Also in Prague under German rule, Henry Wilde had a schoolfriend whose mother, Katerina Rieger, helped him and his mother. ‘Her husband was a German Army intelligence officer and must have had grave reservations about the war. He was later killed in action on the western front.’ Katerina Rieger warned the family of the imminent Final Solution and made various suggestions for their escape—a very courageous thing to do at that time even for a widow of a senior German army officer’. She also gave her ration coupons to Wilde’s mother.2
A young Christian woman in Prague, Libuse Fries, put on a yellow star in order to smuggle food and clothes into the Theresienstadt ghetto for her Jewish friend Egon Sejkorov. She also gave Egon’s sister Erna her own Czech identity card, which she altered in order to enable Erna to travel to Vienna. The deception was discovered, and both women were arrested. Libuse was imprisoned; Erna was eventually sent to Theresienstadt, and from there to Auschwitz. Both women survived the war.3
Among the Czechs who helped Jews in Prague was Zdenek Urbanek. His apartment was one of the few centres in the city from which food parcels were posted to Theresienstadt. At the time of the deportations he also took in a family of three. ‘They were so scared they did not tell me or my wife their names. I only recognized during the long nervous evenings he had been an assistant professor of comparative literature, she a nurse. I was asked to call him Pavel, and her Katia. Shamefully I forgot the name of their little girl. After a stay of three weeks in our rooms they were offered shelter at a farm in southern Bohemia, and left. I am happy to say they survived.’4 In the town of Eger, where all eighteen hundred Jews were confined in a ghetto, the local bishop, Czapik Gyula, forbade his parish priests to assist in the persecution and deportation. When the Jews were rounded up for transfer to Auschwitz in June 1944, the bishop saved eight women by giving them work in his kitchen.5
One of the most remarkable of the Czech non-Jews who risked his life to save Jews was Premysl Pitter, head of the Milis Institute for abandoned children. A Czech Jew, Uta Ginz, later testified that, during the German occupation of Prague, ‘for a long time he sent a supply of milk to the Jewish orphanage on Belgium Street. Someone passed this information to the Gestapo and an investigation was opened against Mr Pitter but this did not prevent him from continuing to send milk for the children.’ Pitter also managed to obtain food that he sent to Jewish addressees known to him in concentration camps. ‘He requested addresses from us and he often brought us boxes of Swiss canned food to send to our relatives and others that we knew in the camps.’
‘Mr Pitter preached at the church of the Bohemian Brothers in Smichov—always to several hundred people who were present and he asked them not to forget their Jewish brethren and to remember that the Jews get very little food. He requested their help and urged them to share the little food they had. Once I was secretly present at one of his sermons and I witnessed his brave requests from the congregation, which certainly put him in great danger, as well as his other deeds that he took upon himself to help the Jews. I remember very well that he once said, “Trees don’t grow to the sky, and better days are ahead and you will be rewarded from heaven for all you have done for the Jews.” Mr Pitter visited Jewish families, and came to us as well, to cheer us up and to support us. He always gave us news reports, which he heard over Allied broadcasts over the radio. He showed us on the map, which he carried in his pocket, the places from which the Germans were retreating.’
Pitter recommended Uta Ginz to a book publishing company where she worked under an assumed name. Before the war ended, she recalled, ‘children of mixed marriages were supposed to be sent to concentration camps, but he warned these families not to send their children to these camps and some of these children he hid in the Milis Institution.’6
Suse Lotte Tieze, to whose sister, Liese Karpe, Pitter gave the use of his premises after her own school for dancing and gymnastics was closed down, wrote: ‘After my sister was deported to Lodz in October 1941, Mr Pitter regularly visited my parents in order to comfort them and give them strength.’ During the German occupation he ‘visited regularly many Jewish families in Prague, specially with small children, and brought fruit, sweets and milk to them, all things Jews were deprived of at that time.’7
When questioned by the Gestapo about the Jewish children he had taken into his school in Prague, Pitter claimed that they were not Jewish, and then smuggled them out of Prague to a children’s home in the village of Myto. In all, Pitter and his assistant Olga Fierz saved a hundred Jewish children from deportation; thirty-five of them live today in Israel. On 13 October 1964, Pitter and Olga Fierz were recognized at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Three decades later the Czech Republic issued a stamp in Pitter’s honour. Hana Greenfield, originally from the Czech town of Kolin, writes: ‘There were so very few that helped and they did not get enough recognition.’8
David Korn was just one year old when his family fled from Czechoslovakia, following the German entry into the Sudetenland in October 1938. The family lived in the small Slovak town of Spiska Stara Ves until May 1942, when the Slovak government, which—led by a Roman Catholic clergyman, Father Tiso—was closely allied with Germany, ordered the deportation of Slovak Jews to German-occupied Poland. The Slovak government even paid the Germans 55 marks for each Jew deported. Only the Lutheran Evangelical Church in Slovakia protested against the deportations, describing them publicly as a violation of justice and humanity.
In the First World War, David Korn’s grandfather had fought for the army of Austria-Hungary, of which Slovakia was then part. In 1942 his widow, David’s grandmother, was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. David’s uncle Martin managed to escape deportation, and found refuge in the forests. David and his elder brother Jacob were taken to a Lutheran Evangelical orphanage in the nearby town of Liptovsky St Mikulas, run by Pastor Vladimir Kuna.
On the way to the orphanage, David remembers passing a public garden at the entrance to which was a sign reading ‘Jews and dogs not allowed’. His account continues: ‘By entrusting my brother and me to the care of Pastor Kuna our parents felt that even if they would not be able to escape deportation and death, at least we will have a chance to survive. Thanks to the efforts of Pastor Kuna and his dedicated and courageous staff we quickly joined the activities of our Gentile fellow students. We attended school, worked in the garden and went to church on Sunday mornings. In the church I did not listen to the prayers, instead I positioned myself near the organ and listened to the beautiful music.’9
Of the seventy children in the orphanage, twenty-six were Jewish children in hiding. ‘Our lives in the orphanage were as any other child’s life during the war,’ David Korn later wrote. ‘We went to school, ate each day and played with Gentile children who were fully aware of our religious origins.’ The orphanage staff, he recalled, were in constant danger of being exposed to the local Gestapo, as hiding Jews was punishable by death. Indeed in November of 1944 Pastor Kuna was taken for interrogation. The charges were “assisting Jews and partisans”. They did not succeed in extracting from him any information about us. He was miraculously discharged; another Pastor had less luck and was executed.’10
Because of the lack of food and warm winter clothing, David Korn caught pneumonia. ‘Medical treatment was not available to Jewish children,’ he recalled. ‘When a Jewish child had to be taken to hospital Pastor Kuna requested the hospital office not to report the admission and not to send the bills for the treatment to the municipal agency. In a previous case, however, somehow a hospital bill landed in the Town Hall. Pastor Kuna miraculously escaped imprisonment. The only remedy to lower my high fever was cold towels, applied by Sister Maria on an hourly basis twenty-four hours around the clock. Fearing that I may die, Pastor Kuna contacted my Uncle Martin hiding in nearby woods to come and see me before I died. In the middle of the night, risking his life, my uncle sneaked in. Seeing a close relative and the devoted care by Sister Maria gave me the strength to overcome my grave s
ituation.
‘The possibility of betrayal was a constant threat. When a strange person entered our room we were told to go to the window and look outside, as if our Jewishness was written in our foreheads.’
At the end of 1944, Liptovsky St Mikulas was liberated by Czechoslovak troops commanded by Pastor Kuna’s brother, General Kuna. The pastor, along with those he had sheltered, was saved.
David Korn was eight years old at the time of liberation, his brother fifteen. His parents did not survive the war. Having escaped from Slovakia to Hungary, they were almost certainly deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in the early summer of 1944.11
Other Slovak pastors also extended a helping hand to Jews in distress. Jana Tanner has written that, in the Slovak capital Bratislava, ‘the Lutheran Pastor Jurkovic (I think that was his name), although he knew he was not making converts, baptized many Jewish families in the hope that it would protect them, and at least it meant that the children could attend school. As far as my family was concerned, he baptized my parents first, so that when my brother and I were baptized he could state on our certificates of baptism that our parents were of the Lutheran religion.
‘During the last year of the war my parents arranged for me (I was then 14 years old) to be hidden in the Lutheran orphanage in Modra in Slovakia. The head of the orphanage was the local Lutheran Pastor, Julius Derer. To my knowledge there were at least six and probably more Jewish girls there at any one time; one Jewish youth was employed in the garden, and a Jewish woman working as a seamstress. In the same town was a Lutheran boarding school for girls where there were also several Jewish girls. However, these were informed on and arrested. Pastor Derer pleaded with the authorities saying he considered himself in loco parentis, thus putting himself and his family in danger, but to no avail. Those of us hiding in the orphanage remained safe. The nuns who ran the orphanage treated us no differently from the other children, although our presence endangered their safety and must have made a difference to their housekeeping as they could not draw rations for us “illegals”.’12
Across central Europe, courageous individuals did what they could. In Bratislava, Joseph Jaksy hid three Jewish women in his urology clinic.13 In the Slovenian city of Maribor, Uros Zun, a policeman, helped save the lives of sixteen Jewish girls who were about to be deported to Germany. A German Jewish woman, Recha Freier, who was in charge of the emigration of young Jews to Palestine, arranged for them to be smuggled across the border from Slovenia into Italy, where they survived the war.14 In the Croat capital, Zagreb, as a result of intervention by the Papal Nuncio, Giuseppe Marconi—a Benedictine Father from Italy—on behalf of Jewish partners in mixed marriages, a thousand Croat Jews married to Catholics survived the war. Across Croatia, forty thousand Jews were murdered. The Cardinal Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac, who in 1941 had welcomed Croat independence, subsequently condemned Croat atrocities against both Serbs and Jews, and himself saved a group of Jews in an old age home.15
It was only in the year 2000 that a professor in Croatia, Branko Horvatinovic, learned, after the death of the couple he knew as his parents, that he was not their child, and that he was in fact Jewish. His real parents had asked a Croat woman, Bosilijka Barudija-Horvatic, to watch over him while they attended a wedding at the church. ‘The vicar locked the church in which my parents took refuge and, betraying them, delivered them to the police.’ His mother was beaten and murdered. His father was believed to have survived. ‘He looked for me but, since I have a new name and ended up in Zagreb, he could not find me.’16
In the Croat town of Susak, on the Adriatic, a Roman Catholic woman, Mathilda Nitsch, had a small boarding house. ‘I could not understand why they killed Jews, who were innocent people,’ she later recalled, ‘so I helped them escape. I stole false passports from the chief of police himself.’ She hid Jews in her boarding house, ‘gave them the false passports I had stolen, and then I took them to other friends in Fiume,’ where ‘most of the Italians—though not the Secret Police—are much better to the Jews than the Nazis. So at night, in Fiume, we put the people on boats, which took them across the Adriatic to other parts of Italy, where we hoped Italian peasants would hide them.’ Arrested by the Italian secret police in Fiume, she was interrogated and tortured. They wanted to know who had worked with her in these acts of rescue. ‘I wouldn’t give out their names. I wouldn’t tell anything.’17
In the Serb town of Bijeljina, Risto Ristic went early one morning to the home of a Jewish woman, Rahela Altara, waking her up with the news of a pending round-up of Jews. Rahela, her mother, aunt, three brothers and sisters fled to the house of a neighbour, where they were hidden. After making certain Rahela and her family were safely hidden, Risto went to warn other Jewish families. That night he was able to save about twenty Jews from deportation.
Rahela and her family managed to escape to territory that was under the control of Yugoslav partisans. Risto visited them a number of times, bringing with him food, other things they needed—and hope.18
In the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, Mustafa Hardaga, a Muslim, was the owner of a building in which Josef Cavilio, a Jew, had a factory manufacturing steel pipes. Hardaga and his wife, and her father Ahmed Sadik, sheltered Cavilio and his family—defying the order proclaimed on posters on the streets of Sarajevo warning its citizens not to give shelter to Communists and Jews. After six weeks in hiding, Josef Cavilio, with his wife and children, managed to escape over the mountains to Mostar in the Italian zone.19
Tova Kabilio-Grinberg was three and a half years old when Susic Zayneba and his family gave shelter to her father in Bosnia: ‘They insisted that he stay, but to harbour a Jew was terribly dangerous. The Nazi headquarters were across the street from them and on the other side was the synagogue, which had been burnt down. My father realized how he was endangering the family so he soon fled and eventually met up with us on the Adriatic coast, where the Italians interned us until we were able to escape and join the partisans.’ Susic Zayneba also helped other Jewish families, ‘once pulling Jews off a death train, and another time giving a Jew a veil to disguise himself as a woman.’20
When the German army occupied Sarajevo in 1941, the city’s new commandant asked Dervis Korkut, the Muslim director of the city museum, to head the collaborationist Muslim community—which was to provide a Bosnian Muslim SS Division. Korkut refused. Not long afterwards, one of the receptionists at the museum announced that a high-ranking German officer wished to view the famous fourteenth-century Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless ancient manuscript describing the Jews’ flight from Egypt. Sensing danger, Korkut hid the document under a display.
‘Alas,’ Korkut told the German colonel, ‘I regret to tell you that the book vanished two years ago.’
Less than a year later, a museum caretaker brought a young woman to see Korkut. Her name was Mira Papo, he said, and she had been in with the partisans. ‘Now with winter coming, Mira desperately needed sanctuary. Barely out of high school, she had no home, no identity papers or family. And she was Jewish.’ Korkut took her to his home. ‘She will be staying with us for a while,’ he told his wife, Servet. ‘We can say she is household help. She will pose as a Muslim and her name will be Amira.’
Servet knew that families harbouring Jews suffered the same penalty as the Jews—death. Nevertheless she agreed. ‘So Mira the Jewish girl began living the routine of Muslims. She had lost religion by then—she had become a communist—but she respected the Korkuts’ faith. Finally, as the war in Yugoslavia turned against the Nazis, the resistance reorganized. Mira bade her protectors farewell in mid-1943, when she joined the partisans.’21
South-east of Yugoslavia, across the Danube, Romania was never occupied by Germany, but its leader, the dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, headed a regime that was sympathetic to Germany, in terms of both mutual territorial ambitions and ideology. Of the eight hundred thousand Jews in Romania before the war, nearly half—three hundred and seventy thousand—were murdered, some by Romanian Fasci
st troops and Iron Guardists, others by German Nazis after the Romanians had deported them eastward. In the summer of 1941, in an outbreak of vicious Romanian anti-Semitism, five thousand Jews were packed into a goods train in the city of Jassy, and then sent southward, the doors sealed, without water or food. For eight days these Jews were kept locked in the train’s cattle trucks, as they were shunted from station to station. At one station, Roman, a local Christian woman, Viorica Agarici, head of the regional Red Cross, had the courage to insist that the German soldiers guarding the sealed train open the doors and allow her to bring the Jews water and food. A thousand were allowed off the train altogether; most of them survived. When the train journey came to an end at Kalarash, more than two thousand of its occupants were dead.
In 1994 a book was published in Romania about Viorica Agarici, entitled The Gentile Who Saved a Thousand Jews. It is estimated that several hundred Jews survived because of her rescue efforts.22
In Czernowitz, then the capital of the Romanian province of Bukovina, the mayor, Dr Traian Popovici, was the only senior Romanian official to protest openly against the establishment of a ghetto in the city. He also spoke out, endangering both his public office and his personal safety, when expulsion of the Czernowitz Jews, and their transportation to Transnistria to be slaughtered, were decreed. He addressed letters and memoranda to his superiors, pointing out the credit due to the Jews of Bukovina, and of Czernowitz in particular, for their massive contribution to the province’s cultural, industrial and communal development. He pleaded tirelessly with the Romanian authorities to persuade the Germans to modify the order of expulsion to exempt doctors, engineers, lawyers and judges, pensioners and others. On 15 October, a countermand came from Bucharest allowing about twenty thousand Jews, members of the learned professions listed by Popovici, to stay on in Czernowitz: this was their reprieve from certain death.
The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust Page 25