The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust
Page 19
After a few months, Mrs Klepacka, ‘in order better to shelter us’, put the two girls in the care of nuns in a nearby convent. ‘An uncle of ours, still alive at that time, paid the nuns for our upkeep during all this period. However, when he, too, perished and no more monies were forthcoming, the nuns, claiming that they had received anonymous letters, denouncing their sheltering of Jews, commanded us to leave. In utter despair, not knowing anybody else, we returned to Mrs Klepacka, who in the meantime had hidden—against remuneration—two elderly Jews and consequently had no place available for all five of us. It was then that her magnanimous nobility showed itself outstandingly: she urged the elderly couple to leave: they were old and had sufficient financial means to pay for another hiding place. Her duty was (thus she argued) to shelter first of all the two children who had nothing and could not pay. This she had promised to my late mother.’
The elderly couple found someone else willing to take them in, for payment. Both survived the war—as did the two girls. Alicja-Irena later wrote that on a recent ‘pilgrimage’ to Poland she visited Maria Klepacka’s grave. ‘I would like to add that one of Mrs Klepacka’s sisters also sheltered Jews in Cracow and was for this “crime” sent to a concentration camp. She survived it, albeit her health has been gravely compromised.’5
Janek Weber recently wrote of his own rescuers both inside and outside Cracow: ‘I came from a well-to-do family, and my father built a small apartment house, which was completed just as the war started. The caretakers of the house were a Polish couple by the name of Ludwig and Aniela Nowak. For the duration of the ghetto, whenever it was perceived that there might be danger for me, I was smuggled out of the ghetto and spent time with the Nowaks until it was felt that it was safe for me to return. This was also the case during the two major deportations when thousands of people were sent to their deaths in Belzec. It was particularly dangerous for the Nowaks to hide me as the whole building had been taken over by the Germans and turned into a military dental clinic. Some of the officers knew me from the days when I lived there with my parents before the establishment of the ghetto. It was difficult for the Nowaks to hide me as their living quarters consisted of just one room.’
Towards the end of 1942, when Janek Weber was nine years old, the Germans began the construction of Plaszow concentration camp. It was feared that in the near future the Cracow ghetto would be destroyed and its surviving inhabitants murdered. ‘In view of this,’ he recalled, ‘my parents discussed the possibility of hiding me with another Polish couple called Michal and Anna Wierzbicki, if and when the ghetto would cease to exist. By way of background; Mr Wierzbicki was the head of the planning department in the town hall in Cracow, and my father had dealings with him relating to the plans and construction of the apartment building. They lived just outside Cracow in a secluded villa.’
Like so many others, Janek Weber’s parents were caught unprepared on 13 March 1943 when the ghetto was surrounded by the SS, as a prelude to the deportation of the last two thousand Jews living there to Auschwitz. A few hundred Jews were taken to the slave labour camp at Plaszow; during the round-up, seven hundred more were shot down in the streets. ‘Due to my parents’ ingenuity,’ Weber wrote, ‘I was smuggled out of the ghetto in a suitcase, and escaped in miraculous circumstances.’ His father had persuaded a German wagoner to take a heavy suitcase out of the ghetto, not knowing what was inside it, and had bribed a German guard to let the boy out of the suitcase once the wagon was beyond the ghetto gate, when the driver was not looking. The last time Janek Weber saw his father was through the air holes that his father had cut in the suitcase.
The young boy was totally dependent for his survival on the Christian couple to whom his parents had sent him. ‘My parents told me to make my way to the Nowaks, and to remain with them, which I did. They took me in without question, and whenever there was a knock at the door, I would hide under the bed. After a week or so, my parents, who were both transferred from the ghetto to Plaszow, started to go out of the camp to their places of work. They made contact with the Wierzbickis, and one evening Mrs Wierzbicki came and took me to their home. The family consisted of two daughters (who were slightly older than me) and a son who was younger. They decided to conceal from their son my presence in the house. They felt that their son might talk to people about me and this could raise suspicions. I was therefore locked in a room which had belonged to a grandmother recently deceased. The boy was told that out of respect to the grandmother’s memory, the room would remain locked. It was imperative that I should remain quiet at all times, and never to approach the window. My food was brought to me at night, and I had a night pot in the room. I was in total isolation for almost two years, until Cracow was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945.’
Although Janek had ‘few memories as to how he spent those dark two years’, a British journalist, Sharon Jaffa, wrote, ‘he recalls reading the same couple of books over and over again, and sometimes simply remaining in bed. Even as an eight-year-old, he was acutely aware of the danger of his situation. He was so disciplined about keeping quiet that for a time he forgot how to speak.’6
After the war, Janek Weber found out that his father had been taken from Plaszow to Gross Rosen concentration camp, where he was murdered. His mother had been evacuated from Plaszow, and was eventually liberated in Bergen Belsen, by the British army, in April 1945. She was the only surviving member of his family. ‘I was reunited with her in Cracow in the summer of 1945.’7
Janek Weber and his mother kept in touch with both the families who had rescued them, helping them materially when they could. In Cracow fifty years later, on 19 June 1995, Michal and Anna Wierzbicki, and Ludwig and Aniela Nowak, were presented with their medals as Righteous Among the Nations. ‘Among my family present’, wrote Janek Weber, ‘were my wife, my two daughters, my son-in-law and my brother and sister-in-law.’8 The medal was presented by the Israeli Ambassador to Poland, in the recently established Jewish Centre of Culture. ‘I was recently in Cracow,’ Janek Weber wrote on 24 September 2001, ‘and spent time with Wanda Wierzbicki (her older sister died a few years ago) and with Mrs Nowak who will be celebrating her ninetieth birthday later this year. Mrs Nowak retired as the caretaker some time ago, but she still lives in our building in the same room she occupied during the war. Wanda lives in the same house which was my hiding place.’9
Many rescuers took in whole families, with the added dangers, costs and difficulties that this entailed. Anna Zellner (then Tauber) was fifteen when, along with her parents and brother, she made her way back to Cracow from a village in Western Galicia, where hiding had become even more difficult than ever, in the hope of finding a safe hiding place. The family was taken in by Tadeusz Sosin—a cello and trombone player—and his wife Zofia, and hidden until the Russians liberated the city on 18 January 1945. The Sosins’ apartment consisted of one bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom. ‘The Sosins lived in the bedroom,’ Anna Zellner recalled; ‘we lived in the kitchen where there was one bed on which my mother and myself slept. There was one mattress under the bed, which was moved every night and occupied by my father and brother. Mr Sosin constructed a hiding place in the pantry—building a false ceiling, which served as a floor in time of peril.’
When anyone knocked at the door, Anna Zellner recalled, ‘we climbed the shelves and all four of us crouched in the hiding spot. My father gave them some jewelry items to sell in order to buy groceries and necessities. They literally and sincerely wanted to save us. Knowing well that they are endangering their lives. The only ones who knew about us were Mrs Sosin’s sister and her brother, who were supplying us with food in order not to arouse suspicion in the neighbourhood by buying large quantities of groceries. Mr Sosin went to work daily. His wife Zofia was cooking and also worked part time. Son Otton attended high school and was tutoring me in many subjects.’10 Anna Zellner is among the many Jews—as many as eight hundred each year—who seek to have their rescuers acknowledged as Righteous Among the Nations.
Another Cracow teenager, Marcel Jarvin (then Fleischer), was fifteen years old when he escaped, in August 1942, from a German labour camp in central Poland, and made his way back to Cracow. There, Marian Wlodarczyk, his father’s former janitor, hid him in his apartment, together with Marcel’s brother and his wife. When a former Gentile schoolfriend confronted him in the street and demanded a large ransom not to denounce him, all three realized they must leave their hiding place immediately: a few hours later Polish police, working for the Germans, came looking for them.
Some time later, Marcel Jarvin was arrested in the street, on suspicion of being Jewish. ‘Despite my denial,’ he later recalled, ‘I was brought before a Gestapo officer who demanded that I expose myself. Being circumcised, the officer hit me in the face for lying that I was not Jewish. Nonetheless I kept on vehemently denying it, so much so that this Gestapo officer decided that I should be examined by a German doctor. In due course a German doctor looked at my penis, looked me in the eyes and pronounced: “No circumcision.” I was released to live another day. However, what must be pointed out is that it was a Polish Gentile policeman who arrested me in the first instance in the street. It may interest you to know that Polish Gentiles were able to recognise Jews much more readily than the Germans.’11
Twenty-five miles east of Cracow, Abraham and Malka Schoen, and their children Tania, Alice and Meyer, had left the ghetto of Bochnia and found a hiding place with a farmer and his wife, Wladyslaw and Stanislawa Lacny, and their daughter Irena. ‘All of us were hidden there for one week,’ Alice Schoen (later Sally Wiener) recalled; ‘then we had to leave because the neighbours were spreading rumours that Jews were being hidden there. My boyfriend Henry and his family had also gone into hiding and eventually wound up in the Bochnia ghetto. The decision was made that my family should also go to the Bochnia ghetto, which was about five miles away, but that I should remain in hiding in order to supply them with food. In the beginning I was able to send them food into the ghetto, but it eventually became too dangerous.’
Wladyslaw Lacny, with whom Alice Schoen was hiding, ‘took all precautions’, she recalled, ‘to hide me from outsiders, regardless of who they might be. For the first year I was hidden underground, under the wooden floor. At that time there were rumours that the Polish underground army, the Armia Krajowa, were searching for hidden Jews, and killing them when they found them…One day they came unexpectedly to the farmer’s house and started to search the premises, but fortunately didn’t find anything. Eventually it became so dangerous that I had to escape. I headed to the Bochnia ghetto, but lost my way and hid in the woods when I heard shots. I buried myself under the leaves and tore up my birth certificate because it indicated that I was Jewish. At the lowest point of my life I recited the Shema (Hear O Israel, our God is One). When the shots ceased, I picked myself up, and, stricken with fear, I spotted a light in a far away house. I went to the house and knocked lightly at the window. When a man came out, I told him I had lost my way. He looked at me and told me that I should not be afraid, that during World War I a Jewish family had saved his life by hiding him in their barn, and dressing him as a milk maid to mislead the soldiers looking for him.’
The new rescuer hid Alice Schoen under the straw in his barn, and told her once more not to be afraid. ‘He didn’t want to tell me his name, in case I might reveal it if I were captured. But he did tell me that he had eight children and twelve cows. I stayed hidden there for one day and one night, and the next night the man showed me the way back to the Lacny family’s village. I had decided to go back there because I had been told that the Bochnia ghetto was in the process of liquidation, and that many Jews there had already been killed, or sent out by train, destination unknown. My farmer and his family rejoiced when they saw me; they thought I had been killed during the shooting I had hidden from, which had indeed been the sounds of Jews being killed. At that point they decided to build a double wall for me. It was 23 October 1943.’
The new place of rescue was tiny. ‘The width of my hiding place was the width of my body, and there was a small hole for the intake of food, and the outtake of refuse. Once I was inside the wall I didn’t see any light until I was liberated on 12 January 1945. I could tell when it was morning by the sounds of the birds chirping, and the rooster. I could tell the nights by the sounds of occasional shots, knowing that another Jewish life was lost. Sometimes the mice were creeping on my body.’
Betrayal, of both rescuer and rescued, was an ever-present risk. ‘One day the German and Polish police came together saying that they were informed that my farmer was hiding a Jew. Their German shepherd dog began sniffing at the hole I was hidden in. I held my breath, and covered myself in the hope that the dog would not smell me. At that point my farmer distracted the dog with salami, and the policemen with vodka, and eventually they left. After that, the rumours about the farmer hiding Jews ceased.’
When, at liberation, the farmer pulled Alice Schoen out of her hiding place, ‘they were shocked at what they saw: a living skeleton of about eighty-five pounds with long fingernails, unable to walk or see. It took me about five weeks to walk properly, and three months to get my vision back.’
Alice’s boyfriend Henry Wiener had also survived—one of the twelve hundred Jews saved by Oskar Schindler in his factories. They were married in a displaced persons’ camp at Fürth, near Nuremberg, ‘the first wedding in the DP camp’.12
The story of a family in the town of Chmielnik, just over fifty miles from Cracow, shows one of the many different kinds of help that were needed, and how it might be found in unexpected places. The biographer of Sonia Garfinkel, Suzan Hagstrom, has written: ‘Some adults with a deep sense of foreboding tried to pass for non-Jew during the German occupation. This was a slim possibility for individuals with financial resources, political connections, and a supposedly Aryan appearance.’ To save Sonia in such a way, her parents ‘asked Mr Opalka, a Pole in Chmielnik’s city hall, to make a false identification card for her. Sonia describes Mr Opalka as a kind man who offered to draft papers for all the sisters and other Jews. The Germans later gunned him down in the street.’13
Some twenty miles from Cracow, in the village of Sieciechowice, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, Roza Kfare (later Dr Rose Kfar), was in hiding, sent there by her parents after the mass deportation of more than sixty thousand Jews from Lvov to Belzec in August 1942. At Sieciechowice she lived with a Polish schoolteacher, Krystyna Moskalik. After the war Rose went to Cracow, to live with friends of her rescuer. There she learned of the fate of her family. Her mother had escaped from a deportation train to Belzec and returned to Lvov, but had died of typhus in February 1943. Her father had escaped from Janowska camp in Lvov, but also died of typhus a month later. ‘I was devastated by the news,’ she recalled. ‘I asked Krystyna why hadn’t she told me about my parents’ deaths. She explained that she feared I might become despondent and lose the will to survive, and she was determined to have me survive.’14
The help given to Jews by non-Jews in Cracow prompted the Germans to set up an increasing number of special courts to try Poles accused of helping Jews—in spite of a report of the German chief of police in the General-Government, dated 7 October 1943, recommending that cases of Poles helping Jews should be dealt with summarily by the police ‘without the necessary delay of court hearings’.15 On 29 January 1944, in Cracow, a special court sentenced five Poles to death for helping Jews. One, Kazimierz Jozefek, as earlier described by Philip Friedman, was hanged in a public square.16
The final liquidation of the Bobowa ghetto took place on 14 August 1942. Of the five thousand Jews in the ghetto, one of the few who survived was twelve-year-old Samuel Oliner, who had been urged by his grandmother to escape from the ghetto into the countryside. After walking for two days, he found refuge with a friendly peasant woman who risked her life by teaching him how to pass as a non-Jew. The young Oliner was given a new name and different clothes, and was taught to read in Polish and recite the catech
ism. When he was ready, Samuel left her home to seek work in a village where he was not known. He found a job tending cows on a farm occupied by a Polish couple who had moved from the city and rented the formerly Jewish-owned farm from the Germans. They knew little about farm work and needed help. Samuel lived there for three years, and survived the war.17
In the city of Tarnow, in the centre of Western Galicia, Dr Maximilian Rosenbusz, the principal of the main Polish Jewish high school, had before the war befriended the district inspector for the Polish Education Ministry, Wladyslaw Horbacki. In June 1940, Rosenbusz had been among the first group of Jews sent to Auschwitz—not then an extermination camp—to work at forced labour in the expansion of the camp. He died soon afterwards, his ashes being returned (for payment) to his family in Tarnow. Soon after the establishment of the Tarnow ghetto, and the start of the deportations that were to lead to the total destruction of the city’s Jewry, Dr Rosenbusz’s wife and daughter escaped from the ghetto and sought sanctuary with the Horbackis. There, Dr Rosenbusz’s daughter Zofia found herself among friends: Wladyslaw Horbacki taught her physics and mathematics, and his wife Milica taught her English. ‘Every slice of bread, each drop of milk or soup was equally shared between rescuers and rescued,’ she later recalled.18
In Przemysl, a Catholic teenager risked her own life, and that of her younger sister, to save thirteen Jews. Stefania Podgorska was sixteen years old when her father died, and her mother and brother were taken off to a German labour camp, as were so many hundreds of thousands of Poles. For the next two and a half years she hid thirteen Jewish men, women and children in the attic of her family home. ‘I just did what I thought I should do,’ was her post-war comment.19