My study of Varian Fry and his colleagues, such as Charles Fawcett, showed me that rescuers’ motives were not as simple as they sometimes claimed. Although they sometimes gave a single reason for their actions, in fact the background to their actions was far more complex. It also crystallised a simple and obvious truth which may become dwarfed in the statistics of the victims of the Holocaust – one person can make a difference.
Conversely, it also underlined the tragedy of the Holocaust. If more bystanders had become rescuers, then the millions of victims would actually have survived and flourished. Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jews and at the end of Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List, the descendants of these survivors appeared – they numbered around 6,000. I am no mathematician, but on the same basis, if the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis had survived they would now have 32 million descendants.
Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum and Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust,8 has now recognised 23,226 non-Jews as Righteous Among the Nations9 (see Table 2). It should be noted here that not only Righteous Gentiles helped Jews in the war. Belated recognition is now being given to Jews who helped Jews, but many others fought different battles. The Righteous scheme was devised specifically to recognise non-Jewish rescuers, and very strict criteria have to be met. It cannot reward other forms of courage, as in the controversy over Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who Yad Vashem acknowledges as ‘a martyr in the struggle against Nazism’ but has not yet been proved to have ‘specifically helped Jews’.10
On 2 February 1996 Varian Fry was named as the first American ‘Righteous Among Nations’ by Yad Vashem. The American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, acknowledging the posthumous honour nearly thirty years after Varian’s death in 1967, said: ‘We owe Varian Fry our deepest gratitude, but we also owe him a promise – a promise never to forget the horrors that he struggled against so heroically, a promise to do whatever is necessary to ensure that such horrors never happen again.’11
Walter Meyerhof, who with his parents escaped from France over the Pyrenees with Varian’s help, established the Varian Fry Foundation in 1997. Its purpose is to teach schoolchildren the lessons outlined by Warren Christopher and, as Walter explained to me, to demonstrate that ‘one person can make a difference’.12 Walter’s father, Otto Meyerhof, shared the 1922 Nobel Prize for Medicine with A.V. Hill, who was later to become Secretary of the Royal Society 1935–45. In 1933 Hill became involved in the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), which helped scholars and scientists from abroad escape the Nazis.
Many rescuers seem surprised that what they did was of interest to anybody else. Modest expressions such as ‘what they did was normal or anyone would have done the same’ are quite common; loyalty to old friends or good employers are frequent reasons, as is opposition to the Nazis’ policies, if not necessarily being the result of wanting to save Jews. Others saw such rescue as an integral part of being in the Resistance or the logical result of their parents’ upbringing. Many books have examined the background of rescuers and tried to find patterns of behaviour based on class, education or other similar sociological reasons. Perry London was one of the first to study this topic in the 1960s. He noted three main characteristics of rescuers. He specified a spirit of adventure, a sense of being socially marginal and intense identification with a parent of strong moral character. Such categorisation is unsatisfactory because for every rescuer who falls into the neat boundaries of his category, another one pops up who defies them. The most common reasons noted are religious beliefs or perceiving that it was one’s duty to help another who was in trouble. Other reasons are the sanctity of life, obeying one’s conscience or shame at not helping a neighbour.
By examining the motivation of several rescuers who may not previously have been written about, it is possible to establish why some bystanders to the Holocaust became rescuers and why so many remained bystanders. An understanding of what influenced their behaviour has relevance today, when the need to support each other in society still exists even if the circumstances are, thankfully, quite different. Naturally, I am aware that whilst the Jews were numerically by far the major target of the Nazis’ racial policies, many other groups were targeted for persecution and murder. My concentration on the Jewish Holocaust is not intended to diminish or ignore their suffering.
I was determined from the start to write about rescuers and the rescued whose experiences were not particularly in the public domain. As a single parent living in Sheffield, I therefore needed to find a way of making contact with people who had not necessarily been approached before. In August 2000 I targeted journals and magazines which would be read by people likely to have personal experiences of the Holocaust, or who might know of others with a story to record, and asked them to publish details of my research. These were:
Common Ground – the Journal of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ)
Jewish Telegraph – a regional Jewish newspaper published in Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester.
Menorah – a magazine for Jewish members of HM forces and small Jewish communities.
Information – The Magazine of the Association of Jewish Refugees.
I also attended two major events where I arranged for each delegate to receive a copy of my project details in their conference pack. These were the Oxford Holocaust Conference Remembering for the Future, held in July 2000, and the European Council of Jewish Communities Presidents’ Conference, held in Barcelona in May 2000. One of the Italian delegates at the latter conference wrote an article for Shalom, the journal of the Rome Jewish Community.
Additionally, contact was made with the South African Jewish community through my friend Brenda Zinober, and all the members of the Leeds-based Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association (HSFA) were also circularised.
In 2002 the London Jewish Cultural Centre held an exhibition called ‘Visas for Life’ about diplomats who between them saved about 250,000 Jews from the Nazis. The opening event gave me an opportunity to meet John Paul Abranches, son of de Sousa Mendes,13 who lived in California, and Agnes Hirschi, stepdaughter of Carl Lutz,14 who lives in Switzerland, with whom I had been corresponding for some time.
Other rescue stories were accumulated through the press, in particular The Jewish Chronicle and obituaries in The Times. Some have been purely as a result of social conversations and sheer coincidence. I attend a lot of meetings and when, in response to enquiries about what I do, I tell people about my research, quite often they can name someone I should contact. There has certainly been a snowball effect over the last few years. I was surprised at being criticised for stating that these stories were collected at random – I find this odd. Collecting stories about Holocaust rescuers cannot be done in the same way as researching the consumption of fish fingers. Extraordinary stories turn up in the most unlikely ways.
In July 2004 I was in Brussels for a meeting at the EU and wondered if someone bilingual would speak to Robert Maistriau,15 a rescuer who only spoke French, for me. One of the EU secretaries consented and subsequently in conversation told the driver assigned to us what she had agreed to do for me. He quite spontaneously told her that his mother, Gisele Reich, had been saved from deportation to Auschwitz at the age of 5 in 1941 because the Nazi officer at the transit camp at Malines (Mechelen) felt sorry for her – she was a sickly child who suffered from a lung disease. The driver had never mentioned this to anyone outside his family before and the story would not have come to light but for my request for help and this chance conversation.
My efforts resulted in the creation of a group of about thirty rescuers/rescued from a variety of countries, where I have had personal contact with either the rescuer or the rescued, or their child or other close relative. This has enabled me to pursue the question of motivation directly, by questioning someone extremely close to or actually involved in the events described. Some of these people have also written books about what happened and these have been referred to in the text. Nevertheless, addition
al specific information has always been obtained by interview (face to face or by telephone), e-mail or letter, and these are all detailed in the footnotes.
The book consists of four parts. The first three contain the narratives of the rescuers and those they rescued. These are categorised by their expressed motivation – religious convictions, humanitarian motives, being a member of the Resistance, feelings of loyalty to the rescued and paid rescuers. The final section discusses the relevance of these events to our lives today and attempts to understand what turns a bystander into a rescuer.
This book is a personal attempt to show the general reader the reality of the Holocaust. This is particularly important now, when the Holocaust is being regularly denied and its scale continually trivialised. Additionally, we are seeing a swing to extreme right-wing politics. When I talk to young people about the Holocaust I ask them to remember four things:
Six million innocent Jews were persecuted and murdered through sheer hatred, including 1.5 million children.
They were killed in many different ways and places. The Holocaust did not just happen at Auschwitz but included ghettoes, labour camps and special shooting raids.
Survivors and their families still suffer the impact of the Holocaust more than sixty-five years on.
A simple change of attitude or behaviour could ensure that this will not happen again – a small act of compassion and decency shows you have learnt the lessons of the Holocaust.
This book aims to record the remarkable stories that were entrusted to me. Indeed, many of my informants have died since they contacted me. I hope that I have been able to do justice to their stories and also offer some insight into what made this remarkable group of people turn from being passive bystanders into rescuers during one of the darkest periods in human history.
On 10 March 2010, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown honoured a pledge he made on a visit to Auschwitz last year. He recognised twenty-eight British Heroes of the Holocaust who were awarded a silver medal engraved ‘in the service of humanity’ above clasped hands. I was delighted to be present as, aided by some forceful lobbying by me, Bertha Bracey (see p. 21) and Henk Huffener (see p. 107) were included on the list. Bertha’s great niece Pat Webb, with her husband Donn and daughter Delia, received Bertha’s medal, and Henk’s daughters Clare and Josephine, who I only tracked down on Friday 5 March, received Henk’s medal.
As I revised my research for publication during the closing months of 2009, I was awaiting the birth of my first grandchild and inevitably I thought about my parents and their experiences in the Holocaust. I also wondered about my maternal grandfather, Armin Klein, who refused to leave his native land, and was murdered in Auschwitz around the time of my birth. James Harry Spier (Jamie) was born in London on 1 January 2010 – the great-great-grandchild of Armin and Rosa Klein, and Eugenie and Malkiel Grunwald, and great-grandchild of my beloved parents. Had the unknown official not sent my mother and me back, our line would have ended in 1944. With this in mind, I ask the reader to follow the Biblical exhortation, which Jews everywhere read every year at the Passover meal, telling the story of the flight from Egypt. In the book of Exodus (13:18) it is stated: ‘And you shall tell your son on that day …’ If the true horror of the Holocaust and the amazing courage of the persecuted and their rescuers is remembered and re-told to the next generation, is it not possible that people may consider their own views and attitudes, and perhaps create a far better world for everyone?
My father, Philipp Grunwald, was so embittered by his experiences as a forced labourer that he wouldn’t bring any more children into the world after the war and he committed suicide in 1955, leaving my mother Leona to bring me up alone. However, I am blessed with three wonderful sons, Daniel (father of James), Ben and Simon, and a lovely daughter-in-law, Michelle. I can only hope that the world in which they bring up their families will never see such horrors again. Perhaps then all the victims of the Nazis – like my grandfather Armin Klein – and all those other millions may not have died in vain?
Notes
1. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 838.
2. ‘The Ethics of the Fathers’, Chapter II, verses 20–21, in The Authorised Daily Prayer Book, trans. Rev. S. Singer (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1962), p. 258.
3. Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1997), p. xii.
4. Ibid., p. xiii.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseilles 1940 (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. xvi.
8. www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/index.asp
9. Yad Vashem’s Department for the Righteous among Nations, 1 January 2010.
10. Marilyn Henry, ‘Who, exactly, is a Righteous Gentile?’ in Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, 29 April 1998, www.jpost.com/com/Archive/29.Apr.1998/Features/Article-6.html, accessed 13 December 2002.
11. Walter Meyerhof, Prospectus for the Varian Fry Foundation, Stanford University, August 1997, p. 1.
12. Walter Meyerhof, notes of meeting with writer in London, 22 September 1997.
13. See p. 54.
14. See p. 34.
15. See p. 120.
1
RESCUERS WITH RELIGIOUS MOTIVES
Quakers were amongst the most active group of rescuers which saved Jews in the Holocaust. This was recognised in 1949 by the award of a Nobel Prize for their humanitarian efforts to both the British Friends Service Committee and its American counterpart.16 The Quakers, so named by Judge Bennet of Derby because they trembled at God’s word, have a history of helping social causes and those in need of humanitarian support. They look only to the Almighty for guidance and have no priests or hierarchy of clergy acting as the conduit to God:
Fundamentally, Quaker worship precluded all hierarchy and transcended principles of political governance. The primary quest was for divine enlightenment, not secular liberty, the overriding belief being that the divine spirit can touch and communicate, ending any separation between the individual and God. Without sermons or sacraments, without clerical intercession, each participant in the silent meeting speaks in his heart to God and, at the same time, to his neighbor. Quaker theology begins and ends as personal experience.17
The Quaker religion is different to most, lacking a formal structure; followers take responsibility for themselves. They do not wait to be told what to do or be led by a clergyman; neither do they assume that someone else will deal with a problem.
Bertha Bracey OBE (1893–1989) was a Quaker Englishwoman who had a profound influence in rescuing Jewish children from the Holocaust in what became the Kindertransport. She was born and brought up in Birmingham where she became a Quaker when she was 19 years old.
When I joined Friends I was deeply grateful for the joyous discovery of the Quaker business procedure, which at its best combines the virtue of democracy, and is yet theocratic. Our lives as human beings are set in two spiritual dimensions. Upwards toward God, and outward toward the community and the life of our world.18
She was the seventh of eight children. All the family were intelligent, but it was only Bertha who received an education because by the time she was born the family had a bit of spare cash. Additionally, all the children except one inherited their father’s character. He was very forthright and always knew he was right.19 No doubt these qualities stood Bertha in good stead in the years ahead.
She attended Birmingham University and spent five years as a teacher. In 1921 she left teaching to go to Vienna to help Quaker relief workers who ran clubs for children suffering from deficiency diseases. Whilst there, her German improved and in 1924 she moved to Nuremberg as a youth worker. From 1926–29 she was based in Berlin. She was subsequently recalled to Friends House in London to do administrative work relating to Quaker centres in Europe. She was to become the central point of a network of help for persecuted Jews coming to Britain.20
Because of her time spent living in Germany, Bertha had a very clear view about the situation there
. As early as April 1933 she reported: ‘For the moment the forces of liberalism have been defeated, and in the March elections fifty-two per cent of the electors voted National Socialist.’ She was perhaps more perceptive than many commentators when, within weeks of Hitler’s election, she commented on the tragedy of the Jews in Germany based on her own recent visit to Frankfurt for the German Quaker Executive Committee:
Anti-semitism is a terrible canker which has been spreading its poison for decades in many Central European countries. It came to a head in Germany on April 1st, when Germany dropped back into the cruelty of the ‘Ghetto’ psychology of the Middle Ages. The very yellow spots used to indicate Jewish businesses and houses is an old mediaeval symbol. Words are not adequate to tell of the anguish of some of my Jewish friends, particularly of those who have hitherto felt themselves much more German than Jewish; who had in fact almost forgotten their Jewish blood. What cruel fate is this that suddenly snatches them up from German soil and leaves them aghast, hurt and rootless, to find themselves ringed about with unreasoning hatred and calculating cruelty? Jewish doctors, teachers and social workers who have given generously of their skill and devotion suddenly find themselves treated as pariahs cut off from any means of livelihood.21
This showed a very full understanding and enormous empathy for the plight of the persecuted Jews. Her close friendship with the Friedrichs influenced her knowledge. Leonhard Friedrich, from Nuremberg, had an English wife called Mary. They had met when he was working in England before 1914 and were married at the Sheffield Friends’ Meeting House on 3 August 1922. They were active Quakers and involved in a Quaker relief centre funded by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), set up through the intervention of President Hoover, himself a Quaker, who was worried about the impact on Germany of the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. These reparations caused great hardship and malnutrition and President Hoover asked the AFSC to organise a large-scale school feeding scheme and 11,000 centres were opened. This help was badly needed and continued as the hyper-inflation of the 1920s aggravated the situation.22
The Other Schindlers Page 2