The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  The boys walked that night to a small convent in Brzuchowice, whose nuns belonged to the Order of St Basil. They slept there that night, and the next day a nun took them back to Lvov, to the Studite monastery near the archbishop’s residence. ‘Here I met for the first time Father Marko (now recognised by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile). Father Marko was a young, handsome priest with a smiling face and energetic manner. He laughed a great deal and when he conversed with us one felt his obvious affection. He listened attentively when I told him that there were two Jewish girls who still remained in the orphanage and then smiled and looked at me thoughtfully without replying. (‘Romka’ and her mother survived and sent me a message after our liberation but I did not meet them again and never got to know their names or story.) Father Marko told us that he would take my brother and Dorko to Uhniv. I was to wait for his return and in the meantime I was again placed with the engineer’s widow and her maid Sofia who were now even more fearful than during my previous stay.’

  Father Marko took the boy by train to Stanislawow, ‘which we reached after much trouble. We stayed there overnight with Father Marko’s friends who were very frightened to accommodate me. A group of Jews who were hiding nearby in a bunker they had built under a bombed-out house had just been apprehended. Father Marko tried to reassure his friends by telling them that I had family in England. I do not know how he knew this.’

  From Stanislawow Father Marko took the boy on, by train, via Czortkow, to the end of the railway line. From there they continued by horse and cart to the village of Paniowce Zielone, where the River Zbrucz flows into the Dniester, which at that point marked the border between pre-war Poland and Romania. ‘Father Marko brought me here to the house of his older brother, Father Stek, who was a parish priest and lived with their elderly mother who managed the household. Before leaving, Father Marko suggested that I tell his mother the day after his departure that I was Jewish. However, I was too frightened to do so and persuaded myself that this extraordinarily shrewd woman had already figured it out all by herself.’

  In due course the boy was taken back once more to Lvov, to a church boarding school. The director, Father Kyprian, found out that the lad was circumcised but did nothing. When liberation came, the young man learned that his father and his grandparents had been murdered. Two months after liberation, on his way home from school, the young man encountered a funeral procession. ‘I recognized immediately that it was the funeral of a very important person because of the large number of Greek Catholic bishops in full funeral vestments who followed the coffin. They were followed by a group of high-ranking officers of the Red Army. Next to me an elderly woman made the sign of the cross in the Greek Catholic manner and so I asked her in Ukrainian whose funeral it was. The Metropolitan Sheptitsky had died, she told me, wiping away her tears.5

  It was not only his Christian flock that mourned the Metropolitan. Those whom he helped to save were, and remain, determined to obtain recognition for the churchman whom one of them, Leon Chameides, calls ‘this saintly man’.6

  Bracha Weisbarth was only three years old when the Germans overran the Ukrainian village in which she lived. She escaped with her mother and brother, and recalls how, ‘while we were in the forest, various individuals helped us. On occasion we were given shelter in their homes.’ All three survived—as the twenty-first century began, her mother was ninety-five years old.7

  Throughout Eastern Galicia, individual churchmen protected Jews. In the small town of Liczkowce, Father Michael Kujata hid eight-year-old Anita Helfgott, a fugitive from the ghetto at Skole, in his parsonage. Later a Catholic couple, Josef and Paulina Matusiewicz, gave her sanctuary. She survived the war.8 Priests played a crucial role in many cases. Felicia Braun was just five years old when, after the death of her mother, she was taken away from the terrible scenes and cries and hiding places—including a coal-box—of the Warsaw Ghetto, to a village in Eastern Galicia. One summer day, she later recalled, her aunt dressed her up ‘in a fancy dress. I had never worn such a dress before. She told me that she was taking me to my grandmother’s house. We walked out of the apartment block toward the walls of the ghetto. All the while, my aunt was repeating out loud the address of my “grandmother”. When we reached the gates, she bent down and whispered to me, “Felicia, you are as smart as Shirley Temple. From now on, you will have to be a little actress in order to stay alive. From now on, your last name will be Garbarczyk.” She pointed out a bench outside the walls where she said I would find a man who would take me to my “grandmother”. She told me that the guard at the wall would turn away when I walked by.’

  Felicia Braun’s account continued: ‘I was five years old. I repeated my instructions dutifully. I kissed my aunt goodbye. I wanted to live. I skipped through the gates and saw the man. He rose to get on a bus. I followed him. He did not speak to me. I followed him when he got off the bus. He motioned me toward a building. We went inside and climbed the stairs to an apartment. Inside, he told me, “Lie down on that bed and don’t move.” I did as I was told, lying motionless in the severe heat, barely breathing so no one could hear me. That night, my father appeared. I had no idea where he had been or how long he would stay. I wanted him to stay with me forever. He bathed me and fed me and led me out to another apartment building. He settled me onto a sofa where I fell into a deep sleep, drained from fear and exhaustion. This was the first of the many places I was moved to. In each of them, I was taught Catholic prayers. It seemed to me that everywhere I was sent, German soldiers followed.’

  Several months later, Felicia Braun recalled, ‘I was taken by the same stranger onto a train. I had been told that I was going to live in the country. I was told I would be safe. I was told not to ask questions. The train was crowded. Soldiers boarded. Their dogs were straining at their leashes, snarling, snapping, biting at whomever the soldiers pointed them toward. They were sniffing out Jews, and when they found them, the soldiers unleashed the dogs to tear the Jews apart. I was so desperate to live that I laughed at the hideous scene, laughed at the Jews being mauled, pretending as if I were Shirley Temple. I was brought to a farmhouse far out in the country and introduced to a middle-aged couple whose names were Leokadia (called Losia) and Kazimierz Stroka. They were to be my new parents. Concerned for my safety, they, too, moved from one part of the country to another.’

  One day, when the Strokas and their new ‘daughter’ were staying in a Ukrainian village near Rawa Russka, Felicia Braun’s own father came for a brief visit. ‘He appeared on Christmas Eve carrying gifts for all of us and stayed for three days. The night before he left, he took me into his arms and covered my face with kisses.’ The next day he left. ‘Watching from the window as he walked through the snow, I knew I would have to be brave like him. I knew I could never let anyone know that I was Felicia Braun, that I was a Jew. I was able to deceive everyone, even the German soldiers who visited the Strokas regularly. They would sit me on their knees and tell me how I looked just like their own daughters, like a good German girl.’

  Felicia Braun recalled the day of her First Communion: ‘I was tortured with apprehension. What if today someone doubts me? I thought. What if someone asks: “Are you sure that child is Catholic? Are you sure she is one of us?” I could not get my face to wear the right expression. No matter how hard I tried to put on my very best Shirley Temple smile, my eyes showed only terror. I was as frightened as I had been in any of the last few years of my life, frightened as I was in the coal-box, frightened that I would be found hiding—this time, in my Catholic disguise. I was terrified that I would be wrenched from the prison of my carefully crafted lies and thrown into a new prison where I would be tortured to death with the truth.’

  The photographer who was taking pictures of the children who were about to receive their First Communion tried to cheer her up. ‘He told me how beautiful I looked in my Communion dress. He took a photograph, but the expression on my face was so miserable that he had to take another one. “Come, you want to be brig
ht for your Communion picture. You will keep it all your life to remember this happy day,” he said. I was nearly sobbing. His second picture looked even worse. In disgust, he told aunt Losia that he would waste no more pictures on me, and that she would have to bring me back another time when I had some control of myself. I already knew how angry “Uncle” Stroka would be.’

  The ceremony went ahead. ‘I was shoved into the procession of children and felt my feet moving toward the altar. As I knelt, I heard the voice of Father Kaczmarek as he leaned toward me with the wafer. I looked up into the kindest face that had ever gazed at me, at a face whose eyes I could look into forever. They were eyes that accepted my lies and loved me despite them. What I saw was the face of my real father. I thanked God that it was him and that none of the people in this church had discovered Felicia’s lie.’9

  In the Eastern Galician city of Tarnopol, a Polish nursing student, Irene Gut Opdyke, worked as a supervisor in a German laundry.

  Located in a camp near the ghetto, the laundry also used Jewish women as forced labourers. The young Polish woman treated these women ‘with special sensitivity’. At the camp, she worked for a German major who suffered from digestive ailments. Irene prepared special meals for him. His gratitude took the form of a willingness to overlook her bending the rules with regard to the Jewish workers. With his connivance, Irene acquired special passes making it possible for the Jewish workers and their families to leave the ghetto and remain in the laundry while deportation ‘actions’ were taking place in the ghetto. In July 1943, when the camp where the laundry facility was located was slated for liquidation, Irene urged the three hundred Jewish forced labourers to flee. She hid nine of the workers in the major’s private apartment. When the major discovered what she had done, he berated her for placing him in jeopardy; but somehow, Irene managed to persuade him to allow the Jews to remain, and he even agreed to furnish his cellar with some conveniences to make their lives more comfortable. When the Gestapo became suspicious and came to investigate, Irene refused to allow them to search the premises, on the grounds that they were the private residence of a major in the German army; she suggested they call him at his office instead. The ruse succeeded, and the police left without conducting a search.

  As the war turned against the Germans, Irene and other personnel in the German civil administration were ordered to evacuate Tarnopol and move towards the German border. Instead, Irene went into hiding with the Jews in the cellar, and then fled with them to the forests; there, before parting from them, she arranged for a Polish woman to look after them. They were subsequently liberated by Soviet forces on 23 March 1944. In the meantime, Irene had been taken with the retreating Germans to Kielce. She managed to escape and joined a Polish partisan unit. She survived the war, to be recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.10

  Walenty Laxander, a Pole living in Tarnopol, was working as an engineer in the nearby Czystylow labour camp when he was handed a bundle and asked to keep it safe until the end of the war. That bundle was a two-month-old girl, Gizela Ginsberg, the only child of a Jewish couple working in the camp. The child was born in April 1943, at the very moment when the Jews of Tarnopol and the surrounding towns—among them the baby’s grandparents—were being deported to Belzec and murdered. A Polish doctor helped Laxander smuggle the baby out of the labour camp, leaving the bundle on a street in Tarnopol for him to collect. He then registered the baby as an ‘abandoned’ Christian child, and raised her as his own. Gizela’s parents were murdered when the labour camp was liquidated. Gizela survived. Shortly before being killed, her father had sent her a letter, asking that Laxander’s memory be one day honoured for his act of rescue. The letter was dated 4 June 1943; fifty-three years later Laxander was recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations.11

  DURING ONE OF the round-ups of Jews in Warsaw in August 1942, Maria (Maryla) Charaszkiewicz, who had already saved a number of Jews in both Warsaw and Lvov, received an urgent message from her dentist in Lvov, Dr Kamila Landau, who asked for help. ‘Maryla came to see me immediately,’ Dr Landau recalled. ‘She did not even let me say a word and she acted very quickly. She told me to put a hat on my head, placed a handbag in my hands, and she took me out of the clinic. We entered a streetcar that went to the Aryan side.’ From Lvov, Maryla Charaszkiewicz took Dr Landau into the countryside, to Grodek Jagiellonski, where her sister Yula lived. Yula took in the fugitive, refusing to accept payment.

  Dr Landau’s account continued: ‘Maryla sent food for me because Yula’s material wellbeing was far from good. She was married to a worker at a railway station. My benefactors looked after me and they hid me without any compensation. I was sick and tired of sitting inside all the time, and in October 1942 I went for a walk. When I got back, I heard screams. It was Yula who intentionally raised her voice saying: “What? My cousin is a Jew? How dare you say such a thing! When she returns from Lvov, I’ll prove what kind of a Jewess she is!” I realized that she raised her voice to let me know what was happening. I fled from there, and I hid in the bushes. Some time later they left. I heard her husband’s footsteps, who came home at that moment, and Yula’s voice: “They came here to look for our Marylka (this is how she called me) and I do not know where she went. I am worried about her.” Then I called her from the bushes and she was happy to hear my voice. It turned out that there had been an informant against me. Our neighbours’ daughter who returned home after being sent to work in Germany understood who I was and informed the Gestapo. “I will go to Lvov tomorrow,” I said. Yula accompanied me. She walked first, and I followed her, and thus we came to Lvov.’

  Maryla Charaszkiewicz described what followed: ‘The door opened, Yula entered and she said: “I brought you your dear friend, and she is waiting for you in St Anna’s Church.” A problem arose, where to hide our Marylka. I called my Ukrainian neighbour who had a room with an entrance from the corridor between our two rooms, and she agreed to lease me a room (for financial compensation). I made a kind of a garbage room, a real dump; and, I told my neighbour I planned to store potatoes there. At that moment even my husband didn’t know that Marylka was in the house. I put a bed in the room for Marylka. We decided that when we were not home, she could use our apartment. We had to reveal this secret to our domestic servant. I told her that my cousin was hiding in the garbage room because she had fled from forced labour in Germany and that my husband didn’t know about her presence.’

  Dr Landau later recalled how, when the Charaszkiewiczes were busy in their shop, she helped their maid with the housework. Then at seven in the evening, she would return to her room, ‘where Mr Charaszkiewicz never entered. After the war he told me that he knew all about this but he pretended not to know. This proved the nobility of his character. He overcame his fear and he didn’t prevent his wife from helping me.’

  Maryla Charaszkiewicz remembered: ‘We were terribly afraid all the time. We were often standing at the window looking into the street and thinking: maybe they are coming…Once we entered our apartment and saw Marylka standing in the kitchen. She obviously forgot it was already seven o’clock in the evening. I shielded the door with my body because I didn’t want my husband to notice Marylka, but I couldn’t hold myself up and I fainted.’12

  Fanny Tennenbaum and her eleven-year-old son Dawid escaped from the ghetto in Lvov in August 1942. A Ukrainian professor who was a friend of the family assisted her escape and found her a temporary hiding place at the home of an Ethnic German in Lvov. Ironically, the son of the professor was serving as a member of the Ukrainian SS on the Eastern Front. After a month, the professor secured false papers for Fanny and Dawid, and found them a long-term hiding place in the village of Zimna Wola. They moved there in December 1942, to live in the home of an elderly retired schoolteacher, Mrs Sokolinska. Shortly afterwards their first hiding place was raided and everyone there was arrested.

  In Zimna Wola, Fanny Tennenbaum hid under the name Franciszka Maria Wieczorkowska. Her son, who had grown his hair long, passe
d as her daughter, and was given the name Teresa Marja Wieczorkowska. He also pretended to be retarded, so as to avoid having to take the required physical examination to attend school. He passed his time playing by himself and reading among the many books in the house. Occasionally during their first year in Zimna Wola, Fanny succeeded in returning to Lvov and visiting her husband, but he disappeared in the spring of 1943. He was almost certainly sent to the concentration camp at Janowska and later perished. The Soviet army liberated Dawid and his mother in September 1944: he was then thirteen years old.13

  In Lvov, Katarzyna Rudawksa hid thirteen-year-old Halina Gartenberg for fourteen months, until liberation: her parents and her brother were also killed in Janowska. ‘Katarzyna was a very simple woman, who could hardly read or write,’ Halina later recalled. ‘She was a very courageous woman of very high moral standards. She told me, at one point, that one day she will stand before her God and would have to explain why she let me die.’14

  Donia Rosen, who later became head of the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, responsible for seven years for submitting names for the Righteous award, was herself saved by two peasant women—one Polish and one Ukrainian—in the Eastern Galician town of Kosow. As a twelve-year-old girl, Donia had witnessed the execution of her parents; she then wandered, alone, in the forest until, as she recalled, she came to a village where she remembered a friend of the family lived, and she asked her for help. This woman, with all her good will, was afraid to take the risk—and even more afraid of her husband who, she feared, might not agree to hide the girl, and might even report her to the police. Nevertheless, she took Donia in for a while, and then introduced her to an elderly woman, Olena Hryhorysztyn, who was prepared to take the risk of helping her. ‘Olena was an old, uncomplicated woman who was in strained financial circumstances,’ Donia Rosen recalled, ‘but she was extremely rich in spirit, kindness, and the nobility of her soul. She was lonely and poor,’ but from the start felt attached to Donia, and set herself the goal of saving her.