The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (11 page)

Redlich’s grandfather decided that the only way to survive was to contact an old acquaintance, the Polish locksmith Stanislaw Codogni. Fifty years later, Codogni’s son Karol recounted how, late at night, the grandfather and a woman ‘knocked on our door. My mother gave them hot milk and they told me to go fetch some potatoes. We also gave them freshly baked bread and some onions.’ From then on, whenever the old man came to their door, the Codognis would give him a sack of food which they had prepared in advance; but they lived in constant fear that he might be caught by the Germans, or that their other efforts to help Jews might be discovered. Forty years later, Karol Codogni wrote to Shimon Redlich: ‘Our house wasn’t far from the ghetto and we were watched at all times. Still, we were able to help a few people who escaped from the ghetto. During the day they would hide in our place and at night continue on their way. I don’t know how many survived.’

For several months the hiding place was unmolested, but then new tenants began preparing the apartment one floor below. ‘When grandpa and mother went down the stairs on their way to the Codognis,’ Shimon Redlich recalled, ‘a woman appeared in a door and warned them that if we didn’t leave within a day or two, she would report us to the police. We had to get out, and fast. At that time my mother’s younger sister Malcia, and Vovo, her young and good-looking husband, were hiding in Raj, a village near Brzezany. Tanka Kontsevych, a young Ukrainian woman and a mother of two, whose husband was sent for compulsory labour in Germany, had been keeping them in her house since the “Judenrein” round-up. Tanka used to visit the Codognis, and carry messages between us and Malcia. A few hours after the new tenant demanded that we leave, grandpa Fishl, disguised as an old woman, went to the Codognis and asked them to convey an urgent note to Malcia, in Raj. My aunt persuaded Tanka to take us all in. The following evening my mother and I descended from the attic. The street was covered in snow, on the corner a lone figure, Codogni’s young son, Karol. When we approached him, he whispered, “Follow me and pray to God.”’

A woman was waiting for them further up the street. It was Tanka Kontsevych. ‘Karol left and we started walking behind the Ukrainian woman. By now my limping mother could hardly walk. My own muscles must have atrophied in the attic and I could hardly move my legs. Tanka ended up carrying me on her back while holding on to my mother’s hand. Slowly we trudged through thick, crisp snow, towards Raj. From time to time mother swallowed a handful of snow. When I asked Tanka half a century later what she remembered about that night, she told me that I was small and my legs hurt. She also recalled that the walking took several hours, since she preferred a roundabout track through the fields. We must have reached her house at dawn. I can still taste the freshly baked white bread and hot milk. I couldn’t believe my luck when promised that from now on I could have all the bread and milk I’d want. After we had eaten we had the first warm bath in months.’

The Kontsevyches were devoted to those to whom they were giving shelter. But, as Shimon Redlich recalled, there were ‘some frightening moments’. On one occasion, as German soldiers ‘horsed around with Tanka downstairs, we sat just above them with bated breath. The tiniest creak could be fatal. I made in my pants, right there, in utter silence, like an animal. One afternoon, while Tanka was out two German soldiers walked in and started yelling for straw. The straw was with us, in the attic.’ Ania, Tanka’s ten-year-old daughter, remembered the event fifty years later: ‘The Germans started to climb to the attic. I knew that up there was this little boy and if they found them they would take them away and kill them. So I grabbed one German by his trouser leg and started pulling him off the ladder. Then I pulled the ladder itself. We had a sort of tug-of-war. Then my mother returned, quickly went up to the attic and started throwing down the straw. At the same time she covered up with straw the people who were hiding up there. And then the Germans finally left.’
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Leon Wells was in hiding in a basement underneath a stable in Lvov after the revolt of the slave labourers in the Janowska camp on 19 November 1943. On 6 December 1943, he later wrote in his memoirs, ‘As usual the owner came down, but this time he seemed very nervous. We realized immediately that something was amiss. He told us that in a neighbour’s house, the Juzeks, only a few hundred yards from there, thirty-two Jews had been discovered. The hideout had been reported to the Germans by Juzek’s own brother-in-law. From the thirty-two, twenty-six were from the Death Brigade, and among them was our leader, Herches. While they were being led to the truck, they had made a sudden attack on the Germans, and twenty-eight of the thirty-two escaped. Juzek and his wife had been arrested and next day publicly hanged in the market. Our host was very much afraid that the discovery of Jews in this neighbourhood would lead to a search of all the houses. A small search did go on during the following days, but nothing happened in our house.’

Leon Wells added: ‘One story circulating at the time was that when the Russian Army came into Tarnopol a group of Jews came out of their hiding place in a Polish house. A few days later, when the Germans returned, this Polish family was hanged for hiding Jews. This story made our host ponder just how long he should keep us in the cellar after the Russian Army had liberated Lvov. Other stories about Poles hiding Jews resulted in new searches for Jews by the Germans. All the houses in the neighbourhood were very thoroughly searched except our house, and this was due only to the fact that our host was the chief representative of the local farmers to the German officials. We were just plain lucky.’

The month of May 1944 again brought bad news. ‘A group of twelve Jews were discovered on Balanowe Street, only one block away from where I used to live. A daughter informed on her own mother, telling the Germans that she was hiding Jews. The mother was hanged, and the Jews were killed.’

As the Soviet troops advanced, pushing the Germans further and further back, Lvov became the front line. ‘One day we heard many German soldiers come into the stable. They were going to use it for some purpose or other. To make it fit for this unknown purpose, they planned to pull out the whole floor above us. We heard the entire discussion. We sat paralysed, staring into the darkness of the basement. The work began; then suddenly an order came for the soldiers to move out. Again we were saved at the last second. At last the Russians arrived! Our host rushed in with this news in the middle of the day. The light went on, and everyone sat up and quietly listened to details of the news. We still could not talk loudly or make any noise because we were still afraid that the neighbours would find out that we were hiding here.’

Liberation brought its own restraints. Leon Wells remembered how it was planned ‘that we would leave in the early hours of the next day, so that no one would see us. Even now our host asked us not to come back to visit him, or for any other reason; it would go hard for him if it were known that he had hidden Jews.’ In a footnote at this point in his book, Wells wrote: ‘How sad was the situation in Poland that when a man proved he possessed high, idealistic qualities, he would be ashamed and unpopular for doing such a great deed!’
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Of the quarter of a million Jews from Eastern Galicia, no more than a few hundred were saved as a result of the help of non-Jews. The examples of those who were willing to risk their lives to try to save Jewish lives are noble; but the dominant thought on reading the stories of the rescuers in Eastern Galicia is how few there were of those rescuers. Their heroism is all the more remarkable, given the extent of the indifference and complicity of the local population.

T
HROUGHOUT THE INTERWAR
years, Vilna was the largest city in eastern Poland, having been seized by the Poles from Lithuania after the First World War. The city had been a centre of Jewish cultural and spiritual life for several hundred years; the Jews knew it as ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania’. Following the German conquest in 1941, most of the city’s fifty-five thousand Jews were murdered by the Germans, with the active support of many Lithuanians; the rescue efforts of a few non-Jewish Vilnaites—individual Poles and Lithuanians—enabled a few hundred Jews to survive.

Gertruda Babilinska worked in Vilna as a nursemaid for a Jewish family, the Stolowickis. After the German occupation, when their son Michael was four years old, his mother was taken gravely ill. Gertruda Babilinska promised her that she would look after her child and, after the war, make sure he was taken to Palestine. After Michael’s mother died, Gertruda went on looking after the boy, pretending he was her own child, and persuading a priest to let him join a church choir. After the war she set out with the boy, then nine years old, for Palestine; but their boat was intercepted by the British as it tried to land its passengers. All those on board, including Gertruda Babilinska and her charge, were sent back to Europe and interned in a displaced persons camp in Germany. They made the journey again when the State of Israel was established, and both nanny and child became citizens. Gertruda Babilinska remained a Catholic, but, as she had promised Michael’s mother, she raised the boy as a Jew.
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Another Roman Catholic nanny in Vilna who saved her young Jewish charge was Bronislawa Kurpi. Abraham Foxman was four years old when she took him for safety to her own home and brought him up as if he were her own child, naming him Henryk Stanislaw Kurpi. It was Foxman, later head of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, who exhorted the Jerusalem gathering of ‘Hidden Children’ in 1993 to bear witness to the goodness of those who had saved and cared for them.
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Rose Levin Weinberg was born in Vilna in March 1941. Four months later, shortly after the German occupation, her father was shot. Her mother then placed her with a Lithuanian couple, the Budrikenes. After the couple died, Rose was taken care of by their daughter, sixteen-year-old Lusia Budrikene, with whom she stayed until 1957, when an aunt from Canada found her, and arranged for her to emigrate to Toronto.
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Another rescuer from Vilna was Krystyna Adolph, a high-school history teacher in the city. Among those she saved was a former pupil, Lydia Aran, who had graduated on the eve of the German invasion, having been in her class for eight years. Lydia Aran later recalled how Krystyna Adolph ‘was recently widowed and taking care of her three-year-old daughter and the old father of her late husband. She managed—God knows how—to send us a message, days before we were rounded up to be locked up in the ghetto, saying: “Girls, if the worst comes to the worst, just come to Ignalino.” But sheltering Jews meant instant summary execution. Would she indeed endanger her own, her little girl’s and her old father-in-law’s lives to help us? Was it sensible to expect her to do so? Would it be fair to put her offer to a test? And what would we do if she refuses to take us in?’

Lydia described her journey to Krystyna Adolph’s village, together with her twin sister Monica: ‘We left Vilna at dawn after a nightmare of searching for a hiding place; the humiliation of rejection, the unbearable embarrassment of trying to impose ourselves on others and seeing them in their moments of truth and failure. The day before, we left the ghetto as usual with the labour squad and were cleaning the army barracks when the young officer who had introduced himself as chaplain approached me once again offering help. This time, I decided to accept the offer. That morning, on our way out of the ghetto we saw yet another young man hanging from a street lamp in the courtyard of the house we slept in. The cries from a nearby house were bloodcurdling. What was there to lose?

‘That evening the officer told our guard that Monica and I would stay in the barracks to clean his rooms. At dusk, he took us to a small house in the military compound. A noisy drinking party was going on inside, and guards seemed used to seeing soldiers with girls milling around. We spent the rest of the night in a small storeroom at the back of the house. At dawn the officer came and we left the compound armin-arm, like friends. We decided to go to the house of our father’s secretary, Mr Zielonkowski, who lived at the outskirts of the town with his old mother. He was very devoted to our father and we counted on his help in leaving the town. When we were nearly there, we took leave of the officer, who wished us good luck and said that he was sure he would not return home from the front. He gave us a small snapshot of himself to remember: a very young blond man on skis, laughing, a long scarf around his neck fluttering in the wind. I lost it when we had to abandon all personal things while crossing into the British-occupied zone at night, a few years later.

‘Mr Zielonkowski panicked when he saw us and refused to let us in. He told us that Miss Sabina, our veteran seamstress, his neighbour, had been executed on the spot the day before, when somebody said she had been talking to a Jew. But he agreed to accompany us up to the city limits and also to tell our father…Indeed, we did meet father, as agreed through Mr Zielonkowski, in a clearing in the woods, near Waka. Very soon after that, father was handed over to the Lithuanian police who shot him. About two hours later we crossed a wide river in a boat with a young Gypsy woman, who gave us a knowing look and offered to tell us our fortunes. We had no money to pay her so the fortune-telling project was dropped but she agreed to take us to the other shore. While crossing, she kept looking at us with pity, humming a little song which sounded like a ballad, repeating the words: “You so young and pretty, your fate so ugly.” We were not sure about her intentions, so we left her and the boat as fast as we could and continued on our way.’

Lydia and Monica reached Krystyna Adolph’s village unexpected and unannounced. ‘Krystyna was not home when we arrived. We were sitting there waiting for her to return, too tired to talk, too worried to care, oblivious to the possibility that we might be seen, too exhausted to think or plan. And then we saw her with Hania, walking up the road toward the house. Suddenly, she saw us. Without a moment’s hesitation, she dropped the little girl’s hand, and started running toward us, her arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome, and in a moment she was hugging both of us.’

That ‘climactic moment’, Lydia Aran wrote, ‘extended into a three-year-old saga of a heroic struggle by this extraordinary woman for the survival of three young people with a death sentence over their heads (at a certain stage we were joined for a year by a wounded Russian prisoner of war, who escaped from a transport), while each of us—if caught—would cause her own immediate summary execution. While all around us whole villages were burned to the ground and families executed on as much as a suspicion of having fed an escapee, Krystyna simply ignored the danger from gossip, denunciation or random discovery of ours and Nicolai’s presence on the farm, and put herself serenely in God’s hands in the simple and unshakable certainty that she was doing what a decent person ought to do.’

The moment of rescue, and the three years that followed, ‘were crucial for us mainly because they saved us from a certain and cruel death. But beyond that they afforded us the rare privilege of surviving the years of the Nazi horrors in an atmosphere of goodness and true sharing, and of witnessing a rare instance of a triumph of courage and generosity over fear and instinctive egoism, under extreme conditions.’

Lydia Aran later wrote: ‘I think that our case is not typical even among those in which non-Jews did help Jews, because of the exceptionally noble motivation and the extraordinary courage of Krystyna, who did not hesitate to put at risk not only her own but also her little daughter’s life to do what she believed was right, who offered to shelter us in her home at her own initiative, and who, from the moment we came, accepted us as an equal and inseparable part of a four-member unit which would survive or die together.’
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Samuel Bak was only eight years old when the German army entered Vilna. A child prodigy, he had the first exhibition of his drawings a year later, inside the ghetto. After his father was sent to a labour camp, he and his mother were taken in by Sister Maria, the Mother Superior of the Benedictine convent just outside the ghetto. ‘In time we became very good friends, Sister Maria and I,’ he later wrote. ‘I always waited impatiently for her daily visit. She supplied me with paper, coloured pencils, and old and worn children’s books, gave me lessons from the Old and the New Testament, and taught me the essential Catholic prayers. After several days Mother’s sister, Aunt Yetta, joined us; later her husband, Uncle Yasha, and Father, after they managed to escape the camp in which they had been long interned, were granted the same asylum.’

Only the Mother Superior and one other nun knew that there were men hiding in the convent. Eventually, as so often, the threat of discovery or denunciation loomed, and a new hiding place had to be found. This was a former convent in which the Germans had housed the looted archives of a dozen museums and institutions in Vilna and the surrounding towns: ‘Trucks loaded with confiscated riches arrived daily to be unloaded in the ancient building’s courtyard,’ Samuel Bak recalled. ‘There the nuns, dressed now in civilian poverty, met a number of Jews who were sent every day from the ghetto to carry and pile the thousands of volumes, documents, and rare books that filled its rooms and corridors. One small group of them created a hiding place for the days that they foresaw would follow the final liquidation of the ghetto. The evening Mother and I arrived was a few months after that liquidation. Three Jewish families were now living buried under the books.’

Sister Maria and Father Stakauskas, a Catholic priest and former professor of history who was employed to supervise and sort the looted material, provided the hidden Jews with food and other necessities. ‘Had the authorities discovered their selfless acts, they would have been tortured and executed,’ Bak wrote. ‘Their courage and devotion went beyond anything I have ever encountered. It was Maria who convinced the group in hiding to take in a woman and a child. She explained to them our state of total despair. Sending us back would have meant our death. The nine people had a hard choice to make, and they vacillated, as clearly we would take up a part of their space as well as some of the very limited portions of available food. Moreover, a few of them were afraid that our presence could increase their chance of being detected. But Maria made it clear how much she cared about us. The group could not afford to alienate her. All this came to our knowledge only later, but it provides one more link in our chain of miracles.’

Sister Maria visited every night. ‘She would knock lightly on a wooden beam, three knocks that were the sign for us to dismantle the bundles of books inserted into our tunnel. She always came with some food, some necessary medications, and, most important, with good news that the German armies were losing on all fronts and that the days of our ordeal were numbered. Her optimism and her courage nourished the energies that were vital for our survival.’

Father Stakauskas visited once or twice a week. ‘In his old black leather case that was stuffed with papers, he brought some hidden carrots, a few dried fruits, or a piece of cheese. But his main contribution to the boosting of our morale was his summary of the BBC news. A village friend allowed him to listen to a clandestine radio in the basement of his barn. The Germans were retreating on all fronts. A map of Europe of my own making and movable little red flags indicated to us all that the Third Reich was shrinking. It was a question of a few weeks or maybe a month or two. We had to hold out. The intensification of Soviet air raids confirmed our hope that the end was nearing.’
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Jan and Zofia Bartoszewicz, a Polish Christian couple, were hiding in their cellar one of Vilna Jewry’s greatest poets and authors, Avraham Sutzkever. He had reached their door exhausted and starving. Having given the poet sanctuary, Zofia Bartoszewicz went into the city to find Sutzkever’s son-in-law, who was in a German labour gang, and managed to hand him a loaf of bread. She then walked every day to the ghetto gate, a distance of more than three miles, to arrange for bread, potatoes and even meat to be smuggled in to Sutzkever’s wife and mother.

While in hiding, Sutzkever fell ill. Zofia Bartoszewicz and her husband took him from the cellar and, despite the risk of discovery, brought him into their own rooms. Calling a doctor, they said that the poet was their own son. When he recovered, they refused to let him go back into the cellar, but insisted he continue to stay with them. All went well until a neighbour caught sight of him. To protect his rescuers from denunciation, Sutzkever returned to the ghetto. Later he escaped, joining the partisans in the woods around the city.
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Betrayal and denunciation were a constant danger: among those murdered at Ponar, outside Vilna, in September 1943, was a young Polish woman who had given refuge to a Jewish child.
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Wiktoria Balul, a devout Polish Christian in her sixties, found sanctuary for a Jewish couple, Moshe and Chawiwa Flechtman, in the home of her son Antoni. With the help of her husband Wincenty, Wiktoria provided those in hiding with food from Polish farmers outside the city. Chawiwa Flechtman was pregnant when she was taken to Antoni Balul’s home. After the baby was born, the Baluls made sure that it was safely hidden. They also took in a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy, Jakow Jakubowicz, who had escaped from the ghetto. All four of those in hiding with them survived the war.
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When David and Leah Gitelman decided to hand over their twenty-month-old baby girl, Getele—so named because she was born inside the ghetto—to a Polish woman, Wiktoria Burlingis, and her Lithuanian husband Pawel, the child was smuggled out of the ghetto in a sack while she was sleeping. The only language the child knew was Yiddish, which would quickly alert those for whom betrayal was a way of life (and a source of food, alcohol and money). Getele was quickly taught Polish, and then, as the risk of betrayal grew, a Polish nun, Aleksandra Drzwiecka, agreed to take the baby. She was already looking after a Jewish boy.
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The boy and Getele survived the war; their parents did not.