The Other Schindlers (16 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
The school gave me a sound foundation for my working and family life and I am forever mindful and thankful that the actions of concerned individuals and
organisations
, including Quakers, made it possible for so many of us ‘Kinder’ to survive; to lead constructive lives and give something back to our host country.
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I asked Frank Auerbach how a Christian woman in Italy had rescued a little Jewish boy from Berlin. He told me it came about through his uncle Jakob Auerbach who was a lawyer. Uncle Jakob’s partner, called Altenberg, had retired to Italy and had already sent his own children to England. In Italy he got to know Iris Origo and heard that she wanted to sponsor six Jewish children to go to safety in England. He suggested his niece and nephew, Ilse and Heinz Altenberg, and Frank Auerbach, his partner’s son. Frank has described how they three children, all under 8 years old, travelled from Hamburg accompanied by the Altenbergs’ nanny on the SS
George Washington
on 7 April 1939, arriving on the same day in Southampton and going straight to Bunce Court. The nanny returned to Germany.
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A biography on Frank Auerbach fleshed out the story. Charlotte, his mother, was artistic and was married to Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer. He was born in 1931 and recalled a childhood of parental strain and worry, partly because of the economic situation – Austrian and German banks were collapsing – and also because of the rise of the brownshirts. As Auerbach learnt to toddle, the Nazis were marching down Berlin’s streets and the persecution of the Jews began:
People like Auerbach’s parents, the liberal, educated German Jews of the professional classes, men and women in whose family traditions stetl and pogrom were vague memories at most, could not imagine the Final Solution; it still lay incubating, like a dragon’s egg, in the minds of Hitler and Himmler.
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Frank’s parents’ anxiety hung over the small child and turned into what he called ‘frantic coddling’: ‘I remember velvet knickerbocker suits and no freedom. I couldn’t run in the park near the house. I couldn’t step outside the door on my own, of course, and my mother would begin to worry if my father was half an hour late home.’
By 1937 they felt the 6-year-old would be in real danger if he stayed in Germany. ‘But his father would not go; presumably, like many other Jews, he hoped that Nazism would soften, that its racial policy would be diluted by
cultural
and economic necessity, and that resolute adults might still breathe the air that would choke a little boy.’
Iris Origo offered an escape route by turning her concerns about Jewish children into actions. It was fortuitous for Auerbach that his family’s tentacles reached to her as she knew none of the six children whose escape she financed.
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I have not been able to find out about the other three children, but Iris Origo’s autobiographical writings are littered with references about what she thought was happening to Jews and others. Her daughter has spoken about her mother’s humanity. This is demonstrated by her insight into the difficulties of the Jewish parents whose children had the chance to leave:
I have never been able to forget the description given to me by one of the Quaker workers in Germany of the agony of mind of the parents obliged to make a choice, when they were told (as was sometimes necessary) that only one child from each family could go. Should it be the most brilliant or the most vulnerable? The one most fitted, or least likely, to survive? Which, if it were one’s own child, would one choose?
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Reading this reminded me of the story of Lore Cahn (
née
Grünberger), who was 14 when her parents put her on the Kindertransport to go to England. At the last moment her father couldn’t bear to let her go – he had been holding her hands through the window as the train began to move and he just pulled her out of the train through the window. She had a terrible time, being sent to Theresienstadt in 1941 with her parents; she was then separated from them and sent to Auschwitz. She was finally liberated in Bergen-Belsen. Her mother had been murdered but her father survived.
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The parents’ choice was diabolical and showed enormous courage, and as Louise London has written:
We remember the touching photographs and newsreel footage of unaccompanied Jewish children arriving on the Kindertransports [by July 1939, 7,700 had arrived, compared with 1,850 admitted into Holland, 800 into France, 700 into Belgium and 250 into Sweden]. There are no such photographs of the Jewish parents left behind in Nazi Europe … The Jews excluded from entry to the United Kingdom are not part of the British experience, because Britain never saw them.
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Iris also ended up providing refuge to many Italian refugee children. Early in 1943 the first group of seven children arrived at La Foce from families in Genoa whose homes had been destroyed. Another little group of six girls arrived from Turin in February and Iris wrote in her diary:
Children such as these, all over Europe, have had to leave their own homes and
families
, and are arriving – bewildered but hopeful – among strangers. There is something terribly moving in this exodus – something, too, so deeply wrong in a world where such a thing is not only possible but necessary, that it is difficult not to feel personally responsible. For the present we can try to salve our consciences by giving them food, shelter and love. But that is not enough. Nothing can ever really be enough.
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How right she was and how universal was the uprooting of families and
bewildered
children by the war – even those evacuated in their own countries, let alone those sent to another country by the Kindertransport.
At La Foce they were pretty well self-supporting, and this included the
twenty-three
children. After Mussolini fell in 1943, and following the surrender of the Badoglio government to the Allies that September, the Germans were still
occupying
much of Italy. The community really pulled together, ‘as the old barriers of tradition and class were broken down and we were held together by the same difficulties, fears expectations and hopes’:
Together we planned how to hide the oil, the hams and cheeses, so that the Germans could not find them; together we found shelter for the fugitives who knocked at out door – whether Italians, Allies or Jews, soldiers or civilians
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Very late the same year, on 15 December, Iris noted:
Two other fugitives turn up – an old Jew from Siena and his son. Both of them, clad in the most unsuitable of town clothes and thin shoes, are shivering with cold and terror. The father, the owner of an antique shop, produces from an inner pocket, drawing me aside, a little carved ivory Renaissance figure which he wishes to exchange for food and warm clothing. We supply the latter, and suggest that he should keep the figure for future needs. He and his son wish to walk through the German lines to Naples – and to all our dissuasions (since it is clear that the old man, who suffers from heart-disease, will die upon the way) they only reply – ‘We have no choice. We must.’ After a rest and some food they start up the hill in the snow, the old man groaning a little as he leans on his son’s shoulder.
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That Christmas, her diary records that the Pope’s Christmas Eve homily sounded fairly despairing as little goodwill abounded, but she commented that in her own village she felt there was ‘a bond of deep understanding born of common trouble, anxieties and hopes such as I have never felt before. And in the attitude of the farmers to all the homeless passers-by (whether Italian soldiers or British prisoners, whether Gentile or Jew) there is a spontaneous, unfailing charity and hospitality.’
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I first heard about Iris Origo from an article in
The Times
on 25 July 2002, about the music festival her daughters, Benedetta and Donata, were running at La Foce to celebrate the centenary of their mother’s birth. I e-mailed the address given and have had great help from Benedetta. Like many relatives of rescuers, she had known little of her mother’s activities during the war. She told me:
Yes, my mother – and many others like her, in Italy at that time – helped Jews on the run … Also, I found out only after her death that she was among some people (from London, I think) who financed the escape to England of some children from Jewish
families in Germany. Among these was the child Frank Auerbach, later to become a famous artist.
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Subsequently, Benedetta wrote that she could not tell me much more but:
beyond this, my family in Italy gave help to any person who appeared in distress or need during the war years, as a matter of course, whether they were Jewish or not … And so did many Italians – who, as a whole, are not antisemitic, contrary to fascist appearances.
As to motivation, I am sure it was pure humanity and fellow feeling that brought not only my mother but countless others in this country to help, hide, feed, save Jewish people during the war. There are so many single stories that are moving – and stories that often deal with very simple people.
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A couple of days later she reiterated her mother’s humanity in another e-mail:
Though my mother had strong religious feelings – that is, she was constantly
searching
for some kind of religious certainty – she was not particularly observant. She was brought up vaguely Anglican, then converted to Catholicism in her sixties – but was never completely convinced. Anyway, her motives for helping others were humanitarian and based on compassion, more than anything else.
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Max Rubino, an art expert, wrote an article in
La Stampa
on 20 October 1990 about Frank Auerbach, and commented on Iris Origo’s help towards him. This was the first that Benedetta knew of her mother’s impact on Frank Auerbach’s life. He concluded that due to her unsentimental nature Iris had never contacted the Auerbachs. I felt this had gone on too long and, having had considerable contact with her eldest daughter Benedetta over a long period, I sent her a copy of his letter and gave him her address.
A biography of Iris Origo described her concern for the refugee local children she cared for at La Foce. Their mothers came to visit them and were overwhelmed by what they saw:
The food the children were given was good and olive oil was added to the diets of the more malnourished. Fannina Fè is now in her late seventies. She was a helper working at the school – her entire family worked for the Origos – when the
refugees
arrived. She remembers the way Iris appeared every day, tasted their food and brought across new toys …
Fannina remembers, ‘I once asked her why she did all this for us. She replied that “if you have too much, you never really want the things that life gives you”.’
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Iris was made a DBE in 1977 and died in 1988. Without her charitable and
compassionate
nature the little 8-year-old boy in Berlin might have become one of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. Auerbach’s long creative career as an artist, which still continues as he approaches 80, would never have occurred. This fact cannot but lead us to ponder what those 1.5 million children might have achieved had they not been destroyed because no one came forward to save them.
Vytautas Rinkevicius (1906–88)
. Irena Viesaite’s cousin, Margaret Kagan, was born in Kovno, Lithuania, on 12 July 1924. She was hidden for several months in a factory by Vytautas Rinkevicius, a Roman Catholic. Margaret was born Margarita Stromaité; her parents were Jurgis Stromas and Eugenia Stromiene.
Lithuania was independent until the Russians invaded on 15 June 1940, to be followed a year later by the German invasion of 22 June 1941. This unleashed anti-Jewish attacks from the Lithuanians themselves, who held the Jews responsible for the year of Soviet occupation. On 27 June they rounded up fifty Jewish men and beat them to death in the Lietukis garage on Vytautas Prospect. Margaret’s father was one of these men. A few days later, Lithuanian partisans raided their house and took their valuables. In August Kovno’s Jews were ordered to the Ghetto being created in the suburbs. At the same time, Jews were being rounded up and killed. Margaret, her mother and her brother Alik (born 1931) were all safe but thousands were killed, including her aunt and her son.
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By August 1941 all the Jews in Kovno were in the Ghetto, created in the old Jewish quarter of Vilijampole.
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Margaret was still in the Ghetto with her mother, grandmother and 11-year-old brother Alik when, in October 1943, conditions worsened and her friend Chana Bravo offered to find Alik a hiding place so he could be smuggled out to live with a non-Jewish family. He stayed with a couple, Antanas and Marija Macenavicius, who kept him until the end of the war. Also at this time, Margaret had become friendly with Joseph Kagan who was a slave labourer in a foundry. The man in charge of the foundry was Johannes Bruess, whom Joseph had known before, and Johannes agreed that Joseph could build a hiding place in the loft of the factory. The bookkeeper, Vytautas Garkauskas, also agreed, but the ‘heart and soul of the scheme, without whom it would have been a non-starter, was the modest factory foreman Vytautas Rinkevicius’.
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Margaret was extremely sceptical when Joseph first asked her to join him and his mother in his hiding place. She agreed to inspect the site and wangled a day’s work at the factory where she met Vytautas:
The man we were approaching was tall and lean, wore blue coveralls and a beret, looked alert, yet reassuringly relaxed. He wore heavy rimmed spectacles and their
thick lenses seemed to set him apart from our ugly world. From behind these lenses his eyes exuded calm, hope and confidence. When I got back to my mother in the Ghetto that evening, I found it difficult to explain just why this man had made such a monumental impression on me; but I did manage to convey my deep-felt confidence in Vytautas’ integrity and goodwill.
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