Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (38 page)

By contrast, church leaders and Christian believers who were used to a certain amount of tension with political authorities and with the surrounding population tended to be more open to the possibility of opposing German policies, and quicker to recognize a Christian mission to aid Jews. It was not the content of Protestantism, most likely, that made French Protestants more likely to aid Jews than French Catholics, but rather their own minority status and history of persecution. In the Netherlands, where Catholics were predominant in some districts and Protestants were in others, the Catholics tended to rescue Jews where Catholics were the minority, and Protestants tended to rescue Jews where Protestants were the minority. Members of smaller religions, especially, were able to trust one another in times of stress, and accustomed to seeing their homes as embattled outposts of truth in a broken world. It seems that the more alienated Christians were from authority before the war, the more likely they were to rescue Jews.

In the occupied Soviet Union, fleeing Jews sometimes found shelter with representatives of banned minor Protestant denominations. Baptists in Ukraine, for example, rescued Jews. They believed that Jews were children of Israel and liked to discuss the Bible and Zionism with them. The Krupa and Zybelberg families stayed in a Baptist’s hayloft for six weeks and grew friendly with him. They promised to invite him to Palestine if they survived. They told him their dreams, and he interpreted them. The Shtundists, an evangelical Protestant denomination that arose in southern Russia and Ukraine under the influence of the Baptists and other Protestants, also tended to be friendly to Jews in distress. Lea Goldberg was a teenage Jewish girl from Rafałówka who, alone, escaped the mass shooting of the Jews of her village in August 1942. She found her way to Shtundists, who took her in. She converted. When the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukraïnsk’a Povstans’ka Armiia, UPA) attacked the Shtundists, most likely in July 1943, they captured her and used her as a nurse. She watched for six months as her UPA unit killed Soviet partisans, Poles, and Jews. When she finally escaped the UPA she made her way back to a Shtundist she knew, who hid her under the hay of his wagon. Emanuel Ringelblum, the Jewish historian who created the archive of the Warsaw ghetto, believed that minor Protestant denominations behaved similarly in Poland. Protestants who rescued Jews were not acting from the ecumenical views that have since become more common, but rather from an interpretation of Christian belief that operated more or less in isolation from the dominant institutions of spiritual and secular authority.

The dominant Roman Catholic Church in Poland took no stance against the mass murder of the millions of Jews who had lived for centuries among its adherents. Catholic doctrine at the time deemed Jews collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus, and Catholic teachings about modernity connected the blight of communism to Judaism. As a result, the motivations of Roman Catholics who rescued Jews had to arise from some sort of individualism, either their own or that of their parish priests. Such Roman Catholics tended to express religious beliefs that were unorthodox or heretical.

Wilm Hosenfeld, a Roman Catholic Nazi German officer stationed in Poland, came to regard the Holocaust as a kind of second original sin. He served as the director of sports for German officers in occupied Warsaw. For whatever reason, he saw the deportation of the Jews from the city with clear eyes and declined to apply political or ideological rationalizations to the sin of murder. For him, the crucial question was simply whether or not the Jews of the ghetto were being deported to their deaths. If so, he wrote, there “is no honor in being a German officer.” After the destruction of the ghetto, he spoke of “a curse that can never be lifted.” He aided several Jews and Poles, rescuing some from certain death. He is remembered for finding and helping the pianist Władysław Szpilman in the ruins of Warsaw during the final weeks of the German occupation. Hosenfeld was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison as a war criminal by the Soviets and died in captivity. Szpilman survived to tell Hosenfeld’s story.

Aleksandra Ogrodzińska, a Polish Roman Catholic, believed in miracles. In 1940, she and Vala Kuznetsov were colleagues in a Soviet workplace in the middle of marshy Polesia, in what had been eastern Poland before the Soviet invasion. After the Germans drove out the Soviets in 1941, Aleksandra lied to the new authorities, claiming that Vala was her domestic help. In this way she removed one Jewish woman from public view. In the weeks and months and years that followed, Aleksandra cried when she told Vala what was happening to the Jews. “Why do we deserve this?” Vala asked Aleksandra. “Just because we are Jews?” Aleksandra wept and tried to comfort Vala, and perhaps herself, by saying that a miracle that very night could liberate them and change everything.

Wonders and visions threaten religious institutions, because they challenge the monopoly of inspiration of the clergy. Gedali Rydlewicz escaped from a transport from Biała Podlaska, on the western edge of Polesia. She found her way to a man at the edge of a forest whom the people of the area called the “Saint.” Michał Iwaniuk wrote religious poetry, blessed people on his own authority, and spoke to all and sundry of his visions. It is unclear whether he was Roman Catholic or Orthodox; Jewish sources are usually mute on the differences among various sorts of Christianity. In either case, he would have been a heretic and a blasphemer; he was certainly an outsider, living beyond the reach of religious and other institutions. Iwaniuk helped something like sixty Jews over the course of the war. When asked why he did so, he said that the Virgin Mary had appeared before him and instructed him to save people.

Roman Catholic nuns were outsiders of a different kind. They and their convents were entirely subordinate to the hierarchy and the teachings of their church. They kept a distance from the everyday politics of religion—as women in an institution directed by men and in which only men can serve as priests, and as people living in isolation from the world in pursuit of specific forms of devotion. Polish Roman Catholic nuns saved hundreds, if not thousands, of Jewish children. In some cases, they wanted to convert Jewish children to the Roman Catholic faith. Michał Głowiński’s mother, when she found her son alive after the war, was happy to allow the nuns to baptize him in recognition of what they had done and risked. From the theological perspective of the Catholic Church, the rescue of souls was more important than the preservation of earthly lives. In the politics of the Catholic Church, the conversion of the children made them Christians.

For the nuns in their convents—women who had left their earthly families or who had none—children had a certain special appeal that older Jews might not have. Yet, in a rather large number of cases, Polish Roman Catholic nuns also rescued young Jewish men, who for any number of reasons did not belong in a convent. Anna Borkowska, for example, the mother superior of a Dominican convent near Vilnius, aided several Jews. One of her favorites was a passionate and intelligent young man called Aryeh Wilner, whom she called “Jurek” (a Polish diminutive for Jerzy, or George). After Wilner left the convent and went to Warsaw, he used “Jurek” as his
nom de guerre
in the Jewish underground and in his contacts with Poles on the Aryan side of the city. In 1943, Wilner was entrusted with the mission of securing support and arms from the Home Army before the uprising in the ghetto. Fighting broke out while he was beyond its walls, and so his descriptions of the motives of the ghetto fighters reached Poles and thus the world. The uprising was not about preserving Jewish life, he explained, but about rescuing dignity. His Polish interlocutors understood this in their own national romantic terms: that Jewish self-sacrifice was meant to redeem the Jewish nation. Wilner seems to have meant something more general. The ghetto uprising was about the dignity of human beings, and thus a challenge to everyone who might have done more but instead did less. If it was redemption, it was also rebuke.

Jurek returned to the flaming ghetto, where he was killed as Aryeh.

Oswald Rufeisen was a young Zionist from southwestern Poland who spoke German as well as Polish. His parents had been subjects of the Habsburg monarchy and enrolled him in a primary school where German was the language of instruction. He was then sent to live with an aunt in Bielsko so that he could continue his schooling in a German-language gymnasium. There he joined Akiba, a Zionist organization, and learned to ride horses with a Polish friend. Rufeisen’s family was integrated into Polish society; his father served for eight years in the Polish army. Young Oswald never experienced antisemitism. Nevertheless, the idea of Zionism—of a land for the Jewish people—gave him a sense of belonging during the years that he spent away from home. When the German army invaded Poland in September 1939, he fled eastward like hundreds of thousands of other Polish Jews, with the idea of eventually reaching Palestine.

Using the Akiba network, he tried to reach a Baltic port where he could catch a ship. He got as far as Latvia, by then a Soviet republic, but was sent back by the NKVD to Lithuania. He managed to escape the border police and make his way to Vilnius, by then the capital of Soviet Lithuania, where he looked for and found fellow Akiba members. Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees had joined the hundred thousand or so Jews who were native to the city. Rufeisen took up several trades, including shoe making, to sustain himself. He found that he liked Russians, but assumed that he and other Jewish refugees in Vilnius would eventually be deported by the NKVD, just as Jews from eastern Poland had been. Instead the Germans invaded in June 1941, and Rufeisen was arrested not long after by a Lithuanian policeman in the German service. When asked for his profession he said that he was a shoemaker; this spared him from being shot at Ponary, since the Germans happened to need shoemakers. In September 1941, he observed a roundup of Jews in Vilnius and decided to hide. Seeing an intoxicated German surrounded by Polish teenagers, he took a chance and helped the man find his way. The German confided in him that he and his comrades had shot 1,700 Jews that day; this was why he was so drunk.

Rufeisen now understood what was happening to the Jews of Vilnius and decided to leave the city. A chance acquaintance offered him work on his farm just beyond its outskirts, three kilometers from the killing site at Ponary. A Belarusian veterinarian who treated the cattle there told Rufeisen that he was welcome to join his family in a safer and more isolated place and wrote him a letter of recommendation. Rufeisen decided to go. The village was called Turets and was not safe; its Jews were all murdered in November 1941, shortly before Rufeisen’s arrival. He found a job as a janitor at the school, working for meals. He took some of the clothing of the murdered Jews when it was distributed among the villagers.

The Belarusian family with whom he was living asked him to register with the police, which meant the local Belarusian auxiliary policemen serving the Germans. The police commander was so impressed with Rufeisen’s German that he tried to hire him as a German tutor. Eventually, Rufeisen came to work as a translator between the Belarusian gendarmes and the German policemen stationed at Mir. He presented himself as a Pole with a German father. He was formally employed by the German police, and wore a German uniform. Much of the work was on horseback, and he had to be present at mass shootings of Jews. At some point he met a Jew from Mir whom he had known in Vilnius, and began to pass news to him that might help local Jews. From his new position inside the German police outpost, Rufeisen warned the Jews of Mir that they were all to be killed on August 13, 1942. He even smuggled them some weapons. Some three hundred Jews escaped Mir as a result.

Denounced to the police by a Jew from Mir as the person who had provided the warning, Rufeisen admitted to his German employer that this was the case. In the course of a conversation about his motives he admitted, of his own volition, that he was Jewish. The German policeman, shocked by this confession, treated him with a good deal of sympathy, saying that Rufeisen was foolish to admit such a thing. Rather than arranging for his execution, his superior made a vague remark about how Rufeisen might somehow survive and left him unattended. Rufeisen made a break for it, and although he was pursued by the men who had been his colleagues and even fired upon, he had the impression that not all of the policemen wanted to catch him.

As he fled, Rufeisen happened to see a nun, which gave him an idea. He slipped through the gates of the local cloister of the Sisters of the Resurrection. This was an unusual order, founded by a Polish mother and daughter and devoted to the particular Polish martyrological tradition of national sacrifice. He asked the nuns for help. They were afraid. They knew that Rufeisen was a Jew and that others in the area knew this as well. They told him that they would pray for guidance. That day the homily in the sermon happened to be the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), which the two women took as a sign from God. In the story a Jew is robbed and beaten and needs help, and he is aided not by one of his own but by a member of a foreign and hostile tribe, a Samaritan. The nuns could hear the parable of the Good Samaritan as simple guidance from a place of authority to help a stranger. But as they themselves must have understood, the parable had a deeper significance. Jesus recited it while discussing with his disciples a crucial biblical passage, Leviticus 19:18: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the LORD.” Jesus told his disciples that “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” after the duty to love God with heart, soul, and mind, was the most important of God’s commandments (Luke 10:27, Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31). The disciples then wanted to know whom they should regard as their people and whom they should regard as their neighbor. It was these questions that Jesus answered with the story of the Good Samaritan, of the stranger who helps a stranger. Then he asked his disciples who was the neighbor in the story, and they answered: “He that shewed mercy on him.” Jesus then told them: “Go, and do thou likewise.”