A source of Polish pride
My father was a doctor; a catholic man who tended to all he knew,
He didn’t care who you were, whether Catholic, Christian or Jew;
I was born in Warsaw in a time when it was frowned upon to have a Jewish friend,
But I was raised to ignore such madness and told only on my good sense to depend.
I was born in 1910; I was a child, who saw the world as it really should have been,
I never knew then the horrors to come or that man could be so obscene;
I married young; later becoming a social worker working in the ghettos of the poor,
I did what I had to do to help but I always I felt I could’ve done that little bit more.
During the war, under German occupation, all the Ghettos for Jews were sealed;
No supplies or medicines were allowed in; so many lives became cruelly concealed.
I had to do the right thing; I posed as a sanitary worker to smuggle in food and supplies,
I saw things that the human eye should never see; skeletal corpses bathed in flies
In 1942 the deportation of Jews from the Ghettos to the Death Camps began;
I joined a Polish organisation called Zegota and together we formed a plan.
We smuggled children out of the ghettos; using boxes, coffins, even a potato sack,
We held our breaths and said many a prayer, never once daring to look back.
The children did not want to leave their families; forever asking the question why?
But how do you tell a child that because they’re Jewish they’ve been chosen to die!
Once we got the children out, we found them homes, new places they could go;
We gave them new identities and taught them all they needed to know.
I kept a list of the children’s names so I could reunite them with their families one day;
But my list had to be hidden far from view or a heavy price we’d all have to pay.
In October 1943 the Germans came to arrest me; an informer had lead them my way,
I was tortured to the point of death but all the children I could never betray.
Officially I was executed in 1944 but in truth Zegota had bribed a guard to set me free;
I escaped from the Pawiak Prison Camp alive and dodged the bullet meant for me.
I went back to what I had been doing before; although this time under an assumed name,
I continued to try to save more children and did so until the end of the war finally came.
In a well buried jam jar I retrieved a list of names; over 2000 children that I’d helped to save;
Innocent Children of the holocaust that were all destined for a far too early grave!
I lived to the ripe old age of 98, when in life; I was told “you can’t “I always said "I can”;
And I died with the knowledge that I did what I did for the good of my fellow man.
(2012)
“If you see a person drowning you must jump in the water to save them, whether you can swim or not” Dr Stanislaw Kryyzan owski (Irene’s father)
Irene refused to think of herself as a hero. “That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true — I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death.”“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.”
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