by Emma Fraser
In April, the Central Government issued another decree. All Jews had to leave their homes and find new ones in a part of Warsaw especially designated for them; the Poles who lived there having had to find new homes of their own. Not all Poles were unhappy. Some of the Jewish homes they acquired were far superior to those they’d left.
Despite the danger, the underground press continued to publish papers and Irena and her colleagues read them avidly. Radio Swit started broadcasting, bringing news of what was happening inside and outside Poland. It made everyone feel they weren’t alone and that, in some small way, they were resisting the Germans too. There had been reports – reliable reports – that several thousand men of the Polish army had escaped and regrouped in France. There was jubilation at first, everyone, Irena amongst them, hoping that their missing loved ones had made it safely to France and were preparing to attack Hitler’s armies in Poland. Their optimism was short-lived. In May, France fell and the Allied forces suffered a terrible defeat at Dunkirk. It looked as if Hitler was unstoppable.
Now, as a second winter under occupation approached, Irena had heard that the Jews inside the ghetto were starving and freezing to death, their corpses stripped by the living and left on the street, no one it seemed having the energy or the resources to bury them. Although they had little to spare for themselves, and although they risked arrest by doing so, some Poles tried to smuggle food into the ghetto. But mostly people kept off the streets as much as they could.
It was the search for food that had brought Irena out in the freezing weather. If Tata were to continue to regain his strength, he needed fruit and vegetables – something more nutritious than the bread and thin soup that they ate most days. But all she’d managed to buy on the black market were a few shrivelled plums.
The rain fell in sheets, obscuring people and buildings, splashing up from the pavement, soaking the hem of her coat until it clung heavily to her shins.
Trying to keep the cold rain from sliding down her neck, Irena pulled up the collar of her coat and rearranged her headscarf until it covered the lower part of her face as well as her head. She curled her hands deep into her pockets in an attempt to generate some warmth, careful not to squash her precious booty. An old man almost bumped into her as he hurried past, his shoulders hunched against the wind, his fearful eyes sliding away from hers.
The rain eased then turned to snow, her feet, already frozen in her leaky shoes, leaving smudged footprints behind her.
A woman stepped out of a doorway and into her path. Her sunken eyes were large in her gaunt face. Tattered, dirty strips of cloth covered her feet and she clutched a bundle of rags to her chest with hands swollen and raw from the cold. She said something in Yiddish that Irena couldn’t understand and hesitatingly opened one palm to reveal a torn Star of David.
Irena’s heart leaped to her throat and she glanced behind her. The street was empty, but for how long? To be even seen with a Jewess outside the ghetto was dangerous.
‘I’m sorry but I can’t help you.’ She dug around in her pocket for the plums and tried to press them into the woman’s hand. ‘Take these. It’s all I have.’
But the woman shook her head impatiently, and speaking more urgently thrust the bundle at Irena. Irena looked down and sucked in a shocked breath. Nestled within the clumps of dirty rags was a baby and even in the dim light she noticed the sunken cheeks and stretched skin of starvation.
The mother pushed the infant towards Irena more forcefully, her intention clear. She wanted Irena to take her baby.
Appalled, Irena took a step backwards. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’ Over the frantic mother’s shoulder she saw that three soldiers had turned in to the street and had huddled together to light cigarettes. Fear closed her throat. If the soldiers discovered the Jewess out of the ghetto and without her armband there was no telling what they’d do.
The woman thrust her child at Irena again, talking urgently, pleading with her. If she took the child the soldiers could punish her too. Arrest her – shoot her even.
Irena pushed the child away. ‘No!’ It came out louder than she’d meant and had attracted attention. One of the soldiers had stopped talking to his companions and was watching them with interest.
‘Don’t turn around,’ Irena told the woman, praying that even if she didn’t speak Polish she could understand it. ‘There are soldiers at the end of the street. Just walk away.’
Soft wet flakes of snow swirled around them as the woman’s desperate eyes bored into hers.
Irena hesitated. She could pretend the child was hers. She could take the baby to the hospital – someone would look after it.
But it was too late. In the seconds it had taken for the thoughts to flash through her head, the soldiers had started walking towards them.
‘Go!’ Irena hissed. ‘In the name of God, go!’
‘Hey, you,’ a soldier called out. The mother turned a ghastly bleached white. She shoved the armband into her pocket, covered her child quickly in the folds of the rags and started to walk away.
‘Halt!’
The woman walked faster. The soldier raised his gun and fired a shot over her head. She stopped, but didn’t turn around.
While his two companions went to her, the other stood in front of Irena. ‘Papers!’
She pulled them out of her handbag and held them out with trembling fingers.
‘Do you know her?’ He tipped his head in the direction of the woman.
‘No. She is a stranger. I…’ Even from here Irena could sense the mother’s fear as the soldiers demanded to see her papers too. When she shook her head, one of the soldiers reached into the pocket of her threadbare coat and pulled out an armband. ‘Juden!’ he spat.
Irena watched helplessly as he opened the bundle the woman was carrying. Exposed to the chilly air, the baby gave a feeble cry. The mother clutched her child closer and although Irena couldn’t understand what she was saying she knew she was pleading for the life of her child.
‘You can go,’ the soldier said to Irena and left her to join his companions.
He snatched the bundle from the mother’s arms and laughed while his friend held his gun to her head.
Irena had only just turned out of Zlota Street when she heard the short but unmistakable spurt of machine-gunfire, followed by an anguished cry. A cry so filled with pain and rage and desolation it froze the blood in her veins.
Another staccato burst and the cry was silenced.
On leaden legs Irena continued on her way.
She only just made it home in time before she vomited. She hung over the toilet bowl long after her stomach was empty. She slid down onto the bathroom floor and wrapped her arms around herself. Why didn’t she take the baby when she had the chance? She could have saved its life – if not the mother’s. But she’d been so frightened, so terribly, terribly frightened.
Unable to move, she stayed there until she heard a key turning in the lock.
‘Irena?’ her father called. ‘Where are you?’
She used the lip of the wash basin to haul herself from the floor.
‘Irena! For God’s sake, answer me!’
She opened the bathroom door, wiping the vomit from her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘My child, what’s happened? Are you all right?’ Her father hurried towards her and led her into the sitting room. She crumpled into a chair and wrapped her arms across her stomach, squeezing her eyes shut to block out the pain and horror.
‘Tata, they shot her. The bastards shot her.’
‘Who? Who did they shoot? Krystiana?’
‘No. Not Krystiana. A mother. A young, defenceless mother. And her baby. They shot her baby, too.’
‘I’ll fetch you some vodka.’ He returned a few moments later with a tumbler filled to the rim. ‘Drink this,’ he instructed before tucking a blanket around her.
Her hands were shaking so badly she spilled most of the contents of the glass down her cardigan. She swallowed, gasping as the
liquid burned her throat, but as the warmth of the liquor spread through her, the trembling in her hands lessened.
When she was sure she could speak without breaking down she told her father what she’d witnessed. ‘I could have saved the baby at least – if I hadn’t hesitated. If I’d been braver.’
‘Hush, Renia. What happened is not your fault.’
She wished she could believe him. ‘It was my reaction that made the soldiers come over.’
‘Oh, Renia. They would have caught her eventually. A Jew on the street with a child. What hope did she have?’
‘I was her hope, Tata. Her one chance. And I failed her.’
He squeezed her hand. ‘No one could have saved her.’
But she couldn’t get the mother’s desperate eyes and final hopeless scream out of her head. She took another gulp of vodka. ‘I know God says we should love our enemies, but he couldn’t mean these monsters. They have no souls.’
Her father sighed. ‘You mustn’t hate, Renia. It will eat away at your soul. They might kill us but don’t let them take your soul. Then they will have won.’
‘I can’t help it.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘I will never forgive them.’ Or herself.
‘You mustn’t think that way. We are all God’s children. Only He can judge.’
‘Then you are a better person then I’ll ever be,’ she replied. ‘If there is a God, one day they will pay for what they’ve done. I will make certain of it.’
She wanted to run out into the street and confront the Nazis, to shout her grief and rage, to batter them with her fists until they were bloodied. But she wouldn’t last a minute if she did.
Her father gripped her hands more tightly. ‘Listen to me, Renia. One day the world will know what has been done to the Polish nation. One day the Nazis will be brought to justice and made to answer for their barbarity and it is up to us to bear witness for all those who can no longer speak for themselves.’
She didn’t want to live in a world where people could be treated as if they were bugs to be crushed underfoot, but her father was right. To give up now would mean those she loved had died for nothing. She owed it to them and their memories to live.
All she had to decide now was how.
Chapter 16
Rozwadow, Poland, 1940
Irena washed her face in cold water, applied a smear of lipstick – it was her last tube so she wanted to make it last – and let herself out of the main gate of the hospital where patients were already queuing for the outpatient clinic. Desperate faces glanced at her as she passed, some calling out a greeting, others just watching her mutely as if they had already given up.
The street was busy with farmers and their carts, although Irena knew the pickings of their produce would be thin. She stopped several and asked if they could sell her something, but they all shook their heads, indicating with a nod the German soldiers who leaned against the walls, smoking cigarettes while keeping an eye on the locals as they went about their business. Irena didn’t look at them, not wanting to catch their eye and bring attention to herself. She’d learned that the trick was to seem invisible.
Rozwadow was typically Polish with the centre built around the square and a mix of one- and two-storey houses and surrounded by farmland. Like almost every city and town in Poland, it had an area into which all the Jews had been corralled. No one was allowed to enter or to leave it – not even to get medical treatment – on the pain of being shot on the spot.
Not having family in the village, Irena had a room at the hospital, although with the number of empty houses, she could easily have found lodgings in one of those, but she was happier staying at the hospital. Anything was better than occupying the bedroom of a beloved missing son or the home of a Jewish family now relocated to the ghetto.
The hospital had over a hundred beds, yet there were only two qualified doctors, Stanislaw and Henryk, and half a dozen nurses to care for the sick. The patients were largely fed and bathed by relatives, mostly female, who brought in rolls of blankets and slept by their loved ones’ beds. Although a few of the patients in the hospital had wounds – many caused by the butt of a SS rifle - most were being treated for some kind of infectious disease or another, diabetes, heart conditions and, now that winter had truly set in and fuel was almost impossible to obtain, pneumonia. Occupation didn’t stop people from getting sick, it just made them harder to treat.
Two of the wards had been allocated to German soldiers, one for the enlisted men and one for the officers, although it was Polish nurses and doctors who cared for them. Most of the soldiers had either dysentery or venereal disease. The German wounded were admitted to their own casualty station or military hospitals. Despite the presence of the Germans, she knew they were lucky. She’d heard rumours about other hospitals being taken over by the Germans, the male doctors either sent to work camps or arrested as the professors in Krakow had been. Since her father’s return there, she worried constantly about him.
In a narrow lane behind the baker’s she managed to buy a small loaf of day-old bread and a lump of cheese. Pleased with her prize, she returned to the hospital and slipped into her room. She used a penknife to cut a slice of bread and cheese and finished her breakfast with a cup of cold water. Then she washed her face again, put on her pyjamas, pulled the thin blanket around her shoulders, crunched herself into a ball for warmth, and, praying that tonight the nightmares wouldn’t come, closed her eyes.
Irena finished wrapping the dressing on the man’s arm, pleased with her work. A little rest and some nursing care and he’d be as good as new. Sadly the same couldn’t be said for the boy in the bed next to him. He was losing his fight.
She wrote some instructions for the nurses and left the ward, heading for the laboratory. She was due to assist in theatre this afternoon when her work in the lab was finished.
Hearing the clatter of boots on cobbles she stopped by a window and looked out to the square. The Nazis were at it again – going from house to house and taking away men in their trucks. There was one of these raids at least once every week.
She wrapped her arms around herself and watched as the soldiers shouted out names and, giving them only a few minutes to dress and pack a small suitcase, roughly dragged men and the older boys out onto the street. There were some cries of protest, but most of the men did what was asked silently, staring straight ahead, not wishing to draw the soldiers’ attention to their children, wives or mothers.
But one woman clung to her father’s arm, shouting defiantly at the young German soldier who was using the barrel of his gun to gesture that the man should take his place in the square. It was Nurse Honisz – Wanda. Irena had worked with her on several occasions and hadn’t taken to her. Although clinically she was excellent, she had a hardness to her features and a way of dealing with the patients that could be rough at times. She was of German origin, one of the Volksdeutsche, and Irena wondered if she was beginning to see the Poles in her care as less worthy of her attention. However, as long as the nurse did her job, there was little anyone could do about her attitude.
‘He is sick! Don’t you understand? Sick and old. He can’t work. Just look at him, he can barely walk.’ Wanda’s voice carried across the square.
Her father seemed bewildered, as if he didn’t know where he was or what was happening. His daughter tried to pull him back inside but the soldier barked something at her, swinging the barrel of his rifle around from father to daughter while looking uncertain.
Perhaps if Wanda hadn’t carried on screaming abuse at the soldier, perhaps if she’d just gone quiet and hustled her father inside, the soldier would have let them go. But her shouts had attracted the attention of the SS officer in charge of rounding up the work detail.
He left the soldiers, who seemed to have found everyone that they had come for, and marched across to the commotion. Then, without saying a word, he drew his pistol and shot the old man through the head. Wanda cried out as her father fell to his knees and almost in
slow motion toppled to the side.
Irena’s stomach clenched. It was Warsaw all over again. ‘Don’t say anything,’ Irena whispered. ‘Bow your head, go back inside, save yourself!’
But the nurse seemed beyond caring. She dropped to her father’s side, cradling his bloodied head in her lap. She raised her eyes to the officer and slowly, but very deliberately, spat at him.
Irena wanted to close her eyes, wanted to turn away, terrified to watch what came next, but she couldn’t. She’d done that too often and she wouldn’t do it again. Even if the soldiers shot her too, one death couldn’t be worse than the thousand she died every day. She ran downstairs and hurried into the courtyard. A soldier had pulled the nurse to her feet and the major’s pistol was pointing at the terrified woman’s chest.
‘Wait!’ Irena called out in German, thankful it was one of the languages her father had insisted she learn when she was younger. She murmured a prayer under her breath as the major turned around and stared at her, his pistol now pointing in Irena’s direction.