Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  • • •

  And then there was Ewa Rechtman. Like Ala, Ewa also could not bring herself to leave her children at the youth circle—not while every day the little ones were being rounded up and deported. Ewa was, Irena said, “their mother, father, sister, friend. . . . And they, in turn, became her biggest consolation.” Among the four girlfriends who before the war had sat at sidewalk coffee tables laughing and talking in Yiddish, Ala, Rachela, and Irena had all been so far—crippling personal tragedies aside—amazingly lucky. Ewa was not lucky that terrible summer.

  “It was a beautiful, warm day,” Irena remembered after, “when the hordes of German troops, armed to the teeth, cordoned off the ‘little ghetto,’ ” where Ewa was working. Ewa was trapped inside the blocked-off streets with her orphaned children. Irena rallied friends for a rescue mission the moment she heard, determined to risk anything and somehow to improvise a plan to save Ewa and the children from deportation. Ala’s commandeered ambulance, liberated from the Umschlagplatz, roared into service. Careening south through the ghetto, Irena’s hands shook. They would again use the ruse of the Umschlagplatz, perhaps. Irena would somehow convince the guards that Ewa was too weak to travel. Or they would hide her somewhere. They had done it enough times with children. Irena didn’t have a plan; she only had a mission. With her epidemic control badge in hand, she haggled with the guards, trying to convince them that she and her team were there on urgent and authorized business to carry out a district medical mission. If only they could get to Ewa. When one route was cut off, they frantically tried another—anything to gain access to the sealed-off streets.

  Across the barrier, dogs barked, and Irena heard gunshots. Someone yelled orders. There was a scream of anguish. Everything else was a frightening silence. One young guard seemed to hesitate as Irena’s eyes pleaded with him, and then he thought better of it. At every turn, they were refused permission to enter the cordoned-off neighborhood during the Aktion. Late that afternoon, in the heat of an August day in Warsaw, lost among the heaving masses of bodies, Ewa Rechtman was wired into one of the cattle cars at the Umschlagplatz, where doors were fastened shut with wire. Unlike Regina, she did not wriggle free of death at the last moment. Ewa perished in August at Treblinka in those white-tiled “showers.”

  Nightmares haunted Irena. The dreams were getting worse, and she would feel tired when she awoke. In those dreams of Ewa, it was always the same horror and futility, always the same terrible imaginings. Irena sometimes heard in her dreams, too, something else, the only mercy in those nighttime torments: her friend’s voice speaking to her once again, as always, “quiet, soothing, and full of kindness.”

  Everything else that had come before—all her office networks, all her smuggling and secrets—were nothing, Irena knew, in comparison to the magnitude of these crimes and losses. Worse yet, in mid-August, the deportations were not yet at the halfway mark. They would go on for another month with a breakneck intensity. Irena would match the Germans step for step in her rage and indignation at this barbarity. “Very quickly, we realized that the only way to save the children was to get them out,” she said, and she was absolutely, wildly determined.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Last Mile

  Warsaw, August–September 1942

  The ghetto was cleared that summer in orderly sections, and three weeks into the deportations the posters were tacked up ordering all residents in the neighborhood block that included Elektoralna and Leszno Streets to vacate their homes and report for selections on the morning of August 14, 1942.

  By August 14, 190,000 people had been transported to their deaths at Treblinka. There were no more open-air street markets in the ghetto, and only a trickle of food made it into the Jewish quarter through underground channels. These were three weeks in which many had not eaten, and not everyone in the ghetto now went unwillingly with the loading platform for one simple reason: the Germans had changed tack and promised large rations of bread and sweet jam to those who “volunteered” for relocation.

  So what if death awaits us in the east? families now reasoned. A certain death from starvation awaited them in the ghetto. Often they were also determined to stay together at any price. The twin sisters of the Jewish actor whom Ala and Nachum had saved from the Umschlagplatz, Rachel and Sarah, were among those who decided they would go voluntarily. Jonas and his wife, Diana, pleaded with the women. Ala had already snatched one of the sisters from death on the railway platform. But that had only made them more frightened and more resolute. “They couldn’t imagine living without each other,” Jonas said later. If they were to perish, they would perish as sisters. At the Umschlagplatz, horrified witnesses in the resistance reported hundreds queuing patiently at the transportation depot. They waited, under armed guard, days before getting a chance to load on the platform. There were so many that witnesses reported: “The trains, already leaving twice a day with 12,000 people each, are unable to hold them all.” Nearly all of them were murdered at Treblinka, including Rachel and Sarah.

  Those who did not queue for deportation went into hiding in their attics and basements during the street roundups. Even those with work papers or Judenrat protection knew better than to risk being seen when a neighborhood was emptied. A Jewish policeman had the sorry task of delivering seven of his fellow ghetto residents to the cattle cars each day—or he would be added to the deportations. “Never before,” survivors remembered later, “had anyone been so inflexible in carrying out an action as a Jewish policeman.”

  Caught up in the roundups on Elektoralna Street that week was a ten-year-old girl. Katarzyna Meloch was already an orphan. Her father, Maksymillian, had perished in 1941 when the Germans occupied Białystok. By then the Germans and the Soviets were at war again, and he and her mother, Wanda, would have fled, because Wanda had Soviet identity papers. But Katarzyna was away at summer camp that June, and they would not leave without their daughter. Maksymillian was sent to the front as a conscript and died there, and Katarzyna and her mother were interned with the other Jews in the city’s ghetto. In the middle of the night, over and over, Wanda shook her sleepy daughter awake to ask Katarzyna: Child, do you remember? Katarzyna knew that the answer was always: Twelve, Elektoralna Street. It was the address of her mother’s family in Warsaw. You must find your way there if anything happens to me. If you are alone, remember your uncle.

  One day, something did happen to her mother. Wanda saw how Białystok was changing and saw danger. The Soviets were the enemy, and the Gestapo searched the crowds for enemies. At last they came for Wanda. “A communist,” said the Gestapo man, shaking her passport. And then, reading further, “Of course, a Jew!” Wanda implored him not to arrest her. She had no interest in politics; she only wanted to save her daughter. “I am only a mother,” she pleaded with him. But the German ordered her into the sidecar of a motorcycle anyhow, and that was the last anyone ever saw of Wanda. Katarzyna was taken to a ghetto orphanage, and she followed her mother’s instructions. She wrote to her uncle, Jacek Goldman, and her mother’s family smuggled the girl into the Warsaw ghetto. Katarzyna made the journey from Białystok to Warsaw alone sometime in the winter of 1941–42.

  By May 1942, when Katarzyna turned ten, she was living in the Warsaw ghetto, in a crowded apartment shared by the family of her kindly uncle Jacek and her grandmother, Michelina. Katarzyna had no mother or father, so Uncle Jacek threw a children’s party for her birthday on the rooftop of the burnt-out shell of the Holy Spirit Hospital, where thirty-two years earlier Irena Sendler had been born and where Stanisław Krzyżanowski had once been a doctor.

  But in August the family wasn’t living in an apartment any longer. Uncle Jacek found them all a hideout inside a chimney in the ruins of the hospital, where the Germans couldn’t find them during deportations. And on the morning of August 14, that was where Katarzyna should have been hiding. But Katarzyna was ten, and instead she was in the courtyard playing in the rubble with several other children. Suddenly some Jewish policemen sp
ied Katarzyna and saw an easy target. One of the men roughly collared the girl, who cried out desperately for her family. But the man held her tightly in his grip and dragged the crying Katarzyna toward the group of women and children destined for selection to the Umschlagplatz.

  Among the falling bricks and scattered remnants of the family’s last possessions, Michelina heard her granddaughter’s frightened cries. What could she do? Michelina carefully and quietly stepped from the shadows. She was an employee of the Jewish hospital and that meant that the family had Judenrat protection. You cannot take the child. There are papers. The policeman looked at the old woman and shrugged, unmoved and uninterested. Michelina had lost Wanda. She was determined that she would not lose Wanda’s daughter. Michelina caught Katarzyna’s eye quickly. Somewhere in the distance there was a brief commotion. When the man looked away for an instant, Michelina gestured urgently. Run, her hands said. Run quickly. And Katarzyna ran. From where she hid among the fallen bricks and twisted metal, the girl watched. The officer laid his rough grip instead on Michelina and pushed her, stumbling, toward the group destined for the railway platform.

  At the Umschlagplatz, Michelina was thrust toward the crowds, hot and frightened, and for long hours in the sun she waited. Then, unexpectedly, she saw a white coat and a familiar face walking along the barbed wire. It might have been Nachum Remba, but it was far more likely her colleague, Ala. She felt herself being drawn quickly toward a makeshift clinic, and afterward she was never quite sure how it had all happened, but when the transports crept that night toward Treblinka, Michelina was not on one of them. She made her way back to the chimney hideout by morning.

  Despairing of Michelina that night, however, the family huddled in their hideout making urgent plans. Uncle Jacek said they would flee the ghetto and join the partisans in the forest fighting for an end to all this madness. One of Katarzyna’s aunts said she would carry on hiding with the children. Uncle Jacek never returned from the forest, and parts of Katarzyna’s family managed to survive on the run for several months before being murdered together. But Katarzyna was not with them. Her salvation came from an unexpected direction, and it was thanks to an old friend of her mother’s.

  Before the war, Wanda Goldman had been a Latin teacher, and one of her students was a working-class girl from the town of Łódź named Jadwiga Salek. Wanda and Jadwiga, teacher and student, later became friends, and then life took them in different directions. Jadwiga moved to Warsaw, where she became a teacher in the 1930s at Dr. Janusz Korczak’s orphanage school in the Żoliborz neighborhood, on the northern end of the city. She joined the Polish socialist movement and eventually became a city social worker in the division that found foster families for orphans. In 1942 she was thirty-one years old and her married name was Jadwiga Deneka; she was one of Irena Sendler’s earliest partners. Jadwiga, Ala, and Irena were about to save Katarzyna.

  All throughout August, Irena and Ala were smuggling children out of the ghetto at a ferocious pace. It was in the period from August 1942 until January 1943—the next six months—that the vast majority of the children they saved were rescued. “We witnessed terrible scenes,” Irena said of those days. “Father agreed, but Mother didn’t. We sometimes had to leave those unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I’d go back there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway station for transport to the death camps.” These scenes played out now, too, in Irena’s recurrent nightmares. Never again would she be free from the dreams that came to her unbidden. Survivors of Warsaw in those years—and especially survivors of the ghetto—speak of this universal haunting. The only grace in all this was that, with the attention of the Germans focused on deporting thousands of Jews each day to Treblinka, there was a chance in the other direction. The friends took advantage of that monomaniacal focus to smuggle out of the ghetto as many of the district’s children as possible.

  One of those children was Katarzyna. Katarzyna, today a retired journalist living in Warsaw, doesn’t know whether Jadwiga Deneka happened to recognize her friend’s daughter or whether Jadwiga came to the ghetto looking for her particularly. Like Irena, Jadwiga had a ghetto pass and was in and out of the Jewish quarter daily, smuggling out children. Perhaps Ala and Nachum learned of the child at the Umschlagplatz from Michelina and contacted Jadwiga and Irena. What Katarzyna remembers today is only that, one day, in the period from August 20 to August 25, when the Jews in Otwock were being liquidated and when there was consequently a brief lull in the deportations inside the ghetto, Ala led her through the gates to the Aryan side in a rescue brigade ambulance. Beyond the gates Jadwiga waited. Katarzyna walked with her mother’s friend up the stairs to a small apartment at number 76, Obozową Street, in the Koło district, where Jadwiga and her brother Tadeusz ran an “emergency room” for Irena’s children. “I walked out of the ghetto,” Katarzyna says, “in a very hot summer (1942). From the apartment in Koło district I can remember huge tomatoes in the window, ripening in the sun. They caught my eye when I walked out of a district where you didn’t think about whether it was summer or winter.”

  These “emergency rooms”—Irena’s “protective readiness centers”—were linchpins in the network’s system for saving Jewish children, and there were at least ten of these houses, maybe more, scattered across the city. In Jadwiga’s apartment, two Jewish families and their small children lived there in hiding at times during the war, and children came and went constantly. Irena had one in her apartment. Jaga Piotrowska and her husband hid more than fifty Jewish people in their apartment during the occupation. Children were hiding with Irena’s old friends Stanisław Papuziński and Zofia Wędrychowska, with Maria Palester and Maria Kukulska. They stayed with activist Izabela Kuczkowska, orphanage housemother Władysława Marynowska, and midwife Stanisława Bussold. And there were perhaps a half dozen others. They all took Jewish children smuggled out of the ghetto into their homes in the first hours and days that they were brought out to safety and prepared the children for their new lives and their next destinations. Some hid Jewish children for years and acted as foster parents for decades afterward.

  Now, in 1942, thanks to Jan Dobraczyński and his coded signature on transfer papers, the children were usually sent on to convent refuges as soon as new “Polish” identity papers could be found. Dozens of children were hidden at the Father Boduen children’s home; dozens more passed through the orphanage and on to destinations with the aid of Władysława Marynowska and Jaga Piotrowska. Some were placed in a religious home in Otwock, and more than thirty Jewish children were ultimately hidden at the Sisters of Service convent in the eastern town of Turkowice. The inspector there knew there were Jewish children there, and he agreed to look the other way on the condition that all the children had convincing if fake Aryan papers.

  When Katarzyna’s false papers came, her new Aryan name was Irena Dąbrowska, the daughter of an unknown Polish woman named Anna Gąska, and her birth certificate made her one year older. Those were facts that fate demanded she memorize completely. The smallest slip—anything that might give her away as Jewish—would be fatal in her new life. Fortunately, Katarzyna had grown up speaking Polish. Had she not, saving her would have been far more difficult. Almost all the children Irena and her network managed to save that summer and into the autumn came from assimilated Jewish families, from professional backgrounds, and, if they were not babies, they already spoke Polish.

  From the emergency shelter, Katarzyna followed the familiar route for children in Irena’s network. She went to the Father Boduen children’s home, as one of their coded “special care” children, and then the nuns transferred her to the sisters at the rural convent in isolated Turkowice. First in the “emergency room” at Jadwiga’s apartment and again at the church-run orphanage, fair-haired women gently drilled her in all rites and rituals of a young Catholic girl. At the convent, to brighten her dark coloring, each morning the nuns braided her hair tightly with white ribbons an
d asked her again to repeat her catechism. But for a Jewish child, it wasn’t remembering that was hard; it was forgetting. Forgetting what one had seen in the ghetto; forgetting one’s family, words, experiences, and language. It was imperative for a Jewish child not to reveal his or her true identity, and there were blackmailers waiting. But the greatest threat often came from other innocent but dangerous tattletale children.

  • • •

  Often the children rescued from the ghetto were baptized and “became” Catholic. With that rite came a new set of authentic church records and documents that did not have to be faked or manufactured. Sometimes, however, Jewish parents shook their heads when Irena told them that baptism was part of how their children would be hidden. Baptism in another faith for these families was an insurmountable obstacle. Jewish religious law is clear, Orthodox fathers told her. We cannot exile our children from the Jewish nation simply to save them now. Among themselves, Jewish families across the ghetto debated the points and called upon the rabbis to guide them. We must not acquiesce in the spiritual destruction of our children, Jews said to each other now. If more than 300,000 Jews are to be annihilated in Warsaw, what is the use of saving several hundred children? Let them perish or survive together with the entire community. Other parents threw aside questions of religion. Save my child, these parents told her. Do what you must to save my daughter. A fracture was growing inside the Jewish community, and Irena and her network were at the heart of the controversy. Much depended on personal trust in the people doing the “saving.” It was another part of the reason why those whom Irena and her network smuggled out and helped to hide were disproportionately orphans, the children of old friends, or the children of culturally assimilated families.

  A fissure was also growing inside Irena’s network. Irena was not a devout young woman. She embraced secular values and above all politics and action. She had also grown up surrounded by Adam’s Jewish culture and did not dismiss its beauty or its power. Jan Dobraczyński and Jaga Piotrowska, though, were growing closer than ever, and both were ardent Catholics. Jan’s faith gave him great influence with the convent nuns and religious home directors. His influence saved lives, and Irena was grateful for his signature on those documents. For Jan and Jaga, however, baptism of these children for its own sake mattered deeply. And the Jewish community was already starting to place Jan Dobraczyński and Irena Sendler in different categories.