The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  She moved to Berlin after the war and died in 1975 in the Jewish old-age home. She left all the family property in Chmielno to the Stenzels in gratitude for what they did for her. Doris Stiefel, whose father was one of Else’s cousins, met the Stenzels’ daughter, Dorota Prycskowska, in 1992 when she took the photographs. Dorota had been a young girl during the war and she still lived in the family home where Else was hidden, with some memory of those years. She died on 17 February 2006 aged 85.

  János Tóth. Naomi Szinai (born 1924, née Mayer) grew up in Hajdudorog, Hungary, which was a village of 12,000 people with a few hundred Jews. Her father was one of five doctors in the village:

  He must have built up a busy practice fairly quickly which provided them with a reasonable, rather than big income as the largely peasant population could not afford to pay too much for their health care. Furthermore, Father treated lots of his patients who could not afford to pay free of charge or for a nominal fee.139

  Naomi was the eldest of three children and had a happy childhood. Their father’s surgery was in their home so the family were involved in opening the door to patients and answering the telephone. They also sometimes accompanied him on house calls when they could have private chats. In the winter they went on a toboggan in the snow which was great fun. They were educated up until the age of 14 in the town and lived in a Jewish circle. Many of this circle were murdered by the Nazis. Life was relatively primitive with limited running water in the houses and drinking water brought up from the well by the maids. They took holidays at a Jewish hotel in Ujhuta in the Bukk mountains: ‘In the summer we used to go on holiday with Mother; Father would only come for a day or two as he wouldn’t leave his patients for longer.’140

  Anti-Semitism was a fact of life from an early age. The Hungarians broke windows in Jewish houses when drunk and shouted nasty things. In school there were many comments – some more unpleasant than others. Once the war started, although Hungary was not occupied by the Nazis until March 1944, Jewish men were called up for forced labour and Dr Mayer was often called for medical service. Her parents listened to Hungarian broadcasts from London to hear the real news rather than Hungarian propaganda, but because it was forbidden Naomi used to stand outside the house and run in to warn them if anyone approached.

  Naomi had decided to flee her hometown even before the Jews were sent to the Ghetto. She decided to get work as a servant, but to do this she needed false papers. She wrote of her father’s influence on her success:

  My father was the local doctor. He had always looked after his patients devotedly and one, in our hour of need, was willing to repay my father’s kindness, although this put his job, his liberty and even his life at risk. He was a clerk in the registrar’s office and so was in a position to provide false documents for me, with which I could pass as an Aryan.141

  Naomi recalls the clerk’s name as János Tóth and told me her sister Elizabeth had written to commend him to Yad Vashem.142 As a result of her false papers, she was able to obtain work as a servant in a nearby town. She presented herself at a hiring market where the servants waited for prospective employees, who inspected them and negotiated wages – similar to the traditional ‘hiring fairs’ in rural England. Naomi has described what happened there:

  A large heavily-scented woman stopped in front of me and asked for my service book, a document which every domestic servant had to have. ‘What’s your name, girl?’ she asked. ‘Maria Falus’, I answered, controlling the tremor in my voice as I pronounced my new name for the first time. She looked at my service book. ‘Why, you have not worked before and you are 18 now.’ Most peasant girls went into service at 14. I had my answer ready. ‘My mother was ill, I had to stay at home and help with the household and the younger children.’ This satisfied her and she started to bargain about wages.143

  Naomi was taken on because she was prepared to take low wages. She worked in the dingy commercial hotel owned by her mistress and husband and looked after their spoilt 6-year-old son. It was very hard work from early in the morning until 11 p.m. and she slept on a camp bed in the kitchen. She was terrified to hear one day that the Jews had been sent into a Ghetto and feared for her family. One day, she was taking the little boy for his afternoon walk when she came across a new fence 20ft high – the Ghetto was behind it. The boy threw some stones at the fence and she was just about to stop him when the guard came up and joked with the boy about the locked-up Jews.144

  One afternoon, when she took him to the playground, the children lost interest in the sandpit and said: ‘let’s play Magyars and Jews’. She was made to play the Jew and the boys pointed their toy guns at her. She was gripped by terror and passed out. As she came round she heard people claiming she was a Jewess and others agreed. Whilst they were considering getting the police, an old lady asked her twice if she was ‘expecting’. Naomi took a minute to understand and then admitted she was three months gone and began to cry.145 The old lady saved her by her compassion and presence of mind.

  Naomi was so troubled and looked so pale that the master was concerned that she was ill and his son might catch something. They therefore sent her to the clinic:

  The waiting room was full and I was rigid with fear that someone would recognise the doctor’s eldest daughter. I hid behind a newspaper. This brought its own terror, with the news of the hunt for Jews. It described the heavy penalties for people who hid Jews or tried to help them in any way. It had news of the capture and execution of fugitive Jews …

  Just then the surgery door opened and I was the next patient. I looked at the doctor and we recognised each other instantly. He was one of my father’s colleagues. ‘My name is Maria Falus’, I said quickly.

  He shut the door and both the nurse and he were silent. I knew what went through his mind. Could he risk not reporting me to the police? Would the nurse give him away, or blackmail him later? I saw them exchange a long glance, while I held my breath in terror.

  Then a nod signalled agreement between them. My luck had held. They were not going to give me away. He took my hand ostensibly to feel my pulse, but I knew he wanted to reassure me and to wish me well. I relaxed and smiled gratefully as I took my prescription from him. He too was to give me strength in the dark days to come, when I recalled his kindness and courage.146

  But Naomi became scared and abandoned her job to return home. Now Hungary was occupied life became difficult for all Jews. Her sister noted that she was the one who made the yellow stars all Jews were forced to wear and stitched them onto their clothes. ‘It had to be a certain kind of yellow, described as canary yellow. Ex-school friends made remarks on the street on meeting us with our yellow star. Life was becoming more and more unpleasant.’147

  Their father was taken away to provide medical service and the women were sent to the Ghetto in Hajdudorog. Their father and the only boy Imre ended up in Mauthausen camp, but, miraculously, the family of five all survived the Holocaust and in 1951 were all together again safely in Israel, although Naomi had married in 1948. She now lives in North London. None of this would have happened if the registrar’s clerk, János Tóth, and the doctor had not protected Naomi in war-torn Hungary out of loyalty to her father. As Mr and Mrs Bela Grunfeld declared, János Tóth continued to be a true friend of the Jews:

  We have known János Tóth since his youth; he was well known in our township for his liberal attitude. In the 1940s he was a civil servant working for the district council. During that time, which corresponded with the years of persecution of Jews, all his actions were directed at supporting and assisting the victims of fascism. During those difficult times, he was the only source of news for us, especially regarding political developments.148

  He later proved to be a real hero by personally saving a Jew from being thrown off a train by a group of Hungarian soldiers:

  In this regard we can attest to the following: On a particular day in the summer of 1944, my brother-in-law/brother Arnold Weinstock was returning by train from Debrecen to Hajdudor
og. A number of soldiers in the carriage started screaming at him, ‘Don’t you know, you stinking Jew, that you are not allowed to travel’, they then grabbed him and wanted to throw him off the speeding train. Mr Tóth, having witnessed these events, stood across the door and managed to calm the raving soldiers somewhat – it was due to his decisive intervention that my brother(-in-law) was not thrown from the train. This incident was related to us by my brother/brother-in-law. He subsequently perished in a concentration camp.149

  János Tóth himself added to the tale by describing the situation after this confrontation and, incidentally, showing how spontaneous his actions had been:

  Following the events described, a man, a civilian, screamed at me in outrage from the far corner of the carriage: ‘Your Lordship will pay for this!’ I recognised the man as György Molnár, innkeeper, and one of the leaders of the local Arrow Cross [Hungarian Nazi Party]. It was only then that I realised that my action was likely to have dangerous consequences.150

  János Tóth managed to get protection by asking the local medical officer, Dr Imre Olah, who was responsible for the health control of local inns, to help:

  When the innkeeper returned home, he found the doctor at his premises, for the purpose of an official health inspection. The doctor informed Molnár, that if he discussed the events on the train with anyone, or if any harm were to befall my person, the inn will be closed down on health grounds. I was very much afraid, that Molnár would talk of my act to the Nazis and soldiers who regularly drank at his inn, which would undoubtedly have resulted in me and my family being deported.151

  Tóth was really frightened and he was right to be scared. He was attacked twice. Once, in late October 1944, when he was passing another inn owned by József Révész, someone shouted: ‘There goes János Tóth, the hireling of the Jews!’ and six Arrow Cross thugs, including Molnár, came out and chased him. He ran but fired four shots with his pistol and wounded Molnár, so he got away. After the war, the Arrow Cross members formed a number of right-wing political parties and infiltrated the Independent Smallholders Party. At 10 p.m. on 6 March 1946, eighteen months after the liberation of his hometown, ‘a band of 20 members of the Youth Movement of the Independent Smallholders Party attacked me with clubs in the presence of my wife. With the last of my strength, collapsed on the floor, I was able to shoot off my last two bullets. The sound of the shots caused my attackers to flee.’152

  At the end of his declaration, Tóth wrote: ‘After liberation, in my function as district notary, I was able to help returning Jews to trace and restore their property.’ He was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1999.153

  Karl (Charles) Petras (1896–1952). I have included the rescue of Hilde Holger (1905–2001) here because it was very difficult to establish exactly what the motive was for her rescue. Loyalty and friendship seem the most plausible. She was a famous dancer who lived in Camden Town for many decades, still teaching pupils into her late nineties. She was one of the first people to contact me when I advertised in the AJR magazine for people to come forward with their stories. She wrote to me originally in August 2000, when she was 95, to tell me about Karl Petras, an Austrian journalist who saved her life by providing her with a visa for India in 1939. She wrote: ‘Karl Petrascu sent me a visa from India to escape Hitler’s Concentration Camps. He was a Journalist. Unfortunately my whole family was gassed – the war broke out, the frontiers were closed. I can’t be enough grateful [for] what he did for me.’154

  Unfortunately Hilde died before I could get to meet her in London. However, I have recently made contact with her daughter, who is wrestling with her mother’s enormous archive in the house where Hilde lived and taught since the 1950s.

  Hilde was born in 1905 as Hilde Sofer into an Austrian Jewish family in Vienna. Her great-grandparents had shared a house with Johann Strauss:

  Holger’s youth coincided with a cultural flowering in the Austrian capital – the era of the composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, the painters Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the writer Stephan Zweig and the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In her work she was to pay tribute to the spirit of those times.155

  She started to dance as a child of 6 and aged 14 she became a student of the influential and pioneering dance teacher and choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser, with whose dance group she toured Europe in the 1920s. In 1926 she started her own group, the Hilde Holger Tanzgruppe (see plate 35). She also worked as a model for many photographers such as Martin Imboden and Anton Josef Trcka (known as Antios), the painters Felix Albrecht Harta and Benedikt F. Doblin, and was the model for Joseph Heu’s famous 1926 sculpture.

  The Nazis were schizophrenic about her type of expressionist free dancing which they appropriated for use in the 1936 Berlin Olympics whilst at the same time condemning it as ‘degenerate’. She realised difficulties lay ahead when her school was closed by the Nazis, but she and her pupils were desperate to continue expressing themselves through dancing. She wrote how her great friend Felix Harta, who lived and worked in a large warehouse, allowed them to use his studio for dance classes and secret performances. This was a risk because the Gestapo were watching and they had to leave in very small groups to avoid arousing suspicion. ‘These classes, in spite of the dreadful pressure and fears, were of great comfort to us all as we danced and freed ourselves for some hours, from all the horror inflicted on us.’ She subsequently heard from some of these students who survived the Holocaust how important these lessons had been to them at that difficult time.156

  Her memoir records her awareness that failure to acquire a visa for emigration would mean ending up in a concentration camp. She describes how, armed with this knowledge, she contacted all her friends abroad asking them to help her get an exit visa to show the Gestapo she was entitled to leave. She wrote:

  On account of my profession I was known to American friends and I also had a dear friend in India, a Viennese Journalist Charles Petrasch [Karl Petras], to whom I wrote Save my life! And thanks to his prompt action he got an entrance visa for me for India and also found someone to give the guarantee for me not to be a burden on the Indian government.157

  She describes how she had long had an interest in India and its dancing, as well as having Indian friends in Vienna. She received her papers through Petras. She describes how the money given to her for the trip by her kind aunts was stolen by a Nazi who threatened to denounce her to the Gestapo if she did not pay up. His behaviour was illegal but in those times ‘there was no law and no justice’.158

  She left for India on 6 June 1939 and was very upset at saying goodbye to her mother and sister who came to the station to see her off – they knew they would not see each other again, and, in fact, fourteen members of Hilde’s family were murdered at Auschwitz.159 She travelled to Paris and from there by train to Marseilles where she got the P&O boat to India. She arrived in Bombay on 21 June 1939 and was met by Charles Petras and Dr Trivikram. She lived with the doctor and his young pregnant wife when she first arrived. He had his surgery at home and she is said to have slept on his consulting couch.

  Initially, Hilde’s rescuer was a mysterious man because of the limited information I received from her about him, and the little written in her memoir. This was not helped by the variation in the spelling of his name. I believe he changed it from Karl Petras to Charles Petrarch to make it more English sounding in a country that was part of the British Empire. However, the spelling Petrasch is also found.

  Dr Margit Franz of Graz University is researching Exile to India during World War II and has examined Hilde’s archive. I am grateful to her for sharing what she has uncovered. She has written that Hans Glas, an architect and one-time lover of Hilde, emigrated to India in July 1938. He had a contract as an architect in Calcutta and tried to get Hilde to come to India. There are several letters in the archive from him and one, dated 16 October 1938, explains how he had been finding out in Calcutta about earning an income as a dancer. He said it was n
ot a good prospect as dancing was associated with prostitution, and apologised profusely for not being able to be more helpful. Apparently, he was also trying to help his two brothers get to India as well. As a result of this information, Hilde undertook a course for heilmassage (medial massage) prior to her departure from Vienna, presumably to provide another source of income.

  Karl Petras was already in Bombay when Glas arrived in India in 1938. Glas wrote to Hilde that he had been unable to meet Petras on his way to Calcutta but would write to him. So far, all that Dr Franz has discovered about Petras before he came to India is that he was a journalist and interviewed Gandhi in London on 29 October 1931.160 He appears to have been a Renaissance man who was interned as an enemy alien by the British between 1939–45, and during this period he wrote poetry and painted watercolours. He was interned with 1,500 other German, Austrian and Italian enemy aliens in the central internment camp Dehra Dun in the Himalayan foothills near the Nepalese border.161 Hilde tried very hard to get him released. There is a letter in the archive from the Archbishop of Bombay, dated 2 February 1940, apologising for the delay in meeting. On the envelope Hilde has written: ‘Historical letter when I tried to get out from the Camp for aliens my “Arian” friend Carl Petras who was accused to be a Nazi which was not true as he saved my life being Jewish.’

  Karl and Hilde remained close friends during all these years and after his release from the camp he became her manager. Dr Franz surmises this was probably to prove that he had an occupation, because this was one condition for being allowed to stay on in India. He stayed in India for the rest of his life and, having been sympathetic to the Indian liberation struggle for some time, he set up an Institute of Foreign Languages in Bombay as a meeting and mediation place between India and the West. He was the director of what became a successful international centre and in 1950 it expanded to New Delhi as well. He arranged exhibitions, performances, cultural radio programmes, as well as the language courses. He helped young artists in Bombay by showcasing their experimental works in his centre – such as Sayed Haider Raza’s 1950 show. Raza, who was born in 1922, has become one of the most distinguished international Indian artists and he still exhibits around the world. In December 2009 I tracked him down in Paris. Both Primavera and I spoke to him on the telephone but unfortunately, although he remembers that Petras organised the exhibition for him and ran his language centre, he was unable to tell us anything about Karl and what sort of a person he was.