Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Irena had to ask herself what she was doing. The political underground was already creating a secret army, a secret government, and publishing resistance newspapers. Dr. Radlińska and the other professors, she learned, were forming a secret Polish university. One of the classrooms would be right there in the convent. But what was anyone doing in the social services? The Jews, Irena could only report, were now banned from receiving any state welfare or working in any state employment, and Irena and the professor both knew firsthand the grim consequences of poverty and unemployment in the most vulnerable segments of that population. Irena’s job was doing community interviews, and Dr. Radlińska might have asked her to reflect on what she had discovered. “There were families where one herring was shared amongst six children during Sabbath,” Irena said when asked the question later.

  Why not build a mirror social welfare system? Dr. Radlińska was toying with the thought. It was something for Irena to consider. That would be a worthy project. That would be true to their work and their values as activists. Precisely when the cooperation between Irena and the professor started is uncertain. So, too, is the exact extent of the professor’s guidance. But wartime intelligence files kept by the underground Home Army on Irena’s activities document the collaboration. Irena Sendler, the files read, “has large Polish contacts, especially on the left. Works directly with Prof. Radlińska of the Free University.” Helena Radlińska was a senior operative in this underground army, and in time she would encourage several of her former students to build networks for the resistance. She would also eventually develop her own independent clandestine Jewish welfare program. And already the leaders of the resistance had a strategy: they would create as many cells as possible, all working for the protection of the movement, in complete isolation from each other. One of those cells would be run by this very capable twentysomething slip of a woman: Irena Sendler.

  When precisely Irena and the professor talked may be uncertain, but one fact is clear: it cannot have been very long at all after the fall of Warsaw, because Irena’s cell developed quickly. The need in Warsaw was urgent. Whom else to bring into the cell with her was the crucial question. Dr. Radlińska would have warmly counseled Irena to trust Irka Schultz. She was another of the professor’s former students—and Irena’s boss in the social welfare offices.

  Dr. Radlińska could also support readily the decision to bring in another coworker and friend, Jadwiga Deneka, another one of the professor’s former students. Jadwiga was a pretty blond woman with a pixie bob, and she had trained originally as a teacher and worked in the innovative orphanage school founded by the professor’s colleague, Dr. Korczak, before transitioning into the city welfare service. At twenty-eight, Jadwiga was a year younger than Irena, a bubbly and vivacious woman, and Irena knew her well from their days together at the Polish Free University and the meetings of the Polish Socialist Party.

  And there was a third alumna of the Polish Free University in the office: Irena’s colleague and friend Jadwiga Piotrowska. Everyone called Jadwiga by her nickname, Jaga, and like Irena she also came from a family with an impeccable pedigree as public servants. Her father, Marian Ponikiewski, was an engineer who worked with the city welfare services designing public housing. Dr. Radlińska knew both Marian and his close collaborator, the social theorist Roman Piotrowski, and, in fact, Jaga had married into the Piotrowski family. She and Janusz Piotrowski had a young daughter and a tumultuous love affair. Jaga was in her mid-thirties, six or seven years older than Irena, a short, sturdy woman with dark eyes, and she was an ardent Catholic. Jaga and Irena had worked together since 1934 in the city offices, and Jaga was one of the support staff working in social services on the placement of orphans. Unlike the others, Jaga was old-fashioned and deeply religious, but Irena trusted her completely.

  This trust in Jaga almost certainly stemmed from Irena’s friendship with her younger sister, Janka. The two sisters could not have been more different. Like Irena, Janka was a bit of a free spirit. Where her sister Jaga was straitlaced and sincere, Janka was irreverent and ironic. She lived on Karolkowa Street in Warsaw’s Żoliborz district with her husband, Józef, who had already joined the underground Home Army. Janka would be there that fateful morning, still four years in the future, when the Gestapo would at last catch up with Irena Sendler. And Janka would also take the lead in saving the life of one of their mutual friends: Regina.

  • • •

  In that first autumn of the occupation, within weeks of the Germans’ arrival, Irena turned to each of them. Resisting German rule and keeping alive the spirit of Polish independence was a matter of national pride that had the power to unify even strangers. It certainly had the power to bring together kindred spirits and four of Dr. Radlińska’s girls.

  The friends and coworkers—Irena Sendler, Jaga Piotrowska, Irka Schultz, and Jadwiga Deneka—gathered together one evening in Irena’s second-floor apartment on Ludwiki Street. At the small kitchen table, in between cigarettes, glasses of cordial, and good-natured chatter, the women decided to do something simple—a small but dangerous act of Polish resistance to the new German rulers. They would quietly circumvent the rules, they agreed, and change the paperwork as needed to carry on as usual to help all their clients. It was a plan without any grand or overarching vision, just a stubborn response to some practical problems, and it wasn’t something they hadn’t done before on occasion either. Irena was one of four conspirators, but she was their natural leader, and the decision would bind these friends together in life and death, although they could not know that in the beginning. Not all of them would survive this endeavor.

  Great, heroic acts sometimes come from small beginnings, and the four friends could have had no way of guessing either, as the circle expanded, what a vast fraternity of strangers they were creating. In the coming months, that circle of trust and courage would expand quickly—too quickly for the comfort of some—as they were joined surreptitiously in their office fraud by an ever-widening group of friends and colleagues in other social centers and in other municipal divisions spread across the city of Warsaw. At the start, it was nothing more than fiddling with some paperwork to thwart the Germans and help their clients. In time, encouraged by Dr. Radlińska and emboldened by small daily successes, it became a fearsome resistance cell that included at its core more than a dozen people from ten different offices and institutions. At its periphery, it relied on the bravery and decency of hundreds. But the vast majority of those who would become bound together in this network, one way or the other, each had connections that went back to their having worked with Helena Radlińska in the 1930s.

  Irena’s resistance cell was a wonder of efficiency—and those who knew Irena and were privy to the secret weren’t in the least surprised. Irena wasn’t a mere organizer. She was a force of nature. Within a year, by the fall of 1940, the small team was providing public welfare support to thousands of Jews in Warsaw. It was based on nothing more than faking files and requisitioning resources, which were then stealthily distributed from Irena’s soup kitchens. Her system was brilliantly simple. “The basis of receiving social assistance was collecting data and statistics from the communities,” she explained. “So we forged these statistics and interviews—meaning we listed made-up names, and in this way were able to secure money, food items, clothing,” which they passed out at the centers. To discourage the Germans from checking up on their fictitious families, they cheerfully added to the dossiers ominous notations about deadly communicable diseases like typhus and cholera. Irena’s small office hummed with activity and shared looks. Irena had wanted an adventure and, knowing that they were fighting against their oppressor, even if it was dangerous, made her feel alive.

  • • •

  If the first year of the occupation had been humbling and hard for the people of Poland—Jewish and Christian—in the second year the occupiers turned the screws tighter. By the autumn of 1940, German control of Warsaw was growing more secure. As Polish culture was forced in
to retreat, attention turned to exploitation and eradication of the Jewish nation-within-a-nation. Faced with a shortage of manual labor, the Germans now plucked Jewish men off the streets for forced-work details. The Jewish population was subject to new punitive restrictions. The synagogues were ordered closed, and the community was forced to endure restrictive curfews. Jews could not send letters overseas, use telephones or trains, walk in the city’s parks, or sit on municipal benches. Eventually Jews—forced to wear in Warsaw a blue-and-white badge with the Star of David for identification—were ordered to step off the sidewalk into the gutter when a German approached them.

  Adam was not exempt from any of those humiliating regulations. By now Irena and Adam were lovers, and their secret romance was not exempt either. A fair-haired young Polish woman, strolling arm in arm in occupied Warsaw with a Jewish man—even just a friend—was dangerous. They were risking abuse, maybe even an ugly and brutal beating. Anti-Semitic thugs across the city, emboldened by German rules that outlawed “interracial” dating, roamed the streets looking for easy targets—which the armband that Adam was required to wear readily provided.

  Something as simple as weekend walks in the park or riding a streetcar across town to a friend’s party were suddenly impossible for Adam and Irena. Perhaps it was now that Irena first began wearing the Star of David herself sometimes as she walked with Adam. She wore it in solidarity, she explained later, and in late 1940, before the worst had started, it still provided her and Adam with some small measure of cover. A Jewish couple risked random street violence, but it would have made their now-forbidden liaisons less conspicuous.

  By the beginning of 1941, that was all changing. By January, young Polish ruffians, encouraged and some said paid on the street corners by the German occupiers, prowled the streets of Warsaw in broad daylight, viciously beating anyone with the Star of David. In March the violence descended into an open pogrom. For more than a week, over the Easter and Passover holidays, more than a thousand roving thugs terrorized Jewish neighborhoods, robbing and pummeling anyone brazen enough to try to stroll the street with an armband. The occupiers looked the other way—and so did much of the city’s shocked population.

  Then, in the first weeks of spring, came the dawning realization that a dangerous typhus epidemic was taking hold in the most impoverished residential districts—districts that, unsurprisingly, were Jewish. Word was trickling across Warsaw that the Germans were making plans to establish a Jewish quarter across the river in the suburbs to isolate the stricken population. In April came quarantine orders of “infected areas.” And by summer, just as the epidemic was losing steam at last and unbeknownst yet to the residents of Warsaw, a decision was made to do something even more radical, something that would change everything for Jews in Poland. It would also change everything for Irena and Adam.

  In mid-October 1940, posters went up across Warsaw. Anxious residents pulled their coats tighter against the biting autumn wind and huddled around the notices to read them. From the German loudspeakers in the squares, the same awful orders were broadcast in hard tones. The news was stunning, and at first Irena and Adam could not believe it. The residents of Warsaw—Jewish and Polish—were to begin making preparations, the orders said. The Jews would move together into a small, undesirable area of the city that had been heavily damaged during the bombings. This new “quarter” would become the Warsaw ghetto. An area of seventy-three streets in the city—just over four percent of the streets in Warsaw—had been reserved for the Jews, carved out from what had long been one of the poorest and most run-down neighborhoods in the city center. Any “Aryan” residents were to immediately quit the cordoned Jewish area and find other accommodations. Those living on the wrong side of the boundary would have to move, regardless of their religion. The residents of Warsaw had just two weeks to make the relocations.

  The city was gripped with panic. The orders affected more than 250,000 residents—nearly one in four in Warsaw, both Jewish and Polish, and there was no organization or system to direct the move. Let them fight for table scraps among themselves—that was, more or less, the German position. The German-controlled Jewish council, or Judenrat, tried to set up a clearinghouse to match families. Surely if Jewish families and Aryan families could arrange to swap housing based on a simple calculation of the size of an apartment and the size of a family, a good deal of agony for everyone could be avoided. It might have worked had the wealthiest residents on either side of the boundary embraced it. But the rich did not. Affluent families were not prepared to live in small, cramped apartments or to relocate to a street they considered “undesirable”—not when they had pockets deep enough to negotiate fine housing on the open market. The best apartments now disappeared in an instant as families of means snapped them up and signed private leases at increasingly fantastic prices. As middle-class families began the panic, the cost of housing shot up further, and unscrupulous landlords on both sides of the boundary preyed upon the desperate would-be tenants. Families often spent days frantically searching for any place to live, no matter how cramped or dilapidated, only to be outbid at the last moment and to start the search all over again in the morning. The poorest residents were left to scramble for a spot in overcrowded tenement housing. Already, Irena and her colleagues in the city offices were witnessing the catastrophic breakdown of Warsaw’s social welfare network.

  All around Irena the moment she ventured into the streets in the last two weeks of October, the crowds of unfortunates, pushing their belongings in handcarts and baby carriages, jostled her in their hurry to find a place in compliance with the German order. At the gates to the ghetto, there were long, snaking lines of those waiting for permission to pass; order was maintained by soldiers with guns and rough raised voices. Young mothers struggled to carry overhead unwieldy bundles of rolled linens and bedding, and even small children dragged along overstuffed suitcases. Vans and cars were scarce, and to Jews they were already forbidden. Transportation inside the Jewish quarter was largely by rickshaw, and distraught families were forced to leave behind many of their largest and most treasured family items. All the swapping around was doubly stressful because the Germans kept changing their minds about which streets were to be included in the new district.

  The cruel melodrama unfolded everywhere on the streets in public view, and Irena had a front-row seat for the worst of the chaos. What if her apartment had been on the wrong side of the boundary? Irena knew it was all just chance. The ghetto began just to the east of her apartment in Wola. Moving her frail mother was a terrifying thought. Janina’s health was a source of constant worry. But if Irena’s apartment was not far from the new Jewish quarter, her office on Złota Street was even closer. Złota Street straddled the new ghetto. From the small windows upstairs, she and Irka Schultz could not miss the tragedy playing out in front of them.

  But Irena’s connection to this heartless diktat was deeply personal. She and her mother had been spared, but Adam and his mother, Leokadia, had not been. They were caught up in the madness, along with the rest of the Celnikier family: his aunts and uncles and cousins. It was only because Adam was her lover and not her husband that Irena was not forced to move to the ghetto with him. Had she been married to a Jew, she would have been treated as one.

  In 1940, Adam lived in an apartment at number 18, Bałuckiego Street, in the southern Mokotów district of Warsaw, well outside the ghetto boundaries. Adam was Jewish, and Mokotów was now an “Aryan” district. He would have to move like so many other tens of thousands across the city, and Irena’s heart ached for him. Adam struggled with the loss of his home. But it was the loss of his books that gutted Adam and left him stammering with disbelief and fury. A doctoral candidate and an historian, a man who lived inside his books and was already retreating into them more and more resolutely, few possessions mattered more to Adam than his library. And there was no way to take all of it with him into the ghetto. How could they possibly carry them—even if the Germans at the checkpoints did no
t burn the books of a Jewish man for sport—when Jews like him were forbidden the use of all but the most rudimentary transportation? Irena wanted to tell him they would find a way somehow. Adam brushed off any reassurance and, looking at the stacks of books in his apartment, glowered. He knew perfectly well that there was no way to take it all with him, and that there was no solution to the ghetto.

  It wasn’t only Adam who faced the pain of being uprooted and dispossessed in their circle. All of Irena’s Jewish friends from the Polish Free University and the social welfare offices were forced to make the move: Ewa Rechtman; Ala Gołąb-Grynberg and her small daughter, Rami; Rachela Rosenthal and her little girl; Ala’s mentor, Dr. Hirszfeld; Irena’s friend, attorney Józef Zysman, his wife Theodora, and their little boy, Piotr. And so, of course, were Adam’s Jewish wife and her relatives, including her mother-in-law, Leokadia Celnikier. Irena’s part in this bohemian love triangle was suddenly a whole lot more complicated. Adam’s mother took a dim view of her son’s way of living. Mother and son had never had an easy relationship, and the move to the ghetto did not improve matters. While the name of Adam’s wife remains a family secret, wartime property records show that some members of the Celnikier and Mikelberg families now lived in the same accommodations. Regina Mikelberg, though, was not among them. Regina moved, instead, with her parents and her brother and younger sister to an apartment in the northwest sector of the ghetto at number 30, Franciszkańska Street. And then, like everyone in the new Jewish quarter, Regina set about trying to figure out how to keep herself and her family from starving.

  • • •

  On the Aryan side, the practicalities of life were easier, but Irena was focused on this same question: How would her Jewish friends survive on the Germans’ paltry rations? How would her Jewish welfare clients?