The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  On one occasion, Coward smuggled himself into Auschwitz ‘and spent the night in one of the death huts searching for a British Jew, a naval officer, reputed to be languishing in the Camp.’28

  On learning of Coward’s death in 1976, Donia Rosen, then head of the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, wrote to his family: ‘We will long remember and will pass on to our posterity the memory of Mr Coward’s heroic and selfless actions, which he rendered in service to his fellow man. Our sages were addressing themselves to men like Mr Coward when they thought: “He who saves one life, it is as if he had saved the entire world”.’29

  STARTING IN THE autumn of 1944, and in increasing numbers into the early months of 1945, more than a hundred thousand Jews were marched, in groups of up to a thousand, from their places of incarceration in several hundred concentration and slave labour camps in the East—including Auschwitz and Monowitz—to slave labour camps and concentration camps in Germany. The Nazi aim was to prevent these Jews being liberated by the advancing Soviet forces, and to be able to continue to exploit them as slave labourers. During these ‘death marches’ the German guards inflicted terrible acts of cruelty on the marchers, thousands of whom were shot dead as they walked, or, too weak to continue, were shot dead as they lay on the ground unable to rejoin the march. Some Jews managed to escape from these death marches. One of them, Jakub Lichterman, had been the last cantor at the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw. He had been deported to Majdanek in 1943 and to Birkenau in 1944. In his group of marchers, about twenty Jews evaded the guards and slipped away. ‘It was snowing,’ he later recalled. ‘We ate snow. Many people died. I saw a little light in a hut. I decided to knock. The others said, “It is dangerous, it might be a German’s hut.” But I thought, “Must I die here? Maybe they will give me something.”’

  Lichterman knocked on the door of the hut. ‘It was an Ethnic German. He gave me hot coffee in a bottle, and bread.’ Then, as Lichterman left the hut, two other escapees came up to him, desperate for a drink. ‘The bottle fell out of my hand. The coffee dropped in the snow. I went back. He had no more food. He gave me a box of matches and said, “There are lots of Germans around. If they catch you, they will kill you on the spot.”’ The Jews wandered off, each to a different part of the wood. Lichterman knocked on another door, another small hut. ‘Can you take me in?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Just one.’ Lichterman was taken in, hidden in a shack, and fed three times a day. Eight days later, with the arrival of Soviet troops, Lichterman was free.30

  To the Jews who survived to the final months of the war, even small acts of kindness that did not put the lives of the helpers at risk could serve as a means of living through until liberation. Ilana Turner recalls that, before leaving Stutthof concentration camp for Dresden, ‘I myself received from a Polish girl warm gloves and a large piece of bread.’ As the girl handed over these precious gifts she whispered: ‘I am so sorry that I cannot give you more.’31

  When a Hungarian military unit was passing through Bonyhad, it included 150 Jewish forced labourers. The historian of the Jews of Bonyhad, Leslie Blau, recalled how, seizing the opportunity, the principal of the local school, Sandor Rozsa, and one of his teachers, Gustav Tomka, ‘talked to the officers and advised them to let the Jews alone and try to escape. The overworked Jews were hidden at the school garret. A couple of days later the Red Army arrived and 150 Jewish lives were saved.’32

  In January 1945 more than six thousand Jewish women, and a thousand Jewish men, were driven towards Palmnicken, a small fishing village on the Baltic Sea. On the march itself eight hundred were shot. Once in Palmnicken, the survivors were put into a disused factory. The German official in charge of the factory, seeing their plight, allocated three potatoes to each of the marchers. One of them, Polish-born Celina Manielewicz, later recalled: ‘We heard that he was a humane man who had objected to us prisoners remaining in his town under inhumane conditions. A few hours later a rumour circulated that the Nazis had shot him.’

  A few days later, the Jews were ordered to line up in rows of five and were marched towards the sea, where German machine-gunners mowed them down. Hardly anyone survived. Three women who did, among them Celina Manielewicz, managed to make their way inland, where they found refuge with a German farmer called Voss. Later, however, Voss tried to turn them over to the Germans. Before he could do so, they were given shelter by two other villagers, Albert Harder and his wife, who fed and clothed them, and pretended they were three Polish girls. One day three German officers asked Frau Harder for permission to take the three girls on an outing. It would have aroused too many suspicions for the girls to refuse. On his way back from the outing with Celina Manielewicz, one of the officers told her, thinking her a local Polish girl, that ‘Two hundred Jews had survived the night massacre, but had been handed over to the Gestapo by the population of the surrounding villages among whom they had sought asylum. They had all been killed.’33

  Celina Manielewicz and her two friends, at least, were safe; Albert Harder and his wife continued to give them shelter until the Russians arrived. But of the more than seven thousand marched to the seashore, only ten had survived.

  Thousands of other concentration camp prisoners were being transported into Germany by rail, in open goods wagons exposed to the ravages of winter. Ben Edelman managed to escape from his train. He owed his survival to a German farmer. As he recalled, ‘I crawled the last half mile to the farmhouse; I was unable to walk any farther. When I reached the gate, a dog came running toward me and sniffed the blood from my wound. The farmer, who had been roused by the dog’s barking, came to the gate and looked down at me. I figured I had nothing to lose by asking him to help me, for without medical attention I would surely die. I saw the farmer go through the motions of blessing himself and I thought, “Thank you, God, for people in this part of the world who still believe in you.” The farmer looked around quickly and then opened the gate and pulled me in. He picked me up, carried me to the barn, and put me on the hay. “I’ll be right back,” he said.’

  The farmer walked away, ‘and I watched him disappear through the barn door. He was gone only about five minutes, but during the time I was alone a small sliver of apprehension and suspicion began to creep into my mind. I began to visualize his coming back with an SS man and, pointing his finger at me, saying: “There he is! I found him here when I came in to get my shovel. I just want you to know I had nothing to do with it.” I said to myself, “What am I doing here letting a German take care of me? A Gentile would have been bad enough, but a German?” Through my wartime childhood years I had developed an emotional and psychological barrier that kept me apart from the Gentile world, a world which I feared and mistrusted as a result of my experiences. Up until now, with a couple of exceptions, my knowledge of the Aryans was linked with fear, distrust, hate, and ultimately the Holocaust.’

  Ben Edelman continued: ‘I was now restless and terrified and even made an attempt to leave, but as I crawled halfway to the door it opened from the outside and in walked the farmer holding a large piece of white bread in one hand and a cup of warm milk in the other. He asked me if I was Jewish, to which I nodded, believing now that he did not intend to harm me. He said I was welcome to stay, but only long enough to rest. He washed my wound and told me I had to leave in a couple of hours because SS men were checking all the farmhouses for escaped concentration camp prisoners.’34

  On the morning of 26 January 1945 a group of ten British prisoners of war, held at night behind bars at prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 20B, near Marienburg, were at work on a German farm twenty-six miles from Danzig. Three hundred Jewish women on a death march from Stutthof concentration camp were brought to a halt near them, repeatedly beaten and brutalized by their guards. Among them was Sara Matuson, who managed to break away from the march and run into a barn, where she hid in the animals’ feeding trough. ‘Quite a bit of time passed,’ she later recalled, ‘and a man came in and I asked if he was Polish…he said he was British.’ Later she r
ecalled his exact words: ‘Don’t move, I’m English—don’t be afraid,’ and she added: ‘English! I knew I was saved!’ That soldier, Stan Wells, was also a captive of the Third Reich. ‘He went into the farm house and brought me bread.’35

  Bill Fisher, the diarist among the men, recorded the sequel: ‘Stan comes to me after dinner and tells me a Jewess has got away and he has her hiding in the cow’s crib. I suggest moving her to loft over camp. Plenty straw and the chimney from our fire will keep her warm. I arrange to take her to the camp. Wait till nearly dusk and go to Stan’s farm, he hands over girl. I tell her to walk five paces near, on the other side of the road, and speak to no one. She is crippled, too frightened to understand me, grabs my arm. I am a bit windy as the Gerries will stop us as it is a definite “crime” for prisoner to speak or walk with women…No trouble at all!…Hot water, soap, towel, old clothes, slacks, food, rushed up to her…Take all clothing off kid, give her paraffin for lice in her hair and bid her goodbye. She grabs my hand and kisses it—and tries to thank me, calls me hero—I say roughly, Drop it, we are comrades, only doing what we can. Had no chance for a good look at her, judge her to be twenty-five years of age.

  ‘Everyone brings in food for our escapee! Hundred weight peas, ducks, hens, best part of a pig. Bread by loaves—and believe me she’s ate three loaves today and five bowls of soup—somewhere around twenty-two pounds of food. She’s ill now—sick diarrhoea. Suggest only milk for a few days…

  ‘We had a good look at her. Her eyes are large as is usual with starvation, sunken cheeks, no breasts. Hair has not been cut, body badly marked with sores caused by scratching lice bites. Head still a bit matted and lice still obviously in. I got my forefinger and thumb around the upper part of her arm easily…Feet blue and raw with frostbite, the right heel is eaten away from frost and constant rubbing of badly fitting clog.’

  Sara Matuson recalled Bill Fisher’s arrival: ‘He brought me a full length coat and put it on top of my clothes and walked with me through the town. Luckily we weren’t stopped—the guards must have thought I looked like a prisoner of war. He took me to the barn and put me upstairs and made a hole in the straw. The straw was for the horses. A couple of the men came that night—one of them a medic—and they brought stuff for my feet which had frostbite, they brought me paraffin for the lice and food, I mustn’t forget the food. I was so hungry and they will tell you how much I ate. They bathed me. All I had was a dress with a very big red Jewish star on the back of it, a thin coat and a blanket. I was very sick—I had diarrhoea. I was with them for three weeks and they nursed me back to health—every day I was visited with food. I only met one who would come up with food—he was Alan Edwards. After about a week the fellows decided I was to visit them. He got a sweater and coat to cover the dress shoes and stockings. I still had flannel underpants from the camp they must have washed them for me. They pushed me through a window and I met them. We all spoke German. They then pushed me back up in to the straw. They overheard that the horses were being moved away and that the straw—my home—was going. They said they would think of something—build a double wall or something but that they would save me. They were all in this together. Alan came one evening and said they were moving that night.’ A Pole would look after her, she was told, but ‘The fellow never showed up. The men who saved my life were moved on—it was nearly the end of the war.’36

  The death march from which Sara had been rescued had started two weeks earlier with twelve hundred prisoners; by the time they reached the farm where the British prisoners of war were working, only three hundred were still alive. One of Sara Matuson’s rescuers, Tommy Noble, a Scot, later recalled that the men would steal food and clothes from civilian Germans passing by; they had a fire in their camp, and could therefore cook. ‘She gained her strength while in hiding.’ Asked why they had risked their lives to hide her, he said: ‘Why not? She was only a young girl. She was a very nice wee thing, she’d been treated badly, like us—they were cruel pigs.’ Another of the men, George Hammond, recalled how, over the weeks, she became like ‘a little sister’.37

  After ten weeks the British prisoners of war were ordered westward. Sara Matuson stayed in the barn on her own until liberation. After the war, in a letter to Yad Vashem seeking recognition for the ten men, she wrote: ‘If one of the ten had been against hiding me, I would not be alive today. This was truly a unanimous decision. It is not who of the prisoners of war brought me food, or tended my frostbite, or who applied paraffin to my hair, or bathed me or who nursed me back to health. All of them were involved. All had to agree; all took equal responsibility and equal risk. Had I been discovered all of us would have been shot. They had all decided, despite the danger, that they would save from the Germans that poor Jewish girl who chanced into their lives.

  ‘In the morning when the men were led to work they would bring me food under the guise of hanging laundry in the barn. They had sawn through the bars of their own prison and in the evening sneaked up to the loft to bring me food. The police station was right outside and the danger was fearful.’ Had Sara been discovered, ‘I would certainly have been shot together with the ten prisoners of war, all of whom had families and homes in England. I had nobody, and no one would have known had I been killed. I would just have been another one of the Six Million, but they had much more to risk and it was close to going home. They could touch freedom.’38

  Three Jewish slave labourers who escaped from a death march near Dresden were hidden by a German husband and wife, Kurt and Hertha Fuchs. The three were Polish Jews: Roman Halter, Josef Szwajcer and Abraham Sztajer. Soon after liberation, Halter left the farm, returning a few weeks later with some gifts. ‘When I arrived,’ he recalled, ‘I found Mrs Fuchs all in black. Her face had aged by years in those few weeks since my departure from them. She screamed when she saw me and refused to speak. Her neighbour told me that a few days after I had left, the Nazis in the village had found out that the Fuchses had sheltered Jews in their home. They then went to the house and took out Mr Fuchs, Szwajcer and Sztajer. Mr Fuchs and Szwajcer were shot. Sztajer managed to talk himself out of it. Mrs Fuchs dragged her husband’s body back to the garden and buried him under a walnut tree.’39

  Forty years later, remembering that terrible day of execution, Hertha Fuchs told Roman Halter: ‘When I heard the shots, I knew that my lovely Kurt was dying. So I ran out into the field and took his head on my lap. He tried to speak, to say something to me. Szwajcer lay dead. Those who murdered my husband and Szwajcer were just walking away. One of them said, “We can get her now, too,” but they just walked away.’40

  Rescue and murder—the two opposite impulses—continued to exist side by side to the very last days of the war: by far the rarer, rescue was the noble face of those tragic years.

  Afterword

  WHAT WERE THE motives of those who tried to save Jews from deportation and death? This question is raised with every account of rescue, as the reader, like the historian, wonders whether he, or she, would have behaved in such a courageous manner. First and foremost, the Righteous of this book chose to act; theirs was a deliberate decision to behave in a civilized, humane manner, rather than to do nothing, or to refuse to be involved, or to take the route of barbarism.

  In the circumstances of a combination of Nazi rule, SS power and Gestapo terror, inaction motivated by fear cannot be belittled. Those who turned against the tide of terror were all the more remarkable. ‘We did what we had to do’ ‘Anyone would have done the same’—the words of many rescuers—mask the courageousness of the course they chose, knowing it to be full of danger, often the danger of execution of their families as well as themselves. Yet these were not foolhardy, rash or intemperate people; most of them made their choice calmly, deliberately and with full realization of the risks—risks that they faced, and took, for months and even years.

  Those who put their lives in jeopardy to save Jews were often people who had known those Jews before the war. Some had been close personal friend
s and neighbours, others had been business partners or business acquaintances, others were teachers or fellow pupils. Some rescuers were women who had worked in a Jewish household, or been nannies to Jewish children. Pre-war friendship and acquaintance played a significant part in many acts of rescue; but equally, many rescuers had never before seen the person, or the family, to whom they gave life-guarding shelter.

  Mordecai Paldiel, head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem since 1982, has supervised the preparation of more than fourteen thousand sets of documentation about those who risked their lives to save Jews. His work brings him in contact every day with stories of incredible courage. ‘Goodness leaves us gasping,’ he has written, ‘for we refuse to recognize it as a natural human attribute. So off we go on a long search for some hidden motivation, some extraordinary explanation, for such peculiar behaviour. Evil is, by contrast, less painfully assimilated. There is no comparable search for the reasons for its constant manifestation (although in earlier centuries theologians pondered this issue).’

  Contrasting good and evil, Paldiel notes: ‘We have come to terms with evil. Television, movies and the printed word have made evil, aggression and egotism household terms and unconsciously acceptable to the extent of making us immune to displays of evil. There is a danger that the evil of the Holocaust will be absorbed in a similar manner; that is, explained away as further confirmation of man’s inherent disposition to wrongdoing. It confirms our visceral feeling that man is an irredeemable beast, who needs to be constrained for his own good. In searching for an explanation of the motivations of the Righteous among the Nations, are we not really saying: what was wrong with them? Are we not, in a deeper sense, implying that behaviour was something other than normal?’