The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Gerrit van der Putten knew a contact address where he could go; he pedalled there with the baby in the basket, parked his bike, and rang the bell. Joop Wortman opened the door. His work as a taxi driver made it possible for him eventually to pass the baby to a courier in The Hague. ‘Gerrit held the basket up for Joop to peek into, and Joop lifted the linen sheet so he could see the baby. It was the first time Gerrit could take a look for himself, and he was growing quite curious. Inside, they found the dark-haired baby, wrapped solely in a diaper and the little blanket provided by the hospital. He still had his identity bracelet on his arm. “Levie Kanes, 25-1-43”, read Gerrit aloud. “Name and date of birth.”’

  Commented Joop: ‘I guess we have a little baby boy with a Biblical name. Remember, Moses, in Exodus, was also saved in a similar basket.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  ‘You have done very well. I will take care of little Levie now, but thank you for thinking so sharply.’67

  SEVERAL DUTCH MEN and women, as well as a Gypsy family, helped save German-born Marion Kaufmann from deportation. She was not yet four years old when, in May 1940, her parents fled with her into Holland, hoping to escape the advancing German army. But on reaching the Dutch city of Arnhem they found the Germans already there. Marion’s mother went to see a Catholic priest, who put her in touch with a Dutch lawyer, Max Knapp, and his wife Ans, a doctor. She then placed her daughter with one of the leaders of the Dutch underground in Amsterdam, Boy Edgar, and his wife Mia.

  Marion Kaufmann stayed with the Edgars from October 1942. Every six weeks, Mia took Marion to a friend who bleached her hair. In March 1943, while en route to the friend’s house, the police stopped Mia and asked her why she had a Jewish child with her. They released Mia but arrested Marion, who was sent to the creche, where Jewish children were held before their deportation. With the help of the Dutch underground, and a co-operative German soldier, the Edgars smuggled Marion (to whom they gave the name Renie) out of the creche. Mia brought her to the train station, and Boy took her by train to a convent where she stayed for two weeks, until she was brought to a farm owned by Jan and Wilhelmina Beelen. The Beelens had three older boys, and two younger girls, Rie and Grada, who became Marion’s friends. She remained with the Beelens until liberation by the Canadians in September 1944. A few weeks later, however, the Germans reoccupied the area. The Beelens then arranged for Marion to be hidden with a Gypsy family until the area was liberated again that October. Following the second liberation, Marion remained with the Beelen family until December 1945, when she was reunited with her mother through the International Committee of the Red Cross.68

  LEENDERT OVERDUIJN IS known to have saved at least 461 Jews. He is one of those whom Mordecai Paldiel chose for an individual entry in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. A Dutch pastor, Overduijn headed a rescue organization of more than forty people in the town of Enschede, helping Jews to find hiding places throughout the region. ‘The division of labour was such’, writes Paldiel, ‘that Overduijn stayed at home most of the time while his daughter and other helpers travelled in different localities to seek suitable places of hiding. Nevertheless, Overduijn frequently visited Jews in hiding, bringing ration cards, cigarettes, and most important of all, news from friends and relatives. His comings and goings were noticed by the authorities, and he was eventually taken in for questioning and imprisoned for an extended period.’69

  Secret escape lines enabled Allied airmen who had been shot down over German-occupied Europe, or escapees from German prisoner-of-war camps, to reach neutral Switzerland or Spain. Jewish refugees were also the beneficiaries of these lines, one of which was run by a Dutch Seventh Day Adventist, John Weidner. He arranged for many Allied airmen as well as Jews to be moved from Holland to Switzerland. There they were safe for the rest of the war, although the airmen were unable to get back to Britain and fly in combat again.

  But the cost of this operation was high. An estimated 150 people assisted Weidner in operating the route of his 280-mile-long evading line. Forty of them were arrested by the Gestapo and killed, among them Weidner’s sister Gabrielle.70

  HENDRIK AND GREES Jager organized an escape route for Jewish children whose parents had been deported. The children, having been hidden by Dutch nurses in Amsterdam, where their hair was dyed blond, would be taken one by one by train to Zwolle, where Hendrick Jager, posing as their uncle, would greet them and take them to a safe haven in one of the many farms in Holland’s northern farm country. The Jagers also took a Jewish girl, Greet de Haas, into their own home, hiding her in the cellar whenever danger threatened.71

  THE 4,464 DUTCH men and women who are known to have helped Jews in Holland during the war years were remarkable in many ways, not least because they had to fight against the passivity of so many other Dutch citizens. Speaking to the Israeli parliament in 1995, Queen Beatrix noted that although some of her compatriots had offered brave resistance, ‘they were the exceptional ones’.72

  Chapter 15

  Italy and the Vatican

  ‘THROUGHOUT MY YEARS of confinement in various camps during the war years in Italy,’ wrote Polish-born Dr Salim Diamand, ‘I never found racism in the Italians. Of course there was militarism; but throughout the war years, I never found any Italians who approached me, as a Jew, with the idea of exterminating my race.’1 Before the German occupation of central and northern Italy in the autumn of 1943, Italian Jews, and the Jewish refugees who had made their way from the German-dominated areas of Europe to Italy since 1933, were safe from deportation. The Italian Fascist regime headed by Mussolini had introduced anti-Jewish legislation before the war, restricting the professions in which Jews could practise; but it did not seek their deaths, or co-operate with Germany, its Axis partner, in demonizing and segregating them.

  On 18 July 1942, in the northern Italian village of Nonantola, Don Arrigo Beccari, a priest at the local Roman Catholic seminary, witnessed the arrival of seventy-four Jewish children and their adult helpers. Forty-three were the children of German, Austrian and Polish Jews whose parents had already been deported and killed. Together with eighteen Jewish girls who had escaped from Austria to Slovenia, and another thirteen Yugoslav Jewish children, they had been taken by a Zagreb Jew, Josef Indig, from Croatia into the Italian-occupied region of Yugoslavia. From there they had crossed into Italy.2

  On seeing the children in his village, Father Beccari persuaded the local authorities to let them stay in a large, empty house, the Villa Emma. There they learnt to build their own furniture and worked the fields, in preparation for kibbutz life in Palestine, whither they had been on their way at the outbreak of war. They could only guess at their parents’ fate. Postcards that a few parents managed to send from their home towns in Poland simply said they had to ‘go away’.3

  On the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, Italy was Germany’s military ally. Italian soldiers fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front and were part of the occupation forces in Poland. There, to the fury of the Germans, Jews in both Lvov and Brody had acquired arms from Italian troops stationed in the town. To the distress of German occupation forces in the east, the Italians seemed to lack entirely any hatred of the Jews; for their part, Italians called anti-Semitism ‘the German disease’.

  On 13 December 1942 Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, wrote in his diary: ‘The Italians are extremely lax in the treatment of the Jews. They protect the Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and will not permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David. This shows once again that Fascism does not really dare to get down to fundamentals but is very superficial regarding problems of vital importance. The Jewish question is causing us a lot of trouble. Everywhere, even among our allies, the Jews have friends to help them.’4

  The Vatican also distressed the Nazi hierarchy. After Pope Pius XII’s Christmas message in 1942, the German bureau in Berlin responsible for the deportation of the Jews (the Reich Security Main Offi
ce) noted angrily: ‘In a manner never known before, the Pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order…Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.’5 At the beginning of 1943, the Germans urged the Italians to allow them to deport the Jews living in the Italian-occupied zone in France, but the Italians refused to ‘co-operate’, and on January 13 the senior SS representative in Italy, SS Lieutenant-Colonel Knochen, telegraphed to the Chief of the Gestapo, SS Lieutenant-General Heinrich Müller: ‘Although the number of Italian Jews (in France) is comparatively small, the privileges accorded to them have been a constant source of serious difficulty because it is impossible to understand why our Axis partner should refuse to align himself with us on the Jewish question.’6

  News of the Italian obduracy reached the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who wrote to the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, on 29 January 1943 to stress ‘the grave security problems’ which Italian resistance to the Final Solution was creating throughout the territories under Axis control. He wanted Italian Jews ‘and other foreign nationals of Jewish race to be removed from the Italian-occupied area in France’. The continued presence of the Jews in the Italian sphere of influence ‘provides many circles in France and in the rest of Europe with a pretext for playing down the Jewish question, it being argued that not even our Axis partner Italy sees eye to eye with us on the Jewish issue’.7

  On February 2, Knochen forwarded to Müller a secret report that described in detail how the Italians in the Alpes-Maritimes department had ‘prevented the enforcement of all anti-Jewish measures which have been ordered by the French Government’. On February 12, after a conversation with Eichmann in Paris, Knochen wrote again: ‘The best of harmony prevails between the Italian troops and the Jewish population. The German and Italian conceptions seem here to be completely at variance.’ If the anti-Jewish measures throughout France were to succeed, ‘they must also be applied in the Italian zone. Otherwise the influx of Jews into this zone—an influx which is only in its initial stage—will assume formidable dimensions, and the result will be mere half-measures.’

  From the SS perspective, worse was to come. On February 22, Knochen informed Müller that the Italian military authorities had compelled the police chief of Lyons to cancel an order for the arrest of several hundred Jews who were to have been sent to Auschwitz ‘for labour service’. Knochen was indignant, telling Müller: ‘The French who were notoriously reluctant to tackle the Jewish question had been confirmed in their resistance by the measures of the Italian authorities. Above all, it was utterly intolerable that the final solution of the Jewish question should be rendered more difficult by an ally who had proclaimed his adherence to the racial gospel.’

  Three days later, Ribbentrop raised the matter personally with Mussolini, urging him to check the ‘pro-Jewish zeal’ of his underlings in France. Ribbentrop was ‘well aware’, he told Mussolini, ‘that Italian military circles, and sometimes the German army itself lacked a proper understanding of the Jewish question. That was the only possible explanation of the order by the Italian High Command to annul the anti-Jewish measures that the French authorities had taken in the Italian zone at Germany’s request.’ Mussolini denied the accuracy of the information, ascribing it ‘to the desire of the French to sow discord between Germany and Italy’. Ribbentrop ended by stating that the Jews in the occupied territories were ‘more dangerous than English agents’.8

  On March 6, SS Lieutenant Heinz Röthke, in a letter to Eichmann, recapitulated all the unfulfilled Italian promises, adding that the Italian Fourth Army had even used force to free Jews arrested by the French police at Annecy. But even repeated German protests failed to persuade the Italian authorities in Italian-occupied France to hand over the Jews in their zone. On March 11, a senior Italian diplomat in Rome, Count Pietromarchi, noted that the Italian Embassy in Berlin had reported ‘macabre details of mass executions of Jews concentrated at the places of massacre from all the occupied territories’, and he added: ‘The only ones to be saved are the Jews who put themselves under our safeguard. Our military authorities, it may be admitted to their credit, maintained a firm opposition to the brutal measures of the Germans. In France they demanded the local authorities to cancel all the instructions against the Jews, such as the duty to wear “the Star of Solomon”, conscription for forced labour and the like. This is perhaps the only action earning us respect among the French. The same happens in Croatia and in Greece. The Germans manifest strong disappointment.’

  Ribbentrop had expressed that disappointment in a diplomatic note of protest, in which, Count Pietromarchi wrote, ‘are enumerated all the attitudes taken by our authorities in occupied countries on behalf of the Jews’, and in which Ribbentrop added that such behaviour on Italy’s part ‘encourages other governments to behave in the same way’.9

  Italy continued to refuse to follow the German lead: on May 24, Gestapo headquarters in Berlin received the copy of a letter written by the senior representative of the Italian High Command in Vichy, General Carlo Avarna di Gualtieri, in which the General had written: ‘The Italian High Command requests the French Government to annul the arrests and internments of the Jews whose place of residence is in the zone occupied by us.’

  As anti-Axis feeling in Italy grew, Italian resistance to the Final Solution also stiffened. On June 23, in a telegram to the Reich Security Main Office headquarters in Berlin, Knochen complained that Italian sabotage was ‘endangering the application of the measures against the Jews’. Four days later, Vatican Radio was reported to have broadcast a papal injunction: ‘He who makes a distinction between Jews and other men is unfaithful to God and is in conflict with God’s commands.’10

  On July 21, Heinz Röthke, in a memorandum to the Reich Security Main Office on ‘the present state of the Jewish question in France’, declared: ‘The Italian military authorities and the Italian police protect the Jews by every means in their power. The Italian zone of influence, particularly in the Côte d’Azur, has become the Promised Land for the Jews in France. In the last few months there has been a mass exodus of Jews from our occupation zone into the Italian zone.’ The escape of the Jews, Röthke noted, ‘is facilitated by the existence of thousands of flight-routes, the assistance given them by the French population and the sympathy of the authorities, false identity cards and also by the size of the area which makes it impossible to seal off the zones of influence hermetically.’ Röthke added that although about twenty reports on this subject had been sent to the Reich Security Main Office, there had so far been no sign of any change in the Italian attitude.11

  THE ITALIAN ZONE of Greece was also a place of sanctuary sought by Jews living in the German zones. In the first weeks of 1943, the Germans prepared for the deportation of Jews both from Salonika, home of fifty-six thousand Jews, and from Macedonia, including the capital, Skopje, where a further five thousand Jews lived. The Italian consulates in both Salonika and Skopje were already protecting those Jews who could claim Italian citizenship; now, as deportation became imminent, both consulates issued passports to Jews who were not Italian citizens. A senior SS official in Greece complained to Berlin on February 8 that ‘many Jews had become new Italian citizens’.

  The Italian consular officials were not deterred by German complaints. On March 6, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the German government’s deportation authority—the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin—protested directly to Rome, urging the Italian government to warn its consular officers in Greece and Macedonia to cease issuing new passports and to repudiate the validity of the passports they had already issued. Kaltenbrunner urged the Italian diplomatic service to stop taking any interest in Jews who held Italian citizenship, ‘since their deportation was inevitable’. Despite this pressure, the Italian consuls in Salonika and Skopje refused to allow the deportation of Jews holding Italian passports, whether or not they were in reality Italian citizens.12
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  The Italian Consul in Salonika, Emilio Neri, saved many Jews by physically transferring them from the German to the Italian zone of Greece. One of those rescued, Madame Malach, later recalled: ‘He put us in contact with Greek railway workers who, either for small amounts of money or just out of sympathy, would hide Jews in transport cars carrying potatoes or other goods to Athens.’ In the Italian zone, she adds, ‘all Jews were helped and even issued falsified documents without Semitic names.’

  Emilio Neri would frequently travel from Salonika to the border of the Italian zone, where he put Jewish refugees on military convoys and even dressed them in Italian military uniforms in order to transfer them to the Italian zone. Working closely with Neri was an Italian officer, Captain Lucillo Mersi, who would also make the journey to the border between the two zones. When the Jews of Salonika were taken to the Baron Hirsch camp as a prelude to deportation, a Jewish woman who managed to escape from the camp asked Captain Mersi to get out her two sons: ‘He got my sons out and eight others as well. He rescued all of those who had even very distant ties to some Italian family. To one Jewish woman, Buena Sarfati, he gave a passport under the name of Maria Tivoli and thus saved her from deportation.’

  Emilio Neri’s successor as Italian Consul in Salonika, Guelfo Zamboni, also did what he could to transfer Jews out of the city, which was under strict German rule, to the Italian-occupied zone, where they would be safe from deportation, and could even receive financial assistance from Italian government funds earmarked for refugees. As a result of a German protest, Zamboni was removed from his post; but his successor, Aldo Gastruccio, continued to try to save Jews from deportation. In an attempt to enlist the help of the Italian army in rounding up Jews for deportation, the German commander in Greece, General Alexander von Lehr, asked the senior Italian general in Salonika, General Carlo Gelozo, to provide soldiers, but Gelozo refused. When Lehr turned to another senior Italian officer in the city, General Tripiccione, he received the same answer.13