Yiddishe Mamas (42 page)

Yad Vashem (from the words of Isaiah, means Eternal memorial) is located on Har Hazikaron (the Mount of Remembrance) in Jerusalem, Israel. It was established in 1953 by the Israeli Knesset. Today, its forty-five acres is a complex of monuments, museums, resource centers, and teaching facilities.

Yad Vashem honors the righteous non-Jews who helped Jews in the hour of our greatest need—on behalf of the Jewish people. Their deeds prove that it
was
possible not to “stand by” or “take orders”—that one can and should oppose evil.

Those so honored serve as role models for future generations and as a beacon for ethical conduct—even when faced with grave physical and psychological danger.

Oscar Schindler has been immortalized in books and on the screen, but relatively little is known about his wife, Emilie. In 2001, a book was published in German,
Ich, Emilie Schindler
by the Argentinian author Erika Rosenberg, which examines Emilie Schindler’s great contribution in saving Jews during the Holocaust.

She was born Emilie Pelzl on October 22, 1907, in the village of Alt Moletein, in the German-populated border region of what was then the republic of Czechoslovakia. Her first major encounter with anti-semitism occurred when the local pastor instructed Emilie that her friendship with Rita Reif, a young Jewess, was not acceptable. Emilie, nevertheless, continued the friendship until 1942 when Rita was murdered by the Nazis in front of her father’s store.

Emilie first met Oscar Schindler when he came to her father’s farmhouse selling electric motors in 1928. He was tall, handsome, and outgoing and they were married in six weeks. Despite his flaws—overspending, lying, and deceiving his young wife (but then apologizing)—he had a generous heart and she forgave him.

In the 1930s, Oscar joined the Nazi party, seeing opportunities in war. In Kraków, by using bribery and selling black market goods, he gained control of a Jewish-owned enameled-goods factory, Deutsch Emailwaren Fabrik—where he employed mainly Jewish workers, the cheapest labor.

As the brutality of the Nazis accelerated, he began to view Jews also as human beings—mothers, fathers, and children. He used his connections, along with bribery and his wife’s help, to risk everything in order to save the 1,300 Schindler Jews from the death camps. Emilie’s jewels were sold to buy food, clothes, and medicine. They set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with black-market medical equipment where Emilie looked after the sick. Those who died were given a Jewish burial in a hidden graveyard that was created by the Schindlers.

The factory produced shells for the German Wehrmacht for seven months—not one usable shell was manufactured—but false military travel passes and ration cards were. Toward the end of the war, Emilie alone saved the lives of 250 Jews who were being transported to a death camp by convincing the Gestapo to send these emaciated Jews to the factory camp. Once released to her, Emilie worked to bring them back to life and health.

Oscar encountered a string of business failures after the war. He then fled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with Emilie, his mistress, and a dozen Schindler Jews. By 1949, they were all farmers
and were supported financially by the Jewish organization called Joint and Thankful Jews. However, success eluded Oscar, and in 1957, he went bankrupt and returned to Germany. He remained estranged from his wife for seventeen years before he died in 1974, at the age of sixty-six.

Emilie never saw him again. She remained in Argentina, living on a small pension from Israel and a $650 a month pension from Germany.

In May 1994, Emilie Schindler received the Righteous Among Nations Award, and in 1995, Argentina decorated her with the Order of May, the highest honor given to foreigners who are not heads of state. She returned to Germany and died on October 5, 2001, in a Berlin hospital.

In 1938 the Cohens fled Austria and went to Italy. When the Nazis asked their allies to turn over their refugees in 1941, Mrs. Cohen took her children to Father Anselm, begging him to care for them and send them to Palestine after the war. Instead, the courageous priest hid the family in a car, covering them with a blue church carpet. The priest diverted the sentries at the Swiss border so that the family could escape into Switzerland. Twenty years later, Sarah Cohen, in Haifa, found a similar carpet and she had it embroidered with, “Blessed Be the Righteous Ones” in Latin and Hebrew. She begged officials in charge of the reception to lay out the huge carpet when Pope Paul VI met Israel President Eshkol in 1964. She even arranged for the pope to walk upon it—and sent it to the aged priest’s church in Laterina, Italy.

Having a son, I felt, as a German, I should act…
These were the words of Beate Klarsfeld, who was born in 1939—the daughter of a German soldier and goddaughter of a Nazi official. She became a Nazi hunter after she married a Jew, Serge Klarsfeld, when she was in Paris, when she was twenty-one. When Beate heard about the atrocities committed against Serge’s family—and after the 1968 election of a Nazi propagandist as chancellor of Germany—she felt the younger generation of Germans should not tolerate this, and slapped the leader in the face at a rally, thereby
marking her as an activist. In 1972, the couple discovered that the notorious Nazi, Klaus Barbie, was hiding in Bolivia and they spent the next eleven years trying to bring him to justice. They finally succeeded in 1983 when he was deported to France, found guilty of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to life in prison. The couple’s son, Arno, is an activist and a lawyer.

Nazi-occupied Holland. 1943. Eighteen-year-old Hilde van Straten-Duizer stood facing German soldiers as they hunted for Jews who were hiding at her mother’s farm. Hilde and her sister began talking and flirting with the soldiers until they left forgetting about checking the loft where a twenty-two-year-old Jewish friend was hiding in the hay. His parents had already been deported. They were murdered at Auschwitz but he had escaped.

Despite the risk to their own lives, Hilde and her mother Gijsbertje Duizer cared for the young Jewish man, Joop de Van Straten, throughout the war. But more, Hilde fell in love with him, and when Holland was liberated, she converted to Judaism, and they married. In 1951, the couple immigrated to Israel and had four children.

Van-straten-Duizer and her late mother were recognized on March 31, 2005, by Yad Vashem.

Hungary. March 1944: Maria Olt went to the infirmary to see her Jewish physician, Dr. Kuti Nevo, who was wearing the infamous yellow emblem. The distraught physician told Maria of his concern for his wife Miriam and their newborn child. Miriam Nevo later explained: “Maria … had decided to save our baby daughter. She brought the infant to a small village. A few days later she returned … and took me to the same village, introducing me as a gypsy who had given birth out of wedlock. … She returned once again to the city and brought my husband back with her, hiding him in a small cellar in her father’s vineyard. Maria provided us with forged documents, and transferred our daughter to a family … in a small village near the Slovakian border, providing her with papers of a Christian child. … Maria moved us from place to place. Once
I had reached the point of despair: We saw a convoy of Jews who were being deported to Auschwitz. The train stopped near us. Impulsively, I wanted to join the procession and be rid of my suffering once and for all. Maria prevented me from taking this desperate step. She borrowed money and rented a small apartment in the village for me. After a short time, she brought my husband to the apartment. In another small apartment, near the Gestapo headquarters, Maria hid [and cared for] other Jewish families.”

Irene Opdyke was born in 1918, in Poland, to a Catholic family. She was a member of the Polish underground and when she was discovered by Russian soldiers, was beaten and raped and then sent to a hospital. She fled, desperate to locate her family, but was captured by the Germans and placed in a munitions plant, where she collapsed from the heavy labor. She was a pretty Aryan-looking girl and attracted an SS officer, Eduard Rugemer. He arranged for her to have a lighter assignment—in a mess hall. It was here that Irene saw the horrific treatment of the Jews in the ghetto, including a baby flung into the air and shot as though it were hunting game.

She became Rugemer’s housekeeper in the Ukraine, which included supervising the workforce, twelve Jews. When she learned of plans to kill them, Irene hid them and cared for them in Rugemer’s villa—until he discovered them. She became his mistress—to save their lives, and her own.

Eventually, she married William Opdyke, who was with the United Nations working on behalf of displaced persons from the camps after the war. She came to southern California in 1949.

Though initially silent about her activities, she later started speaking to groups and, in 1999, wrote
Into My Hands.
Irene was recognized by Yad Vashem in 1982.

“I’ll remember all my life, the mother that shouted to her child, ‘Run, run, run,’ and the Swiss customs man shouted, ‘Come here, come, come, come to me.’ And I didn’t even see the horrors they must have then suffered.”

The French actress Catherine Samie said these words. At age ten, she helped her mother lead Jews across the mountains into Switzerland to escape occupied France.

Sixty years later, Ms. Samie, a Catholic, performed in the play (2001) and film
The Last Letter
(2003), in which a Jewish woman, awaiting death in the Ukraine, addresses the son she will never see again. As her death looms, she asks him “to be strong and wise,” then describes where ditches are being dug, “that’s where you’ll find the mass grave where your mother is buried.” She reassures him her love is “forever … indestructible.” Ms. Samie has said: “It wasn’t acting. It was a testimony.”

Ona Simaite was a librarian at Vilnius University. She took advantage of her freedom of movement into the Jewish ghetto— ostensibly to retrieve books loaned to Jews before the war—as a pretext to secure valuable literary works by Jewish authors. She also looked after Jews in hiding outside the ghetto. Ona was arrested during an attempt to smuggle a Jewish girl outside the ghetto and was tortured and sent to a concentration camp. She survived but suffered permanent damage to her health.

Joop Westerweel, a Dutch educator and sworn pacifist, created a clandestine network to help Jewish youth, members of a Zionist pioneering group, avoid detection. He then accompanied them through occupied Belgium and France to the Spanish border. He was eventually apprehended and executed by the Germans.

Dr. Adelaide Hautval was arrested for illegally crossing the demarcation line dividing the two parts of France. While she was in jail awaiting trial, she vociferously protested the inhuman treatment of Jewish prisoners. Censured as a “friend of the Jews,” she was sent to Auschwitz, where she refused to join a team of doctors performing pseudo-medical experiments on women. After the war, Hautval testified in the 1964 London trial
Uris vs. Dering,
affirming that it
was
possible to disobey inhuman Nazi orders even in Auschwitz.

Bram Pais, a brilliant physics student, was the last Jew in Holland to receive a PhD before the Nazi ban on higher education for Jews. He and his family were one of the families aided by Tina Strobos, a medical student who lived with her mother and grandmother. These women offered shelter, food, false identification papers, and contact between other Jewish families. Despite the fact that their home was often the target of SS raids, Tina’s cool presence of mind convinced them to release captured Jews, thereby saving the lives of numerous Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

In 2005, seventy-two-year-old Ruth Gruener, who has two grown sons, finally reunited with the woman who saved her life during the Holocaust—Joanna Zalucka, eighty-one. The tearful reunion occurred sixty years after Joanna hid the then young Jewish girl in her bedroom for eight months and saved her from being murdered by the Nazis in Poland.

Ruth’s father put his daughter under his overcoat, and left her with Zalucka’s family as he expected to be slaughtered by Ukrainian nationalists.

The child spent her time in a chair, afraid to even look out the window from Joanna’s bedroom. Joanna, then eighteen, was in charge of caring for eight-year-old Ruth. The child spent so much time silent and immobilized that she had to relearn how to walk and speak normally.

After the war, Ruth and her family went to Munich, then on to Brooklyn. She eventually married Jack Gruener, another survivor, and started a family.

Had Zalucka been caught, she probably would have faced the death penalty. She was, however, later imprisoned by both the Germans and Soviets as a suspected member of the Polish underground.

Ruth and Joanna, who had been writing to one another, were reunited by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. Their meeting was tearful and emotional. “It is just so wonderful that no words can describe how I feel,” said Gruener. “It’s a miracle,” Zalucka added in Polish.

Gruener and her parents, from Lvov, Poland, were the only Jews in their extended family of three hundred who survived the Holocaust.

In 2003, the Karski Foundation in Washington, D.C., announced the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award of valor and courage. Her name was Irena Sendler.

During the war, Sendler, who worked for the Warsaw health department, was a member of Zegota, the Polish underground. Her code name was “Jolanta.”

She rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto at great personal risk by placing them with Christian families. She was also sensitive to the need for these children to eventually reunite with their families, and buried jars containing their real and assumed names in a garden, so that after the war, they could unearth the names of their families.

In 2001, in a small Warsaw apartment, four adoring American students from Uniontown, Kansas, sat with their hero, ninety-one-year-old Irena Sendler, who received a medal from Yad Vashem. When sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Cambers called her a hero, Sendler explained that a hero does extraordinary things. She considered what she did simply a normal thing to do.