The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (15 page)

Others in a similar plight found sanctuary only briefly. When the Jews of Parysow were being transferred to the Warsaw Ghetto, three Jewish sisters managed to escape to the village of Puznow. There they were given sanctuary by a Polish villager. They would sleep in his home at night, and hide in the nearby woods during the day. Betrayed by another villager, they fled eastward, towards the River Bug, which was then the border of the Soviet Union. They were never heard of again.
¹⁷

In the convent at Wawer, six miles east of Warsaw, the Mother Superior, Johanna Reiter, took in four-year-old Felicja Sandezer, keeping her safe until the end of the war, when she was reunited with her mother.
¹⁸
At another convent in Wawer, that of Sister Felicja Nek, the young Alicja Pinczewska was given sanctuary, under the name Alicja Woloszczuk, masquerading as a Catholic. While at the convent she celebrated her First Communion. After she had been there for a year, an anonymous Polish informer wrote to the convent that he knew it was hiding a Jewish child. Forced to leave, Alicja was taken to Warsaw, where she was found a place of refuge by several Christian families in the ‘Aryan’ sector of the city.
¹⁹

In the small town of Ksiaz Wielki, north of Cracow, Joseph Konieczny, and his two sons Stach and Sender, sheltered seventeen members of the Matuszynski family, hiding them in a bunker under his barn. A surviving member of the family, Aron Matuszynski, later recalled: ‘This was our final hiding place. We came from various other hiding places, which no longer provided us with safety, and we had all reassembled in desperation at the Koniecznys. This righteous couple, risking their own lives, provided us with shelter and food.’ Because conditions in the hiding place were so crowded, Aron and his wife left for another hiding place: they were given shelter by Wladyslaw Kukuryk and his wife in the nearby village of Swiecice.

The Matuszynski family was kept safe by its respective rescuers from 7 November 1942, the day of the final destruction of Jews in Ksiaz Wielki—when all five hundred Jews still in the ghetto were killed—until 5 May 1944, a period of eighteen months. What followed was cruel, but not untypical of the risks and dangers of hiding Jews in Poland. It began with the arrival of a platoon of men from the underground Home Army. Armed with machine guns, they interrogated the Konieczny family. ‘They beat Mr Konieczny and his sons Stach and Sender so mercilessly that they finally gave in and showed the secret bunker to the soldiers. These soldiers claimed they were partisans and that the hidden group would be taken as partisan members. But that was a lie. They took the entire before-mentioned group to the local forest in the village Adama. The soldiers told them to remove their shoes, boots, clothing. They placed the machine guns in a crossfire manner. This action alerted some members of the group to try to escape. My brother Jankiel Matuszynski, my brother-in-law Martin Hershkowitz, and Heynoch Leysorek, escaped. The rest of the members who had been sheltered by the Koniecznys were slaughtered.’

The soldiers counted the dead. ‘Three of their intended victims had escaped. But twelve bodies lay in the forest. They had been told of seventeen members, and there were two more missing. Word went out to scour the countryside for the two missing members. Mr Wladyslaw Kukuryk came to my wife and me, and begged us to leave his bunker for two weeks. The soldiers would surely find us and then he and his family would be killed. We slipped out of the bunker during the night.’

News of the massacre spread rapidly throughout the area. On the following day, 6 May 1944, it was the Gestapo that came to Joseph Konieczny’s property. ‘Mr Konieczny and his two sons were already in hiding for they had feared that the Armia Krajowa was out to search and kill them too. At home on the Koniecznys’ property the Gestapo found the men gone and only Mrs Konieczny together with her eighteen-year-old daughter and youngest baby girl of about two years. They took out Mrs Konieczny from the house and then shot her. The eldest, eighteen-year-old daughter saw this and ran towards her mother and the Gestapo shot her as well. The youngest baby daughter was miraculously spared.’

Aron Matuszynski survived the war. His brother Jankiel also survived—but was killed six months after liberation by Polish anti-Semites.
²⁰

Despite the dangers, those Poles who were able and willing to help Jews could go to extraordinary lengths to do so. In Czestochowa, a shoemaker named Borowczyk obtained the necessary papers for a Jew, Joseph Wisnicki, to pass as a Polish worker, enabling him to get work outside Poland. As Wisnicki had no money, Borowczyk paid for the documents, and then accompanied him across Germany to the Austrian town of Bludenz, where Wisnicki found work in a garden nursery owned by an influential member of the Nazi Party.
²¹

Also in Czestochowa, Genowefa Starczewska-Korczak gave sanctuary to a young Jewish girl, Celina Berkowitz, shortly before her parents were killed. When the Germans executed Genowefa’s husband, she was forced to place her Jewish charge and her own two daughters in a Catholic orphanage. But each weekend she brought all three girls home.
²²

Helena and Waclaw Milowski hid a Jewish couple, Isaac and Bala Horowitz, and their son Gabriel, in their apartment in the centre of Czestochowa. Waclaw Milowski had collected them from the farm where they had been in hiding, but where the farmer had been attacked and robbed. There was one corner in the apartment, the couple who were saved later recalled, where they could walk upright, but in other parts they had to stoop so as not to be seen by somebody outside. If something unusual were to happen, they would have to go down to the cellar, most of which was full of coal: if forced to stay there, they could do so only in a sitting position, with hardly any air. In this hiding place they spent twenty-two months, without seeing even a patch of sky. Every day Milowski brought two buckets of water for washing and drinking; every day he emptied a bucket of their excrement, which was burnt in an oven. When Milowski was absent (because of work, visits to his family, etc.) his brother Lucek would bring them water; but since he was able to come only once a week, they had to make do with two buckets for a whole week. Milowski also used to bring them food which he bought with their money—bread and potatoes. It later emerged that Helena Milowski’s father had also hidden two Jewish women.
²³

Uriel Reingold, who sent me the account of the Milowskis, and who is related to the Horowitz family, wrote about the Righteous: ‘My thoughts on the subject are, I presume, shared by many who feel, as I do, great admiration for all those who endangered the lives of their children, as well as their own lives, to save Jews. I have no doubt that they are the true heroes of this dark period. It is easy for me to reach this conclusion when I ask myself: “Would I act as they did?”’
²⁴

In Tykocin, north-east of Warsaw, Marysia Rozensztajn was not yet three years old when the two Polish women who were hiding her and her mother were killed and her mother arrested and sent to Auschwitz, as a Polish political prisoner. The little child was found wandering in the street by a Polish couple, Lucyna and Waclaw Bialowarczuk, who, realizing she was an orphaned Jewish child, took her into their home and looked after her until the end of the war. Her mother, Bela, who survived Auschwitz and Belsen, found her daughter in Tykocin in 1946. Two years later Bela was killed in a traffic accident. Marysia was adopted by a Jewish woman, and later left Poland for the United States. Her two rescuers were later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.
²⁵

In Wolomin, north-east of Warsaw, Anna Grabowska and her husband hid a Jewish woman in their home for more than a year. But in 1943 Polish hooligans attacked the house, smashing the windows, and warned the couple that they knew they were hiding Jews. Because of the threats, Anna Grabowska took the woman she was hiding to Warsaw, where her sister, who was involved with the Polish underground, could look after her.
²⁶

Among those saved by non-Jews in Kielce was a young girl called Nechama Tec, who was later to write one of her first books about Christian rescuers in Poland.
²⁷
She herself was hidden with a Polish family, the Homars, who also gave shelter to her parents. ‘In day to day contact,’ she recalled, ‘they never took advantage of us, they never behaved cruelly or even inconsiderately, but treated us instead with respect and kindness,’ and she adds: ‘Considering our close quarters and the dangerous times, this was a real blessing. I often heard my parents say we were fortunate to come across such considerate people.’
²⁸

Doba-Necha Cukierman was also fortunate. She and her family were hidden in Lublin by the Prokop family. ‘On the second evening,’ she recalled, ‘after Mr Prokop returned home from work, we sat around the kitchen table discussing the latest news of happenings in Lublin and reading the
Glos Lubelski
(‘Voice of Lublin’) newspaper. As we talked about the Nazi cruelty to the Jews, Mr Prokop revealed something that left me speechless and terrified. He said, “In principle, I am an anti-Semitic, but you and Jan are an exception. I like you both.” I felt as though a knife had been struck into my heart, but as it was nighttime and having nowhere to turn, I stayed—silence enveloping me again. I felt that the Prokops, although they proclaimed to be our friends, and had in fact risked their lives to help us on many occasions, wanted to see me elsewhere, not with them.’
²⁹
Anti-Semitic opinions were held by other rescuers as well; but being anti-Semitic did not mean that one could not save a human being from otherwise certain death.

In their comprehensive study of the fate of non-Jewish Poles who tried to help Jews in the face of what rapidly escalated into rampant barbarism, the writer Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who himself was active in helping Jews, and his co-author Zofia Lewin, who survived through being hidden by Poles, give many examples of heroism, on the part of both individuals and husbands and wives. One such couple was the Malickis, who worked in the municipal population records office in Warsaw. Bartoszewski and Lewin record how, “Together with the local parish priest they forged entries in the register of births and deaths and gave us the Christian certificates of two deceased women. In order to prepare such documents three persons had to collaborate. The Malickis had issued documents for numerous Jews. Unfortunately, one of the latter fell into the hands of the Gestapo who thus learned the names of these persons. The parish priest was shot, the Malickis were taken to Treblinka where the Germans broke Malicki’s arms and legs in order to force him to divulge the names of other rescued Jews. He did not betray anyone. Both Malickis perished in Treblinka.’
³⁰

Every non-Jew who decided to hide and feed a Jew risked death. Bartoszewski and Lewin record an incident in the town of Wierzbica, where, on 29 January 1943, after learning through Polish informers that three families in the town were hiding three Jews, the Germans shot fifteen people, among them a two-year-old girl. For trying to save three people, fifteen people were murdered.
³¹
In January 1943 at Pilica, in southern Poland, a Polish woman and her one-year-old child were shot for hiding Jews.
³²

Local records suggest that active sympathy for Jews was widespread in certain villages. In Bialka, on the edge of the Parczew Forest, Jews took refuge with the villagers to avoid a German manhunt. On the second day of the hunt, 7 December 1942, the Germans entered the village and shot ninety-six villagers, all men, for helping Jews.
³³
Three days later, a few miles west of the Parczew forest, at Wola Przybyslawska, seven Poles were shot for concealing Jews.
³⁴

Some—rescuers and rescued—were luckier. Jan Nakonieszny hid five Jews in a hen-house which was only two feet high, four feet wide and thirteen feet long. The fugitives were Henryk Sperber, his mother, his sister, his fiancée and his cousin. All five survived the war. So, too, did their saviour.
³⁵

Jaffa Wallach and her husband Norris found refuge in the house of a Polish mechanical engineer, Jozef Zwonarz, who lived in Lesko. ‘He was the only link we had with the external world,’ Norris Wallach later wrote. ‘His wife and five children knew nothing about our hiding in that house.’ Jozef Zwonarz also hid Jaffa Wallach’s brother Pinkas and her sister Anna. He had already taken their four-year-old daughter Rena out of Lesko, on the eve of the deportation to Zaslaw, and found the child a home with a Polish ‘uncle’, Jan Kakol, who lived in the forest. ‘It is important to emphasise’, Norris Wallach wrote, ‘that Zwonarz, and the Kakols as well, endangered their lives for pure human motives without any financial gain nor expectations.’

Those whom Zwonarz saved were to honour his memory for the rest of their lives; and to remember, too, how he would use his knowledge as a mechanical engineer, while ‘repairing’ German vehicles, to sabotage them—especially, Norris Wallach recalled, those that were about to set out ‘for hunting Jews’.
³⁶
In the course of seeking the award of Righteous Among the Nations for this rescuer, one of those whom he saved, Dr Nathan Wolk, was interviewed by Yad Vashem. His interviewer noted: ‘Jozef Zwonarz never received any compensation and he, too, lived in very trying circumstances. He could barely provide for his own family, but, nevertheless, he provided for the needs of those he rescued, as well. His wife wasn’t aware of his rescue mission at all. Only a month before liberation, when a bomb fell on the shop and it was impossible to stay in the pit under the shop, Jozef Zwonarz transferred all five of those he rescued to the cellar of his house. Thus, his wife learned that for two years he had been hiding Jews in the house.’ After liberation, Jozef Zwonarz returned to Dr Wolk ‘the ten dollars and a watch he had given him when he went into hiding’.
³⁷