Irena's Children

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  She was also in charge of leading the youth circle at number 9, Smocza Street: Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

  “Don’t you people understand yet?”: Ibid.

  “I was a frequent visitor to the walled district”: Ibid.

  Prices for smuggled food were astronomical: Samuel Kassow, translated and co-edited by David Suchoff, In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

  “Abuses—wild, bestial ‘amusements’—are daily events”: Bartoszewski, The Warsaw Ghetto.

  Above all, Irena’s friends were watching hungry small children die each day from typhus: “Irena Sendler,” Association of “Children of the Holocaust” in Poland.

  “the population density [inside the Jewish quarter] is unimaginable”: Bartoszewski, The Warsaw Ghetto, 9.

  “The Jews will die from hunger and destitution”: State University of New York at Buffalo/Jagiellonian University, “Slow Extermination: Life and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Info Poland, http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/web/history/WWII/ghetto/slow.html.

  “I want to steal, I want to rob, I want to eat, I want to be a German”: Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 39.

  Ewa Rechtman was an increasingly important figure at CENTOS: Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

  Ewa ran the youth center at number 16, Sienna Street: Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. See also Virtual Shtetl, “Janusz Korczak’s Orphanage in Warsaw,” trans. Ewelina Gadomska, www.sztetl.org.pl/en/article/warszawa/39,heritage-sites/3518,janusz-korczak-s-orphanage-in-warsaw-92-krochmalna-street-until-1940-/.

  “orgy of parties”: Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 249. On the archives kept by Ringelblum and his collaborators inside the ghetto, see The Warsaw Ghetto: Oyneg Shabes–Ringelblum Archives: Catalogy and Guide, eds. Robert Moses Shapiro and Tadeusz Epsztein, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

  The Sienna Street complex where Ewa worked housed one of those cafés: Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 119.

  the café was only a stone’s throw from the relocated Czyste Hospital’s main ward: Grodin, Jewish Medical Resistance. See also Barbara Góra, “Anna Braude Hellerowa,” Warsaw: Association of “Children of the Holocaust” in Poland, 2011, 38–39.

  the Jewish actor Jonas Turkow: Norman Ravvin, “Singing at the Café: Vera Gran’s Postwar Trials,” Canadian Jewish News, January 13, 2015, www.cjnews.com/books-and-authors/singing-caf%C3%A9-sztuka-vera-gran%E2%80%99s-postwar-trials.

  Everyone is crying: Agata Tuszynska, Vera Gran: The Accused, New York: Knopf, 2013, 68, 71.

  Wiera was rumored to be part of a group of Jewish people actively collaborating: Dan Kurzman, The Bravest Battle: The 28 Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993, 5.

  Who should get the vaccinations?: Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

  Her family lived in one of the large apartment buildings in the area: Ibid. See also Marian Apfelbaum, Two Flags: Return to the Warsaw Ghetto, Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007, 49.

  Józef would tell her about the best nightclubs in Warsaw: Aniela Uziembło, “Józef Zysman,” Gazeta Stołeczna, no. 141, June 20, 2005, 9; Grochowska, “Lista Sendlerowej.”

  Many members of the ghetto police were former lawyers and even judges: Katarzyna Person, “A Forgotten Voice from the Holocaust,” Warsaw Voice, March 31, 2011, www.warsawvoice.pl/WVpage/pages/article.php/23365/article.

  Along with Adam and Arek, he threw his energies into the Jewish resistance: Yad Vashem, This Month in Holocaust History, “Judischer Ordnungsdienst,” www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/resources/jewish_police.asp.

  Józef joined an underground socialist press: Anna Poray, 2004, “Waclaw and Irena Szyszkowski,” Polish Righteous, www.savingjews.org/righteous/sv.htm. See also August Grabski and Piotr Grudka, “Polish Socialists in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, www.jhi.pl/en/publications/52.

  Józef’s secret cell met for weekly organizational meetings: Grabski and Grudka, “Polish Socialists in the Warsaw Ghetto”; see also “A Forgotten Voice from the Holocaust” and Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

  CHAPTER 5: CALLING DR. KORCZAK

  But the fact was, Jan didn’t mind saying: Jan Engelgard, “To Dobraczyński był bohaterem tamtego czasu,” Konserwatyzm, June 19, 2013, http://www.konserwatyzm.pl/artykul/10342/to-dobraczynski-byl-bohaterem-tamtego-czasu. Review of Ewa Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach. Udział żeńskich zgromadzeń zakonnych w akcji ratowania dzieci żydowskich w Polsce w latach 1939–1945 [Jewish Children in the Monasteries: The Role of Female Religious Congregations in the Rescue of Jewish Children in Poland from 1939–1945], Zakrzewo: Replika, 2012.

  After the first office purges, Jan was promoted to director: Mirosława Pałaszewska, personal correspondence. I owe a significant debt of gratitude to Ms. Pałaszewska for making her entire personal archive of material available for this project. Many of the items are newspaper clippings and private archival materials from the families, most in Polish, which would otherwise have been nearly impossible to reconstruct.

  It occurred to Irena that the chemistry was obvious: Ibid.

  The frontline task of locating and caring for Warsaw’s children: Marek Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory, New York: Berghahn Books, 2012, 149; Nahum Bogner, “The Convent Children: The Rescue of Jewish Children in Polish Convents During the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/pdf/resources/nachum_bogner.pdf. See also Cynthia Haven, “Life in Wartime Warsaw . . . Not Quite What You Thought,” (interview with Hana Rechowicz), May 21, 2011, http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2011/05/life-in-wartime-warsaw-not-quite-what-you-thought.

  “For an absurdly low salary you had to be stuck in the office”: Mirosława Pałaszewska, personal correspondence.

  Whereas they used to send six hundred youngsters a year to the Father Boduen children’s home: Klara Jackl, “Father Boduen Children’s Home: A Gateway to Life,” Museum of the History of Polish Jews, June 11, 2012, www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/cms/your-stories/794/ and personal correspondence.

  The two frightened children: Cynthia Haven, “Life in Wartime Warsaw . . . Not Quite What You Thought.”

  But it was also summary execution for any gentile: Ellen Land-Weber, To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue, Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002, 195.

  Jan’s aging father was a friend of the “old doctor”: Jan Dobraczyński, Tylko w jednym życiu [Once in a lifetime], Warsaw: Pax, 1977; also Mirosława Pałaszewska, personal correspondence. See also Andras Liv, “1912–1942: Korczak Orphanage Fate in Warsaw: Krochmalna 92—Chłodna 33—Sienna 16,” January 2, 2012, http://jimbaotoday.blogspot.ca/2012/01/korczak-orphanage-in-warsaw_02.html, excellent selection of historical photographs of the orphanage sites.

  “[At] my request,” Jan said, “my father telephoned him”: Jan Engelgard, “To Dobraczyński był bohaterem tamtego czasu.”

  “A few minutes before curfew”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER 6: GHETTO JUGGERNAUT

  The word floated to mind and hung there stubbornly: Irena Sendler, “O Pomocy Żydom.”

  The women had made contact with a local priest in the distant city of Lwów: Yad Vashem, “Irena Schultz: Rescue Story,” The Righteous Among the Nations, db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=4017410; and Anna Poray, 2004, “Waclaw and Irena Szyszkowski,” Polish Righteous, www.savingjews.org/righteous/sv.htm.

  the professor’s handmade dolls for the children: Irena Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto”; also “Władysław Witwicki: Rescue Story,” database, Yad Vashem.

  “Please don’t ask me”: Irena Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

  “Above the entrance to the sewer, I said good-bye to Father”: The Last Eyewitnesses: Children of the
Holocaust Speak, eds. Jakub Gutembaum and Agnieszka Lałała, Vol. 2, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005.

  She saw these children every day at Adam’s youth circle: Irena Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

  “You can be calm about the child”: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Irena Schultz,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/644/.

  “I didn’t ask for any details,” Władka said: Andrzej Marynowski, personal communication.

  “It was enough to know that [Irka] had to take the Jewish children out of the ghetto and put them in a safe place”: Ibid.

  “My mother took me out,” she says. “I don’t remember how”: Rami Gołąb-Grynberg, personal communication.

  He remembers those days with his mother: Andrzej Marynowski, personal communication.

  Disaster was coming: How was she going to get a message to Irena?: Irena Sendler, “O Pomocy Żydom.”

  a thirty-year-old Jewish man named Szlama Ber Winer: “Grojanowski Report,” Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206317.pdf.

  CHAPTER 7: ROAD TO TREBLINKA

  In April 1942, the prisoners had been set to work on a new construction project: Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. See also Chil Rajchman, The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir, New York: Pegasus, 2012.

  “said it was to be a bath”: Chris Webb, The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance, Stuttgart: Ibidem Press, 2014, 14, 21, passim.

  Tickets would be required of everyone entering the baths: Chil Rajchman, Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory, 1942–1943, trans. Solon Beinfeld, London: Maclehose Press, 2009.

  “Jews of Warsaw, for your attention!”: Yitzhak Arad, “The Nazi Concentration Camps: Jewish Prisoner Uprisings in the Treblinka and Sobibor Extermination Camps,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Yad Vashem International Conference, Jerusalem, January 1980, Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/resistyad.html.

  In time, an orchestra would play Yiddish songs: Toby Axelrod, “Treblinka Survivor Attends Berlin Ceremony,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 1, 2005, www.jta.org/2005/08/01/life-religion/features/treblinka-survivor-attends-berlin-ceremony. See also Mark Smith, Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling, Mt. Pleasant, SC: The History Press, 2010, 112.

  They cost about the same as another increasingly desirable commodity: Axis History Forum, online discussion (thread: Adam Fisher, August 31, 2002, http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=6901). Measuring historical values is notoriously complex, but, roughly speaking, one USD ($) in the 1940s was roughly equivalent to 5.3 Polish złotych. For a discussion of historical values and calculators, see the excellent academic-run resource MeasuringWorth: www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php.

  “protective readiness distribution points”: Michał Głowiński, The Black Seasons, trans. Marci Shore. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005.

  “It became necessary to take the children to the Aryan side”: “Fundacja Taubego na rzecz Życia i Kultury Żydowskiej przedstawia Ceremonię Wręczenia Nagrody im. Ireny Sendlerowej,” 2013 program.

  Leon worked in the civil transportation office: Jewish Rescuers of the Holocaust, 1933–1945, “Jewish Organizations Involved in Rescue and Relief of Jews,” August 25, 2012, http://jewishholocaustrescuers.com/Organizations.html.

  The senior priest, Father Marceli Godlewski: Chana Kroll, “Irena Sendler: Rescuer of the Children of Warsaw,” Chabad, www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/article_cdo/aid/939081/jewish/Irena-Sendler.htm; see also Joachim Wieler, “The Long Path to Irena Sendler: Mother of the Holocaust Children,” (interview with Irena Sendler), Social Work and Society 4, no. 1 (2006), www.socwork.net/sws/article/view/185/591.

  As chief nurse of the ghetto hospitals: Joachim Wieler, “The Long Path to Irena Sendler.”

  a fellow social worker named Róża Zawadzka: Irena Sendler, “Youth Associations of the Warsaw Ghetto”; also Jonas Turkow, Ala Gólomb Grynberg; also Marcin Mierzejewski, “Sendler’s Children,” Warsaw Voice, September 25, 2003, www.warsawvoice.pl/WVpage/pages/article.php/3568/article.

  “One day she left me with Róża”: Personal correspondence.

  Irena called together a meeting of women in his division: According to Jan Dobraczyński, the staff members who came to him were Irena Sendlerowa, Jadwiga Piotrowska, Nonnę Jastrzębie, Halina Kozłowską, Janina Barczakową, Halina Szablakównę; Mirosława Pałaszewska, private archives; also Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Jan Dobraczyński,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/436,dobraczynski-jan/.

  “That whole group”: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Jan Dobraczyński,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/436,dobraczynski-jan/.

  “[But] I did not look for these children”: Ibid.

  “Normally,” Jaga explained, “the section manager would not sign these papers”: Ibid.

  From then on, Ala was in contact with Jan Dobraczyński: Nahum Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers: The Rescue of Jewish Children with Assumed Identities in Poland, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009, 22.

  It was increasingly Ala who coordinated advance logistics: Ibid.

  For the moment, the infant would stay hidden at the home of Stanisława Bussold: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2010, “Stanisława Bussold,” Polscy Sprawiedliwi (Polish Righteous), www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/pl/family/331,bussoldstanislawa/.

  “What we had on those lists”: “Fundacja Taubego na rzecz Życia i Kultury Żydowskiej przedstawia Ceremonię Wręczenia Nagrody im. Ireny Sendlerowej,” 2013 program.

  The doctor was in his early sixties: Betty Jean Lifton, The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak, New York: Schocken, 1989; and Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

  “It is a difficult thing,” he wrote, “to be born and to learn to live”: Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

  “We are told that all the Jews . . . will be deported to the East”: Adam Czerniakow, Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, ed. Raul Hilberg et al., Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999.

  “Wednesday, July 22, 1942. So this is the end of the ghetto”: Władysław Bartoszweski, The Warsaw Ghetto.

  CHAPTER 8: THE GOOD FAIRY OF THE UMSCHLAGPLATZ

  Marek was charged with coordinating the transfers: Michael T. Kaufman, “Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90,” New York Times, October 3, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/world/europe/03edelman.html.

  And they saved an old friend, Jonas Turkow: “Edwin Weiss,” Warsaw Ghetto Database, Polish Center for Holocaust Research, http://warszawa.getto.pl/index.php?mod=view_record&rid=09121996103042000001&tid=osoby&lang=en; and “Nachum Remba,” Warsaw Ghetto Database, Polish Center for Holocaust Research, http://warszawa.getto.pl/index.php?mod=view_record&rid=05011904155335000002&tid=osoby&lang=en.

  Anything to convince the Germans someone could not travel: Eli Valley, The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide, New York: Jason Aronson Publishers, 1999, 230.

  Fussy and frightened children, unable to feign disease: Jonas Turkow, Ala Gólomb Grynberg.

  She and Remba had diverted an ambulance: Nachum Remba, Warsaw Ghetto Database, Polish Center for Holocaust Research, http://warszawa.getto.pl/index.php?mod=view_record&rid=05011904155335000002&tid=osoby&lang=en.

  the SS came for the children at Dr. Korczak’s orphanage: Agnieszka Witkowska, “Ostatnia droga mieszkańców i pracowników warszawskiego Domu Sierot,” Zagłada Żydów, Studia i Materiały, vol. 6, 2010, http://korczakowska.pl/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Agnieszka-Witkowska.-Ostatnia-droga-mieszkancow-i-pracownikow-warszawskiego-Domu-Sierot.pdf, 22 and passim.

  That day she happened to come early, well before noon: Ibid.

&nbs
p; When Irena heard the news that the children were all destined for deportation: David Cesarani and Sarah Kavanaugh, Holocaust: Jewish Confrontations with Persecution and Mass Murder, vol. 4 of The Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Study, London: Routledge, 2004, 56.

  “The children were to have been taken away alone”: Jürgen Oelkers, “Korczak’s Memoirs: An Educational Interpretation,” Universität Zürich, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft, Lehrstühle und Forschungsstellen [published lecture], 95–96. See also Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939–1945, trans. A. Bell, with extracts from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld, New York: Picador, 1999.

  “You do not leave a sick child in the night”: Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper’s Wife.

  The children set off from the orphanage singing: Jürgen Oelkers, “Korczak’s Memoirs.”

  With children, the march across the ghetto, from south to north: Agnieszka Witkowska, “Ostatnia droga mieszkańców.”

  It was a swelteringly hot day already: Ibid.

  witnessed the doctor’s three-mile walk: I. M. Sidroni, “Rabbi Zalman Hasid,” trans. Alex Weingarten, The Community of Sierpc: Memorial Book, Efraim Talmi, ed., Tel Aviv, 1959, www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/Sierpc/sie377.html.

  But that morning his back was straight: Vladka Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Steven Meed, Jerusalem: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1972, review by Rivka Chaya Schiller, Women in Judaism 9, no. 1 (2012), http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/19161/15895.

  What is the possible guilt of these children?: Janusz Korczak, The Child’s Right to Respect, Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2009, www.coe.int/t/commissioner/source/prems/PublicationKorczak_en.pdf.