The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (17 page)

On 3 June 1943, during a deportation from Michalowice, three Jews had hidden in a barn, opening fire as the Germans approached. Tadeusz Seweryn, a Pole, later recalled how one of the Jews was killed and one escaped. The third fought to the end, and was burnt to death when the barn was set on fire. Enraged at the resistance, the Germans then killed two Polish farmers, Stefan Kaczmarski and Stanislaw Stojka, for hiding the three Jews.
⁴⁸

On the night of 23 February 1944, in the remote Polish village of Zawadka, the Germans arrested a former primary-school headmaster, Aleksander Sosnowski, and his seventeen-year-old daughter, together with two Jewish women whom he had hidden and sheltered in an attic for a year and a half. All four were killed.
⁴⁹

Among the few Jews who survived in hiding in Lubartow was twenty-year-old Raya Weberman. Together with her father and her uncle, she had stayed in hiding since the final ‘Action’ against the Jews in the Lubartow ghetto in November 1942: at first in a hole under the kitchen floor of a Polish farmer, Adam Butrin; then, as the German searches began, in a pit that Butrin dug under the floor of his stables. After a further search, they had to live for three weeks lying down in a field, and then in the nearby forest, drinking stagnant water. ‘The water was green, bitter and full of insects,’ she later recalled. Then they returned to the hole under the stable. ‘For two years we wore the same clothes,’ Raya recalled. ‘I read bits of newspaper, dozens of times each.’ When liberation came in late July 1944, ‘Butrin joyously told us the good news. Afterwards he returned and announced sadly: “The Russians hate Jews too.”’
⁵⁰

Raya Weberman, her father and uncle owed their lives to the bravery of Adam Butrin. Another non-Jewish Pole who showed such bravery was Teresa Strutynska-Christow. She was fifteen years old when the Germans hanged her mother in the town square, and left her body hanging there for seven days in a deliberate attempt to frighten all the Polish inhabitants of the town. Teresa’s home overlooked the square. For seven days she saw her mother hanging there. As a result she decided to hide Jews—and did so.
⁵¹

On 3 November 1942 the Jews of Zaklikow were deported to the death camp at Belzec. Dana Szapira, then seven years old, later recalled how, at the time of the deportation, ‘there was a Jewish woman dentist. Her leg was broken.’ A German official came; the woman told him that she was the only dentist in the town, and suggested that she might be of some use at headquarters. Having taken her out of the deportation line—she was on a stretcher—the German then went off to see if she could be employed, which would have saved her; ‘while he was gone a German soldier known as “Moustache” came up. “What are you doing here?” he said, and shot at her, not to kill her, but to see her writhe. Slowly, here and there, here and there, she was killed.’

Dana Szapira and her mother, Lusia, were hidden by a Polish farmer who had no idea they were Jewish. They survived inside a cubbyhole in his cowshed. One day the farmer heard a knock on the door: it was a Jew, carrying in his arms his teenage son. ‘I have been hiding in the woods for months,’ the Jew told the farmer. ‘My son has gangrene of his foot. I cannot cut it off myself. Please get a doctor.’

The farmer went to the Gestapo and told them about the two Jews. ‘He got two kilogrammes of sugar for reporting them,’ Dana Szapira recalled. ‘They were taken away and shot.’
⁵²

Dana and her mother were exceptionally lucky: ‘We went to great lengths to make sure that the farmer did not know—or suspect—that we were Jews. That would have been the end of us.’ To ensure that the deception worked, mother and daughter went to church every Sunday.

Sixty years later, Dana Szapira (Dana Schwartz) reflected: ‘I am so sorry I cannot give you any Righteous in my life. In my life there have not been any Righteous Gentiles.’
⁵³

IN HIS STUDY
of Polish-Jewish relations in the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of how in Lukow the Jews hid in the surrounding woods for some time after the ‘resettlement action’. It was ‘a frequent occurrence’, Ringelblum wrote, ‘for Polish children playing there to discover groups of these Jews hiding: they had been taught to hate Jews, so they told the municipal authorities, who in turn handed the Jews over to the Germans to be killed.’
⁵⁴

Confirmation of the flight of numerous Lukow Jews to the surrounding forests, as well as the part played by the local population in tracking them down and denouncing them, is to be found in the diary of a Polish teacher from Lukow, whose righteous instincts are revealed in the horrified tone of his diary entry. He wrote, three days after the event: ‘On 5 November, I passed through the village of Siedliska. I went into the cooperative store. The peasants were buying scythes. The woman shopkeeper said, “They’ll be useful for you in the round-up today.” I asked, “What round-up?” “Of the Jews.” I asked, “How much are they paying for every Jew caught?” An embarrassed silence fell. So I went on, “They paid thirty pieces of silver for Christ, so you should also ask for the same amount.”’

The teacher’s account continued: ‘Nobody answered. What the answer was I heard a little later. Going through the forest, I heard volleys of machine-gun fire. It was the round-up of the Jews hiding there. Perhaps it is blasphemous to say that I clearly ought to be glad that I got out of the forest alive. In Burzec, one go-ahead watchman proposed: “If the village gives me a thousand zloty, I’ll hand over these Jews.” Three days later I heard that six Jews in the Burzec forest had dug themselves an underground hideout. They were denounced by a forester of the estate.’
⁵⁵

Rescue and denunciation: the range of conflicting responses demonstrated in human behaviour is astonishing. Eugenia Schenker, a graduate of the Cracow Conservatory of Music, recalled what happened after her escape from a labour camp. ‘I was hidden by a Polish family until their neighbours denounced them to the Germans and I had to escape to another Polish family and the same thing happened after a short period of time and I had to run again. It happened the same way, but four families tried to help me without any compensation, really only out of the goodness of the heart.’
⁵⁶

The numbers of those who betrayed Jews and their rescuers must certainly have run, in Poland, into many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. It is, however, due to other Polish men and women of courage and goodwill that Eugenia Schenker—and all those who have written to me about their rescuers—are alive today.

A survivor from the southern Polish town of Rzeszow, Henry Herzog, wrote from his home in the United States: ‘I am alive today due to the courage of three Gentile Poles.’ Returning to Rzeszow long after the end of the war, he was able to pay his respects to two of his rescuers, Titus and Luiza Zwolinski, ‘prostrating myself on their tomb’. Yet he knew that another Jewish friend of his had been betrayed by the Poles and executed. Henry Herzog added: ‘I fully agree with you that the memory of those who at the risk of their own lives, as well as of their families, helped Jewish people escape the genocide should be held in sanctity, counted and recounted.’ And he adds: ‘The memory of Righteous Gentiles has to find its place of honour and gratitude in the annals of the Holocaust. The controversy due to acts of bestiality by other Poles is not negligible, but should not be allowed to cast a doubt over the acts of humanitarian courage of the Righteous Gentile Poles.’
⁵⁷

W
ARSAW, WITH ALMOST
half a million Jewish inhabitants on the eve of the Second World War, was to see by far the largest destruction of Jewish life of any city in Nazi-dominated Europe. In November 1939 the Jews of Warsaw were ordered to live in a ghetto: more than eighty-nine thousand were forced to leave their homes throughout the city and to move into the predominantly Jewish section of the city, where two hundred and eighty thousand Jews already lived, many in crowded tenements. A further twenty-six thousand Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto from across the River Vistula, mostly from the suburb of Praga.

Many Poles looked with satisfaction at the Jews being moved into the ghetto, even gloating; but there were others who behaved decently. Writing in his diary on 19 November 1940, the Warsaw Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum recorded that on the day after the ghetto wall was completed, ‘many Christians brought bread for their Jewish acquaintances and friends’, while others helped Jews ‘bring produce into the ghetto’. That very day a Christian Pole was killed by the Germans while ‘throwing a sack of bread over the wall’.
¹

For the first year of their existence behind the wall, some of the ghetto dwellers experienced individual acts of kindness by their nonJewish neighbours of pre-ghetto times. Despite the risks incurred in doing so, some of these Poles even took Jews for a night or two into the calm and quiet of their homes in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw—the common term used for the non-Jewish sections of the city—where food, though scarce, was at least available in life-sustaining quantities. But on 10 November 1941 the German Governor of Warsaw, Dr Ludwig Fischer, who was determined to bring all such help to an end, issued an official decree, imposing the death penalty on ‘those who knowingly give shelter to such Jews or help them in any way (e.g., by taking them in for a night, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any sort, etc.)’. The decree noted that sentences would be imposed by special courts. The Governor added: ‘I forcefully call the attention of the entire population of the Warsaw district to this new decree, as henceforth it will be applied with the utmost severity.’
²

Hundreds of non-Jews ignored this order. Maria Charaszkiewicz—who was to plant the second tree of the Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem in 1962—was one of them. From the moment Fischer’s draconian order came into force, she stole into the ghetto almost every day to help her Jewish friends. During one of her visits, which took place during an outbreak of yellow fever, she succeeded in smuggling out of the ghetto the members of the Pollak family and a girl named Henia, whom she hid in her apartment for the night, and for whom she afterwards found a hiding place among her relatives. In 1941 she made a journey to Lvov, where she had lived before the war, found shelter there for two Jewish girls whom she had managed to get released from a deportation, and then brought the girls’ parents, Cesia and Janek Lewin—friends of hers from before the war—back with her to Warsaw, where she found them shelter.
³

The deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to the death camp at Treblinka began in July 1942. All those deported were murdered within a few hours of reaching the camp. David Wdowinski writes of the journey on the deportation trains: ‘Sometimes a humanitarian Ukrainian for a piece of gold or a watch or a thousand zloty would bring half a litre of water.’
⁴

Jews who managed to escape from the ghetto into ‘Aryan’ Warsaw had to find families who were willing to risk their own lives in taking them in. Each story is different, and each one reveals the humane, decent character of the individuals who took such grave risks. The story of Bernard and Felicja Feilgut and their five-year-old granddaughter Ewa is one example. At first, posing as non-Jews, they rented a room in the home of Stefania Laurysiewicz and her two daughters. When their money ran out they had to tell their landlady that they were Jewish—and they asked her for help. Yad Vashem’s archive records the sequel: ‘Although aware of the danger, Laurysiewicz and her daughters responded in the affirmative. For humanitarian motives and for no material reward, they protected fugitives and met their every need.’ Since Felicja Feilgut and her granddaughter looked ‘Aryan’, spoke Polish fluently and frequently attended the church near their place of hiding, ‘the two did not arouse the neighbours’ suspicions’. But Bernard Feilgut, ‘whose facial features bespoke his Jewishness’, had to remain in the apartment at all times, and retreated to a hideout whenever visitors came. When in early 1944 Wanda Laurysiewicz married Jan Spychalski, who moved into his mother-in-law’s apartment, the young man also took on the task of helping the three Jews.
⁵

Four people had taken an enormous risk—and they continued to do so for almost two years. Both families, rescuers and rescued, survived the war. In another collective effort, seven members of the Brejna family worked together to save and protect Jews. Tadeusz Brejna was married to Stefania-Barbara, a doctor who worked in a fever hospital near the ghetto. Fearing infection, the Germans kept out of the building, which consequently served as a temporary hideout for Jewish refugees. Tadeusz obtained ‘Aryan’ papers for a number of Jews, while Stefania-Barbara performed operations to disguise the traces of circumcision and Tadeusz’s sister, Stanislawa-Lucyna, a nurse, assisted Jews in need of medical care. In December 1942 a five-year-old Jewish girl, Teofila Raszbaum, was brought out of the ghetto, suffering from burns to her hands. She was taken to the Brejnas’ home, where she was looked after by Tadeusz’s father, Boleslaw Brejna, his wife, Wladyslawa, their son, Kazimierz, and daughter, Zofia. The Brejnas did not abandon Teofila; they kept her hidden in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw throughout the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of April 1943, and kept her with them even after their own expulsion from Warsaw in the wake of the Polish Uprising in August 1944. (The Brejnas were supporters of the Armia Krajowa, the underground Polish Home Army, and Boleslaw and Kazimierz were executed by the Germans during the uprising.) In 1941–2, the Brejnas also gave refuge to Juliusz and Stefania Kepski, after Stefania had been denounced to the Gestapo as Jewish.

As devout Catholics, the Brejnas regarded it as their duty to save Jews, and asked nothing in return for their actions. After the war, the Kepskis and Teofila Raszbaum emigrated from Poland, but they continued to maintain contact with the Brejnas for many years to come.
⁶

The need to disguise circumcision was also a concern of a Polish surgeon named Feliks Kanabus, who used the techniques of plastic surgery to reverse the operation. He also used false certificates to circumcised Jews stating that their circumcision was ‘necessitated by an infection’.
⁷
In December 1945 two American Jews, Dr S. Margoshes and Louis Segal, who were on a World Jewish Congress mission to Poland in search of survivors, were told by several Jews whom they met of ‘a legendary figure, a Polish doctor by the name of Kanabus who, at the risk of his own life, the lives of his children and his aged mother, had saved many Jews by hiding them and also by some remarkable operation which he performed’.

It was then, noted Dr Margoshes, ‘that I resolved that I would seek out Dr Kanabus.’ Eventually he found him: ‘A youngish man with a pleasant Slavic face, blond hair and a ready smile, he immediately inspired confidence. He told me of his years at the Warsaw University, where he joined a Socialist group and befriended many Jews at a time when Jewish students of medicine were barred from the courses in anatomy. He also told me of his sense of shame and humiliation at the sight of many Poles aiding the Nazis in their perpetration of horrible crimes against Jews, and of his resolve to do what he could to save as many as possible.’

The rest of the story of Dr Kanabus the astounded Margoshes learned from Dr Michael Tursz, a physician who was one of many Jews saved by Kanabus. ‘Both he and his wife had been dragged from their home to the Warsaw Ghetto. In sheer despair, Dr Tursz sent a message to his original friend of university days, Dr Kanabus, asking for aid. He was most surprised to receive a quick answer, for in those days of terror friendship counted for but very little. Before long Dr Kanabus managed to get into the Warsaw Ghetto, and by a ruse, to lead both Dr Tursz and his wife past the ghetto watch. For the next three years Mrs Tursz, on forged papers prepared by Dr Kanabus, served as a kitchen maid in Dr Kanabus’ household, while Dr Tursz spent his days and nights in a cellar which Dr Kanabus secured for him with the connivance of his family and some of his friends.’
⁸

Kanabus’s wife Irena had helped with the operations, and had supervised the recovery of the patients. She too was honoured by Yad Vashem as a Righteous person.

Jan Zabinski and his wife Antonina were among the very first Poles to be recognized at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as Righteous Among the Nations. When the Germans occupied Warsaw, Jan Zabinski was the director of the Warsaw Zoo. The Germans also appointed him superintendent of the city’s public parks. As a result of the German air raids on Warsaw in September 1939, most of the cages in the zoo had been emptied of their animals. With the beginning of the deportations from Warsaw in 1942, Zabinski decided to use the empty cages as hiding places for Jews who were fleeing from the ghetto. Over the following three years, he provided several hundred Jews with temporary shelter in the animal houses, as well as providing refuge for some twenty Jews in his own two-storey home in the zoo grounds. During the uprising in August 1944, Zabinski, himself a member of the Polish underground, was captured by the Germans and sent as a prisoner to Germany; but his wife continued to help Jews who were hiding in the ruins of the city.
⁹

Sister Matylda Getter was the Mother Superior of the Warsaw branch of the Order of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary. In peacetime she and her Order had worked mainly among orphans and the sick in hospitals. In 1942, when she was already ill with cancer, Sister Matylda took the incredible risk of taking in any Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto who had managed to escape and who were brought to her. She placed these children in various homes owned by the Order, many of them in the one at Pludy, seven and a half miles outside Warsaw. It has been estimated that Sister Matylda succeeded in rescuing several hundred Jewish children. For doing so, she was accused by some people of unnecessarily endangering the lives of non-Jewish orphans in the homes of the Order. Her reply was that ‘by virtue of the Jewish children’s presence, God would not allow any harm to befall the other children’. Whenever a Gestapo raid on one of the orphanages was believed imminent, Sister Matylda took those Jewish children who looked “too obviously” Jewish into temporary shelter elsewhere. When there was not enough time to do this, those particularly Jewish-looking children would have their heads or faces bandaged as if they had been injured.
¹⁰

Wladyslaw Kowalski was a retired colonel in the Polish army at the time of the German invasion of Poland. As the Warsaw representative of the Dutch-owned Philips Company, he was given freedom of movement in Warsaw by the occupying forces, a privilege he exploited to the full in his many successful attempts to save Jews. His first rescue effort was made in September 1940, when he saw a ten-year-old Jewish boy wandering in the streets of ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. He took the boy to his own home, fed him and obtained a new identity card for him, as well as a permanent home with one of his friends. In February 1943, after the first Jewish revolt in the ghetto, Kowalski bribed the Polish guards at the ghetto gate to allow seven Jews to leave, and then found safe havens for them on the ‘Aryan’ side. That November he helped a family of four living near Izbica—whose ghetto was a staging post for deportation to the death camp at Belzec—to reach Warsaw, where he found them a hiding place, once more with his friends.

After the Jewish ghetto revolt in April 1943, Kowalski gave refuge in his own home to twelve Jews, buying material with which they were able to construct an underground shelter. The fugitives made wooden toys that Kowalski was able to sell in the city, helping to cover the cost of feeding and maintaining his ‘guests’. At the time of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, Kowalski converted the basement of a ruined building into a hiding place for himself and forty-nine Jews. Their daily ration consisted of three glasses of water, a small quantity of sugar, and vitamin pills. They remained there in hiding for 105 days, until liberation. After the war Kowalski married one of the Jewish women he had saved; together they moved to Israel.
¹¹

Jozef and Helena Biczyk lived in the basement of a building in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. Here they gave shelter to two Jewish girls, Alicja Fajnsztejn (aged thirteen) and her sister Zofja (aged seven). Before the war Jozef had been the superintendent of one of their father’s properties in the city, and, later, the girls’ parents joined them in hiding. The Biczyks continued to live in the basement, while the four Fajnsztejns lived in the laundry room in the attic, joined at times by other Jews in search of a place to hide.
¹²
They remained there for a year and a half, until liberation.

Before the war, Genowefa Olczak, known as Genia, worked in Lodz as a housekeeper for Roma and Aleksander Rozencwajg and their small son Gabriel. After the outbreak of war the family moved to Warsaw, taking Genia with them. Aleksander Rozencwajg joined the Polish army, and with several thousand other officers was killed by the Soviets at Katyn in 1940 after having been interned. When non-Jews were ordered to leave the ghetto, Genia had to go, but still brought food to the Rozencwajgs until the ghetto was completely sealed. ‘One day they marched us all to another part of the ghetto in order to take the children and old people away—shoot them or send them to camp,’ Roma Rozencwajg’s niece, Bianka Kraszewski, recalled. ‘I was “camouflaged” to look much older than I was, but my aunt and Gabriel had no chance—we made a hole in the wall of the “shop” and took out bricks and hid them there, not knowing if we would come back or find them alive.’ This ‘shop’ was one of several dozen German-run workshops in the ghetto where Jews were put to work making clothes and other items for the German army.