The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  In 1992, fifty years after Father Bruno began his rescue efforts, nine of those who owed their lives to him held a commemoration in a private home in Maplewood, New Jersey. A journalist who was present, Joseph Berger, recorded their stories for the New York Times. ‘I think he was one of the very few good people,’ said Jack Goldstein, the host of the reunion. ‘He saw what was being done was wrong. Were it the reverse situation, I don’t know how many people would have done what he did. Père Bruno, as he was known, was a slender, gentle man in his thirties with sharp eyes twinkling out from behind the spectacles of a scholar. A university teacher, he was an expert on the early Christian communities, which were made up of people who called themselves Jews but adhered to the teachings of Christ.’

  Rachelle Goldstein was two and a half years old when she and her elder brother Jacques, aged nine, were found a hiding place in a Protestant orphanage in Uccle in July 1942. They stayed there, with several cousins, for eight months, until another child ran away from the orphanage and threatened to denounce the Jewish children. It was Father Bruno who found them other places to go. Rachelle was found sanctuary in the Convent of the Franciscan Sisters in Bruges, under the name of Lily Willems.38 When Rachelle learned she would be staying there, she burst into tears. Some months later a woman member of the resistance came to the convent and left her a doll, a present from her mother. ‘She told me my parents knew where I was,’ Rachelle Goldstein recalled. ‘It meant everything to me.’

  A year later, after the liberation of Belgium, Rachelle was playing in the convent garden when a man and woman came to see her. She did not recognize them until the woman embraced her. ‘When I went close to the woman, I recognized my mother by her scent.’

  Jack Goldstein was nine years old when his mother took him and his twin brother to a train station to meet Father Bruno. He immediately gave them new names and new identity papers. They stayed the night with a doctor who, the next day, hid them under a blanket in the car. The doctor and Father Bruno talked their way through several German roadblocks to a convent, where the children spent the next six months. ‘I didn’t know if I would ever see my parents again,’ said Jack Goldstein. ‘I lived in fear. I studied Christianity. I went to church every morning, but I knew of my Jewish heritage.’

  Many of Father Bruno’s children made their way to the United States, where a remarkable quirk of destiny brought two of them together. Rachelle and Jack Goldstein did not know each other as children; they met in 1955 at a dance. Rachelle inquired about Jack’s European accent, and the tale he told led to the discovery that they had been saved by the same man.

  Another young boy, Bernard Rotmil, was hidden on a farm as a teenager and recalled that Father Bruno used to ride for many miles on a bicycle to visit him in hiding, to try to relieve his homesickness. Ultimately, he said, Father Bruno ‘is best described by the simple Yiddish word for a decent person. He was a mensch.’

  Flora Singer was helping her mother by taking jobs packing soap powder and assisting a dressmaker ‘when Père Bruno stopped by and asked whether she would rather go to school. Her mother said that in order to eat they needed the money Flora brought in, so Père Bruno offered to bring the family food if Flora went to school. He then arranged for her to be hidden safely, for eleven months.39

  In recent years, Flora Singer frequently talks about Father Bruno when she gives lectures in the United States about the Righteous. ‘I hold him up as an example of what a human being should be’, she has written; ‘he was certainly a model to be emulated.’40

  ‘The last time I saw Père Bruno’, wrote Paul Silvers, one of the 320 youngsters for whom Father Henri Reynders found a safe haven in Belgium, ‘was shortly after the liberation of Belgium. It was during the Jewish High Holidays of 1944. The Dutch Synagogue in Brussels was packed with worshippers. The Rabbi suddenly halted the service and announced that Père Bruno had just come in for a final visit with “his children” before joining the Belgian troops as a chaplain. The reception given Père Bruno by the congregation was tumultuous. Kids were clinging to his arms and tearful parents were showering him with thanks and blessings. It took a long time for decorum to return to the synagogue and for the services to resume. When I looked for him, Père Bruno had quietly slipped out.’41

  IN BELGIUM, AS in every German-occupied country, and in Germany itself, it often took many non-Jews, working together or at different times over several years, to save a single Jew. Martin Glassman and his younger brother Gary left Italy in April 1939 with their Polish-born maternal grandparents to comply with an Italian law that all foreign-born Jews must leave Italy. Their destination was Brussels. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, they were interned by the Belgian authorities, as foreign aliens, at Camp Marneffe. There, having reached the age of thirteen, Martin Glassman had his barmitzvah. After the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 they were released, and set off in the direction of Namur, but the German forces soon overran the whole country and they returned to occupied Brussels.

  The first help given to Martin Glassman by a non-Jew came when he reached the age of fifteen and required his own identity card. A forged card was provided by Dr Thys, a member of the Belgian resistance who later took part in an attack on a deportation train—the twentieth train that left Malines for Auschwitz.

  On the run from the forced labour decree issued by the Germans at the end of May 1942, Martin Glassman and his brother Gary were taken in by Madame Holland and her son Paul in their boarding house in Rhode St Genese outside Brussels. Their uncle Arthur Hellman was also found sanctuary, by Dr Thys and Madame Holland, in a tuberculosis clinic; later he returned to his home. The boys’ grandparents, Emelie and Heinrich Hellman, were caught and arrested, then deported to Auschwitz and their deaths.

  Later, Frère Luc de Bisshop, the Brother Director of the Institut St Nicolas in Anderlecht, took in the two brothers, registering them as Catholic students. He alone knew that they were Jewish. Martin Glassman later recalled: ‘The Institut permitted students in good standing to exit Saturday afternoon and re-enter on Sunday evening. This created a need for a secure place for one night. Uncle Arthur forbade us to come to his house for fear of being denounced by one of his German tenants. Soon after the start of the school term, a spinster lady named Bile Durant became the liaison between our uncle and us. She visited us frequently, brought us clothing, school supplies, sweets and some pocket money. She would also take us along to her residence. Her sister, a physician, was married to a Jew of Russian ancestry who was also a physician. Their names were Drs Alechinsky, their offices and residence were on rue Franz Merjay 43. We were given frequent shelter at this location. Summer vacations presented special problems because of the lengthy period during which the school was closed. During that long recess the Alechinskys permitted us to use their summer residence, the “Maison Rose” in the village of Sauvagemont. During those stays, Mademoiselle Durant would be our guardian. She would keep us busy with house chores, learning English and freehand drawing. In the fall we would resume our classes.’

  Betrayal led to the arrest of Arthur Hellman. He was taken to the Gestapo fortress at Breendonk, tortured, and executed on 28 February 1944. He was thirty-seven years old. But his young nephews, Martin and Gary, were in safe hands. When Allied bombing raids led to the closure of the Institut, ‘Mademoiselle Durant came to the rescue by securing us shelter in a Boy Scout camp in Momignies near the Franco-Belgian border. The camp shared facilities belonging to Trappist monks who generously provided this shelter for young men irrespective of origin to escape forced labour for the Germans. By the end of August the Germans had sustained heavy casualties; they requisitioned the facilities for their wounded and ordered us out within twenty-four hours. For the remainder of the occupation I was hidden in the Alechinsky residence, Gary in an orphanage until our liberation on September 3, 1944.’

  Martin Glassman adds: ‘It should be noted that there were many anonymous individuals who gave aid and comfort who wishe
d to remain nameless or whose encounter was too brief for any introduction. I’ll give you two examples. An Italian seamstress who at one time had been an employee of my uncle, spent hours in the street of his residence to intercept me should I go near the premises to warn me of his arrest. On one of the many religious holidays when I needed shelter, I was put up in the plundered offices of a physician who had been arrested for her activities with the resistance. I remained several days in the basement of the premises. My food was brought to me nightly by a Spaniard who himself was a wanted man because of his anti-Franco activities.’42

  Cirla Italiaander was eight years old when her father Jaap was deported: he and all four of her grandparents were killed at Auschwitz. Her mother gave her into the care of a Christian couple, Jean-Louis and Betty Liem. The first thing the child had to do was to change her name to something less foreign: she became ‘Suzy’. Then she was carefully coached in what she must do if the Gestapo came. ‘There was a procedure we were to follow. I would pretend to be deaf and dumb and not speak whatever happened. We had no secret hiding places, but when Madame Liem’s brother visited, we stayed upstairs; we were fed in advance and the brother and sister-in-law and their children didn’t know. I was told “Suzy, don’t make a noise because so-and-so is visiting.”’

  Recalling that during the Allied bombing raids against German military targets in Belgium, Madame Liem would pray, Cirla commented: ‘I must say, when she made the sign of the Cross, I felt God would protect me. Her actions were guided by the knowledge that we were human beings and God would not approve of the Nazis. She was a very devout Catholic and felt that nobody should be killed because of race or religion. She took it on her that it was her mission in life.’43

  Cirla remained in hiding with the Liems for eighteen months. After the war, she and her mother emigrated to Britain.44

  Any act by a non-Jew, no matter how small or incomprehensible, could be the critical one in the story of a Jew’s survival. Three-year-old Susan Preisz and her mother had been taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Avenue Louise in Brussels, ‘amidst a crowd of Jews of all ages’, the young girl’s cousin Walter Absil later wrote, ‘some crying, others praying. A scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno.’ What happened next was as life-saving as it was unexpected: ‘A tall SS officer approached the grilled door, he asked in a loud commanding voice “to whom does this child belong”, pointing at little Susan. Susan’s mother gathered her child in her arms: “To me,” she managed to say. “Come with me, Jewess,” ordered the officer. He supplied the trembling mother with a pail, brush and water, ordering her to wash the stairs leading out of the cellar. This done, he ordered her out of the building. Holding her child, blinking at the bright sunlight filtering through the canopy of the tall chestnut trees lining the avenue, she walked slowly home.’

  Walter Absil went on to ask: ‘What caused the miracle? Did the officer see his own child in Susan’s face? No one will ever know.’ Susan Preisz and her mother survived the rest of the war in the Belgian countryside, ‘helped and hidden’, Walter Absil writes, ‘by those brave people risking their lives without hesitation. Other countries had some righteous humanitarians helping under extremely dangerous conditions, but the Belgians and Danes, above all of the German-occupied countries, behaved as real civilized Europeans.’45

  Walter Absil was himself saved from deportation by a Belgian family who adopted him, and then by Belgian resistance fighters in the forest.46

  THE PRINCIPALITY OF Luxembourg was overrun in May 1940 as German troops moved through it to conquer Belgium. Two of its citizens had worked to save Jews, but neither had been active in Luxembourg itself. One, Abbé Mat, had carried out his acts of rescue in neighbouring Belgium; the other, Victor Bodson, in neutral Spain.47

  After describing the deportation of 674 Jews from Luxembourg between 1941 and 1943, the historian Ruth Zariz writes: ‘Luxembourg became judenrein (“cleansed of Jews”) except for a few Jews who had gone into hiding or were married to non-Jews. Once the deportations started, the chances of Jews being saved were poor. The country was small; it had a relatively large German population; the Luxembourgers were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and while there were few instances of open hostility or informing, neither were there many efforts to hide Jews or otherwise help them.’48

  Indifference, even betrayal, constitute many of the stories that emerge in every country; but in every country there are also many examples of risk and rescue; even tiny Luxembourg had Abbé Mat and Victor Bodson, albeit beyond its borders.

  Chapter 14

  Holland

  BY 1 JANUARY 2002, Dutch citizens had received the second largest number of Righteous Among the Nations awards given by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem: 4,464 in all, second only to Poles.1 This reflects the courage of many individual members of a small nation that was itself suffering the rigours of German rule. It was a nation which had a tradition of religious tolerance going back to the time when it rejected the Inquisition, and welcomed many thousands of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Wartime rescue efforts were also remarkable because Holland, ruled for almost five years by a Reich Commissar responsible directly to Berlin, contained a significant element in its social fabric sympathetic to the Nazi ideology. As a result, compared with Belgium’s nearly 50 per cent, less than 20 per cent of Holland’s Jews managed to find hiding places during the war, and many of these—including Anne Frank and her family—were betrayed. Of Holland’s hundred and forty thousand Jews when war broke out (including twenty thousand refugees from Germany and Austria), a hundred and seven thousand were deported to their deaths.

  The first test of Dutch reaction came on 22 and 23 February 1941, after Dutch fascists who attacked Jews in Amsterdam were met by a vigorous Jewish self-defence, during which one Dutch fascist was killed and a German policeman injured. In reprisal, the Germans seized 425 Jews, mostly youngsters, who were later deported to Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps, and murdered. In reaction to the arrests, what the Dutch Jewish historian Louis de Jong has called the ‘powder keg of indignation’ against German occupation and Dutch collaboration ‘was full to the brim’. The Dutch Communist Party called a general strike for February 25. The personnel of the Amsterdam municipal tramways, writes de Jong, ‘set a fine example and within a few hours the strike was more or less general. It continued for two days. When as a result of indiscriminate shooting nine Amsterdam citizens were killed and forty-five wounded, and when, moreover, the Germans threatened serious reprisals, the workmen returned to the wharves and factories and the shopkeepers reopened their doors.’

  De Jong goes on to ask: ‘Does the history of the Diaspora offer another example of a non-Jewish group protesting against the persecution of Jews living in their midst by carrying out a general strike? Without doubt, patriotic sentiments played an important part in the strike movement, but one would fail to appreciate the true importance of this magnificent manifestation if one did not find the strongest motives in human sympathy and in indignation caused by the brutal behaviour of Jew-hunters.’

  On 2 May 1942 the Germans ordered all Jews over the age of thirteen to wear a yellow star on their clothing. Louis de Jong notes that there were a few cases, ‘altogether perhaps several dozens throughout the country—of non-Jews expressing their protest by wearing the Jewish star; some of these were imprisoned, others were sent to the concentration camp of Amersfoort. It was much more general to sympathize with the Jews in ways which did not attract the attention of German or Dutch Nazis. The Jews had been branded.’2

  A turning point for the Jews of Holland came on 14 July 1942. That day a special issue of the Jewish weekly newspaper contained an ominous notice, based on information provided by the Gestapo: ‘Some 700 Jews have been arrested today in Amsterdam. Unless the 4,000 Jews who have been assigned to labour camps in Germany report this week for transportation, these 700 hostages will be sent to a concentration camp in Germany.’ The notice was signed by the two chairmen of the
Jewish Council of Amsterdam.

  A seventeen-year-old Dutch girl, Edith van Hessen (later Velmans), later wrote that it was this declaration that ‘galvanized’ her older brother Jules into action. ‘He had come to the conclusion that the only thing to do now was to “dive under”—i.e. to assume a new identity—before the dreaded summons arrived for him. He convinced Father and Mother that they should let me go too.’3 Edith van Hessen was fortunate that a Dutch couple, Tine and Egbert zur Kleinsmiede, ‘had been following the predicament of the Jews with mounting dismay. They lived in Breda, a provincial town in the south of the country, with their only child, Ineke, who was four years older than me.’ Tine zur Kleinsmiede, or ‘Mrs z K, as I called her, was in her mid-forties. She was a formidable, proud, attractive woman with prematurely white hair and a determined set of the jaw. Her husband was fourteen years older, big, bulky and jovial, a retired high-school headmaster. They seemed nice, serious and thoughtful people. I immediately felt at ease with them. It was decided that very evening. The z Ks would take me in.’4

  In Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s family had gone into hiding on 9 July 1942, when her sister Margot received a call-up notice. The Van Daan family, with whom the Franks shared their hiding place for three years, went into hiding with them five days later. Those who helped the Franks and the Van Daans included Miep Gies, who acted as a go-between with the outside world, providing the family with information and going on errands for them. When the family first arrived at their hiding place, it was Miep Gies who, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, ‘took us quickly upstairs and into the “Secret Annexe”. She closed the door behind us and we were alone.’5 Almost exactly a year later, Anne Frank wrote: ‘Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much. Almost every day she manages to get hold of some vegetables for us and brings everything in shopping bags on her bicycle.’6