Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (39 page)

Rufeisen was taken by the nuns to their cloister and sheltered for more than a year. “It is difficult even to imagine the subterfuges to which the Sisters had to resort in order to enable me to stay,” he later recalled, “especially in the autumn and winter, and even to make my stay more pleasant.” He spent his time in the cloister reading the New Testament. Still a Zionist, Rufeisen discovered in Jesus an image of the Jew at home in Palestine. In December 1943, when his presence seemed to be endangering the cloister, he agreed to leave, dressed as a nun. He encountered a Jew from Mir, who led him to Soviet partisans. The unit in question was shooting all of the Poles in its ranks, so Rufeisen was now eager to prove that he was a Jew. Other Jews from Mir whom Rufeisen had saved were with Tuvia Bielski and his family camp. So Rufeisen served with Bielski’s men for a time. Then he allowed himself to be persuaded by Jews he had saved at Mir to go to work for the Soviets as the Red Army returned to the region. He served in the NKVD for three months, writing reports on the behavior of people he had known during the war. Rufeisen was one of countless people who worked for the security apparatuses of both Nazi Germany and the USSR, but of course one of the very few Jews who managed to do so. Finally he made his way to Cracow and there joined a monastery.

Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, the Greek Catholic metropolitan, referred to the parable of the Good Samaritan in his communications with his Ukrainian flock. “Understand,” he wrote, “that everything that you do in the direction of loving your neighbor in this way will bring God’s blessing to your family and village.” Michał Iwaniuk, known as the Saint, also cited the parable, if imprecisely. Five Jews who were rescued by a Roman Catholic priest in Krosno would later cite a reference he had made familiar: “love thy neighbor.” Among the thousands of individual Polish Roman Catholics who chose to help Jews, many explained their motivations by the same reference, inexact but unmistakable: the duty to “help a neighbor.”

For such men and women, to be a neighbor was a reciprocal relationship: a neighbor was someone who helped another, or someone who needed help from another; someone who showed mercy, or someone who needed mercy. Humanity recognized itself in the suffering other. During the war, Oswald Rufeisen read the New Testament in hiding in a cloister, but when he joined a monastery he took an Old Testament name: Daniel, the interpreter of dreams, the prophet of calamities. The Christians who showed mercy to Jews such as Rufeisen were exceptions in the moral catastrophe that was Christianity during the Holocaust. In a time of inundation, they worked quietly against the current, surfacing to help, and then disappearing.

I
ta Straż, a young woman of nineteen, was pulled by Lithuanian policemen to a long pit in the Ponary Forest. She had heard the firing of the guns and now could see the rows of corpses. “This is the end,” she thought. “And what have I seen of life?” She stood with others naked at the edge of the trench as the bullets flew past her head and body. She fell straight backward, not feigning death, simply from fright. She remained motionless as one body after another fell on top of her. When the pit was full, someone walked on top of the final layer of corpses, firing downward into the heap. A bullet passed through Ita’s hand, but she made no sound. Earth was thrown over the pit. She waited for as long as she could, and then pushed her way through the bodies and dug through the soil. Without clothing, covered only in mud and in the blood of herself and others, she sought help. She visited one cottage and was turned away, and then a second, and then a third. In the fourth cottage she found help, and she survived.

Who lives in the fourth cottage? Who acts without the support of norms or institutions, representing no government, no army, no church? What happens when the encounters in grey, of Jews needing help contacting people with some connection to an institution, give way to simple meetings of strangers, encounters in black? Most Jews most of the time were turned away, and died. When the outside world offered threats but no promises, the few people who acted to rescue Jews often did so because they could imagine how their own lives might be different. The risk to self was compensated by a vision of love, of marriage, of children, of enduring the war into peace and into some more tranquil future.

In the simplest form, this vision was one of sexual desire. In her recollections of escape from trains to both the Gulag and Bełżec, Zelda Machlowicz does not say that she was attractive; nor does she need to: Her tone and her story suffice. Zelda was a country girl, the daughter of a family of Jewish farmers in interwar Poland, in eastern Galicia, today in western Ukraine. Many Jews farmed in this part of the world. Whereas Jews in the Russian Empire had been forbidden to own land beyond the towns, Jews in the Habsburg monarchy had been allowed to farm. After the Habsburg monarchy was destroyed by the First World War and Galicia became part of Poland, thousands of Jews continued to till the soil and to raise livestock. The Machlowicz family were among these until the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. In 1940, the NKVD deported the family as “kulaks,” people who owned too much property.

Zelda jumped from the Soviet deportation train, leaving her parents behind, and made for the town of Rawa Ruska, where she hid from Soviet authorities. When the Germans arrived in June 1941, she was already accustomed to living by her wits. She sought to avoid the German shooting campaigns and then, beginning in early 1942, transport to the German death facility at Bełżec. Zelda was concealing not her person but rather her identity, frequenting places where she was not known and presenting herself as a Ukrainian girl. She did not enter the ghetto and did not wear the star by which Jews were supposed to mark themselves. She had certain advantages. As a woman, she carried no physical sign of Jewishness. She was most likely wearing clothes that revealed that she was rural but not that she was Jewish. Like other Jews from the countryside, she could speak Ukrainian well, and could perform certain feats that non-Jews believed that Jews could not, such as saddle and ride a horse. She was never recognized as a Jew by a stranger, but she was, after a time, recognized by people she knew.

Most of the police power, under German as under Soviet occupation, was local. Although Zelda was not from Rawa Ruska, she ran the risk every day that one of the Ukrainian auxiliary policemen would recognize her. One day two of them did. They stopped—teenage boys themselves—and taunted her. “Come with us to Bełżec,” they said, “where you can rest.” A third Ukrainian policeman ran up and joined them; Zelda recognized Pietrek Hroshko, with whom she had attended school before the war. “Don’t take her,” he told his colleagues. “She’s my fiancée from before the war, I’ll keep her.” In Ukrainian, the word “fiancée” has a much broader meaning than in English: more like “girlfriend.” The first two Ukrainian policemen left him to it. Then Pietrek turned to Zelda, and an exchange began that revealed not only the complexity of the death around them, but the sophistication of the young life within them.

Later Zelda was denounced by a fellow Jew and deported to Bełżec. She escaped from that train as well, although she was shot and wounded. She was found by a Ukrainian family who took her for a Ukrainian and nursed her back to health. The young man of the family was a policeman in the service of the Germans, and he, too, was attracted to Zelda. “Mom,” he said, “you’ve brought me a fiancée.” Zelda decided to make her way to Lwów and join a cloister. On the way she stole identity documents from a Ukrainian girl who was sitting next to her on the train. As the saying in Lwów went, the passport held body and soul together. Zelda stole the girl’s identity and took on a series of jobs, one of which was falsifying German documents.

A Jewish woman might be rescued by a new lover—someone she met in hiding, who proposed marriage and so a new home and shelter. Alicja Rottenberg left the Warsaw ghetto to seek shelter on the Aryan side. She and two female cousins hid first with the secretary of her uncle. There they were denounced and had to flee. Next they found a place with a sailor, but had to leave because of unwanted sexual attention. After that they were lodged by a former prostitute, who took a liking to Alicja. The former prostitute was unable to keep the three young women for very long, but she did find them a new refuge with her sister and her sister’s two daughters, who were to be paid by Alicja. The cohabitation of five young women in an unconventional situation brought tensions of the conventional kind.

A friend of the house, a young man called Zdzisław Barański, began to pay more attention to Alicja than to the two sisters. When he proposed marriage to Alicja rather than to one of them, they became jealous and denounced Alicja to her suitor as a Jew. Alicja hoped to spare Zdzisław the trouble she knew would ensue. “I could see for myself that the situation was unpleasant. I decided to tell Barański that, for our common good, we should break off the relationship. The next evening when Barański came to see me I began to speak in a delicate way about ending our understanding. He responded immediately that he already knew about everything, and that it was all of no significance to him. He promised to take care of me and to help me insofar as he could.”

At that point the host family decided to steal everything from their Jewish tenants and then denounce them to the police. The decision probably arose not so much from anger as from calculation. When the sisters told Zdzisław that Alicja was Jewish, they were, in effect, denouncing their mother as someone who was illegally sheltering Jews and themselves as conspirators. In a moment of human jealousy they had endangered the lives of their mother and of themselves. The only way to ensure their own safety, to know that Zdzisław would not denounce them, was to be rid of the Jews. Alicja was safe: Her fiancé was as good as his word and found her a new shelter in the outskirts of Warsaw. Alicja’s two cousins were shot the next day. Alicja and Zdzisław did indeed marry after the war. They had a daughter and were later divorced.

A wife might save a husband, or a husband a wife. Sofia Eyzenshteyn was a midwife in Kyiv, in Soviet Ukraine, known for her “golden hands.” In September 1941, the Germans shot most of the Jews who had remained in the city at Babyi Iar. Sofia’s husband, who was not Jewish, dug a shelter for her in the back of a courtyard. He disguised her as a homeless person and led her there. Then, continuing what must have been a family routine, he walked the dog and spoke to it. When he approached the hiding place, he addressed the flow of speech to his wife. He brought her food and water. She found the hiding unbearable and asked him to poison her. This he did not do. She survived.

Love for children could also bring about rescue.

Katarzyna Wolkotrup was a Polish grandmother. She lived in Baranowicze with her children and their families: She had a married daughter, a married son, and an unmarried son. Her daughter and son-in-law had a baby, Katarzyna’s first and only grandchild. Her three children were on friendly terms with a Jewish couple, Michał and Chana, who had a baby of the same age. Michał and Chana hid in the basement of the house with their little daughter. The baby would cry, and Grandma Katarzyna, at Chana’s request, would take the baby out for air. This was much safer than Michał or Chana appearing outside and indeed almost without risk: The baby was a girl and so not circumcised, and anyone watching would likely see nothing more than a grandmother with her own grandchild. There was no more typical sight in Poland, where the grandmothers raise the children.

One day when Katarzyna was out with Michał and Chana’s baby, she heard loud noises back at the house and was afraid to return. When she finally did she found everyone dead: not only Michał and Chana, but also her own three children, her son-in-law, her daughter-in-law, and her baby grandchild. They had been denounced by a neighbor, who probably got the house as a reward. At the age of fifty-four, now without any of her family and without the future she had expected, Katarzyna left Baranowicze for good. She kept the little girl as her own, raising her, as the Jews who interviewed her after the war noted, to be “healthy and lovely.”

Nannies also raise children, and love them. In Warsaw, Maria Przybylska had worked for the Lewin family as the nanny of little Regina, raising her for the first years of her life. From the Warsaw ghetto, Regina’s father made contact with Maria. After he was deported to Treblinka and murdered, his wife and daughter left the ghetto for the Aryan side and found Maria. Regina’s nanny took them both in, her former ward and her former employer, and found them both shelter. Regina could more easily pass as Polish, presumably at least in part because she had been raised by a Polish nanny. She lived with some of Maria’s Polish friends, to whom she was introduced as Maria’s niece. Regina’s mother, on the other hand, was recognizably Jewish in her speech and appearance. It was agreed that Regina’s mother would stay with a male friend of Maria.

Maria was now working for a German family, from whom she stole food and coal for Regina and her mother. Maria’s friend gave Regina’s mother his own bed and slept on the floor. A cook in a restaurant, he stole meat for the woman under his care, taking none for himself. Regina, writing from Sweden in 1946 as a seventeen-year-old, had this to say about the woman and man who saved her and her mother: “I owe to those people everything, that today I can see the sun and look at people, that I exist and enjoy life and freedom. I don’t know if anyone from my own family would have made such a sacrifice and cared for us, the way that they cared for us and loved us.”

Men sometimes took in children, because their wives asked them to or because they wanted to themselves. Sergiusz Seweryn adopted a three-year-old orphan girl who was known in his village, near Białystok, to be one of two Jewish survivors. He loyally raised her until his wife left him, taking the child. Stanisław Jeromiński, also from the Białystok region, took in the one-year-old daughter of a Jewish acquaintance. After the war he did not want to part with the girl: “He regards her as his daughter and says that he risked his head for her”—which, in fact, he had.

Sometimes men lost their own children, and missed them, and did something about it. This was how Rachela Koch and her two daughters survived. The Koch family had lived before the war in Kołomyja, a city in Galicia where almost no Jews survived the war. Rachela and her two girls tried to escape the shooting actions by fleeing to a bunker. They were the last three in and so got the worst place, in the darkness and fetidity of the very deepest hole. As a result, they escaped the shooting when the hideout was found.

After climbing out, the three of them awaited death, in grief and misery, at the side of the road. A passing Pole, Michał Federowicz, recognized them as Jews, as most Poles could with most Jews most of the time. He asked them why they were courting death so openly; they expressed their resignation. He took all three of them in, the mother and the two daughters, and treated them as if they were his own. His three children, he told Rachela and her daughters, had been taken away by the Germans. Michał must not have been a young man, and these must have been grown children, since he regarded not only Rachela’s daughters but also Rachela herself as a child. “As a protest,” he told them, “it would be right and good to take in three other children.”

Women lost children, and the absence was felt by those closest to them. Ewa Krcz, for example, a mother in a village not far from the Polish town of Oświęcim, lost her daughter Genia during the war. She was inconsolable. Her little boy knew how he could help. Nearby was the complex of camps and killing facilities that the Germans had built around the Polish military base at Oświęcim: Auschwitz. Here was a place where, at war’s end, there were many children who desperately needed care.

The last major transports to Auschwitz were of the Jews of Hungary, most of whom were murdered, but some of whom were still working as slave laborers when the camp was closed. The adults were marched in horrible conditions toward Germany, the children left behind. Many of the boys and girls were already orphans; others were becoming orphans as surviving parents fell behind on the death marches and were shot. Some were too young to know their own names. Ewa’s son, at his own initiative, walked into Auschwitz and chose a two-year-old girl who he thought would please his mother. The child was very ill, but Ewa nursed her back to health and raised her. Later the girl would seek her birth parents in Hungary. She did not find them.