Irena's Children by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Author:Tilar J. Mazzeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

CHAPTER 12

Toward the Precipice

Warsaw, 1943

A knock at three a.m. never meant anything but disaster, so the quiet tapping that startled Irena from her sleep one night in the spring of 1943 set her heart racing.

They could be betrayed at any moment to the Gestapo. As German fears grew about the strength of the Polish resistance movement taking hold in Warsaw, the efforts to ferret out the dissidents had become ferocious. When the Gestapo came, however, they would not knock discreetly. One had to remind oneself of that. Those visits came with the pounding of boots, and shouts, and the splintering of wood for the maximum terror effect. There was a precise etiquette to wartime knocks, and this was the reluctant predawn signal of a conspirator.

That could only mean one thing: something terrible had happened on that night’s rescue operation. Pulling her robe tightly around her, Irena hesitated. She did not turn on the light. A silhouette could betray her. But even in the darkness she knew where the most recent additions to the lists and the week’s account books were. They rested on the kitchen table, under the window, as always. It was her private protocol. In one swift motion Irena silently dropped them from the window, and watched the cigarette papers on which the lists were written flutter to the ground and settle among the garbage cans and stacked refuse. There, no one would notice a scrap with a few light pencil marks. “For safety’s sake, I was the only person who kept and managed the files,” Irena said later, adding, “I practiced many times to [hide them] swiftly in the eventuality of unwelcome visitors.”

Looking around the room quickly, Irena reassured herself that all was in order. She could hear her mother’s quiet breathing in the back bedroom and was glad that the knock had not awakened her. Irena worked carefully to keep her mother in the dark about her dangerous activities. It was the best way, when the worst came, to protect her.

Irena slid back the lock and opened the door as quietly as the battered wood and old hinges would allow. Her heart froze with terror. She thought she could just catch a glimpse across the hall of her neighbor’s door quietly closing. Had the old woman beaten her to the knock? At Irena’s door stood a teenager with four small children. All of them were drenched in sewage.

The teenager was a steely sixteen-year-old girl with dark eyes and a tangle of curls pulled back severely under a cap. Irena didn’t know her real name; all the Jewish couriers in her network had code names. So did Irena, of course, although the true identity of “Jolanta” had long been an open secret in the resistance. But one could only tell under torture what one knew, and so it was better not to ask any questions, and Irena never asked the girls where they came from.

Jolanta, the young woman whispered. Irena opened the door wider and urged the soggy group inside the darkened kitchen.

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