The Other Schindlers (31 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
When the Germans invaded Lithuania, as in other occupied countries, deep-seated resentments against the Jews and murderous anti-Semitic hatreds were let loose. In Lithuania’s second city of Kaunas, locals, encouraged by watching Germans, killed several dozen Jews they claimed were communists. The Jews were beaten to death with crowbars in a courtyard of an apartment block. Once the massacre was over, a local man picked up an accordion, stood on the bodies and began to play the Lithuanian national anthem. For him, the Jews’ death was an occasion not just for satisfaction, but celebration.
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Poles had reason to be afraid to help the Jews. A poster from 14 December 1943, in the form of a ‘Public Announcement’ from the SS and the police in the district of Galicia, shows that of fifty-five people sentenced to death for assorted crimes, ‘there were eight Christians who were sentenced to death for hiding Jews’.
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However, using the principle of ‘collective responsibility’, the Nazis often
punished
the whole family, including children, or even the whole community. The lesson was often underlined by public executions, as in the case of the Baranek family. Wincenty Baranek, a prosperous but generous farmer, had hidden four Jews. On 15 March 1943 the Germans arrived at his farm at dawn. He hid his two sons aged 9 and 10, but they were discovered, and they were all shot in front of their neighbours, together with the four Jews they had attempted to hide. The two young boys had tried to escape, but had been restrained by a neighbour told to guard them.
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Some families were punished when groups of houses were destroyed by fire with the occupants inside. In the village of Stary Cieplow, four farms were
surrounded
by Germans, again at dawn. They plundered the cottages, taking the best items, then set fire to the houses with the occupants – thirty-three Poles and an unknown number of Jews – inside. According to an eyewitness, a young girl who ran out of one of the houses was shot and her body tossed onto the fire, after her new shiny, black boots had been pulled off. In Huta Pienacka, in the winter of 1944, the Germans learnt that the villagers occasionally gave food and shelter to about 100 Jews hiding in the forests. The Nazis surrounded the village and, with the help of the Ukrainian police, set fire to it and stopped anyone from leaving – even the animals were destroyed.
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It should be recalled that the Nazis fanned the existing anti-Semitism with their propaganda, using posters showing Jews as ‘repulsive and dangerous
criminals
or as vampires sucking Polish blood … Public lectures were held asserting that Jews were immune to typhus but functioned as carriers of the disease and could pass it on to Aryans.’
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Irene Opdyke was a Catholic Pole who hid twelve Jews in the house where she acted as housekeeper, even though her employer was an SS officer. She described her horror at returning to her hometown of Radom:
‘And pasted on the walls were posters – cruel, mocking posters – caricaturing the Jews, who were liked to every depravity and sin. Every woe and affliction of the Polish people were laid at their feet. Loudspeakers on street corners blared
warnings
about the Jews in Polish and German.’
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It is fair to stress that the rescuers who responded to the plight of the Jews were in many cases going against the mores of their society and risked the
condemnation
of the authorities and their own social circle and family. That required true moral courage. Elia Rinkevicius’ concerns for her child, when Vytautas told her about hiding the Kagans, seem perfectly understandable when we appreciate the risks they were running.
Michal Glowinski, born in 1934, is an established Polish writer little known in the West. In 1998 a book of essays,
Czarne Sezony
(
The Black Seasons
), about his Warsaw childhood during the Holocaust, appeared. ‘Each of them is a record of real life experience, it comes from flashes of memory which do not include all events, do not encompass all my life in those times and history of my survival’.
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A Polish literary critic, Jacek Leociak, describes the writing as ‘an archipelago of memory’.
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In one memorable essay he describes how even when there was no question of needing to hide a Jew, the presence of one, even a small boy, made a group of ordinary Polish women panic.
On this occasion, Michal’s aunt Maria, his mother’s younger sister, was entrusted with finding him somewhere to hide:
she moved about on the Aryan Side most freely. She possessed what was then called ‘good looks’, which were not merely a privilege, but moreover a divine bestowal. Good looks meant that the person in hiding aroused less suspicion. People with good looks did not draw attention, they could blend into the crowd; it was easier for them to play the role of someone they were not. Maria’s looks were exquisite; she was an attractive blonde who looked as though she had been born into a noble estate, rather than into a Jewish merchant’s family. Anyone with less than intimate knowledge would never have discerned what origins lay behind her impeccable Slavic beauty. And so when I’d found myself homeless and no one knew what to do with me, it fell to Maria to deal with my very problematic situation.
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He described his experience in a pastry shop where Maria left him briefly to make a phone call. Within minutes he was being scrutinised by a group of
ordinary
Polish women who realised he was Jewish and began interrogating him: ‘As usual in such situations, I would have most preferred to melt into the ground. I heard: “A Jew, there’s no question, a Jew.” – “She certainly isn’t but him – he’s a Jew.” – “She’s foisted him off onto us.”’
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It is ironical that Maria’s blonde looks convinced them she was not Jewish:
The women asked me various questions, to which by then I’d ceased to respond, rather muttering sometimes only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ … Yet I heard not only the questions directed at me but also the comments the women expressed more quietly, to the side, as if only to themselves, but in such a way that I couldn’t fail to hear. Most often they spit out the threatening word ‘Jew’, but also, most terrifying, they repeated: ‘we have to call the police’. I was aware that this was equivalent to a death sentence … Those women were not possessed by an uncontrollable hatred … These were normal, ordinary, in their own way resourceful and decent women, hard-working, undoubtedly scrambling to take care of their families in the difficult conditions under the occupation. Neither would I exclude the possibility that they were
exemplary
mothers and wives, perhaps religious, possessing a whole array of virtues. They had found themselves in a situation that to them felt troublesome and threatening, and so they wanted to face it directly. They did not think, though, at what price. Perhaps that transcended their imaginations – although they must have known how it would end if they were to ‘call them’ – or perhaps it was simply not within the boundaries of the moral reflection accessible to them.
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Why were these women so worried about a little Jewish boy quietly eating his pastry in the darkest corner of the café? Why could they not ignore him and get on with their gossip? Why did they feel the need to call the police? Surely they knew this could mean death for him? They did not feel they could remain passive in this situation – why was this little Jewish boy such a threat to them?
Most bystanders were indifferent to the fate of the Jews – often denying they knew what was happening even when living close to a camp. This is always
surprising
from our perspective – exemplified by J.D. Salinger’s (see p.
163
) comment to his little daughter: ‘You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.’
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Conversely, the victims were aware of life outside their restrictions, like Eva Heyman, who, while living in the Ghetto in Nagyvárad, Hungary, could hear her old icecream van go by on the other side of the fence.
Adina Szwajger recalled the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto at Easter 1943. She wrote: ‘In Warsaw, on Krasinski square, outside the walls of a burning Ghetto in that awful Easter of 1943, the merry-go-round went round and jolly music played. And people enjoyed themselves.’ She refers to the poem
Campo dei Fiori
written by Czelow Milosz and distributed by the Underground press in 1943. It refers to the burning alive in 1600 of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, in the
Campo dei Fiori in Rome, whilst the locals were enjoying themselves in the square’s tavernas:
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Someone will read as moral
That the people of Rome or Warsaw
Haggle, laugh, make love
As they pass by martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
Of the passing of things human,
Of the oblivion
Born before the flames have died.
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In a dream Adina sees the merry-go-round and behind the Ghetto wall ‘my house is burning. Because that is where it stood. Right by the square.’
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The bystanders’ indifference was because they did not care about the Jews or what happened to them. One Polish woman described her feelings for the Jews: ‘That guilt of mine, which bordered on cruelty, was my indifference to the Jewish fate. I was completely indifferent to the human beings who were perishing in the Ghetto. They were “them” and not “us”.’
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This is the contrast between the bystanders and the rescuers; the rescuers did not differentiate between themselves and the Jews. That is why they were surprised to be asked about their motives.
In March 2001 Professor Richard D. Heffner published a series of interviews with the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor. The first interview, ‘Am I my Brother’s Keeper?’, addressed the question of
indifference
. Heffner asked: ‘You’ve spoken about those who put people in the death camps and brought about their deaths directly. You also speak about others who stood around indifferently. Do you feel that this is increasingly a theme in our times?’ Elie Wiesel replied:
Oh, more and more. I have the feeling that everything I do is a variation on the same theme. I’m simply trying to pull the alarm and say, ‘Don’t be indifferent’. Simply because I feel that indifference now is equal to evil. Evil, we know more or less what it is. But indifference to disease, indifference to famine, indifference to
dictators
, somehow it’s here and we accept it. And I have always felt that the opposite of culture is not ignorance; it is indifference. And the opposite of faith is not atheism; again, it’s indifference. And the opposite of morality is not immorality; it’s again indifference. And we don’t realize how indifferent we are simply because we cannot not be a little bit indifferent.
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The perpetrators and bystanders were indifferent – the rescuers were not.
Gerda Haas, as a young woman with her parents in Germany, rescued a Jewess. She stressed to me there were only two types of rescuer: a) those who were approached by (or on behalf of) the fugitive; b) those who offered shelter to a persecuted person out of their own free will.
Gerda says she knew no one who refused to help when asked, but knew many who had suffered as a result, either by death or time in a concentration camp. She reveals that others were also hidden, such as a Catholic priest and a deserter from the German army. She claims: ‘Practically in every third house in that village where I lived, was a fugitive hiding from the German authorities.’
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Henry Walton’s parents, Siegmund Weltlinger and Grete (
née
Gumpel), remained in Berlin all through the war, where they were hidden by six different couples, whose names Henry doesn’t know. But he knew they were all non-Jews who risked their lives and were prepared to share their meagre food rations. Whenever they thought there was a chance of discovery they were moved on to the next couple – ‘always to loyal friends who would take them in at a moments notice’. Henry recalls the last one was a Mrs Hahn, who owned a grocer’s shop and was therefore able to help the network with food. After the war his parents, who lived into their eighties, kept in touch with Mrs Hahn and helped her rebuild her business. ‘They were friends we had known over many years. They hated what the Nazis were doing, and were intent on saving lives … that was their only motivation.’ Henry’s parents were in hiding from 1942 until the end of the war. Henry says many people were murdered by the invading Russian troops, but because his father could speak a little Russian, he was able to save not only his wife but the people who had hidden them by saying they were all Jewish.
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His parents were reluctant to talk about their traumatic time. He wrote to me: ‘I just wanted you to know, there were loyal, and decent Germans, who were prepared to risk their lives, to save the lives of the “enemy” of the state.’
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Henry Walton himself was able to escape to England from Germany as a young man, in June 1939, with the help of the Quakers.
Barbara Lovenheim’s book
Survival in the Shadows
documents how seven Jews, from three families, went into hiding in Berlin in January 1943 and were
discovered
by the Red Army soldiers in April 1945. About fifty non-Jewish Germans ensured their survival without ID or ration cards. Barbara explains that she wrote the book ‘as a reminder that not even the most despicable tyrant can fully eradicate goodness’.
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Henry Walton’s parents could have told a similar story.
Roman Halter has described how in March 1945, when he was 17, he and two other older Jewish men escaped from a death march and were taken in by a
childless
couple in Oberpoyritz near Dresden. He stayed with Kurt and Hertha Fuchs
until May 1945 when, after seeing Russian troops, he dreamt about his
grandfather
who told him to go home. He immediately decided to return to his home in Poland to search out the rest of his family. In his hometown he discovered that he was one of only four Jews to survive from the pre-war Jewish community of 800. As he felt frightened and threatened in Poland, he went to Prague; there he found some Red Cross supplies which he decided to take to the Fuchs to thank them.