Einar Follestad was an active member of the Pentecostal movement. When he learnt on October 26 of the arrest in Oslo of his friend Josef Raskow, a Jewish shop-owner, he immediately went to the house of Raskow’s brother, Herman, and his wife Fanny, who was then six months pregnant, in order to help them. From that moment, the whole Follestad family—Einar, his wife Agnes, her parents and her sister—became actively involved in preparing the rescue of their two friends. An escape route was worked out whereby the Raskows were able to cross into Sweden. Four Norwegians had taken part in this single act of rescue.’3
In Norway, as elsewhere, people under occupation could choose to collaborate with the authorities or help the Jews. Two Norwegian policemen arrested a Jewish schoolboy, Selik Mahler, in his classroom at the Cathedral High School in Trondheim on October 27; but two farmer’s sons lent his brother Salomon a pair of skis and accompanied him to the Swedish border two days later.4
In February 1942, all seven bishops of the Norwegian Lutheran Church had resigned in protest against the isolation and persecution of the Jews in Norway. Following the deportations of October, all seven sent a letter, dated 10 November 1942, to Norway’s Minister-President, Vidkun Quisling—whose name had by then become synonymous with betraying one’s own people. In the letter they stated that for the previous ninety-one years the Jews had possessed a legal right to reside and earn a livelihood in Norway. But under Quisling’s rule, the bishops noted, the Jews were being deprived of their properties without warning, and being punished as the worst criminals ‘wholly and solely because they were Jews’.
The seven bishops reminded Quisling that he had on various occasions emphasized that his party would protect the basic Christian values. One of those values, the bishops pointed out, was being endangered: the Christian commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’, which they described as ‘the most elementary legal right for any human being’. The bishops went on to say that they were motivated in writing by the deepest dictates of conscience; they did not want the Church, by silence, to be ‘coguilty’ in ‘legalized injustice’ against the Jews. ‘The Church has God’s call and full authority to proclaim God’s law and God’s Gospel. Therefore, it cannot remain silent when God’s commandments are being trampled underfoot. And now it is one of Christianity’s basic values which is being violated; the commandment of God which is fundamental to all society…Stop the persecution of Jews and stop the race hatred which, through the press, is being spread in our land.’
This protest from the bishops was supported by many respected theologians, nineteen church organizations and six non-state church religious societies. A total of over sixty signatures from all sections of Norway’s Protestant communities endorsed the letter. On two consecutive Sundays, November 15 and 22, prayers were said for the Jews from the pulpits, and in most cases the text of the protest letter was read. The pulpits of the Protestant churches had become an effective means of anti-Nazi communication during the occupation.5
On November 25 the administrator of the Oslo Jewish Children’s Home received a warning about the impending arrest of both the children and their guardians. She immediately contacted members of the Norwegian resistance, among them Ingebjorg Sletten and Tove Tau, who managed to take all the children to a villa in the suburbs. Later they were smuggled across to neutral Sweden, and safety, by a route north of Kongsvinger, to the east of Oslo. Among these children were thirty-seven Czech refugees whom Sigrid Lund had helped bring across Europe from Prague in October 1939.
The first deportation of Jews from Norway to Auschwitz took place on the night of 26–27 November 1942 from Oslo, when 523 Norwegian Jews were taken by ship to Stettin, and then on by train. At the quayside, many Norwegians had gathered, hoping somehow to help the Jews, but stood powerless as men, women and children were forced on board.6 Many Norwegians, however, took part in smuggling Jews across the border between Norway and Sweden. Among them was Odd Nansen, the son of the polar explorer and friend of refugees, Fridjof Nansen. Odd Nansen was arrested by the Gestapo, incarcerated near Oslo, and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. He survived the war.7
Several hospitals in Oslo, and also in Lillehammer, had become centres for hiding Jews until rescue could be arranged. Doctors, nurses and hospital administrators falsified the records of these ‘patients’ and failed to report the release of Jewish patients to the state police, as ordered by the Quisling government. Even Jews who had been hospitalized with legitimate illnesses were spirited safely across the Swedish border on stretchers. The Carl Fredriksen Transport Organization used two trucks five evenings a week from October 1942 to January 1943, rescuing hundreds of Jews.8
On the night of December 3, Henriette Samuel, the wife of the Chief Rabbi of Norway, and her children were among forty Jews taken in two trucks to the Swedish frontier. As the trucks were officially meant to be carrying potatoes, the escapees had to look like tubers covered by tarpaulins, and to keep strictest silence lest the Germans discover them in routine searches along the way. The children were given sleeping pills, the adults forbidden to speak. The last stage of the transit, led by the Norwegian resistance, was impassable to trucks and had to be undertaken on foot, with the temperature down to twenty degrees below freezing. The children were woken up and all forty Jews were then smuggled across the border into neutral Sweden.9
On December 21 another thirty-four Norwegian Jews crossed into Sweden, assisted by Norwegians who had provided them with food and clothing. A United States Office of Strategic Services report, sent secretly from Sweden eight days later, stated: ‘The Norse are infuriated by the anti-Jewish attitude of the Germans and Quislings, and in order to frustrate the maltreatment of Jews risked their own lives. In one case, that of Dr Henri Zellner, 74-year-old escapee, he stated that his wife, who was paralysed, refused to leave Norway, and she was carried across the border bodily by the Norwegians.’10
Samuel Abrahamsen comments: ‘Sweden was not easily accessible on foot. The border patrolled by German troops was an area of thick forest, mountainous terrain, difficult to cross in snow and frost.’11 In his book Justice in Jerusalem, Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor at the Eichmann trial, expressed his and Israel’s appreciation of the Norwegian underground’s efforts in transporting eight hundred Jews across Norway to safety in Sweden ‘under especially perilous circumstances’.12
Perhaps forty Jews managed to survive the war inside Norway, living with false ‘Aryan’ papers in hospitals, nursing homes and homes for old people. One lived through the war in a small cabin in a remote forest.13
IN FINLAND, SEVERAL hundred local Jews—whose families had lived there since the time Finland had been part of the Tsarist Empire—had been joined after 1933 by a further two thousand refugees from Germany and Austria. In August 1942, at the request of the SS, eight of these refugees were deported to Germany, and then sent on to Auschwitz. All but one of them were murdered. The SS then demanded that all the remaining German-and Austrian-born Jews in Finland be handed over. Protests were immediate, from senior clergymen and from the minority Social Democratic Party. The Finnish Cabinet, which that August had agreed to deport Finland’s Jews to Germany during a private visit to Finland of the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, changed its mind and refused to allow any further deportations. Thus two thousand Jews were saved.14
A SIMILAR PUBLIC protest took place in Denmark, where the SS were also cheated of their prize—one they had coveted for more than a year and a half, since the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when Denmark’s seven thousand Jews had been designated for deportation and death in the lists meticulously prepared by Adolf Eichmann. Following the occupation of Denmark in the spring of 1940, the Germans had pursued a policy of co-operation and negotiation with the Danish authorities. As a result, the Jews had been left unmolested. But growing Danish resistance to the German occupation slowly undermined any chance of continued co-operation, and on 28 August 1943 the Germans declared martial law.
The SS hoped
to use this opportunity to deport Denmark’s Jews. They were forestalled by the actions of a German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and been posted to Denmark before the German conquest by German military intelligence. Following the German conquest of Denmark he had made contact with the leaders of the Danish Social Democrat Party, with whom he was on good terms. Learning of the deportation plans on 11 September 1943, Duckwitz flew to Berlin two days later to try to have the plan set aside, but was told it had already been approved by Hitler. On September 25 he flew to the Swedish capital, Stockholm, saw the Swedish Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson, and discussed with him the possibility of Denmark’s Jews being smuggled across the narrow belt of water to Sweden. Returning to Copenhagen on September 28, Duckwitz passed on details of the imminent deportation, and the possibility of a safe haven in Sweden, to three of the leaders of the Social Democrat Party (one of them a former Prime Minister, the other two future post-war Prime Ministers). The information he gave them was precise: the round-up would take place on the Friday and Saturday night of that very week.15
Forewarned of the planned deportation, Danes and Jews took immediate action, as did Per Albin Hansson, who had promised Duckwitz that the Swedish government would help in the effort to rescue Denmark’s Jews. As Leni Yahil, the historian of the rescue of Danish Jewry, has written, ‘all groups of the Danish population went into action in order to save the Jews. Dozens of protests poured into the offices of the German authorities from Danish economic and social organizations; King Christian X expressed his firm objection to the German plans; the heads of the Danish churches published a strong protest and used their pulpits to urge the Danish people to help the Jews; and the universities closed down for a week, with the students lending a hand in the rescue operation. The operation went on for three weeks, and in its course all 7,200 Jews and some 700 non-Jewish relatives of theirs were taken to Sweden. The costs of the operation were borne partly by the Jews themselves and to a large extent by contributions made by the Danes. The Danish resistance movement grew in size and strength as a result of the successful rescue effort and was able to keep open a fairly reliable escape route to Sweden.’ When Rolf Gunther, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, travelled from Berlin to Copenhagen to organize the deportation of the Jews, the Danish police not only refused to co-operate with him but issued an order prohibiting German police from breaking into apartments in order to arrest Jews.16 The Germans did not have the personnel to enforce martial law.
Among individual Danish rescuers was Dr Jorgen Gersfelt, a physician in Rungsted, who helped more than a thousand Jews across The Sound from the harbour at Snekkersten. One of those whom Dr Gersfelt helped rescue, Sam Besekow (later a well-known Danish theatrical personality), recalled how Gersfelt ‘mobilized all available fishing boats and motor launches, even row boats were not spurned. Jorgen discovered the whereabouts of my parents—he was as dear to them as he was to me—picked them up himself and saw them on to the train to Snekkersten. This train was so crammed with Jews that, at a glance, anyone would have guessed what was going on, what with heavy luggage, children crying in the arms of frightened mothers—a Gypsy caravan on rails.’ During the first few days, eleven hundred people were saved; ‘then the Gestapo got the idea and arrests and captured ships followed. Jorgen was magnificent, turning his private home into a bedlam of refugees on the run, sleeping everywhere on the floors and in the hallways—and he personally escorted my parents to the coast of Sweden, just as he dispensed sedatives to the children to prevent them from making noises that might arouse the suspicions of the Germans.’
Another of those who gave significant help was Fanny Arnskov, a leading figure in the Danish Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. She not only helped Jews during the October days, but later took charge of sending parcels to those who had been seized and sent to Theresienstadt. The Danish government insisted on the Danish Jews in Theresienstadt being given special protection, and food parcels. Almost all the other inmates of the camp, mostly German, Austrian and Czech Jews, tens of thousands in all, were starved to death or deported to Auschwitz and murdered.17
Starting on the eve of the planned deportation from Denmark and continuing for three weeks, Danish sea captains and fishermen—some members of the resistance, others simply public-spirited—ferried a total of 5,919 Jews, 1,301 part-Jews (designated Jews by the Nazis) and 686 Christians married to Jews to neutral Sweden. Among those saved in this way was Niels Bohr, the atomic scientist, who was to put his expertise at the disposal of the Americans. Two of those who helped organize the crossings were Ole Helweg and Bent Karlby, architects who left their jobs in order to form the Danish-Swedish Refugee Service, also known as the Ferrying Service. They were helped by a Danish naval lieutenant, Eric Staermose.18
The Danes’ support for the Jews was remarkable. On one occasion, when a Jew was discovered by a Danish Nazi in the street in Copenhagen, an angry crowd forced him to hand the Jew over to the Danish police, who later helped him to escape.19 One would-be safe haven failed, however. The eighty Jews hidden in the attic of the church at Gilleleje, awaiting transfer to a boat, were found by the Gestapo and deported to Theresienstadt.20
On 1 October 1943, the second day of the Jewish New Year, the Germans found only five hundred Jews remaining in Denmark. All were sent to Theresienstadt; of them, 423 survived the war. On 14 April 1945 the Swedish Red Cross negotiated their release.21
The Danish Jews who had been ferried to Sweden survived the war unmolested, as did a further three thousand Jewish refugees who had reached Sweden before the outbreak of war, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Reflecting on the rescue of so many Jews in such a short time by a whole nation acting in unison, the historian Leni Yahil concludes: ‘The Danish people’s resolute refusal to discriminate against their Jewish fellow citizens and to surrender them, or the refugees among them, to the Germans; the rescue launched to transfer the Jews to a safe haven in Sweden; and the unwavering support and protection they gave to the Theresienstadt deportees—all represent an exercise of high moral and political responsibility, outstanding and exceptional for the time in which it took place.’22
Chapter 12
France
FOLLOWING THE FRENCH capitulation in June 1940, France was divided into two zones: the Occupied Zone, which included the Channel and Atlantic coastal areas, and the Free Zone (‘Zone Libre’), also known as the Unoccupied Zone, ruled from Vichy by a French collaborationist government headed by Marshal Pétain. His ‘Vichy France’ was eager to accede to German demands with regard to the isolation, and eventual deportation, of Jews, both foreign-born and French-born.
The first deportation of Jews from Paris to Auschwitz took place on 27 March 1942. Most of those taken were Polish-born Jews living in Paris, within the Occupied Zone. The deportations continued throughout April, May and June. On July 16 and 17 a mass round-up led to the incarceration and eventual deportation of Jews from Paris, elsewhere in the Occupied Zone, and even from the ‘Free Zone’, under sole control of the Vichy regime. Helping Jews required the combined effort of many people, each individually at risk, but seeking—and finding—strength in joint action. A high point came in late August 1942, as the deportations of foreign-born Jews—and in particular children—intensified. Senior church figures took a leading role: just south of Lyons, Protestant and Catholic clerics, including Cardinal Gerlier, the Archbishop of Lyons, joined forces with Jewish resistance groups to find hiding places for five hundred adults and more than a hundred children from a camp in Vénissieux, from which the local Prefect had ordered their deportation. Not only Cardinal Gerlier, but also his Secretary, Monseigneur Jean-Baptiste Maury (later Bishop of Reims), were honoured for their acts of rescue.1
The Night of Vénissieux, as it became known, also saw the birth of the ‘Circuit Garel’, the first clandestine network in the south of France set up to protect Jewish children. Jews and Christians participated equally in the work of rescue. Elisabeth Maxwe
ll, a French Protestant who has studied this period, writes that it was ‘the first episode in France when ecumenism truly worked, and when all forces of goodwill and decency combined’—to thwart a Vichy order to deport six hundred Jews to the transit camp at Drancy, in a suburb of Paris, for deportation to ‘the East’.2
Georges Garel was a French Jew who owned a small electrical appliance shop in Lyons. ‘His name was impeccably French,’ noted the historian Yehuda Bauer; ‘he had never been connected with any Jewish causes; he was completely unknown; and he had all the human qualities essential for such an undertaking.’3 Among Christians who helped in this particular effort to deny the Germans their prey during the Night of Vénissieux, and for two years after that, was Abbé André Payot.
‘We did what we had to do,’ was his comment when one of those he had helped across the border suggested some special honour.4
Eighty-three deportations took place by rail from France to Auschwitz and other death camps in the East. When an engine driver, Léon Bronchart, was ordered to drive a train of deportees from the town of Montauban, he refused—the only engine driver known to have done so—and wrote to Marshal Pétain to protest against the order he had been given. No one followed his example. A month later he smuggled a Jew in his locomotive from Brive to Limoges, and then on to the safety of the Italian Zone in south-eastern France. Denounced to the Gestapo, he was deported to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, and later to the slave labour camp at Dora. There, until liberation, he was a source of moral strength to his fellow prisoners.5
On 28 August 1942, as the deportations from France continued, the Germans ordered all Catholic priests who sheltered Jews to be arrested.6 Those taken included a Jesuit who had hidden eighty Jewish children destined for deportation.7
The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust Page 27