Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

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  FOR ROBERT MILES

  Ripeness is all

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 Becoming Irena Sendler

  CHAPTER 2 Dr. Radlińska’s Girls

  CHAPTER 3 Those Walls of Shame

  CHAPTER 4 The Youth Circle

  CHAPTER 5 Calling Dr. Korczak

  CHAPTER 6 Ghetto Juggernaut

  CHAPTER 7 Road to Treblinka

  CHAPTER 8 The Good Fairy of the Umschlagplatz

  CHAPTER 9 The Last Mile

  CHAPTER 10 Agents of the Resistance

  CHAPTER 11 Żegota

  CHAPTER 12 Toward the Precipice

  CHAPTER 13 Ala Rising

  CHAPTER 14 Aleja Szucha

  CHAPTER 15 Irena’s Execution

  CHAPTER 16 Warsaw Fighting

  CHAPTER 17 How the Stories Ended

  CODA: The Disappearing Story of Irena Sendler, 1946–2008

  Afterword: Author’s Note on the Story of Irena’s Children

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters

  Reading Group Guide

  About Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface

  Kraków, 2009

  When I first visited Poland, sometime around 2009, I thought it would be a vacation. My brother and sister-in-law, working with the U.S. State Department, had lived in Kraków for several years already, and had lived for a time in Wrocław before that, and had witnessed the country’s integration into the European Union and its rapid second postcommunist transformation. Their two small children—twins and then not yet toddlers—were learning their first words in Polish, and my sister-in-law was the director of an international school located outside the city.

  All three of us had grown up nominally Catholic, although none of us have ever had, I think, any particular interest in religion. Because Kraków, unlike Warsaw, escaped being bombed or razed into oblivion at the end of the Second World War, its Catholic heritage is everywhere in the Old Town architecture. It is a beautiful and in some ways still medieval city. But few areas of the city are as atmospheric as the historic Jewish quarter in Kazimierz, where tourists make pilgrimages to see Oskar Schindler’s factory and to see the winding streets where parts of Schindler’s List were filmed for Spielberg’s motion picture. On the other hand, if you want to imagine what the Warsaw ghetto looked like in the 1940s, there is no point in going to Warsaw. Only a small percentage of it remains there. The ghetto was razed in the spring of 1943. After the Warsaw uprising a little more than a year later, the rest of the city was leveled, and only ten percent of the buildings were left standing. Warsaw is essentially modern.

  The year that I visited, the school was in the final stages of a major capital project, and the campus was being developed and surrounded by fencing. My sister-in-law spent her days, she joked, largely scolding local construction crews, and she had amassed a colorful arsenal of Polish profanity. The site had been rolling farmland for years, and at one edge of the property a wood had been left to grow up in the midst of the fields and, later, scattered suburban houses. Standing together at the edge of the copse, I ventured to ask idly who owned the forest and why it had clearly been left wild for decades. After a moment’s pause, she let out a sigh and said to me, “The trains to Auschwitz, you know, used to run not far from here. Not right here, but in the area.”

  There was nothing in the woods, just parkland, and in the beginning she used to walk there, she said. But the first of November in Poland is All Saints’ Eve, and everywhere in the country it is the tradition on that night to light candles on the graves of the dead. It was only on the first holiday at the school, when the roadside that skirted the edge of the woods was burning everywhere with candles, that she understood that something terrible had happened there.

  Later, locals told her that it was 1945, at the end of the war, when the Red Army was driving back the retreating Germans. The arrival of the Red Army brought no joy in Poland. Few women—from schoolgirl to most ancient babcia—escaped being raped by Soviet soldiers that winter in Kraków. And few Germans who encountered Soviet troops ever made their way back across the border. Across Poland, there were hundreds of nameless massacres like this one. Under communist rule, no one would have dared light a candle in the forest, but things had changed now. There were still old men and especially old women who remembered. “It’s everywhere here,” my sister-in-law said sadly. “Poland is an unmarked graveyard, and what can you do except leave the past quietly buried?”

  We went back to the school, and the bright voices of happy elementary school children came drifting into the corridor from all directions. I thought about the German deaths that happened here and the tracks that lead to Auschwitz and the stories of infants torn from their mothers and smashed against brick walls to murder them. I thought about my small niece and nephew and how I would kill anyone who did that to my children. My brother asked me a few days later if I wanted to see Auschwitz, and I said that I didn’t.

  A few years later, my sister-in-law was one of the first people to tell me the story of “the female Schindler,” Irena Sendler—or, in Polish, where women’s last names take on a feminine case ending, Irena Sendlerowa. Unconnected in space and time, those two conversations are, nevertheless, how this book started. I have never been able to separate the threads that connect Irena Sendler’s story with that experience of the abandoned Polish earth and the voices of schoolchildren. As a writer, I stopped trying.

  In her native Poland, Irena Sendler is a heroine today, although that is also a relatively recent postcommunist development. Her story, like so many stories across Poland, was quietly buried for decades. With her friends and a team of dedicated coworkers, Irena Sendler smuggled infants out of the Warsaw ghetto, past German guards and Jewish police traitors, in suitcases and wooden boxes. She brought out toddlers and schoolchildren through the city’s foul and dangerous sewers. She worked with the Jewish teenagers—many of them girls of fourteen or fifteen—who fought bravely and died in the ghetto uprising. And, throughout it all, she was in love with a Jewish man, whom she and her friends spent the war anxiously hiding. She was a feather of a person with an iron spirit: a four-foot-eleven-inch wisp of a young woman, in her late twenties when the war began, who fought with the ferocity and intelligence of an experienced general and organized, across the city of Warsaw and across the divides of religion, dozens of average people into foot soldiers.

  Before she was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, Irena Sendler saved the lives of more than two thousand Jewish children. At immense risk she kept a list of their names so that after the war their parents could find them. She could not know, of course, that more than ninety percent of their families would perish, most of them in the gas chambers at Treblinka. She also could not have guessed as a left-wing radical and lifelong socialist that after the war her children would be targeted under Soviet communism because of her wartime actions.

  But while Irena Sendler was undeniably a heroine—a woman of immense, almost unfathomable moral and physical courage—she was not a saint either. To make her a saint in the telling of her story is, in the end, to do a kind of dishonor to the true complexity and difficulty of her very human choices. Time after time, during my researches and interviews in Israel and especially Poland, those who survived that
period in Warsaw said to me the same thing: “I don’t like to talk about those years with anyone who didn’t live them, because unless you were there you cannot understand why people made their decisions or the kinds of prices they paid for them.” Irena’s love life was anarchic and unruly, and she struggled with the self-knowledge that she was not a good wife or a good daughter. She placed her frail and ailing mother in grave danger and kept the knowledge of those risks from her. She was reckless and sometimes myopic, she ranked the abstract before the particular, and, at moments, she was perhaps even selfish in her selflessness. When the time came, she ultimately was a largely absent and distracted mother. She was at once a heroine—although she disdained that word, too—and a flawed and average person. But she was also someone gifted with a sense of purpose and righteousness so powerful that she was able, by her example, to persuade others around her to be better than they otherwise might have been, and to do something together amazingly decent and courageous.

  Throughout writing this book, I have been humbled by the courage of those “others” as well: the dozens of men and mostly women who quietly joined her. Irena said that for each child whose rescue she organized, on average ten people in Warsaw risked their own lives in the process. Without the courage and sacrifice of those who joined her, success would never have been possible. For those who aided Irena, the choices were monstrous. Punishment for helping a Jew began with having your family executed in front of you, starting with your children. It is trite and facile to describe to anyone who loves a child what it means to ache in the presence of life’s fragility, and the vast majority of those who aided Irena had young children. Yet not once did any of these people—dozens of them—flinch from helping Irena in her mission. No one, Irena once said, ever refused to take in one of the Jewish children.

  This is the story of Irena Sendler, the children she saved, and those dozens of courageous “others.” It is also the complicated and sometimes dark but courageous story, too, of the Polish people. If there are too many names in the beginning of this book, consider that I tell the stories of some small fraction of those whom we know assisted Irena. And consider that, as the book goes on, the names become sadly fewer. I tell their stories here to do all of them some small honor. Their lives and, sometimes, their deaths speak to what we are capable of as average people in the face of evil and horror.

  Prologue

  Warsaw, October 21, 1943

  Aleja Szucha. Irena Sendler knew her destination. The door slammed shut up front, and the black prison car lurched into motion. She had been given only minutes to dress, and her fair, bobbed hair was bed tousled.

  Janka Grabowska had run down the front path with her shoes and thrust them at her at the last moment, braving the violent caprices of the soldiers. Irena hadn’t thought to lace them. She was focusing on just one thing: staying calm and keeping her face blank, placid. No sad faces. That was the wisdom Jewish mothers gave to their children when they left them for the last time in the care of strangers. Irena wasn’t Jewish, but it was still true that sad faces were dangerous.

  They must not think I have any reason to be frightened. They must not think I am frightened. Irena repeated that thought silently. It would only make what was coming harder if they suspected what she was hiding.

  But Irena was frightened. Very frightened. In the autumn of 1943 in Nazi-occupied Poland, there were no words more terrifying than “Szucha Avenue.” There may have been no words more terrifying anywhere in wartime Europe. It was the address of the Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw. The brutalism of its exterior seemed cruelly suited to the Germans’ purpose. From inside the squat complex of buildings, the corridors echoed with the screams of those being questioned. Those who survived remembered afterward the rank scent of fear and urine. Twice a day, just before noon and in the early evening, black vans punctually returned from the holding cells at Pawiak Prison to collect the bruised and broken bodies.

  Irena guessed that it was just after six o’clock in the morning now. Maybe six thirty already. Soon the late October sun would be rising over Warsaw. But Irena had been awake for hours. So had everyone in the apartment building. Janka, her trusted liaison and a dear friend, had joined a small family celebration for the feast of Saint Irena that night. After gorging on cold cuts and slices of cake, Irena’s frail mother and her visiting aunt retreated to the bedroom. But Janka had already missed the curfew and would have to spend the night. So the younger women camped out in the living room and sat up late, talking and drinking tea and cordials.

  After midnight, Irena and Janka dozed at last, and by three a.m. the girls were sleeping soundly on makeshift cots. But in the back room, Irena’s mother, Janina, was restless. How Janina had enjoyed hearing the carefree murmur of the girls’ voices! She knew from her daughter’s taut jawline that Irena was taking chances, and she had a mother’s heavy worry. Pain made it hard to sleep, and so Janina let the thoughts carry her. Then, in the darkness, came a sound that she knew was wrong. The heavy thudding of boots echoed from a stairwell somewhere. Irena! Irena! Janina hissed in an urgent whisper that penetrated Irena’s dreams. Bolting awake, Irena heard only the anxiety in her mother’s tone and knew in an instant what it meant. Those few moments to clear her head were the difference between life and death for all of them.

  What came next was the racket of eleven Gestapo agents pounding at the apartment door, demanding entry. The fear brought a strange, metallic taste to Irena’s mouth, and underneath her rib cage the terror came and went in shocks that felt electric. For hours the Germans spewed threats and abuse, gutted the pillows, and tore apart the corners and cupboards. They pulled up floorboards and broke furniture.

  Somehow they still didn’t find the lists of the children.

  The lists now were all that mattered. They were just thin and flimsy scraps of cigarette paper, little more than rolled bits of tissue, part of Irena’s private filing system. But written on them in a code of her own invention were the names and addresses of some of the thousands of Jewish children whom Irena and her friends had saved from the horrors of Nazi persecution—children they were still hiding and supporting in secret locations all across the city and beyond Warsaw. At the last possible instant, before the door flew open, giving way to the bludgeons and pounding, Irena tossed the lists on the kitchen table over to Janka, who with brazen aplomb stuffed them into her generous brassiere, deep under her armpit. If they searched Janka, God knew, it would be all over. It would be even worse if they searched Janka’s apartment, where there were Jews hiding. Irena could hardly believe it when the Germans themselves covered up the worst bit of incriminating evidence: she watched, mesmerized, as a small bag with forged identity papers and wads of illegal cash was buried under the debris of smashed furniture. She wanted nothing more than to fall to her knees in that moment. And when she understood that the Gestapo wasn’t arresting Janka or her mother but only her, she was positively giddy. But she knew that the laughter rising inside her was tinged dangerously with hysteria. Dress, she told herself. Dress and leave here quickly. She threw on the well-worn skirt she had folded over the back of the kitchen chair only hours earlier and buttoned her sweater as fast as she could to speed her departure before the agents had a chance to reconsider, and walked out of the apartment into the cold autumn morning barefoot. She hadn’t even noticed until Janka came running.

  Now, though, she had time to think about her own dilemma as the car swayed at each street corner. Sooner or later there was no question that they would kill her. Irena understood that already. This was how her story ended. People did not return from Aleja Szucha or from the ghetto prison at Pawiak, where arrestees were locked up in between their bone-crushing interrogations. They did not return from the camps like Auschwitz or Ravensbrück, where the innocent “survivors” of the Gestapo were deported. And Irena Sendler was not innocent.

  The sedan cranked hard to the right as it headed southeast across the still-sleeping city. The most direct route would take them towa
rd Warsaw’s broad prewar avenues, first skirting west and then south of the wasteland that had once been the Jewish ghetto. During the first years of the Nazi occupation, Irena had been in and out of the ghetto three or four times a day sometimes, each time risking arrest or summary execution, trying to help to save some of their old school friends, their Jewish professors . . . and thousands of small children. Now, in late 1943, there was only ruin and rubble. It was a killing ground, an endless graveyard. The ghetto had been leveled after the Jewish uprising that spring, and her friend Ala Gołąb-Grynberg had disappeared inside that inferno. Word in the underground whispered that Ala was still alive, in the forced-labor camp at Poniatowa, one of a group of young militants secretly planning their escape from the prison. Irena hoped that, when this barbaric war was over, Ala would make it back to collect her small daughter, Rami, from the orphanage where Irena had her hidden.

  The prison car passed a few blocks north of what had once been the Polish Free University. The institution was another war casualty. Irena had completed her degree in social work across town, at the University of Warsaw, but she had been a frequent presence on the Polish Free University campus in the 1930s, and it was there, thanks to Professor Helena Radlińska, that her resistance cell had been formed. They had been, almost to the last one, Dr. Radlińska’s girls in the days before the occupation. Now they were part of a well-organized and daring network, and the professor had been the inspiration for that too. It was a network of urgent interest to her captors. Irena was in her early thirties now, but her girlish, waifish looks were deceiving. The Gestapo had just captured one of the most important figures in the Polish underground. Irena could only hope that the Germans did not know it.

  Crammed in beside her, a soldier, in his tall leather boots and with a tangling whip and truncheon, let down his guard. It was the end of their nighttime shift of terror. Irena sat on the lap of another young recruit, and she guessed that the boy wasn’t more than eighteen or nineteen. They even seemed, she thought, to be dozing. Irena’s face was calm but her mind was racing. There was so much to consider and so little time left to her.