The Good Doctor of Warsaw

by Elisabeth Gifford

  CHAPTER TWO

  WARSAW, MAY 1937

  Korczak is still mourning the loss of his wireless broadcast. Millions tuned in across Poland each week to hear his message of understanding and respect for children. But now it seems a Jew may not speak on Polish air. Contract terminated. What is he if he isn’t Polish? He thinks and he dreams in Polish, knows the streets of Warsaw as well as he knows his own palm. Truly, the poison of the Nazi insanity is spreading across Europe.

  At least he still has the lectures, the chance to influence a new generation of teachers who will one day care for Poland’s children. He’s wearing his tweed suit with a fob watch in the waistcoat, a bow-tie.

  Korczak slows his steps so that the small boy at his side can keep up as they climb the stairs. Around them the smooth surfaces of the hospital echo and re-echo with footfalls and with distant doors closing.

  ‘Good afternoon, Dr Korczak,’ a nurse calls out as she hurries by, glancing at the skinny urchin holding his hand. She evidently wants to ask what the doctor’s doing here today, years since he resigned to take care of a house full of orphans. A bachelor father, caring for a hundred children.

  Outside the radiography door, Korczak kneels down to talk to little Szymonek.

  ‘We’ll go inside, there will be lots of people there, and then I’m going to ask you to stand behind the special machine. Are you ready?’

  Szymonek nods. Large serious eyes. ‘Because it will help the grown-ups understand children.’

  ‘You have great courage, my little man.’

  Korczak stands up and opens the door. He’s still angry and shaken by the discovery yesterday that one of his own teachers in the orphanage on Krochmalna Street had dragged a boy down to the cellar and left him there in the dark.

  ‘What else could I do, Pan Doctor?’ the teacher had asked, expecting sympathy perhaps. ‘Jakubek wouldn’t listen to me. I was so exasperated I even raised my hand, but he just yelled back, “Hit me and Pan Doctor will have you thrown out.” I’m not proud of it, but I saw red then and pulled him down to the cellar. He went quiet after that.’

  ‘You left a child alone in the dark?’ Korczak had closed his eyes, speaking almost in a whisper. ‘But how do you know he wasn’t acting badly because he was suffering? You’re the adult. You had the chance to find out what was wrong, to teach him that he doesn’t need to lash out when he’s upset. But no, what do you do? It’s into the dark, into the cellar.’

  Korczak had had to rush away at that point, the tears close.

  A few days later, they learned why Jakubek had been so difficult. He had been out on a Saturday to visit his beloved grandmother only to find that she had passed away.

  The room is filled with chattering students. They are all puzzled as to why they’ve been asked to vacate their usual lecture room in the Institute of Pedagogy and walk over to this laboratory in the hospital. They fall silent as Dr Korczak enters, expectant. No one falls asleep in Korczak’s lectures.

  But his attention is only on the child, speaking in a low voice to him as he leads Szymonek to stand behind a square glass screen. The blinds are down, the boy’s skinny chest luminous in the gloom. His eyes follow the doctor as the lecture begins.

  ‘So you’ve been with the children all day. I understand. It’s not easy sometimes. Some days you’re worn out. You can’t take any more. You feel like yelling at them, feel perhaps the impulse to raise your hand.’

  Dr Korczak switches on the fluorescent lamp behind the child. The glass screen lights up with an ethereal glow showing a portrait in dark pencil, a small child’s ribs. Inside is the shadow of a heart, beating fast, jumping like a panicked bird.

  ‘Look carefully. This is how a child’s heart behaves if you shout at them, if you raise your hand. This is what a child’s heart does when they are afraid. Look carefully, and remember.’

  Korczak turns off the lamp, puts his jacket around the boy and picks him up. ‘That will be all.’

  Korczak leaves with the child and the stunned room breaks into a buzz of chatter.

  A boy taller than anyone else in the room, a long athletic frame, a slightly receding hairline above a broad forehead that gives the impression of good sense, is packing away his notebooks hurriedly. Misha is thinking about how he’s going to write a letter to his father that night, explaining why he isn’t going to get an engineering job now he’s finished his degree. Instead, he’s going to begin a teaching degree at night school and carry on working at Korczak’s orphanage as a barely paid student helper. His father will be furious. He knows from his own job as a teacher that there’s no money in education, no jobs. He’ll blame Korczak for this catastrophe, which will be correct.

  If you want to change the world, change education.

  As he crosses the room, a pen falls from Misha’s canvas bag. He kneels to retrieve it and looking up sees a girl still sitting on a chair, lost in her own thoughts, reflecting on the talk. He sees fair hair drawn back from an oval face, clear blue eyes, generous lips, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Just a girl.

  But he can’t move, he can’t look away; deep in his chest there’s the unmistakable hum of a tuning fork, the inevitable true note around which all the other notes will harmonize. This girl. He badly wants to speak to her, to sit by her and take her hand.

  But what’s he thinking of? He’ll be on duty at the home soon. And let’s face it: he’s going to be too poor to fall in love for a long time. He should be strong. He has that letter to write.

  He shoulders his bag and leaves.

  *

  But the girl won’t leave him. Over the next few days Misha finds himself back in that moment again, gazing up at a pale, open face, impelled to speak to her.

  So at the next lecture, he decides, he’s going to do it. He’s really going to find a way to talk to her.

  But a crowd of friends surrounds her. A boy in a chalk-striped suit, oiled hair, calls out, ‘Sophia.’

  Her name. Misha picks it up like a treasure.

  He watches the eager-faced boy, notes how he laughs self-consciously at something she says. Is she smiling back because she likes him too? Is she just being polite? Misha finds he dislikes him intensely.

  Next time. He’ll go up and speak to her next time. Sophia.

  But there is no next time. Korczak’s lectures are cancelled. No reason given, though everyone knows why. Only true Poles can be trusted with the education of Polish minds.

  Now Misha has no business going to the university any more. Misha’s studying for a teaching certificate at the night school. He was only there at the Institute lecture because Korczak invited him.

  It’s for the best, he tells himself. He’s being ridiculous, falling in love with a stranger. And no, he certainly isn’t going to let himself go back to the Institute and hang around the gates in case she comes out.

  He waits for his crush to fade, like a graze on a child’s knee that will heal itself in time. But she ambushes him as he’s crossing Saxon Park in the cool of the evening. She ambushes him when he’s standing by a window looking over the yard where one of the boys is playing a harmonica, ‘My Shtetl Beltz’. Her face comes back to him like a longing for home.

  He finds himself hoping he will bump into her somewhere. It feels as though it’s something that is meant to happen, will happen. But the months go by, summer comes and goes. The air begins to have an unpredictable tang of cold.

  Autumn is almost here, and he still hasn’t seen her again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WARSAW, SEPTEMBER 1937

  Sophia takes her identification card back from the university registrar. There’s a rectangular stamp inked above her photo.

  ‘What’s this?’

  The registrar shrugs. ‘If you’re Jewish you sit on the allocated benches this term. There’s a notice down in the hall.’

  Students are crowded around the board, reading the announcement. Rosa’s there, her nose screwed up in disgust. She turns as Sophia joins her.<
br />
  ‘Of course they’ll say it’s for our own protection, to stop incidents like that poor medic who had his face slashed last term.’

  Rosa sighs and takes Sophia’s arm as they head for their lecture. ‘I don’t recognize Poland any more. It was hard enough getting a place here, and now this. Sometimes I think your friend Tosia has the right idea. We should join one of the youth movements and quietly prepare to leave for Palestine.’

  Sophia looks at her in horror. ‘How can you say that? Never. We’re Poles. Poland is our home. The harder they make it, then the more determined we just have to be. It’s nonsense, this talk of segregation in lectures. There’s never been a ghetto mentality in Poland, and as far as I’m concerned there never will be.’

  A hot anger stays with Sophia but she still feels a flutter of apprehension as they enter the hall. Several of the tiered benches on the left are empty, nothing more than a piece of paper on them. The girls join the students standing at the back, talking in buzzes of indignation.

  As Professor Kotarbinski enters, everyone hushes. He walks down through the benches and takes his place on the podium. Almost six feet tall, a military moustache waxed to two points, Kotarbinski commands the room as he surveys the empty benches in silence. A bang of wood on wood resounds as he picks up his chair and places it decisively to one side.

  ‘Until the university can devise more satisfactory seating arrangements, I will be renouncing my right to sit.’

  With a rattling of benches several more non-Jewish students rise to join him. Sophia feels a tight lump in her throat. They’re not without friends.

  She can still feel the sting of heat in her cheeks as she makes her way down to the podium at the end of the lecture to thank Kotarbinski. Really, the whole thing is simply embarrassing.

  ‘It’s a bad business, but you mustn’t let them bully you out of here, Sophia. Promise me you’ll finish your degree.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to stop me, sir.’

  Across the main gates students in white caps with green ribbons in their lapels have rigged up a banner. Black ink is bleeding through the sheeting, the message clear even from the back: ‘Ban Jews from university’.

  The girls look at each other. No choice but to walk beneath the insulting slogan. Rosa adjusts the tiny Tyrolean hat perched on her newly waved black hair and they lock arms again.

  ‘Here goes,’ says Sophia.

  ‘Honestly, Father could buy most of this lot out any day,’ Rosa mutters as they walk under the banner.

  Sophia feels exhausted as they wait for the tram. Mostly it’s the basic hurt of being disliked, the unpopular girl shunned in class. Infantile and deeply wounding.

  ‘Let’s forget about all this,’ says Rosa as they board the red tram. ‘Come to my place this evening. A little party. We’ll put some records on. Dance. And how about a smile? When you’re as pretty as you are, Sophia, you’ve no reason to ever look down in the mouth.’

  The tram takes them to Grzybowski Square where they embrace and part. Sophia has lived in this area all her life and she can feel herself relaxing once again as she makes her way through the familiar bustle of the Friday market. On Twarda Street she turns into the courtyard of her apartment block. Women are taking down the washing from the wooden clothes dryers, gossiping together. A busker is playing ‘My Shtetl Beltz’ on an accordion, looking up at the windows in the hope that someone will throw down some coins. Children are playing hopscotch – just as they have always done, just as they always will.

  She opens the door to the apartment and breathes in the comforting smell of Father’s books, Mother’s flowers out on the balcony. But something’s going on. In the kitchen, Mother is already in her apron, stirring a pot on the stove. The wooden board that covers the enamel bath in the corner is piled with serving dishes and bowls of vegetables. Krystyna is shelling peas into a colander and looking mischievous.

  ‘So what is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘She wants to know what’s happened,’ Mother says. ‘What makes you think something’s happened?’

  ‘It’s Sabina,’ Krystyna blurts out. At fourteen, Krystyna isn’t much good at keeping secrets.

  ‘Really? Has Lutek said something?’

  ‘That’s for Sabina to tell us,’ says Mother. ‘Anyway, they’re both here for supper so you’ll know soon enough. And look at the time. It’ll be dusk before we know it. Krystyna, I want you to lay the table, the best cloth mind, and Sophia, I want you to go down and get a nice bottle of wine from Judel’s and some other things. I’ve written you a list.’

  Sophia takes the list and goes down to the market. Six peaches and a bunch of parsley. Women in long skirts and headscarves stand behind baskets of bagels and barrels of herring. A young woman in a smart rayon dress sits by a board heaped with rolls of cloth. Sophia could close her eyes and know exactly where she was just from the mix of fried onions and lemons, of baked bread and cabbages, of tarry pine boards baking in the sunshine.

  She walks on past the teenage boys in their short gabardine coats and girlish side locks streaming out of the Yeshiva school, past the people hurrying up the steps of the church with its two square towers for their evening communion. Then on to Sosnowicz’s delicatessen, run by the mother of a school friend, where diners sit at tables eating her famous sausage with cabbage. Seeing Sophia, Mrs Sosnowicz calls her to the front of the queue and pops an extra parcel of red sausage in her basket as a gift.

  ‘I hear there’s good news for Sabina,’ she whispers and slips back to her customers.

  At Horowicz wine shop Judel comes to meet her at the door holding out her arms.

  ‘A wedding in the family – may he whose name may not be mentioned be praised. And people always want something special for a special day, and at a special price.’ She shows Sophia the bottle she’s already picked out and takes the coins in exchange.

  ‘May I live to see so much happiness for my own daughters,’ she adds with a sigh.

  At the baker’s, Sophia buys a plait of sweet challah bread. Looking around now at the crowded shop, women in shawls bringing in pots of cholent stew to cook overnight in the baker’s oven, she wonders what her fellow students would see. As a child, growing up speaking Polish, and going to a Polish school, Jewishness always seemed to be little more than a family quirk, like red hair or having a peculiar aunt. But now, with work so hard to find, with the Far Right gaining power, she’s often hurt and angered by certain newspaper articles, by offhand comments from people she thinks of as friends. Do they really think almost half of Warsaw should pack their bags and leave for Madagascar or some place? Warsaw is and always will be her home.

  By the time Sophia gets back, the best dinner service is set out on the table, the candles ready to light for the Sabbath meal. Krystyna has changed into her best dress.

  ‘Mrs Sosnowicz in the delicatessen tells me Sabina is engaged.’ Sophia unloads the fruit carefully onto a plate. ‘Mother, how come she knows before I do?’

  ‘So she knows. People like to know. And did Judel give you a good price on the wine? Ah, yes. She’s found something nice for Sabina here.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. Sabina’s getting married.’

  ‘Well, twenty-three isn’t too young to be thinking of getting engaged, Sophia. Or twenty even.’ Her mother pauses expectantly.

  ‘No, Mother, there’s no one I’m hiding. Anyway, I’m sure Judel or someone would know about it before me. And Mother, I’m not getting married. I’ve no time for all that.’

  Her mother nods knowingly.

  The door opens and Sabina and Lutek come in followed by Father in his long coat with its astrakhan collar. ‘See who I found in the street outside, Mother,’ he calls out. ‘Looked like they could do with a good meal so I brought them with me. You wouldn’t happen to have cooked anything, would you?’

  She laughs, indicating the sideboard laden with cold meats, flaked cod and pickles. Sabina kisses everyone, a glossy fox fur over the shoulder of her hourgla
ss suit. She unpins the little beret from her immaculately lacquered hair.

  Krystyna takes the fox stole and strokes it with a little sigh. ‘Sabina, you’re so lucky getting to buy such lovely things, and at a discount.’

  ‘When you work as a model at a top couturier’s house, you have to look as if you’ve just stepped off the train from Paris,’ says Mother proudly. Sabina is the acknowledged beauty of the family, with her ethereal, pale skin, enormous dark eyes and silky black hair. Krystyna and Sophia are blonde like their mother’s side of the family and grew up like two sturdy little puppies, tumbling over each other noisily, while Sabina looked on with wide eyes, her dress clean, the large ribbon in her hair still in place.

  Mother takes the fur from Krystyna and stows it carefully in the hallway.

  ‘You can borrow it one day if you like,’ says Sabina, seeing Krystyna’s face fall.

  ‘Really? You’re such a darling. But isn’t it expensive?’

  Sabina shrugs. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Now all my girls are here, we can light the candles,’ says Mother, her voice mellow with happiness.

  They gather around her at the tableside as she strikes a match and carefully sets a little flame to each wick. She circles her hands above the candles, drawing in the scent of wax and flame, then covers her eyes to pray. When she removes her hands, she’s been crying a little. ‘My girls,’ she says. ‘Growing up.’

  As the dusk falls, lights begin to glow in the windows around the courtyard for the Friday supper. A skein of song from somewhere outside, a deep male face joined by the voices of children, Shalom aleichem, peace be with you. Sophia too begins to hum and the rest of the family join in around the table and sing a couple of the old verses.

  They’re not a strictly religious family, but for Mother the Friday meal is sacrosanct and her face is radiant and a little proud with all her girls around her. The peppery scent of so many books along one wall, the lemony musk of Mother’s flowers through the balcony windows, mix with the challah yeast and dusky wine.