The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Jews who managed to escape from the ghetto into ‘Aryan’ Warsaw had to find families who were willing to risk their own lives in taking them in. Each story is different, and each one reveals the humane, decent character of the individuals who took such grave risks. The story of Bernard and Felicja Feilgut and their five-year-old granddaughter Ewa is one example. At first, posing as non-Jews, they rented a room in the home of Stefania Laurysiewicz and her two daughters. When their money ran out they had to tell their landlady that they were Jewish—and they asked her for help. Yad Vashem’s archive records the sequel: ‘Although aware of the danger, Laurysiewicz and her daughters responded in the affirmative. For humanitarian motives and for no material reward, they protected fugitives and met their every need.’ Since Felicja Feilgut and her granddaughter looked ‘Aryan’, spoke Polish fluently and frequently attended the church near their place of hiding, ‘the two did not arouse the neighbours’ suspicions’. But Bernard Feilgut, ‘whose facial features bespoke his Jewishness’, had to remain in the apartment at all times, and retreated to a hideout whenever visitors came. When in early 1944 Wanda Laurysiewicz married Jan Spychalski, who moved into his mother-in-law’s apartment, the young man also took on the task of helping the three Jews.5

  Four people had taken an enormous risk—and they continued to do so for almost two years. Both families, rescuers and rescued, survived the war. In another collective effort, seven members of the Brejna family worked together to save and protect Jews. Tadeusz Brejna was married to Stefania-Barbara, a doctor who worked in a fever hospital near the ghetto. Fearing infection, the Germans kept out of the building, which consequently served as a temporary hideout for Jewish refugees. Tadeusz obtained ‘Aryan’ papers for a number of Jews, while Stefania-Barbara performed operations to disguise the traces of circumcision and Tadeusz’s sister, Stanislawa-Lucyna, a nurse, assisted Jews in need of medical care. In December 1942 a five-year-old Jewish girl, Teofila Raszbaum, was brought out of the ghetto, suffering from burns to her hands. She was taken to the Brejnas’ home, where she was looked after by Tadeusz’s father, Boleslaw Brejna, his wife, Wladyslawa, their son, Kazimierz, and daughter, Zofia. The Brejnas did not abandon Teofila; they kept her hidden in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw throughout the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of April 1943, and kept her with them even after their own expulsion from Warsaw in the wake of the Polish Uprising in August 1944. (The Brejnas were supporters of the Armia Krajowa, the underground Polish Home Army, and Boleslaw and Kazimierz were executed by the Germans during the uprising.) In 1941–2, the Brejnas also gave refuge to Juliusz and Stefania Kepski, after Stefania had been denounced to the Gestapo as Jewish.

  As devout Catholics, the Brejnas regarded it as their duty to save Jews, and asked nothing in return for their actions. After the war, the Kepskis and Teofila Raszbaum emigrated from Poland, but they continued to maintain contact with the Brejnas for many years to come.6

  The need to disguise circumcision was also a concern of a Polish surgeon named Feliks Kanabus, who used the techniques of plastic surgery to reverse the operation. He also used false certificates to circumcised Jews stating that their circumcision was ‘necessitated by an infection’.7 In December 1945 two American Jews, Dr S. Margoshes and Louis Segal, who were on a World Jewish Congress mission to Poland in search of survivors, were told by several Jews whom they met of ‘a legendary figure, a Polish doctor by the name of Kanabus who, at the risk of his own life, the lives of his children and his aged mother, had saved many Jews by hiding them and also by some remarkable operation which he performed’.

  It was then, noted Dr Margoshes, ‘that I resolved that I would seek out Dr Kanabus.’ Eventually he found him: ‘A youngish man with a pleasant Slavic face, blond hair and a ready smile, he immediately inspired confidence. He told me of his years at the Warsaw University, where he joined a Socialist group and befriended many Jews at a time when Jewish students of medicine were barred from the courses in anatomy. He also told me of his sense of shame and humiliation at the sight of many Poles aiding the Nazis in their perpetration of horrible crimes against Jews, and of his resolve to do what he could to save as many as possible.’

  The rest of the story of Dr Kanabus the astounded Margoshes learned from Dr Michael Tursz, a physician who was one of many Jews saved by Kanabus. ‘Both he and his wife had been dragged from their home to the Warsaw Ghetto. In sheer despair, Dr Tursz sent a message to his original friend of university days, Dr Kanabus, asking for aid. He was most surprised to receive a quick answer, for in those days of terror friendship counted for but very little. Before long Dr Kanabus managed to get into the Warsaw Ghetto, and by a ruse, to lead both Dr Tursz and his wife past the ghetto watch. For the next three years Mrs Tursz, on forged papers prepared by Dr Kanabus, served as a kitchen maid in Dr Kanabus’ household, while Dr Tursz spent his days and nights in a cellar which Dr Kanabus secured for him with the connivance of his family and some of his friends.’8

  Kanabus’s wife Irena had helped with the operations, and had supervised the recovery of the patients. She too was honoured by Yad Vashem as a Righteous person.

  Jan Zabinski and his wife Antonina were among the very first Poles to be recognized at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as Righteous Among the Nations. When the Germans occupied Warsaw, Jan Zabinski was the director of the Warsaw Zoo. The Germans also appointed him superintendent of the city’s public parks. As a result of the German air raids on Warsaw in September 1939, most of the cages in the zoo had been emptied of their animals. With the beginning of the deportations from Warsaw in 1942, Zabinski decided to use the empty cages as hiding places for Jews who were fleeing from the ghetto. Over the following three years, he provided several hundred Jews with temporary shelter in the animal houses, as well as providing refuge for some twenty Jews in his own two-storey home in the zoo grounds. During the uprising in August 1944, Zabinski, himself a member of the Polish underground, was captured by the Germans and sent as a prisoner to Germany; but his wife continued to help Jews who were hiding in the ruins of the city.9

  Sister Matylda Getter was the Mother Superior of the Warsaw branch of the Order of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary. In peacetime she and her Order had worked mainly among orphans and the sick in hospitals. In 1942, when she was already ill with cancer, Sister Matylda took the incredible risk of taking in any Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto who had managed to escape and who were brought to her. She placed these children in various homes owned by the Order, many of them in the one at Pludy, seven and a half miles outside Warsaw. It has been estimated that Sister Matylda succeeded in rescuing several hundred Jewish children. For doing so, she was accused by some people of unnecessarily endangering the lives of non-Jewish orphans in the homes of the Order. Her reply was that ‘by virtue of the Jewish children’s presence, God would not allow any harm to befall the other children’. Whenever a Gestapo raid on one of the orphanages was believed imminent, Sister Matylda took those Jewish children who looked “too obviously” Jewish into temporary shelter elsewhere. When there was not enough time to do this, those particularly Jewish-looking children would have their heads or faces bandaged as if they had been injured.10

  Wladyslaw Kowalski was a retired colonel in the Polish army at the time of the German invasion of Poland. As the Warsaw representative of the Dutch-owned Philips Company, he was given freedom of movement in Warsaw by the occupying forces, a privilege he exploited to the full in his many successful attempts to save Jews. His first rescue effort was made in September 1940, when he saw a ten-year-old Jewish boy wandering in the streets of ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. He took the boy to his own home, fed him and obtained a new identity card for him, as well as a permanent home with one of his friends. In February 1943, after the first Jewish revolt in the ghetto, Kowalski bribed the Polish guards at the ghetto gate to allow seven Jews to leave, and then found safe havens for them on the ‘Aryan’ side. That November he helped a family of four living near Izbica—whose ghetto was a staging post for deportation
to the death camp at Belzec—to reach Warsaw, where he found them a hiding place, once more with his friends.

  After the Jewish ghetto revolt in April 1943, Kowalski gave refuge in his own home to twelve Jews, buying material with which they were able to construct an underground shelter. The fugitives made wooden toys that Kowalski was able to sell in the city, helping to cover the cost of feeding and maintaining his ‘guests’. At the time of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, Kowalski converted the basement of a ruined building into a hiding place for himself and forty-nine Jews. Their daily ration consisted of three glasses of water, a small quantity of sugar, and vitamin pills. They remained there in hiding for 105 days, until liberation. After the war Kowalski married one of the Jewish women he had saved; together they moved to Israel.11

  Jozef and Helena Biczyk lived in the basement of a building in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. Here they gave shelter to two Jewish girls, Alicja Fajnsztejn (aged thirteen) and her sister Zofja (aged seven). Before the war Jozef had been the superintendent of one of their father’s properties in the city, and, later, the girls’ parents joined them in hiding. The Biczyks continued to live in the basement, while the four Fajnsztejns lived in the laundry room in the attic, joined at times by other Jews in search of a place to hide.12 They remained there for a year and a half, until liberation.

  Before the war, Genowefa Olczak, known as Genia, worked in Lodz as a housekeeper for Roma and Aleksander Rozencwajg and their small son Gabriel. After the outbreak of war the family moved to Warsaw, taking Genia with them. Aleksander Rozencwajg joined the Polish army, and with several thousand other officers was killed by the Soviets at Katyn in 1940 after having been interned. When non-Jews were ordered to leave the ghetto, Genia had to go, but still brought food to the Rozencwajgs until the ghetto was completely sealed. ‘One day they marched us all to another part of the ghetto in order to take the children and old people away—shoot them or send them to camp,’ Roma Rozencwajg’s niece, Bianka Kraszewski, recalled. ‘I was “camouflaged” to look much older than I was, but my aunt and Gabriel had no chance—we made a hole in the wall of the “shop” and took out bricks and hid them there, not knowing if we would come back or find them alive.’ This ‘shop’ was one of several dozen German-run workshops in the ghetto where Jews were put to work making clothes and other items for the German army.

  It was Genia Olczak who came to the rescue, making hiding places for the Rozencwajgs in her small apartment. ‘In a niche behind an armoir two people could stand, and behind a false wall in the toilet—one person,’ Bianka Kraszewski recalled. ‘My aunt, my uncle Karol and his wife Estka and my little cousin Gabriel left the ghetto and went to stay with Genia. She prepared false papers for each of them, but for Gabriel prepared a false birth certificate as her son out of wedlock. She went to work every day to help support them and if anyone knocked on the door the three adults would go to their hiding places. Gabriel stayed home under the pretext that he had TB.’

  Bianka Kraszewski’s account continued: ‘Genia also was instrumental later on (November 1942) in getting my mother and me out of the ghetto, getting papers for us and finding us hiding places. Later on she did the same for my father (April 1943). When the workers of our “shop” were moved to the Poniatowa camp they took everyone—including my brother, cousins, another uncle, four aunts and my best friend—except my father whom they ordered to keep an eye on the “shop”.’

  At one of the Schultz workshops in Warsaw, the largest in the ghetto, it was the German manager, Fritz Schultz, who carried out an act of kindness. As Bianka Kraszewski wrote: ‘Mr Schultz forcefully put my father in the trunk of his car and drove him to the Aryan side of Warsaw (where I and my mother were). My grandfather committed suicide—before they could take him to Auschwitz. I don’t know about the others, but my nineteen-year-old brother was later taken to the Trawniki camp. Inmates of both camps were killed in November 1943. Genia kept finding places for us to hide—as it was too dangerous for us to be together with my parents. (On 1 February 1944 they were denounced and shot together with their host Mr Przybysz.) Soon after that someone denounced Genia and she had to get rid of my uncle and two aunts. They were hidden after that in the Old Town district of Warsaw and after the Warsaw Uprising ended unsuccessfully and they had nowhere to go, they too committed suicide.’

  Genia Olczak continued to do all she could; taking the young Gabriel Rozencwajg to her village, where she looked after him until liberation. Bianka Kraszewski added: ‘About ten years ago, Genia was awarded a medal of Righteous Among the Nations, and travelled to Israel and saw a tree being planted in her name in Yad Vashem. She never married—her young years were devoted to trying to save us all and especially to Gabriel whom she loves like her own son.’ Genia, she wrote, ‘who risked her life for us for years, thinks she only did what she should have done and certainly does not consider herself in any way heroic. However, this good, kind, wonderful woman is loved by everyone and if angels would walk this would have been one of them.’13

  Each story of rescue reveals different aspects of the courage of the rescuers. William Donat was just five years old when he was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto. ‘I had already survived many hours in the bunker my parents and their neighbours had fashioned,’ he later wrote, ‘and I had just been rescued from Umschlagplatz, the infamous railhead the Germans had set up to transport Warsaw’s Jews to Majdanek and Treblinka. My father had managed to persuade a Ghetto policeman to snatch me out of that place of terror. That close call had been so chilling that my parents began a massive effort to place me on the Aryan side. It was difficult enough to place a girl, but to find someone willing to take a boy was unheard of. I had blond hair and blue eyes, and we spoke only Polish at home, but still, I was a Jewish boy bearing the sign of the covenant.’

  William Donat’s account continued: ‘My parents reviewed their entire list of Christian friends and business acquaintances and, after exhaustive communications, they found an older couple, active in the underground, who might be willing to take me. Before the war, the man had worked for my father’s newspaper as an editor. His wife, who was to become my “Auntie Maria”, came to see me at the printing shop where my father worked. The shop was outside the Ghetto walls, making this meeting possible. She felt that I could “pass” and arrangements were quickly made: my mother taught me the “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” prayers; I learned my new last name and got my first haircut; I was to forget the Ghetto and to remember that my mother was in the country and my father in the army. I had been living with Auntie Maria and Uncle Stefan for about a month when one of the neighbours betrayed me to the local Polish police. Auntie Maria stood up to the pistol-waving policemen, deftly bargaining for my life with the American $20 gold pieces that my father had given her, while reminding them that one day the war would end. A deal was struck—they would not take me to the Gestapo, but she could no longer keep me with her.’

  Several days later, William Donat was sent across the Vistula to an orphanage in Otwock which was run by nuns. ‘Shortly after my arrival in this strange and inhospitable place, I was approached by a young nun who said to me, “Admit you’re a Jew and I’ll help you.” I persisted in denying what must have been obvious to all the nuns, until one day, feeling particularly lonely and melancholy—I even remember thinking that it must be my birthday—I confessed my terrible secret, but only after the nun promised to keep the confidence. She told me not to worry, she could fix everything. She arranged to have me baptized and I threw myself into daily prayers, going to mass, asking God for more food. This went on for two years…’

  William Donat’s mother and father both survived deportation and the camps. After the war, he recalled, people in Warsaw would point them out as ‘an unusual sight, a Jewish family where all the members had survived’.14

  THE RESCUE OF Jews by Poles was, is and will remain a controversial topic. The historian Yisrael Gutman, who was himself in the Warsaw Ghetto—and later in the camps at Majdanek and Auschwit
z—has written: ‘Thousands of Jews escaped to the “Aryan” side of Warsaw and its vicinity at the time of the mass deportation, and it is estimated that between fifty and twenty thousand Jews were in hiding beyond the ghetto during the period. Even if these figures account for only five percent of Warsaw’s Jewish population at its height, they nonetheless represent a substantial number in absolute terms. Despite the fact that the Polish public was rife with elements that exposed Jews and turned them in to the Nazis, and gangs of Polish extortionists (szmalcownicy) were the bane of Jews in hiding or living under false identities, it is obvious that the concentration of such a large number of fugitives in a single area could not have been possible without the active involvement of a good number of Poles.’

  Gutman goes on to reflect that there are ‘many facets to this ardent involvement. One particular sector of the intelligentsia—comprising both men of progressive views and devout Catholics who worked with unrelenting devotion to rescue Jews—was of singular importance. At first these people attempted to help Jews with whom they were personally acquainted—primarily assimilated Jews—but in the course of time, the aid and rescue of Jews per se became an all-consuming mission. These circles were the seed that eventually blossomed into Zegota.’15

  Zegota—the Polish acronym for the Council for Assistance to the Jews—was set up on 27 September 1942. Its establishment was to prove a turning point in the history of the Righteous. The originators of the Council were two women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz.16 They knew full well that any Pole who helped a Jew, and was caught, could expect no mercy. Before the First World War, Wanda Filipowicz had been active, within the Socialist movement, for Polish independence. Between the wars, Zofia Kossak had been head of the Catholic Front for the Reborn Poland, which believed Poland would be a better place without Jews. She was also a best-selling novelist, having made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1933 and written three historical novels about the Crusades: one of them, Blessed Are the Meek, had become a bestseller in the United States.