The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  RESCUES MOTIVATED BY LOYALTY

  Maria (Mitzi – née Müller) Saidler (1900–94) was a Roman Catholic woman born in rural Austria. She had acted as a live-in cook to Hermann and Camilla Fleischner for fifteen years when, due to a Nazi decree, she had to move out. It was no longer permitted for an Aryan woman under 50 years of age to live under the same roof as a Jewish man. In any event, since Hermann could no longer earn his livelihood because his wholesale button business had been ‘aryanised’,116 they could not afford to keep her. Nevertheless, Mitzi continued to come to their flat to help Mrs Fleischner who had been an invalid since the early 1930s.

  When they had to leave their home, ‘because a Nazi “required” it’, and had to move elsewhere where they shared a flat with several families, Mitzi continued to visit them and even brought them food. When they were ordered to be resettled at Theresienstadt, Mitzi advised them not to comply and offered to hide them in her own little flat. Because Camilla suffered from poor health, the offer was felt to be impracticable and was declined. Mitzi promptly approached a friend of the Fleischners, a Mrs Sommer, who accepted the offer and stayed with Mitzi from 1942 until the end of the war. Mitzi fed her by sharing her ration card with her. Hiding Jews could incur the death penalty, or at least deportation to a concentration camp, and Mitzi risked that willingly.117

  Otto Fleming, the Fleischners’ son, told me that even after his parents had been sent to Theresienstadt, Mitzi continued to send them food and also co-operated with the Chief Rabbi of Vienna and his wife in sending food parcels to others in Auschwitz. Chief Rabbi Öhler himself was living in the same flat as Otto’s parents, but was protected by a senior Nazi who found him work with the Jewish Archives.118 It appears that the Fleischners were sent to the Chief Rabbi’s own flat along with four other families, so each one occupied a room in the six-bedroomed flat. As a result of the many visits she made, Mitzi and Mrs Öhler became good friends. When Otto and his wife Dorothy went back to visit Mitzi in May 1982, and to collect some valuables that the Fleischners had entrusted to Mitzi, she took them to meet Mrs Öhler, and they saw the room where they had lived.119

  Otto brought Mitzi’s actions to the attention of Yad Vashem, as did Mrs Sommer’s daughter Resi, who had worked as an interpreter in the British Embassy in Tehran during the war. She was honoured by attending with her daughter, planting a tree in the Grove of the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem in March 1981; subsequently Mitzi was honoured by the Israeli Embassy in Vienna.

  My informant, the Fleischners’ son, Otto Fleming, died in 2007. He had written about his family and their life in Vienna. He explained that he only experienced anti-Semitism at the end of his time at the gymnasium, which must have been around 1932 as he was born in 1914. Apparently the head boy took him on one side:

  He said that we had always got along well but he had now joined the National Socialist Party (the Nazis). He had nothing against me personally but I should understand that, from now on, he would no longer be able to speak to me. I think that was very decent and when I saw him again in 1980 and he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, I felt very sorry for him.120

  After he had matriculated, he decided to study medicine, even though life was becoming difficult for Jewish students, who were being attacked and beaten up even on university premises. He started in 1933 and suffered considerable prejudice from all sides, but one of the most memorable occasions was when a lone woman harangued him and a friend in the street. In March 1938 he was about to take his final medical examinations when the Anschluss prevented Jews from taking finals. Jews began to be attacked in the street or dragged off to camps. He rarely left his home and eventually decided to leave Austria. However, it was not easy to find a country willing to take desperate Jews, who could be dragged off as they waited in long queues outside various embassies. Otto managed to get a ticket to Shanghai but, as he also acquired a visitor’s visa to Palestine, he left Austria in July 1938 and spent some years there. In 1942 he joined the British army, and after the war completed his medical qualifications, eventually becoming a GP in South Yorkshire. In 1999 he was invited back to Vienna to receive an honorary doctorate from the university, sixty-one years late.121

  Otto wrote of returning to Vienna with apprehension:

  All the time we were in Vienna I felt uneasy every time I met a man in my age group. I always had to think, ‘Is this the man who killed my parents?’ But I was also reunited with some old schoolfriends who greeted me very warmly.

  In the ’80s my wife and I were holidaying in Seefeld. As we walked past an elderly man, we heard him murmuring, ‘There’s too many foreigners here again, we should do some gassing and injecting’. It was after that that we decided not to take holidays in Austria again.122

  Otto’s wife Dorothy, who came from Vienna in the Kindertransport, told me the first time she met Mitzi was in August 1958 when they were staying with a family friend of Otto’s near Saltsburg. Otto became ill and Mitzi brought him traditional chicken soup and Knaidlach (matzo dumplings) which his mother had taught her to make. She gave them some family possessions she had been guarding since the war. After that visit, Mitzi married a railway worker by the name of Saidler and had a daughter but was later widowed. The next time they saw her was at Yad Vashem when she was honoured as Maria Saidler on 29 March 1981. The third time they saw her was in May 1982, when the Flemings took their three children to Vienna and Prague to show them their ‘roots’. They saw Mitzi in her flat and met her daughter. Mitzi took them to see the Öhler flat where Otto’s parents had lived until their transportation to Theresienstadt in 1942; they had subsequently been murdered in Auschwitz in October 1944.123 Hermann was 63 and Camilla 62.

  During this 1993 trip they also visited the Fleischners’ former home where they were welcomed by Resi Sommer – the daughter of Mrs Sommer whom Mitzi had hidden in her tiny flat. As the Russians attacked at the end of the war, Mrs Sommer had rushed back to the Fleischners’ flat and claimed it back from the Nazis living there, in case the family returned. Apparently, not long after this 1993 visit, Mitzi moved into a retirement home run by the railways, as she was becoming forgetful and was not deemed safe on her own. She died in 1994 aged 94.124

  It appears that Mitzi’s motivation was loyalty to the Fleischners and a desire to help people for whom she had worked for many years and with whom she had a good relationship. This loyalty was extended to their friend Mrs Sommer. Otto has said of her: ‘She was a simple woman who knew what was right and wrong.’125

  Mr & Mrs Stenzel. Else Pintus (1893–1975) was hidden for two and half years by a family called Stenzel in Danzig.126 Else was born in Chmielno, the youngest of eight children. She never married and kept house for her brother Heinz, a watchmaker in Kartuzy (formerly Karthaus). In 1947 she wrote a war memoir in the format of a letter to her brothers Gustav and Paul, who with Else were the only three to survive the Holocaust. Gustav was hidden in Germany and Paul lived in Shanghai with his wife and child during the war.

  Else claimed the Stenzels hid her because they had a good relationship with her parents. When the Stenzels’ last cow died, they were in desperate financial straits, and Else and her brother Heinz were the only ones prepared to lend them money. The Stenzels therefore hid her out of loyalty. Doris Stiefel (née Pintus) translated Else’s diary from the original German in 1998. Doris’ father Richard Pintus was one of Else’s first cousins and they corresponded regularly after the war. Doris, who now lives in Seattle, thinks the reason they helped her was as follows:

  It seems that in the case of the Stenzels, as in others, humanitarian motivation, depending on how that is defined, was based on a warm, personal and long-lasting relationship that existed between those doing the saving and the individual saved. [The] Stenzels willingly risked their own lives for Else Pintus but it is hard to imagine that they would have done it for any Jew who happened along. Else repeatedly remarks on their kindness to her. To my thinking, [the] Stenzels were very decent simple country folk, who ob
viously were not of Nazi ideology.127

  Else described in her diary how they took her in on 14 December 1942:

  Mrs Stenzel immediately recounted the time when things had gone badly for them and the sheriff was after them, when even the last of their cows succumbed, and then Heinz, without being asked, had loaned them money. She had come at that time and talked about all their bad luck. She had not asked for anything, just mentioned that neither family nor friends were willing to help. We had just received the rent for the lake. I happened to be busy in the kitchen at the time and Heinz came to me and asked if we shouldn’t give them the rent money, things were going so badly for them. I immediately agreed, and so she took the rent – speechless, because she had neither asked for nor expected to receive any help. With our money then they pulled themselves up again. First they got the sheriff off their back, bought another cow, and then started taking in summer guests.128

  Else continually stressed the Stenzels’ goodness in spite of the great personal risks they were running. However, she had a very difficult time at the hands of Regina, the elder daughter of the family, who treated her like a slave and severely exploited the situation. Else had arrived at the Stenzels in December 1942, initially to stay only until the following summer, but in fact she remained hidden until 25 March 1945 and did not experience any fresh air in all that time. Her room was an attic room under a ‘low cardboard-thin roof, the place approximately 3 meters long, 2 meters wide – where they stored junk. In the summer it was hot like an oven, in the winter icy cold. In the winter my breath froze the bed to my nose.’129 She describes how difficult it was to be incarcerated:

  On the street I could see and hear acquaintances. The window I dared open only a tiny crack. I was afraid that I would be seen from the street and recognized. Would I ever walk that street again, as a free person? Often I despaired of it. How often I was reminded of the song, ‘Freedom, it is mine.’ One had sung it at school without understanding its meaning. Now I knew what it meant to be free. [The] Stenzels brought the food up to me; but had to make sure that neither the maid nor the children noticed it. For me, the worst and most embarrassing was the toilet arrangement. A bucket for the night was placed in the hallway at the window next to my door, ostensibly for Regina, who also lived upstairs. In the morning the children had to bring it down.130

  The ordeal of being confined but yet hearing ordinary lives going on is a common theme in the memoirs of persecuted Jews from the Holocaust. One experience that has always stayed in my mind since I first read it in 1995, is that of Eva Heyman who could be described as a Hungarian Anne Frank – she even addresses her diary as a person like Anne did.

  Eva was a 13-year-old girl in the Ghetto in Nagyvárad, where my father was born. She kept a diary for a few months in 1944 before she was deported to Auschwitz, where the notorious Mengele selected her and himself pushed her onto a truck to be killed on 17 October 1944.131 Eva chronicled her time in the Ghetto and on 14 May 1944 describes hearing the ice-cream seller’s bell ringing outside. She comments that looking out of the window was punishable by death, so she could not see him, but she and her cousin Marica heard him:

  This afternoon I and Marica heard the icecream vendor ringing. As you know, we can’t look out through the window, because even for that we can be killed. But we’re still allowed to hear, and so I and Marica heard the icecream vendor ringing his bell on the other side of the fence. I like icecream, and I must say that I like the icecream they sell in cones on the street much more than the icecream they sell in confectionery shops, even though in the confectionery shops it’s much more expensive! Formerly, whenever I used to hear the icecream vendor’s bell, I would dash to the gate. Mostly I would ask for a lemon cone. But if I didn’t hear the bell, Ági [Eva’s mother] and Grandma or Juszti or Mariska would rush outside and bring the lemon cone. Ági liked to say that in front of our house, the icecream vendor ‘is sure to earn something’ – that is, he was certain to sell at least one cone.

  Once that poor icecream pedlar was very sad, because one of his children was sick. I went with him to grandpa’s pharmacy and he gave him medicine free of charge. I remember that for a long time he didn’t come, but then he brought a huge lemon cone and wouldn’t take any money for it. Of course, I don’t know, because I can’t see, if the one ringing on the other side of the fence is the same icecream man who used to come to us, but in all of Várad there were just two icecream pedlars. Maybe it really was him, and now he is sad because his customers are locked up behind the fence. I think he must remember me, because I went with him to Grandpa that time for the medicine for his boy. Marica and I even told each other how well off the icecream man’s boy is now, better off than we are; anybody in the world is better off than us, because they all can do whatever they want and go wherever they want, and only we are in the Ghetto.132

  Adina Szwajger, who was a 22-year-old medical student working in the Ghetto hospital, recalled the defeat of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt on 19 April 1943, when the Luftwaffe dropped incendiary bombs until the place was engulfed in flames. There was shooting and Jews leapt from burning buildings, but meanwhile, literally a few feet away outside the Ghetto, ‘the merry-go-round went round and jolly music played. And people enjoyed themselves.’ Polish families had come from Easter services in nearby churches to spend time in Krasinski Park just outside the Ghetto wall. She later returns to the same theme: ‘But I remember the laughter of the children. Because they were playing, and going round on the merry-go-round. And the music was playing.’133

  To return to Else’s story, she wrote that the Stenzels’ house was geared up to having guests in the summer – presumably paying guests, because she describes a variety of different people who stayed in the house whilst she was incarcerated. She records at various times police boarding at the house, and fanatical Nazis who were relatives from Berlin with two children aged 3 and 6. She describes her difficulties with these curious children around:

  Often they try the doorknob, rattle the door, spy through the keyhole and cuss at Regina – I had to cover the keyhole and all cracks. [The] Stenzels warned me whatever I did, not to reveal myself. The Berlin children were all over the place. To bring food up to me was very difficult. Even worse was the toilet business. In the oppressive heat, under the cardboard-thin roof, I didn’t take a drop of liquid, suppressed my thirst, just to dry up my bladder. I couldn’t fall asleep at night for fear that I might give myself away whilst I slept; I was afraid I might sigh.134

  The continual fear of being betrayed tormented her and her rescuers. The Gestapo used to come at night and she always got dressed so that she could claim that she had just arrived. Towards the end of the war, in January 1945, Else writes of eighty SS men being quartered at the Stenzels’. They were searching for deserters and partisans. They were 18-to 20-year-old hooligans who terrified everyone because they had some dangerous Ukrainians with them. They ransacked houses, searching with dogs. She wrote:

  Now I thought my final hour had come, five minutes before the closing of the gates. Even [the] Stenzels, who had always appeared very calm or at least never showed me otherwise, now got very nervous. They wanted to entrust someone to get me some kind of papers but I was afraid again of bringing another person into the know. I didn’t want to have the whole family Stenzel on my conscience and now had to prepare to end my life.135

  Although Else had some poison, her courage failed her, so she was still alive when suddenly, after four weeks, the SS left. The Russians finally liberated the area on 10 March 1945; however they all hid in the cellar due to fear of the Russians’ activities, and Else later found them to be anti-Semitic. She describes her emergence from hiding:

  That was the first time, from December 14, 1942 until March 25, 1945, that I got out into the fresh air. The last few days spent entirely in the cellar. I came outside and immediately became dizzy. And, to my dismay, I could hardly walk. Through my thin shoes the cobblestones dug into my feet like pins. The soles of my feet had b
ecome soft like an infant’s. I had become so afraid of people that I didn’t want to be seen by anyone. On top of which there was the fear that the Russians might yet be beaten back. On the move to the parsonage though, I was seen. It went like wildfire through the village. People I knew came to visit and to invite me. But I didn’t want to go anywhere; it took a long time till I got used to the fresh air.136

  Else survived the war thanks to the Stenzels. Ironically, after the war they had to prove that they had not been Nazi supporters and had been good to the Poles. The fact that they had protected Else was in their favour and she was the major witness for them. Else told her brothers that she was the only Jew to have survived in the Kartuzy region, and the only Jewish people in Danzig came from the East. ‘Of the Jews we had once known, no one is left here.’137

  In 1949 Else wrote of her life to Erich Pintus, an uncle of Doris Stiefel. She wrote very sadly:

  I’m alive, more or less healthy and you’ve got to be pleased with just that. Apart from that I vegetate here, lonely, deserted and forgotten by everybody, the only Jewess in the whole area of Karthaus, no relatives or acquaintances here – all either murdered or emigrated. I get by as housemaid or something like that. What that means for me at 56 only you can tell. Lucky the people who were able to turn their backs on Europe in time.138