Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Another new friend, Rachela Rosenthal, on the other hand, was drop-dead gorgeous. Rachela was training in Dr. Radlińska’s program to be a teacher, and she was lithe and blond. Men stopped on the streets to talk to her, and often she chatted back because everyone knew Rachela had a bubbly personality. Irena was pretty in a plump and quiet sort of way, but men didn’t turn on the street to watch her pass, and her wit was, she had to admit, drier and more abrasive.

  The third member of their circle was Ewa Rechtman, a language student working with another professor they all knew well, the jovial Dr. Władysław Witwicki. Ewa was immensely clever, and everyone said she was one of the most talented scholars in the graduate program at the Polish Free University. But Ewa had no hard edges. She had a head of dark, tumbling curls, and her quiet, lilting voice made everything she said sound like a lullaby.

  After work or sometimes a lecture, Irena put off going home a bit longer and stopped off with the girls at a café for a coffee or an ice cream and a few laughs. Young women in those days dressed fashionably, in low-slung heels and brightly patterned dresses, and her new friends thought nothing of smoking cigarettes in public. Irena had long since abandoned her youthful scouting pledges. She also no longer felt any need to rush off to confession simply because the thought of Adam made her heart race faster. Irena’s hair was cut in a wavy bob that, by then, was no longer scandalous, just practical. She had bright eyes that her friends remembered as startlingly blue and a smile that looked more than a bit like mischief. The other young women were all from Jewish families, and they howled with laughter to hear a Catholic girl like Irena say something in Yiddish.

  They would also talk politics, of course. Their work was focused on social justice. The Polish Free University was still a center of radical activism, and Irena’s new friends were ardent socialists like her father. Occasionally she would meet someone whose politics went a bit further. “I met a few, illegal members of the Polish Communist Party, right after [their] spending time in prison,” Irena confessed. She thought they were “smart, noble people.” Adam flirted with communism himself, and perhaps that was part of his allure. When, as the only child of an extraordinarily rich family, he inherited the largest share of his father’s fortune in the 1930s, his widowed mother, Leokadia, was aghast at his plans. He planned, he told her boldly, to give it all away to charity. Leokadia wept and pleaded and scolded, but Adam just dug in his heels. The money has to go, he told his mother. Adam had struggled his whole life with the curse of wealth, and he didn’t believe in inheritances. Neither did new communist friends of theirs, Stanisław Papuziński and his daring, political girlfriend, Zofia Wędrychowska. They lived together and even had a small son already, but they didn’t have any plans to get married. Marriage was a bourgeois institution, and they were bohemians.

  Irena found it all enchanting. When it came to leftist politics, Irena had an impeccable family pedigree, after all, and her new friends knew it. Her father had played an important role in the creation of the Polish Socialist Party, and there were still party members across Warsaw who remembered Stanisław Krzyżanowski. And no one spoke of Irena’s father more fondly or more often than Helena Radlińska, who had known him personally. Helena and her ex-husband, Zygmunt, had been founding activists in the Polish Socialist Party in the early 1900s, and Zygmunt—a doctor at the University of Warsaw hospital—had worked alongside Stanisław Krzyżanowski. For Irena, who never stopped missing her father’s presence, it was all a kind of profound homecoming. She joined the Polish Socialist Party herself, and “I fit right in with my political past,” Irena said. Unfortunately for Mietek, she had found her true family.

  She was moving further and further away from her shaky marriage and closer to Adam and her new friends in Dr. Radlińska’s circles. She was also becoming more politically engaged than ever. That meant doing, not talking. What can be done? That was always the question Irena asked herself. She looked at her campus identity card, stamped with the word “Aryan,” and it made her furious. She scratched out the word and boldly presented it on campus as a silent protest. When the campus administrators learned of her rebellion, however, they decided they had had enough of this petite rabble-rouser and her presence at the University of Warsaw. Irena was slapped with an indefinite university suspension. It would be years before she would be allowed to return to classes.

  Mietek might have been forgiven for feeling a bit relieved to learn that his young wife’s boisterous and bruising days as a campus agitator had reached an abrupt administrative conclusion. Perhaps he already suspected that her heart was with Adam. Perhaps he was too tired of the quarrels for it to matter. But, in the way of failing young romances everywhere, it’s likely he clung for a while to the hope that she would return to him and to her senses. When news came that year that Dr. Radlińska’s mother-and-child center had to be shut because it had run out of community funding and that Irena’s job there was ending, too, it seemed like a perfect chance for Irena to settle down at last and have children of her own. After all, Irena was already in her mid-twenties. At any rate, Mietek was soon offered an important career opportunity and a permanent teaching job at the university several hours away in Poznań. He assumed, naturally, that Irena would follow.

  But following that path set out when she was a girl was no longer something Irena could imagine. Irena was no longer a dutiful teenager, doing what other people wanted and expected because she could not imagine other options. Duty had caused heartache already for her and for Adam. She knew she had failed as a wife, but she didn’t want to be married to Mietek. Like her mother and her new friends, she was a bohemian at heart. Like her father, she was born for constant action. She didn’t want to leave Warsaw and this new extended family. She was determined somehow to complete her studies and applied over and over to have her suspension lifted. And, whether she said so or not, she wasn’t prepared to give up whatever this burgeoning thing was with Adam. She quickly found a new job in the city’s municipal welfare services with the help of Dr. Radlińska and broke the news to Mietek. She was staying in Warsaw.

  When Mietek went to Poznań, there was no divorce. The Catholic Church forbade divorce, and scandal would not help Mietek. But Irena did not go with him. Suspended from the University of Warsaw and now working full-time as a social worker, Irena lived for the sake of propriety with her mother, but insofar as the rest of her life—and especially about Adam—Irena just kept quiet. That habit of secrecy, later, would prove to be lifesaving.

  • • •

  For three years—years in which Irena’s workplace friendships and her romance with Adam deepened—the academic suspension remained in place. Each year Irena petitioned the administration. Each year she met with a stubborn refusal. Those in high offices on campus still remembered her rabble-rousing. It was only in 1938, when a sympathetic philosophy professor at the University of Warsaw stepped in on the sly to process the papers allowing her to reenroll for a year, that Irena had a chance to complete her studies. She made the most of the narrow window of opportunity. In the late spring of 1939, at the end of the school year, Irena submitted her final master’s thesis to her advisor, Dr. Wacław Borowy, a professor of Polish literature and culture, and was at last allowed to graduate. Adam had already qualified as an attorney, but the anti-Jewish feeling in the city, which infuriated him, had dimmed his career prospects. As far as he was concerned, he was as Polish as anyone. But the senseless laws restricting what Jews could and could not do offended his pride and patriotism, and Adam was a moody and sometimes melancholy young man. He turned inward to books and poetry and private reflections. Instead of practicing law, as both he and Irena had once dreamt of doing, Adam began doctoral work in political history with Dr. Borowy.

  Precisely when Adam’s marriage failed, no one is certain. Even the name of his wife is only conjecture. Jewish family records in Warsaw often did not survive the occupation, and Irena’s family prefers still to keep her name a closely guarded secret. All that is kn
own for certain is that Adam’s wife was one of Irena’s friends from the university. A series of unlikely wartime coincidences and some old property records in Warsaw suggest that she may have been a college friend named Regina Mikelberg. If Adam’s wife was not Regina, she was someone like Regina: an educated and assimilated Jewish woman from a wealthy Warsaw family. And, whatever the case, Regina Mikelberg was part of their wartime circle and part of their wartime story. When the war came, Irena and her network would not forget about Regina.

  That summer of 1939, Irena and Adam knew, of course, that war with the Germans was coming. They were both politically aware and realistic. They had lived with the specter of European fascism and, indeed, with Polish anti-Semitism for years already. By July, Warsaw buzzed with rumors that the Polish forces were quietly mobilizing. Adam would be deployed himself by the end of August. The young people were naturally apprehensive about how the world was changing around them, but they were also all supremely optimistic and confident. After all, Dr. Radlińska had taught them that the commitment of a small group of well-intentioned people could shape the world according to their vision of it. They were about to test the limits of what was possible.

  • • •

  When the attack on Warsaw started, it still shocked Irena. It didn’t matter that she had known that an assault was coming. The wail of air raid sirens across the city awoke Irena and her mother with a start at six o’clock on the morning of September 1, 1939, and her first thought was for Adam. Adam was somewhere out there on a military exercise. This was a declaration of war at last, but since spring there had been armed incursions and scuffles along Poland’s western border, and the Polish army had been mobilized for battle two days earlier.

  Now Irena joined her rumpled neighbors as they poured out of their apartments and gathered in the empty streets, peering up at the sky and speculating, desperate for some explanation. From the sky came nothing—no bombs, no sounds—but still the siren wailed on, and at last exasperated air raid guards shooed them all back inside. The anxiety and the early hour made people cross, and somewhere in the apartment complex a door slammed loudly. At the kitchen table in their bathrobes and slippers, bleary-eyed and grim, Irena and her mother Janina listened to the news as it came in over the Polish radio. Irena’s shoulders tensed as the crackling voice of the announcer spoke the words that everyone feared were coming: Hitler’s attack on Poland had already started.

  Hovering over the radio, Irena leaned in closer to hear the report. The city leadership now was asking government and municipal workers to stay at their posts around the clock and to resist the German aggressors. Thank heavens. She wanted to be doing something. A look from her mother told her to at least sit down and finish her coffee. What could she do at six in the morning anyhow? The next hour passed slowly. Irena, stop fidgeting, her mother scolded her with a smile. Irena waited until she couldn’t bear it any longer. At seven she flew down the stairs to the open apartment courtyard, past Mr. Przeździecki’s gardens. No one was worrying about the flowers that morning, and the yard was empty. Tossing her weathered old bag into the basket of her bicycle, Irena hitched up her skirt just a bit daringly, in case she had to pedal quickly. As her foot pushed down hard and the bicycle glided into motion, she turned east, toward the Old Town, in the direction of her office on Złota Street, with a welcome sense of purpose and determination that morning, powerfully relieved to have something to do besides wait and worry with her mother.

  In the office, she went to look first for her boss, Irena Schultz, a thin, birdlike blonde with a big smile. Irena—“Irka”—Schultz was more than just Irena’s supervisor, though. She was also one of Dr. Radlińska’s girls, and they were a tight-knit sorority. At nine a.m. the aerial attack on Warsaw started at last. The approaching German bombers, one resident of the city remembered, at first sounded like “faraway surf, not a calm surf but when waves crash onto a beach during a storm.” Before long the city rattled with the constant “hum of planes, tens, maybe even hundreds” and with powerful, rocking explosions. Girls in the office ran for the cellars and held each other’s hands tightly in the musty darkness.

  When the squadrons passed, the streets were in chaos. In all her twenty-nine years, Irena had never seen anything like this devastation. But it was only the beginning. What was happening to them? Around her, private cars and hackney cabs, now called into duty as makeshift ambulances, ferried the wounded through littered streets to hospitals. The wheezy car horns blared impatiently around her, but surely the drivers could see it was useless. Where the bombs and artillery had hit buildings, the streets were filled with broken glass and piles of fallen bricks. Irena watched in amazement as flames engulfed the gutted façades of entire apartment buildings. The walls swayed and then toppled in crashes to the cobblestones around her. People pulled their coats tightly around them and hurried across the streets and open squares, seeking the safety of doorways, as the skies grew dimmer. Irena coughed and covered her mouth with her scarf. Clouds of dust stung her eyes and coated the insides of her throat and nostrils. She could see dead horses in the street, killed in their traces, and, sometimes, mangled human bodies. Doctors and nurses helped rush moaning residents to aid points and later delivered supplies to field stations as the fighting edged closer.

  Fear gripped Warsaw. Across the city, one anxious thought united residents. What was it like out there, on the front lines, if this was what happened in a city full of civilians? Irena thought about Mietek. She had said a friendly good-bye to him at a depot a few days earlier when he had come to Warsaw for the deployment and had wished him good luck and safety. One of her other friends from the social services office, a pro bono Jewish lawyer named Józef Zysman, had been called up as a reserve officer as well, and Irena worried about him. She would have to check in on his wife, Theodora, and their baby, Piotr, she thought to herself. Then, there was Adam. There were always thoughts of Adam. He was also in a regiment, out there somewhere.

  The matter-of-fact question that morning in the office, in a city where a siege was clearly starting, was where to start with services? Irka Schultz was the office boss, and she called everyone together. The trouble was that suddenly everyone was one of the needy. They had never faced this kind of welfare crisis. All morning they scrambled, asking each other what to do first.

  Within hours the answer became immediately obvious: someone had to help the displaced and injured refugees already flooding into Warsaw. Someone had to find food and shelter for people bombed out of their homes in the city. The residents of Warsaw would fight to defend the city for nearly a month, and before it was all over there were reports of the cavalry on horseback facing down modern German tanks in a desperate action that told the whole story of just how outgunned the Poles truly were. The numbers of refugees grew daily as people of the countryside and smaller cities sought safety together. They arrived on foot, tired and frightened. Women with haunted eyes told how, along dusty roads, the German planes had swung low and aimed gunfire at families pulling their belongings. Country folk working in the fields ran for the hedgerows, but on the open roads there was no cover. Irena listened to their stories and tried to keep her hands from shaking. At the time, she was a senior administrator in a branch of the social welfare office responsible for running soup kitchens across the city, and over the next few weeks she and her coworkers set up and manned dozens of makeshift canteens and shelters for the survivors.

  On September 24, near the end of the onslaught, more than a thousand German aircraft filled the skies over Warsaw in bombing raids that went on for hours and turned whole districts into rubble. For two more days, the devastation was unrelenting. Some of the worst-hit areas of the city included the quarter just to the north of Irena’s office that ran from the Jewish and Polish cemeteries on the west to the great synagogue on the east. All the bombing meant wounded people—people who wouldn’t make it to a canteen but were still hungry. Where to start now? Irena knew in an instant. She sped off on her bicycle toward
the Czyste Hospital on Dworska Street, determined to find her friend Ala.

  The Jewish hospital was a sprawling genteel compound not far from the Vistula River, and before the war it had boasted one of the most modern medical facilities anywhere in Europe. Now the nurses and doctors were already running short of supplies. Ala was working frantically to treat the refugees and the wounded. They were doing thirty or forty serious operations a day, a nurse reported with a quick shake of her head, all without anesthesia. One of those patients was likely to have been Dr. Radlińska. When the bombers flew over the buildings in her district, the floor rocked beneath Helena Radlińska’s feet, and she ran for the stairwell and the open courtyard. On the street, the brown dust again filled the air, and then Helena heard the first cries of the wounded trapped inside the rubble. Someone had to help them. The doctor headed back into the building just as another portion crumbled. She felt only pain and then felt nothing. Those who dragged her, moaning and half-conscious, from the ruins could see burns and broken bones that would cripple her for months.

  All of Warsaw suffered. There was no water, no electricity, and no food. The “[c]orpses of men and animals are heaped in the streets,” one eyewitness remembered. “[M]en of goodwill are burying the dead where they find them; in a garden or a square or the courtyards of houses. Famished people cut off pieces of flesh as soon as a horse falls, leaving only the skeleton.” The German planes flew so low overhead that Irena could look up and see the pilots’ faces. In the air raid shelters, the injured were piled on stretchers, crying quietly and begging for water. Everyone tried not to think of the men on the front. At home, her mother whispered urgent prayers, and Irena had to admit that she, too, was praying.