The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (16 page)

When two thousand Jews were murdered in the Rembertow ghetto in August 1942, Yehudis (Judith) Pshenitse was twelve years old. After the war she recalled how she was helped to survive. ‘I went to see the priest,’ she wrote, ‘who had known me as a small child, when I used to go into the church with our Christian maid. I wept and begged the priest to save me. I told him what had happened to my parents. He calmed me and promised me that he would give me as much help as he could. He hid me in his cellar. Every day I went to church with him, and I became one of the best singers in the church choir. After a time he gave me false papers, with my name listed as Kristina Pavlovnia. I began to feel like a genuine, born Christian.’

That did not last long, however. ‘One day, when I was walking to church, a Christian stopped me on the street and said, “What are you doing here?” I ran away in terror. When I told the priest, he calmed me, telling me to go back into the cellar and be as quiet as possible. That same day two Germans went to see the priest, demanding that he surrender the Jewish girl whom he had hidden. He denied that there was anyone in his house. They threatened to shoot him, but he continued to insist that he was hiding no one. The Germans tortured him in various ways, but he continued to refuse to give me up until he fell to the ground covered with blood. His body was pierced in several places, and his face was unrecognizable. Then the Germans left him as he was and went away. Before he died, the priest asked his housekeeper to take me out of my hiding place and bring me to him because he wanted to bless me.’

Her memory of this moment was terrifying: ‘All I saw was a pool of blood and the priest’s body, torn into pieces. I fainted. When I came to, he raised his crushed and broken hand and caressed me. Finally he told his housekeeper to give me over to trustworthy people, to behave toward me like a mother so that no one would suspect I was Jewish. Thus, leaning against him, I felt his body grow cold. Once again he asked that I be hidden in a safe place, and then he died. I can’t remember the priest’s name. He was a parish priest in Nowy Dwor. The housekeeper led me away from the priest and cleansed me of his blood. She changed my clothes, and at five in the morning she led me to Modlin. She left me there and disappeared.’ After that, living by her own wits, posing as a Christian child, Yehudis Pshenitse survived the war.
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IN THE COURSE
of investigations that led to more than five thousand Polish non-Jews being honoured for saving Jewish lives, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem received more than ten thousand notarized testimonies from those who were saved. In one case, however, there was at first no witness, only a story that was eventually authenticated forty-eight years after the war, when witnesses were found. At some time during 1941, an unknown Jewish woman arrived at the house of the Krasucki family in Minsk Mazowiecki, and asked if she could leave a newborn infant there for a few days. Irena Krasucki and her husband, who had two small children of their own, took the baby in, despite the danger of the undertaking. No one came to claim the baby, which had arrived with no financial support nor hope of such. After a time the Krasucki couple gave the child the name Bolek Strzycki, telling neighbours that he was a relative from a far-off city.

In 1943, amid fears that little Bolek’s Jewish identity would be discovered, Irena passed the child on to her mother, Jozefa Baranowska, who agreed to care for him until the end of the war. After liberation, the boy was handed over to Jewish institutions, and resided in various orphanages until his official adoption in 1948 by a couple named Kurtz, who emigrated with him to the United States.
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Nadja Goldberg and Heinich Laznik were married in July 1939, less than two months before the German invasion of Poland. Their daughter, Esther Rachel, was born in August 1940. The family were on friendly terms with a non-Jewish couple, Kazimierz and Janina Tworek. When the Jews of Piotrkow were confined to a ghetto, and compelled to labour in the city’s factories, the way to work for Nadja and Heinich went past the Tworeks’ house. Sometimes, as they passed by in the morning, the Lazniks would leave a note saying, ‘We need bread’ and on their way back that evening there would be some bread left out for them.

When the deportation of Piotrkow’s Jews began in October 1942, Nadja Laznik managed to break away from the round-up, carrying her two-year-old daughter with her. Her husband also managed to escape the deportation. Their granddaughter, Lisa Garbus, later wrote: ‘After that escape, my grandmother asked a non-Jewish family they knew (I don’t know who that family is) if they would hide her and my mother. They were afraid to hide an adult, but agreed to take my mother. That family didn’t keep her for long, though. They left her in a train station with a note pinned to her. She was found and brought to a Catholic orphanage where she spent the rest of the war as a Catholic child.’

Lisa Garbus’s account continued: ‘A few months after hiding my mother, my grandparents went to the Pietrusiewiczes’ house in the middle of the night and knocked on the door. My grandparents told me that the father (I’ve forgotten his first name) opened the door, looked around to see if anyone was watching, and silently led them inside. “It was an unspoken agreement,” my grandparents told me. I think they were hidden first in the attic of the small house, and then, when that seemed too dangerous, Mr Pietrusiewicz fabricated a hiding place for them outside, underneath the outdoor dog kennel that was behind the shed in their large backyard. He even created a ventilation system with pipes that came up into some bushes. I saw the shed and the yard when I was there (another house now takes up half the yard). The hiding place and dog kennel are no longer there. They crouched in that hole for around two years, and I can’t imagine what it was like. My grandmother used to say, “Anne Frank, she lived in a castle compared to where we were.” Then she would add, “But we are alive, and she is not.”

‘The family would bring them food every day, making it look like they were feeding the dog. I think there was some signal for the dog to move to free the access to the hiding place. The Pietrusiewiczes had four or five children (all of whom knew my grandparents were there), and there wasn’t much food, but my grandparents told me that they always left a little food on their plate, so that the family would never think that they didn’t have enough. Mr Pietrusiewicz would sit with them sometimes, and I think my grandmother did some knitting. At night they would use the bathroom and walk around the yard, but that became too dangerous in the winter when their tracks in the snow might arouse suspicion. They washed once a week, and my grandparents always insisted that they were clean. When the Russians liberated Poland, Mr Pietrusiewicz wisely advised them to remain in hiding for another month or two, because it was still not safe. “Just because the Germans are gone doesn’t mean the Poles won’t kill you,” he told them.’
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Lisa Garbus’s rescuer made money illegally distilling alcohol and selling it on the black market. ‘One day,’ she wrote, ‘the Germans did a search of all the houses on their street. If they had found the black market operation, the family could have all been killed. But they skipped the Pietrusiewicz house. After the war, when my grandparents emerged from hiding thin and pale and unaccustomed to the light of day, they tried to thank their saviour. “You saved us,” they said. “No,” he said, “I didn’t save you. You saved me. It was because you were hiding in my yard that the Germans passed over my house during their search.”’

Reflecting on this remark, Lisa Garbus wrote: ‘Who knows what he actually meant. Maybe he was superstitious and really believed they were his good luck charm. Or maybe by saying that they saved him, he meant that they saved his humanity, that they allowed him to be a decent human being in the midst of all that chaos. Whatever he meant, it is clear that his message to them was: “You don’t owe me anything. You did the favour for me.” This, for me, reveals the core of this man’s virtue, and that of his family. It’s one thing in these happier times, to tell house guests that it was a pleasure to have them over, and to turn the guests’ appreciation around and thank them for coming. It’s quite another to thank the people you saved by risking the lives of your whole family and to tell them that they owe you nothing, that you, in fact, feel you owe something to them. This is the ultimate gift, even more profound than the gift of life he gave them.’
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When the war was over the Lazniks found their daughter in the infirmary of an orphanage in Zakopane. ‘The orphanage workers recognized that they were her parents,’ Lisa Garbus wrote. ‘My grandparents had a picture, and apparently, she hadn’t changed much over the three or so years. And my grandparents recognized her. At first they just visited her, so as not to shock her; then they took her with them. She would cry to go to Church on Sunday, and she would hide bread in her clothes.’ As to Esther Rachel’s time in the orphanage, Lisa Garbus comments: ‘When my mother was there, her name was Wanda. I don’t know if she had false papers, but I think my grandmother did instruct her, before leaving her with the family, to speak Polish, not Yiddish. Not much is known of her time there. My mother remembers very little. She doesn’t remember any Polish. She only remembers not wanting to eat. The children were at long tables, and they were supposed to clean their plates, but she threw her food under the table.’
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As a result of Polish Christians’ courage, a family of three had survived. ‘Both my grandparents saw their Polish saviour as a father figure. My grandfather carried a picture of that man in his wallet every day of his life.’
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Sabina Schwarz (later Sabina Zimering) was sixteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. In October 1942, shortly before all but two thousand of the twenty-two thousand Jews in the Piotrkow ghetto were deported more than a hundred miles to Treblinka and their deaths, her mother told her that if her Catholic friend, Danka Justyna, would give up her identification papers, she might pretend to be a Pole and perhaps survive. Danka and her sister Mala had been lifelong friends of Sabina and her sister Helka; both worked for the Polish underground. Incredibly, Danka’s family provided three sets of false identification papers: one for Sabina, one for Helka and the third for their mother. The two girls, whose brother was in a labour camp, escaped the ghetto only two or three hours before it was surrounded.

Thus began an odyssey of ‘Hiding in the Open’, the title of Sabina Zimering’s as yet unpublished memoirs. On their father’s advice, the two sisters went to Germany as Polish volunteers, to work in a labour camp. At one point, on the verge of being discovered, they decided to flee. They were arrested at a railway depot. When the director of the camp was summoned to the police station to identify the girls, instead of angrily condemning them, he asked the police commander to return them to the camp, where, he said, they were good workers and well-liked. However, others had already accused them of being Jews, and they were forced immediately to run again. Trying to get to Switzerland, they managed to reach Regensburg, where they found jobs in the luxurious Maximilian Hotel. ‘It was some time before she [Sabina] realized that the guests were all high-ranking German military officials. She was still working there when American soldiers displaced them all.’
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The two Jewish sisters, as well as their brother, survived the war: their parents, and fifty members of their wider family, were murdered.

Each story of rescue has its own remarkable features. From the town of Chmielnik, Kalman and Sara Garfinkel sent two of their seven children, their daughter Helen and their son Fishel, to a farmer in nearby Celiny. There, the two youngsters worked as shepherds by day, and at night slept on haystacks inside the barn. The farmer taught them how to pray, and how to cross themselves. Their story has been told by an American writer, Suzan Hagstrom: ‘One day, fear, rather than loneliness, prompted Helen to take Fishel home. “I saw a sign,” Helen said. “It offered a bottle of vodka and 100 zlotys for farmers to tell the Germans where the Jewish children are. My brother couldn’t read. He was only seven. I got scared. The next day we walked home.”’

Their father persuaded them to return to the farm. ‘One day, as the children herded cows towards the barn, the farmer greeted them frantically, saying two Germans on motorcycles were approaching. He hid Fishel, and gave Helen a scarf and apron to wear, instructing her to milk a cow and not to talk, even if she were asked questions.’ The German asked her, ‘Where are the Jewish children?’ She shook her head. ‘I kept milking the cow,’ she recalled. ‘All I could think of was the Germans are going to find my brother, and my brother will tell.’

The Germans left, but after they had gone the farmer explained he could no longer keep them. ‘He had a family, and he was afraid.’ For a second time the two children returned to their parents.
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There followed years in ghettos, slave labour camps and deportations: the fate of almost all of the two million Jews under the General-Government. Helen survived the war, as did her elder brother Nathan and three of her sisters; but her parents, her brother Fishel, and a younger sister, Rachel, were deported to Treblinka and murdered.
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THE NEED FOR
places of refuge in Poland spanned more than two years, from the start of the deportations in mid-1942 to liberation at the end of 1944 or early 1945.

By 1943, tens of thousands of Jews were in hiding throughout occupied Poland, Byelorussia and the Ukraine; and German searches for them were continuous and brutal. On 22 March that year a Polish eyewitness in the town of Szczebrzeszyn, Dr Zygmunt Klukowski, recorded in his diary one of the harrowing scenes he had witnessed: ‘Yesterday they brought me a dangerously wounded peasant from Gruszka Zaporska. He had concealed six Jews from Radecznica in his cow barn. When the police appeared, he began to run and was shot at. He died last night. The gendarmes did not permit the family to carry away his body and ordered the Municipal Administration to bury him as a bandit. The Jews were shot by the Polish police of Radecznica and, shortly after the event, the gendarmes appeared in Gruszka and shot the peasant’s wife and two children: a six-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy.’
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