The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  The mayor’s office was always crowded with Jews seeking help. He authorized payment to Jewish pensioners of the full sums that they had been given before the war. Daringly, he added thousands of names to official rolls of Jews declared exempt from transportation; as one of those who testified on his behalf wrote: ‘Dr Popovici saved souls wherever possible, in the full knowledge of the danger to which such actions exposed him.’23

  The Papal Nuncio in Romania, Archbishop Andrea Cassulo, appealed directly to Marshal Antonescu to limit the deportations planned for the summer of 1942.24 His appeal was ignored; hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were deported to Transnistria.

  Following the deportations, and the killings that accompanied them, the Queen Mother of Romania, Queen Elena, made repeated efforts to have Jews brought back from the extreme perils of the labour and concentration camps in which they had been incarcerated. Elena was a Greek princess who had married the Romanian King Carol, from whom she was divorced in 1930. When she learnt of the plight of the deportees she immediately sent them food—as many as a third of the deportees died of starvation. In October 1942, when yet another group of Jews were about to be deported, one of them, the famous Romanian philologist Barbu Lazareanu, asked a well-known doctor, Victor Gomoiu, for help. The doctor knew Queen Elena and appealed to her. It is said that she told her son Mihai, who had succeeded his father as King, that she would leave the country if this new deportation took place. Mihai secured the Jews’ release.25

  Albania, on the Adriatic Sea, had a Jewish population of about three hundred in the interwar years. In February 1939 a hundred Jewish refugees arrived from Vienna. King Zog and his government allowed all of them to stay. When a further ninety-five Jewish families—three hundred Jews in all—arrived in March 1939, the King again gave them permission to stay.

  In April 1939 the Italians invaded Albania; King Zog was overthrown and Italian rule imposed. Soon afterwards the Italians asked the Albanian puppet government to expel all foreign-born Jews—the four hundred or so refugees. The Albanian administration, in a brave display of independence, refused. Indeed, as many as four hundred more refugees arrived from Yugoslavia and Poland in the following years.

  In April 1941, the Italian rulers of Albania took advantage of the German conquest of Yugoslavia to annex Yugoslavia’s Kosovo province, inhabited mostly by Ethnic Albanians. Four hundred Jews had fled there as the German troops drove through Yugoslavia.

  In Pristina, the capital of the annexed region, the local authorities complied with German demands and gaoled sixty Jewish men. But a sympathetic local doctor, Spiro Lito, persuaded the mayor not to let the Germans take the sixty Jews to Poland and certain death. He also convinced the German authorities that the Jewish prisoners had typhus and that it was necessary to send them to hospitals in Albania to avoid an epidemic. The Jews were taken to Berat, given false documents and found refuge around Albania, mostly with friends of Dr Lito in Lushnja, Shijak, Kavaja and Kruja.

  When Italy surrendered to the Allies in July 1943, German troops moved into Albania. From that moment the SS, determined to begin deportations from a new region, asked the Albanian government for a list of all the Jews in the country. The government refused, as it had refused to give up the Jews during the Italian occupation, and the Jews were taken into hiding.26 In the occupied province of Kosovo, however, the Germans paid no heed to the Albanian authorities, seizing all four hundred Jews who had fled there from other regions of Yugoslavia two years earlier, and sending them by rail to Belsen; only a hundred survived the war.

  In Albania proper, successful efforts were made by individual Albanians, both Christians and Muslims, to protect Jews from deportation and death. Refik Vesili was sixteen years old when, in November 1943, he sought his parents’ permission to hide all four members of the Mandil family, as well as four of their cousins, in the family’s home in the mountain village of Kruja. His parents agreed, and all eight Jews were hidden there until liberation eleven months later.27

  In Vlora, Nuro Hoxha hid seventeen Jews in his house. He also dug a ditch in which all seventeen could hide as precaution against a possible German raid. In the village of Zall-Herr, Hoxha Ferri found places of rescue for eighty Jews and Italian soldiers who had escaped when Italy surrendered. Nadire Bixhiu took more than eighty Jews into her home and found places of safety for them. One of several refugees from Germany who were saved from deportation, Irene Grunbaum, wrote in her memoirs that one day she would tell the world how the Albanians ‘protected a refugee and wouldn’t allow her to be harmed even if it meant losing their lives. The gates of your small country remained open, Albania. Your authorities closed both eyes, when necessary, to give poor persecuted people another chance to survive the most horrible of all wars. We thank you.’28

  The Albanians remained true, despite German pressure, to their ancient tradition of hospitality: the person who seeks your help becomes your honoured guest, to be guarded and protected. The most recent encyclopaedia of the Holocaust recognizes the achievements of the Albanian people with regard to the rescue of Jews, noting that the residents of the town of Berat protected all the hundred or so Jewish refugees who found shelter there, and that others were saved in Elbasan, Valona, Debar and Shkoder, and in Tirana, where many were disguised as Muslims.29 An ‘overwhelming majority of the Albanian population,’ wrote Mordecai Paldiel, ‘Muslim and Christian, gave refuge to two thousand Jews in their midst, resulting in the almost total rescue of this Jewish community.’30

  IN THE SPRING of 1943 the Germans began the deportation of more than forty-five thousand Jews from northern Greece, which had been under German occupation for almost two years. The Greeks, for whom the German occupation was a harsh burden, did what they could to try to help Jews avoid deportation. Nikos Kilessopoulis, assistant mayor of the town of Katerini, was at the municipality building late one night with the other town officials when a telegram arrived from the SS instructing them to arrest the local Jews. Without hesitation he hurried to the Jewish houses and urged the Jews to escape to the mountains. Thirty Jews left. The few who could not endure the harsh conditions in the mountain villages returned, and were deported. The majority survived in the mountains.31

  In reporting that deportations to Poland were continuing, Guelfo Zamboni, an Italian diplomat in Greece added: ‘Lately Jewish children have been given out for adoption to Greek citizens and foreigners.’32

  On 22 September 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop, who five months earlier had destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto and crushed the Jewish uprising there, was appointed Chief of Police in Greece. His task was to carry out the registration and deportation of all Jews. His first instruction included the order: ‘Any Christian who hides a Jew will be shot.’33

  The will to help could not always be turned into action. In the town of Janina nineteen hundred Jews were seized. Only five managed to escape deportation. An eyewitness recalled: ‘The Christian people of the city were deeply moved on the day of deportation,’ but they were powerless.34

  In Athens, General Stroop summoned Archbishop Damaskinos, and asked for his co-operation in deporting the Jews. Damaskinos left Stroop’s office and immediately ordered the Greek Orthodox religious leaders to hide Jews, and not turn them over to the occupiers. The Jews were also helped by many Italian soldiers in the city, who were regarded by the Germans as traitors to the Axis. Thanks to their support and that of the archbishop and his church, most of Athenian Jewry was saved.35

  Among those who did what they could to shelter Jews in Athens was Princess Alice of Greece, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria (and the mother of Prince Philip). She gave refuge in her own house in the centre of the city—opposite that of the archbishop—to Rachel, the widow of Haimaki Cohen, and to Rachel’s young daughter and son Michel. Princess Alice also helped Rachel Cohen’s other three sons, Jacques, Alfred and Elia, to escape from Greece and join the Allied forces. ‘She not only saved the lives of our mother, sister and Michel, but also the lives of all the rest
of us,’ Alfred Cohen later wrote, ‘because we would never have dared to flee Greece while knowing the rest of the family were left behind totally unprotected.’36

  The Princess’s Greek staff said nothing about those who were in hiding: their loyalty was not in doubt. The greatest danger came when, as a matter of courtesy, German officers came to call on the Princess. But her secret was kept, and Rachel and Michel Cohen survived the war, as did Jacques, one of those whom she enabled to escape to Turkey.37

  Also in Athens, Roger Millieux, director of the French Institute in the city, hid two Jews in the Institute itself.38 In Salonika, a Greek couple, Lina and Vittoria Citterich, gave a safe haven to Rena Shaki after the deportation of her parents. Later they enrolled her in a Roman Catholic convent school in the city, the Sisters of Saint Joseph. Her parents, taken to Auschwitz, never returned.39

  At the time of the German occupation of Athens, the Levis family had been warned by a pre-arranged signal from Dimitrios Vlastaris, Director of the Aliens Department of the Greek police, who was a friend of the family.40 As a result of his warning, wrote Jeff Levis (then Pepos Levis), ‘my whole immediate family went into hiding. We remained in hiding during thirteen months, until the liberation of Athens by the Allies in 1944. We were fortunate enough to be in the small minority of Greek Jews who survived. We owe our survival, by and large, to Greek Christian friends of the family who either hid us in their homes or arranged for us to hide in other places.’

  The principal rescuer of the Levis family was Michael Mantoudis, the Director of the Department of Culture and Fine Arts in the Greek Ministry of Education. His wife, Adamantia, was Mrs Levis’s best friend. Jeff himself was hidden in the study of their home. ‘During the thirteen months that we were in hiding,’ he writes, ‘we had various close escapes from the German army and the SS, as well as from Greek Quisling units.’41

  At Volos, on the Aegean coast of mainland Greece, Rabbi Pessah, through his contact with the resistance, obtained shelter for more than 752 Jews in the mountain villages east of the town. When the Germans came to deport them, only 130 were found. In nearby Trikkala, 470 Jews found refuge with Greek villagers in the mountains; only fifty were captured. In Patras, the German consul wrote to his superiors that ‘after the newspapers announced the obligatory registration of all Jews, they disappeared.’42

  On the Greek island of Zante, sixty miles from Corfu, the Mayor, Lucas Karrer, and the leading churchman, Archbishop Crysostomos, not only alerted the Jews to danger but sent 195 of them to remote villages in the hills. Unfortunately sixty-two Jews, all of them elderly, who could not make the sudden journey into the rough terrain, were seized by the Gestapo in Zante and taken to the port. ‘If the deportation order is carried out,’ Crysostomos declared, ‘I will join the Jews and share their fate.’43 But by a remarkable chance, when the boat arrived from Corfu it was already so packed with Jews that it did not stop.44

  MORE THAN forty-eight thousand Jews were living in Bulgaria when war broke out. A further seven and a half thousand came under Bulgarian rule in 1941 in Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, and four thousand more in Bulgarian-occupied Thrace. During 1941 the Bulgarian government sent many Jews to labour camps inside Bulgaria. Although there was no question of deporting them to Germany, conditions in the camps were harsh. When, on 24 May 1942, there was a mass round-up of Jews in Sofia for deportation to the camps, a young Bulgarian, Rubin Dimitrov, hid twenty Jews in his grandmother’s bakery, sheltering them until the raid was over. When the Bulgarian police learned what he had done they beat him so severely that his eyesight was permanently damaged.45

  On 22 February 1943 the Bulgarian government agreed to a German request to deport the Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia: eleven and a half thousand men, women and children, from twenty-three communities, were deported to Treblinka and murdered. On February 28 one of the leading Bulgarian churchmen, Metropolitan Stefan of Sofia, was on a visit to the town of Dupnitza when he saw the arrival of deportation trains, carrying Jews from Thrace to Treblinka. He protested to King Boris.46 A few days later, the Germans prevailed upon the Bulgarian government to issue a deportation order for all the forty-eight thousand Jews of Bulgaria proper. On March 10 the seizure of Jews began in the city of Plovdiv, home of the Metropolitan Kiril: fifteen hundred Jews were arrested that night. The historian Uriel Tal has described how Kiril ‘got up early in the morning when it was still dark and rushed to the rescue of the arrested Jews’.47

  Again, Metropolitan Stefan wrote at once to the King: ‘The cries and the tears of the slighted Bulgarian citizens of Jewish origin are a lawful protest against the injustice done to them. It should be heard and complied with by the King of the Bulgarians.’48 In the northern part of Bulgaria, farmers threatened to lie down on the railway tracks to prevent passage of the deportation trains. Speaking at a session of the Bulgarian Holy Synod three weeks later, Metropolitan Kiril told the church dignitaries about the Jews seized in Plovdiv: ‘They were detained in a school and had to be transported to Poland, just like the Jews from the newly liberated territories and Aegean Thrace. In the morning I was told what had happened. I did not know what was going on and thought that maybe the Jews in the whole country had been arrested that night. A special train to transport them was expected to arrive at the station. The citizens’ indignation was enormous.’

  Kiril went on to stress that the internment that had started as a prelude to deportation ‘is extremely unjust and cruel. It should be underlined that the Holy Synod is unanimous in its position on that issue. I hope the head of state will be notified of our attitude. As a last resort, we could express our view from the pulpit and could instruct the parish priests what to do.’

  Speaking after Kiril, Metropolitan Stefan noted that it was the duty of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to ‘bring consolation to all who suffer’. Whenever Jews sought shelter within the confines of the Church, ‘we cannot turn them back. Their suffering is inhumane.’ When someone ‘comes to your house and tells you to pack up things in two hours and be ready to leave for some place unknown—this is unheard of and unseen in our country.’ As well as Kiril and Stefan, eight other senior churchmen, among them the highly respected Neofit of Vidin, signed a formal protest to the King on behalf of all the Jews of Bulgaria.49

  The Vice-Speaker of the Bulgarian parliament, Dimiter Peshev, angered by the earlier deportations from Bulgarian-occupied territory, on German orders, organized a petition on March 17, opposing the deportation of the Jews from Bulgaria proper. Fifty members of parliament signed, whereupon the government rescinded its order of a week earlier and released those Jews who had already been taken into custody. Their release came to be known in Bulgaria as a ‘miracle of the Jewish people’.50

  Hitler did not have the means to occupy Bulgaria and organize the deportation using German troops and police. Thus the Jews of Bulgaria survived the war. In a report to Berlin on 7 June 1943, Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, the German Ambassador to Sofia, looking back on the failure of the German deportation plans two and a half months earlier, lamented the fact that the Bulgarian people ‘lacked the ideological enlightenment that we have’, and that the Bulgarian man in the street ‘does not see in the Jews any flaws justifying taking special measures against them’. Fifteen years later, when Beckerle was on trial for wartime crimes, German jurists acting for him noted that ‘in Bulgaria there was no anti-Semitism in the conventional sense of the word.’51

  Chapter 11

  Norway, Finland and Denmark

  ON THE OUTBREAK of war in September 1939 there were seventeen hundred Jews living in Norway, most of them in the capital, Oslo. Two hundred of them were German and Austrian refugees who had found sanctuary in Norway after 1933. In April 1940 the German army invaded Norway; two months later the Norwegian army surrendered, and power passed to the German Reichskommissar, Josef Terboven. At his beck and call, as Minister-President, was a former Norwegian army officer, Vidkun Quisling, the head of the pre-war Norwegian fascist movement
. The first anti-Jewish action took place in April 1941, when the synagogue in Trondheim, in northern Norway, was seized and vandalized. Immediately afterwards, the leading churchman in the city, Dean Arne Fjellbu, privately warned the local Norwegian Nazis that if the synagogue action presaged a general persecution of Jews, ‘I can assure you that the Church will sound the alarm from one end of the country to the other. Here the Norwegian Church stands one hundred percent united. Such a thing we will not tolerate.’

  The head of the Methodist Church in Trondheim, Pastor Einar Anker Nilsen, offered the Trondheim Jews the church attic for their synagogue services. The two Torah scrolls that had not been vandalized were transferred there. So that nobody could see that Jews congregated in the church, comments the historian of Norwegian Jewry during the war, Samuel Abrahamsen, ‘members of the congregation were instructed to arrive and leave the church one by one, or not more than two together in order not to attract undue attention. This functioned very well, although it was dangerous.’1

  The first mass arrest of Jews in Norway took place on 25 October 1942. One of the Norwegian non-Jews active in helping Jews avoid deportation was Sigrid Lund. She has described in her memoirs how she and a friend learnt the news: ‘On October 25, the telephone rang. A male voice said: “It will be a large party tonight. But we only want to have the large packages.” Then he hung up. At first I was in doubt as to what it meant. Myrtle and I spoke about it for quite some time. Then we said almost simultaneously: “This must be about the Jews. And the large packages must be the men.” They were at risk of being arrested immediately.’

  The two women agreed that they should warn as many men as possible ‘without daring to use the telephone. The problems were how to locate the men and obtain access to their homes. Many Jews were warned but did not believe persecutions could happen in Norway on any large scale. For others the warning came too late. The Norwegian police had already been there.’2