She’s made a good cabbage soup and set the table. There’s bread, herrings, a humble meal for such a reunion, but what can you do when food, electricity, coal, supplies of everything are erratic and rationed?
In the distance she can hear the clacking of trains from the junction. And then, yes, the sound of a rough engine. When she sees it, unmistakably, a green-grey jeep with a canvas top approaching from the direction of the church, she can’t breathe. She flies down the stairs out onto the street, waving. She’s smiling like an idiot.
It must be him. Is it him?
The jeep stops and a tall man with a fine-boned brow and receding hair, thick black eyebrows and delicate eyes, a smile as broad as a summer sky, gets out and rises up to his full height. Different and just the same. She can’t take it all in at once. He wears a uniform. He looks older.
And his arms are around her, the smell of woollen cloth, of cigarettes and Misha’s own familiar scent.
‘It’s you. It’s you.’
‘You smell so good,’ he says with a little moan. ‘Like Sophia.’
His eyes wide, he stares at her face, checking some inventory as if he’s not convinced it’s really her. She kisses him shyly. How good to kiss his cheek, his lips, his eyes, slaking her thirst for him. A long, deep kiss as their lips meet. Passers-by turn their heads discreetly, smiling to see a happy reunion.
Franek the driver stands back on the pavement, grinning.
Misha doesn’t want to break away and lose her as they go inside; his arm encircles her waist. She feels the pull when he bends down and picks up his kitbag. Franek follows with his arms loaded with packets from the jeep. For Misha’s reunion with Sofia – all he has talked about since they left Berlin – the cook in the army’s kitchens has loaded Misha with enough meat, cheeses, butter and bread for a week.
Misha stops when he sees the room filled with flowers.
‘So many admirers. I’m not surprised,’ he says with a grin.
‘From the children, for my name day. From my class.’
‘So you’re teaching.’
‘Yes. I’m a teacher.’
They eat surrounded by the scent of flowers. It’s the kind of feast Sophia and Krystyna can only remember from before the war. And yet, behind the joyfulness, there’s a current of sorrow.
‘Have you heard nothing more from your family?’ Sophia asks Misha quietly.
‘No. It seems they may all have perished in Pinsk, murdered at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen. I still hope to hear from Niura. She said she was going to try and head back to Lvov, but I’ve had no news.’
‘There’s still hope.’
‘And Lutek? Your uncles and aunts?’
Sophia shakes her head. ‘We think they may have been taken to a camp. We’ve had no news. But Krystyna’s heard from Bronek.’
‘I had a letter from England. He’s coming back soon.’
Marianek is clutching the toy car that Misha has brought for him, even though he’s fallen fast asleep, his head on the table. Sophia carries him through to his bed and she and Misha stand and watch him for a while, hand in hand.
When they go back to the table, Krystyna has taken a packet of stubby candles from the parcels Franek and Misha brought. She sets them on plates and saucers around the table. Whispers a name each time she lights one. No one switches on the electric light. The sorrow always waits, like water behind a dam, seeping into the room, and pooling in the candlelight.
‘Sometimes,’ Sophia murmurs, ‘I dream they are all alive again. Or I’m standing in the street and I’m back in the ghetto so clearly. And then I don’t know why I’m still here.’
Misha pulls her closer. ‘I know.’
‘Do we deserve to live?’ she whispers. ‘Without them?’
‘Yes. Because we will live for them. The world cannot be left as it is. We make it better.’
Korczak’s words. They sit and watch the candles in silence.
Then Krystyna gets up, looks at Franek and nods to the door. She’s going to take him to a nice little café she knows and buy him a beer for making sure Misha made it home safely.
They hear them talking as they go down the stairs. Krystyna laughs at something Franek has told her.
Sophia lays her head on Misha’s shoulder. The candlelight keeps its vigil as they begin to talk. Giving the missing years to each other in small pieces. She holds him as he explains how he left the ghetto. She watches the shadows of pain that ghost across his face from time to time, even as he smiles. As he strokes her cheek, she knows he sees the same shadows in her own face.
She’s been so afraid that they would feel like strangers, but as she holds him now, runs her hands along his spine, his neck, her lips across his lips, it feels so familiar – like walking home at last, the air beneath the trees cool with the scent of the forests. Familiar and tender. He pulls her gently towards him and she folds into his shape. Her husband. Her love.
In the morning, before he leaves in the white light, Sophia takes Korczak’s book from the shelf, the same book Misha gave her on their wedding day, and writes in the front, ‘For darling Misha, for our future. Never forget.’ She places it inside his kitbag.
CHAPTER FORTY - SIX
In the long wooden cabins at Little Rose, the light is beginning to bring the room into focus as Korczak sits at his desk. The birds are stirring outside, whirring down onto the veranda to pick up the crumbs he has scattered for them. The curtains move with a breeze that brings a touch of damp coolness from fields still wet with dew. It should be a fine day. A good day to go swimming.
He hears a whisper behind him. Szymonek, a small boy again, is standing in his nightgown; their newest arrival, his head still shorn.
‘Pan Doctor, is it time to get up yet?’
‘It is if you are up. Do you want to be the first to hear some good news? Today we’re going to the river.’
‘Can I wake the others?’
‘Gently. If they are ready.’
‘I will sing.’
‘That might work. Some people appreciate singing first thing in the morning.’
Szymonek begins a song he learned while he was living abandoned and hungry on the streets, with a full gamut of Yiddish swear words.
‘Do you know another one, Szymonek, perhaps?’
He thinks.
‘What about the one we sang yesterday?’
Szymonek nods and goes into the dormitory singing ‘Oyfn Pripetshik’, the Yiddish alphabet song that the children taught Korczak on his first summer camp.
Korczak watches the unforgettable sight of children waking in the dormitory: who yawns ready to jump out of bed, who is slow to rise and is perhaps not so well.
The sun will soon put that right. After breakfast, Zalewski will get the hay cart ready. The children will pile in and drive along the sandy tracks through the fenceless fields to a river that seems to run level with the land, the water clear above the stones shimmering with light while the day rings with the voices of children. Later, they will come home again, sunburned a little, the girls with headscarves, the boys with caps. No doubt they will all want to pick flowers and bring them home for Pani Stefa.
Rolls and herring for breakfast, and strong coffee and a cigarette, what better? The day is beautiful in its shimmering simplicity of hazy blue horizons and wide damp fields of new corn. In the cabin nearby, Stefa is calling to the girls.
He rises from the desk and leaves the paper he is writing. The child is not a person tomorrow; he is a person today. A child has the right to love and respect. He has the right to grow and develop. A child has the right to be who he is and to be taken seriously. A child has the right to ask questions and resist injustice.
Szymonek runs back in and takes his hand. ‘Pan Doctor, may I sit next to you at breakfast?’ he whispers.
‘Of course, my son. Though I have terrible table manners. Perhaps you could give me some advice.’
After breakfast Korczak wanders along the tables collecting mugs
and plates. The children are already out in the garden calling to him, the cart ready to go. Someone has put a straw hat on the horse and decked it with flowers. Someone else has taken the pennant from over the door and its green silk is now flying from the back of the cart.
Zalewski clicks to the horse and the cart moves off. The mist is burning away from the corn where poppies and butterflies dance in the breeze. Singing and chattering, the children set off along the sandy tracks to spend a day splashing and paddling in the calm pools along the river.
POSTSCRIPT
At the end of the Second World War, though Polish airmen had played a vital role in the decisive battle of Britain and though thousands of Polish soldiers had fought alongside the Allies, liberated Europe looked away from a Poland under Soviet occupation.
Slowly, with long lines of men, women and children passing salvaged bricks from hand to hand, the determined Varsovians began to rebuild their beloved old city centre by referring to photographs, architect’s plans and memories.
This was the Warsaw that Misha and Sophia returned to, living in an apartment overlooking the vast levelled bombsites of Warsaw.
Sophia worked as a teacher in a building that had once served as offices for Nazi soldiers in charge of deportations from the Umschlagplatz site situated on the other side of the road. Misha was given a job in publishing and together they raised three boys.
Before the war a third of Warsaw had been Jewish. Now the vibrant Jewish community had disappeared. Misha and Sophia were among the one per cent to survive the Warsaw ghetto, out of an original population of four hundred thousand. The razed ghetto site was eventually built over with estates of Soviet housing blocks and a network of roads wide enough to take a Soviet tank.
Misha served as a father figure for the children who did not perish during the war, mostly made up of those children who had grown up and left the orphanage before the ghetto years, many emigrating to Israel, the US, Canada and France. Only a handful of boys from the ghetto home survived including the boys working outside the ghetto with Misha and Sammy Gogol and Erwin Baum.
Sammy and his remaining relatives were taken to Auschwitz. He was spared from the gas chambers because he was picked out to play his harmonica in the orchestra. He was forced to play to the crowds walking into the gas chambers each day. After he saw his family go by, he always played with his eyes shut. Still in striped pyjamas, Sammy travelled to Israel where he founded a children’s harmonica orchestra and returned to play with them at Auschwitz on the very place where he had once stood as a prisoner – but now a free man. Erwin was also sent to Auschwitz but on arrival he managed to switch lines to avoid the gas chambers and was put on sorting prisoners’ belongings. He was sent to Dachau and was later liberated by the US army in 1945. After the war Erwin went to the US and married with children and grandchildren.
To Misha and Sophia’s great joy they heard that Niura was alive and living in France. She and her husband returned to Warsaw, but after her husband was imprisoned briefly by the Soviets, suspected as a spy, they escaped back to Paris where they remained for the rest of their lives.
Krystyna and Bronek married but later separated. A pilot for Polish airlines, Bronek defected from Communist Poland, remaining in Paris after piloting a Polish plane there. Krystyna later remarried and became a Polish member of parliament.
In 1946, following a Polish massacre of Jews in Kielce, Yitzhak was sent by the Polish government to investigate the situation and he persuaded the government to open Poland’s southern border and allow Jewish emigration for a limited period.
Misha and Yitzhak were both sent to monitor the border crossing as some 20,000 Jews left through the Czech Republic. Misha and Sophia debated leaving Poland then, but as Sophia had a new baby they were unable to make the journey and the window of opportunity to leave Soviet Poland closed. Yitzhak and his wife Zivia managed to emigrate to Israel and founded the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum in memory of those who died in the uprising, with a room dedicated to Korczak and the children.
In the late sixties, demonstrations and riots occurred in Poland’s universities protesting against the Polish government, and Jewish lecturers and students were held accountable. Jews were pushed out of government jobs. Korczak’s books were considered too Jewish by the authorities and fell into disfavour. Sophia and Misha feared for their future.
When, in 1967, their youngest son, seventeen-year-old Roman, was allowed to go to Stockholm to attend a technical summer school, Misha insisted on doing all Roman’s packing. He fastened the case and ordered Roman not to open it until he got to Stockholm. When Roman arrived in Sweden and opened his case, he found not only summer shirts, but also thick sweaters, hats and gloves – enough for a Swedish winter. The message writ loud and clear was that Roman was not to come home but to remain in Sweden. He did not see his parents and brothers again until they were allowed to move to Sweden three years later.
Once settled in Stockholm, Sophia and Misha both worked in education, teaching Korczak’s message of the child’s right to love and respect.
The Nazis razed the Treblinka death camp to the ground in the war’s closing days in an attempt to hide the evidence of their genocide. 900,000 people were gassed there during the war in the space of 14 months. After the war, the site of the death camp became a peaceful clearing in the middle of the woods, with a large monument erected over the site of the gas chambers and a trail of smaller stones laid to represent the people of the 1,700 Jewish towns and village communities killed in Treblinka. Before they left Poland, Misha and Sophia attended a memorial ceremony at Treblinka, their hearts full of pain for all those family and friends they had lost there. Only one boulder was inscribed with an individual’s name. It read: Janusz Korczak and the children.
In Sweden in 1994, Roman raised funds and helped design a Holocaust monument commemorating the family and friends known to the community of Jews living in Sweden. Many of the people in this book have their names recorded on the granite wall. One of the granite walls carries just the same inscription to Korczak and the children as in Treblinka.
The real monument to Korczak, however, is his call to make the world a better place for children from all backgrounds. Korczak helped write the first International Declaration of the Rights of the Child in Geneva in 1924. Taken up by the League of Nations that same year, it was adopted in extended form by the United Nations in 1959 and remains in place to this day.
In Poland, Israel and all over the world, Korczak’s teachings and his principles of respect and empathy are still followed and taught in schools, universities and at education conferences. His plea to treat all children with fairness, and to consider the welfare of the child as the most important basis for nationhood, irrespective of race, remains as vital and important today as it did when he first wrote How to Love a Child over a century ago, as a medical officer writing by candlelight in the hospital tents behind the battlefields of the Somme.
In 2016 the Polish government founded the Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of Jewish History, with a children’s room dedicated to Korczak’s values of tolerance, justice, respect and empathy. There is also a museum dedicated to Korczak in part of Korczak’s original orphanage on Krochmalna Street (now renamed Jaktorowska Street) where children once again play beneath the tree in the front yard, watched over by Korczak’s statue.
Korczak’s diary was smuggled out of the ghetto a few days after Korczak and the children were taken. One of the boys, probably Mounius with the red hair, delivered it to Igor Newerly, a teacher from Korczak’s homes who ran the children’s newspaper for Korczak for many years. Maryna Falska had the diary hidden behind a wall in the Polish children’s home she once ran with Korczak, but she died during the war, and for several years no one knew where it was. The diary resurfaced in America during the sixties and was published, in English translation, by the Holocaust Library in 1978.
Poland remained under Soviet control until 1980. 59 years after the outbreak of the Second World War, Polan
d finally became a free and independent country.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As a young mum and teacher, I had a lot of questions about the best way to care for children, and a lot of anxiety. I came across Korczak’s words at a teaching seminar and they burst across the landscape like a ray of sunshine. He advocated not a prescribed best way to raise children but a relationship based on knowing who the child really was, respecting them as an individual and working out what they need from that understanding. In other words, how to love a child.
The tutor in charge of the seminar also told us about Korczak’s life. I was surprised that I’d never heard about such a remarkable man and decided to attempt to write a book to bring his ideas and story to more people.
I had two problems however. I knew very little about his life, and I didn’t know how to write a book. I attended writing classes, published three other books, and, ten years later, began to write about Korczak.
It was also a journey into some of the darkest history of the twentieth century. I read intensively, including the Warsaw Ghetto diaries and accounts of Janusz Korczak, Mary Berg, Adam Czerniakow, Michael Zylberberg, Halina Birnbaum, Wladyslaw Szpilman, Janina David, Yitzhak Zuckerman and various first hand accounts from the Oneg Shabbat archives published in the book Words to Outlive Us. I visited the British Library, the Weiner Library and the Polish Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford, searching for any books I could find on Korczak. I read biographies of Korczak by Betty Jean Lifton, Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, Igor Newerly, Shlomo Nadel and Adir Cohen. I also managed to source some of Korczak’s works including How to Love a Child, The Child’s Right to Respect, When I am Little Again and Little King Matt.
I contacted some of the various Korczak Associations worldwide for information, and found Misha Wroblewski listed as head of the Korczak Association in Sweden. His son, Roman Wroblewski-Wasserman, replied to say that Misha had recently passed away, but that he could help with any information. I travelled to Sweden to meet Roman, and over the following years he became a friend and trusted adviser on this story, providing a stream of information on Korczak and on the Warsaw ghetto years. This book would not have been possible without his hard work and his kindness in sharing his parents’ story. Roman’s parents, Misha and Sophia, worked with Korczak both before and during the war, living in the ghetto with him and the children. They were among the less than one percent who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, out of a population of over half a million. The book became their story also.
The Good Doctor of Warsaw Page 25