The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  Though my mother had strong religious feelings – that is, she was constantly searching for some kind of religious certainty – she was not particularly observant. She was brought up vaguely Anglican, then converted to Catholicism in her sixties – but was never completely convinced. Anyway, her motives for helping others were humanitarian and based on compassion, more than anything else.92

  Max Rubino, an art expert, wrote an article in La Stampa on 20 October 1990 about Frank Auerbach, and commented on Iris Origo’s help towards him. This was the first that Benedetta knew of her mother’s impact on Frank Auerbach’s life. He concluded that due to her unsentimental nature Iris had never contacted the Auerbachs. I felt this had gone on too long and, having had considerable contact with her eldest daughter Benedetta over a long period, I sent her a copy of his letter and gave him her address.

  A biography of Iris Origo described her concern for the refugee local children she cared for at La Foce. Their mothers came to visit them and were overwhelmed by what they saw:

  The food the children were given was good and olive oil was added to the diets of the more malnourished. Fannina Fè is now in her late seventies. She was a helper working at the school – her entire family worked for the Origos – when the refugees arrived. She remembers the way Iris appeared every day, tasted their food and brought across new toys …

  Fannina remembers, ‘I once asked her why she did all this for us. She replied that “if you have too much, you never really want the things that life gives you”.’93

  Iris was made a DBE in 1977 and died in 1988. Without her charitable and compassionate nature the little 8-year-old boy in Berlin might have become one of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. Auerbach’s long creative career as an artist, which still continues as he approaches 80, would never have occurred. This fact cannot but lead us to ponder what those 1.5 million children might have achieved had they not been destroyed because no one came forward to save them.

  Vytautas Rinkevicius (1906–88). Irena Viesaite’s cousin, Margaret Kagan, was born in Kovno, Lithuania, on 12 July 1924. She was hidden for several months in a factory by Vytautas Rinkevicius, a Roman Catholic. Margaret was born Margarita Stromaité; her parents were Jurgis Stromas and Eugenia Stromiene.

  Lithuania was independent until the Russians invaded on 15 June 1940, to be followed a year later by the German invasion of 22 June 1941. This unleashed anti-Jewish attacks from the Lithuanians themselves, who held the Jews responsible for the year of Soviet occupation. On 27 June they rounded up fifty Jewish men and beat them to death in the Lietukis garage on Vytautas Prospect. Margaret’s father was one of these men. A few days later, Lithuanian partisans raided their house and took their valuables. In August Kovno’s Jews were ordered to the Ghetto being created in the suburbs. At the same time, Jews were being rounded up and killed. Margaret, her mother and her brother Alik (born 1931) were all safe but thousands were killed, including her aunt and her son.94 By August 1941 all the Jews in Kovno were in the Ghetto, created in the old Jewish quarter of Vilijampole.95

  Margaret was still in the Ghetto with her mother, grandmother and 11-year-old brother Alik when, in October 1943, conditions worsened and her friend Chana Bravo offered to find Alik a hiding place so he could be smuggled out to live with a non-Jewish family. He stayed with a couple, Antanas and Marija Macenavicius, who kept him until the end of the war. Also at this time, Margaret had become friendly with Joseph Kagan who was a slave labourer in a foundry. The man in charge of the foundry was Johannes Bruess, whom Joseph had known before, and Johannes agreed that Joseph could build a hiding place in the loft of the factory. The bookkeeper, Vytautas Garkauskas, also agreed, but the ‘heart and soul of the scheme, without whom it would have been a non-starter, was the modest factory foreman Vytautas Rinkevicius’.96

  Margaret was extremely sceptical when Joseph first asked her to join him and his mother in his hiding place. She agreed to inspect the site and wangled a day’s work at the factory where she met Vytautas:

  The man we were approaching was tall and lean, wore blue coveralls and a beret, looked alert, yet reassuringly relaxed. He wore heavy rimmed spectacles and their thick lenses seemed to set him apart from our ugly world. From behind these lenses his eyes exuded calm, hope and confidence. When I got back to my mother in the Ghetto that evening, I found it difficult to explain just why this man had made such a monumental impression on me; but I did manage to convey my deep-felt confidence in Vytautas’ integrity and goodwill.97

  Margaret and Joseph got married in the Ghetto before they left. When I asked Margaret about her marriage she said it was a civil ceremony conducted by Avraham Tory (1909–2002), a young lawyer who was appointed secretary of the Kovno Jewish Council set up by the Nazis. He subsequently became well known when his meticulous diaries covering 1941–44 were published as Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. He was one of the few Holocaust diary writers who survived to publish his work after the war.98 Apparently the Jewish Council was authorised to carry out civil marriage ceremonies because religious ceremonies were banned.99

  Eventually, in November 1943, the three of them went to the hideout where they hid for 300 days. Meanwhile, her brother Alik found someone to hide his mother but it was becoming much harder to leave the Ghetto. In July 1944 she was deported to Stutthof concentration camp where she perished in November.100

  The trio continued hiding in the factory and each day Vytautas came to bring them food and tell them when they could move around. He also dealt with their personal waste. They had to be quiet during the day when the factory was operational and were therefore only active during the hours of 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Margaret describes the difficulty of obtaining water and how they poured water through a towel into a bucket to cut down the noise.101

  Vytautas was a wonderful support throughout the difficulties of living that half-life:

  How he managed to remain so calm (unrattled) and supportive throughout these nine mouths will forever remain a mystery to me. We Jews were under sentence of death and in this ‘no choice-ein breira’ situation would, not unnaturally, have to accept risk and deprivation in an effort to save our own skins. Yet there was Vytautas, risking not only his own life, but also his family’s – voluntarily (out of his own free will), without any financial incentive or hope for reward, simply in order to save our lives.102

  One difficulty was his wife, Elia, whom he had tried to protect by not telling her what he was doing:

  Apparently she had noticed that Vytautas now seemed preoccupied and absent minded more often than before; besides, valuable food items started going missing out of her pantry. This led her to start suspecting Vytautas of being involved with another woman. It was only when faced with this suspicion that Vytautas confessed to hiding us.103

  Once she knew, she proved to be extremely supportive, but understandably worried whether as parents they were right to risk their own child’s life. Margaret describes Elia as a generous and kind-hearted woman. However, because of these reservations poor Vytautas could not share his worries about the project with his wife or the Kagans.104 These difficulties were exemplified the day the bookkeeper, Mr Garkauskas, was arrested and the Kagans and Vytautas did not know whether or not it was related to the Kagans. Fortunately, the next day ‘an exceptionally agitated Vytautas came to tell us that Mr Garkauskas had managed to smuggle a letter out of jail to tell us that his arrest was unconnected with us’. But their relief was short-lived when they heard the truth:

  Sadly, he had been denounced by a neighbour for harbouring a Jewish child and the inevitability of tragic consequences marred our own relief at not having come to the end of our road. As it happened, G. managed to escape death, the child did not. To reconcile our double-edged emotions of horror and relief was hard.105

  Vytautas continued his care for them and even arranged a brief ‘holiday’ with some Lithuanian friends for Joseph’s mother when the claustrophobic conditions became too much for her.106 As G
erman defeat became more likely in the summer of 1944 there were concerns that the retreating Nazis would blow up the factories. Vytautas arranged with Alik’s foster family for Joseph and his mother to go to them. Margaret was to follow a few days later but had to stay in the loft because of her Jewish appearance. Vilijampole was liberated by the Russians on 31 July 1944. The Ghetto was set on fire by the Germans as they left and the surviving inhabitants met a horrible end. Finally, Vytautas installed the three of them in his own home which seemed like a palace after all their privations. After finding a flat to rent they tried to come to terms with what had happened to Europe and its Jews.

  In January 1945 they set off to try to find Joseph’s father who had gone to England before the war. The subsequent Cold War years prevented contact but Margaret saw Vytautas in 1964 and recalls: ‘Words failed us both at this indescribable moment, but our emotions mingled in a long silent embrace.’ In 1972 Margaret and Joseph met Vytautas in Moscow, with his daughter Vitalija, and the couple who hid Alik. The rescuers all died before Lithuania gained its independence: Marija and Antanas in 1979 and 1980 respectively, and Elia Rinkevicius in 1981. Vytautas died in 1988. Both couples were recognised as Righteous Among the Nations in 1976.107

  In 1989 Vitalija was able to visit London with her husband, and at the House of Lords – in the presence of Dr Kahle, Chaplain of Westminster Cathedral, family and friends – the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jakobovits, made a moving speech and presented the medal of a Righteous Gentile to Vitalija.

  Vitalija’s words were few but memorable. Naturally she was happy and grateful for this honour to her parents and thanked everyone; but above all she wanted to convey what she felt sure her father would have said on this occasion: ‘I am no hero, I have done nothing out of the ordinary; nothing other than any normal human being would have done.’108

  When Margaret’s husband died in January 1995, Tam Dalyell wrote an obituary in which he referred to Vytautas. He wrote that Kagan had told him that ‘one day he noticed that Rinkevicius was angry when he saw a boy being beaten up and he decided on the spot that he could trust him and confided his plan of hiding his fiancée’s family behind a wall in the factory’. Dalyell reminded his readers that the penalty for helping Jews was summary execution for the offender and his family.109

  When I asked Margaret what she thought about his motivation, she wrote to me: ‘simple human decency – cannot really explain’.110

  Jaap van Proosdij (1921– ) was only 21 when, in 1942, he helped rescue about 250 Dutch Jews. His Resistance group was so successful that they almost rendered genuine baptismal certificates useless because:

  The possession of a baptismal certificate often gave protection during a razzia, and some Christian churches were prepared to assist in providing such documents. Later we printed letterheads of fictitious churches. As the Germans had great respect for rubber stamps we invented a real beauty from an imaginary non-existing ‘Dutch Ecumenical Council of Churches’, with a cross and several Latin words. All our certificates were embellished with that stamp.111

  Everything was fine until ‘One day the Jewish Council phoned and said it had genuine Church certificates in its possession, but these had been refused by the SS because they did not have this particular stamp on them’.112 From then on they had to put their fake stamp on all genuine documents to ensure their acceptance by the SS. Unfortunately, Jaap told me the stamp was lost some years ago and cannot be reproduced here.113

  Jaap was born in 1921, the second of five children, to an independently minded advocate in Amsterdam and he too eventually became a lawyer. He describes his mother as having a strong personality but his father as being the main influence. ‘He loved his profession, had a very independent spirit and cared for his clients more than his fees.’114 As a young man he knew nothing about Jews, having attended both a Protestant school and university. The law firm he joined in 1942 was called Van Krimpen & Kotting. The Sephardi Jewish community had approached the firm to get some sort of protection from persecution for its members. Dutch Jews were being deported regularly from Amsterdam and whilst the firm started the work acting legally, eventually it became clear to Jaap and his colleagues that the only effective way to save Jews from the Nazis was to prove that they were not Jewish, and accordingly they began acting illegally.

  The Germans had invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. After vicious air bombardment the country capitulated on 14 May, Queen Wilhelmina and the government having fled to London. A civilian German administrator, the Austrian Artur Seyss-Inquart, was installed on 18 May 1940 and independent Dutch control ended.115 There were 140,000 Jews in Holland at this time, of whom 30,000 were refugees from Germany and Austria, and the majority – 80,000 – lived in Amsterdam. Seventy-five per cent of these Jews were murdered by the Nazis and a major tool was the Joodsche Raad (Jewish Council), created under duress on 12 February 1941, ostensibly to prevent disturbances between Jews and Dutch Nazis. On 9 May 1942 the wearing of the yellow star was made compulsory.116

  Jaap has explained that Holland had very detailed population records. ‘It had a meticulous population register which traced most people back to the time of Napoleon’ and they therefore realised the only chance of success was to prove to the German authorities that people were not Jewish. In one particular case, Jaap even managed to convince them that a man who was chairman of his synagogue was not even remotely Jewish.117

  This work was based on the fact that:

  If you were single and could prove that you had two non-Jewish grandparents, then you were considered a non-Jew. In the case where a Jew was married to a non-Jew, proof of two non-Jewish grandparents was also required. If a Jew was married to another Jew, it was then necessary to have three non-Jewish grandparents. All the cases Kotting and I dealt with were illegitimate and we had to forge documents and falsify papers.118

  Jaap had been asked to help Dr Hans Georg Calmeyer, the civil administrator during the occupation of the Netherlands, who dealt with racial classification. Calmeyer ultimately decided whether someone was Jewish or not. His decision determined who was sent to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork and then on to labour or death camps.

  Before he got involved, Jaap made several visits to The Hague to meet the officials who were dealing with this vital documentation:

  I travelled daily to The Hague for three weeks and made copies of official rubber stamps and the handwriting of the officials, studied the internal procedures and befriended the staff. My partner, Mr Kotting, persuaded the Dutch secretary in Calmeyer’s office to accept a monthly payment equal to her official salary. From then onwards we had access to all Calmeyer’s other files as well. All this information was very valuable for what we were to do later with other applications.119

  Jaap was plausible because he was young, blonde and innocent-looking. Calmeyer approved of Jaap initially because he prepared a list of people who he felt were not worth saving. This impressed Calmeyer who believed in Jaap’s ‘“honest and loyal” work, and he trusted me as a professional, honest and trustworthy person from that time until the end of the War. (Little did he know that the names we gave him were of people who no longer existed.)’120 After the war, Calmeyer refused to accept he had been misled by Jaap. ‘But van Proosdij was always honest and had no part in those lies,’ he claimed.121

  In 1942 the SS started urging Calmeyer to hasten the process of classification and fill a weekly deportation train holding 1,000 people. This policy was relentlessly pursued, reducing the Netherlands’ population of 140,000 Jews to 40,000 by September 1944, when the Arnhem allied offensive destroyed the railway lines. Jaap van Proosdij recalls one horrific occasion when, in desperation to fill their weekly Tuesday ‘quota’, the SS rounded up every man, woman and child – whether patient, medical staff or visitor – in the Jewish psychiatric hospital at Apeldoorn, and herded all 1,500 of them into the death train.122

  Looking back, Jaap admitted they used an excellent forger and ‘faked marriage certificates, entered false b
irth certificates in church registers, and forged baptismal certificates and counterfeit papers attesting to secret adoptions which showed that the person had not been born Jewish’.123 This was all done at great personal risk; had he and the rest of the team been discovered at any time, they would have been executed. One particular girl whom he saved from Westerbork grew up to become a paediatrician and visited him in South Africa in the 1960s. He said it was a very emotional time and they talked well into the night about what had happened. He commented that it was the first time he had felt safe to talk about what he had done.124

  Even before the war was over, Jaap was planning how to restore Jewish property to its owners. He set up a committee which, in effect, drafted the legislation and subsequently handled many cases. ‘We handled a lot of those cases – you should have seen how irritated the top lawyers got with me, this cheeky young upstart who had specialised in these laws.’125 Restitution work became his speciality until he emigrated in 1951. In South Africa he had to re-qualify and then had what he describes as ‘a low key practice’.126

  With the war over, Jaap married his sister’s best friend in 1947. In 1951 they emigrated to South Africa – a country which in due course became a pariah state because of its racial policy. He notes:

  Nothing can compare to the pure evil of the Nazis, who organised the scientific murder of millions of Jews. In South Africa it was oppression, not annihilation. But the frightening connection is that in both cases there was a total intolerance and lack of respect for another race – which is unacceptable on any level.127

  Jaap acknowledges the influence of his parents. ‘We were brought up with high ethical standards, which together with your religion, I believe, contribute to you acting righteously.’ He adds: ‘Why did most people not help the Jews? You should ask them. Maybe they were not in a position to do so, or were too scared. It is possible, of course, that maybe they just didn’t care about their fellow beings.’128