On the following day, the slave labourers were sent elsewhere to work and did not return to that neighbourhood. ‘I never learned the names of these good people nor their address, but for the rest of the winter I blessed them, while my frozen feet recovered thanks to their kindness and humanity. These were righteous gentiles.’11
Anna Ostrowiak and her sister worked in a slave labour camp at the German airport in Deblin. Their supervisors were two German soldiers, Lieutenant Schläde and Sergeant Schmidt. ‘Both were decent men,’ Anna Ostrowiak recalled: ‘Schmidt never raised his voice to us. Every day at the assembly point prior to job assignments, instead of calling us he sang to us: “Come over, come over, come over to Schmidt.” Schläde appeared only from time to time: ‘His huge open face was always smiling.’
The girls worked mainly outdoors, sweeping the area outside the hangars, washing military vehicles, digging ditches for storing potatoes for the winter and performing other manual tasks. When winter came, their work became much harder. ‘Schläde gave us permission to eat our meager lunch soup inside the hangars, at noon. When the weather was extremely cold, he even let us clean the premises inside the heated hangars. We knew where the potato bunkers were, so soon one of us used to sneak out to steal some of the potatoes. But how could we eat raw potatoes? So we devised a plan. We will smuggle the potatoes into the camp and the people who worked at the Kohlenstelle will smuggle in some pieces of coal. We will cook them very primitively outside the barracks after work and share the loot. It was a risky undertaking because once in a while we were searched and several other inmates were publicly hanged for stealing. But hunger overrode that concern.’
Lieutenant Schläde found out what the women were doing, but far from punishing them, he took an astounding step: ‘One day at noon he came over to us with two soldiers carrying a small, primitive stove, some coal and pipes. He took us to the second floor of the hangars into an empty room and asked the soldiers to install the stove. When the soldiers left, he gave us some matches and with a wink in his eye gave us an order: “Lunch-time Potato Stealing”, then added softly: “I have a wife and two nice children, but the damned war.” Then he was gone.’
In July 1944, as Soviet forces began to advance deep into German-occupied Poland, the slave labour camp at Deblin was evacuated to Czestochowa. That Christmas, Anna Ostrowiak and her fellow slave labourers were surprised to find a Christmas cake in a paper bag, left on a bench. A German soldier, who knew it was there, did nothing. ‘Back to work we went,’ Anna Ostrowiak later recalled, ‘constantly debating the risk of consuming the delicacy. The soldier still was yelling his lungs out until darkness fell and the landing strip was cleared of snow and ice. Totally exhausted and hungry we returned to the shack to dispose of the tools. The cake was still there. “Out, out,” the soldier commanded, loudly. Then, suddenly, he walked out and left us all alone. We stood speechless when one of the girls broke the silence. “Listen, all of you,” she said. “There is something phony about this guy. First of all, he yelled at us too much and too loud, and now he walks out and leaves us unguarded? I don’t care what you do, but I am going to take a piece of that cake and eat it right now. I am not afraid of him.” Like hungry animals we all fell in line and within a minute the cake was gone. Cleaning up every little crumb we found a small note at the bottom of the pan. It said “Glory To The Highest, Peace On Earth.” Silently the soldier escorted us back to the barracks, his gun still drawn, his heavy boots still loudly hitting the ground.’12
Within three weeks of this act of kindness, Anna Ostrowiak’s brother, who was also working in the ammunition factory, came to her in desperation. His identity number had been taken away. Within hours he would be deported to his death. ‘Our group supervisor’, Anna Ostrowiak recalled, ‘was an SS woman whom we called “Hexa No. 2” (Witch No. 2) because there was another Hexa much more brutal than ours was. Grief stricken with my brother’s news, all I could do was cry with him. For a moment, my mind went blank.’
Anna Ostrowiak was jolted back to reality when she saw ‘our “Hexa” leaning over me. With a soft voice I never thought she had, she asked me why we are crying. I answered that my younger brother was dismissed from his job, his tag was taken away and tomorrow he is going to go away—I don’t know where. I also told her that destiny had kept us together for the last three years and perhaps I can go with him. “He is not going away from you,” she told me with a decisive voice; then, turning to him, she asked him where he was working. When he told her where his place of work was, she turned to me again, and with her familiar harsh voice ordered me to start working again. Then she disappeared.
‘Within several minutes she was back with three identity tags. My brother was still beside me when she handed him the tags and ordered him to return to work. As my brother, in bewilderment, walked away, she leaned to me again and whispered softly: “I have a young son who looks very much like your brother, in fact he has the same colour blue eyes as your brother has.” I wanted to say something, but in a minute she was gone to the other end of our workplace.’
Four days later the camp was liberated.13
IN DACHAU, Dr Moses Brauns, a survivor of the Kovno ghetto and an expert on typhus—which he had helped to eliminate in the ghetto—was asked by the Germans to write a report on the deaths at Dachau. He did so, stating correctly that the cause of death of the inmates whom he had examined was starvation. Dr Brauns’s son Jack, who was with his father in Dachau, recalled the sequel. ‘This report had to go to Dachau main camp on a weekly basis where the top German physician in charge of all Dachau Camp had to review it. The specific day when the report arrived, the man who was the chief physician and was known to be an alcoholic was not in Dachau and the report proceeded on to Berlin. It was a big surprise in Berlin that the death certificate stated that the inmates in Dachau had died from starvation. This was not accepted by Berlin, which insisted that the rations were all calculated and provided for survival, not for death.’
A committee was sent from Berlin to investigate how a prisoner or inmate could die from starvation. What they did not know, and probably did not want to know, was that more than half the food assigned to the camp was being taken by the SS and sold on the black market. When the committee left and the German physician returned to Dachau, he was, Jack Brauns recalled, ‘obsessed with the intent to kill the man who had written the report, my father’. The physician did not know Dr Brauns; but to protect the doctor, an SS man in his fifties, Private Helmanowitsch, took Dr Brauns out of the camp and to his own home. ‘He felt that it would be safer for my father to be there until the storm calmed down.’14 A few days later, when the physician’s anger had abated, Dr Brauns returned to the camp. An SS man had saved his life.
Before the war, Helmanowitsch, a German from Memel, living in Kaunas, had brought his wife to be treated by Dr Brauns for typhus. Under his care, she recovered. To check on her recovery, Dr Brauns would visit her in her home. Jack Brauns recalled: ‘I accompanied him on these visits. I remember Mr Helmanowitsch as very soft spoken and very respectful to my father.’15
In 1939, Helmanowitsch had been among several thousand German-speakers expelled from Lithuania by the Lithuanian government, in reaction to the German occupation of Memel. Driven from his home and dumped across the German border, he had joined the SS.
At Dachau’s Camp Four, in nearby Kaufering, another survivor of the Kovno ghetto, Zev Birger, was working as a slave labourer, under daily threat of death. One day an electrician was required. Without hesitation he volunteered. ‘I could not imagine that work in another place could be any worse,’ he recalled, ‘which was why I had volunteered so quickly. The worst scenario was that the Germans would soon discover I was not an electrician, and would finish me off—but that was going to happen soon anyway, I figured. An electrical engineer from AEG needed an assistant, and I was assigned to work with him. Naturally he noticed after just the first day that I had never studied this profession, but he said to me: “You are c
ertainly no electrician, but you learn quickly, I still want to keep you on and see if you can really work.” In this way he actually gave me a chance to live. This man still had human emotions and did not just obey orders. He had sympathy for me. My previous work in the ghetto, in the locksmith’s workshop, had prepared me technically for this task. I worked well and was a great help to him. He was always very satisfied with my work and therefore treated me compassionately.’16
IN FEBRUARY 1943 the Russian Orthodox nun Mother Maria (Elizabeth Skobtsova), who had helped save many Jews in Paris, was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück. Even there, as Elisabeth Maxwell has recorded, ‘she continued her rescue activities until her death. For nearly two years, she lived in a vermin-infested cell block with 2,500 other women, most of them Jewish. Because she was a Gentile and thus of privileged status, she survived for quite a long time, witnessing daily the dying moments of her Jewish cell-mates who were dragged to their deaths before her eyes. She helped as she could, sharing food and giving moral support when she was powerless to offer any more substantial help.’ As she lay dying, ‘her last act was to slip her Gentile identity card to a Jewish woman in the hope of saving her life.’17
By the end of April 1945, while German troops were still fighting throughout northern Europe, most members of the SS were doing their best to slip into anonymity. On April 28—the day before Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, with Soviet troops surrounding the German capital—the Swedish Red Cross negotiated the release of three thousand five hundred Jewish women being held in the harshest of conditions in Ravensbrück concentration camp, north of Berlin. To ensure that the agreement was not a trap, ten were taken by bus to Sweden on April 28; the rest followed within a few days. On their way through Germany, five of the women were killed in an Allied air raid. The others reached Sweden safely, but twenty-six of them were too weak to survive, despite being given the very best of medical attention when they reached their host country.18
The Swedish Red Cross also arranged for a group of French Jewish women in Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, to be allowed to leave Mauthausen for Switzerland. The first group left on April 9, crossing the Austrian–Swiss border at Kreuzlingen. A second group reached Switzerland on April 25, when they were taken to hospital in St Gallen.19
VERY FEW JEWS interned in the camps escaped; but some of those who did found help outside. Following the revolt of Jewish slave labourers on 2 August 1943 at Treblinka, where they were being forced to dig up and then burn the bodies of tens of thousands of Jewish deportees from Warsaw and central Poland, most of the Jews who managed to get beyond the perimeter of the camp were hunted down by German and Ukrainian units, and killed. Others, on reaching the banks of the River Bug, were helped by a Pole, Stanislaw Siwek.20 After a revolt of Jewish slave labourers at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, on 29 September 1943, two of those who got away were hidden by two Ukrainian sisters, Natalya and Antonina Petrenko, underneath their house.21 And after escaping on 24 December 1943 during a mass breakout from the camp at Borki, where Jewish slave labourers were likewise being forced to dispose of the bodies of thousands of Jewish victims of earlier massacres, Josef Reznik was helped in hiding by a Polish priest.22
Henry Wilde was among the Jewish prisoners in a Waffen-SS labour camp at Semovice, in Czechoslovakia, where he worked loading and unloading artillery shells. These were kept in former farmhouses and barns, and a Waffen-SS non-commissioned officer, Wilhelm Bergmann, from Munich, was in charge of the place where Wilde worked. ‘He treated me and two others detailed there like normal labour, provided from his allotment (mostly bread and margarine but also occasional apples) for us, and often came by himself to talk about his family and general matters,’ Wilde later recalled. ‘I felt that he was not happy with the war and his own position in it (he had been in a tank unit, was wounded on the Eastern Front and had the Iron Cross First Class on his chest). One day, towards the end of the war (winter of 44/45), he took me aside and told me in confidence that things looked bleak for all of us. The camp was to be taken over by SD people (the really bad SS security service) and there would very likely be an order to shoot all inmates if the Russians came nearer.’
Wilde added that Bergmann ‘just about suggested that I make a run for it if possible. I actually did this a few days later, but not from the work site so as not to endanger him. I think he took a great risk and I never learned if I was the only one he warned. I actually got away and was free for several weeks, hiding at an old German country doctor’s home near Chemnitz (a World War One army friend of my father) who also took a grave risk. I was arrested there and ended up in Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war. I later learned that Dr Laurentius (my father’s friend) was never arrested and that he survived the war and continued practicing at Oberlungwitz for a number of years before his death. He was a righteous man and so was his family which included several teenagers, all mandatory members of the Hitler Jugend but still able to keep a closed mouth.’23
At Auschwitz, Maryla Chodnikewicz, a Polish partisan who had been caught by the Germans, brought two Jewish girls into the kitchens where she worked. There they were able to survive as Polish prisoners, with less cruelty and more food. They were also able to steal hot water for some of their friends who were literally freezing in the Jewish section of the camp.24 Recalling her own incarceration in Auschwitz, Hungarian-born Isabella Leitner wrote of ‘the gentile woman from Budapest, she of noble birth, who was sent to Auschwitz because she had committed an unpardonable crime—she had helped her Jewish friends. I no longer remember her name, only her aristocratic face, drawn and hungry…She died in the ovens later, but now she was with us, and we loved her, and she loved us. There had not been any need for intellectual utterances for a long while now. Only the language of survival was of import here. Yet with her, on occasion, we actually talked of books. Strange must be the ways of the hungry, for even while the body is starving the mind may crave nourishment too.’25
Body and mind were both nourished by one of the block leaders in Auschwitz. His name was Franz, and an eyewitness of his actions was Rudolf Vrba, who later escaped from Auschwitz and helped bring details of its gas chambers and slaughter to the West. Vrba later recalled how, as Franz shouted at his work detail, ‘he swung at us with his club. To the passing SS men he looked and sounded a splendid kapo, heartless, brutal, efficient; yet never once did he hit us. In fact all the time I knew him, I never saw him strike a prisoner and that in Auschwitz was quite a record. I learned the reasons for his humanity later. In the first place he was a civilized, honourable man. Secondly he had suffered under the Nazis much longer than we had and hated them much more deeply.’
Vrba learned that Franz’s battle against the Nazis ‘had begun when he tried to reach Spain at the age of seventeen to fight against Franco. He never got further than the Austrian frontier, however, and when the Nazis took over his country, they sent him to Dachau concentration camp. After that came a succession of concentration camps; and when war broke out he became a kapo because experienced, hardened prisoners were needed to teach manners to the naïve newcomers who were being driven behind barbed wire in hundreds of thousands all over Europe.’
On one occasion, Franz and Vrba saw a group of starving Slovak girls who were scavenging empty food tins from the rubbish bins, ‘and scraping them clean with their fingers’. Franz said to Vrba: ‘Rudi, we must do something for those girls,’ and proceeded to steal a box of marmalade from the camp store. After that he was known to those in his barrack as ‘Franz Marmalade’, a name that still attached to him after the war, where he ran a hotel in Vienna.26
Helena Toth was the daughter of a Hungarian baron. Shortly before the Second World War she had married a Yugoslav Jew, Benjamin Elias. He was among many hundreds of Jews seized and deported in 1944 to the Baja concentration camp, inside Hungary. Helena Elias made her way to the camp, where she was received by the commanding officer and managed to convince him, without revealing that Benj
amin Elias was her husband, that he was a Jew who always helped Christians. On that ground, she requested his release. It took her two and a half months of sustained effort to persuade the camp officials to release her husband and six other Jews. The very day of their release, the other Jewish captives in Baja were sent to Auschwitz. The seven who survived did so as a result of Helena Elias’s persistence and persuasiveness, and her willingness to put her own life at risk.27
A NAME CAN be deceptive: Charles Coward was far from a coward. A British soldier in the battle for France, in 1940 he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped from captivity several times, but, like so many escapees, was caught, and finally sent as a punishment to a prisoner-of-war camp attached to Auschwitz III, the slave labour camp at Buna-Monowitz, only a few miles from the gas chambers, where Jews, foreign workers and Allied prisoners of war worked in the construction of the largest synthetic oil plant in German-occupied Europe. At any one time, as many as ten thousand Jews toiled there. Two of them, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, later wrote about the cruel suffering endured in that place.
Norbert Wollheim, a Jewish prisoner at Monowitz, testified at the Nuremberg Trials immediately after the war that at least four hundred Jews had been able to get away from the Jewish slave labour camp at Monowitz because Charles Coward had had an ingenious idea: he would collect precious chocolate from his fellow British prisoners of war and exchange it with one of the Monowitz guards—an SS sergeant-major who was open to bribery—for dead bodies, whose identities he then gave to Jews, a few each night, as they were marched back to their barracks from the I. G. Farben factories. These ‘substituted’ Jews were then given civilian clothing and smuggled out of the camp altogether.
The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust Page 43