The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (51 page)

Wilde added that Bergmann ‘just about suggested that I make a run for it if possible. I actually did this a few days later, but not from the work site so as not to endanger him. I think he took a great risk and I never learned if I was the only one he warned. I actually got away and was free for several weeks, hiding at an old German country doctor’s home near Chemnitz (a World War One army friend of my father) who also took a grave risk. I was arrested there and ended up in Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war. I later learned that Dr Laurentius (my father’s friend) was never arrested and that he survived the war and continued practicing at Oberlungwitz for a number of years before his death. He was a righteous man and so was his family which included several teenagers, all mandatory members of the Hitler Jugend but still able to keep a closed mouth.’
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At Auschwitz, Maryla Chodnikewicz, a Polish partisan who had been caught by the Germans, brought two Jewish girls into the kitchens where she worked. There they were able to survive as Polish prisoners, with less cruelty and more food. They were also able to steal hot water for some of their friends who were literally freezing in the Jewish section of the camp.
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Recalling her own incarceration in Auschwitz, Hungarian-born Isabella Leitner wrote of ‘the gentile woman from Budapest, she of noble birth, who was sent to Auschwitz because she had committed an unpardonable crime—she had helped her Jewish friends. I no longer remember her name, only her aristocratic face, drawn and hungry…She died in the ovens later, but now she was with us, and we loved her, and she loved us. There had not been any need for intellectual utterances for a long while now. Only the language of survival was of import here. Yet with her, on occasion, we actually talked of books. Strange must be the ways of the hungry, for even while the body is starving the mind may crave nourishment too.’
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Body and mind were both nourished by one of the block leaders in Auschwitz. His name was Franz, and an eyewitness of his actions was Rudolf Vrba, who later escaped from Auschwitz and helped bring details of its gas chambers and slaughter to the West. Vrba later recalled how, as Franz shouted at his work detail, ‘he swung at us with his club. To the passing SS men he looked and sounded a splendid kapo, heartless, brutal, efficient; yet never once did he hit us. In fact all the time I knew him, I never saw him strike a prisoner and that in Auschwitz was quite a record. I learned the reasons for his humanity later. In the first place he was a civilized, honourable man. Secondly he had suffered under the Nazis much longer than we had and hated them much more deeply.’

Vrba learned that Franz’s battle against the Nazis ‘had begun when he tried to reach Spain at the age of seventeen to fight against Franco. He never got further than the Austrian frontier, however, and when the Nazis took over his country, they sent him to Dachau concentration camp. After that came a succession of concentration camps; and when war broke out he became a kapo because experienced, hardened prisoners were needed to teach manners to the naïve newcomers who were being driven behind barbed wire in hundreds of thousands all over Europe.’

On one occasion, Franz and Vrba saw a group of starving Slovak girls who were scavenging empty food tins from the rubbish bins, ‘and scraping them clean with their fingers’. Franz said to Vrba: ‘Rudi, we must do something for those girls,’ and proceeded to steal a box of marmalade from the camp store. After that he was known to those in his barrack as ‘Franz Marmalade’, a name that still attached to him after the war, where he ran a hotel in Vienna.
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Helena Toth was the daughter of a Hungarian baron. Shortly before the Second World War she had married a Yugoslav Jew, Benjamin Elias. He was among many hundreds of Jews seized and deported in 1944 to the Baja concentration camp, inside Hungary. Helena Elias made her way to the camp, where she was received by the commanding officer and managed to convince him, without revealing that Benjamin Elias was her husband, that he was a Jew who always helped Christians. On that ground, she requested his release. It took her two and a half months of sustained effort to persuade the camp officials to release her husband and six other Jews. The very day of their release, the other Jewish captives in Baja were sent to Auschwitz. The seven who survived did so as a result of Helena Elias’s persistence and persuasiveness, and her willingness to put her own life at risk.
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A NAME CAN
be deceptive: Charles Coward was far from a coward. A British soldier in the battle for France, in 1940 he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped from captivity several times, but, like so many escapees, was caught, and finally sent as a punishment to a prisoner-of-war camp attached to Auschwitz III, the slave labour camp at Buna-Monowitz, only a few miles from the gas chambers, where Jews, foreign workers and Allied prisoners of war worked in the construction of the largest synthetic oil plant in German-occupied Europe. At any one time, as many as ten thousand Jews toiled there. Two of them, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, later wrote about the cruel suffering endured in that place.

Norbert Wollheim, a Jewish prisoner at Monowitz, testified at the Nuremberg Trials immediately after the war that at least four hundred Jews had been able to get away from the Jewish slave labour camp at Monowitz because Charles Coward had had an ingenious idea: he would collect precious chocolate from his fellow British prisoners of war and exchange it with one of the Monowitz guards—an SS sergeant-major who was open to bribery—for dead bodies, whose identities he then gave to Jews, a few each night, as they were marched back to their barracks from the I. G. Farben factories. These ‘substituted’ Jews were then given civilian clothing and smuggled out of the camp altogether.

On one occasion, Coward smuggled himself into Auschwitz ‘and spent the night in one of the death huts searching for a British Jew, a naval officer, reputed to be languishing in the Camp.’
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On learning of Coward’s death in 1976, Donia Rosen, then head of the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, wrote to his family: ‘We will long remember and will pass on to our posterity the memory of Mr Coward’s heroic and selfless actions, which he rendered in service to his fellow man. Our sages were addressing themselves to men like Mr Coward when they thought: “He who saves one life, it is as if he had saved the entire world”.’
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STARTING IN THE
autumn of 1944, and in increasing numbers into the early months of 1945, more than a hundred thousand Jews were marched, in groups of up to a thousand, from their places of incarceration in several hundred concentration and slave labour camps in the East—including Auschwitz and Monowitz—to slave labour camps and concentration camps in Germany. The Nazi aim was to prevent these Jews being liberated by the advancing Soviet forces, and to be able to continue to exploit them as slave labourers. During these ‘death marches’ the German guards inflicted terrible acts of cruelty on the marchers, thousands of whom were shot dead as they walked, or, too weak to continue, were shot dead as they lay on the ground unable to rejoin the march. Some Jews managed to escape from these death marches. One of them, Jakub Lichterman, had been the last cantor at the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw. He had been deported to Majdanek in 1943 and to Birkenau in 1944. In his group of marchers, about twenty Jews evaded the guards and slipped away. ‘It was snowing,’ he later recalled. ‘We ate snow. Many people died. I saw a little light in a hut. I decided to knock. The others said, “It is dangerous, it might be a German’s hut.” But I thought, “Must I die here? Maybe they will give me something.”’

Lichterman knocked on the door of the hut. ‘It was an Ethnic German. He gave me hot coffee in a bottle, and bread.’ Then, as Lichterman left the hut, two other escapees came up to him, desperate for a drink. ‘The bottle fell out of my hand. The coffee dropped in the snow. I went back. He had no more food. He gave me a box of matches and said, “There are lots of Germans around. If they catch you, they will kill you on the spot.”’ The Jews wandered off, each to a different part of the wood. Lichterman knocked on another door, another small hut. ‘Can you take me in?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Just one.’ Lichterman was taken in, hidden in a shack, and fed three times a day. Eight days later, with the arrival of Soviet troops, Lichterman was free.
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To the Jews who survived to the final months of the war, even small acts of kindness that did not put the lives of the helpers at risk could serve as a means of living through until liberation. Ilana Turner recalls that, before leaving Stutthof concentration camp for Dresden, ‘I myself received from a Polish girl warm gloves and a large piece of bread.’ As the girl handed over these precious gifts she whispered: ‘I am so sorry that I cannot give you more.’
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When a Hungarian military unit was passing through Bonyhad, it included 150 Jewish forced labourers. The historian of the Jews of Bonyhad, Leslie Blau, recalled how, seizing the opportunity, the principal of the local school, Sandor Rozsa, and one of his teachers, Gustav Tomka, ‘talked to the officers and advised them to let the Jews alone and try to escape. The overworked Jews were hidden at the school garret. A couple of days later the Red Army arrived and 150 Jewish lives were saved.’
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In January 1945 more than six thousand Jewish women, and a thousand Jewish men, were driven towards Palmnicken, a small fishing village on the Baltic Sea. On the march itself eight hundred were shot. Once in Palmnicken, the survivors were put into a disused factory. The German official in charge of the factory, seeing their plight, allocated three potatoes to each of the marchers. One of them, Polish-born Celina Manielewicz, later recalled: ‘We heard that he was a humane man who had objected to us prisoners remaining in his town under inhumane conditions. A few hours later a rumour circulated that the Nazis had shot him.’

A few days later, the Jews were ordered to line up in rows of five and were marched towards the sea, where German machine-gunners mowed them down. Hardly anyone survived. Three women who did, among them Celina Manielewicz, managed to make their way inland, where they found refuge with a German farmer called Voss. Later, however, Voss tried to turn them over to the Germans. Before he could do so, they were given shelter by two other villagers, Albert Harder and his wife, who fed and clothed them, and pretended they were three Polish girls. One day three German officers asked Frau Harder for permission to take the three girls on an outing. It would have aroused too many suspicions for the girls to refuse. On his way back from the outing with Celina Manielewicz, one of the officers told her, thinking her a local Polish girl, that ‘Two hundred Jews had survived the night massacre, but had been handed over to the Gestapo by the population of the surrounding villages among whom they had sought asylum. They had all been killed.’
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Celina Manielewicz and her two friends, at least, were safe; Albert Harder and his wife continued to give them shelter until the Russians arrived. But of the more than seven thousand marched to the seashore, only ten had survived.

Thousands of other concentration camp prisoners were being transported into Germany by rail, in open goods wagons exposed to the ravages of winter. Ben Edelman managed to escape from his train. He owed his survival to a German farmer. As he recalled, ‘I crawled the last half mile to the farmhouse; I was unable to walk any farther. When I reached the gate, a dog came running toward me and sniffed the blood from my wound. The farmer, who had been roused by the dog’s barking, came to the gate and looked down at me. I figured I had nothing to lose by asking him to help me, for without medical attention I would surely die. I saw the farmer go through the motions of blessing himself and I thought, “Thank you, God, for people in this part of the world who still believe in you.” The farmer looked around quickly and then opened the gate and pulled me in. He picked me up, carried me to the barn, and put me on the hay. “I’ll be right back,” he said.’

The farmer walked away, ‘and I watched him disappear through the barn door. He was gone only about five minutes, but during the time I was alone a small sliver of apprehension and suspicion began to creep into my mind. I began to visualize his coming back with an SS man and, pointing his finger at me, saying: “There he is! I found him here when I came in to get my shovel. I just want you to know I had nothing to do with it.” I said to myself, “What am I doing here letting a German take care of me? A Gentile would have been bad enough, but a German?” Through my wartime childhood years I had developed an emotional and psychological barrier that kept me apart from the Gentile world, a world which I feared and mistrusted as a result of my experiences. Up until now, with a couple of exceptions, my knowledge of the Aryans was linked with fear, distrust, hate, and ultimately the Holocaust.’