’s old back garden to look for the buried records on which the names and addresses and true identities of as many as 2,500 Jewish children had been recorded. They had a large, unwieldy shovel. It was just midday, and the women wore sturdy boots as they picked among the bricks and rubble. The house had been destroyed in the uprising and since then looted, and the garden was a tangle of twisted metal and brush. In 1945, Warsaw was bleak and treeless. They searched that day for hours, but it was hopeless. The lists, along with Irena’s wartime journals and account books, like so much else in the city, were lost forever, destroyed in the inferno and destruction of the Warsaw uprising.

  However, Irena and her team were undaunted. The women set about to re-create large portions of the list from shared memory. The lists were never complete. Irena freely admitted that there were almost certainly children whose names they could not remember. The lists they could reconstruct were carefully punched out on Jaga’s old typewriter, salvaged from the ruins. When the names were neatly catalogued, Irena gave the list to Dr. Adolf Berman, her colleague in Żegota and now the postwar head of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. In 1945, Adolf Berman took the list to what was then Palestine, and they rest today in an Israeli archive to respect the privacy of those thousands of families.

  “Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes,” Irena insisted to those who wanted to celebrate her actions. “Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true—I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.” And Irena worked for decades afterward helping reunite “her” children with their families.

  Jaga Piotrowska and Jan Dobraczyński made their own lists of the Jewish children who had passed through the Catholic orphanages during the war and been given new identities, but here their stories diverged from Irena’s. “The awareness that I behaved in a decent manner and with dignity” was something Jaga afterward said she treasured. More than fifty Jewish people passed through her home during the years of the occupation, and she acted with immense and true courage. But there was also, Jaga said, “a deep wound in my heart. . . . When Poland was liberated in 1945, a Jewish community was established,” Jaga explains, “and Janek Dobraczyński and I went over to it to give them the lists of the saved children.” Jewish community leaders still remembered those old conversations with Jan Dobraczyński. Dr. Adolf Berman quoted back to Jan what he had said when the Jewish parents were powerless, how the children themselves would have to decide their faith when they were old enough. You baptized them and made them Christians, came the retort. “During the conversation,” Jaga said, “we were told . . . that we had committed a crime by stealing hundreds of children from the Jewish community, baptizing them, and tearing them away from their Jewish culture. . . . We left completely broken.” Forty years later Jaga was still grappling with this on her conscience.

  • • •

  The end of the war also raised for Adam and Irena some other pressing questions. What to do about her marriage with Mietek? What to do, for that matter, about Adam’s wife?

  By the end of 1946 the question took on a special kind of urgency. When Mietek returned to Poland from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, Irena was five months pregnant with Adam’s daughter. What else could Mietek do? A divorce went ahead quickly. Adam had some complicated matters to attend to himself before they could focus on new beginnings. All that is known for certain of his private matters today is that he and Irena remained good friends with his wife after their divorce and that, for reasons one can only guess may have been connected to his unorthodox love life, his Jewish mother, Leokadia, was furious.

  In 1947, after having loved each other sometimes passionately and sometimes hopelessly for more than a decade, Adam and Irena were at last married in a small Polish ceremony. On March 31, 1947, Irena gave birth to their first child, a little girl named Janina after her mother. In 1949 there was a second child, a son, Andrzej, who died as an infant, and a few years later another little boy, Adam.

  Irena remained unwavering in her commitment to her work. She threw her passion as zealously as ever into the social welfare department. She worked hand in glove in the years that followed with Maria Palester at the orphanage in Okęcie, and until the end of her very long life, she always kept her door open to any of her 2,500 children. She had been, said one witness, “the brightes
t star in the black sky of the occupation,” and that star was undiminished.

  CODA

  The Disappearing Story of Irena Sendler, 1946–2008

  In a fairy tale or motion picture, this would be the end of Irena Sendler’s astonishing biography. We would read that the traumas of the war only touched her lightly. We would read of how her quiet heroism was celebrated across Poland, and I would tell you that it is only because this happened in a distant country that you have not heard this story.

  But life after the war in communist Warsaw was not easy, especially for those who had fought for Polish freedom in the resistance; throughout the 1940s and 1950s the Soviet state persecuted those who had participated in the Warsaw uprising and those who, like those of Żegota, had turned to the Western Allies for their resources. Many of those people Irena had worked with most closely were now targeted, and Irena herself was under perilous and constant suspicion. It was not the end of anti-Semitism, and there were reasons why many of the Jewish survivors kept their silence. Names were changed. History was rewritten.

  And so the story was buried except among the innermost circle of collaborators. It was too dangerous to speak of what they had done together. Irena was devastated when—after decades as a left-wing activist and lifelong socialist—the ruling communist party punished her by targeting her children, who were denied educational opportunities in postwar Poland. Only among her old friends would Irena speak freely of the past. Sometimes she would look for Rachela—the only one of her Jewish school friends, besides Adam and Regina, to survive the ghetto revolt. “There are times when she avoids me,” Irena wrote of that long postwar friendship. “Sometimes we go two or three years without seeing each other. During those periods she manages to forget the past, at least a little, and enjoy the reality of the present. But sometimes, she’s overcome with a longing for her lost loved ones, her parents, her brothers and sisters, and the surroundings in which she grew up. That’s when she visits me.” On those days, Irena was flooded by her own memories of Ewa and Józef and Ala and Dr. Korczak and all the lost children. And in her sleep, even decades after the war, Irena was haunted by nightmares about those who perished and nightmares about the children. “In my dreams,” Irena said, “I still hear the cries when they were leaving their parents.”