Since the window of the stairwell in that building faced the balcony of their home, her parents placed boards between the window and the balcony and always left a window open so that during the Nazi actions, people could escape to their home. There they could stay or escape through the building to another street where there was no danger.14
Costanza also spoke about a Jewish family, originally from Poland, who lived in her parents’ property and changed their name to Kellner to elude the Nazis. She also said her parents ‘never boasted of their deeds and always stressed that any person would have acted as they did in the same situation’. Nicla Fiorentino stressed that Donna Guilia was a very good woman whose actions put her in personal danger and she expected no recompense or acknowledgement. It is noted that after the war she returned ‘all the belongings that she stored in her home, including gold and merchandise, to the owners’. Warm relations were maintained between the rescued and their rescuers after the war. Costanza said that ‘When her parents died the Jews closed their shops during the funeral and participated in a prayer service in the church’.15
Nicla’s two daughters repeated the story but their evidence was hearsay as they were born after the war. However, they added an interesting detail that Donna Guilia had helped their Aunt Renata when she was giving birth to her son Mario in the cellar. Because of the dangerous conditions he was only circumcised eight months later.16
The Costagutis’ other daughter, Clotilde Capece Galeota, explained: ‘What I can tell you now is that everything my mother did was out of humanitarianism. We live just at the border of the Jewish Ghetto so she knew these people and she didn’t think twice in helping them without any question and at risk of her safety.’17
Milton Gendel, a historian who originally told me about the Costagutis, said: ‘Her parents, long-since dead, were right-wing. I doubt that they were generally pro-Jewish. The people they helped were neighbors, and some were early members of the Fascist Party, I’ve been told.’18
In December 2002 Donna Guilia and her husband, both now deceased, were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations in Rome, in the presence of their daughter Costanza and several members of the four families who would not have been there but for their rescuers’ bravery. It was held at Palazzo Valentino before the Israeli Ambassador and the Chief Rabbi. At the ceremony, Silvano Moffa (President of the Province of Rome) particularly emphasised the role of Donna Guilia, and said: ‘with the simplicity and profound dignity, which comes only from the love of one’s fellow men for humanity’s sake, beyond all rhetoric, stands out like a mother to all those who came to her for help and comfort.’ The President concluded:
They never gave up. After the war, they never spoke of what they had done as an act of heroism but as something that it was right to do; they have taught us to be on the side of the weak and to face the future with confidence, seeking to build a better world with every deed in our daily lives.19
It was noted:
Unfortunately, there were few people in Europe who behaved like the Costagutis and who, beyond the bounds of politics (Achille was a volunteer in the Fascist militia), felt it was their moral duty to follow their sense of natural justice and did not passively accept racist laws and deportation.20
One of those present at the ceremony in 2002, Giovanni Terracina, the son of one of the families rescued, remembered that a year back, when an increase in anti-Semitism was evident, he had jokingly asked Costanza whether her cellars were still available.
Christine (Christl) Denner (1922–92). Edith Hahn-Beer was born in 1914 in Vienna. She became a law student but was forced to abandon her studies, like other Jewish students, in 1938 after the Anschluss. After being a forced labourer in a rural area she was sent back to Vienna, which would have led to deportation. She decided to ignore the Nazis’ edicts and although she boarded the train sporting her compulsory yellow star, when she got off at Vienna she was no longer wearing it. She was fortunate that a Nazi woman she knew as Frau Doktor enabled her to visit another Nazi who dealt with racial identity – a Sippenforscher, named Johann Plattner. She had been told to tell him the truth and, sitting at home ‘wearing a brown Nazi uniform with a swastika on his arm’, he told her exactly how to get Aryan papers – but she needed an Aryan friend’s help.21 He explained that if her friend previously obtained a vacation ration book as proof, she could claim she had been on holiday and say she had lost her papers. She would receive a new set and Edith could then use the original ones and pass as an Aryan. Plattner even told her not to apply for a Kleiderkarte – ration book for clothing – as these were distributed from a national list and the authorities would realise there were two people with the same identity. Plattner’s role is remarkable as he saw her in his own home and his two young sons, aged 10 and 12, opened the door to her.
His instructions were very specific but she needed someone of the same age who looked like her. Edith had a friend called Christl Denner, who was eight years younger at only 18, but fitted the bill. They had lived in the same building before the war and the concierge had recommended Edith as a tutor to the two Denner girls. The building was Palais Salvator, an old Hapsburg palace. When the Nazis created the Ghetto, the Hapsburgs were forced to evict any Jews and Edith’s daughter still has the very apologetic letter that was sent to the family22 and told her the plan:
Christl did not hesitate for one second. ‘Of course you may have my papers,’ she said. ‘I’ll apply for the vacation ration card tomorrow.’ And that was it. Do you understand what it would have meant if Christl Denner had been discovered aiding me in this way? She could have been sent to a concentration camp and possibly killed. Remember that. Remember the speed with which she assented, the total absence of doubt or fear.23
Yet the fear was there. She knew how dangerous this was because she never told anyone what she had done until after the war – not even her sister Elsa, to whom she was extremely close, for fear of betrayal to the Gestapo. She was right – when she eventually told Elsa after the war she responded: ‘How could you do it? How could you put my life in danger like that?’ As Edith’s daughter commented, Elsa never said what a wonderful thing Christl had done or how proud she was of her sister.
Edith used the papers to go to Munich, far away from Christl because they now both had the same name. She also had to act ten years younger than her real age. There, sewing to pay her rent and working as a Red Cross nurse, she met a German, Werner Vetter, who fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. She felt obliged to tell him she was Jewish but he accepted it and they married in 1943, with Edith giving birth to her daughter Angela in 1944. Ironically, Christl could not marry her childhood sweetheart, Hans Beran, during the war because Edith, holding her name, was already married. It was only after the war, when Edith was able to regain her true identity, that Christl and Hans were able to marry.24
At the end of the war Werner was sent to Siberia. Edith completed her law studies and became a family law judge in Brandenburg. In 2007 a plaque in her honour was unveiled on the new court house there.25 Her husband returned in 1947 but could not cope with a wife who was a judge rather than the dutiful hausfrau he had left behind. They divorced and he returned to his first wife. After living in Israel for many years, it was only when, in 1997 aged 83, she sold her wartime papers through Sotheby’s to pay for cataract operations, that her story became well known. In 1999 her account was published in a co-written book The Nazi Officer’s Wife.
The difference between the two Denner sisters’ response belies the theory sometimes put forward that family upbringing creates rescuers, because they reacted so differently to Edith’s plight. However, Christl and Edith remained extremely close friends and their friendship lasted until Christl died in December 1992.26 Christl was recognised by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1985 under the name of Christa Beran. Edith died in March 2009 aged 95. A film is to be made of Edith’s remarkable story. The irony of the tale is that, apparently, Vetter was married about seven ti
mes, but confided to Angela: ‘The time I spent with your mother were the happiest two years of my life.’27
Josephine and Victor Guicherd.28 Berthe (Betty) and Jacques Lewkowitz were hidden by the Guicherds for about three years in the tiny village of Dullin in the Savoie mountains in France. Berthe’s mother Perla and 2-year-old brother Michel were less fortunate. They were on transportation No 84 which left Valenciennes, their hometown, on 15 September 1942 with 1,054 Jews on board, of whom 264 were children. The train travelled via the Belgian transit camp of Malines to Auschwitz and Betty’s mother and brother were never seen again.29
Betty’s parents were both Polish and her father, Schmuel Lewkowitz, had been trying to get to Lisbon around 1932 when he ran out of money in Valenciennes and stayed there to become a furrier. The family home was also his shop and had entrances to the street at the front and the back. Betty was born on 19 April 1935.
She recalled her mother as a very kind soft person who sang a lot with a lovely voice. Her parents spoke Yiddish to each other but spoke French to the children, even though their French was not good. The family were not observant and she had no recollections of her mother lighting the Sabbath candles on a Friday night or celebrating Passover with a Seder. In fact, her mother was not a good cook.
In June/July 1940, when France fell to the Germans, Betty was 5 and her brother Jacques was 3. Her mother was pregnant and her father arranged for them to flee on a truck. They were very limited in what they could take and Betty had to leave her ‘walking/talking’ favourite doll behind. There were lots of people on the road going north to Normandy – not just Jews. Their baby brother was born in Donfront. Eventually they returned home and found the house empty. They did not know whether it had been emptied by the Germans or the French, but Betty’s father went to a local auction house to refurnish the home.
When Betty was 6 she started going to a local Catholic school and although she was the only Jewish girl in the school, the nuns were very kind to her. She had to wear a yellow star on the left side of her clothes as the Germans specified; children aged 6 and over were included. A nun at the convent sewed hers with poppers so she could take it off inside the school. In spite of this consideration, each day there was a prayer in the convent about the Jews killing Jesus.
In the summer of 1942 her father began to worry about the children, and Betty and Jacques were sent to stay with a young couple in a nearby town. On 7 September it was Jacques’ birthday and her parents came to visit with their baby brother, bringing a cake. Betty’s father told their mother to stay there with them but she said she would go back with him. On 11 September, at 5.00 p.m., the Gestapo arrived at the home with French police. They knocked at the door and when no one answered a neighbour said there was no one home. Schmuel escaped through the back door but the Gestapo took Perla and the baby. They were never seen again by the family.
Betty and Jacques were saved because in the few days between the birthday and the arrival of the Gestapo, their father had taken them away to another house where their aunt looked after them. He told them they had a new name – Leroy. He was very tough with them and shouted a lot. Later he came to collect them and they travelled a long way; part of the journey was on a barge on the Lescaux river. They had to travel in the coal-hold and Betty did not like the smell, but her father just shouted and pushed her in. During the journey Betty asked her father about her mother. He initially said she would come when they were in Lyons, but subsequently he cried and said she had been taken by the Germans but she would come back after the war.
At the end of September, accompanied by their aunt, they were taken to Dullin by a Monsieur Nicolai. It was another long journey and at the end they had to walk about 3km. They were extremely tired when they arrived at the Guicherds’ farm. Apparently, M. Nicolai was a member of the Jewish Underground and saw Victor Guicherd working on his land one day and asked him if he would like to look after some children. Victor said he and his wife were very poor and had no confort. Nevertheless, he said he would like to but he would speak to his wife Josephine. The Guicherds had no children of their own and Josephine agreed to take the children. Betty only heard this story late in life.
Betty described her life on the Guicherds’ farm as a paradise, and said the three years she spent there were the happiest of her life until she had her own children. She described with enormous pleasure the chickens and cows and the mountains. There was no running water or bathroom and the children never had to wash except on Sunday when they had a bath before going to church. She enjoyed going to church and prayed to the statue of the Virgin Mary to bring her mother back. She also enjoyed going to school, where she was taught by nuns who she was sure knew they were Jewish but never said anything. She also learnt to play the piano because she liked hearing the nuns play the organ.
She had a wonderful relationship with Victor, who was very wise and knowledgeable about country matters and the seasons. He taught her about birds, the flowers and trees, the weather and stars. He had his breakfast in the fields and she used to take it to him in a basket, and whilst he ate he taught her about country life. They had eleven or twelve cows, who each had a name, and she helped with them after school. She learnt how to make butter, cream and goats’ cheese. Josephine had been in service before her marriage and was an excellent cook, so she taught Betty how to do it.
In the video Betty describes the three Christmases they spent with the Guicherds, and watching everyone go to Midnight Mass. All the villagers carried lights to go to the church and it looked like a Bruegel painting.
There was also another Jewish family hidden in the village, which was more of a hamlet with only ninety villagers. There were some collaborators but most people hated the Germans and accepted they were Jewish, although because of bombing, as in England, many non-Jewish children were evacuated to the country.
The Guicherds had taken enormous risks in looking after these children. The infamous Klaus Barbie was based at Lyons and personally supervised the deportation of forty-one Jewish children, aged between 3 and 14, to Auschwitz. They had been hidden in a large country house in Izieu, only 3 miles from Dullin. Collaborators had told his agents that Jewish children were hiding in Izieu, in Dullin and in the other Savoie mountain villages, and he had set out to find them. For five days, while a German armoured personnel carrier patrolled the footpaths, and the soldiers knocked on the doors at Dullin, Victor Guicherd concealed Betty and Jacques in a hollow table of the kind French paysans use to store bread and flour (see plate 22).30
Some years ago I visited Barbie’s HQ in Lyons, which is now a museum to the Resistance. It was very quiet with few visitors and I found the atmosphere heavy with dread, knowing that members of the Resistance had been tortured to death – I could not finish the tour and escaped outside. So the Guicherds knew they were running dreadful risks, but when asked why they did it in subsequent years they always responded: ‘Why do you ask?’ In answer to my question on their motivation, Betty wrote:
This, of course, is the question of questions. There was no ulterior motive – financial, religious or egocentric – of which we are aware. It may have been an altruism that really cannot be defined in normal human terms – the Guicherds certainly didn’t want and couldn’t put it into words – ‘why do you ask?’ they said.
We think they, M. Guicherd, in particular, fell in love with Betty as the daughter they did not have and decided to defy the Germans and French collaborators to keep her alive. They knew that they were running risks – Barbie had rounded up Jewish children a few miles away in Izieu – and were well aware that they would be shot if their activities were discovered. We think that even in such terrible times remarkable people emerge to show us that humanity and the Just, no matter how few, are more than mere trees, planted in Yad Vashem, but the seeds and blossom of our future.31
This view is corroborated by the letter Victor wrote around 1980–81 when Yad Vashem was endeavouring to honour him. He explained he was unable to go to Paris be
cause Josephine was disabled and his own age precluded such a journey. He continued:
You ask me for a testimony on behalf of the Jews during the years of Occupation. I helped as much as I could those who were in distress and, as I have already told you, I consider that as natural as simple human solidarity.
You are asking me for memories; those I prefer are those that concern the two children, Berthe and Jacques, who were confined to our trust for three years. It is their aunt who brought them to us when their mother had been deported with her baby. We did our best to educate them, to give them instruction and in one word – to love them.
We were very sad to have to give them back to their father and since we have always been in touch with them.
Today Jacques is a doctor in Paris, married and the father of three children; Berthe went to Israel, lives in Jerusalem. Is married to a journalist, Mr Eppel, and is the mother of two children.
Their affection is the best reward for what we have done for them.32
Betty described how the joy of liberation was tempered by the sorrow of leaving the Guicherds, with whom they had been so happy. Victor heard about the end of the war on the radio, to which he used to listen in his cellar. The church bells were ringing and everyone was very happy, but in August their father came for them. They no longer knew their father, he was a stranger to them, and they did not want to go back with him. Josephine made them a packed lunch for the train and Victor walked with them to the station. Everyone was crying.
Their aunt looked after them for a year and took Betty to the cinema to see the films of the liberation of the camps. After a year she was sent to a boarding school in their old hometown but her father never visited her. She was the only Jewish girl in the school and hated giving her name. Her father remarried when she was 14 and she told me that the immediate post-war years were the worst of her life.33 Betty’s father died in 1990 aged 86.
The Other Schindlers Page 10