The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (22 page)

Many rescuers took in whole families, with the added dangers, costs and difficulties that this entailed. Anna Zellner (then Tauber) was fifteen when, along with her parents and brother, she made her way back to Cracow from a village in Western Galicia, where hiding had become even more difficult than ever, in the hope of finding a safe hiding place. The family was taken in by Tadeusz Sosin—a cello and trombone player—and his wife Zofia, and hidden until the Russians liberated the city on 18 January 1945. The Sosins’ apartment consisted of one bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom. ‘The Sosins lived in the bedroom,’ Anna Zellner recalled; ‘we lived in the kitchen where there was one bed on which my mother and myself slept. There was one mattress under the bed, which was moved every night and occupied by my father and brother. Mr Sosin constructed a hiding place in the pantry—building a false ceiling, which served as a floor in time of peril.’

When anyone knocked at the door, Anna Zellner recalled, ‘we climbed the shelves and all four of us crouched in the hiding spot. My father gave them some jewelry items to sell in order to buy groceries and necessities. They literally and sincerely wanted to save us. Knowing well that they are endangering their lives. The only ones who knew about us were Mrs Sosin’s sister and her brother, who were supplying us with food in order not to arouse suspicion in the neighbourhood by buying large quantities of groceries. Mr Sosin went to work daily. His wife Zofia was cooking and also worked part time. Son Otton attended high school and was tutoring me in many subjects.’
¹⁰
Anna Zellner is among the many Jews—as many as eight hundred each year—who seek to have their rescuers acknowledged as Righteous Among the Nations.

Another Cracow teenager, Marcel Jarvin (then Fleischer), was fifteen years old when he escaped, in August 1942, from a German labour camp in central Poland, and made his way back to Cracow. There, Marian Wlodarczyk, his father’s former janitor, hid him in his apartment, together with Marcel’s brother and his wife. When a former Gentile schoolfriend confronted him in the street and demanded a large ransom not to denounce him, all three realized they must leave their hiding place immediately: a few hours later Polish police, working for the Germans, came looking for them.

Some time later, Marcel Jarvin was arrested in the street, on suspicion of being Jewish. ‘Despite my denial,’ he later recalled, ‘I was brought before a Gestapo officer who demanded that I expose myself. Being circumcised, the officer hit me in the face for lying that I was not Jewish. Nonetheless I kept on vehemently denying it, so much so that this Gestapo officer decided that I should be examined by a German doctor. In due course a German doctor looked at my penis, looked me in the eyes and pronounced: “No circumcision.” I was released to live another day. However, what must be pointed out is that it was a
Polish
Gentile policeman who arrested me in the first instance in the street. It may interest you to know that Polish Gentiles were able to recognise Jews much more readily than the Germans.’
¹¹

Twenty-five miles east of Cracow, Abraham and Malka Schoen, and their children Tania, Alice and Meyer, had left the ghetto of Bochnia and found a hiding place with a farmer and his wife, Wladyslaw and Stanislawa Lacny, and their daughter Irena. ‘All of us were hidden there for one week,’ Alice Schoen (later Sally Wiener) recalled; ‘then we had to leave because the neighbours were spreading rumours that Jews were being hidden there. My boyfriend Henry and his family had also gone into hiding and eventually wound up in the Bochnia ghetto. The decision was made that my family should also go to the Bochnia ghetto, which was about five miles away, but that I should remain in hiding in order to supply them with food. In the beginning I was able to send them food into the ghetto, but it eventually became too dangerous.’

Wladyslaw Lacny, with whom Alice Schoen was hiding, ‘took all precautions’, she recalled, ‘to hide me from outsiders, regardless of who they might be. For the first year I was hidden underground, under the wooden floor. At that time there were rumours that the Polish underground army, the Armia Krajowa, were searching for hidden Jews, and killing them when they found them…One day they came unexpectedly to the farmer’s house and started to search the premises, but fortunately didn’t find anything. Eventually it became so dangerous that I had to escape. I headed to the Bochnia ghetto, but lost my way and hid in the woods when I heard shots. I buried myself under the leaves and tore up my birth certificate because it indicated that I was Jewish. At the lowest point of my life I recited the Shema (Hear O Israel, our God is One). When the shots ceased, I picked myself up, and, stricken with fear, I spotted a light in a far away house. I went to the house and knocked lightly at the window. When a man came out, I told him I had lost my way. He looked at me and told me that I should not be afraid, that during World War I a Jewish family had saved his life by hiding him in their barn, and dressing him as a milk maid to mislead the soldiers looking for him.’

The new rescuer hid Alice Schoen under the straw in his barn, and told her once more not to be afraid. ‘He didn’t want to tell me his name, in case I might reveal it if I were captured. But he did tell me that he had eight children and twelve cows. I stayed hidden there for one day and one night, and the next night the man showed me the way back to the Lacny family’s village. I had decided to go back there because I had been told that the Bochnia ghetto was in the process of liquidation, and that many Jews there had already been killed, or sent out by train, destination unknown. My farmer and his family rejoiced when they saw me; they thought I had been killed during the shooting I had hidden from, which had indeed been the sounds of Jews being killed. At that point they decided to build a double wall for me. It was 23 October 1943.’

The new place of rescue was tiny. ‘The width of my hiding place was the width of my body, and there was a small hole for the intake of food, and the outtake of refuse. Once I was inside the wall I didn’t see any light until I was liberated on 12 January 1945. I could tell when it was morning by the sounds of the birds chirping, and the rooster. I could tell the nights by the sounds of occasional shots, knowing that another Jewish life was lost. Sometimes the mice were creeping on my body.’

Betrayal, of both rescuer and rescued, was an ever-present risk. ‘One day the German and Polish police came together saying that they were informed that my farmer was hiding a Jew. Their German shepherd dog began sniffing at the hole I was hidden in. I held my breath, and covered myself in the hope that the dog would not smell me. At that point my farmer distracted the dog with salami, and the policemen with vodka, and eventually they left. After that, the rumours about the farmer hiding Jews ceased.’

When, at liberation, the farmer pulled Alice Schoen out of her hiding place, ‘they were shocked at what they saw: a living skeleton of about eighty-five pounds with long fingernails, unable to walk or see. It took me about five weeks to walk properly, and three months to get my vision back.’

Alice’s boyfriend Henry Wiener had also survived—one of the twelve hundred Jews saved by Oskar Schindler in his factories. They were married in a displaced persons’ camp at Fürth, near Nuremberg, ‘the first wedding in the DP camp’.
¹²

The story of a family in the town of Chmielnik, just over fifty miles from Cracow, shows one of the many different kinds of help that were needed, and how it might be found in unexpected places. The biographer of Sonia Garfinkel, Suzan Hagstrom, has written: ‘Some adults with a deep sense of foreboding tried to pass for non-Jew during the German occupation. This was a slim possibility for individuals with financial resources, political connections, and a supposedly Aryan appearance.’ To save Sonia in such a way, her parents ‘asked Mr Opalka, a Pole in Chmielnik’s city hall, to make a false identification card for her. Sonia describes Mr Opalka as a kind man who offered to draft papers for all the sisters and other Jews. The Germans later gunned him down in the street.’
¹³

Some twenty miles from Cracow, in the village of Sieciechowice, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, Roza Kfare (later Dr Rose Kfar), was in hiding, sent there by her parents after the mass deportation of more than sixty thousand Jews from Lvov to Belzec in August 1942. At Sieciechowice she lived with a Polish schoolteacher, Krystyna Moskalik. After the war Rose went to Cracow, to live with friends of her rescuer. There she learned of the fate of her family. Her mother had escaped from a deportation train to Belzec and returned to Lvov, but had died of typhus in February 1943. Her father had escaped from Janowska camp in Lvov, but also died of typhus a month later. ‘I was devastated by the news,’ she recalled. ‘I asked Krystyna why hadn’t she told me about my parents’ deaths. She explained that she feared I might become despondent and lose the will to survive, and she was determined to have me survive.’
¹⁴

The help given to Jews by non-Jews in Cracow prompted the Germans to set up an increasing number of special courts to try Poles accused of helping Jews—in spite of a report of the German chief of police in the General-Government, dated 7 October 1943, recommending that cases of Poles helping Jews should be dealt with summarily by the police ‘without the necessary delay of court hearings’.
¹⁵
On 29 January 1944, in Cracow, a special court sentenced five Poles to death for helping Jews. One, Kazimierz Jozefek, as earlier described by Philip Friedman, was hanged in a public square.
¹⁶

The final liquidation of the Bobowa ghetto took place on 14 August 1942. Of the five thousand Jews in the ghetto, one of the few who survived was twelve-year-old Samuel Oliner, who had been urged by his grandmother to escape from the ghetto into the countryside. After walking for two days, he found refuge with a friendly peasant woman who risked her life by teaching him how to pass as a non-Jew. The young Oliner was given a new name and different clothes, and was taught to read in Polish and recite the catechism. When he was ready, Samuel left her home to seek work in a village where he was not known. He found a job tending cows on a farm occupied by a Polish couple who had moved from the city and rented the formerly Jewish-owned farm from the Germans. They knew little about farm work and needed help. Samuel lived there for three years, and survived the war.
¹⁷

In the city of Tarnow, in the centre of Western Galicia, Dr Maximilian Rosenbusz, the principal of the main Polish Jewish high school, had before the war befriended the district inspector for the Polish Education Ministry, Wladyslaw Horbacki. In June 1940, Rosenbusz had been among the first group of Jews sent to Auschwitz—not then an extermination camp—to work at forced labour in the expansion of the camp. He died soon afterwards, his ashes being returned (for payment) to his family in Tarnow. Soon after the establishment of the Tarnow ghetto, and the start of the deportations that were to lead to the total destruction of the city’s Jewry, Dr Rosenbusz’s wife and daughter escaped from the ghetto and sought sanctuary with the Horbackis. There, Dr Rosenbusz’s daughter Zofia found herself among friends: Wladyslaw Horbacki taught her physics and mathematics, and his wife Milica taught her English. ‘Every slice of bread, each drop of milk or soup was equally shared between rescuers and rescued,’ she later recalled.
¹⁸

In Przemysl, a Catholic teenager risked her own life, and that of her younger sister, to save thirteen Jews. Stefania Podgorska was sixteen years old when her father died, and her mother and brother were taken off to a German labour camp, as were so many hundreds of thousands of Poles. For the next two and a half years she hid thirteen Jewish men, women and children in the attic of her family home. ‘I just did what I thought I should do,’ was her post-war comment.
¹⁹

Also in Przemysl, in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a ten-year-old Jewish girl, Maria Klein, was given refuge. She later recalled ‘thirteen very frightened’ other Jewish children accepted, like her, ‘with grave risk’. The fact that she was Jewish was known only by three of the nuns: Sister Amelia (the Mother Superior), Sister Ligoria and Sister Bernarda. They gave her a key to the church so that ‘if the Germans made a search, I was to hide inside the altar where the Holy relics were kept’.
²⁰

On 1 January 1967 a Polish weekly newspaper published a letter from Roza Reibscheid-Feliks, a Polish Jewish woman then living in Tel Aviv. She wrote: ‘my conscience would not leave me alone if I kept silent about the deeds of these “Righteous”. Some helped me for a whole year, others for two months, some for a few days only, but I shudder to think what would have happened if they had not held out their helping hand just for those few days! Even he who gave me shelter for one night only—may he be blessed! I should be grateful to you, sir…if in any way open to you, you would transmit my thanks to my saviours.’
²¹
Roza Reibscheid-Feliks then listed nine individuals and two families, each of whom had helped her to survive. Among them were two churchmen: Canon Wojciech Bartosik from the village of Wawrzenczyce, near Miechow, and the Revd Dr Ferdynand Machay, from Our Lady’s Church in Cracow.

TRAGICALLY, MANY OF
those who gave shelter to Jews were caught—usually through betrayal—and killed, as were those whom they sheltered. Nobody can calculate the numbers, but some evidence of such betrayal and execution has survived. In September 1944, shortly before Soviet forces entered Przemysl, a Jewish survivor, Yosef Buzhminsky, saw in a courtyard in the city ‘a little girl six years old playing there. Gestapo and SS men arrived, surrounded the courtyard. It was a Polish family consisting of eight people. They began whipping the girl, and then they executed all of them right there in the courtyard.’ This Polish family had hidden the Jewish girl.
²²