Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  For a week or two the ruse worked, and families crawled through the sewers to safety. But soon the Germans grew wise to the escape routes. They now shut off all the city utilities and pumped poison into the water and gas mains to kill those escaping. By early May, for those left behind, there was no easy exit. Ala was among those who stayed on, fighting. From burnt-out shelters on opposite sides of Gęsia Street, Ala, Nachum, and Nachum’s wife, Henia, tried to help the wounded ghetto fighters with medical services.

  On May 8, 1943, close to the end, the German patrols raided the bunkers on Gęsia Street. All around Ala, the ghetto was burning. “There was no air, only black, choking smoke and heavy, burning heat radiating from the red-hot walls, from the glowing stone stairs,” her fellow activist, Marek Edelman, wrote in his diary. “The flames cling to our clothes, which now start smoldering. The pavement melts under our feet.” Mothers jumped with their small children to their deaths four or five stories below, amid a hail of German gunfire. Charred corpses lay on the streets, and buildings were reduced to rubble. In the underground dirt cellars, the hospital team crouched together fearfully, piling rocks carefully to hide from view their children. But the Germans hunted with dogs now, and one of those dogs betrayed Ala. She could taste the dirt and ash in her mouth, and her legs trembled as they crawled out into the open at gunpoint.

  They were marched that day together to the assembly point at Nalewki Street. The path led to the Umschlagplatz. Ala knew what awaited them on the other end of the train line. For two days they waited for the train to come. German and Ukrainian soldiers probed the bodies of young men, searching their body cavities for hidden weapons, and around Ala young men were disemboweled and dying. Ala tried not to watch, too, as the prettier girls were raped in turn by a gang of laughing soldiers, followed by the unmistakable ricochet of the gunfire. Perhaps Henia Remba was one of those women. She was young, and there is no known record to show that she ever left Warsaw. Murmurs of pain were silenced with iron cudgels, and then Ala and Nachum were wired into one of the cattle cars destined for Treblinka.

  On the Aryan side, the burning of the ghetto could be clearly seen from Świętojerska Street and from Krasiński Square, and there, despite it all, the carnival continued.

  • • •

  The partisans did battle until there was no longer a ghetto left to hide in. By May 9, their number dwindling, the top leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization—one of several resistance groups in the ghetto—was Marek Edelman. But by May 10 or 11, there wasn’t any drama left for curious Poles to watch, just relentless execution and death by fire. Jewish fighters raised a makeshift plea, scrawled on a bedsheet, over the wall toward the Aryan side: “Brother, Please Help! We Fight for Our and Your Freedom!” But no help ever came from the Polish masses. Marek and his partisans, men and women, retreated to the buried hillside bunkers and, in a desperate change of tactics, only came out after darkness for nighttime street fighting. During the days, the ghetto was eerily quiet, and the ever-present whisper of flames and sometimes beams crashing were the only sounds heard. The fighters ran out of water and ammunition. The only goal in the last days was not to be taken alive by the Germans. Trapped in hideouts that would be their crypts, families and resistance leaders pulled out from their last, precious possessions their cyanide pills and committed suicide together.

  • • •

  Only a handful of the Warsaw ghetto fighters escaped death and transport to the camps. These were the fighters who managed to slip, undetected, to the Aryan side in the last days of the revolt. There were fewer than two hundred of them. But Marek Edelman was one of them. He remembered later how, with the ghetto collapsing around them, a few strong and lucky fighters—men and women—“half-walked, half-crawled for twenty hours” through sewers booby-trapped by the Germans, squeezing themselves through fetid pipes just over two feet in diameter in darkness. On the other side, trucks and comrades, ready to rush away to the forests or safe houses, waited for them. At one of those grates, Irena stood sentinel.

  At 8:15 p.m. on May 16, just as dusk settled over Warsaw, a colossal blast of dynamite shook windows as far as the Aryan quarter. The great synagogue shuddered for a moment and then crumbled. It was the last symbolic defeat of the Jews of Warsaw. The battle for the ghetto was over. The German governor-general of the city informed his superiors in Berlin that his mission was accomplished. “Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed. The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more.” Only the bombed-out steeple tower of Saint Augustine’s church rose up forlornly in the center of a sea of concrete and brick rubble. The governor-general proudly reported that the total number of Jews destroyed in the Aktion, at the death camps or by fire, totaled 56,065 out of a population of perhaps 60,000.

  And for those Jews in hiding on the Aryan side of the city, life now became—though it was hard to believe it—infinitely more precarious.

  • • •

  Many in hiding outside of the ghetto now despaired of survival. Constant terror took a psychic toll from which some would never recover. Faced with the chance of fleeing, some Jewish men and women now took fantastic gambles. One of those men was Irena’s old friend, the attorney Józef Zysman.

  When Józef and his family escaped the ghetto at the end of 1942, the Hotel Polski was a seedy four-story building at number 29, Długa Street, located just outside the ghetto boundary. On the ground floor was a restaurant, and the stairs above led to rooms with narrow rectangular windows overlooking the cobbled avenue. Since his escape, Józef had been moving from one apartment safe house to another, and the family had separated for safety. Irena was looking after little Piotr, and Theodora was living now with false papers.

  By the late spring of 1943, Józef was lonely and tired. Szmalcowniks stalked the city, ferreting out hidden Jews for extortion and the German bounty. They searched for small clues of someone in hiding: the play of shadows against an attic window at twilight or an extra loaf of bread in a housewife’s basket. Then his guardians would come to Józef, frantic, and he would flee to the streets at a moment’s notice, again homeless. Józef wandered, trying to think of where he could go to sleep just for a few hours. He missed his family. He missed his life. He knew that he could not carry on in this state of constant terror.

  It was sometime in the second or the third week of May that Józef first heard a wild rumor. The occupiers, someone whispered to Józef, were willing to exchange Jews for German citizens abroad, and the Jews would be sent out of Poland on regular train service. Soon the rumors took on an even more fantastic dimension. People said now, at the underground cafés where Jews on the run learned to go for news and coffee, that a long-awaited ration of visas and passports for foreign-born Jews and Jews wanting to emigrate to South America and Palestine had arrived in Warsaw from the embassies abroad. The papers arrived too late to save their intended recipients. The Umschlagplatz had claimed nearly all of them. But that didn’t mean these visas and passports couldn’t save someone—although salvation would come at black-market prices.

  Behind it all were an unscrupulous Jewish profiteer named Adam Żurawin and a ghetto gangster named Leon “Lolek” Skosowski. No one quite knew how, but during the ghetto uprising they had come into possession of an astonishing cache of undelivered mail, which included hundreds of emigration papers. Adam, the whisperers at the underground cafés said, managed a small hotel at number 29, Długa Street. You could go there to buy a passport. The fees, naturally, were staggering. Only rich Jews who had saved something of their prewar fortunes would be able to pay Adam Żurawin’s prices, although that did not stop desperate and impoverished families from trying. Rumor had it, too, that the hotel was being set up as a kind of neutral staging ground—a place where Jews could register for emigration and wait safely until the papers were processed and the deportations out of Poland started.

  Józef watched and waited. But it was true! The first arrivals registered for visas, and they were told that they would have to be patient. They check
ed into sunlit rooms on the upper stories, and the Germans didn’t come to arrest them. In fact, it seemed like some kind of paradise. Inside the confines of the hotel corridors and rooms, the residents were granted unimaginable freedom. Here, Jews didn’t have to wear the Star of David, and the Gestapo studiously—too studiously, some said—ignored the building. A small patch of cobblestone in front of the main entrance was declared a patio for the café-restaurant, and from the street corner Józef could plainly see for himself well-dressed Jews enjoying coffee unmolested in the late spring sunshine. People came and went, and at night the neighborhood rang with the sounds of the wildest, most joyous parties at the Hotel Polski. Women pulled out their hidden fur coats and their mothers’ pearls and walked the corridors with a swish of satin. Amorous couples, desirous of nothing as much as life and this freedom, staggered tipsily through the corridors, oblivious to the fate of others.

  At the Hotel Polski, it was miracle after miracle. Still, Józef was watchful. But he was also growing desperate. On May 21, even the naysayers and the doubters were silenced. That morning sixty-four Jews from the hotel—with no SS guards and with great politeness from the Germans—boarded a well-equipped and comfortable train destined for the camp at Vittel, on the eastern border of France, where conditions were known to be civilized. On the train, even the children had their own seats and waved a cheerful good-bye to Warsaw from the gleaming windows.

  Those who boarded inevitably included those willing to pay the largest bribes. Some families paid 750,000 złotych—something over $2 million—for one of the precious passports. Many families paid 20,000 or 30,000 złotych for single documents that might help in an application. When letters arrived from Vittel that the recipients knew were authentic, confirming safe arrivals and good conditions, things went crazy. More than 2,500 Jewish people rushed from their hiding places on the Aryan side. Some figures put the number as high as 3,500. They all came to jockey for a place on the list of emigrants—to roll the dice in what even those going there understood was the war’s most spectacular and dangerous lottery.

  Irena’s friend, the Jewish attorney Józef Zysman, was among them. It wasn’t that Józef believed the Germans so much as he had lost faith in his chances of survival on the run, for hiding Jewish men was much, much harder than hiding mothers or children. And for some reason—perhaps it was pride, perhaps it was the sense that he had already asked too much by giving her Piotr—Józef didn’t reach out to Irena. He didn’t believe he could last on the Aryan side much longer, and if there was any chance, it was worth the wild gamble.

  The Polish underground tried to warn Jews that it was a trap. Urgent messages buzzed across all their secret networks. But the Jews who went could not be persuaded. Hope was too powerful. For months a fantasy world had taken hold at the Hotel Polski, and the party went on until the gangsters were confident that the last pockets of hidden wealth were exhausted. The Hotel Polski was nothing more than a cruel opportunity—arranged between the Gestapo and a handful of Jewish collaborators—to strip Warsaw’s Jewry of its last remaining resources. Among those Jewish collaborators and the architects of this tissue of rumor was a woman whom Irena and Józef knew well from the ghetto. She was the sultry cabaret singer who crooned old love songs at the smoke-filled Café Sztuka, and she was Ala’s cousin: Wiera Gran. Irena was convinced that Wiera was a Gestapo informer.

  Irena wasn’t the only one. Many of those closest to Irena saw evidence of Wiera’s treachery. Secret files of the Home Army warned its agents that Wiera Gran, “Jewess, before the war, a cabaret dancer, now leads an office of the confidants of the Gestapo, who are occupied mainly [in] hunting for Jews.” At Żegota, Dr. Adolf Berman saw her as a Nazi collaborator. So did Ala’s young friend, the now-celebrated ghetto hero Marek Edelman. Jonas Turkow, the Jewish actor whom Ala and Nachum had saved at the Umschlagplatz, claimed to have witnessed her betrayals directly. Asked later to describe the singer, whom she had watched perform that night with Ala in the ghetto nightclub in the days before the great Aktion, Irena was blunt in her assessment of Ala’s cousin: “Wiera Gran, a cabaret actress . . . worked for the Gestapo alongside Leon Skosowski. . . . It hurt me a great deal that among the list of great people of the Jewish Nation, Wiera Gran was among them—a criminal, who sold out her own people.”

  One of those Wiera was rumored to have sold out that year was Józef Zysman. He presented himself that spring, along with those thousands of others, at the shabby front desk of the Hotel Polski. He handed over whatever sums that registration required. And for weeks Józef passed his days pacing up and down the tired hallways, his last resources dwindling rapidly amid the scenes of jubilant chaos. At last, one morning in July, someone excitedly spread the word. They were leaving! The trains were coming! It seemed so civilized to Józef in the beginning. Jews calmly boarded the trains, expecting to head west, to life and freedom. How long was it before those on board realized that the tracks only led to the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen? And when the trains could not take them all and the Gestapo was eager to be done with the affair, those who remained—several hundred—were taken to the notorious Pawiak Prison in the ruins of the ghetto. Some were lined up against the elm tree in the courtyard and executed in a hail of gunfire. Others were led opposite the prison gate to Dzielna Street, to where a rough wooden platform stretched out over the abyss of a burnt-out foundation. As shots rang out, bodies tumbled from that parapet into a mass grave filled with jumbled quicklime-covered bodies. Among the victims of the Hotel Polski was Józef Zysman. “A wonderful man died a martyr’s death, dishonorably deceived by barbarians”—that was Irena’s indictment. Irena and her friends would not forget the role of Wiera Gran in his murder. Wiera protested her innocence. Irena was not persuaded. After the war, there would be consequences and more allegations. There would be trials and recriminations, and Irena would bear testimony against Wiera personally.

  • • •

  Something else astonishing and heartbreaking made its way that summer back to Warsaw through the channels of Żegota and the underground, too, and surely its leader, Julian Grobelny, shared the news with Irena. A determined group of Jewish fighters, caught up in the deportations to Treblinka in the last days of the ghetto uprising, had been sent on to a slave labor camp at a place called Poniatowa. There the prisoners were set to work fabricating German military uniforms for the textile magnate Walter Toebbens, and most of those saved from the gas chambers were Jews who had been assigned to his factories inside the ghetto. Henia Koppel, the mother of baby Bieta, was one of them. Now word was coming that a dozen or so among them were organizing within the camp a resistance cell and an underground railroad. Someone among them got word to Marek Edelman’s organization. They needed urgent help to keep on fighting. Someone in the cell got a message to Julian Grobelny at Żegota as well. Among their number, Julian learned, was a woman, a nurse, who had already set up at the camp a secret medical clinic and a children’s youth circle. Her team needed false identity papers, money, and, once again, weapons. Operations had begun to smuggle out the children with the aid of local Żegota operatives. Then they planned to stage a mass prison escape and another Jewish uprising. That nurse was Ala.

  • • •

  Nineteen forty-three was a year of great tragedy and moral darkness in Warsaw, but there were also amazing stories of survival and struggle—Ala’s and others’. That autumn there was another dramatic rescue of a child whose life would be tied forever to Irena’s story. Chaja Estera Stein was the first of Irena’s own two foster daughters. Once again it was Julian Grobelny who made the connection.

  Estera came from the village of Cegłow, not far from Warsaw, and in 1940, the year Estera turned thirteen, she was interned in the ghetto in Mrozy with her parents, Aron and Faiga, and her little sister, Jadzia. In 1942 the Mrozy ghetto was liquidated. Aron, Faiga, and Estera fled the roundups with their lives and huddled together that first night in an old garden shed on a farm outside the village. But little Jadzia ha
d been left behind in the chaos alone, and her mother was frantic. Aron laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and promised: he was returning to the ghetto. He would find her. For days the mother and daughter waited in the shadows. Then Faiga understood that Aron and Jadzia were never returning.

  Faiga looked at her hungry and tired daughter. They couldn’t stay in a garden shed forever. In the darkness, Faiga crept for help to the only person in the village she could think might help them. Aron owned a factory, and his business was making soda water. Julian Grobelny owned one of the large farms in the village—perhaps even the farm where Estera and her mother were hiding. Julian and Aron were great friends, both with each other and with the local priest in the parish church. Estera’s image of her father was always one of him and the priest walking together, her Orthodox Jewish father with his long beard and black garbardine coat and the priest in his swaying cassock. When Faiga knocked on the door of the parish house, the old priest gave her food and water and promised he would help her. But Faiga did not survive the return journey. She was captured and murdered. The priest sent urgent word to Julian that they would have to hurry if they were to save Estera.

  Julian turned, as always, to Irena, the director of Żegota’s child welfare cell, who sent a courier to the priest with new identity papers. Estera’s new Aryan name was now “Teresa Tucholska,” and she would have to travel alone on the train to Warsaw. Anything else was too dangerous. The priest walked Estera to the train station and showed her which compartment to enter, and when the Germans asked to see her papers, Estera remembered what to say perfectly. The railway station in Warsaw was crowded and noisy, but on the platform a small blond woman waited for her patiently. Irena touched the girl’s shoulder reassuringly. Come along, then, Teresa. And the next few days Estera stayed with Irena and her mother in the small apartment in Wola, during those dangerous first hours of transition. Estera was an independent and clever girl, but in the space of weeks she had lost her entire family, and Irena found herself wishing for the first time that she had babies.