Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Irena craved the hum of activity and, faced with challenges like this, couldn’t imagine herself trapped at home, bored, nursing babies. At work she threw herself into finding solutions and was busier than ever. Her small network of coworkers had started out falsifying internal office records to funnel welfare support to needy Jewish families. Now she was also on the hunt for something else: blank copies of the official documents that sometimes passed through their hands in social welfare services—the paperwork needed to give Jewish friends new Aryan identities.

  With new “Polish” papers a Jewish family might, after all, circumvent these orders, if they were just a bit daring. They might, like Dr. Radlińska, disappear somewhere in the sprawling metropolis of Warsaw and pass unnoticed. The trouble was convincing Jewish friends to risk it. Adam simply refused. He would not leave the ghetto. His stubbornness drove Irena wild with worry. It also hurt. Adam was surely free by 1940 as far as Orthodox Jewish law saw it. Or if he wasn’t free, he could have been. Divorce in the Orthodox tradition was as simple as him offering his wife a get—a written commitment to set her free to marry elsewhere. It was Irena whose Catholic marriage was an impediment. But his refusal to choose bothered her. What did it say about their relationship? The truth was that Adam had plunged into a deep depression and was incapable of any action. And guilt was surely part of this tangled emotional calculus for him. How could he save himself and abandon his extended family?

  And anyhow, as repressive as the orders were, most in the Jewish community still believed that they would be safer in the ghetto, living apart from the Germans and from their often anti-Semitic Polish neighbors. Everyone assured each other that the changes would be minor. Most people believed that, like the medieval ghettos across Europe, the gates would only be shut at night, and in the daytime the city would go about its business. We’ll still meet at each other’s apartments, just as always, they told each other. We’ll still live, after all, in the same city. If the ghetto remained open, what was the danger, really? But already in October work started on a ten-foot-high brick wall that would run through the middle of the block that divided Złota Street from its neighbor to the north, Sienna. A small section of the wall still stands there in Warsaw, a few doors down from the location of Irena’s wartime office, one of the few remnants today of the ghetto perimeter.

  • • •

  The new Jewish quarter was an area of the city originally intended for about 80,000 residents, and most parts of the neighborhood had streets with working-class houses that lacked even basic modern amenities. But some parts of the area, especially the grander houses running along Sienna Street, were gracious bourgeois districts. The wealthiest members of the Jewish community quickly snapped up those apartments. Irena’s friends were largely among them. Her friends were from assimilated, affluent families, and sometimes they had not actively practiced Judaism for decades. Some, like Dr. Radlińska and her cousin, Dr. Hirszfeld, had Jewish roots but had converted to Catholicism. These facts meant nothing to the Germans. Some, like Adam and Józef, simply thought of themselves as Polish. Others, like Ala and her husband Arek, were proud Zionists whose plans to emigrate to Palestine had been interrupted by world politics. But they were all educated, successful people with graduate degrees and professional careers, and they all spoke Polish fluently. Perhaps most important, they had a wide network of contacts outside of Jewish circles.

  Among the Jews of Warsaw, Irena’s friends were in a perilously small minority. They were the privileged few. Only a fraction of the city’s Jewish community ever blended into the cultural life of Poland, and for the most part the Jews truly were a nation-within-a-nation. By the best estimate, in the words of one wartime survivor, “In Warsaw, there were several thousand Jews who practiced professions in which they intermingled with Polish society—lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, writers, actors.” Irena’s friends were all part of that. The rest of the city’s Jewish population—more than 350,000 people on the eve of the occupation—lived and worked in shocking isolation from their “Slavic” neighbors.

  In the beginning, even in the ghetto, money could buy considerable protection from want and deprivation. Irena’s friends moved to the better parts of the area and mostly tried to be optimistic. In other parts of the new quarter, though, the conditions were far less salubrious, and life was grim from the outset. Those who kept to the old practices and to the old languages mostly found themselves on streets where the apartments were cramped and scruffy. These unassimilated families were typically both much larger and much poorer, and those who had come to Warsaw as refugees were already especially desperate. The majority of these families did not speak Polish, nor could they have known as friends any of their ethnically Polish neighbors in the city. In the apartments above the street-front shops, three, four, even five families lived cramped together in one small apartment, sharing hallway toilets and jockeying for floor space. They were conditions ripe for disease and disaster.

  That autumn, one of Irena’s friends did steadfastly refuse to move to the ghetto. She was a fellow social worker named Maria, and by 1940 she was already part of Irena’s secret welfare fraud network. Maria had not been born Jewish and neither had her husband, another of their friends and colleagues. He was Dr. Henryk Palester, a specialist in infectious diseases in the government’s Ministry of Health who worked closely with both Irena’s friend Ala and Ala’s mentor Dr. Hirszfeld. Maria’s May-to-December marriage to a man nearly thirty years her senior had scandalized her old-fashioned family, but it wasn’t only the age difference between these two idealistic socialists that rattled her parents. It was the fact that Henryk, a fair-haired, balding gentleman with a long, handsome nose and square black glasses, had also taken the unusual step as a younger man of converting to Judaism. And in 1940 that meant that the Palester family—Maria, Henryk, and their two children, a middle schooler named Małgorzata and a teenager named Kryštof—should have been busy packing for a move to the ghetto.

  Maria had other plans, however. Although her husband Henryk had been summarily dismissed from his government job when the Jewish employment restrictions were put in place, they all had Catholic birth certificates and baptism records. Unless the Germans came looking for them, Maria figured there was a better-than-average chance that they could ride out the war under their own name, in their own apartment, by just carrying on as Polish Catholics. They were not disavowing Henryk’s Judaism, but this was not the moment to be pointing it out to the occupiers, either. When Maria’s Jewish-born friend and neighbor—a professor and the mother of a preteen daughter—let on that she was planning to make the move to the ghetto as ordered, Maria persuaded her to risk it also. Maria Palester was already certain that the ghetto was a trap set for the Jewish community. Something whispered to her that here was terrible danger.

  Maria refused to spend the war skulking around and hiding out in her apartment. It was all a game of confidence, she figured. The best bet was to hide in the open. Fear was a gambler’s tell, and Maria was a sharp and experienced cardplayer. When her regular bridge game turned out to include some Gestapo informers and even some ethnic German Volksdeutsche, she made a point of being charming and vivacious. Maria was a slender woman, with dark, curly hair and high cheekbones, and she knew how to carry it off gracefully. It could never hurt to have a bit of protection if they were discovered, and everyone knew already that bribes could solve all sorts of problems. Maria’s Gestapo connections would, before the war was over, be a life-or-death matter for Irena.

  Within weeks, there was no doubt that the Palester family had made the right decision. November 16, 1940, was a Saturday. Jewish families, slowly walking to clandestine Shabbat services in cellars and attics, were stunned to learn that overnight the ghetto had been sealed entirely. It came like a thunderbolt, residents said afterward. No one had seen this coming. Jews were forbidden to leave the closed area, ostensibly to stop the recurrence of the communicable diseases for which they were blamed on ugly racis
t posters that went up around the city.

  At first, despite the presence of German, Polish, and Jewish soldiers at the outposts, the barricades were policed lightly. All afternoon and for another week after, the ghetto remained half open. That weekend, as word spread across Warsaw, Polish residents—both friends and strangers—arrived in huge numbers at the walls to bring supplies of bread and gifts of flowers. Others on the Aryan side worked to arrange shipments of fresh produce into hastily organized ghetto markets, and whole families now searched the makeshift market stalls that sprang up out of canvas-covered wagons or on rickety tables for food for their families.

  When Adam and Irena walked through the streets of the ghetto together that first week, wet laundry hung from upstairs windows flapped in the autumn wind, and the tide of people carried them along unnoticed. It would be the last time they could walk like this, out in the open, for years to come. Irena loved Adam, but already things were not easy. His fatalism and passivity grated on her, and sometimes now they quarreled. Why would he not leave with her? He could walk out of the ghetto with her today. She would find false identity papers. She would find them for his wife and mother, too, if that were what he wanted. It was not impossible to be together. But Adam wouldn’t or couldn’t.

  Soon the boundaries were guarded with ruthless determination, and, as the food ran out, the prices of everything inside the ghetto rose catastrophically. Market shipments were confiscated, and Irena was aghast when she learned that the official rations allotted to her Jewish friends amounted to a paltry 184 daily calories. Following the law meant certain starvation. Smugglers naturally began to set up cunning operations, using small and nimble street children to climb the perimeter. The Germans responded by adding loops of barbed wire and broken bottles to the walls, still under furious construction, and by shooting the children. Irena listened to the tap of bricks, one against another. And every day the wall that separated her from Adam grew higher and higher.

  • • •

  When the ghetto lines were drawn, the Jewish hospital on Dworska Street was left on the Aryan side of the boundary. Those unlucky enough to need medical care now had to pass through German checkpoints. So did the hospital staff each morning. As Ala Gołąb-Grynberg lightly kissed her small, sleeping daughter good-bye in the darkness every morning that autumn, it hurt. She knew she might not make it home alive that evening. It had not taken very many crossings at the ghetto boundaries to understand this stark reality. But, as the chief of nursing, Ala had no choice—not ethically. Along with a team of seventy-five other nurses and doctors, twice a day she ran this terrible gauntlet.

  The hospital staff huddled together just before seven each morning on Twarda Street throughout November, waiting for the signal. Ala tried not to remember what this street used to be like before the war, when it was a happy bustle of middle-class houses and Jewish shops. Now residents scuttled along the edges of the buildings, as far from the checkpoints as they could press themselves, and farther along the road the Germans had turned the street’s grand synagogue into a fodder warehouse and a rank stable for horses. She was glad to see Ludwik—Dr. Hirszfeld—huddling in his overcoat against the bitter morning cold, his tufts of white hair peeking out from beneath a dignified fedora. Leave it to Ludwik to look elegant even in the ghetto, even after what Ala could guess had been another late night in the cabaret café around the corner, where he was a regular. Ludwik Hirszfeld had a passion for sultry jazz and old love songs, and Arek’s glamorous cousin, Wiera, was one of the greatest ghetto singers.

  As the clock approached seven precisely, the hospital staff gathered together and slowly approached the checkpoint at the corner where Twarda and Złota Streets intersected. Irena’s old office wasn’t far, and if Ala craned her neck she might have made out the doorway in the distance. But after German review of some office files turned up more questions than answers, Irena had been summarily transferred to a satellite facility well away from the ghetto. Around Ala, nonchalant police officers with cocked helmets pushed bicycles along the cobblestone streets, guns flung casually over their shoulders. It was just another start of their workday, too, at the ghetto stations.

  At the checkpoint, a sign in German and Polish warned, Typhus Infection Area, Authorized Passage Only, and beside her Ala heard Dr. Hirszfeld growl softly. Her mentor had said often enough that if you wanted to create a typhus epidemic, this ghetto was an excellent way to do it. Already the hospital staff was on the front lines of that hopeless battle. One in five of her admitting staff would succumb to the disease from treating patients. But long before any of them faced those risks, there was the immediate danger ahead of them. They still had to pass the sentinels, who would frog-march them under armed guard to the doors of the hospital. That morning, luck was not with them. It had happened before, and it would happen again. But every time they were left shaken and bruised and terrified. As they entered the Aryan zone and began their brisk walk, Ala caught sight of a handful of young SS men sauntering in their direction. Ala dropped her eyes to the pavement instantly. Don’t look at them, she told herself silently. But looking away made no difference, and she heard herself gasp as the butt of a rifle came down hard on the chest of one of the doctors in the front of their convoy. He fell, and she turned away again from the sounds of thudding boots hitting bone as he lay there moaning. The rest passed in a daze. More rifle butts. More boots, followed by cries of pain and words in German. As Polish residents hurrying to work looked on in astonishment, the doctors were lined up to do jumping jacks, faster and faster, until they toppled over amid howls of laughter and the SS moved on, looking for fresh entertainment.

  Soon even these forays outside the ghetto were forbidden. Ala could not say she was sorry. In December the Jewish hospital was closed, and the medical teams were assigned instead to smaller clinics scattered throughout the ghetto, at a greatly reduced capacity. It wasn’t enough to meet the overwhelming need, and things inside the Jewish quarter went downhill quickly. By the end of 1940 the district had become notorious as a cemetery for the living. Maria and Henryk Palester lived in constant danger of detection, but it was better by far than the alternative.

  It was all part of a final solution that, however dimly conceived, had been inexorably set into motion before the fall of Warsaw. In that same directive, SS leader Reinhard Heydrich reminded his henchmen in Warsaw that “the first prerequisite for the final aim is the concentration of the Jews” in urban areas. Only “cities which are rail junctions should be selected as concentration points,” he informed his agents. Warsaw was one of the largest of all those crossroads. As soon as the local Jewish population of Warsaw was rounded up, the refugees shipped in from other cities started arriving. All Jewish communities of less than five hundred were dissolved across the Generalgouvernment, and their residents—when they survived—were forced to relocate as well to the cities. Eventually, Jews from Germany would also be deported to the Warsaw ghetto, crowding conditions further. The result was more than a half a million people forced to starve inside a walled and guarded district.

  Adam was one of them. Regina was another.

  No one was in the least surprised to learn that, within weeks, with her characteristic resourcefulness and determination, Irena had obtained an epidemic control pass that allowed her to be in and out of the ghetto constantly.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Youth Circle

  Warsaw, 1940–1941

  Irena was shivering, but she was trying hard to concentrate. Rickettsia prowazekii. Bacterium. Pediculus humanus humanus. Louse infection. The room was crowded with young men and women, each scratching cramped notes in the dark on precious paper.

  Across the room, Irena exchanged a worried glance with her friend Ala. Ala was rail thin now in the early months of 1941, with sharp black eyes, and her ill-fitting clothes hung from her shoulders. Her daughter, Rami, was five that year, and Irena knew that Ala lived with her parents, Moshe and Rachel; her older brother, Janek; and a two-year-old orphan
girl named Dahlia—all crammed into an apartment around the corner at number 4, Smocza Street.

  Ala was now the chief nurse in the ghetto, an official appointment by the Judenrat, and the position allowed her a rare ghetto pass and the right to make professional visits on the streets of the Jewish quarter after the curfew. She was also in charge of leading the youth circle at number 9, Smocza Street, and she was secretly organizing, along with Dr. Radlińska’s cousin, Dr. Ludwik Hirszfeld, community-run sanitation courses and paramilitary medical training like this lecture. Some young Jewish people were already talking about armed resistance. Ala’s husband, Arek, who had miraculously survived the eastern front and made his way home to Warsaw, was one of those early activists. Arek, though, had not returned to the Jewish quarter. He lived instead in the forests outside the city and had joined the partisans there. Career prospects in the ghetto, after all, were dim for actors, and already the children were going hungry. Irena could see it all took a toll on her friend.

  Now, intoning firmly, the lecturer, Dr. Landau, emphasized his point again by tapping his chalk against the makeshift blackboard. There was one candle in the room, and he taught in the shadows. But he didn’t care that they were learning under difficult circumstances or that this was a dangerous, clandestine lesson. Dr. Landau was a strict disciplinarian, unbending. He was firm and gruff, and he had about him something that reminded Irena of a sergeant or maybe even a general.

  Sanitation is the key to stemming the epidemic that is gaining on us, he went on, tapping the blackboard from time to time to punctuate another sentence. Typhus depended on cramped quarters and confined human populations to multiply like this. Death rates have shot up from just under a thousand to several thousand a month, and we will have to work on measures . . .