Isaac's Army (33 page)

Irene’s duties in the Home Army were not immediately clear to the Mortkowiczes, but she seemed to play a role similar to that of the mysterious Monika Zeromska. That both young women were exceedingly attractive was not a coincidence. Much like the Jewish couriers selected by Zivia, they were chosen at least in part for their looks.

Hanna quickly developed a deep respect for their landlady’s courageous daughter. “
If Irene sped off somewhere with a bag, she was sure to be taking supplies or clothes to someone in desperate need. If she was running off to the train station at an odd hour, her eyes red with tears, she was sure to be hurrying to save someone in trouble or to assist the family of someone arrested.” Irene, Hanna later wrote,
“was like a breath of life, like a wave of hope, fragrant, dashing, and fair.”

It was the bold and beautiful Irene who took Joanna away from her mother and grandmother in the fall of 1942 and brought her to live under an assumed identity in a convent in Warsaw. The family did not have much choice. The approaching school year had created a potentially serious security problem. Since the Germans allowed elementary schools up to the sixth grade to operate legally in Poland (no further education was deemed necessary to train future generations of slave laborers), keeping Joanna home from school would have aroused suspicion. Sending her to school, on the other hand, posed a different set of risks. The environment at public school was difficult to control. There were hundreds of students from different backgrounds. All it took was for one of them to come from an anti-Semitic home, and Joanna could be denounced as a Jew. Anti-Semitism was sufficiently widespread that it was almost a statistical certainty that someone would eventually tip off the Germans. The Gestapo would then take Joanna away and execute everyone at Irene Grabowska’s house.

The solution to Joanna’s pedagogic dilemma came from a seemingly unlikely savior: the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This was the same order of Dominican nuns that had sheltered the Mortkowiczes at the Zbikow estate and helped ZOB courier Ari Wilner in Vilna. The sisters had a boarding school for girls in Warsaw that was ideally suited to Joanna’s particular needs. It was within the confines of a walled convent, away from prying eyes and in an environment strictly controlled by the local Mother Superior. Joanna would be welcomed there and protected from both Germans and blackmailing greasers. The school was already providing sanctuary to a dozen other Jewish girls, her mother and grandmother were informed by Irene.

The offer was not easily spurned. Nor was it widely extended by the combative Roman Catholic Church in Poland. After centuries of relatively peaceful cohabitation, the Church had recently become increasingly hostile toward Judaism. The belligerence was partly the result of the same late-nineteenth-century socioeconomic forces that had embittered the rural aristocrats left behind by the Industrial Revolution. In rapidly growing cities, as once modest synagogues morphed
into soaring edifices that rivaled cathedrals, the Church, like the agriculturally based nobility, suddenly felt threatened. It fought back by aligning itself with the nationalist forces that spearheaded the wave of political anti-Semitism that swept Poland after independence. During the Depression, Catholic publications had been among the loudest critics of perceived Jewish economic dominance. During the Holocaust, the Church distinguished itself largely by its silence.

Fortunately for Joanna, individual members of the Polish clergy were willing to buck papal indifference and risk their lives to save Jews. Nuns in particular were free to act on their own conscience because each convent operated independently from the hierarchy during the Nazi occupation. The temporary autonomy afforded to the Nazarene, Ursuline, Albertine, Franciscan, and Carmelite orders
would result in the rescue of at least twelve hundred Jewish children.

At the convent where Joanna was to live, the Mother Superior had taken the unusually democratic step of putting her admission to a vote. “
Sister Wanda called us together,” a young nun, Maria Ena, recalled. “She began by reading the Gospel of St. John 15:13–17,” in which it is written that there is no greater love than laying down one’s life for another. “She explained that she did not wish to jeopardize the house, the sisters, the community. She knew what could be awaiting us.” Two nuns from their order had just been executed in the town of Slonim for hiding Jews. “Was it prudent to risk it for a few Jewesses?” Sister Wanda asked. “It was our decision.”

Heightening the risk was the fact—which Joanna’s mother did not know—that an entire SS battalion was garrisoned in a fortified complex directly across the street from the convent. The barbed wire barricades, guardhouses, and snarling German shepherds were a frightful sight for new pupils. Once inside, however, an entirely different atmosphere reigned. “
I clearly remember my first encounter with that place,” Joanna later wrote. “I am standing on the threshold of a huge gymnasium, holding Irene’s hand tightly. The shining floor smells of fresh polish. By the wall a large group of girls are sitting cross-legged, all staring curiously at the new girl. I am dying of embarrassment and fear. For the first time in my life I must remain alone in a new place, with strange people. I want to tear away from Irene and run home crying, but I know it is not possible. There is no home and if I ‘make a
scene’—my grandmother’s most abusive definition of hysterical behavior—I shall compromise myself in the eyes of these girls forever, and that will not help me at all. So I make the first conscious decision of my entire life; I let go of Irene’s hand, and, on that shining floor, in defiance of fate, I do a somersault, then a second, and third, and keep rolling until I end up at the other end of the room. The girls clap and the nuns laugh. I know I have won their hearts; I feel accepted and thus safe.”

Joanna’s days soon became a blur of regimented discipline. At seven she rose, washed, tidied her bed, and did gymnastics.
Breakfast and prayers followed punctually at eight. Between nine o’clock and noon, classes were held. After lunch, one hour of organized games was followed by another hour of manual labor. At three thirty everyone did homework and chores until the dinner bell summoned them to the cafeteria at five thirty. After supper, the girls had half an hour of free time followed by evening prayers at seven. A half hour later the lights were turned off.

Only then, when the girls were alone in their bunks in the dark, would they let their guard down and whimper. During the day, every child hid her true emotions behind a “jester’s mask” of cheerful joviality, Joanna recalled. “
This was the special skill of many occupation-era children. None of the dozen or so Jewish girls hidden at the convent, some of whom already had terrible experiences behind them, ever showed their sadness or fear about the fate of their loved ones. The crying was done at night.”

Though boarders were not supposed to discuss their personal lives, talk about their backgrounds, or use their real names, almost everyone soon knew which children were Jewish and which girls were the daughters of Home Army officers on the run. Even if the Jewish boarders looked and sounded “good,” the smallest slips, sometimes even a single word, could give them away. One blond girl was presumed to be Gentile until she
referred to her torn undershirt as a
lejblik
, something Christians never did. Another also fooled everyone until she cried out in Yiddish in her sleep one night.

Joanna was luckier than most of the other girls in that she was able to see her mother and grandmother every second week, when Irene would come get her and take her to Piastow for the weekend.
Most of the other children received occasional care packages and letters from relatives. Parental visits, however, were extremely rare. Many of the Catholic boarders were war orphans. The parents of most of the Jewish girls were also either dead or trapped in the Ghetto, while the daughters of senior Home Army officers could not see their families because of security risks. The Germans would not hesitate to use them to catch their “terrorist” fathers if their true identity was revealed.

The threat of the Gestapo loomed large over the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and not solely because the dreaded SS were their neighbors. The cassock or nun’s habit offered little protection from the Nazis.
One in five Polish priests died at the hands of the Germans during the war. Nuns and monks fared slightly better, but nearly a thousand were shot for various offenses. The Germans knew well that the Polish Church had a long history of fighting foreign oppressors, whether czarist, fascist, or communist, and targeted it accordingly. In Sister Wanda’s case, the suspicion was warranted. In addition to harboring Jews and the children of Resistance leaders, the Mother Superior also allowed illegal high school and university-level courses to be conducted on convent grounds, held training seminars for Home Army chaplains, and opened her doors to Underground operatives in need.

Because of the looming threat, Joanna and the girls practiced for Gestapo raids in the way most schoolchildren participate in fire drills. “
When an internal bell rang during lessons, we gathered the prewar books for Polish and history [both banned subjects] from our desks double-quick and shoved them into a special storage space,” Joanna recalled. “Sometimes the alarm was real—then the nuns hid the endangered children in the infirmary, behind the altar in the chapel, or in the enclosure.” Joanna had to stay in the altar for several hours during one such search. “By then I was already thoroughly versed in conspiracy. I knew by heart all the new facts of my [forged] identity card. My mother was called Maria Olczak, née Maliszewska, and my grandmother had become her own daughter’s mother-in-law, borrowing the name Julia Olczak, née Wagner, from my father’s late mother. My grandmother’s sister Flora, alias Emily Babicka, née Plonska, daughter of a carpenter born in Luninsk in Byelorussia, was no longer her
sister, just a chance acquaintance. Flora’s husband Samuel was now Stanislav. Luckily, he was still her husband, which made his life much easier, because his daughters, Caroline and Stefanie, who had two different surnames and were not apparently related to each other or to their parents, were always making blunders and were incapable of hiding their family connections. It was all very complicated.”

CHAPTER 26

BORUCH AND ROBERT LEARN DIFFERENT LESSONS

Joanna’s cousin Robert was also posing as a Christian student in the fall semester of 1942. Only the Jesuit school Osnos attended taught in English rather than Polish and was located three thousand miles away, in Bombay.

Robert was twelve, in the first awkward stage of adolescence, and the war was so far removed from his daily life that it soon became nothing more than a distant memory. Of his days in Warsaw during the 1939 siege, all that eventually remained was a vague recollection of burying himself in Jules Verne and Mark Twain, his “escape.” Of his flight to Berlin with his mother, Martha, there was only the faintly bitter aftertaste of his great-uncle’s inhospitality. All he would remember of the flight from earthquake-ravaged Romania to Turkey was the lingering terror of a few hours when he got separated from his parents and found himself lost and alone in Istanbul. The stopover in Iraq was more memorable, but fleeting, since his parents kept moving farther east. As for the journey from Iraq to India, just one acronym stayed lodged in his mind: POSH—Port Out, Starboard Home. “
Because of the sun, the elegant people were housed on the shady, port side of the
ship on the way out and on the starboard side on the way in.” Robert, Joseph, and Martha Osnos were in steerage. Broke, they cobbled together funds for the trip through the sale of some jewelry, then gambled on an immigration loophole. “
In Baghdad, my father had heard that if you had a transit visa, the British just let you stay in India,” Robert recalled. Joseph Osnos had obtained such a visa back in Bucharest, to the Dutch East Indies. He had thought it useless at the time. Now, armed with this facilitating document, the Osnoses booked passage to the port of Karachi, where the colonial authorities were desperate for skilled Europeans to buttress the war economy.

It was so hot in the hold of the ship that the Osnoses often slept on deck. Robert imagined himself as Sinbad the Sailor, while his parents marveled at the ocean glowing “
phosphorescent like green gold fire and stars like we’d never seen them before.” Their liner languidly traversed the parched coastline, calling on Gulf ports in Persia, Oman, and Bahrain, where Robert was captivated by Arab dhows and sword-bearing local officials in ornate turbans and flowing black robes.

“We had this wonderful feeling of a suspension of time and problems,” Martha reflected on the idle weeks the family spent at sea. She did not know what awaited them in India, how they would earn a living, or whether any country would ultimately take them in. But they were together, safe, and overwhelmed by the generosity of their Arab shipmates, who gave them dates and pomegranates, offerings so exotic to Martha that she “
didn’t even know what they were or how to eat them.”