The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (53 page)

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Authors: Martin Gilbert

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In explaining the motives of those who, like herself, gave shelter to Jews, Pastor Trocmé’s wife Magda, one of the French rescuers honoured at Yad Vashem, later remarked: ‘Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done—nothing more complicated. It was not decided from one day to the next what we would have to do. There were many people in the village who needed help. How could we refuse them? A person doesn’t sit down and say I’m going to do this and this and that. We had no time to think. When a problem came, we had to solve it immediately. Sometimes people ask me, “How did you make a decision?” There was no decision to make. The issue was: “Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!”’
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‘I took the risk because I am a humanist,’ a Dutch rescuer, Jan Schoumans, commented when, at a ceremony in his home in Toronto, he was presented with a Righteous Among the Nations Award.
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Cecile Seiden, who was saved in Belgium, later reflected: ‘After the war, my mother, father and I wondered why our righteous Rescuers had saved us. We told the Spiessens that they were true heroes and they would simply answer, “No, we were not heroes but this was the correct thing to do!” We were also so grateful to the Stettler family for giving me a home and a wonderful new family and for sharing their lives and taking such good care of me. One can never repay the kindness and courage that the righteous Rescuers demonstrated during this period of unbelievable horror and inhumanity, when one nation tried to destroy another nation with blind hatred and ferocity unequalled in history.’
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Michel Reynders, who as a teenager was involved with his uncle, Father Bruno, in helping to save Jews in Belgium, commented: ‘Our family is proud of having its name on a tree at Yad Vashem, but we think we only did our duty as Christians: to help people in necessity or in danger is one of the prime Christian obligations.’ Of those who did not heed the commands, Michel Reynders reflects: ‘We are sad and ashamed for these “black sheep” and hope that future generations will understand the message of love and charity more clearly.’
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Flora Singer, one of those saved by Father Bruno, asked him many years later why, since conversion was not his goal, he had risked his life to save so many children. He told her, ‘Flora, why do you keep asking? I only did what I’m supposed to do.’
²²Asked why he had taken such risks to hide the children in Nonantola, in Italy, Father Beccari commented—at the age of ninety-two, still living in the village: ‘It was simple. They were children in danger. What would you have done?’
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Given the dangers faced by every person who hid or sheltered a Jew, given the ever-present prospect of severe punishment, of execution, and of the execution of one’s whole family, the number of those for whom evidence of rescue has been ascertained is indeed high. By the beginning of 2000 the Yad Vashem committee set up to commemorate those ‘who risked their lives to save Jews’ had located seventeen and a half thousand such people. A former member of the committee, Baruch Sharoni—who had left Poland for Palestine before the war—has asked: ‘Is the number 17,500 a final one? Not at all. First, the committee’s work is not done. Not all the names of these wonderful people have been submitted to it. Many died alongside the survivors. Others passed away without anyone to remember them. Still others have requested, for reasons known only to themselves, not to be revealed.’
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The Jewish imperative in remembering and recognizing the work of the Righteous is also an important aspect of their story, for without the determination to find the eyewitnesses and record their stories the Righteous would not have been accorded their true place in history. During his two decades of work at Yad Vashem, Mordecai Paldiel has followed up information and requests from all over the world from those who want to honour their rescuers. ‘I must confess’, he has written, ‘that I have always viewed the work I perform here, within the framework of the “Righteous Among the Nations”, as a moral duty which we, the generation of the Shoah, have toward those within the non-Jewish population of German-dominated Europe who exerted themselves to save Jews, and thereby rescued the spirit and idea of man, as expressed in the best Biblical tradition.’
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Recognition and remembrance continue into the twenty-first century, even as the number of those rescued, and the number of surviving rescuers, declines. When the Holocaust is finally beyond living memory, the desire to remember and honour those who extended a helping hand will remain. This is a question not only of recognizing individual bravery, but of providing a reminder that it is possible for human beings, in situations where civilized values are being undermined, to find the strength of character and purpose to resist the evil impulses of the age, and to try to rescue the victims of barbarity. Long after the Righteous of the Second World War have died, they will serve as models of the best in human behaviour and achievement to which anyone may choose to aspire. As Pierre Sauvage, one of the youngsters saved in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, explained when he made a film about the village, he wanted his son ‘to learn that the stories of the righteous are not footnotes to the past’.
²⁶Above all, the stories of the Righteous emphasize, in the words of Mordecai Paldiel, ‘the belief that man, if he is to be appreciated as a unique creature, is indeed endowed with a great capacity for goodness; for moral and ethical behaviour. This bright and shining side of man, if put to full use, is more than enough to offset the other, and darker, side of man’s behaviour.’
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The many survivors who have written to me about their rescuers feel strongly that these individual, selfless acts—the acts whereby they were saved—have not entered sufficiently into the general histories of the Holocaust, or indeed of the Second World War. Put succinctly, as they see it, and as the material presented in this book surely underlines, human decency was also an integral part of the war years; and it was a decency that, had it been on an even larger scale, had it permeated even more deeply into the societies of that time, could have saved many more lives—thousands, even tens of thousands. The story of the Righteous is not only a story of the many successful individual acts of courage and rescue; it is also a pointer to what human beings are capable of doing—for the good—when the challenge is greatest and the dangers most pressing. Each of the nineteen thousand and more known stories—like each of the several hundred stories in these pages—must lead each of us to ask: ‘Could I have acted like this, in the circumstances; would I have tried to, would I have wanted to?’ One can only hope that the answer would have been—and would still be, if occasion rose—‘yes’.

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