The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust Read online

  Rescue in the East

  STARTING IN 1933, as Nazi rule imposed harsher and harsher conditions on the Jews of Germany, many governments opened their gates to Jewish refugees. The United States accepted the largest number, more than a hundred and fifty thousand, followed by Britain with more than eighty thousand, including almost ten thousand children brought to Britain on the British government’s initiative in what became known as the Kindertransport after the destruction of synagogues and Jewish property during Kristallnacht in November 1938. Many of these children were given new homes by Christian families. Even when governments, including Britain and the United States, imposed quotas on the number of Jewish refugees allowed in, individual diplomats made special efforts to issue as many visas as possible. Prominent among these diplomats were the British Passport Control Officer in Berlin, Captain Frank Foley, and the Chinese Consul-General in Vienna, Dr Feng Shan Ho. The visas they issued enabled several thousand Jews to leave Germany and Austria during the period when German policy was to allow Jewish emigration. On the Swiss border, a Swiss police officer, Captain Paul Grüninger, ignored the orders of his superiors and let more than two thousand Jews cross into Switzerland.

  When war came, with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, other diplomats outside the Nazi sphere issued visas which enabled Jews to leave Europe altogether. In the Lithuanian capital Kaunas—Lithuania then being neutral—a Dutch diplomat, Jan Zwartendijk, and the Japanese Consul, Chiune Sugihara, enabled more than two thousand Jewish refugees from Poland to cross the Soviet Union en route for Japan, Shanghai and the Americas. Following the German invasion of France, Holland and Belgium in May 1940, a Portuguese diplomat stationed in southern France, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, issued transit visas that enabled many thousand Jewish refugees to cross into Spain before German troops reached the border and closed it. In Marseilles, an American citizen, Varian Fry, was head of an American Emergency Rescue Committee that, over a thirteen-month period, issued documents enabling more than twelve hundred mainly German refugees, including many Jewish intellectuals, writers, artists and scientists, to leave Vichy France for the United States. Fry and his team were supported in their efforts by the American Vice-Consul in Marseilles, Hiram Bingham.1

  In German-occupied Poland, where all Jews were forced to live in ghettos, starvation took a terrible toll. More than two million Polish Jews were trapped in the ghettos; the Germans would not allow any emigration. Then, in June 1941, Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union, overrunning an area in which more than two million more Jews were living. Within a few days of the German invasion of this vast eastern region, the mass murder of Jews began on a scale hitherto unknown: hundreds, sometimes thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, being killed every day. This was the start of the Holocaust, the systematic destruction of the Jews of Europe. This mass murder was carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, SS killing squads, assisted by local volunteers, among them Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians. By the end of 1941 as many as a million Jews had been murdered in the conquered regions of the Soviet Union.

  In the face of such a systematic and sustained frenzy of killing, every act of rescue was remarkable. In Bialystok, the first eastern Polish city to be overrun, one of the first acts of the killers was to lock hundreds of Jews into the main synagogue and then set it on fire. At one moment, while the SS were concentrating on shooting Jews who were trying to escape from the front of the building, a Polish Christian—his name is not known—who had been employed as an odd-job man by the synagogue opened a small window at the back, and several dozen Jews managed to escape. By the end of that day of burning and shooting, two thousand Jews had been murdered.2

  At Jedwabne, forty miles from Bialystok, more than a thousand Jews were murdered on 10 July 1941. Their killers were not the German occupiers but local Polish villagers, their neighbours for generations. During the massacre, a Polish woman, Antonina Wyrzykowska, sheltered seven Jews from Jedwabne in her home in the nearby hamlet of Yanczewka. Her courage was later recalled by two of those to whom she gave shelter, Lea and Jack Kubran, at that time eighteen-year-olds who had just married: ‘For twenty-eight months’, they wrote, ‘this selfless and generous woman protected us, giving us bread, water and potatoes as we hid in two bunkers. Antonina kept her sheep on a floor over the bunkers for further camouflage. Constantly the Gestapo poked its guns around the farm looking for the seven Jews. We were ready to commit suicide if they discovered us. Ingeniously Antonina had spilled gasoline around the area covering the bunkers so that the Gestapo’s bloodhounds could not smell their prey.’3

  Another of the seven in hiding, Moishe Olszewicz, later wrote: ‘Best friends, the goodness and virtue of these people cannot be described. No amount of money can adequately compensate them and no words can adequately thank them. It was not one day and not one minute, but two and a half years of fear and suffering, of anguish and fear.’ When liberation came, ‘We left the stable, just like the animals, into the lighted world, full of air and sunshine, which for us had been forbidden, and we embraced our saviours. Their joy cannot be described. They looked at our thin and pale faces, at our thin arms and legs, at our extinguished eyes which looked and saw nothing, the hearts which let out a cry full of pain knowing we had lost the best and most beautiful—our families.’4

  After the Russians liberated the area, Moishe Olszewicz recalled, ‘Antonina’s Polish neighbours taunted her over having hidden the seven Jews. She was even beaten up once and she and her husband were forced to leave the farm. (He himself had only known about four Jews being hidden—not all seven.)’5 Antonina Wyrzykowska’s family eventually emigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago.6

  In supporting her for a Righteous award, another of those whom she saved wrote to Yad Vashem: ‘My Jewish brethren, these were terrible times, and the struggle for survival was unbearably hard. You can’t truly appreciate and value what the Wyrzykowski family did for those seven Jews who survived and now have children of their own. I now live in Yedwabno—Jedwabne—and I am still the same Jew called Grondowsky. My Jewish brethren, I would like all of you who happen to read this statement to know that thanks to the Wyrzykowski family, seven Jews survived, and it is impossible to evaluate the reward this family deserves for rescuing us.’7

  Menachem Finkelsztajn was also saved by Antonina Wyrzykowska. He had fled to Jedwabne from the neighbouring village of Radzilow, where local Poles had murdered a large number of Jews two days earlier, on June 23—only twenty-four hours after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and two weeks before the Jedwabne massacre. Both the local priest and the local doctor had refused all Jewish appeals for help. Only the arrival of a group of German soldiers, who were shocked by the slaughter, saved the lives of eighteen Jews, including an eight-year-old boy who had dug himself out of the mass grave.8

  Bronka Klibanski, masquerading as an ‘Aryan’ Pole in Bialystok while serving as a liaison for the Jewish partisans in the nearby forests, recently paid tribute to a Polish officer in the underground Polish Home Army, the Armia Krajowa. Dr Filipowski worked in a German pharmaceutical warehouse and ‘provided me with medicines and equipment for the partisans’ he also guarded Mordechai Tenenbaum’s underground archives, which had been smuggled out of the Bialystok ghetto. Bronka Klibanski also recalled that another Pole, ‘an elderly man named Burdzynski, would come and visit one of us whenever it was necessary to allay a landlady’s suspicions; these visits were interpreted as proof that we were Christians.’9

  The Polish province of Volhynia, which the Soviet Union had annexed in October 1939—today it is part of Ukraine—was overrun by the German army in the first weeks of the German-Soviet war. More than a quarter of a million Jews were living there. Starting in November 1941, ghettos were established for Jews in all the towns and villages where they lived. In one of these towns, Ostrog, the Germans regularly sent ‘work brigades’ of Jews out of the ghetto. These groups did not return. Realizing that there could be no safety in remain
ing in the ghetto, Lisa Dawidowicz and her family escaped into the countryside. ‘We searched for a hiding place,’ she later recalled. ‘A poor farm woman agreed to hide our family of five in an underground potato cellar—there was no room to stand and we could breathe only through a hole covered by pumpkins. We remained there for sixteen months.’10

  From the beginning of the German occupation, the position of Jews in hiding was precarious in the extreme. On 25 September 1941, the first day of the slaughter of the Jews of Ejszyszki (in Yiddish, Eishyshok), in which the mass murder of almost five thousand people was carried out by Germans and local Lithuanians, several Jews who escaped from the village made their way to the home of a Christian friend in the village of Dociszki. In the words of Yaffa Eliach, the historian of Ejszyszki, herself a survivor and eyewitness, this man ‘welcomed them with open arms and fed them bread, honey and warm milk’. Another non-Jew who took Jews in for the night at the time of the slaughter was Yashuk Kapitan: when the Jews arrived at his home his wife was already in bed, ‘her head barely visible amid piles of pillows and goose-down quilts looted from Jewish homes’. After a night in the barn and a day in the hayloft, the Jews were asked to leave: Kapitan felt their presence had become too dangerous. Walking to the village of Korkuciany, they came to the home of a farmer who knew them. The farmer let them in, and agreed to take a message from them to the Radun ghetto, eight miles away, which had as yet escaped destruction.

  Another local farmer, Zoludzewicz, took in a pre-war Jewish friend and his family who had escaped the massacre. But, Yaffa Eliach has written, the farmer’s son ‘feared that the farmers in the vicinity would betray them, burn the house down, and kill everyone in it’. The son even refused to eat or drink unless the Jews were sent away, and after two weeks Zoludzewicz asked the family to leave. Yaffa Eliach herself (then Yaffa Sonenson), her parents and sister, and several other members of her family, found refuge in the village of Korkuciany with a Polish farmer, Kazimierz Korkuc, and his mother. Korkuc was ‘a completely honourable and generous man, who helped dozens, even hundreds, of Jews in the vicinity’. Near his bed was a trapdoor, covered with straw and manure: it ‘led to a narrow shaft, which in turn led to a tunnel that was connected to a pit, a cave-like space beneath and beyond the house, with an air shaft consisting of a hole beneath a cherry tree’. In this pit, Yaffa and her parents hid with three other members of their family. So secret did the hiding places have to be that the Sonensons did not know at first that their first cousins had also taken refuge on the Korkuc property: nine Jews in all. Other Jews were also in hiding elsewhere on the property, and on nearby farms where Korkuc had found them a place. A Lithuanian shepherd on the Korkuc estate, Antoni Gawrylkewicz, would warn Jews in hiding when a Polish People’s Army unit came into the area; some of these units did not hesitate to kill Jews when they discovered them. Many Jews on the run found food at the farm: Korkuc was willing, in Yaffa Eliach’s words, ‘to risk his life on a daily basis’. After the war, Kazimierz Korkuc and his mother were ‘unable to return to their home in safety because of the help they had given to Jews’.11

  Elsewhere in the Ejszyszki region, in one of her many hiding places, a Jewish woman, Miriam Kabacznik, nearly lost her life on account of her dumplings. A neighbour of the family who was hiding her, a man who belonged to the People’s Army, ate some soup with dumplings in it which Miriam had cooked. ‘These dumplings could only have been cooked by a Jewess,’ the neighbour remarked. That very night she was on the run again, in search of a new shelter.

  In July 1942 the liquidation of the Volhynian ghettos began. In the city of Wlodzimierz Wolynski (in Russian, Vladimir-Volynsk; in Yiddish, Ludmir), it began on 1 September 1942 and continued for two weeks. Almost all the twenty thousand Jews in the ghetto, half of them refugees from dozens of smaller towns and villages, were murdered. While the killing was at its height, a Jewish woman, Ruszka Singer, escaped with her fourteen-year-old daughter Nechama into the woods. There they hid until the coming of winter forced them to seek shelter at the home of a farmer, Nikolai Vavrusevich. After the war, Vavrusevich fell on hard times. Fifty years later the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which at that time was providing him with financial help, described his response to Ruszka Singer’s plea: ‘Risking death, Nikolai took in this miserable mother and child and brought them to his shed. When Ruszka came to the shed, she found thirteen other Jews in hiding. Nikolai gave Ruszka and Nechama warm, dry clothes and food. The fifteen Jews lived in the shed, not venturing forth for fear of being noticed by a neighbour. The winter was very severe. The Jews moved from the shed to the house and to the forest depending on the circumstances. Nikolai and his brother Mikhail dug a bunker under the shed and this is where the Jews remained for the duration of the war until they were liberated in 1944.’12

  When, fifty-five years later, Nechama was reunited with Mikhail and Nikolai Vavrusevich in New York, she recalled that in April 1943 the Vavruseviches had dug up extra potatoes and beets from their fields so that she and her mother could observe Passover and refrain from eating leavened bread. The Vavruseviches also helped those in hiding observe the Sabbath each Friday by lighting a makeshift candle: an oil-dipped piece of thread in a hollowed out potato.13

  When the Einsatzgruppen entered the small Volhynian town of Zofiowka (Sofiyevka), all two thousand Jewish inhabitants were forced into an open, unfenced ghetto, and strictly guarded. During a three-day ‘Action’—the word used both by the SS and by the Jews to describe the moment of the destruction of a whole Jewish community—starting on 25 August 1942, all the Jews in Zofiowka were taken in small groups to a nearby forest to be murdered: shot down mercilessly in cold blood. Only thirty-six managed to elude their captors. Making their way with difficulty to the village of Cholopiny, the survivors sought out Alojzy Ludwikowski, a Polish farmer whom they had known before the war. He agreed to try to shelter all of them. Digging a number of pits in the dense forest, in which they could hide, and covering the pits with undergrowth, he provided them with clothing, food and even weapons. In February 1943 the Germans discovered one of the pits. The sixteen Jews hiding there opened fire in self-defence; all of them were killed in the ensuing battle. The other twenty remained in hiding until liberation.14

  When the SS turned their attention to Lutsk, two thousand of the twenty thousand Jews in the ghetto managed to escape the round-ups. The historian of the fate of Volhynian Jewry, Shmuel Spector—who himself escaped from Volhynia to the Urals before the German occupation—has recorded that, with the help of Witold Fomenko, a Ukrainian, many of them hid first in the houses of Poles inside the city or in its outskirts, and then, under cover of darkness, made their way to the woods.15 In the Volhynian village of Strumowka, near Lutsk, Fomenko had a hairdressing shop opposite the synagogue. David Prital, who had been a youngster in the ghetto, later recalled that it was said he ‘would come to the ghetto with bags full of bread in order to distribute the bread to the women whose husbands were deported or shot during the first “Actions”. This man tried to encourage Jews who were depressed by regaling them with cheerful stories and jokes about the Germans.’16 David Prital himself was saved by a Ukrainian couple in the same village, Sawko and Okseniya Mironiuk. In 1992 he wrote to the Claims Conference in New York to obtain financial support for Mrs Mironiuk, then a widow, eighty-five years old and blind: ‘To my knowledge she and her family saved a second Jew, Ignnetz Shetz, who after the liberation joined the Russian army and died subsequently fighting the Germans. I remember when Ignnetz was hiding in Mironiuk’s house. The Germans were conducting house-to-house searches and Ignnetz wished to leave but the family refused to let him go. For no reason the Germans passed their house and all were saved.’17

  However, the local Ukrainian population could also be terrifyingly hostile to those who sought refuge; it had, after all, carried out murderous pogroms of its own against the Jews in the first weeks of the war. A Jew who had fled from the ghetto of Dabrowica later recalled that, when he asked a Ukrainia
n peasant friend for help, the ‘friend’ told him: ‘You’ve left all your property with the others in the town and you come to me asking me to help and save you. I thought you were smart but now I see that you’re very dumb. Hitler has conquered almost the whole world and he is going to slaughter all the Jews because they crucified our Jesus. You think you can get away from this fate? You shouldn’t have run away from the ghetto; at least you would have rested in the same grave with your family. Now who knows where you’re going to die. My advice for you is to return to the ghetto. Take a loaf of bread and get out of my sight, for the devil remains the devil and the Yid remains a Yid.’18 Such an attitude, widespread as it was, throws into even starker contrast the goodwill of those who were willing to risk their lives to try to help Jews.

  In his testimony to Yad Vashem, David Prital recalled how the first Pole to whom he turned for sanctuary in Lutsk had demanded more money than Prital could even contemplate. He then decided to seek out the Bron family, whom he knew, and who lived in the village of Ozhenitsa. ‘I had developed a friendly relationship with this family all year long, but they never promised to help me in a time of crisis. I arrived at their home in the evening and asked them to let me sleep for only one night. When Mr Bron saw the state I was in, he agreed to let me in. I felt the tension in the house caused by such a dangerous guest who could bring death upon the entire family. During that night I was thinking about my friends who remained in the ghetto. Early in the morning I got up with the same big frightening question. Where shall I go now? I decided that I must do something and went to the kitchen. I lit the fire in the oven and started to peel potatoes for breakfast. My hosts were surprised when they saw me doing the household chores when they woke up, but at the same time they were pleased to see that some housework had been done. “Not so bad,” said Mr Bron, “you see, the night has passed and not a single German has come. Let’s hope that no one will come, after all, how can they keep an eye on each house?” I felt that the tension eased a little.’