The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  In the Holger archive there is a press cutting on faded Financial Times pink paper, dated 13 February 1951, describing the cultural activities at the centre in New Delhi. It refers to language classes in Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Russian and Spanish. In January 1951 the Swiss inister in New Delhi opened a posthumous art exhibition by the Swiss artist Molly Ruetschi. A play by Shaw was presented and a recital by ‘the British songstress Miss Victoria Kingsley’. Future plans were for an ‘Indian Week’ with dance and music events, and distinguished Indian guests were going to lecture on aspects of Indian cultural life.162

  When I visited Hilde’s daughter she showed me an invitation for Hilde Holger and Karl Petras to attend an Art Preview on 3 January 1949 in Bombay, and on 15 February 1951 Karl wrote to Hilde from New Delhi on rather ‘art deco’ notepaper for his Institute of Foreign Languages, where again he was described as Charles Petras, Director. I also saw wonderful photographs of Hilde dancing.

  Hilde had a difficult life and her daughter Primavera enumerated her problems for me. She had become a dancer and then taught dancing to earn a living; she fled Hitler and lost many members of her family in Auschwitz and came with no money to an exotic country. Having married a Parsee doctor and homeopath, Dr Ardeshire Kavasji Boman-Behram, her first child was stillborn. Then she had her daughter Primavera and a son Darius, who had Down’s syndrome and holes in the heart. After the murder of Gandhi, whom she had met, she came to England in 1948, but around 1962 her husband left her for someone else. Her daughter eventually brought them together again many years later and they remarried. Subsequently, her husband said that although she was very difficult to live with, he had enormous respect for her.

  Like many survivors, she suffered from guilt that she had escaped when relatives had not. She seems to have had the gift of friendship, supporting others and teaching young people right until the end. She kept up to date by reading the newspapers every day and the house was always full of people who she helped and who helped her. It is extraordinary to consider that but for Karl Petras, her eighty-year career as a dancer might have been tragically terminated with the rest of her family in the Holocaust.

  Karl Petras, however, over-worked, and after suffering a heat-stroke, died in Delhi on 1 July 1952.163 But the mysterious Karl/Charles had saved a most remarkable woman. As Julia Pascal wrote:

  Her achievements in Britain were more those of an educator than as a dancer, and her fame here never reached the peak it enjoyed in pre-Nazi Vienna. None the less, she gave to future generations a link to a rich cultural heritage that Hitler failed to efface.164

  Dr Franz has explained the visa/affidavit situation for refugees from Europe:

  Apparently, as a result of the number of refugees seeking entry to India, the British had annulled the visa-abolition agreement with Germany and Austria following the Anschluss in March 1938. The refugees had to reassure two authorities and administration units, the British in London and the British Indian government in New Delhi, of two essentials regarding their stay in British India:

  1. not to be of any security risk

  2. not to be a financial burden

  The new rules for visas indicated that the applicant had to be in possession of a valid national passport bearing a visa for India given by a British passport or consular authority, a return-ticket – even if the possibility of return was restricted by Germany – and two affidavits signed and verified by British Indian or British citizens guaranteeing the refugee’s maintenance in India or a possible re-patrification. Additionally, a guarantee of employment was very helpful, and in some cases essential, as the number of sponsorships British or British-Indian persons could offer to refugees were limited. After intense negotiations, the Jewish Relief Association was able to sign for refugees’ maintenance and overtake these sponsorships with the beginning of the year 1939. Jewish families like the Ezras in Calcutta or the Sasoons in Bombay were able to offer financial guarantees that also contributed massively to the work of the Relief Association.

  I note from my own parents’ Austrian passports that we too had similar conditions imposed on our entry into England on 24 May 1947. We were initially only allowed in for two months and forbidden from undertaking employment, paid or unpaid.

  PAID RESCUERS

  Before we leave the subject of rescuers, we should note that not all rescuers were altruistic. Some did it purely for money without showing any concern about their charge other than to keep them safe to ensure maximum payment. One Polish woman, who may well not have been alone, was paid both by Jewish and Polish Resistance groups for one child. Pani Borciñska took a young Jewish girl, Margarita Turkov, into her apartment in Warsaw on 18 August 1942 when she was 8½ years old. Margarita was to be known as Maria Konrad, nickname Marysia. Margarita was fortunate that her looks were not typically Jewish. With light brown hair and hazel eyes, she could pass as a normal Polish child. Months later she noted: ‘I was considered lucky to be able to go about freely, nothing about me to suggest I might be Jewish.’165

  On her first night with this strange woman, an air raid forced them into the cellars. In a pause between blasts, someone commented, ‘Nothing to worry, they just want to drop a few on the Ghetto – finish off the kikes’ and giggled. This made her cry and say she wanted to go back to her mummy. To cover up, Pani Borciñska told everyone in general: ‘this relative of hers had just arrived from the country because her parents had been sent for labor in Germany and the child was still confused’.166

  Her recent traumatic experiences left her fearful, compounded now by the harsh treatment she was receiving, and she began to wet the bed. This caused her endless unpleasantness with her guardian who was not a kindly soul and beat her incessantly.167 But Margarita writes that she was not really cruel just bad tempered:

  Pani Borciñska did not want me to stay in order to have a victim to torture. She originally agreed to temporarily take in a Jewish child for the money she would get for it, and she ended up getting paid from two sources, the Jewish and the Polish underground resistance organizations, one not knowing the other was paying. She did not intend to be unkind but could not help it that I provoked her so.

  Pan Borciñski, her husband, was a blond, blue eyed, squat man with a gentle mien. He never wanted to take in a Jewish child because he did not want to endanger the family, especially his beloved Bozenka [their daughter two years older than Margarita]. But his wife prevailed and he agreed to the temporary arrangement. Then, when the money began to make a difference in their lives, she convinced him they might as well continue, their lives being in danger anyway since he belonged to the Resistance in which also Danusia [the eldest daughter aged 20+] and Bogdan [son aged 15] began to play increasingly active roles. And so he agreed to that as well.168

  She contrasts his kindness to her with his wife’s behaviour, and notes how difficult she found it:

  The constant terror in which I lived made it impossible for me to respond affectionately and I just wished he would stop being kind. I learned how to brace myself to bear cruelty – the feeling of gratitude for all his small gestures of kindness and sympathy was too much of a burden. What I found especially hard to bear were the nights he would come home drunk and berate his wife for treating me the way she did. They would start fighting and it invariably ended up with her beating him up. I would rather take the blows myself than have that sweet, gentle man suffer them for trying against the odds to protect me.169

  Perhaps the greatest shock Margarita received, not long after her arrival, was when she was told to call her hosts uncle and auntie. On that particular evening she was washing her feet before going to bed when the son, Bogdan:

  A lanky, blond boy with gray-green eyes and a streetwise air kept watching me and asked with a smirk, ‘How does it feel to wash yourself with a soap made out of your brothers and sisters?’ I looked up uncomprehending while Auntie hissed at me to be careful lest I leave some spots, at the same time telling Bogdan to shut up. I was looking now
at Uncle who was seated at the kitchen table and had put down the newspaper he had been reading. There was pain on his face as he gently answered my look, ‘Yes, it’s true, I am afraid. The soap we get is made in the camps of Jewish fat.’ I stared at him while this information was sinking in. I still did not know about the camps. Bogdan could not stop himself from adding, ‘And new lamp shades from their skin.’ At this point he received a blow from Auntie who advised him to keep his trap shut or he would really get it from her, while he protested that I might as well know what was what.170

  Margarita’s memoir is quite terrible to read as it narrates the way she hardened herself to the treatment which was so alien to her previous experience. She writes of auntie’s nastiness to her own children which alternated with demonstrations of affection, particularly to Bozenka, who was obviously her favourite. Both in the memoir and in subsequent correspondence she stresses her shock:

  When she got into one of her fits, she was liable to hand it out to them as well, but they were used to her and had learned how to protect themselves. I had never before experienced anybody talking or behaving in such a manner and my constant state of shock was only slowly turning into numbness, my being encased in a hard shell.171

  Although Pani Borciñska treated her with utter contempt, she never accused her of stealing, and when her little hoard of money disappeared she asked Margarita who had taken it. She knew it was Bogdan, but before she could respond Pani had confronted him:

  he wanted to know why she should suspect him and not the Jewish bitch. She began to beat him but he managed to escape and run out into the landing. Convinced that I had told on him, he screamed at the top of his voice, as he started running down the stairs, ‘Yes, believe a slandering Yid! The f***ing good for nothing kike is now more valuable to you than your own flesh and blood!!’ Fortunately nobody was around to hear this and Auntie managed to run after him and drag him back into the apartment. This time he really got it from her.172

  Actually, auntie kept her until Russia liberated Poland and her father came for her:

  She had been keeping me now for a long time without any money for me coming in and she was willing to continue keeping me on the chance that my parents or some other relatives had survived and would handsomely remunerate her for all the trouble and expense I caused her. Otherwise, she had a plan to sell me to some peasants.173

  Pani was lucky and so was Margarita, who was planning how to escape if she was sold. When Margarita’s father turned up to collect her in the spring of 1945 he settled the debt. Margarita recalls that he went back to his office and borrowed from whoever he could, and then returned a few hours later ‘with the cash and I left with him’.174

  Margarita was thoroughly traumatised by her whole experience, and even though her parents survived to take her to America in December 1947, her life has been scarred by these events:

  Counselling was not known in those days. My parents thought it was enough to have me back with them and while they were aware (at least to some extent) of what I went through during the time with Mrs Borciñska they had no clue to what extent I was damaged. Years of therapy after I grew up did not touch upon that experience and only recently, a new therapeutic approach helped me relive and accept those emotions which were buried and denied all the years and which, among other causes, prevented me from having any fulfilment in life – till now; and this therapy was what enabled me to write about those times.175

  A final case of someone who paid for safety was Lea Goodman’s parents, who voluntarily entered the Kostrze camp near Krakow in September 1942. Lea had been born in 1935 in Krakow and was an only child. In 1941 the family of three moved to Dzialoszyce, her mother’s hometown. However, on the eve of the mass deportation of Jews they travelled to Kostrze. Lea was 7 at this time.

  The camp’s commandant was a German engineer called Richard Strauch whom Lea described as an opportunist like Schindler. She believes her parents may have paid to stay. The camp had Jewish guards and there were Jewish secretaries in his office in the town. Lea remembers visiting the office. After they had been there a short time, Richard Strauch told Lea’s parents that the authorities had learned there were children in the camp and he could not keep them anymore. He found places for them all in an orphanage in the Ghetto:

  We were about twenty children in a horse-drawn cart. We were all quite happy; it seemed as we were going on an excursion. My father followed the cart and after some kilometres, in a suburb of Krakow, my father took me off and said I was going to say goodbye to friends, and rejoin the children in the Ghetto, which of course I did not. If I had I would probably not be alive.176

  Lea was placed with a Christian family, Mr and Mrs Soltisova, who were business friends of her father, and she believes her survival was due to being with them. Lea’s father was arrested by the Nazis at the end of 1942 when he left his work party to go into a shop which was forbidden to Jews. He did not survive the war.

  Her mother then joined Lea and they moved from place to place. Eventually they heard that travel to Hungary from Poland through Slovakia was possible with the help of the Underground. Lea’s memories of their journey from Krakow are clear; as there was snow on the ground she thought it was February or March. In the small group of six or eight was a girl strapped to a relative who carried her – she had lost the use of her legs from being hidden in a confined space. The guide disappeared and they eventually found their way back to Krakow.177

  Left with nowhere to go, they turned up at her mother’s old dressmaker who took them in. She kept them for free – perhaps out of loyalty. There was also a Christian teacher who her mother used to meet in the street, who she believes gave her money and addresses of places to stay. They stayed in three different places and had to pay ‘danger money’ to be lodged. However, Lea and her mother made another attempt to reach Slovakia – and survived – and she remembers the drama of crossing the border at night. She commented: ‘The Slovaks, who at that time were still an axis power of the Germans, behaved with humanity towards illegal refugees and that could not be said most of the time of the neutral Swiss, who in similar situations like ours sent people back to occupied France.’178

  Their real good fortune was that they started their journey late in the war, March 1944, and never reached Hungary where they might have joined the thousands sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. As Lea has written: ‘We stayed in Slovakia, where we were liberated by the glorious Russian army.’179

  Lea always wondered how the guides and the forays across the borders were organised. She eventually read Robert Rozett’s article which told her:

  From February 1943 until March 1944 an extraordinary and, in many ways, unique rescue operation took place. Zionist youth-movement members, veteran Zionist and Orthodox anti-Zionists in Slovakia and Hungary, backed by representatives of the Jewish Agency from Palestine in Turkey and aided by gentile couriers (guides), strove in loose federation to extricate Jews from Nazi-occupied Poland. Those who were smuggled out of Poland were brought to Hungary, generally by way of Slovakia, with the hope of eventually bringing them to Palestine.180

  They arrived in the town of Kezmarok, where they stayed until the end of the war. Her mother found work as a mother’s help, passing as a Polish Christian. After the liberation they went to Prague and at Easter 1946 they went to France. Her mother remarried and had another daughter in 1948. Lea married Dennis Goodman in 1954. He had been sent to school in England in 1936 from Germany aged 13. His parents had moved to Holland and did not survive. Lea has lived in London since the age of 18 and is a sculptor. Dennis died in 2007 aged 84.

  Lea concluded that the fact she and her mother survived in Krakow, on the Aryan side, was very unusual. Very few Jews managed to do so in a town which was the headquarters of the Germans in Poland.181

  Notes

  1. Michelle Quinn, ‘The Artists’ Schindler’ in San Jose Mercury News, G-1, 29 March 1999, p. 10.

  2. Grace Bradberry, ‘Surrey’s own Oskar Schindler’
in The Times, 1 March 1999, p. 15.

  3. Teresa Watanabe, ‘Japan’s Schindler’ in The Los Angeles Times, 1994.

  4. Chinese People’s Daily, 10 September 2001.

  5. Dominic Kennedy, ‘British Schindler saved 1,000 Jews from Nazis’ in The Times, 5 April 2002, p. 6.

  6. Dr Bal-Kaduri, ‘1,100 Jews Rescued by a German’ in Yad Vashem Bulletin, December 1957, No 2, pp. 12–3.

  7. Linley Boniface, ‘Saved from Death by Schindler’s List’ in Hampstead & Highgate Express, 5 May 1995, p. 50.

  8. Judith Simons, obituary for Victor Dortheimer 1918–2000, Jewish Chronicle, 26 May 2000.

  9. Ron Fisher, A Schindler Survivor – The Story of Victor Dortheimer, Carlton TV, 1995.

  10. Svitavy in Czech, Zwittau in German.

  11. Herbert Steinhouse, ‘The Man Who Saved a Thousand Lives’, 1949, in Oskar Schindler and His List (Forest Dale, Vermont: Eriksson, 1995), ed. Thomas Fensch, p. 13.