Irena's Children
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Irena Stanisława Krzyżanowska—for that was her maiden name: “Irena Sendlerowa,” Geni database, www.geni.com/people/Irena-Sendlerowa/6000000019948138463.
“If someone else is drowning, you have to give a hand”: Magdelena Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej: Reportaž z 2001 Roku,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 12, 2008, n.p.; also David Barré and Agata Mozolewska, Elle, elle a sauvé les autres . . . Paris: Éditions du Cosmogone, 2009.
Dr. Krzyżanowski, with the aid of his brother-in-law: Aleksander Kopiński, personal correspondence.
He welcomed everyone kindly: Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”
Since Jews made up nearly fifty percent of the local population: Yoram Gross, personal correspondence.
She was accustomed to the sight of Jewish mothers: Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.” Generally the reluctance to have Catholic and Jewish children play together was on the Jewish side; see Mark Paul, “Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles,” January 2015, www.kpk-toronto.org/archives/jewish_attitudes.pdf.
“I grew up with these people”: Irena Sendler, “O Pomocy Żydom,” Lewicowo, October 6, 2011, http://lewicowo.pl/o-pomocy-zydom. The article is a reprint of material originally published as This Is My Homeland: Poles Helping Jews, 1939–1945, eds. Władysław Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinówna, 2nd ed., Kraków: Znak, 1969. That text is based on two earlier statements, an early article by Joseph Goldkorn, “He Who Saves One Life,” Law and Life, no. 9 (1967), and the written testimony of Irena Sendler, first published as “Those Who Helped Jews,” Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute 45/46, 1963.
“Don’t spoil her, Stasiu”: Ibid.
large, square house at number 21, Kościuszki Street: Anna Legierska, “A Guide to the Wooden Villas of Otwock,” August 10, 2015, Culture.pl, http://culture.pl/en/article/a-guide-to-the-wooden-villas-of-otwock.
Jewish culture was familiar to Irena: Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”
Irena felt more at home with the Jewish mothers: Marjorie Wall Bingham, “Women and the Warsaw Ghetto: A Moment to Decide,” World History Connected, http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.2/bingham.html.
Uncle Jan and Aunt Maria were rich: Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”
“I was constantly drawn back to those areas”: Legierska, “A Guide to the Wooden Villas of Otwock.”
Scout’s pledge “to be pure in thinking”: “Rediscover Polish Scouting,” Polish Scouting and Guiding Association, http://issuu.com/zhp_pl/docs/rediscoverpolishscouting.
The boy’s name was Mieczysław “Mietek” Sendler: “Piotrków: Pamiątkowa tablica ku czci Sendlerowej,” ePiotrkow.pl www.epiotrkow.pl/news/Piotrkow-Pamiatkowa-tablica-ku-czci-Sendlerowej-,2801. See also Paweł Brojek, “Piąta rocznica śmierci Ireny Sendlerowej, Sprawiedliwej wśród Narodów Świata,” Prawy, May 12, 2013, www.prawy.pl/wiara/3049-piata-rocznica-smierci-ireny-sendlerowej-sprawiedliwej-wsrod-narodow-swiata.
Adam was married to a Jewish woman: Anna Mieszkowska, Prawdziwa Historia Ireny Sendlerowej, Warsaw: Marginesy, 2014, 21–22.
“My father,” she explained, “was a doctor”: “Fundacja Taubego na rzecz Życia i Kultury Żydowskiej przedstawia Ceremonię Wręczenia Nagrody im. Ireny Sendlerowej,” October 23, 2013 program, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, http://nagrodairenysendlerowej.pl/dir_upload/download/thumb/9b515fb73c99cb31408f589b0b27.pdf.
Dr. Radlińska quickly offered her newest acolyte not just a student internship: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Irena Sendler,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/cms/biography-83/.
Another neighbor, Basia Dietrich: Testimony of Barbara Jankowska-Tobijasiewicz, “Irenę Sendlerową i Barbarę Ditrich: niezwykłe sąsiadki z ul. Ludwiki wspomina,” Urząd Dzielnicy Wola, January 28, 2010, www.wola.waw.pl/page/341,internetowe-wydanie-kuriera-wolskiego—-wszystkie-numery.html?date=2010-01-00&artykul_id=394.
“Everyone here was dedicated and true to their goals”: Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”
CHAPTER 2: DR. RADLIŃSKA’S GIRLS
The end of his raised cane shimmered in the light: Joanna B. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2006, 113.
“Because,” she snapped, “I am Polish”: Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005; also Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”
a seating area in the lecture halls for Jewish students that was set apart: Mary V. Seeman, “Szymon Rudnicki: Equal, but Not Completely,” Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, book review, June 7, 2010, http://spme.org/book-reviews/mary-v-seeman-szymon-rudnicki-equal-but-not-completely. Note that throughout this book I use the term “Aryans.” Both Jews and gentiles used that word freely throughout the occupation of Poland, and it has been retained as historically accurate.
Other professors supported the students: Ibid.
“The years at the University were for me very hard”: Yoram Gross, personal correspondence.
The third member of their circle was Ewa Rechtman: Here and throughout on Irena’s youth circle friends, see Irena Sendler, “The Valor of the Young,” Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies 7, no. 2 (1993), 20–25.
“I met a few, illegal members of the Polish Communist Party”: Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”
He planned, he told her boldly, to give it all away to charity: Anna Mieszkowska, Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust, trans. Witold Zbirohowski-Koscia, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010.
“I fit right in with my political past”: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Irena Sendler,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/cms/biography-83/.
Adam had already qualified as an attorney: Sendler, “The Valor of the Young.”
Adam began doctoral work in political history: Andrzej Biernacki, Zatajony artysta. O Wacławie Borowym 1890–1950, Lublin: Norbertinum, 2005.
By July, Warsaw buzzed with rumors: John Radzilowski, “The Invasion of Poland,” World War II Database, ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=28.
From the sky came nothing—no bombs, no sounds: British Broadcasting Corporation, “On This Day: 1939: Germany Invades Poland,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/1/newsid_3506000/3506335.stm.
Hitler’s attack on Poland had already started: “Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War,” Avalon Project: Yale Law School, www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/document/wardir1.htm.
direction of her office on Złota Street: Barré and Mozolewska, Elle, elle a sauvé les autres.
“faraway surf, not a calm surf but when waves crash onto a beach”: Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, New York: W. W. Norton, 2008, 32.
Doctors and nurses helped rush moaning residents to aid points: Irena Sendler, “O Pomocy Żydom.”
a pro bono Jewish lawyer named Józef Zysman: Sendler, “The Valor of the Young.”
He was also in a regiment, out there somewhere: Sendler, “The Valor of the Young.” See also Irena Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto: A Tribute to Jewish Rescuers,” ZIH archives (Materialy Zabrane w Latach, 1995–2003, sygn. S/353), trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Michael Barańczak.
Irka Schultz was the office boss: Irena Schultz’s name has been shortened throughout to the Polish nickname for Irena, Irka, in order to avoid confusion between Schultz and Sendler in the narrative. This is the equivalent in English of differentiating, say, between one character as “Jennifer” and another as “Jenny.”
senior administrator in a branch of the social welfare office: Louis Bülow, “Irena Sendler: An Unsung Heroine,” www.auschwitz.dk/sendler.htm.
“Corpses of men and animals are heaped in the streets”: Details paraphrase material from the Polish Ministry of Information, The German Invasion of Poland, London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1940, excerpted at http://felsztyn.tripod.com/germaninvasion/id1.html.
Exh
austed, Irena and her boss, Irka, sat together in an office: Barré and Mozolewska, Elle, elle a sauvé les autres.
Some 40,000 people died in the bombings of Warsaw: For a contemporary account of the Siege of Warsaw by a Żegota survivor, see Władysław Bartoszewski, 1859 Dni Warszawy, Kracow: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1974.
While the Germans considered how best to arrange a mass forced migration: Ellen Land-Weber, “Conditions for the Jews in Poland,” To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue, Humboldt State University, www2.humboldt.edu/rescuers/book/Makuch/conditionsp.html.
Of course she must help!: “Irena Sendler Award for Repairing the World,” program description, Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej, www.ceo.org.pl/pl/sendler/news/program-description.
“The sole goal of [their] schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic”: “Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era: Terror Against the Intelligentsia and Clergy,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/poles-victims-of-the-nazi-era/terror-against-the-intelligentsia-and-clergy.
Dr. Borowy, immediately joined the underground university: Mieszkowska, Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust, 26.
Dr. Radlińska, hobbled but resolute: “Life and Activity of Helena Twóczość Radlińskie,” http://sciaga.pl/tekst/69744-70-zycie_twoczosc_i_dzialalnosc_heleny_radlinskiej. See also Zofia Waleria Stelmaszuk, “Residential Care in Poland: Past, Present, and Future,” International Journal of Family and Child Welfare, 2002/3, 101.
So did Ala’s mentor and medical research partner, Dr. Hirszfeld: Thomas Hammarberg, “2007 Janusz Korczak Lecture: Children Participation,” Brussels: Commissioner for Human Rights/Council of Europe, 2007, https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=090000168046c47b. See also Bogusław Filipowicz, “Nadzieja spełniona: dzieło Ireny Sendlerowej w ratowaniu dzieci żydowskich,” Quarterly Research 1, no. 1 (2010), www.stowarzyszeniefidesetratio.pl/Presentations0/09Flipipowicz.pdf.
Aleksander Rajchman, a prominent mathematics professor: Antoni Zygmund, “Aleksander Rajchman,” Wiadomości Matematyczne 27 (1987), 219–31, excerpted at www.impan.pl/Great/Rajchman.
Some fifty thousand other members of the “intelligentsia”: On this history, see Richard Hugman, ed., Understanding International Social Work: A Critical Analysis, New York: Palgrave, 2010.
Later, hundreds of Catholic priests were rounded up: Ewa Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939–1944, New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997, 17, 45.
Her husband, Arek, had left Warsaw: personal correspondence.
Restrictions required Jewish property to be registered: Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, 18.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews—nearly one in ten in Poland: Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 373–99.
ten Poles in Warsaw were murdered for every Jewish resident: Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, 17.
“In reference to today’s conference in Berlin”: Ibid., 18.
CHAPTER 3: THOSE WALLS OF SHAME
Rudnicki was the false name under which Helena Radlińska was working: Internetowy Polski Słownik Biograficzny, “Helena Radlińska,” www.ipsb.nina.gov.pl/index.php/a/helena-radlinska.
“There were families where one herring was shared amongst six children”: Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”
“has large Polish contacts, especially on the left”: Government Delegation for Poland, Department of the Interior, folder 202/II-43, reprinted in Krzysztof Komorowski, Polityka i walka: Konspiracja zbrojna ruchu narodowego, 1939–1945, Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza “Rytm,” 2000.
“She would also eventually develop her own independent clandestine Jewish welfare program”: Stelmaszuk, “Residential Care in Poland.”
Irena’s colleague and friend Jadwiga Piotrowska: Jan Dobraczyński, private diary, 1945; courtesy of Mirosława Pałaszewska, personal communication.
Her father, Marian Ponikiewski: Tadeusz Cegielski, “Liberum Conspiro, or the Polish Masonry between the Dictatorship and Totalitarianism, 1926–1989,” Le Communisme et les Elites en Europe Centrale, March 31, 2004, École Normale Supérieure, colloquium presentation, www1.ens.fr/europecentrale/colloque_elites2004/4Documents/Resumes/Cegielski_resum.htm.
She and Janusz Piotrowski had a young daughter: “Jadwiga Maria Józefa Piotrowska,” Geni database, www.geni.com/people/Jadwiga-Piotrowska/6000000015472386167.
She lived on Karolkowa Street in Warsaw’s Żoliborz district: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “The Stolarski Family,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/123,the-stolarski-family/; see also “Józef Dubniak,” Museum of the Polish Uprising, www.1944.pl/historia/powstancze-biogramy/Józef_Dubniak.
team was providing public welfare support to thousands of Jews: Irena Sendler, “O Pomocy Zydom.”
It was based on nothing more than faking files: Ibid. See also Barré and Mozolewska, Elle, elle a sauvé les autres.
“The basis of receiving social assistance was collecting data”: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Irena Sendler,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/cms/biography-83/.
By January, young Polish ruffians: Yisrael Gutman, Ina Friedman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 28.
Germans were making plans to establish a Jewish quarter: Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 169.
Those living on the wrong side of the boundary would have to move: Yad Vashem, This Month in Holocaust History, “Warsaw Jews During World War II,” www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/resources/warsaw.asp.
wartime property records show that some members of the Celnikier and Mikelberg families: Kawczyński and Kieszkowski, Dekret Bieruta, database, www.kodekret.pl/Dekret-Bieruta.pdf. The Bierut Decree, passed in 1945, was an effort to restore real estate confiscated during the German occupation, making it an important immediate postwar record of property ownership.
Regina Mikelberg, though, was not among them: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “The Stolarski Family,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/123,the-stolarski-family/.
But already in October work started on a ten-foot-high brick wall: Harrie Teunissen, “Topography of Terror: Maps of the Warsaw Ghetto,” July 2011, www.siger.org/warsawghettomaps.
“In Warsaw, there were several thousand Jews who practiced professions”: Kurek, Your Life is Worth Mine, 15.
She was a fellow social worker named Maria: Janina Goldhar, personal correspondence; see also Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Maria Palester,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/434,palester-maria/; and “Irena Sendlerowa,” Association of “Children of the Holocaust” in Poland, www.dzieciholocaustu.org.pl/szab58.php?s=en_sendlerowa.php.
It was the fact that Henryk: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Maria Palester,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/434,palester-maria/.
Jewish families, slowly walking to clandestine Shabbat services: “Spiritual Resistance in the Ghettos,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005416.
It came like a thunderbolt, residents said afterward: Emanuel Ringelblum, qtd. Monica Whitlock, “Warsaw Ghetto: The Story of Its Secret Archive,” January 27, 2013, British Broadcasting Corporation, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21178079.
Polish residents—both friends and strangers—arrived in huge numbers: Władysław Bartoszewski, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Christian’s Testimony, trans. Stephen J. Cappellari, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
Soon the boundaries were guarded with rut
hless determination: Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 228–29. See also Stanislaw Adler, In the Warsaw Ghetto: 1940–1943, An Account of a Witness, trans. Sara Philip, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1982.
official rations allotted to her Jewish friends amounted to a paltry 184 daily calories: “Warsaw,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005069. Historical descriptions of Warsaw throughout this story have benefited from the following additional sources: Karol Mórawski, Warszawa Dzieje Miasta, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Kxiąžka i Wiedza, 1976; Robert Marcinkowski, Warsaw, Then and Now, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Mazowsze, 2011; Olgierd Budrewicz, Warszawa w Starej Fotografii, Olszanica: Wydawnictwo Bosz, 2012.
The Germans responded by adding loops of barbed wire: Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 228–29.
Now residents scuttled along the edges of the buildings: “Nożyk Synagogue, Twarda Street 6,” Virtual Shtetl, www.sztetl.org.pl/en/article/warszawa/11,synagogues-prayer-houses-and-others/5,nozyk-synagogue-twarda-street-6/.
One in five of her admitting staff would succumb to the disease: Naomi Baumslag, Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus, Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2005, 107.
As Polish residents hurrying to work looked on in astonishment: Michael A. Grodin, ed., Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust, New York: Berghahn, 2014, 70.
In December the Jewish hospital was closed: Commission of History at the Polish Nurses’ Association, “The Nursing School at the Orthodox Jew Hospital at Czyste District in Warsaw,” Virtual Museum of Polish Nursing, www.wmpp.org.pl/en/nursing-schools/the-nursing-school-at-the-orthodox-jew-hospital-at-czyste-district-in-warsaw.html.
“the first prerequisite for the final aim is the concentration of the Jews”: The Einsatzgruppen Reports, eds. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, Shmuel Spector, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1989.
“cities which are rail junctions should be selected”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 4: THE YOUTH CIRCLE
Her daughter, Rami, was five that year: “Mlawa Societies in Israel and in the Diaspora,” Jewish Mlawa: Its History, Development, Destruction, ed. and trans. David Shtokfish, Tel Aviv, 1984, 2 vols., www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/mlawa/mla449.html, see especially chapter 14, “Modern Times.” See also Jonas Turkow, Ala Gólomb Grynberg: La Heroica Enfermera del Ghetto de Varsovia, trans. Elena Pertzovsky de Bronfman, Buenos Aires: Ejecutivo Sudamericano del Congreso Judío Mundial, 1970.