Most applicants were the sole survivors of their families, having run from camps or jumped off trains. An oral surgeon requested dental instruments so that he could work; another man requested money to support his orphaned niece and nephew. A young newspaper delivery boy had outlived his family and found shelter with a Polish family that cared for him as long as he brought in wages. He refused to enter a hiding spot and coveted his freedom, but he was desperate for a winter coat so he could continue to work during the cold months. The organization had only enough to offer 500 to 1,000 z?otys per person per month, when the cost of living was about 2,000. But it did all it could. Young, Aryan-looking Jewish women went out to deliver the monthly funds, visit their charges, and help when plans backfired—as they often did.
Some ads for rooms were traps, some neighbors were nosy, and, in some cases, the landlord would raise his price once the Jew arrived. Kashariyot often had to imply that the Polish resistance was involved, to make the hosts feel proud. In one melina, a woman started hallucinating in Yiddish. The son of the Pole hiding them poisoned her out of fear and hid her body under the floorboards of the bunker. The other Jews, including this woman’s daughter, were traumatized. Vladka arranged for a new apartment to house the Jews and the landlady.
Similarly, Vladka found a young Jewish woman named Marie a housekeeping job—these were the best situations because they provided food and lodging and one rarely had to go outside. One day the little girl of the house asked Marie what life was like in the ghetto. Marie panicked. It turned out the girl’s mother was Jewish, and the father had banished his wife to the ghetto. The Gestapo came over to search their home for the missing mother. Marie felt unsafe, so Vladka found her a new shelter.
One Jewish couple lived with their former maid in her miniscule bedroom inside an SS residence—Vladka had to move them. Another woman and her son lived under a pile of debris, in the dark, crouching there for months on end; they had not washed the whole time. The landlady had sold all their clothes. Again, Vladka had to carefully relocate them and provide medical treatment.
As the Germans began to lose on the eastern front, the reign of terror in Warsaw peaked. Poles were kidnapped for slave labor or sent to Pawiak Prison. Hiding places had to be even more creative. In one apartment, a wall was built next to a toilet so that a Jew could hide in the remaining space in the bathroom. The wall was painted and hung with decorative brushes. Another Jew hid in a hollow tiled stove.
Some people hid in more “liveable” melinas, where—despite the anxiety and depression caused by being confined—they could still function. Vladka brought composition paper to a hidden musician who’d been playing on a tuning fork; she gave two women books to tutor the household children. Vladka’s fellow underground operative, Benjamin, hid with his family in the kitchen of a shed inside a Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of town. They had little food but were able to light Sabbath candles.
Thirty Jews—including the historian Emanuel Ringelblum—lived in a secure suburban hideout under a garden; the admission fee was 20,000 z?otys per person. These Jews collected research and wrote essays and reports. To hide his large food shipments, the host opened a grocery store. Tragically, the man had a fight with his mistress, the only person outside his family who knew about the bunker. She reported it—everyone was killed.
Vladka made connections with Hungarian smugglers, with partisans, and with Jews outside Warsaw. She traveled without papers to help a group of Jewish fighters who’d escaped from the Cz?stochowa ghetto and were hiding with peasants in the countryside. On the train, she pretended to be a smuggler, carrying fake merchandise—money for the Jews was hidden under her belt. At a major inspection, a “fellow smuggler” directed her to a freight train where all the smugglers hid. She learned that Polish smugglers had good tactics for avoiding Nazis and often followed them. She arrived in the village and found the house that Antek had described, but the landlady denied all knowledge. Vladka persisted, and finally the woman led her to a shed. The comrades—already in debt—were ecstatic, and from then on, she brought them cash, clothes, and medication on a regular basis. Once, funds from the US and London were delayed, and she visited later than expected to find that the landlady had evicted them. Several had been killed, others joined partisan groups, a few hid in the forests, skeletal. Vladka arranged for new Poles to take them in.