Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Despite what Irena wished, Estera could not stay on in her apartment. Liaisons and resistance couriers came and went, and it was too dangerous for a child already. At last, Irena hit upon the perfect solution. She would send Estera to Zofia and Stanisław, her old friends from the Polish Free University and both activists in the cells of Dr. Radlińska’s underground networks. Zofia and Stanisław had four children of their own, and they were already hiding in their apartment at number 9, Lekarska Street, in the Ochota district, three additional Jewish youngsters. Of course they would hide Estera, they assured Irena—and “Teresa” would become the eighth child in their wartime family. It was just in time. Soon, Irena wouldn’t be in a position to safely take care of anyone. It was Irena who, in the fall of 1943, would desperately need saving.

  CHAPTER 14

  Aleja Szucha

  Warsaw, October 1943–January 1944

  Bracka Street was just off a main thoroughfare to the east of where the ghetto had stood, and its busy storefronts included a laundry shop where housewives could get some relief, if they had the money to spare. Women came and went all day there, picking up neatly wrapped brown paper parcels or linens piled in baskets. Sometimes, though, the women came and went bringing something else, a note, or a message, tucked among the folds of garments. In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested the woman who ran the shop, accusing her of aiding the resistance by passing parcels and messages. Taken to Szucha Avenue and tortured, brutalized at Pawiak, and interrogated again with iron bars and truncheons, the broken and wretched woman gave the Gestapo what information she knew. She was almost certainly executed afterward. There was no way to blame someone in these circumstances. No one knew whether they would be able to withstand torture until faced with one’s executioners. When she cracked, she named at least three women who used her shop as an underground postbox. One of them was Irena Sendler.

  • • •

  On the evening of October 19, Irena and her family gathered for a small party. One of her aunts had come and spent the night with her mother. So, too, had Irena’s friend—and her underground liaison—Janka Grabowska. Janka and her husband, Józef, were a couple whom many people trusted to keep their secrets. They were hiding for some members of the Jewish Fighting Organization important files and archives, and they were also still hiding their friend—a woman who was, perhaps, something even more to Adam and his family: Regina Mikelberg, along with her sister. Neither Janka nor Irena had forgotten Regina’s dramatic escape from the railcars rolling toward Treblinka or the old ties of college friendship that connected them to each other and to Adam, no matter how complicated Irena’s most private emotions.

  After the cakes and cordials, the mother and aunt retired to bed, but Janka and Irena stayed up talking until long after curfew. It was nearly two in the morning, in fact, before the younger women settled down to sleep on makeshift beds in the living room. Before letting herself drift off to sleep, Irena carefully did what she always did as a precaution: she placed the current card files with the names and the addresses of dozens of Jewish children in the center of the kitchen table, underneath the window. She tucked her weathered workbag, which held some blank identity papers and a large sum of money, by the side of her bed for safekeeping. Then she dozed lightly.

  At just after three a.m. the pounding started. Her mother, Janina, suffering from a heart condition that left her tossing fitfully, had awoken moments earlier, and her whispered alarm had given Irena the precious few moments she needed to clear her fuzzy head and spring into action. The agents roared at the door, screaming: Open! Gestapo! A pry bar scratched at the door, and there was the sound of cracking. Irena had practiced her routine many times. She had prepared for this eventuality. She grabbed the lists and moved swiftly toward the window. As she was about to lift the sash, her heart stopped. Below were more Gestapo agents, gazing malignantly up at her. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. What was she going to do now? Irena scanned the room hopelessly. There was nowhere safe to hide the lists. As the pounding on the door grew more furious and the door began to give way, she tossed them desperately to Janka: This is a list of our children; hide it somewhere. Save it! It cannot fall into the hands of the Gestapo! She had time to see Janka stuff the list into her bra before the door clattered open.

  Eleven Gestapo agents swarmed forward, and behind them Irena saw the horror-stricken face of Mr. Przeździecki, the building manager. The men went wild. The agents stood above her, inches away, and screamed threats and orders at her. In their frenzy they destroyed the apartment. They tore apart the insides of the stove looking for hidden materials, pulled up the floorboards, threw dishes from the cupboards. It was all calculated for maximum effect, and Irena had to admit that it worked. She was frightened. The search went on for three heart-stopping hours, and there was something almost surreal about how it all unfolded. Irena didn’t believe in miracles, but as the Gestapo began tearing apart the mattress of her makeshift bed, she watched in awe as the rickety frame collapsed on top of the bag, sitting there in plain view, with all the identity documents and cash inside. Irena could not believe it. The Germans had just hidden from themselves the most incriminating of all the evidence.

  All the while, they battered Irena and her visitors with questions. Irena at last convinced the agents that Janka was an innocent out-of-town visitor like Irena’s aunt, although in fact Janka was practically a neighbor. Her mother, the agents saw plainly, was too ill to be engaged in the underground. So that left only Irena.

  At six a.m. the agents wrapped up their search, and the agent in charge barked at Irena to dress quickly. Pulling on her skirt in a rush and trying to quickly button up her sweater, Irena’s heart felt lighter than she ever could have imagined. If they were letting her get dressed, they were done searching. If they were done searching, they hadn’t discovered the lists. And if they weren’t there for Janka, they didn’t know about Jaga’s apartment or the sisters’ collaboration with her. Her eyes met Janka’s, but Irena didn’t risk a smile. All she wanted was to get out of the apartment before the Gestapo could reconsider.

  As the agents led her into the corridor, their heavy boots echoed in the stairwell. Along the hallway, Irena knew that the neighbors were listening at their doors in silence. A few moments later it would be chaos and gossip.

  A prison car waited outside, its engine already running. Janka dashed down the walkway at the last moment—a dangerous impulse. In her hands, Irena saw her shoes. She will need them. Please. The men just nodded, bored, and gestured to Irena to get on with it.

  Irena knew her destination. The sedan was cramped, and Irena was pressed inside, onto the lap of one of the young Gestapo agents. The doors slammed closed and the car lurched into motion. She supposed she had always known this moment would come, but she realized suddenly she hadn’t been prepared for it.

  The sun wasn’t yet up over Warsaw, and in the half-light of morning the agents closest to her dozed lightly. Irena tried to think calmly, rationally. Janka knew how important the lists were and she would surely hide them. She understood how things stood. There was no chance, realistically, of Irena surviving.

  As the car turned south to join the broad boulevards, Irena thought of Dr. Radlińska and her dozens of sleeping conspirators scattered across the city. At least, she desperately hoped they were sleeping. She thought of Adam. Would she be strong enough to keep his secret? There was no point in pretending. Something terrible was coming next. She knew that. Was there pain enough in the world that would lead her to betray Adam’s hiding place? Was there enough to make her betray Jaga or Janka or the children? What about Adam’s Jewish wife? Would she die to protect her also? Irena thought she could bear it. But most could not stand the torture. She must steel her nerves. She would die in silence. As long as her friends and the children survived, she told herself, she could suffer anything. That was what everyone said at the beginning.

  As they approached the final turn, Irena slipped her hands into her coat pockets to warm them for a f
inal few moments. The jolt of fear came like a knife in her heart. A list. Addresses. She had forgotten last night to take it out of her jacket. On a small roll of cigarette paper was scratched the details of one of the safe houses.

  Irena rode the rising tide of panic for a moment. There was no time left. They were nearing Szucha. The young man on whose lap she was perched, surely his breathing meant he was dozing? Quietly, gently, she rolled and shredded the tissue paper into balls in her pocket. Its flimsy texture gave way quickly. If nothing else, it would smudge the writing. Watching the heads of the nearest agents bobbing and swaying with the car’s motion, she was nearly certain they were sleeping. What else could she do but this one last gamble? She lifted her hand gently to the open window and let the tiny bullets flutter free. The agent beneath her twitched and snorted, and then nothing.

  Irena leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes, too, but with tears streaming down her face.

  • • •

  The slaughterhouse. That was what people on the streets of Warsaw called the squat gray compound on Szucha Avenue. Steel chains and locks studded the iron gates that rose up before Irena, and the guards wore ugly whips slung at their hips and high black boots with a glossy polish. A bored officer brusquely hustled Irena toward the anteroom. Beyond the doorway, she could make out the contours of a large room where interrogations were conducted. She was pushed along quickly for registration, into a small room where a typewriter clanged and the radio played German music.

  She waited. Soon she was led into another room where a tall German man asked her questions in perfect Polish. His manner was smooth and gentle. Irena knew that the intention was deadly. What was her name? Where did she live? Who was her family? Those were easy questions—questions to which the Gestapo already had the answers. But before long the questions moved on to more perilous ground. We know you are helping the resistance and the Jews, Pani Sendler. What organization are you working for? It will be better for you. They knew about Julian Grobelny. They were hunting for this elusive man “Konrad Żegota.” They knew about the underground postbox at the laundry. The thickness of the man’s file made her start feeling very frightened. She prayed they did not know about Adam.

  She protested that she knew nothing. It was all a misunderstanding. She was a social worker, and that brought her into contact with many people. Naturally. But if someone in her circle was doing something wrong, she knew nothing about it. The agent gave her a thin smile and arched his eyebrow. He had seen it all before. These people always protested their innocence in the beginning. Torture had a way of getting them talking. She was choosing the hard way. So be it, Pani Sendler. We will talk further, I promise.

  Another guard pushed Irena along the corridor afterward. The tunes still drifted from the radio. It was early and everything else was silent. Before long the transfers from Pawiak would be arriving and the hallways would echo with footsteps and weeping. The ceilings there were low and the corridor narrow. Irena passed four cells, each with iron grates and a row of narrow wooden benches, and at one of them the door was pushed open. Others sat silently, with slumped shoulders, and no one turned as she entered, stumbling. Sit, came the stern order. You are to look only at the back of the head in front of you. No speaking. Irena smelled fear and dampness. They were all new arrivals, sleepless and worried.

  The narrow bench was hard and too low to be comfortable. The ground beneath her shoe was sticky. Blood. A wave of dizziness flooded over her. For a time Irena and the others sat motionless. Just after eight a.m. the transports arrived and the benches around her filled with strangers. The radio stopped playing, and now names were called. Soon cries of terror came from the hallway, the distant sounds of things being thrown, dull thuds, and then the cries of bodies being broken. Sometimes there was gunfire. Interrogations took place on the upper floors or in the basement, but the doors and windows were left open as an inducement to the others waiting to assess their options carefully. Said one survivor of those morning rituals at Szucha Avenue, “One could hear curt questions, the murmur of low answers and again and again, the sound of blows, after which came a shriek, often a woman’s sob, clutching at our hearts and impeding our breathing.”

  There was another prison tradition. On the first day of their arrest, prisoners were severely beaten. Often, one savage session did the trick. By the second or third day, many proved more pliable and willing. Irena would never talk of the abuse she suffered that day or in the days that followed, but others remembered the abuses at Pawiak with horror. There were blows to the face with fists and boots that left eyes hanging from sockets, and bone-shattering strikes with rubber truncheons. Soldering irons burned the flesh of breasts and faces. Shoulders were dislocated. Afterward the limp and bloodied inmates were thrown back into the cells and ordered to sit at attention until the covered prison trucks that would transport them to Pawiak rolled through the gates. On October 20, 1943, Irena was among those bruised and beaten bodies. Inside the darkness of the transport van that first afternoon, she tried to push the pain and fear from her mind as the truck sped across the city, its horns blaring a disconsolate refrain—but every movement was agony.

  • • •

  At Pawiak, a prison guard marched Irena down broad stone stairs. Those who could not stand were hauled along, and a handful of grim-faced nurses and doctors pulled the most dangerously beaten from the truck and loaded them, moaning, onto canvas army stretchers. Officially, Pawiak was the prison for political figures, academics, students, doctors, and those in the resistance and illegal universities—the intelligentsia. But in practice, it was a notorious black-site prison, and there was no legal process. One-third of those who arrived that afternoon with Irena would face execution. Most of the others would perish after being sent away on the late-night transports that left the prisoners at Pawiak in a constant state of terror. Those destined for the concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz were hauled into the prison courtyard after lights-out and, in the darkness, pummeled with rifle butts by furious guards, then loaded on coaches handcuffed to one another. Irena understood. Death was how this ended.

  • • •

  At Pawiak, Irena was shocked to see old friends and conspirators among the inmates. In her cell that first night, Irena and her neighbor Basia Dietrich grasped hands silently in the darkness. In an urgent whispered conversation, long after lights-out, Basia told Irena that another friend, Helena Pęchcin, had also been arrested. Helena was a history schoolteacher. Basia and Irena had lived nearby for years in the same apartment complex in Wola, where Basia was a Scout leader and still ran the community kindergarten. Irena had known Basia since those first days as a young newlywed with Mietek. Unofficially, though, Basia was a captain in a resistance movement known as the Powstańcze Oddziały Specjalne “Jerzyki”—the Insurgent Special Forces “Swifts”—a group of dedicated men and women who ran, in parallel to Irena’s network, an operation rescuing several hundred Jewish children from the ghetto. Helena was Basia’s operational partner. By the spring of 1943, when the Insurgent Special Forces were combined with Home Army operations and became part of the sprawling and diffuse underground movement that included Żegota, their group was in regular contact with Irena.

  The next morning Irena made contact with another friend inside the prison. Jadwiga Jędrzejowska was alive! She could not believe it. Jadwiga Jędrzejowska was another of Dr. Radlińska’s girls from before the war, a few years older than Irena and her close circle, but Irena recognized her instantly. Jadwiga and her Jewish boyfriend, Horak, joined the resistance immediately after the occupation started, working in the underground press movement, and for three years they eluded the Gestapo. But in 1942 the two were arrested. Horak was shot, and for a year Jadwiga languished in prison, assigned at first, despite her medical training, to cleaning latrines and offices. But in the prison there was an astonishing resistance taking shape, and soon Jadwiga was pulled into the network. Two husband-and-wife teams were at the heart of this
underground cell: Dr. Anna Sipowicz, a dentist, and her medical doctor husband, Dr. Witold Sipowicz; and Dr. Zygmunt Śliwicki, a physician, and his wife, the prison head nurse, Anna Śliwicka. All four were members of the Polish resistance; like Irena, the women were in their early thirties and fearless.

  At nine a.m. on the second day of her incarceration, Irena stood with the others at attention. Breakfast—a bit of moldy bread and ersatz coffee—was over. So were the eight thirty a.m. calls for the day’s executions. As the stricken women were led out for the last time, Irena dropped her eyes to the ground. She could not bear to watch this. Above her scuffed shoes, she felt the red welts rising along her ankles where bedbugs crawled over her in the night, and even moving her head made her face throb where the first German blows had fallen. The nine a.m. roll calls were for patients ordered to the medical clinics. Irena’s mind wandered. Her head jerked up as she heard Jadwiga Jędrzejowska’s voice call out Irena’s name for the dentistry office. Dentist? Irena started to say, I don’t need to see the dentist . . .

  Then it flashed upon her: it was a message. Irena stepped forward wordlessly and followed.

  The window of the cramped office into which she was led looked out over the ruins of the ghetto. It was hard to forget what she had witnessed there. Ewa. Dr. Korczak. Rachela. Ala. Józef. As far as she could see, it was a sea of rubble and stone and burnt-out ruins of foundations.

  When the prison dentist, Dr. Anna Sipowicz, slipped into the room, Irena realized she also knew Anna from prewar activist circles. What a relief to be among friends! Irena started to speak, but Anna quickly put up a finger and gestured to the dentist’s chair before her. Irena nodded. In order not to raise suspicion, Anna would have to drill a hole and fill a cavity that had never existed. But Irena, in the dentist’s chair, understood at last when Anna passed her a gryps—a secret wadded prison message. It was from Julian Grobelny—“Trojan”—and the message was simple: “We are doing everything we can to get you out of that hell.” On the tissue-thin paper that Anna held out to her, Irena scribbled back the only return message that mattered. The lists are safe! As long as Irena did not break under the torture, no one knew the location of the hidden children. What Irena didn’t tell Julian Grobelny, of course, was that the lists were with Janka. It would have been too great a risk if the message were intercepted. It would turn out to be an amazingly lucky decision.