Rumors that Dr. Korczak’s orphanage was being emptied swept through the ghetto just after nine o’clock that morning. Irena usually made her daily visits to the ghetto in the afternoons, when work was over and the loading at the Umschlagplatz was under way. That day she happened to come early, well before noon. Irena was a familiar face at the ghetto orphanage and one of the children’s favorite guests at their amateur theatricals. The children shrieked with pleasure at her small gifts and silly antics, and she stopped by to look in on her street children especially. When Irena heard the news that the children were all destined for deportation, she raced toward Sienna Street hoping somehow to get to the old doctor in time to warn or to help him.
But the SS had long since arrived at the orphanage with the orders. “The children were to have been taken away alone,” one witness remembered, and the doctor was given fifteen minutes to prepare them. Dr. Korczak steadfastly refused to leave the children. “You do not leave a sick child in the night,” Dr. Korczak stated bluntly, his voice barely containing its fury, “and you do not leave children at a time like this.” The German SS officer leading the procession laughed and told the professor to come along, then, if he wished, and good-naturedly asked a twelve-year-old boy carrying a violin to play a tune. The children set off from the orphanage singing.
The route to the loading platform was arduous. With children, the march across the ghetto, from south to north, might have taken as long as three or four hours. Irena first saw them coming at the corner of Żelazna Street, then turning into Leszno Street. It was a swelteringly hot day already—“insanely hot,” Irena said—and sometimes the children had to stop and rest, but as they turned the corner they were still marching confidently. Irena understood in an instant that the doctor had kept from them any fear or knowledge of what was coming. Anxious Jewish residents stayed off the blocked streets, and Irena remembered afterward there were only a handful of pedestrians. Those who braved the streets walked quickly, head down, toward their destinations, willing themselves to be invisible. But that day dozens, including Jonas Turkow, watched from windows or street corners in astounded silence as they witnessed the doctor’s three-mile walk through the ghetto with the orphans. The doctor’s face was a frozen mask of hard-won self-control, and Irena knew that he was already sick and struggling. But that morning his back was straight and he was carrying one of the weary toddlers. Am I dreaming? The thought floated through Irena’s mind. Is this possible? What is the possible guilt of these children? On the empty street corner, her eyes met the doctor’s for a moment. He didn’t stop to greet her. He did not smile. He said nothing. The doctor just kept walking. The children marched in rows of four, neatly turned out in their best holiday clothes and disciplined. Then Irena saw what the littlest ones were carrying.
In their hands they held the dolls that Dr. Witwicki, her old psychology professor at the University of Warsaw, had carved for them. Irena herself had smuggled the dolls through the ghetto checkpoints. She had given them to children at the centers, and when the boys and girls had only been allowed to take one object on their journey, this was what they had chosen. “Clutching the dolls in their little hands, holding them close to their hearts, they went on their last walk,” Irena said. She knew already what they did not. That they were going to the freight yard and to their execution.
At the Umschlagplatz, the guards drove them with whips and rifle butts, a hundred or a hundred and fifty at a time, into the holding grounds. Germans, Ukrainians, and Jewish policemen towered over the children’s heads, barking orders. There under the hot sun, after the chaos and bruising gauntlet, the children and the doctor waited until the railcars were loaded in the evening. Did Irena follow them as far as their final destination? If she did, at the outskirts of the corrals, she would have seen Ala and Nachum.
Nachum and Ala saw the children only at the last moment, when the boarding of the freight trains was about to begin. Nachum, aghast, rushed to the doctor’s side, hoping to stop him going. Witnesses say that Nachum was one of the last people to speak with Janusz Korczak and Stefania before the boxcars were loaded. This time Nachum was not his characteristic calm self. He was wild-eyed and desperate. He begged the old doctor to come with him to see the Germans. We will ask the Judenrat for a postponement, Doctor. Please, come with me. We can stop this. Januscz Korczak shook his head slowly. I cannot leave the children, not even for a moment. The doctor knew that if he turned his back, the Germans would herd the children into the waiting railway cars and he would never be allowed to join them.
The children, frightened, turned to Dr. Korczak for guidance. The doctor looked sadly at Nachum for one long final moment. That look would stay with Nachum and haunt him. Then, turning his back on Nachum and the ghetto, Janusz and Stefania calmly ushered the children into the boxcar, and the doctor stepped in behind them. In each arm he held a tired five-year-old. “I will never forget that sight,” said Nachum of the doctor’s dignity and the even greater dignity of the children who trusted him on this final journey. “It was not a simple boarding of the freight cars—it was an organized silent protest against this barbarism.” As Nachum watched the children silently enter the windowless boxcars, whose floors were already spread with the quicklime that would burn them—as the doors pressed shut on too many small bodies and were wired tightly closed behind them—this jovial and resilient actor broke down helplessly on the platform.
Irena was also inconsolable. “Remembering that tragic procession of innocent children marching to their death,” Irena said afterward, “I really wonder how the hearts of the eyewitnesses, myself included, did not break in two. . . . No, our hearts did not break.” But that evening “I used my last ounce of strength to walk into the house,” Irena said later. “Then I had a nervous breakdown . . .” Frightened by the depth of Irena’s despair, her mother finally could see no other option but to call a doctor for sedation. “Of all my most dramatic war-time experiences, including my ‘residence’ and torture in the Pawiak Prison, being tortured by the Gestapo on Szucha Street, watching young people die . . . not one left so great an impression on me as the sight of Korczak and his children marching to their death,” Irena said simply.
• • •
Still Ala and Nachum carried on, fighting bravely each day at the railway platform. Each morning Ala summoned her reserves and threw herself into the work that had united her and Irena in the beginning: saving the children. But at night, after the freight cars had started their gruesome journey eastward, in the hours before the Jewish police arrived to prepare for the next round of deportations, Ala lay in a dingy attic on Smocza Street thinking. One evening in that first week or two of August, Irena visited her there. The small room looked out over the rooftops of the Warsaw ghetto. The two old friends sat together holding hands, watching the sun setting. Ala was sad and serious. Irena pleaded with her.
Rami was safe on the Aryan side. Arek was with the partisans in the forests outside Warsaw, part of a Jewish fighting group preparing for armed resistance. Ala was in constant communication with the underground and would walk out of the ghetto at any moment. Irena knew a safe place with friends where Ala could go into hiding. She would hide Ala herself if necessary. She begged her friend to let her help her. Ala, in this envelope there are identity papers. Take them. Ala let them rest on the table between them. Irena, look at me. Irena understood. Ala was a thin, dark-complexioned woman approaching forty in the summer of 1942, with sharp Jewish features and “bad” looks, and Irena could not pretend that it was not dangerous. Papers would not be enough to save Ala if the Germans came looking.
But that wasn’t the only reason Ala left the papers untouched. “She was waging a quiet but intense battle with herself,” said Irena of those hours they talked that evening. “I understood her. Her child was out there, her husband [Arek] was in the forest, fighting, but this was the place she loved—where her work was, her responsibilities, the sick, the old, the children.” Irena understood because, by now, she wa
s also waging a quiet and intense private battle inside herself. She, too, was torn between wanting to save the children and just wanting to save herself and Adam.
Ala needed to wage her battle a bit longer. She needed to consider. Ala could not bring herself to flee yet, not when it meant leaving her people. Others around her were now making a different decision, and Irena tried to persuade her. There is no shame in living, Ala. Ala’s friends were already leaving. Dr. Radlińska’s cousin and Ala’s longtime collaborator, Dr. Ludwik Hirszfeld, had fled the ghetto, escaping through the crypts that ran beneath the All Saints Church and guided by Jan Żabiński, the zookeeper in Warsaw and an officer in the clandestine Home Army. Dozens of refugees were hiding in the empty animal cages and in the grounds of the zoo, where Irena was a frequent and welcome visitor.
Ala did not fault the doctor. She was not a woman prepared to judge the actions of others when these were the stakes. There was no right or wrong in Ala’s mind; there were only the dictates of circumstance and conscience. After Irena left her friend, promising to come back soon to talk more, Ala sat awake for a long time considering. Irena’s envelope still rested on the small table. Finally, Ala made her decision. Picking up a stub of pencil and smoothing out a small piece of paper, she began to write what she knew might be a final letter. It was addressed to Jadwiga Strzałecka, the friend and orphanage director on the Aryan side who was caring for Rami. The words were a mother’s farewell to her small and much-loved daughter. “I give my child in your care, raise my child as if it was yours,” she wrote. And then at last she put her hand out to touch the identity papers. She already knew she would never use them. She carefully tucked them away in her satchel. In the morning she would give them to a Jewish woman on the street—the ultimate gift of survival. As Ludwik Hirszfeld said of Ala later, “She struggled between the instinct of a mother and that of a nurse and a social worker. The latter won—she stayed with the orphans.”
• • •
As the roundups drew closer, even Adam agreed at last to let Irena and her underground contacts lead him and his remaining family out of the ghetto. Adam had resisted. Like Irena’s other Jewish friends, Adam was determined to carry on working and trying to help the children at the youth center. It was work that Irena more than anyone understood and cherished. A shared commitment to helping the abandoned and orphaned children of the ghetto bound them together, and watching Adam across a room, bending over these small children and caring for them, only deepened her love and passion for him. It wasn’t only the children either. Adam’s family ties, complex and agonizing, fueled his indecision.
All throughout July, that was what Adam’s furrowed brow told Irena over and over, and Irena tried to tamp down her worry. And perhaps it was sometimes worry mixed, even, with a tinge of jealousy. At night in her narrow bed, listening to her mother’s labored breathing, Irena prayed now. Her lips made the words silently as she asked for the life—and the love—of Adam.
By the end of the month the situation was growing critical. When Adam’s aunt Dora was shot dead in Warsaw at the end of July, probably not far from the property that she and his uncle Jakub owned with members of the Mikelberg family, Adam was rattled. When word came that his eighteen-year-old cousin, Józefina, had been gunned down in Otwock after being caught hiding from the Germans, fear gripped the family. How much longer would it be before Adam’s mother was another victim of the Germans and their deportations? When Irena pleaded with him to let her find a safe refuge for him and Leokadia now, Adam agreed.
Saving Leokadia was dangerous but not impossible, and that summer Adam’s mother was spirited out of the ghetto. It was a perilous undertaking to help any Jewish resident cross the ghetto boundary, of course, but once a Jewish woman was on the other side and had new Aryan papers, her survival depended in large part on how well she could act the part of a Polish woman. However, a circumcised Jewish man, whose religion could be verified in a moment, lived in constant danger, and Adam was a particular challenge for another reason. Despite his new Polish identity papers, which transformed him into the gentile Stefan Zgrembski, his face told a different story. Adam would have to stay hidden at every moment from everyone except his guardians and—if she could arrange it—Irena. Because Irena wanted, desperately, even recklessly, to find him a hiding place where they could be together, and that was, perhaps, the most difficult part of the equation.
Irena turned to another of the old college friends whom she had drawn into her network. Maria Kukulska ran one of the all-important “emergency rooms” for Irena’s smuggled children out of the spacious apartment in the Praga district that she shared with her teenage daughter. Climbing the stairs to Maria’s apartment, Irena debated with herself: Could she ask this of a friend, even a friend as dear and brave as Maria? She would not pretend. She was asking Maria to risk her life and the life of her daughter to keep Adam. Fear was chilling. Irena cradled the warm cup of tea that Maria poured for her. Maria looked at her friend and then laughed. You love him, don’t you, Irena? Irena laughed, too, and nodded. In that case, there was no question. Of course Adam would move into Maria’s spare bedroom.
Regina Mikelberg, however, was loaded at the Umschlagplatz onto one of the death camp trains that summer. As the door was sealed shut on the dozens trapped inside the fetid cattle cars, Regina grew frantic. When the cars rolled slowly away from Warsaw, the cries of fear and the rising stench were too much for the slender thirty-year-old woman. She still had a sister in the ghetto. She had her family. And, perhaps, if she really was Adam’s first Jewish wife, she had a husband she could turn to, however loose the ties that by now bound them. Whatever else was true, Regina knew Adam and Irena, and that would be part of what would save her. If only she could get free, Janka Grabowska and Irena would find somewhere to hide her. In the sweltering heat of the railway car, where body pushed against body, a dim ray of light shone through a small, dirty ventilation window. It was a narrow opening. Regina, though, was slender and determined. She pulled herself up toward the opening, and a man below let her put a foot on his shoulder. His sad, knowing eyes urged her to risk it. With a mighty push, Regina threw herself through the window and onto the hard tracks below. Without looking back, she ran into the darkness as the train rattled onward, bound for Treblinka.
• • •
When Irena tried to look for Rachela Rosenthal, another of Dr. Radlińska’s girls and also a ghetto youth circle leader with Ewa and Adam, her heart grew heavy. Irena searched everywhere in the ghetto for her friend. Rachela was nowhere. And nowhere, they all knew by now, surely meant those trains destined for the east. Irena’s heart whispered the terrible thought that Rachela—bright and boisterous Rachela—might have gone willingly in order to try to find her missing five-year-old daughter. Rachela was living the nightmare of everyone in the ghetto. She had turned her back, and her entire family disappeared to the Umschlagplatz in the interval. There was a powerful incentive to follow them.
Rachela’s loss of her child unhinged her. It was a sorrow intensified by another cruel fact of the ghetto. Her child’s disappearance was the only thing that gave Rachela any decent chance of survival that summer. During the roundups “hardly anyone bothered about the children,” one young Jewish woman remembered. The children “wandered about, neglected among the masses of humanity,” during street selections. Anyone over the age of thirty-five and mothers with small children were selected automatically for the railway platform. Children who understood too clearly the stakes ran from their parents now in order to save them. “How wise and understanding they were, those little ones,” that young witness recalls, “trying to persuade their mothers to go on without them.”
Irena searched and finally abandoned hope. But Rachela was, by astonishing chance, also among the survivors that summer. Pressed into a work gang and marched each morning outside the ghetto for slave labor, she was numb with grief. And Irena was right to worry that Rachela no longer cared one way or the other about survival. She would n
ot have lifted a finger now to save herself, not after she had failed her daughter. Others in her work gang, however, were determined to flee the Germans, and at the end of a shift, as the backs of the guards were turned to them, a young man leaned in to whisper to Rachela, We are fleeing the ghetto. Get ready. And then the others scattered in all directions around her. Rachela stood alone in the middle of an unfamiliar street on the Aryan side of the city, and she wanted her daughter. She had no plan, so she started walking. She wandered the streets hopelessly that evening, ready to die, willing someone to shoot her. And when curfew fell, that would be inevitable. She didn’t have long to wait now. A girl passing her on the street stopped suddenly in front of her. Rachela! Rachela looked up and recognized a Polish woman she had known from before the war at socialist party meetings. The young woman—in the resistance and an activist like Irena—saw in an instant Rachela’s danger. Come with me. There is a safe place where I will take you, the woman urged her. Rachela let herself be taken into hiding.
Irena searched for her friend for weeks in the ghetto after her disappearance but could not find her. Like Ala, however, Rachela was also destined to become a heroine. In hiding on the Aryan side, she soon joined her Polish friend in the resistance and would become, before the war was over, a ferocious underground fighter.
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