The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (24 page)

Thirty years before the publication of this article brought the story of the rescuers of Berlin to a wide public, Inge Deutschkron had written to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recalling ‘the people who risked their heads to help us’. Emma Gumz and her husband ‘were the first to take us in. They hid us for four weeks, continued to give us food throughout the two years and four months of our underground life. I also worked in her laundry as an ironer during that time.’ Another rescuer was Lisa Holländer. ‘She hid us for over nine months. Her husband was Jewish—Paul Holländer—and was killed in concentration camp, long before the deportations started.’ Then there was Käthe Schwarz, who both hid another Jewish woman and ‘for some months supplied us with food’. Another German couple, Walter Rieck and his wife, ‘were more or less in charge of our underground living. Whenever we did not know where to turn he helped out. The Riecks looked after us ever since 1938 when we needed someone to hide things or help us in other difficulties. It is also hard to describe in a few lines what Walter Rieck has done for us.’ Among other things, Walter Rieck employed Inge Deutschkron’s mother, ‘although he knew that she lived underground. He also gave her ration cards.’
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In a German television documentary in 1973, Albert Jurgens, a former Berlin policeman, spoke of how he had given shelter in his home to a Jewish couple (‘I had met the man at the railway station, and we got to talking’). He procured false papers for them, and travelled with the couple to the Swiss border where he smuggled them across. Jurgens lost his job as a result of this act of compassion. Lili Bat Aharon, an Israeli journalist, noted that he ‘recounted his tale with utter simplicity, as if his actions had been quite ordinary’.

In the same television programme, Bruno Motzko spoke of how he had hidden Jewish families in his home in Essen, procuring falsified documents for them. Also shown on the programme was Helen Jacobs. In answer to the question ‘Why did you do it?’ she replied: ‘To defend democracy and to fight against discrimination—of which the Jews were the greatest victims.’ She had hidden Jews in her home and sent packages to people in concentration camps—with her return address on them. She had provided those hidden by her with food, clothes and necessary documents.
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Among the many testimonies of Jews who were saved in Berlin is one from Ruth Gumpel, who was seventeen when war broke out. She wrote of her family’s rescuers, Max and Anni Gehre: ‘The Gehres had been patients of my father’s for many years. During that time their daughter had recovered from diphtheria, for which they were very grateful.’

When it was time for her family to think of going into hiding, ‘Mrs Gehre was instrumental in finding hiding places for all of us. As a matter of fact the Gehre family kept my father hidden in a pantry of their small apartment from 9 January 1943 till the end of the war in May 1945. Mrs Gehre also arranged often new hiding places for me and my now sister-in-law Ellen Arndt, when it became necessary for us to move. The Gehres shared their meagre ration cards with all of my family. They did not accept any money from us. As ordinary working-class people, the Gehres were motivated by human decency to help Jews, with no expected rewards or remuneration. Many of our personal belongings were hidden in their apartment and returned to us at the end of the war. None of the neighbours knew about my father’s presence in the apartment. During air raids he stayed there while the Gehres had to go to the shelter. Of course whenever they had company, my father kept out of sight.’
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Other Berliners who risked their lives to save Ruth Gumpel and her family were Gustav and Anni Schulz, who took in her mother on several occasions, and also hid her father’s medical instruments. Then, as she recalled, there were ‘Mr and Mrs Max Koehler and their son Hans, and Ernst and Maria Treptow’, of whom Ruth’s younger brother Bruno, who was seventeen in 1943, wrote: ‘I went into hiding on 30 January 1943 (three months after my mother was deported to Auschwitz). When my hiding places became unusable in April 1943, I remembered the Treptows and went there. They took me and my friend Joachim S., who was also in hiding, into their apartment. Since Mr Treptow was in the scrap and recycling business, there was a storage basement in the same house and we both slept there on bales of rags. Joachim S. was caught in a police dragnet on the streets of Berlin and was never heard from again. I stayed with the Treptows till their apartment house was destroyed during an air raid in May 1944. They moved to their one-room cottage in the suburb of Rangsdorf near Berlin and took me along. When neighbours became suspicious and started to ask questions, I had to move out.’ Bruno Gumpel then found refuge with another German friend, Erich J. Arndt.
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Rudolf Horstmeyer was not Jewish, but his wife Felicia was. Although the Nazi authorities encouraged non-Jewish husbands to divorce their Jewish wives, he refused to do so. Both were teachers: when the Gestapo came to arrest them, former pupils who had later joined the Nazi Party interceded, and protected them. When deportation was imminent they were tipped off and escaped to the countryside, where they were hidden, and survived.
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Evy Goldstein was only one year old when war broke out. Her father Ernst was among several thousand Berlin Jews deported to Auschwitz and killed in 1943. She and her mother Herta survived in Berlin thanks to the help given them by two rescuers, Dr Elisabeth Abegg and Hildegard Knies.
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In the Holocaust Museum in Washington, Evy Goldstein’s photograph is part of the photo archive, with a note that for the last part of the war she was hidden on the estate of the Baroness von Huellensen in East Prussia.
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Beginning on 27 February 1943, in Berlin the Gestapo rounded up 4,700 Jewish men who were married to non-Jewish women. They were taken to a collection and detention centre in the Rosenstrasse, from which they were to be deported to their deaths. In front of this building, however, an estimated two thousand of the non-Jewish wives gathered to demonstrate—as close as they could to where their husbands were being held—and demand the men’s release. Their protest began on a Sunday morning. By nightfall as many as two thousand more wives had joined them. They stayed in the street for a whole week, refusing to leave until their husbands were set free. At midday on Monday, March 6, Dr Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and one of the most actively anti-Jewish members of Hitler’s inner circle, gave in. Suddenly the Jews who had been about to be deported became ‘privileged persons’: free men who, the official announcement explained, ‘are to be incorporated in the national community’. The 4,700 Jewish husbands thereby survived the war, living in Berlin. Their wives’ protest is a little-known tale of courage—and of successful defiance.

These wives had a choice. They could have opted to end, by divorce, the increasing discrimination, deprivation and danger which they had endured since Hitler had come to power ten years earlier. Instead, they chose to risk their lives to remain with their husbands. Charles C. Milford—then Klaus Mühlfelder—whose mother was one of those German spouses, noted: ‘Couples who divorced in the belief this would improve the lot of their children, inadvertently condemned the Jewish spouse to death, as these were to be deported and killed when the systematic extermination of German Jews got under way.’
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The stories of mixed marriages often contain great heroism. Peter Gruner, a non-Jew, was inseparable from his Jewish wife. Margit Diamond, his niece by marriage wrote: ‘He remained with his wife throughout the war, saving her life and exposing himself to untold dangers when he could have had a much easier time by leaving her. He and his wife were not allowed in the air raid shelter during the bombing of Berlin, they received starvation rations, both had to do slave-type labour…he could have avoided all the hardships had he left his Jewish wife. Both barely survived the war.’

Margit Diamond also recalled a second uncle, Paul Saloschin, who was married to another aunt. ‘The Holocaust records show that he was transported from Berlin to Lodz along with his wife, and then “liquidated”,’ she writes, and then adds: ‘When I told this to some survivors who knew my family intimately, I found out for the first time that my “uncle” Paul was
not
Jewish! Thus it appears that he, too, refused to abandon his Jewish wife and went to his death with her.’
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Otto Weidt, a German pacifist, had a small brush factory in a courtyard in the centre of Berlin. Blind himself, he took in several dozen Jews, most of them blind, or deaf and mute, and, in his discussions with the deportation authorities, insisted that the work they did for him was essential for the German war economy.
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Today, at the entrance to his courtyard, a plaque notes: ‘Many men thank him for having survived.’
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Every attempt to rescue a Jew was fraught with danger. Emmy Erdmann, from Trier, gave her identity card to a Jewish friend, who thereby survived the war, and helped other Jews escape across the border into Holland. For these humane acts, she was eventually arrested and executed.
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FROM THE MOMENT
of the German annexation in 1938, Austria’s identity was merged with that of Germany: even the geographical term ‘Austria’ was replaced by smaller regions. In 1943, in a declaration issued from Moscow, the Allies stated that Austria was the first victim of Nazism, as a result of the annexation. Austrian anti-Semitism had been strong, and many of the cruellest concentration camp commandants and guards were Austrian-born, but there were many individual Austrians, like individual Germans, who opposed the Nazi persecution of the Jews and suffered as a result; some tried to help save Jewish life, despite the great risks. Eighty-three Austrians have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.
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One such Austrian was Lambert Grutsch. The life he saved was that of a young woman, Helena Horowitz, who on 15 December 1942 ran away from the ghetto in the Polish town of Debica, ‘without a name, without any identification papers’, as she later recalled. ‘I wound up, as “Sypek, Julia”, in Biezanow near Plaszow, working in Firma Stuag, a Viennese construction firm.’ It was there that Lambert Grutsch, an overseer in the firm, offered to help her by getting her out of Poland. ‘He knew that I was Jewish, but when he went with me to the Arbeitsamt in Cracow, to apply for me to serve as a maid and farmhand for his wife, I was officially working for his Firma Stuag and I also had a bona fide Arbeitskarte.

‘I arrived in Tyrol on February 6, 1944. He was going home for a three-week vacation and he officially took me out of Poland as a slave-worker. He didn’t say a word to anybody. I worked on his parents’ farm all through 1944 till after the Liberation. The sons were all in the army and Adelheid and I did all the necessary farm work. I was “die Polin” Julia and got accepted as a cherished member of the family. They had absolutely no idea what was going on in the world. I worked hard, but I was in paradise.’
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Lambert had taken Helena to his family home at Jerzens, in a remote valley high in the Austrian Tyrol—a narrow valley ending in the glaciers that mark the Austro-Italian border. He then returned to Poland.
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Aram and Felicia Taschdjian were part of a small Armenian community in Vienna, refugees from the massacres of their compatriots in Turkey after the First World War. One night in 1942 Valentin Skidelsky, who had escaped from a train taking him to a concentration camp, came to their door in search of a safe haven. They took him in, and hid him in their attic until the end of the war.
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Ella Lingens-Reiner was an Austrian doctor. In 1942 she hid a Jewish girl called Erika in her flat in Vienna. ‘We had to nourish her,’ she recalled, ‘but to get food, one needed ration cards. Friends of ours, a couple of teachers who were in charge of distributing these cards, put some of them aside for Erika. When Erika needed surgery for appendicitis, we could not bring her to the hospital without papers. It was our own maid who did not hesitate to give her the papers, so that she could be treated in the hospital. The last month Erika was with us, she took a sunbath on the roof of our house. Some people in the house opposite saw her and informed the police. A policeman rang at the door. Erika kept quiet. But the policeman said: “I know there is someone inside. I will fetch a man who will open the door by force.” When he went away, Erika was in panic. Suddenly, the door opened and there came a girlfriend of my brother-in-law who had given her a key. Erika informed her of her situation. Ten minutes later when the policeman rang again, a girl opened and told him: “I am sorry, I did not open the first time, but I was so ashamed for being seen naked.” The policeman fined her for her indecency. This girl, whom she had never seen before or afterwards, saved Erika’s life.’

Ella Lingens-Reiner adds: ‘All these people would have been killed if discovered. None of them ever claimed to be a hero. Yad Vashem does not even know their names. But my husband and I could not have helped anybody without their assistance. For anyone who is honoured today for saving Jewish lives, there were ten or more who did the same.’
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In 1942 Ella Lingens-Reiner helped another Jew escape from Austria. For her determination to help, she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, but survived.
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Several Austrians enabled Lorraine Justman-Wisnicki to avoid recapture after she and her friend Marysia Fuchs-Wartski had escaped from a prison in Innsbruck in January 1945, before the area was liberated. The first to help was Rudl Moser. ‘We found refuge, compassion and understanding,’ Lorraine later recalled. ‘Strangers became close family. They were deeply concerned, they cared. What an elated feeling after ten months in prison! “Don’t worry, doves! I will protect you from the Nazi-swines!”—Rudl’s voice sounds a bit high-flown now. A good-natured chap, he was happy for us and proud of his part in our escape.’