The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Lisa Garbus’s rescuer made money illegally distilling alcohol and selling it on the black market. ‘One day,’ she wrote, ‘the Germans did a search of all the houses on their street. If they had found the black market operation, the family could have all been killed. But they skipped the Pietrusiewicz house. After the war, when my grandparents emerged from hiding thin and pale and unaccustomed to the light of day, they tried to thank their saviour. “You saved us,” they said. “No,” he said, “I didn’t save you. You saved me. It was because you were hiding in my yard that the Germans passed over my house during their search.”’

  Reflecting on this remark, Lisa Garbus wrote: ‘Who knows what he actually meant. Maybe he was superstitious and really believed they were his good luck charm. Or maybe by saying that they saved him, he meant that they saved his humanity, that they allowed him to be a decent human being in the midst of all that chaos. Whatever he meant, it is clear that his message to them was: “You don’t owe me anything. You did the favour for me.” This, for me, reveals the core of this man’s virtue, and that of his family. It’s one thing in these happier times, to tell house guests that it was a pleasure to have them over, and to turn the guests’ appreciation around and thank them for coming. It’s quite another to thank the people you saved by risking the lives of your whole family and to tell them that they owe you nothing, that you, in fact, feel you owe something to them. This is the ultimate gift, even more profound than the gift of life he gave them.’41

  When the war was over the Lazniks found their daughter in the infirmary of an orphanage in Zakopane. ‘The orphanage workers recognized that they were her parents,’ Lisa Garbus wrote. ‘My grandparents had a picture, and apparently, she hadn’t changed much over the three or so years. And my grandparents recognized her. At first they just visited her, so as not to shock her; then they took her with them. She would cry to go to Church on Sunday, and she would hide bread in her clothes.’ As to Esther Rachel’s time in the orphanage, Lisa Garbus comments: ‘When my mother was there, her name was Wanda. I don’t know if she had false papers, but I think my grandmother did instruct her, before leaving her with the family, to speak Polish, not Yiddish. Not much is known of her time there. My mother remembers very little. She doesn’t remember any Polish. She only remembers not wanting to eat. The children were at long tables, and they were supposed to clean their plates, but she threw her food under the table.’42

  As a result of Polish Christians’ courage, a family of three had survived. ‘Both my grandparents saw their Polish saviour as a father figure. My grandfather carried a picture of that man in his wallet every day of his life.’43

  Sabina Schwarz (later Sabina Zimering) was sixteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. In October 1942, shortly before all but two thousand of the twenty-two thousand Jews in the Piotrkow ghetto were deported more than a hundred miles to Treblinka and their deaths, her mother told her that if her Catholic friend, Danka Justyna, would give up her identification papers, she might pretend to be a Pole and perhaps survive. Danka and her sister Mala had been lifelong friends of Sabina and her sister Helka; both worked for the Polish underground. Incredibly, Danka’s family provided three sets of false identification papers: one for Sabina, one for Helka and the third for their mother. The two girls, whose brother was in a labour camp, escaped the ghetto only two or three hours before it was surrounded.

  Thus began an odyssey of ‘Hiding in the Open’, the title of Sabina Zimering’s as yet unpublished memoirs. On their father’s advice, the two sisters went to Germany as Polish volunteers, to work in a labour camp. At one point, on the verge of being discovered, they decided to flee. They were arrested at a railway depot. When the director of the camp was summoned to the police station to identify the girls, instead of angrily condemning them, he asked the police commander to return them to the camp, where, he said, they were good workers and well-liked. However, others had already accused them of being Jews, and they were forced immediately to run again. Trying to get to Switzerland, they managed to reach Regensburg, where they found jobs in the luxurious Maximilian Hotel. ‘It was some time before she [Sabina] realized that the guests were all high-ranking German military officials. She was still working there when American soldiers displaced them all.’44

  The two Jewish sisters, as well as their brother, survived the war: their parents, and fifty members of their wider family, were murdered.

  Each story of rescue has its own remarkable features. From the town of Chmielnik, Kalman and Sara Garfinkel sent two of their seven children, their daughter Helen and their son Fishel, to a farmer in nearby Celiny. There, the two youngsters worked as shepherds by day, and at night slept on haystacks inside the barn. The farmer taught them how to pray, and how to cross themselves. Their story has been told by an American writer, Suzan Hagstrom: ‘One day, fear, rather than loneliness, prompted Helen to take Fishel home. “I saw a sign,” Helen said. “It offered a bottle of vodka and 100 zlotys for farmers to tell the Germans where the Jewish children are. My brother couldn’t read. He was only seven. I got scared. The next day we walked home.”’

  Their father persuaded them to return to the farm. ‘One day, as the children herded cows towards the barn, the farmer greeted them frantically, saying two Germans on motorcycles were approaching. He hid Fishel, and gave Helen a scarf and apron to wear, instructing her to milk a cow and not to talk, even if she were asked questions.’ The German asked her, ‘Where are the Jewish children?’ She shook her head. ‘I kept milking the cow,’ she recalled. ‘All I could think of was the Germans are going to find my brother, and my brother will tell.’

  The Germans left, but after they had gone the farmer explained he could no longer keep them. ‘He had a family, and he was afraid.’ For a second time the two children returned to their parents.45 There followed years in ghettos, slave labour camps and deportations: the fate of almost all of the two million Jews under the General-Government. Helen survived the war, as did her elder brother Nathan and three of her sisters; but her parents, her brother Fishel, and a younger sister, Rachel, were deported to Treblinka and murdered.46

  THE NEED FOR places of refuge in Poland spanned more than two years, from the start of the deportations in mid-1942 to liberation at the end of 1944 or early 1945.

  By 1943, tens of thousands of Jews were in hiding throughout occupied Poland, Byelorussia and the Ukraine; and German searches for them were continuous and brutal. On 22 March that year a Polish eyewitness in the town of Szczebrzeszyn, Dr Zygmunt Klukowski, recorded in his diary one of the harrowing scenes he had witnessed: ‘Yesterday they brought me a dangerously wounded peasant from Gruszka Zaporska. He had concealed six Jews from Radecznica in his cow barn. When the police appeared, he began to run and was shot at. He died last night. The gendarmes did not permit the family to carry away his body and ordered the Municipal Administration to bury him as a bandit. The Jews were shot by the Polish police of Radecznica and, shortly after the event, the gendarmes appeared in Gruszka and shot the peasant’s wife and two children: a six-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy.’47

  On 3 June 1943, during a deportation from Michalowice, three Jews had hidden in a barn, opening fire as the Germans approached. Tadeusz Seweryn, a Pole, later recalled how one of the Jews was killed and one escaped. The third fought to the end, and was burnt to death when the barn was set on fire. Enraged at the resistance, the Germans then killed two Polish farmers, Stefan Kaczmarski and Stanislaw Stojka, for hiding the three Jews.48

  On the night of 23 February 1944, in the remote Polish village of Zawadka, the Germans arrested a former primary-school headmaster, Aleksander Sosnowski, and his seventeen-year-old daughter, together with two Jewish women whom he had hidden and sheltered in an attic for a year and a half. All four were killed.49

  Among the few Jews who survived in hiding in Lubartow was twenty-year-old Raya Weberman. Together with her father and her uncle, she had stayed in hiding since the final ‘Action’ against
the Jews in the Lubartow ghetto in November 1942: at first in a hole under the kitchen floor of a Polish farmer, Adam Butrin; then, as the German searches began, in a pit that Butrin dug under the floor of his stables. After a further search, they had to live for three weeks lying down in a field, and then in the nearby forest, drinking stagnant water. ‘The water was green, bitter and full of insects,’ she later recalled. Then they returned to the hole under the stable. ‘For two years we wore the same clothes,’ Raya recalled. ‘I read bits of newspaper, dozens of times each.’ When liberation came in late July 1944, ‘Butrin joyously told us the good news. Afterwards he returned and announced sadly: “The Russians hate Jews too.”’50

  Raya Weberman, her father and uncle owed their lives to the bravery of Adam Butrin. Another non-Jewish Pole who showed such bravery was Teresa Strutynska-Christow. She was fifteen years old when the Germans hanged her mother in the town square, and left her body hanging there for seven days in a deliberate attempt to frighten all the Polish inhabitants of the town. Teresa’s home overlooked the square. For seven days she saw her mother hanging there. As a result she decided to hide Jews—and did so.51

  On 3 November 1942 the Jews of Zaklikow were deported to the death camp at Belzec. Dana Szapira, then seven years old, later recalled how, at the time of the deportation, ‘there was a Jewish woman dentist. Her leg was broken.’ A German official came; the woman told him that she was the only dentist in the town, and suggested that she might be of some use at headquarters. Having taken her out of the deportation line—she was on a stretcher—the German then went off to see if she could be employed, which would have saved her; ‘while he was gone a German soldier known as “Moustache” came up. “What are you doing here?” he said, and shot at her, not to kill her, but to see her writhe. Slowly, here and there, here and there, she was killed.’

  Dana Szapira and her mother, Lusia, were hidden by a Polish farmer who had no idea they were Jewish. They survived inside a cubbyhole in his cowshed. One day the farmer heard a knock on the door: it was a Jew, carrying in his arms his teenage son. ‘I have been hiding in the woods for months,’ the Jew told the farmer. ‘My son has gangrene of his foot. I cannot cut it off myself. Please get a doctor.’

  The farmer went to the Gestapo and told them about the two Jews. ‘He got two kilogrammes of sugar for reporting them,’ Dana Szapira recalled. ‘They were taken away and shot.’52

  Dana and her mother were exceptionally lucky: ‘We went to great lengths to make sure that the farmer did not know—or suspect—that we were Jews. That would have been the end of us.’ To ensure that the deception worked, mother and daughter went to church every Sunday.

  Sixty years later, Dana Szapira (Dana Schwartz) reflected: ‘I am so sorry I cannot give you any Righteous in my life. In my life there have not been any Righteous Gentiles.’53

  IN HIS STUDY of Polish-Jewish relations in the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of how in Lukow the Jews hid in the surrounding woods for some time after the ‘resettlement action’. It was ‘a frequent occurrence’, Ringelblum wrote, ‘for Polish children playing there to discover groups of these Jews hiding: they had been taught to hate Jews, so they told the municipal authorities, who in turn handed the Jews over to the Germans to be killed.’54

  Confirmation of the flight of numerous Lukow Jews to the surrounding forests, as well as the part played by the local population in tracking them down and denouncing them, is to be found in the diary of a Polish teacher from Lukow, whose righteous instincts are revealed in the horrified tone of his diary entry. He wrote, three days after the event: ‘On 5 November, I passed through the village of Siedliska. I went into the cooperative store. The peasants were buying scythes. The woman shopkeeper said, “They’ll be useful for you in the round-up today.” I asked, “What round-up?” “Of the Jews.” I asked, “How much are they paying for every Jew caught?” An embarrassed silence fell. So I went on, “They paid thirty pieces of silver for Christ, so you should also ask for the same amount.”’

  The teacher’s account continued: ‘Nobody answered. What the answer was I heard a little later. Going through the forest, I heard volleys of machine-gun fire. It was the round-up of the Jews hiding there. Perhaps it is blasphemous to say that I clearly ought to be glad that I got out of the forest alive. In Burzec, one go-ahead watchman proposed: “If the village gives me a thousand zloty, I’ll hand over these Jews.” Three days later I heard that six Jews in the Burzec forest had dug themselves an underground hideout. They were denounced by a forester of the estate.’55

  Rescue and denunciation: the range of conflicting responses demonstrated in human behaviour is astonishing. Eugenia Schenker, a graduate of the Cracow Conservatory of Music, recalled what happened after her escape from a labour camp. ‘I was hidden by a Polish family until their neighbours denounced them to the Germans and I had to escape to another Polish family and the same thing happened after a short period of time and I had to run again. It happened the same way, but four families tried to help me without any compensation, really only out of the goodness of the heart.’56

  The numbers of those who betrayed Jews and their rescuers must certainly have run, in Poland, into many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. It is, however, due to other Polish men and women of courage and goodwill that Eugenia Schenker—and all those who have written to me about their rescuers—are alive today.

  A survivor from the southern Polish town of Rzeszow, Henry Herzog, wrote from his home in the United States: ‘I am alive today due to the courage of three Gentile Poles.’ Returning to Rzeszow long after the end of the war, he was able to pay his respects to two of his rescuers, Titus and Luiza Zwolinski, ‘prostrating myself on their tomb’. Yet he knew that another Jewish friend of his had been betrayed by the Poles and executed. Henry Herzog added: ‘I fully agree with you that the memory of those who at the risk of their own lives, as well as of their families, helped Jewish people escape the genocide should be held in sanctity, counted and recounted.’ And he adds: ‘The memory of Righteous Gentiles has to find its place of honour and gratitude in the annals of the Holocaust. The controversy due to acts of bestiality by other Poles is not negligible, but should not be allowed to cast a doubt over the acts of humanitarian courage of the Righteous Gentile Poles.’57

  Chapter 6

  Warsaw

  WARSAW, WITH ALMOST half a million Jewish inhabitants on the eve of the Second World War, was to see by far the largest destruction of Jewish life of any city in Nazi-dominated Europe. In November 1939 the Jews of Warsaw were ordered to live in a ghetto: more than eighty-nine thousand were forced to leave their homes throughout the city and to move into the predominantly Jewish section of the city, where two hundred and eighty thousand Jews already lived, many in crowded tenements. A further twenty-six thousand Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto from across the River Vistula, mostly from the suburb of Praga.

  Many Poles looked with satisfaction at the Jews being moved into the ghetto, even gloating; but there were others who behaved decently. Writing in his diary on 19 November 1940, the Warsaw Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum recorded that on the day after the ghetto wall was completed, ‘many Christians brought bread for their Jewish acquaintances and friends’, while others helped Jews ‘bring produce into the ghetto’. That very day a Christian Pole was killed by the Germans while ‘throwing a sack of bread over the wall’.1

  For the first year of their existence behind the wall, some of the ghetto dwellers experienced individual acts of kindness by their nonJewish neighbours of pre-ghetto times. Despite the risks incurred in doing so, some of these Poles even took Jews for a night or two into the calm and quiet of their homes in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw—the common term used for the non-Jewish sections of the city—where food, though scarce, was at least available in life-sustaining quantities. But on 10 November 1941 the German Governor of Warsaw, Dr Ludwig Fischer, who was determined to bring all such help to an end, issued an official decree, imposing the death
penalty on ‘those who knowingly give shelter to such Jews or help them in any way (e.g., by taking them in for a night, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any sort, etc.)’. The decree noted that sentences would be imposed by special courts. The Governor added: ‘I forcefully call the attention of the entire population of the Warsaw district to this new decree, as henceforth it will be applied with the utmost severity.’2

  Hundreds of non-Jews ignored this order. Maria Charaszkiewicz—who was to plant the second tree of the Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem in 1962—was one of them. From the moment Fischer’s draconian order came into force, she stole into the ghetto almost every day to help her Jewish friends. During one of her visits, which took place during an outbreak of yellow fever, she succeeded in smuggling out of the ghetto the members of the Pollak family and a girl named Henia, whom she hid in her apartment for the night, and for whom she afterwards found a hiding place among her relatives. In 1941 she made a journey to Lvov, where she had lived before the war, found shelter there for two Jewish girls whom she had managed to get released from a deportation, and then brought the girls’ parents, Cesia and Janek Lewin—friends of hers from before the war—back with her to Warsaw, where she found them shelter.3

  The deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to the death camp at Treblinka began in July 1942. All those deported were murdered within a few hours of reaching the camp. David Wdowinski writes of the journey on the deportation trains: ‘Sometimes a humanitarian Ukrainian for a piece of gold or a watch or a thousand zloty would bring half a litre of water.’4