The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  By 1944 she was put with a woman who had a daughter of a similar age, whose husband had been deported. The woman was unkind to her and warned her not to touch her daughter’s food. She also made unpleasant remarks about Jews. A kind neighbour found her some work in an orphanage for children under 2 years old. The director, Dr Izidorius Rudaitis, was told she was half-Jewish and she worked as a domestic help. She had only been there a week when the Gestapo arrived. She went to the toilet and decided to stay put to protect her rescuers. The Gestapo had come looking for Jewish children they had been told were in the orphanage. The director denied it and winked at Irena. The Gestapo went away and she felt much safer. However, two months later the Gestapo came back, to the house she was staying at. Her woman rescuer told her to leave immediately by the back door as they came through the front door. She went back to the dentist where she stayed for one day.

  It was after all these traumatic experiences that in March 1944 Irena was finally sent to Stefanija. She had six children but only three were living with her at the time. Irena arrived late in the afternoon and Stefanija told her own children to treat Irena like a sister from the country. Although she was a very devout Catholic, and was very tolerant, she was a strict mother to her children.67

  After Lithuania was liberated by the Russians on 13 July 1944, Irena stayed with the family and started going to school. On 14 March 1946 Stefanija was arrested, tried by a KGB three-man board and sent to Siberia. She was only allowed to return in 1956 after Stalin’s death. In 1967 she died in Irena’s arms. She was only one of many tens of thousands of Lithuanians who were exiled to Siberia. Historians have calculated that between 1940 and 1952 up to one-third of the Lithuanian population was lost to massacre, war casualties, deportations, executions and immigration.68

  Irena stayed in Vilnius and is now a Professor of Philology, World and German Literature at its university. In 2001 she led a seminar at the Stockholm International Forum on Holocaust Education and in answer to a question on the motivation of teachers; she replied:

  As a Nazi Holocaust survivor myself, I would like to say, that the terrible experience we went through should motivate us not only to concentrate on our own suffering, but be open and especially sensitive to the suffering of our fellow man and do everything to prevent a new Holocaust in the future. It is a question of the survival of mankind in general.69

  Professor Veisaite was also the founding chair of the Open Society Foundation of Lithuania. It was founded in 1990 with the aim of fostering democracy in the former Soviet Republic, and she chaired it from 1993 to 2000. Lithuania is trying to examine the truths of the past and Irena has said this is not a Jewish project. She added:

  It is a question for all of us in common. Of course it has not been an easy process, but it is very important equally for Jews and Lithuanians. We are trying to create a civil society, and in this effort it is crucial for Lithuania to understand what happened here. Because as long as you are hiding the truth, as long as you fail to come to terms with your past, you can’t build your future.70

  The Lithuanians are accepting their role in the Holocaust and accordingly, in 1995, the new President of Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas, appeared in the Knesset in Israel to deliver a formal apology for Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis. Meanwhile, Veisaite was active with various projects. She participated in the creation of the House of Memory which ran an essay competition for the whole country called ‘Jews: Neighbors of my Grandparents and Great-Grandparents’, which encouraged children to interview their elders and several volumes of winning entries have been published. She initiated the creation of the Centre for Stateless Cultures at Vilnius University. She also helped to initiate a travelling exhibition: ‘Jewish Life in Lithuania’. She is anxious to promote tolerance and an understanding of beliefs and practices different to one’s own but with complete non-acceptance of intolerance.71

  Irena wrote about Stefanija’s family in 1997: ‘My relations with the whole family remained extremely close up to the present. I feel that her children are my brothers and sisters, and their children – my nephews and nieces.’

  Irena has concluded:

  Unfortunately, to kill thousands of people only a few men with machine guns are needed, and they do not risk anything except their souls. Saving of just one man involved exceptional devotion, undescribable courage of many people, and they were risking not only their lives, but also those of their children.72

  Iris Origo DBE (1902–88) was a writer with an American father and Anglo-Irish mother. She grew up in Italy after her father’s death when she was 8. He had expressed the wish that she be brought up in Italy or France – ‘free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, then she can’t have it.’73 She was educated in Florence, where she later met an Italian aristocrat, Marchese Antonio Origo, whom she married on 4 March 1924. They settled on a neglected Tuscan estate, La Foce, which they restored and maintained under German occupation.74 Mussolini had come to power in 1922 and the Origos benefited from his policies to keep people on the land rather than moving to the towns.

  When Italy entered the war as an ally of Germany, Iris worked with the Italian Red Cross in Rome dealing with British POWs until she became pregnant in 1942 and returned to La Foce. She was in a very difficult position because her own country was at war with her adopted country and she was married to an Italian. Her husband Antonio, who in the early years approved of Mussolini’s agricultural policies, took some time to understand what fascism really meant. Iris, initially uncertain, came to detest it long before he did. As a writer, Iris recorded her wartime experiences in her adopted country in diaries which were published after the war. They provide a valuable insight into how life changed around her.

  Writing of the pre-war period 1935–40, Iris was aware of the changes occurring in Europe, even in her isolation at La Foce, and describes the impact of the radio at that time: ‘Previously, non-combatants had been, for the most part, only aware of what the press of their own country told them, or what they saw with their own eyes. Now, we were all constantly exposed to these confusing, overwhelming waves, from friends and enemies alike.’75

  In this period she wrote of her shock at a telephone call she received from a woman acquaintance in the immediate pre-war period. ‘She and I had been asked to send a nominal invitation to an old Czechoslovak professor and his wife, which would enable them to get a transit visa through Italy and thus escape from Prague and rejoin their sons in England.’ Her acquaintance was complaining about having been asked to get involved and complaining that this ‘might have got us into trouble’. Iris tried to explain that the professor and his wife were old and ill and this was their only chance to rejoin their sons. The woman was quite unmoved: ‘I have no sympathy with such people. Why didn’t they get out months ago, when their sons ran away?’ Iris managed to ring off. A few minutes later the woman rang back demanding to know what Iris was going to do about it, and warning Iris that Italy was not neutral and she could get her husband into trouble. ‘Why, it’s the sort of thing one would hardly do for a member of one’s own family!’

  Iris was very upset and she wrote:

  Swallowing my anger – which was sharper for being mixed with a mean little twinge of uneasiness – I hedged, and then, having rung off, sat on the edge of the bed, trembling. The ugly trivial conversation seemed to have a dispro-portionate importance: it seemed to symbolise all the cowardly, self-protective, arrogant cruelty of the world – our world.76

  Fortunately, Iris Origo did not allow this acquaintance to influence her. In the late 1930s, with ‘the Juggernaut approach of war’, she still visited England regularly. She wrote that through her close friend Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895–1949), cousin of the late Queen Mother, and some Quaker friends she ‘was able to share the efforts of some people who, already then, were devoting their energies to enabling a few Jewish scholars, old people and children, to make their escape from Germany be
fore it was too late’.77 The children came on the Kindertransport and most never saw their parents again. Iris sponsored six Jewish children and paid for them to go to Bunce Court School in Kent, run for Jewish refugee children. Quakers were instrumental in the running of the school. When one boy from Berlin left in 1947 aged 16, he stated his intention of becoming a painter and eventually became a pupil of David Bomberg. His name was Frank Helmet Auerbach.

  Bunce Court had evolved from a German progressive boarding school called Herrlingen, sited in the Schwabian Jura mountain region, created and run by a remarkable Jewish woman called Anna Essinger. In 1933 she realised she and the school had no future under Hitler and, aged 54, she moved it to England with the help of the Quakers, bringing seventy pupils with her.78 Eventually it housed many children whose parents were exterminated in the concentration camps. Walter Block wrote of Bunce Court:

  The school gave me a sound foundation for my working and family life and I am forever mindful and thankful that the actions of concerned individuals and organisations, including Quakers, made it possible for so many of us ‘Kinder’ to survive; to lead constructive lives and give something back to our host country.79

  I asked Frank Auerbach how a Christian woman in Italy had rescued a little Jewish boy from Berlin. He told me it came about through his uncle Jakob Auerbach who was a lawyer. Uncle Jakob’s partner, called Altenberg, had retired to Italy and had already sent his own children to England. In Italy he got to know Iris Origo and heard that she wanted to sponsor six Jewish children to go to safety in England. He suggested his niece and nephew, Ilse and Heinz Altenberg, and Frank Auerbach, his partner’s son. Frank has described how they three children, all under 8 years old, travelled from Hamburg accompanied by the Altenbergs’ nanny on the SS George Washington on 7 April 1939, arriving on the same day in Southampton and going straight to Bunce Court. The nanny returned to Germany.80

  A biography on Frank Auerbach fleshed out the story. Charlotte, his mother, was artistic and was married to Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer. He was born in 1931 and recalled a childhood of parental strain and worry, partly because of the economic situation – Austrian and German banks were collapsing – and also because of the rise of the brownshirts. As Auerbach learnt to toddle, the Nazis were marching down Berlin’s streets and the persecution of the Jews began:

  People like Auerbach’s parents, the liberal, educated German Jews of the professional classes, men and women in whose family traditions stetl and pogrom were vague memories at most, could not imagine the Final Solution; it still lay incubating, like a dragon’s egg, in the minds of Hitler and Himmler.81

  Frank’s parents’ anxiety hung over the small child and turned into what he called ‘frantic coddling’: ‘I remember velvet knickerbocker suits and no freedom. I couldn’t run in the park near the house. I couldn’t step outside the door on my own, of course, and my mother would begin to worry if my father was half an hour late home.’

  By 1937 they felt the 6-year-old would be in real danger if he stayed in Germany. ‘But his father would not go; presumably, like many other Jews, he hoped that Nazism would soften, that its racial policy would be diluted by cultural and economic necessity, and that resolute adults might still breathe the air that would choke a little boy.’

  Iris Origo offered an escape route by turning her concerns about Jewish children into actions. It was fortuitous for Auerbach that his family’s tentacles reached to her as she knew none of the six children whose escape she financed.82 I have not been able to find out about the other three children, but Iris Origo’s autobiographical writings are littered with references about what she thought was happening to Jews and others. Her daughter has spoken about her mother’s humanity. This is demonstrated by her insight into the difficulties of the Jewish parents whose children had the chance to leave:

  I have never been able to forget the description given to me by one of the Quaker workers in Germany of the agony of mind of the parents obliged to make a choice, when they were told (as was sometimes necessary) that only one child from each family could go. Should it be the most brilliant or the most vulnerable? The one most fitted, or least likely, to survive? Which, if it were one’s own child, would one choose?83

  Reading this reminded me of the story of Lore Cahn (née Grünberger), who was 14 when her parents put her on the Kindertransport to go to England. At the last moment her father couldn’t bear to let her go – he had been holding her hands through the window as the train began to move and he just pulled her out of the train through the window. She had a terrible time, being sent to Theresienstadt in 1941 with her parents; she was then separated from them and sent to Auschwitz. She was finally liberated in Bergen-Belsen. Her mother had been murdered but her father survived.84

  The parents’ choice was diabolical and showed enormous courage, and as Louise London has written:

  We remember the touching photographs and newsreel footage of unaccompanied Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransports [by July 1939, 7,700 had arrived, compared with 1,850 admitted into Holland, 800 into France, 700 into Belgium and 250 into Sweden]. There are no such photographs of the Jewish parents left behind in Nazi Europe … The Jews excluded from entry to the United Kingdom are not part of the British experience, because Britain never saw them.85

  Iris also ended up providing refuge to many Italian refugee children. Early in 1943 the first group of seven children arrived at La Foce from families in Genoa whose homes had been destroyed. Another little group of six girls arrived from Turin in February and Iris wrote in her diary:

  Children such as these, all over Europe, have had to leave their own homes and families, and are arriving – bewildered but hopeful – among strangers. There is something terribly moving in this exodus – something, too, so deeply wrong in a world where such a thing is not only possible but necessary, that it is difficult not to feel personally responsible. For the present we can try to salve our consciences by giving them food, shelter and love. But that is not enough. Nothing can ever really be enough.86

  How right she was and how universal was the uprooting of families and bewildered children by the war – even those evacuated in their own countries, let alone those sent to another country by the Kindertransport.

  At La Foce they were pretty well self-supporting, and this included the twenty-three children. After Mussolini fell in 1943, and following the surrender of the Badoglio government to the Allies that September, the Germans were still occupying much of Italy. The community really pulled together, ‘as the old barriers of tradition and class were broken down and we were held together by the same difficulties, fears expectations and hopes’:

  Together we planned how to hide the oil, the hams and cheeses, so that the Germans could not find them; together we found shelter for the fugitives who knocked at out door – whether Italians, Allies or Jews, soldiers or civilians87

  Very late the same year, on 15 December, Iris noted:

  Two other fugitives turn up – an old Jew from Siena and his son. Both of them, clad in the most unsuitable of town clothes and thin shoes, are shivering with cold and terror. The father, the owner of an antique shop, produces from an inner pocket, drawing me aside, a little carved ivory Renaissance figure which he wishes to exchange for food and warm clothing. We supply the latter, and suggest that he should keep the figure for future needs. He and his son wish to walk through the German lines to Naples – and to all our dissuasions (since it is clear that the old man, who suffers from heart-disease, will die upon the way) they only reply – ‘We have no choice. We must.’ After a rest and some food they start up the hill in the snow, the old man groaning a little as he leans on his son’s shoulder.88

  That Christmas, her diary records that the Pope’s Christmas Eve homily sounded fairly despairing as little goodwill abounded, but she commented that in her own village she felt there was ‘a bond of deep understanding born of common trouble, anxieties and hopes such as I have never felt before. And in the attitude of the
farmers to all the homeless passers-by (whether Italian soldiers or British prisoners, whether Gentile or Jew) there is a spontaneous, unfailing charity and hospitality.’89

  I first heard about Iris Origo from an article in The Times on 25 July 2002, about the music festival her daughters, Benedetta and Donata, were running at La Foce to celebrate the centenary of their mother’s birth. I e-mailed the address given and have had great help from Benedetta. Like many relatives of rescuers, she had known little of her mother’s activities during the war. She told me:

  Yes, my mother – and many others like her, in Italy at that time – helped Jews on the run … Also, I found out only after her death that she was among some people (from London, I think) who financed the escape to England of some children from Jewish families in Germany. Among these was the child Frank Auerbach, later to become a famous artist.90

  Subsequently, Benedetta wrote that she could not tell me much more but:

  beyond this, my family in Italy gave help to any person who appeared in distress or need during the war years, as a matter of course, whether they were Jewish or not … And so did many Italians – who, as a whole, are not antisemitic, contrary to fascist appearances.

  As to motivation, I am sure it was pure humanity and fellow feeling that brought not only my mother but countless others in this country to help, hide, feed, save Jewish people during the war. There are so many single stories that are moving – and stories that often deal with very simple people.91

  A couple of days later she reiterated her mother’s humanity in another e-mail: