Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  “I didn’t ask for any details,” Władka said later. “She asked me to take those children and to find them a safe home in a foster family. I agreed to help without any questions.” Turning toward the orphanage, Władka tilted her head. I should get back. Come another time, and we can discuss how we make placements.

  When Irka returned, she brought with her another contact, a woman whom she explained might sometimes bring the children to Władka. The new contact was a twenty-six-year-old woman, and her name, Irka said, was Sonia. But “Sonia” was the code name of a Polish nurse named Helena Szeszko, one of the newest additions to Irena Sendler’s growing network.

  Ala Gołąb-Grynberg was the one who had drawn Helena into their conspiracy. Helena Szeszko was a senior operative in a resistance cell in the medical underground. Ala was the chief nurse in the ghetto. They had worked together, hand in glove, for months already. Across the city, there were dozens of small cells, each working in secrecy and isolation. Slowly those circles were finding points of connection.

  The need for a medical underground was urgent. After all, neither sick Jews hiding on the Aryan side nor wounded resistance operatives caught in the ghetto could check themselves into local hospitals, and everywhere in the Jewish quarter the need for supplies was desperate. Another old friend was at the heart of this sister network: one of its leaders was Dr. Juliusz Majkowski in the infectious disease offices. Some of his epidemic control passes had gone to Irena, Irka, Jaga, and Jadwiga. But one of them had gone to Helena. That meant that Helena, too, could come and go from the ghetto. And she could take sick Jewish children and hidden supplies with her in the municipal ambulances.

  Władka knew nothing of this. She knew nothing of this until years after. Knowing was dangerous. “It was enough to know that [Irka] had to take the Jewish children out of the ghetto and put them in a safe place,” she said. And it was enough to know that “Sonia”—and sometimes also Ala Gołąb-Grynberg—would appear at her door at a moment’s notice. Ala’s husband, Arek, was still in and out of the ghetto, working with the Jewish resistance, and his underground contacts—along with Ala’s senior position at the Judenrat—meant that Ala, too, could slip in and out of the ghetto anytime she needed. Sometimes, Ala’s daughter remembers today, her mother took the little girl with her on these trips into that other world. “My mother took me out,” she says. “I don’t remember how. I was out a couple of times coming and going.” But mostly Ala went alone.

  At the orphanage the women established a code. There was a telephone at the Father Boduen children’s home, and when someone rang Władka, the conversations were nothing but frivolous girl talk. They chatted idly about borrowing skirts or scarves. They would make plans to come for tea or check in on ailing mothers. There would be a day and a time. And there would always be something about color. Color and clothing was how the right child could be identified—now and later. Władka kept a careful log of the clothes and the children’s appearances, especially the ones who came to her without papers. How else, after the war, would their parents find them? Władka’s simple notations would very quickly inspire in Irena something bold and amazing. Władka’s modest accounting of the waifs and orphans who passed through her care was almost certainly the reason Irena herself now kept a master list of all the children.

  Healthy children who were fair-haired and blue-eyed or those who didn’t look stereotypically Jewish could be integrated into the life of the orphanage once the appropriate false documents were located and an official registry number could be given. False documents were one of Helena Szeszko’s specialities. Helena and her husband, Leon, got their start in the underground setting up a cell to forge identity papers. “Polish”-looking children weren’t the ones who gave Irena Sendler the nightmares that were already starting to plague her sleep by 1942. Once these children were safely on the Aryan side, saving them was not yet so uncertain. Getting out took courage. And sometimes the children were consummate actors. Ala came from a famous theatrical family. Now she coached children at playing sick in order to save them. More often, though, on their perilous ambulance rides with hidden children, Ala and Helena counted on the German fear of infection and hid the youngster under piles of dirty rags or inside already occupied coffins. That was bad enough, but not what gave Irena night terrors. What jolted her awake at night were dreams about the children with “bad” Semitic features.

  Irena’s fears were not unfounded. These children couldn’t be seen even for an instant on the Aryan side and arrived at the orphanage in burlap sacks slung over a workman’s shoulders, delivered to the back door as laundry or potatoes. For these arrivals Władka had to be sure a foster family was ready to take the children instantly and keep them constantly quiet and hidden. These youngsters were rarely at the Father Boduen children’s home for more than a few hours. Sometimes they came with Helena, sometimes with Irka or Ala, and sometimes—as the number of children grew in the spring of 1942—with Jaga Piotrowska and Jadwiga Deneka.

  When these children could not be placed instantly, the women had no choice but to take desperate chances and keep them in their own homes until there were arrangements. Irena, Jaga, Jadwiga, and Władka all hid children in their apartments sometimes. At Władka’s, her elementary school–age son, Andrzej, had the grave responsibility of helping his mother care for desperately ill younger children. Today, Andrzej is a distinguished elderly gentleman with a warm smile and gracious manner still living in Warsaw. He remembers those days with his mother and how his job as a small boy was taking the young Jewish hideouts to the bathroom down the hall, where someone had to watch them carefully at the toilet. Little bodies coming back from the brink of starvation, he says, with the grim expression of someone who remembers, could suffer from appalling gastric troubles.

  The children came and went from the Father Boduen children’s home, and with every passing day the Gestapo grew more suspicious. German agents combed Władka’s official records, searching for any scrap of evidence. But the real records were never in the file cabinets. Władka would never be so foolish. When the paperwork frustrated them, the Gestapo thugs in their midst held guns to Władka’s head in the corridor and bullied all the staff with threats of mass executions. By the spring of 1942, their network grew and so did the surveillance. The children who came and went officially were carefully monitored and their paperwork scrutinized by the occupiers. But it only meant, Irena stubbornly concluded, that more of the children would have to come and go, at ever greater risk, completely off the record.

  Although the Gestapo didn’t know it yet, it was Irena’s network they were hunting. Irena was the tactical commander of this growing citizens’ army, which now included nearly two dozen people drawn together from the political underground, the welfare offices, and the Jewish community. The risks with that number of people were enormous—and no one was in more danger than Irena.

  • • •

  When Irena’s colleague Irka Schultz discovered the little girl in the sewer, it should have all been easy. But the entire operation nearly crumbled because of another risk they had not weighed carefully enough. The child had “good” looks. Irka passed the emergency code along to Irena and then to Władka. The child needed medical attention quickly, and the orphanage had staff doctors. Because the fair-haired toddler looked so quintessentially Polish, Irena and Irka decided to risk going through legitimate channels at the Father Boduen children’s home.

  The women quickly agreed on a plan and a story. Irka would take the child to the orphanage and hand her over to the clerk at reception. There would have to be a formal report to the German police, notifying them of a foundling, and Irka would write in her careful hand how she, a social worker, in nothing more than the course of her duties, had chanced upon the little girl in a stairwell somewhere far from the Jewish quarter. When an investigation turned up nothing, the child would be allowed to stay at the orphanage. After all, the world was full of war orphans.

  The plan, however, went terribly
wrong from the first moment. In the orphanage clinic, a brusque nurse took the little girl away and firmly pointed Irka to a hard chair set far back from the doorway. Wait here, Pani. Irka sat. Paperwork, she supposed. With the Germans, there was always more paperwork. What Irka could not know was that, behind closed doors, her life hung in the balance. The duty physician had taken one good look at this famished child and she was already on the phone with the police, demanding they take action. The doctor never guessed the child was Jewish. She guessed instead that Irka was a child abuser and the little girl’s unwed mother. When a Polish policeman arrived to escort her to the station around the corner, Irka was dumbstruck and left reeling.

  How do you prove you are not a child’s mother? Irka tried asking the policeman. She desperately needed to know the answer. Irka insisted all afternoon that the child was not her own. She explained that she had found her. No one there, the police informed her tartly, believed that story. Irka was flummoxed. And soon she started to be frightened. She could hardly tell the truth. It would be a certain death sentence for her and the toddler. Helping a Jewish child meant execution, and it was obvious to anyone where a child climbing out of a sewer had come from.

  They went around and around in circles. At last, the officer snapped shut his folder and stood up, smoothing out his jacket. There will be a thorough investigation, Pani Schultz, the bored officer warned her. Until then . . . He didn’t need to explain. He simply slammed the door shut behind him. Irka’s head sunk into her hands at the thought of what it all meant. The child would be interviewed. It was almost certain that the little girl would betray her unwittingly by speaking some word or another in Yiddish. She was a child. She couldn’t possibly know better. Irka lay awake on the hard cell bed all that night thinking about just one thing. Disaster was coming: How was she going to get a message to Irena?

  When a young boy thrust the scribbled message toward her and slipped off quickly, Irena knew it was bad news. Władka had heard about some trouble at the clinic. For days, as the court date loomed, the women in the office network racked their brains to come up with some way to save Irka from a prison sentence that was beginning to look increasingly certain. It wasn’t just that prison was a brutal place. Convicted felons were fodder for the concentration camps. At last Irena had to admit defeat. There was only one solution that she could see, and it was one that would endanger all of them. Irena and her contacts at the orphanage would have to take the indignant physician into their confidence as their newest, unwitting conspirator. The orphanage’s director was enlisted to explain to the doctor that Irka was not the one who had brutalized this child. It was the ghetto.

  The doctor, aghast, immediately agreed to drop the charges, and the courageous director ran interference with the police, blithely offering false testimony. With an apologetic shrug, she explained that, anyhow, the evidence had gone missing. The child’s real mother had come to fetch the toddler, and who knew where they had gone? Home somewhere, surely. The ruse worked—because what else could the police do, really?—but Irena knew this was a lose-lose proposition. It all looked very suspicious, and it created a good deal of talk and attention. Talk and attention were dangerous. Now Irena had one more unwitting conspirator to manage and a high-risk operation that was perilously close to being an open secret. They couldn’t go on like this. She needed to find a safer means of transferring children to city orphanages. The transfers had to happen higher up the chain.

  It also had to happen urgently. A new fear was taking grip inside the ghetto. On her visits to see Ala on Smocza Street, Ala told her now of the terrible rumors reaching her contacts in the underground. Whispered reports were spreading in Warsaw, with news of death in the east. In January, a thirty-year-old Jewish man named Szlama Ber Winer, who had escaped a camp at a place called Chełmno, arrived in the city with terrifying stories. He told of how thousands were murdered in the forest, gassed together in long containers, and his listeners wept to hear him bear witness to the agonized screams of fathers made to piss on the open graves of their families and then made to lie down among them to be executed in a hail of gunfire. But there were whispers, too, whispers that soon the Germans would round up all the children under the age of twelve and take them to a special camp, a city of children. Many in the Jewish quarter could not believe these tales were anything except crazy rumors. Those who did believe them—young men like Adam—began talking about armed Jewish resistance, and families started making immediate plans to get their sons and daughters out of the district. It was no coincidence that, by the spring of 1942, the number of children that Irena and her conspirators were smuggling out of the ghetto was exploding.

  Irena knew she would have to bring still more people into the secret. The Father Boduen children’s home was just one of the social welfare institutions and orphanages she was using to place children, but the operation at the home needed to be streamlined and expanded. She would also need to find other ways to place children in foster families, through other underground connections. One person had the power to make this happen: the social welfare administrator Jan Dobraczyński, the man whose politics Irena questioned.

  Jan Dobraczyński had balked at the danger before and returned dozen of children to the ghetto. And how could she trust a man with politics so different from her own, a man with anti-Semitic feelings? Jaga tried to remind Irena that she was wrong in her judgment of Jan. He was guided by his Catholic faith, and he did not lack a moral compass, even if he and Irena could not agree on which direction true north rested. Jan was as committed as any of them to the underground Polish state that they were all building. Jaga’s face said to Irena that she was being narrow-minded and stubborn. We need his help, Jaga told her gently. Still, Irena resisted.

  Something else was nagging at Irena. What to do about the lists that they were keeping? Jaga understood the problem. She, too, was worried. Only Irena and her closest conspirators ever knew the real names of these children whose identities were disappearing. Only Irena knew everything. What if something happened to her? Would anyone ever again be able to find the children who were already being hidden under false names far across the city?

  What if . . .

  Irena would have to think up some solution.

  CHAPTER 7

  Road to Treblinka

  Warsaw, July 1942

  Since June 1941, some Jewish and Polish prisoners had been working in a labor camp in a small village near the Bug River, less than seventy miles northeast of Warsaw. A few miles away was the railway junction at Małkinia, and in the winter of 1942 the prisoners there worked in the gravel pits, surrounded by forests.

  In April 1942, the prisoners had been set to work on a new construction project. There was a branch spur of rail line built from Małkinia junction, just a little zigzag of a track, and long trenches were dug out. Workers from nearby villages were brought in to quickly set up barracks. The guards overseeing the camp were cruel and executed daily a couple of dozen Jewish workers. The field was covered with the dead, left for the dogs in the evening.

  On June 15, 1942, the new project was at last completed: a camp for Jews. Its centerpiece was a long brick-and-concrete building surrounded by barbed wire. “The SS men,” recalled Jan Sulkowski, a Polish prisoner made to work on the building, “said it was to be a bath. . . . A specialist from Berlin came to put tiles inside and he told me that he had already built such chambers elsewhere.” It looked clean and inviting. There were cloakrooms for undressing, with hooks for clothing and storerooms and a cashier’s post for storing valuables, and piles of soap and towels. Tickets would be required of everyone entering the baths, and the price would be twenty złotych.

  Later, there would be a Red Cross camp infirmary, with a bright white-and-red banner, where those too infirm or troublesome to make the walk to the baths could receive special, faster treatment. The make-believe train depot, with the posted times of imaginary arrivals and departures, would only be built months later, once word of the terrible
truth had made its way back to Warsaw. On July 23, 1942, when it received its first Jews from the ghetto, there was simply a railway platform to greet arrivals at the death camp in Treblinka and a flag that waved over the roof when the chambers were running. There was a sign on the platform, in German and Polish:

  Jews of Warsaw, for your attention! You are in a transit camp from which you will be sent to a labor camp. As a safeguard against epidemics you must immediately hand over your clothing and parcels for disinfection. Gold, silver, foreign currency and jewelry must be placed with the cashier, in exchange for a receipt. These will be returned to you at a later time upon presentation of the receipt. For bodily washing before continuing with the journey all arrivals must attend the bathhouse.

  In time, an orchestra would play Yiddish songs and cheerful camp marches to cover the sound of barking dogs and the screaming.

  • • •

  Henia Koppel was twenty-two in the summer of 1942. She lived in the ghetto with her husband, Josel, who was a rich banker and many years older. Her father, Aron Rochman, a successful businessman, lived not far away with Henia’s family, and for a time the combined wealth of the two families offered some protection, even in the ghetto. With considerable foresight, Josel stashed away much of their large fortune in a numbered account in Switzerland, and enough was still hidden in banknotes secreted underneath the floorboards or tucked deep inside a mattress somewhere that there was money that summer to buy Henia one of the coveted German work permits. The permit allowed her to work as slave labor at the Walter Toebbens ghetto factory as a seamstress. Working for the Germans brought a certain measure of safety. Soon mass resettlements to the labor camps were coming. There had been warnings and cryptic announcements. The ghetto had been holding its collective breath since at least April. The Germans didn’t so readily ship off to the labor camps outside Warsaw people who were already working in the city, so work papers were precious. By July, permits were selling for upward of 5,000 złotych—something approaching the modern equivalent of $15,000. They cost about the same as another increasingly desirable commodity that summer: cyanide capsules.