The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (18 page)

It was Genia Olczak who came to the rescue, making hiding places for the Rozencwajgs in her small apartment. ‘In a niche behind an armoir two people could stand, and behind a false wall in the toilet—one person,’ Bianka Kraszewski recalled. ‘My aunt, my uncle Karol and his wife Estka and my little cousin Gabriel left the ghetto and went to stay with Genia. She prepared false papers for each of them, but for Gabriel prepared a false birth certificate as her son out of wedlock. She went to work every day to help support them and if anyone knocked on the door the three adults would go to their hiding places. Gabriel stayed home under the pretext that he had TB.’

Bianka Kraszewski’s account continued: ‘Genia also was instrumental later on (November 1942) in getting my mother and me out of the ghetto, getting papers for us and finding us hiding places. Later on she did the same for my father (April 1943). When the workers of our “shop” were moved to the Poniatowa camp they took everyone—including my brother, cousins, another uncle, four aunts and my best friend—except my father whom they ordered to keep an eye on the “shop”.’

At one of the Schultz workshops in Warsaw, the largest in the ghetto, it was the German manager, Fritz Schultz, who carried out an act of kindness. As Bianka Kraszewski wrote: ‘Mr Schultz forcefully put my father in the trunk of his car and drove him to the Aryan side of Warsaw (where I and my mother were). My grandfather committed suicide—before they could take him to Auschwitz. I don’t know about the others, but my nineteen-year-old brother was later taken to the Trawniki camp. Inmates of both camps were killed in November 1943. Genia kept finding places for
us
to hide—as it was too dangerous for us to be together with my parents. (On 1 February 1944 they were denounced and shot together with their host Mr Przybysz.) Soon after that someone denounced Genia and she had to get rid of my uncle and two aunts. They were hidden after that in the Old Town district of Warsaw and after the Warsaw Uprising ended unsuccessfully and they had nowhere to go, they too committed suicide.’

Genia Olczak continued to do all she could; taking the young Gabriel Rozencwajg to her village, where she looked after him until liberation. Bianka Kraszewski added: ‘About ten years ago, Genia was awarded a medal of Righteous Among the Nations, and travelled to Israel and saw a tree being planted in her name in Yad Vashem. She never married—her young years were devoted to trying to save us all and especially to Gabriel whom she loves like her own son.’ Genia, she wrote, ‘who risked her life for us for years, thinks she only did what she should have done and certainly does not consider herself in any way heroic. However, this good, kind, wonderful woman is loved by everyone and if angels would walk this would have been one of them.’
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Each story of rescue reveals different aspects of the courage of the rescuers. William Donat was just five years old when he was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto. ‘I had already survived many hours in the bunker my parents and their neighbours had fashioned,’ he later wrote, ‘and I had just been rescued from
Umschlagplatz
, the infamous railhead the Germans had set up to transport Warsaw’s Jews to Majdanek and Treblinka. My father had managed to persuade a Ghetto policeman to snatch me out of that place of terror. That close call had been so chilling that my parents began a massive effort to place me on the Aryan side. It was difficult enough to place a girl, but to find someone willing to take a boy was unheard of. I had blond hair and blue eyes, and we spoke only Polish at home, but still, I was a Jewish boy bearing the sign of the covenant.’

William Donat’s account continued: ‘My parents reviewed their entire list of Christian friends and business acquaintances and, after exhaustive communications, they found an older couple, active in the underground, who might be willing to take me. Before the war, the man had worked for my father’s newspaper as an editor. His wife, who was to become my “Auntie Maria”, came to see me at the printing shop where my father worked. The shop was outside the Ghetto walls, making this meeting possible. She felt that I could “pass” and arrangements were quickly made: my mother taught me the “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” prayers; I learned my new last name and got my first haircut; I was to forget the Ghetto and to remember that my mother was in the country and my father in the army. I had been living with Auntie Maria and Uncle Stefan for about a month when one of the neighbours betrayed me to the local Polish police. Auntie Maria stood up to the pistol-waving policemen, deftly bargaining for my life with the American $20 gold pieces that my father had given her, while reminding them that one day the war would end. A deal was struck—they would not take me to the Gestapo, but she could no longer keep me with her.’

Several days later, William Donat was sent across the Vistula to an orphanage in Otwock which was run by nuns. ‘Shortly after my arrival in this strange and inhospitable place, I was approached by a young nun who said to me, “Admit you’re a Jew and I’ll help you.” I persisted in denying what must have been obvious to all the nuns, until one day, feeling particularly lonely and melancholy—I even remember thinking that it must be my birthday—I confessed my terrible secret, but only after the nun promised to keep the confidence. She told me not to worry, she could fix everything. She arranged to have me baptized and I threw myself into daily prayers, going to mass, asking God for more food. This went on for two years…’

William Donat’s mother and father both survived deportation and the camps. After the war, he recalled, people in Warsaw would point them out as ‘an unusual sight, a Jewish family where all the members had survived’.
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THE RESCUE OF
Jews by Poles was, is and will remain a controversial topic. The historian Yisrael Gutman, who was himself in the Warsaw Ghetto—and later in the camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz—has written: ‘Thousands of Jews escaped to the “Aryan” side of Warsaw and its vicinity at the time of the mass deportation, and it is estimated that between fifty and twenty thousand Jews were in hiding beyond the ghetto during the period. Even if these figures account for only five percent of Warsaw’s Jewish population at its height, they nonetheless represent a substantial number in absolute terms. Despite the fact that the Polish public was rife with elements that exposed Jews and turned them in to the Nazis, and gangs of Polish extortionists (szmalcownicy) were the bane of Jews in hiding or living under false identities, it is obvious that the concentration of such a large number of fugitives in a single area could not have been possible without the active involvement of a good number of Poles.’

Gutman goes on to reflect that there are ‘many facets to this ardent involvement. One particular sector of the intelligentsia—comprising both men of progressive views and devout Catholics who worked with unrelenting devotion to rescue Jews—was of singular importance. At first these people attempted to help Jews with whom they were personally acquainted—primarily assimilated Jews—but in the course of time, the aid and rescue of Jews per se became an all-consuming mission. These circles were the seed that eventually blossomed into Zegota.’
¹⁵

Zegota—the Polish acronym for the Council for Assistance to the Jews—was set up on 27 September 1942. Its establishment was to prove a turning point in the history of the Righteous. The originators of the Council were two women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz.
¹⁶
They knew full well that any Pole who helped a Jew, and was caught, could expect no mercy. Before the First World War, Wanda Filipowicz had been active, within the Socialist movement, for Polish independence. Between the wars, Zofia Kossak had been head of the Catholic Front for the Reborn Poland, which believed Poland would be a better place without Jews. She was also a best-selling novelist, having made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1933 and written three historical novels about the Crusades: one of them,
Blessed Are the Meek
, had become a bestseller in the United States.

Zofia Kossak’s past known anti-Jewish stance, and her fame, made her wartime advocacy of helping the Jews a powerful one. In spite of her anti-Semitism she had been repelled by the savagery of the Nazi persecutions of the Jews, and her human instincts drove her to use her organizational skills to do something about it. Her opposition to the occupation regime would lead to her being sent to Auschwitz—to the Polish section of the camp, itself a centre of torture and terror. She survived her incarceration there, and was in due course recognized in Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
¹⁷

A month before the establishment of Zegota, Zofia Kossak wrote the appeal issued by the clandestine Front for the Rebirth of Poland. Headed ‘Protest!’ it declared: ‘What is occurring in the Warsaw Ghetto has been occurring for the past half year in various smaller and larger cities of Poland. The total number of Jews killed already exceeds a million, and the number enlarges with each passing day. Everyone dies. The wealthy and the impoverished, the elderly, women, men, youth, infants, Catholics dying in the name of Jesus and Mary, as well as Orthodox Jews, all of them faulted for the fact that they were born of the Jewish race, condemned to extermination by Hitler.’

The Polish ‘opponents of Jews’, the appeal stated, ‘demonstrate a lack of interest in a matter, which is foreign to them. The dying Jews are solely surrounded by Pilates washing their hands of any fault. This silence cannot be tolerated any longer. Whatever its motives, they are despicable. In the face of crime, one cannot remain passive. Who remains silent in the face of slaughter—becomes an enabler of the murderer. Who does not condemn—then consents.’

Bizarrely, yet honestly, Zofia Kossak went on to note that the feelings of Catholic Poles towards Jews ‘have not changed. We have not stopped considering them the political, economic and conceptual enemies of Poland’ but the ‘consciousness of these feelings does not free us of the responsibility of condemning the crime. We do not wish to be Pilates. We do not have the ability actively to forestall the German slaughter, we cannot change anything, and save anyone—yet we protest from the depth of our hearts, which are encompassed with pity, indignation and anger. God requires this protest from us, God who does not allow murder. It is required of a Catholic conscience. Each being, calling itself human, has a right to brotherly love. The blood of the innocent calls for vengeance to the heavens. He, who does not support this protest—is not Catholic.’
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Zofia Kossak then threw all her energy into her work with Zegota. In its first two months, its members took care of an estimated 180 Jews, mainly children. At first Zegota’s activities were almost entirely limited to Warsaw, where it opened three safe houses in which Jews could be hidden at any time. It also distributed documents, cash and clothing. But within a few months, branches of Zegota were opened in Cracow, Brest-Litovsk and Siedlce. Contacts were also made, and help given, in Kielce, Bialystok, Radom and Bochnia, as well as in Lublin and a number of localities in the Lublin region, including Zamosc. Eventually Zegota’s rescue efforts extended to the Eastern Galician city of Lvov. Liaison between these towns and Warsaw was undertaken by Ferdynand Arczynski, who was also Zegota’s treasurer.

Active in Zegota from its earliest days was Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. As an eighteen-year-old underground activist in 1940, he had been imprisoned by the Germans in Auschwitz for seven months. On his release he was among the founders of Zegota—and later one of the first Poles to be recognized by Yad Vashem.
¹⁹
Many years later he was to recall that in the pre-war years his parents had Jewish friends and business associates who would visit them at home. ‘Even though my family was Catholic, we had a very liberal outlook towards the world. What was important for me is not a person’s religious beliefs, but whether a person is a good human being.’
²⁰

Irena Sendlerowa headed the children’s section of Zegota. Before the war she had been a senior administrator in the social welfare department of the Warsaw municipality, and before the establishment of Zegota she had used her connections in the municipality to place Jewish families on the welfare rolls, using fictitious Christian identities; to get apartment superintendents to register them as tenants; and to get social workers to report, falsely, that they were afflicted with contagious diseases so they would not be inspected. In time, more than three thousand Jews were receiving assistance through her connections. After the sealing of the ghetto she obtained special passes from physicians in the epidemic control department that allowed her and her co-conspirator, Irena Schultz, to enter the ghetto at will. The two women made daily visits with food, medicine, clothing and money. They were able to bring substantial quantities of these items into the ghetto with the help of plumbers, electricians and other Polish workers who were allowed to bring their trucks into the district.

As the situation in the Warsaw Ghetto deteriorated, with starvation rampant, and deportations intensifying, Irena Sendlerowa and Irena Schultz began to help get children out of the ghetto. At the end of 1942 they were contacted by Zegota, and their network was incorporated into the new organization. As head of the children’s section of Zegota, Sendlerowa placed more than two and a half thousand Jewish children in orphanages, convents, schools, hospitals and private homes. She provided each child with birth and baptismal certificates and a new identity. In addition, she carefully recorded in code the original names of all the children and where they were being placed, so that after the war they could be claimed by surviving relatives. In autumn 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Pawiak prison. Though subjected to severe torture that crippled her for life, she did not reveal her networks of rescue.
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