The Other Schindlers (2 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
One morning in Budapest, during the autumn of 1944, an unknown official in charge of deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz sent all the women
accompanied
by children back to their homes. My mother, Leona Grunwald, was one of those women – and I was a tiny baby in her arms.
I have no means of knowing who that official was and what his motives were for what he did. I cannot know his name or his fate, but it is chilling to think that but for his actions, on arrival at Auschwitz I would have been tossed into the fires with other babies – murdered before I was aware of life. His actions helped both of us to survive the Holocaust.
As George Eliot wrote in the final sentence of Middlemarch:
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
1
The actions of the Holocaust rescuers are truly one of the lights in that great darkness – many of the rescuers do lie in ‘unvisited graves’, unrecognised by Yad Vashem or anybody else. Their bravery will no longer be remembered with the death of those they rescued, merely with the passage of time or even because their rescue attempt failed with tragic results for all concerned. This book attempts to record their courage and understand the motivation of those who had the insight to know what was the right thing to do and the courage to do it, whatever the personal risks.
Stories of the heroism of rescuers have been told by many in the sixty-five years since the true horror of the Nazis’ policies became apparent. Even now, however, many still remain untold. There is very little time, as the baby born in July 1944 is now 65; anyone who was an adult witness to the Holocaust will be over 80. Time is running out: for example, Hilde Holger, who responded to my plea for information aged 95, died before I could meet her, but her daughter helped me instead (see p.
136
). Additionally, many of those who provided information and
stories have not lived to see this book published. Even the children of rescuers and survivors are ageing. It was vital that this task was completed before it was too late and I, as a fortunate survivor, felt an obligation to attempt a small part of it. Encouragement came from the Talmud:
Rabbi Tarphon said, The day is short, and the work is great, and the labourers are sluggish, and the reward is much, and the Master of the house is urgent. He also used to say, It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it.
2
The question may be asked: what is the point of investigating such stories that are now over sixty-five years old? What is their validity in today’s world and for us in the twenty-first century? Certainly the story of the rescuers is one of the few optimistic aspects of the Holocaust. My interest in the subject was aroused by my dissertation on Varian Fry for my MA in Holocaust Studies at Sheffield University (1996–98). I had come across Varian Fry accidentally, through seeing a BBC documentary about him in June 1997, and became so interested in what he achieved that after I had completed the MA, I felt that the motivation of rescuers in general was a subject I should like to research further. I wanted to examine what moved rescuers to take enormous risks, risks not only for themselves but also their families, to save someone’s life at a time when normal moral standards of democratic life were suspended under the Nazis.
Varian Fry was not the stuff of which heroes are traditionally made. Yet he was for many years the only American recognised as a Righteous Gentile – he chose to involve himself in another continent’s woes. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become embroiled in Europe’s horrors. He was an unassuming man who, after the fall of France in June 1940, offered to go to Vichy France to rescue refugees for the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). He only offered to go if nobody else could be found and he went because nobody else was found. He was meant to rescue 200 artists and writers on a list produced by the ERC, using visas obtained by President Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor. In the end, he probably saved about 4,000 refugees. On his return to America, after thirteen months, he wrote about his experiences. When the book was finally published in 1945, he explained why he had agreed to go on such a perilous venture:
After several weeks of fruitless searching for a suitable agent to send to France, the Committee selected me. I had had no experience in refugee work, and none in underground work. But I accepted the assignment because, like the members of the Committee, I believed in the importance of democratic solidarity.
3
However, he also had other reasons. He wrote about his warm sentiments towards many of the writers and artists whose work had given him pleasure:
novelists like Franz Werfel and Lion Feuchtwanger; painters like Marc Chagall and Max Ernst; sculptors like Jaques Lipchitz. For some of these men, although I knew them only through their work, I had a deep love; and to them I owed a heavy debt of gratitude for the pleasure they had given me. Now that they were in danger, I felt obliged to help them, if I could; just as they, without knowing it had often in the past helped me.
4
Fry cited his sympathy for the German and Austrian Socialist Parties, based
primarily
on their excellent workers’ housing projects of the 1920s. ‘I had not always agreed with their ideas or their methods, but I knew when I saw those housing projects that their hearts were in the right place.’
5
But earlier experiences as a journalist were highly influential. Fry had visited Germany in the 1930s and thus had an insight shared by few of his countrymen:
Finally, I knew from first-hand experience what defeat at the hands of Hitler could mean. In 1935 I visited Germany and tasted the atmosphere of oppression which the Hitler regime had brought. I talked to many anti-Nazis and Jews, shared their anxiety and their sense of helplessness, felt with them the tragic hopelessness of their situation. And while I was in Berlin I witnessed on the Kurfuerstendamm the first great pogrom against the Jews, saw with my own eyes young Nazi toughs gather and smash up Jewish-owned cafés, watched with horror as they dragged Jewish patrons from their seats, drove hysterical, crying women down the street, knocked over an elderly man and kicked him in the face. Now that that same oppression had spread to France, I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.
6
Although some of this was reported in the
New York Times
on 17 July 1935, with the byline ‘Editor describes rioting in Berlin’, the most horrific incident was recorded by fellow American Mary Jayne Gold. Mary was a wealthy socialite who met Varian in Marseilles and funded some of his rescue activities:
At a café, Varian watched a pair of storm troopers approach the table of a
Jewish-looking
individual. When the poor man reached nervously for his beer, with a quick thrust of his knife one of the storm troopers pinned the man’s hand to the wooden table. The victim let out a cry and bent over in pain unable to move. The ruffian shouted something about Jewish blood on German blades, withdrew the knife, and swaggered away. Varian heard him say to his companion, ‘this day is a holiday for us.’
Varian told me the story in a low, mumbling voice, as he often spoke when he was deeply moved. I think the mental image of that hand nailed to the table beside the beer mug had something to do with his decision to go.
7
My study of Varian Fry and his colleagues, such as Charles Fawcett, showed me that rescuers’ motives were not as simple as they sometimes claimed. Although they sometimes gave a single reason for their actions, in fact the background to their actions was far more complex. It also crystallised a simple and obvious truth which may become dwarfed in the statistics of the victims of the Holocaust – one person can make a difference.
Conversely, it also underlined the tragedy of the Holocaust. If more bystanders had become rescuers, then the millions of victims would actually have survived and flourished. Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jews and at the end of Spielberg’s film,
Schindler’s List
, the descendants of these survivors appeared – they numbered around 6,000. I am no mathematician, but on the same basis, if the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis had survived they would now have 32 million descendants.
Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum and Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust,
8
has now recognised 23,226 non-Jews as Righteous Among the Nations
9
(see Table 2). It should be noted here that not only Righteous Gentiles helped Jews in the war. Belated recognition is now being given to Jews who helped Jews, but many others fought different battles. The Righteous scheme was devised specifically to recognise non-Jewish rescuers, and very strict criteria have to be met. It cannot reward other forms of courage, as in the controversy over Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who Yad Vashem acknowledges as ‘a martyr in the struggle against Nazism’ but has not yet been proved to have ‘specifically helped Jews’.
10
On 2 February 1996 Varian Fry was named as the first American ‘Righteous Among Nations’ by Yad Vashem. The American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, acknowledging the posthumous honour nearly thirty years after Varian’s death in 1967, said: ‘We owe Varian Fry our deepest gratitude, but we also owe him a promise – a promise never to forget the horrors that he struggled against so heroically, a promise to do whatever is necessary to ensure that such horrors never happen again.’
11
Walter Meyerhof, who with his parents escaped from France over the Pyrenees with Varian’s help, established the Varian Fry Foundation in 1997. Its purpose is to teach schoolchildren the lessons outlined by Warren Christopher and, as Walter explained to me, to demonstrate that ‘one person can make a difference’.
12
Walter’s father, Otto Meyerhof, shared the 1922 Nobel Prize for Medicine with A.V. Hill, who was later to become Secretary of the Royal Society 1935–45. In
1933 Hill became involved in the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), which helped scholars and scientists from abroad escape the Nazis.
Many rescuers seem surprised that what they did was of interest to anybody else. Modest expressions such as ‘what they did was normal or anyone would have done the same’ are quite common; loyalty to old friends or good employers are frequent reasons, as is opposition to the Nazis’ policies, if not necessarily being the result of wanting to save Jews. Others saw such rescue as an integral part of being in the Resistance or the logical result of their parents’ upbringing. Many books have examined the background of rescuers and tried to find patterns of behaviour based on class, education or other similar sociological reasons. Perry London was one of the first to study this topic in the 1960s. He noted three main characteristics of rescuers. He specified a spirit of adventure, a sense of being socially marginal and intense identification with a parent of strong moral
character
. Such categorisation is unsatisfactory because for every rescuer who falls into the neat boundaries of his category, another one pops up who defies them. The most common reasons noted are religious beliefs or perceiving that it was one’s duty to help another who was in trouble. Other reasons are the sanctity of life, obeying one’s conscience or shame at not helping a neighbour.
By examining the motivation of several rescuers who may not previously have been written about, it is possible to establish why some bystanders to the Holocaust became rescuers and why so many remained bystanders. An
understanding
of what influenced their behaviour has relevance today, when the need to support each other in society still exists even if the circumstances are,
thankfully
, quite different. Naturally, I am aware that whilst the Jews were numerically by far the major target of the Nazis’ racial policies, many other groups were
targeted
for persecution and murder. My concentration on the Jewish Holocaust is not intended to diminish or ignore their suffering.
I was determined from the start to write about rescuers and the rescued whose experiences were not particularly in the public domain. As a single parent living in Sheffield, I therefore needed to find a way of making contact with people who had not necessarily been approached before. In August 2000 I targeted journals and magazines which would be read by people likely to have personal
experiences
of the Holocaust, or who might know of others with a story to record, and asked them to publish details of my research. These were:
Common Ground
– the Journal of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ)
Jewish Telegraph
– a regional Jewish newspaper published in Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester.
Menorah
– a magazine for Jewish members of HM forces and small Jewish communities.
Information
– The Magazine of the Association of Jewish Refugees.
I also attended two major events where I arranged for each delegate to receive a copy of my project details in their conference pack. These were the Oxford Holocaust Conference
Remembering for the Future
, held in July 2000, and the European Council of Jewish Communities Presidents’ Conference, held in Barcelona in May 2000. One of the Italian delegates at the latter conference wrote an article for
Shalom
, the journal of the Rome Jewish Community.
Additionally, contact was made with the South African Jewish community through my friend Brenda Zinober, and all the members of the Leeds-based Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association (HSFA) were also circularised.