Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  On September 27, Warsaw surrendered.

  Exhausted, Irena and her boss, Irka, sat together in an office on Złota Street when word came that it was over. Everyone in the office was crying and hugging. The Germans and the Soviet Union had divided Poland between themselves as conquerors. The secret deal had been sealed even before the bombing ever started. In the partition of Poland, the prize of Warsaw went to the Germans, who declared it part of the Generalgouvernement and who were even now marching into the city.

  Would husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers make it home? And what were they coming home to? Families across the smoldering and hungry city had a hundred anxious questions. Some 40,000 people died in the bombings of Warsaw. The toll on the front lines was even more staggering. Nearly 70,000 men were dead. Another 630,000 were even now en route to Germany and the Soviet Union as prisoners of war. The Germans were never going to let all the young Polish men just go home, where they could harass the occupiers and organize an armed national resistance fighting for a free Poland. Mietek Sendler was among those captured. We’ll pray for your husband, people reassured each other. Pray for Mietek, yes. But Irena also added a silent, fervent wish for Adam.

  • • •

  Resistance happened quickly in Poland. It was something of a miracle, or so it seemed to Irena, who watched it take shape and flourish. Word spread quietly across Warsaw in the next few weeks. Among the countries occupied by the Germans, Poland was exceptional in several ways. Most exceptional was the fact that, in Poland, an organized and determined partisan movement took shape almost immediately, largely led by older men, by the Jewish community, and by a great number of courageous women of all ages. Some of the most extraordinary were the youngest. But Irena and, miraculously, Adam were also among them. For Adam it was a bittersweet return to a fallen Warsaw. They had failed at the front lines. But the young people across the city were determined to keep on fighting the Germans. The groundswell of resistance was a large part of the reason why Poland was also subject to such brutal tactics of repression.

  Already an entire underground state was forming. First, the Polish government-in-exile set up headquarters in Paris. Then it evacuated to London, where it funneled financial and logistical support to “home” branches. As always, the problem with getting it all up and running efficiently was politics and squabbling.

  As a result of the squabbling—because Polish politics before the war had been no less divisive—most of the resistance efforts were organized along old party lines. That endless bickering was the result, in large part, of the country’s tumultuous history and long struggle for national independence. It was only at the end of the First World War, after more than a century of foreign domination, that the “Polish” state was re-created for the second time in its history. But that treaty did little to settle the matter of its eastern borders, toward the Ukraine, which its watchful Russian neighbors coveted. Its neighbor to the west, Germany, had other imperial ambitions. Hopelessly caught between a left-wing Bolshevik-controlled Soviet Union—around which swirled any number of wild and ugly theories about the Jewish world conspiracy—and the rise of far-right nationalism and proto-fascism on its western boundary in the 1920s and 1930s, Polish politics was Janus-faced. Which was the lesser of those two evils, the far left or the far right? It was an impossible question. In the absence of answers, people clung to their old political alliances.

  The atmosphere at the clandestine meetings of the Polish socialists that Irena and Adam attended that autumn was nervous but defiant. Most of the young men in the city now were Jewish, and Irena had been wild with relief when both Adam and her lawyer friend Józef made their way safely back to Warsaw. Other Polish men—men who were not also Jewish—were sent systematically to prisoner-of-war or labor camps, forced to feed the Nazi war machine. Mietek was captured and incarcerated in Germany. Jews like Adam and Józef, however, were unfit for any use in the eyes of the fascists. Caught up in their tangled logic of anti-Semitism, German functionaries in Berlin asked themselves what to do about this Jewish “problem.” If Adam and Józef were not men but something less than human, they could pose no danger as soldiers or combatants. There could be no purpose in sending them off to prisoner-of-war compounds. But the Germans did not wish to live among what they considered to be a species of diseased degenerates, and there would have to be some “solution.” Poland was already the planned dumping ground for Jews from across Europe. While the Germans considered how best to arrange a mass forced migration, in Warsaw alone upward of a hundred thousand young Jewish people like Adam were left at loose ends for the time being.

  And it wasn’t only Adam. Józef, Ewa, and Ala were also determined activists who found themselves suddenly unemployed and idle. They, too, were quickly drawn into the web of these secret political gatherings. At first the clandestine nature of things was exciting as they whispered code words at the thresholds of dim apartments or gathered in the back rooms of shops and basements. The warm camaraderie and optimism buoyed Irena’s spirits throughout October 1939, and besides, it just felt good to be sitting next to Adam. The war will be over soon, everyone said so confidently. Perhaps until then it will not be so bad under the Germans. Irena tried to be hopeful. But evidence to the contrary was mounting quickly.

  The Gestapo soon began hunting those it considered troublemakers—and Irena and her friends were unmistakable agitators. A sudden noise from outside the apartment could make an entire room of people jump. The hard wooden chair beneath her creaked as Irena wriggled and tried to get comfortable during speeches that even a war couldn’t make less long-winded, and Adam glanced furtively toward the door, longing for the cigarettes resting in his coat pocket. The first order of business, the leaders announced, was to deliver emergency support funds to party members and activists who were forced into hiding. They had all gone underground quickly, and suddenly those most in need included nearly all their former professors. The party needed secret couriers to keep in contact with them and funnel them money. It was a dangerous mission, and they shouldn’t underestimate the risks to their own safety. Irena’s heart beat faster. Of course she must help! Irena volunteered instantly. She felt a surge of affection for Adam when she saw him smiling.

  The professors had wisely gone into hiding when Warsaw fell to the Germans—and it wasn’t because they were Jewish. Warsaw in 1939 was one of the world’s most dynamic and diverse cities. There were somewhere on the order of a million people living in the city that year, and just over a third of them were Jewish. The remaining residents were largely but not exclusively “ethnic” Poles. The Germans, however, considered the Poles, as part of the Slavic race, to be inferior to Aryans and ominously classified them, right along with their Jewish neighbors, as Untermenschen, or “subhumans.” Although the citizens of Warsaw hadn’t been given a copy of the German memorandum ordering the complete annihilation of Polish culture, it wasn’t a mystery to anyone in the socialist party or at the secret meetings Irena attended. To accomplish that cultural annihilation, killing off the country’s intellectuals was the first order of business.

  But the category of “intellectuals” was a broad one: it included not just professors but also the country’s doctors, teachers, lawyers, judges, journalists, writers, wealthy landowners, industrialists, prominent businessmen, hereditary aristocrats, activists, social workers, politicians, priests, nuns, military officers, engineers, communists, and scientists. In short, an “intellectual” was anyone with cultural power. To cripple the professional Polish classes, Hitler gave instructions to kill all people of influence, shutter the schools and universities, and burn their libraries. Another early German memo laid out the plan for the next Polish generation clearly: “The sole goal of [their] schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one’s name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable.”

  The response of Polish activists, on the left and the right, was to crea
te in Warsaw a mirror world that matched the new German institutions, structure for structure. Patriots erected an entire underground Polish state—the one thing on which Poles from across the political spectrum were united. There would ultimately be secret Polish courts and a secret “Home Army”; the groundwork had already been laid for a secret university.

  Adam and Irena’s thesis supervisor, Dr. Borowy, immediately joined the underground university and began work on a collaborative publishing project. He and some of the country’s most eminent professors wrote, in bold defiance of the Germans, a sociological analysis of the occupiers and their crimes called Nazi Kultur in Poland, later smuggled out to publishers in Britain. Dr. Radlińska, hobbled but resolute, quickly joined the underground state and began building from her hideout a curriculum of secret university classes. So did Ala’s mentor and medical research partner, Dr. Hirszfeld, and Dr. Witwicki, the Polish psychologist who mentored their friend Ewa Rechtman.

  These were the lucky ones—the ones who needed supporting. Helena Radlińska’s brother, Dr. Aleksander Rajchman, a prominent mathematics professor at the University of Warsaw, was not so fortunate. Arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated, he was dead in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, north of Berlin, within the first year of the occupation. He was not alone. Some fifty thousand other members of the “intelligentsia”—and more than two-thirds of Helena Radlińska’s colleagues—were ultimately executed or sent with Dr. Rajchman to perish in concentration camps. In Kraków, at the Jagiellonian University, the Gestapo arrested nearly two hundred professors—the entire faculty—on the afternoon of November 6, 1939. Most died in the aftermath. Later, hundreds of Catholic priests were rounded up, in Warsaw especially; few clergymen survived those encounters.

  These were the people Irena and her friends knew best. They were their teachers, mentors, political compatriots, and professional contacts in the social services and at the universities. They were the people they looked up to and wanted to become. They sometimes ran the charitable institutions that worked closely with city social workers; sometimes they were Irena’s direct colleagues. Then, after the purges, the mass “resettlements” began: another half a million Poles were rounded up on the streets and sent to work as German slave labor.

  The Jewish community was not spared a share of the earliest abuses. Germans and their far-right Polish supporters—and they were numerous—in the first months of the occupation smashed Jewish shop windows, attacked on the streets Orthodox men with their distinctive beards, and randomly beat Jews to death for sport and entertainment.

  In the emergency room of the Jewish hospital, on the front line of those atrocities, Ala Gołąb-Grynberg struggled to make sense of it. How could this be happening? As a lead nurse in the hospital’s ambulance corps, Ala was part of a triage that already seemed endless. She nursed the broken bodies of the old, whose only crime was not being quick enough to follow orders in German accents that they did not understand. For this, they were hauled feetfirst behind horse-drawn cabs along cobblestone streets until their skulls shattered. She saw men whose beards had been torn from their faces or hacked off carelessly with knives, and scrawny street children fighting to survive SS beatings. She kept her face calm and worked quickly. But inside, Ala thought she knew now the furious desperation of a trapped animal. Sometimes throwing open the broad sash of a hospital window, she leaned as far out as she could, sucking in the fresh air. She never thought of jumping. But everyone sometimes thought of falling. At home, Ala wrote poems on bits of scrap paper and tried to make sense of the jumbled images.

  And around her, everything was jumbled, no matter how much Ala and her nursing staff struggled to impose order. What had once been gleaming hospital wards now teemed with broken people. Where the artillery fire had blown out the plate glass along some walls, the windows were covered haphazardly with dusty sheets and scrap wood. By late October the wards were already freezing in the mornings. The patched-up room mirrored the patched-up, shattered bodies within them, and at the end of her shift her head ached from clenching her jaw in fury. But, more than anything, Ala was worried and sometimes frightened: worried about these victims of brutality but worried, too, about her own family. Her husband, Arek, had left Warsaw with the mobilization in August. The only news they could get of him was a vague report that he had been seen somewhere on the eastern front in late September in bad condition. Her brother, Samuel, and his wife were already in Russian territory; perhaps somehow Arek would find them? Ala also worried about her small daughter and about money.

  Everyone who was Jewish was suddenly worried about money. The Germans slapped crippling economic restrictions on the Jewish community with the goal of making sure that anyone who was Jewish lived in poverty. It began with forced Jewish unemployment. Jews could no longer hold any state or government positions. In the city social services, dozens of Ala and Irena’s friends were summarily fired, including their friend Ewa Rechtman and a friendly old doctor they knew named Henryk Palester. Restrictions required Jewish property to be registered, their businesses Aryanized, and their bank accounts frozen. Adam fumed with indignation. In a coffee shop near his apartment on Bałuckiego Street that winter, knee to knee under the table, Adam and Irena had long, urgent conversations about the future. Perhaps they considered flight. Like Ala and Arek, Irena also had family connections in the Ukraine. Maybe they could build a life together there. Hundreds of thousands of Jews—nearly one in ten in Poland—wisely slipped across the Soviet border to the east that year. Those who did were far more likely to be survivors. But both Adam and Irena had widowed mothers. Irena’s mother was frail; fleeing with Janina was impossible. So was deserting her. Adam’s mother, Leokadia, exasperated him, and now she talked more resentfully than ever of his abandoned inheritance. They quarreled, too, about the collapse of his marriage. But while Adam longed to be free of his mother, he couldn’t abandon her either. Leaving was out of the question.

  In the first year or two of the occupation, some among the Warsaw Jewry said that there were limits to what could possibly happen. War was hard, of course. People understood this. Terrible things—isolated things—would happen. Others in the Warsaw Jewish community were more wary and cynical. But, at the start, the Germans singled out Poles and not the Jews for systematic purges. In the first year or two of the occupation, ten Poles in Warsaw were murdered for every Jewish resident killed, and it was considered so much safer to be Jewish that there were tales of Christian residents putting on the Star of David armband and adopting Yiddish accents during street roundups. Because the first systematic anti-Semitic edicts were primarily financial, the Jewish population was lulled into a sense of relative safety. That was precisely the intention.

  What Warsaw’s Jewry could not know—and what Adam and Irena never imagined—was that, in a conference in Berlin on September 21, 1939, before the city’s surrender, plans had already been made as well for their future. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo, a man whom even Hitler declared was heartless, sent instructions to commanders in Poland that month: “In reference to today’s conference in Berlin,” he ordered, “I once again draw your attention to . . . the final solution.” The wheels of the Holocaust were, even now, in motion.

  CHAPTER 3

  Those Walls of Shame

  Warsaw, 1941–1942

  Behind her, Irena could hear all the sounds of Jewish life in Warsaw. The street criers calling out in Yiddish joked with each other good-naturedly, jockeying for the best corner while they hawked their wares. When one moved along, the stone streets echoed with the scrape and rattle of the iron wheels on the handcarts. She could hear in the distance the streetcar coming down Gęsia Street and the cry of gulls squabbling along the nearby Vistula River. At the doorway marked number one, she hesitated for a moment, taking in the spiced aromas of street food and the cold air of late autumn. Then Irena softly pulled the handbell to the convent of the Ursuline sisters.

  The face that greeted Irena from
under the starched wimple was unlined by age, and the young nun gravely inquired the reason for her visit. I’m here to see Pani Rudnicki, please, Sister. The woman nodded silently and carefully pulled back the bolt on the heavy door. Irena stepped into the shadows of the foyer and heard the bolt drawn smoothly behind her.

  The young nun led Irena on, though the courtyard and along the halls to an unremarkable doorway. How strange to be taken to see someone who didn’t exist! Mrs. Rudnicki was a fiction. Or, if a person with that name once lived, she did no longer, and in her death had unwittingly lent her identity to a desperate stranger. Rudnicki was the false name under which Helena Radlińska was working from her hiding place inside this walled convent. Already, some in the Jewish community had taken the steps of securing false “Aryan” identity papers.

  With a quiet knock, Irena crossed the threshold to where her old professor was waiting, and when Dr. Radlińska warmly grasped her hand, Irena felt a flood of pleasure. For her part, Helena Radlińska admired this young woman’s bravery and spirit. But, with the eyes of experience, she could see that Irena did not comprehend the risks or the dangers. Still, Helena was immensely grateful for the assistance. She needed the money if she were to impose upon the kindness of the nuns here in hiding.

  Over sweet, milky tea, a Polish staple, the professor told her story. Gesturing to her cane, she talked ruefully of the bombing of her apartment and the loss of all her manuscripts and her library. She talked of finding refuge there in the convent with the Catholic sisters. But, looking at the sturdy walls around her, Helena Radlińska had no illusions. She knew already that the Gestapo was hunting for her. If the time came, the sisters could not save her. Never mind. She was determined to carry on fighting. There was so much to discuss, and the hours ticked by swiftly. Dr. Radlińska, cooped up and still on the mend, wanted to know everything that was happening. What was Irena doing? And what was happening?