The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Another of the Germans who worked under Plagge, Christian Bartolomae, later testified about him: ‘During my time serving in Vilna in September 1941, he gave me the order to liberate the Jews Zablocki and Trananricz from the Lukiszki prison. A few days later I got the order to free the parents of two Jewish haircutters from the SD prison. During the same time he accommodated thousands of Jews with wives and children in the park territory. He fed them and protected them from death and persecution. After that he gave them “passage tickets” in order to have the liberty to go to the city without fearing persecution. The Jewish doctor Wolfson and his father were employed as workmen in order to save them from execution. Doctor Wolfson was thus able to continue his work as a physician.’

  Another of Plagge’s German employees, Lieutenant Alfred Stumpff, recalled how an SS sergeant at the Repair Park who had threatened a Jewish worker and physically attacked him was reprimanded by Plagge, who then transferred the sergeant to a section of the workshops where he would not come in contact with Jewish workers. Lieutenant Stumpff also testified that Plagge employed Jews in the repair workshops as barbers, shoemakers, tailors and cooks, cleaning workers and gardeners: ‘naturally, the Park wasn’t allowed to employ such people, and Mr Plagge could have got into serious trouble by doing so. The people were camouflaged to the outside as professional workers of the Motor Vehicle Repair Park.’3

  Three days before the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, Plagge took a thousand people out of the ghetto to a work camp on the outskirts of the city. There they remained under his command, safe from deportation, and well treated, from September 1943 to July 1944. Only when the SS took over the workshops was Plagge’s protection stripped away; thereafter he was no longer able to help them. His last act was to call them all together, as recalled by William Begell, one of his Jewish workers. ‘Plagge said that we all must have heard that the front line is moving west’ and that the Motor Vehicle Repair Park’s assignment was to always be a certain number of miles behind the front line. It was therefore being moved away from Vilna. As a result, Plagge told them, ‘you the Jews and workers will also be moved. It is natural to think that since all of you are highly specialized and experienced workers in an area of great importance to the German Army, you will be reassigned to a Motor Vehicle Repair Park unit. I cannot assure you that it will again be my unit, but it will be a Motor Vehicle Repair Park unit. You will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS which, as you know, is an organization devoted to the protection of refugees. Thus there is nothing to worry about.’

  Begell went on: ‘This is my recollection of the speech. I have repeated it to myself hundreds of times over the years. I also remember thinking that this overt warning to us that we were about to be killed (by mentioning the SS as an organization for the protection of refugees) was made with a human stroke of the pen, so to say, because—and I repeat—because he didn’t have to say it at all. These thoughts have been in my mind since that time and I stand by them. What is important now, I believe, is that Plagge tried to communicate the impending danger to the HKP Jews during his speech. That, again in my opinion, is a proven fact. Plagge had warned us in no uncertain terms. I know that the group of us (about three dozen) who escaped through the window in the machine shop knew exactly what we are escaping from and we were totally aware of Plagge’s role in warning us.’

  Two days later, the SS entered the camp and began to kill all the prisoners. As a result of Plagge’s warning, however, between a hundred and fifty and two hundred of his workers and their families, including Pearl Good and her parents, were able to hide in specially prepared hiding places—known as malines—or escape from the camp altogether. ‘These survivors and their descendants’, writes Pearl Good’s son Michael, ‘are certain that Karl Plagge, a man whom they knew to be decent and caring, had saved them twice from almost certain death: first when the ghetto was being liquidated in September 1943, and again in the days before liberation when he warned them again of the impending arrival of the SS.’4

  In Vilna, a German army sergeant, Anton Schmid, was in charge of a camp near the main railway station where German soldiers awaited reassignment to new units. A large number of Jews from the Vilna ghetto were assigned to various labour duties in Schmid’s workshops: upholstering, tailoring, locksmithing and shoe-mending. Schmid, who had been shocked by what he had learned of the mass killings at Ponar, decided to do whatever he could to help Jews survive. His many good deeds included securing the release of Jews incarcerated in the city’s prison, and surreptitiously supplying food and provisions to Jews inside the ghetto.

  In three houses in Vilna that were under Sergeant Schmid’s supervision, Jews were hidden in the cellars during various ‘Actions’. Schmid also became personally involved with the leaders of the Jewish underground and co-operated with them. He helped some of them reach Warsaw and Bialystok (where they reported on the mass killings at Ponar) by transporting them over long distances in his truck. Some of these underground fighters met, planned activities and slept in his home. He sent other Jews to ghettos that were relatively more secure at that time, including Lida and Grodno.

  Anton Schmid was arrested in January 1942 and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. He was executed on 13 April 1942.5

  ‘MY BOSS WAS a fine, middle-aged German army man, named Baker,’ wrote Mania Salinger. In charge of a labour camp factory in Radom, where thirty Jewish women worked outside the ghetto, he was ‘a warm, caring person who a while later saved our lives. He patiently taught me office procedures, corrected my German, my typing. He was a great friend.’ Baker shared his lunches and food parcels from Berlin with his Jewish labourers. ‘This kind of generosity was, of course, forbidden.’ Baker called his workers ‘my children’.

  After she had acquired a forged Polish passport, Mania Salinger consulted Baker. Several of her friends had escaped to other cities posing as Christians; should she attempt the same thing? ‘Mr Baker was all for it; he strongly advised me to take advantage of it, even offered counsel where it was best to go, how to act.’

  Baker learned in advance about the imminent second deportation from Radom, ‘and without any explanations, ordered us to get home, pack a few belongings, valuables, and ordered us to return to work immediately. He claimed emergency work orders at early morning hours so he ordered us to stay at work for the night.’

  All thirty girls stayed overnight in a deserted warehouse. ‘Mr Baker stood outside all night with a shotgun in his hand, guarding our safety. We kibitzed and teased him about his over-concern. Little did we know that he practically stole us without any orders or permission, defying instructions from higher echelons and risked his life to save ours. About 5 a.m. we started hearing shots and screams coming from the ghetto area. Our first instinct was to run back to our families, but Mr Baker forced us to stay and to keep silent. Thousands were killed that night, or taken by train to what turned out to be the gas chambers of Treblinka. If I had been in the ghetto that night, I would definitely have gone with my mother to Treblinka.’

  Shortly after this, Mania Salinger and several others from her work group were transferred to a safer work environment—a farm in Wsola. ‘Mr Baker visited us there, I am sure he arranged the transfer. Hard to believe—a German soldier! I tried to find him after the war ended, but I was unsuccessful. I regret to this day never seeing him again and getting to express my gratitude.’ Baker, she added, was ‘exceptional, but there were other Germans with whom we were in contact while working in Radom, Wsola, or later in Pionki, that were warm, friendly, understanding and helpful. Even much later while in Germany in concentration camp, we encountered many incidents of concerned German civilians, especially women, who openly showed us compassion and contempt for their country’s regime.’6

  Arnold Boden was an Ethnic German whose family had lived in Poland for many generations. Yehudis Pshenitse—whose rescue by a Catholic priest was recounted in chapter 5—later recalled the grim conditions in the ghetto of Rembertow, whe
re she and her parents were living: ‘Conditions grew steadily worse, my father lay sick in bed and my mother was swollen from hunger. That was when I became the breadwinner for the family. Bearing a sack and a letter from my father to Arnold Boden, asking him to help us out with some food, I set off along various paths for Nowy Dwor,’ a distance of twenty-five miles.

  Her quest was not in vain. ‘Arnold Boden was a good friend of my father. I gave him the letter, and he responded with sincere concern. He filled my sack with food, and I started back to my parents, who awaited me impatiently. Unfortunately, my route back was impeded. The German guards detained me, took my sack of food, gave me a few heavy blows, and sent me back to Nowy Dwor. Once again I went to see Arnold Boden; once again he gave me food, and this time he accompanied me back to Rembertow.’

  Three years later, at the time of the liquidation of the ghetto, the young girl—by then eleven years old—was being driven with hundreds of other Jews towards specially dug pits when she saw Arnold Boden again. ‘He said to me, “Leave your grandmother here. She is old already, but you are still a small child. I want to get you out of here.” At first I didn’t want to follow him, preferring to stay with my grandmother, but eventually he convinced me and led me away. Suddenly before my eyes I saw ditches being dug, and people being thrown in alive. When I saw my grandmother being pushed, I burst out weeping and tried to run to her, but Boden dragged me away by force. I don’t even remember how I made it back to Nowy Dwor.’7

  Ben Guterman was thirteen when war broke out. After the establishment of the Piotrkow ghetto, he worked in the headquarters of the city’s German police. There he befriended a German soldier, Private Gerhard Wurl. On several occasions, Wurl even went into the ghetto to Guterman’s home, where he got to know the whole family. As conditions in the ghetto worsened and the fate of the Jews became more uncertain, the soldier warned Guterman that ‘terrible things are going to happen,’ and that he, Wurl, would like to help him. He then issued Guterman with a certificate giving him a new name, Jan Stepian, born in the town of Sieradz, some sixty miles away. Wurl wrote on the certificate that ‘the Pole, Stepian’ had been working in the German headquarters for a long time, had been ‘very reliable, conscientious and hard working’, and that he should be given every help wherever he found employment. Wurl then took Guterman to Warsaw and found him a job in a factory employing Poles.

  Soon afterwards Private Wurl was sent to the Russian front. From Warsaw, Guterman maintained a regular correspondence with him. The Poles in the factory had begun looking at Guterman with great suspicion, and this was exacerbated when one day they discovered that he was corresponding with a German soldier. There were whispers that Guterman was a Jew who had been specially planted among the Poles to spy on them. When Guterman informed Wurl about these suspicions, his benefactor arranged to come back to Warsaw on leave. He told Guterman that he had decided to take him to a friend’s farm in Germany, but in order to get into Germany, Guterman had to go through a medical examination, as did every Polish worker who volunteered to work in the Fatherland.

  As a Polish doctor examined Guterman, Wurl hovered nearby. Noticing that Guterman was being questioned more thoroughly than others had been, he immediately went up to the Polish doctor, and asked if anything was wrong. The Polish doctor said, ‘I think he is a Jew,’ whereupon Wurl shouted at him: ‘I have no time to mess around here. This man is going to work on my friend’s farm. You had better sign quickly, before I do something to you.’ Cowed, the Pole signed the certificate.

  On the way to the farm Wurl told him, ‘Whatever you do, you are the Pole, Jan Stepian. Never divulge to anybody who you really are, not even to my father, and definitely not to my brother.’ Wurl’s brother was a keen Nazi. Guterman worked on that farm for about two years, until the area was liberated by the Russians. After liberation, he returned to Piotrkow, where he met his sister, who had also survived with papers that had been provided for her by Wurl, enabling her to work in Cracow for a high-ranking Gestapo officer as a nanny for his children.8

  A GERMAN ARMY officer, 51-year-old First Lieutenant Albert Battel, a veteran of the First World War who had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1933, was stationed in the Polish city of Przemysl, on the border between Western and Eastern Galicia. On the morning of 26 July 1942 an SS and German police detachment was about to cross the bridge spanning the River San, which separated the ghetto from the rest of the city. Their task was to round up the Jews in the ghetto for deportation to Belzec. But Battel ordered the sergeant-major commanding the soldiers at the bridge not to let them cross. The sergeant-major brandished his revolver and threatened to order his men to open fire unless the SS men retreated. They did.

  Lieutenant Battel had heard of the SS plans to send most of the ghetto population to a death camp. Only one day before the bridge encounter, he had used German army trucks to take Jewish workers and their families—between eighty and one hundred people—out of the ghetto to the other side of the river and house them under direct army supervision. In later arguments with the SS, there would be snide remarks about the German army ‘protecting Jews so that they could polish the boots and clean the quarters of its sergeants’.

  As the deportation grew imminent, Lieutenant Battel persuaded his superior, Major Liedke, to declare a state of emergency, which would allow him to control all movements in the town. Although the Jewish population was normally under the jurisdiction of the SS, the army could assert its authority under certain conditions. Early that same afternoon, however, high-ranking SS officers arrived to persuade the army to open the bridge. Lieutenant Battel could do nothing against superior authority. The deportation of 3,850 men, women and children—the majority of the ghetto population at that time—took place the following day.

  Two months earlier, Battel had already tried—unsuccessfully—to prevent the deportation of a thousand Jews who worked for the German army. Although there had been complaints against him, no official action was taken by the SS, ‘in order to preserve good relations’ with the army. ‘In the long run, of course,’ wrote Ernie Meyer, a journalist who had studied Battel’s file in Yad Vashem, ‘Albert Battel could not keep even the small number of Jews who continued working for the Wehrmacht in Przemysl out of the hands of the SS. No action was taken against him immediately, apart from a mild reprimand from his commanding officer.’ Not long afterwards, however, the story reached the highest level of the SS hierarchy, whereupon the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, wrote a letter to Martin Bormann, the head of the Reich Chancellery, saying that ‘right after the war Battel should be arrested’. Fortunately the power of the SS finished with the end of the war.

  In the 1970s, Michael Gilad-Goldman, who during the war was a youngster in the Przemysl ghetto, recalled Lieutenant Battel’s activities. ‘I remember well hearing about the clash between the Wehrmacht and the SS on the bridge. The day was my sixteenth birthday, and although I never saw Oberleutenant Battel, we Jews knew that we had a protector in him. A few of the people he took out of the ghetto survived the war and are in Israel now.’9

  In August 1942, at the height of the deportations from the ghettos in Poland, an SS officer, Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein, who had witnessed the gassing of several thousand Jews at Belzec a few days earlier, was on a night train from Warsaw to Berlin. So shaken was he by what he had seen that he described the whole mass murder process to a Swedish diplomat, Baron Göran van Otter, who was on the same train. Gerstein begged the diplomat to pass the information on to the Swedish government, and to ask them to make it known publicly, in an attempt to alert the whole German population to what was happening. Were the German people to know the truth, Gerstein believed, they would demand a halt to such horrendous mass murder. The Swedish diplomat passed on the information as asked, but the government in Stockholm decided, almost certainly in order not to damage its good relations with Nazi Germany, to keep the terrible information secret. Gerstein continued to do the work with which the SS had entrusted him, arranging
for the shipment of poison gas to the death camps, including Auschwitz. But in the course of supplying the gas, he was able, certainly on one occasion, to delay and even divert a shipment.

  In a book about Gerstein, the historian Saul Friedlander, a former hidden child whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, wrote that had there been in Germany thousands, even hundreds, of Gersteins—people in the Nazi apparatus who were prepared to divert or damage the shipment of the poison gas to the camps—‘then surely hundreds of thousands of the intended victims would have been saved. But there were none save Gerstein.’10

  The historian Reuben Ainsztein has written of how, in Bialystok, there were a number of Germans and Austrians who helped Jews to survive. One of these, Arthur Schade, who had been a Social Democrat when Germans were free to choose their political allegiance, was the manager of a textile mill. Through a group of Jewish girls, led by Maryla Rozycka, Schade maintained contact with the Jewish resistance organization inside the ghetto and with the Jewish partisans in the forests, supplying them with arms, clothes and valuable information. After the liquidation of the ghetto he hid twelve Jews in his factory. All twelve survived until the arrival of the Red Army.11

  Other Jews were saved by Schade at his home. In recommending him for an honour after the war, Shamai Kizelshtein, then an Israeli citizen, wrote to Yad Vashem that Schade had ‘performed a humanitarian deed of the highest degree by providing a hideout for my family—myself, Shamai, my father Beryl, my mother Raizel, my sister Mina, my cousin Mary, as well as for the Goldstein family that numbered three people—a couple with a child—on the roof of his house, and fed us and took care of us during our exceedingly difficult situation. After the “Action” in the ghetto ended and the danger passed, he brought us back in a truck hidden under raw materials delivered to a textile factory in the ghetto. In this way he saved us from cruel dangers at least for some period of time. Unfortunately, only I, my sister and my cousin survived, after much suffering.’ Kizelshtein added: ‘I must emphasize that Arthur Schade put his own life at risk as well as the life of his family in order to save us in that critical time.’12