The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (52 page)

Ben Edelman continued: ‘I was now restless and terrified and even made an attempt to leave, but as I crawled halfway to the door it opened from the outside and in walked the farmer holding a large piece of white bread in one hand and a cup of warm milk in the other. He asked me if I was Jewish, to which I nodded, believing now that he did not intend to harm me. He said I was welcome to stay, but only long enough to rest. He washed my wound and told me I had to leave in a couple of hours because SS men were checking all the farmhouses for escaped concentration camp prisoners.’
³⁴

On the morning of 26 January 1945 a group of ten British prisoners of war, held at night behind bars at prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 20B, near Marienburg, were at work on a German farm twenty-six miles from Danzig. Three hundred Jewish women on a death march from Stutthof concentration camp were brought to a halt near them, repeatedly beaten and brutalized by their guards. Among them was Sara Matuson, who managed to break away from the march and run into a barn, where she hid in the animals’ feeding trough. ‘Quite a bit of time passed,’ she later recalled, ‘and a man came in and I asked if he was Polish…he said he was British.’ Later she recalled his exact words: ‘Don’t move, I’m English—don’t be afraid,’ and she added: ‘English! I knew I was saved!’ That soldier, Stan Wells, was also a captive of the Third Reich. ‘He went into the farm house and brought me bread.’
³⁵

Bill Fisher, the diarist among the men, recorded the sequel: ‘Stan comes to me after dinner and tells me a Jewess has got away and he has her hiding in the cow’s crib. I suggest moving her to loft over camp. Plenty straw and the chimney from our fire will keep her warm. I arrange to take her to the camp. Wait till nearly dusk and go to Stan’s farm, he hands over girl. I tell her to walk five paces near, on the other side of the road, and speak to no one. She is crippled, too frightened to understand me, grabs my arm. I am a bit windy as the Gerries will stop us as it is a definite “crime” for prisoner to speak or walk with women…No trouble at all!…Hot water, soap, towel, old clothes, slacks, food, rushed up to her…Take all clothing off kid, give her paraffin for lice in her hair and bid her goodbye. She grabs my hand and kisses it—and tries to thank me, calls me hero—I say roughly, Drop it, we are comrades, only doing what we can. Had no chance for a good look at her, judge her to be twenty-five years of age.

‘Everyone brings in food for our escapee! Hundred weight peas, ducks, hens, best part of a pig. Bread by loaves—and believe me she’s ate three loaves today and five bowls of soup—somewhere around twenty-two pounds of food. She’s ill now—sick diarrhoea. Suggest only milk for a few days…

‘We had a good look at her. Her eyes are large as is usual with starvation, sunken cheeks, no breasts. Hair has not been cut, body badly marked with sores caused by scratching lice bites. Head still a bit matted and lice still obviously in. I got my forefinger and thumb around the upper part of her arm easily…Feet blue and raw with frostbite, the right heel is eaten away from frost and constant rubbing of badly fitting clog.’

Sara Matuson recalled Bill Fisher’s arrival: ‘He brought me a full length coat and put it on top of my clothes and walked with me through the town. Luckily we weren’t stopped—the guards must have thought I looked like a prisoner of war. He took me to the barn and put me upstairs and made a hole in the straw. The straw was for the horses. A couple of the men came that night—one of them a medic—and they brought stuff for my feet which had frostbite, they brought me paraffin for the lice and food, I mustn’t forget the food. I was so hungry and they will tell you how much I ate. They bathed me. All I had was a dress with a very big red Jewish star on the back of it, a thin coat and a blanket. I was very sick—I had diarrhoea. I was with them for three weeks and they nursed me back to health—every day I was visited with food. I only met one who would come up with food—he was Alan Edwards. After about a week the fellows decided I was to visit them. He got a sweater and coat to cover the dress shoes and stockings. I still had flannel underpants from the camp they must have washed them for me. They pushed me through a window and I met them. We all spoke German. They then pushed me back up in to the straw. They overheard that the horses were being moved away and that the straw—my home—was going. They said they would think of something—build a double wall or something but that they would save me. They were all in this together. Alan came one evening and said they were moving that night.’ A Pole would look after her, she was told, but ‘The fellow never showed up. The men who saved my life were moved on—it was nearly the end of the war.’
³⁶

The death march from which Sara had been rescued had started two weeks earlier with twelve hundred prisoners; by the time they reached the farm where the British prisoners of war were working, only three hundred were still alive. One of Sara Matuson’s rescuers, Tommy Noble, a Scot, later recalled that the men would steal food and clothes from civilian Germans passing by; they had a fire in their camp, and could therefore cook. ‘She gained her strength while in hiding.’ Asked why they had risked their lives to hide her, he said: ‘Why not? She was only a young girl. She was a very nice wee thing, she’d been treated badly, like us—they were cruel pigs.’ Another of the men, George Hammond, recalled how, over the weeks, she became like ‘a little sister’.
³⁷

After ten weeks the British prisoners of war were ordered westward. Sara Matuson stayed in the barn on her own until liberation. After the war, in a letter to Yad Vashem seeking recognition for the ten men, she wrote: ‘If one of the ten had been against hiding me, I would not be alive today. This was truly a unanimous decision. It is not who of the prisoners of war brought me food, or tended my frostbite, or who applied paraffin to my hair, or bathed me or who nursed me back to health. All of them were involved. All had to agree; all took equal responsibility and equal risk. Had I been discovered all of us would have been shot. They had all decided, despite the danger, that they would save from the Germans that poor Jewish girl who chanced into their lives.

‘In the morning when the men were led to work they would bring me food under the guise of hanging laundry in the barn. They had sawn through the bars of their own prison and in the evening sneaked up to the loft to bring me food. The police station was right outside and the danger was fearful.’ Had Sara been discovered, ‘I would certainly have been shot together with the ten prisoners of war, all of whom had families and homes in England. I had nobody, and no one would have known had I been killed. I would just have been another one of the Six Million, but they had much more to risk and it was close to going home. They could touch freedom.’
³⁸

Three Jewish slave labourers who escaped from a death march near Dresden were hidden by a German husband and wife, Kurt and Hertha Fuchs. The three were Polish Jews: Roman Halter, Josef Szwajcer and Abraham Sztajer. Soon after liberation, Halter left the farm, returning a few weeks later with some gifts. ‘When I arrived,’ he recalled, ‘I found Mrs Fuchs all in black. Her face had aged by years in those few weeks since my departure from them. She screamed when she saw me and refused to speak. Her neighbour told me that a few days after I had left, the Nazis in the village had found out that the Fuchses had sheltered Jews in their home. They then went to the house and took out Mr Fuchs, Szwajcer and Sztajer. Mr Fuchs and Szwajcer were shot. Sztajer managed to talk himself out of it. Mrs Fuchs dragged her husband’s body back to the garden and buried him under a walnut tree.’
³⁹

Forty years later, remembering that terrible day of execution, Hertha Fuchs told Roman Halter: ‘When I heard the shots, I knew that my lovely Kurt was dying. So I ran out into the field and took his head on my lap. He tried to speak, to say something to me. Szwajcer lay dead. Those who murdered my husband and Szwajcer were just walking away. One of them said, “We can get her now, too,” but they just walked away.’
⁴⁰

Rescue and murder—the two opposite impulses—continued to exist side by side to the very last days of the war: by far the rarer, rescue was the noble face of those tragic years.

WHAT WERE THE
motives of those who tried to save Jews from deportation and death? This question is raised with every account of rescue, as the reader, like the historian, wonders whether he, or she, would have behaved in such a courageous manner. First and foremost, the Righteous of this book chose to act; theirs was a deliberate decision to behave in a civilized, humane manner, rather than to do nothing, or to refuse to be involved, or to take the route of barbarism.

In the circumstances of a combination of Nazi rule, SS power and Gestapo terror, inaction motivated by fear cannot be belittled. Those who turned against the tide of terror were all the more remarkable. ‘We did what we had to do’ ‘Anyone would have done the same’—the words of many rescuers—mask the courageousness of the course they chose, knowing it to be full of danger, often the danger of execution of their families as well as themselves. Yet these were not foolhardy, rash or intemperate people; most of them made their choice calmly, deliberately and with full realization of the risks—risks that they faced, and took, for months and even years.

Those who put their lives in jeopardy to save Jews were often people who had known those Jews before the war. Some had been close personal friends and neighbours, others had been business partners or business acquaintances, others were teachers or fellow pupils. Some rescuers were women who had worked in a Jewish household, or been nannies to Jewish children. Pre-war friendship and acquaintance played a significant part in many acts of rescue; but equally, many rescuers had never before seen the person, or the family, to whom they gave life-guarding shelter.

Mordecai Paldiel, head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem since 1982, has supervised the preparation of more than fourteen thousand sets of documentation about those who risked their lives to save Jews. His work brings him in contact every day with stories of incredible courage. ‘Goodness leaves us gasping,’ he has written, ‘for we refuse to recognize it as a natural human attribute. So off we go on a long search for some hidden motivation, some extraordinary explanation, for such peculiar behaviour. Evil is, by contrast, less painfully assimilated. There is no comparable search for the reasons for its constant manifestation (although in earlier centuries theologians pondered this issue).’

Contrasting good and evil, Paldiel notes: ‘We have come to terms with evil. Television, movies and the printed word have made evil, aggression and egotism household terms and unconsciously acceptable to the extent of making us immune to displays of evil. There is a danger that the evil of the Holocaust will be absorbed in a similar manner; that is, explained away as further confirmation of man’s inherent disposition to wrongdoing. It confirms our visceral feeling that man is an irredeemable beast, who needs to be constrained for his own good. In searching for an explanation of the motivations of the Righteous among the Nations, are we not really saying: what was wrong with them? Are we not, in a deeper sense, implying that behaviour was something other than normal?’

Evil instincts are taken for granted; altruistic, humane behaviour appears to need special explanation. Is it possible, asks Paldiel, ‘that we are creating a problem where there ought not to be one? Is acting benevolently and altruistically such an outlandish and unusual type of behaviour, supposedly at odds with man’s inherent character, as to justify a meticulous search for explanations? Or is it conceivable that such behaviour is as natural to our psychological constitution as the egoistic one we accept so matter-of-factly?’
¹

Agnes Hirschi, who, with her mother, was given sanctuary in Budapest by Carl Lutz, wrote about his motivation in issuing protective documents to Jews in Budapest: ‘The laws of life are stronger than man-made laws. That’s how my father thought and that’s how he acted. He was not born a hero, he was rather shy and introverted.’ In Budapest ‘it was not his task to rescue Jews, he was chief of the Swiss Legation’s Department of Foreign Interests, and he was in charge of the interests of fourteen belligerent nations, among them the United States and Great Britain.’ But the instinct to help was deep within him. ‘He had grown up in a Methodist family in eastern Switzerland. He was the second oldest of ten brothers and sisters. His mother was a strong personality. They were poor but she helped people in trouble and sick, as much as she could. She gave an example of humanity and was deeply admired by her son Carl.’ His motive was a simple one, which his stepdaughter encapsulated thus: ‘Carl Lutz, as an engaged Christian, could not tolerate the Jews being pursued and killed in Budapest. He had to protect and help these people. He felt, God gave him this task, and he was persuaded He would give him also the force to fulfil it.’
²

Those Christian values, which had first been shown when the Good Samaritan went out of his way on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, were central to the actions of many thousands of rescuers. Good deeds do not necessarily come unsought. In 1964, when the Belgian priest Father Bruno was honoured for finding homes for as many as 320 Jews, he asked those gathered to honour him: ‘Saved? But who saved? What did I do? I searched; but searching without finding is perfectly fruitless: finding is essential. But finding was not my doing…finding meant that doors were opened, the door of a home, the door of a heart.’
³
The Baptists in eastern Poland had been motivated by their religious belief that God was testing their Christian faith by sending them Jews in distress. Nor were Jews universally regarded as the enemy by Christian Europe in the inter-war years; when asked to give details about his rescue activities in Serbia, Risto Ristic would only say: ‘I did my best to save Jews because I love them.’
⁴
There were many practising Christians, especially in the eastern regions of Europe, who went out of their way to harm Jews; there were others, even in the midst of this primitive hostility, who risked the disapproval of their Christian neighbours to try to save Jews, and were sometimes themselves betrayed by those neighbours—betrayed and then killed.

Dislike of German occupation also motivated many rescuers: this was particularly true, for example, in Belgium, France and Holland, where helping Jews was for some an integral part of the pattern of resistance; indeed, in Holland, seven separate resistance organizations helped hide Jews. With regard to Warsaw, Zofia Lewin noted that the ‘overwhelming majority’ of the people who helped her survive on the ‘Aryan’ side of the city expressed, ‘by their whole attitude towards me’, their protest against the occupier. ‘Not only did they not let me feel that my very presence was dangerous, they also treated me as one of themselves, a person in greater danger due only to external reasons, due to the false principles of the occupying power and not because of any essential difference on my part.’
⁵
Hatred of the occupier was a feature of rescue in many lands.

There were also social characteristics and patterns of behaviour that affected the reception of Jews in search of refuge. When Refik Veseli, the first of sixty Albanians to be awarded the title of Righteous, was asked how it was possible that so many Albanians helped to hide Jews and protect them, he explained: ‘There are no foreigners in Albania, there are only guests. Our moral code as Albanians requires that we be hospitable to guests in our home and in our country.’ When asked about the possibility of Albanians reporting the presence of the Jews to the Germans, Veseli said that while such a thing was possible, ‘if an Albanian did this he would have disgraced his village and his family. At a minimum his home would be destroyed and his family banished.’ The discussion was pointless as ‘no Albanian disgraced us’.
⁶

Whole nations could, if circumstances allowed, prevent the deportation of Jews, or enable them to escape deportation. This was true of Italy and Hungary before the German military occupations of those countries in 1943 and 1944 respectively. It was true of Denmark on the eve of full German occupation. It was true of Finland and Bulgaria throughout the war. Reflecting on the reasons why Bulgarian Jews survived the Holocaust, and on what he calls ‘the fragility of goodness’, the historian of Bulgarian rescue efforts, Tzvetan Todorov, after describing the actions of ‘men of conscience and courage’ like the prelates Stefan and Kiril, has written that even the King would not have agreed to stand up to German pressure ‘without the swell of public opinion against the deportation, and without the intervention of many around him’. Todorov concludes that ‘the people were opposed to the anti-Semitic measures, but a community is powerless without leaders, without those individuals within its midst who exercise public responsibility—in this case, the metropolitans, the deputies, the politicians who are ready to accept the risks that their actions entailed. All this was necessary for good to triumph, in a certain place and at a certain time; any break in the chain and their efforts might well have failed. It seems that, once introduced into public life, evil easily perpetuates itself, whereas good is always difficult, rare, and fragile. And yet possible.’
⁷

Dislike of Nazism and its racial doctrines; a refusal to succumb to them, a refusal to be bullied, even by superior force; an unwillingness to allow evil to triumph, despite the overwhelming military and secret police powers of Nazi Germany; contempt for prejudice, a sense of decency: each played its part in making acts of rescue possible, even desirable. When Tine zur Kleinsmiede was honoured in Israel in 1983, she told the assembled officials she had done nothing special in hiding Jews in Holland: ‘Anyone would have done the same thing, in my place. Any decent person, that is.’ She put a special stress on the word ‘decent’.
⁸

In 1988, visiting the Lithuanian town of Naumiestis from which his family had come, and where virtually the whole Jewish community had been murdered, Dr Benjamin E. Lesin, a Los Angeles surgeon, asked his hosts, ‘Didn’t anybody help?’ and then ascertained that ‘dozens had’. He was told of a couple to whom a baby girl was passed through a ghetto fence; of a carpenter who saved twelve Jews; of a farmer, part of a network with two other farmers, who saved twenty-six. ‘I was overwhelmed by their modesty,’ Lesin recalled. ‘I asked the couple who had saved the baby (now living in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) why they put themselves in so much danger. Their response was, “We did the only thing a decent person would do…what a good Christian would do.”’
⁹

The response of that Lithuanian couple—‘We did the only thing a decent person would do…’—was almost universal among rescuers. In 1989 Vitalija Rinkevicius received the Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous on behalf of her parents, who had helped save Margaret and Joseph Kagan in Kaunas. During the ceremony she said she was happy and grateful for this honour to her parents and thanked everyone; but above all she wanted to convey what she felt sure her father would have said on this occasion: ‘I am no hero, have done nothing out of the ordinary, nothing other than any normal human being would have done.’
¹⁰

Reflecting on the altruistic behaviour of the Righteous, Samuel Oliner, who was himself saved as a youngster, commented in 1994: ‘Acts of heroic altruism are not the exclusive province of larger-than-life figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer. Rather, they are manifestations of ordinary people whose moral courage is born out of the routine ways in which they live their lives—their characteristic ways of feeling, their perceptions of authority, the rules and examples of conduct they have learned from family, friends, religion, political leaders, their schools, workplaces, and all their associates.’
¹¹

Asked about his motives for saving Jews in Bialystok during the war, the German paint-shop manager Otto Busse reiterated that he was a Christian, ‘and considered it his duty according to the way he interpreted his Christian conscience’. He did not belong to any denomination. ‘I do not hold with the institutionalized church. We must go back to early Christianity. We should be neither crusaders nor missionaries. Instead, we should let the idea of Christ come to new life in our hearts. If this had happened earlier, there would never have been the Hitler Holocaust.’
¹²

Major Helmrich and his wife, who had helped Jews in the Polish city of Drohobycz, reflected: ‘We were fully aware of the risks and the clash of responsibilities, but we decided that it would be better for our children to have dead parents than cowards as parents.’
¹³
Major Karl Plagge—who had been a member of the Nazi Party from 1932 to 1939—spoke of why he had protected Jews in Vilna during the war. ‘There needed to be people who were doing something good for the German reputation,’ he said. ‘I was ashamed.’
¹⁴

One of those who took in Jewish children in France, Marie-Elise Roger, commented: ‘I did nothing unusual…I only took in a little guy who had just lost his parents…I loved him and gave him food to eat. If I had not done this, that would not have been normal.’
¹⁵
Recalling the help given by French farmers at Dullin in hiding Jewish children, David Eppel—who later married one of those children—has written: ‘To meet and talk with these unpretentious farmers, long after it was all over, was truly to understand the meaning of the term “righteous”. No political or religious ideology compelled their actions. So why did they do it? “Why do you ask?” they answered.’
¹⁶

As to her motive in helping save Jews in France, Jeannette Brousse commented: ‘I felt horrified by the atrocious fate likely to befall all these innocent victims whose only “mistake” was to have been born Jewish. I did not know any Jews before these events. I discovered they were people like us, even though some influential newspapers presented them as scapegoats for all evils. I was determined to find solutions so that the greatest number of those who came to me could be saved.’
¹⁷