The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  On one occasion Polina Golovchenko learned that neighbours had denounced her to the Germans for hiding Jews, and that the Gestapo were on their way. She immediately took the Mankers to another hiding place. The Garrards describe how, when the Gestapo arrived at her home, she ‘calmly handed them all her keys, and told them they were welcome to search her house and grounds. After combing her property for hours, they left, uttering more threats and imprecations.’ She then ‘went serenely to the hiding place, and brought the Mankers back into her home, even though she knew that she was under constant surveillance by neighbours seeking the bounty for handing over a hidden Jew’.31

  After the destruction of the ghetto of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred Jews survived in hiding places known as ‘malines’, mostly in cellars and outhouses. Outside help was also essential for survival; a local couple, Ignacy Kurjanowicz and his wife Maria, helped the young Moshe Smolar to survive by giving him food to eat and to take back to his hiding place. ‘The Kurjanowicz family took me in for a week,’ he later wrote, ‘and I was invited to visit them once a week on a regular basis. For greater safety, and in order not to make me look too obvious in the streets of the town, he accompanied me to the ghetto fence and from there I sneaked into the den (malina). From that day, I came there regularly for a full day once a week, until 4 January 1943, when peasants discovered my hideout, and I had to leave it for good. Then the Kurjanowicz family, after discussing the matter, decided to keep me in their house until there was a chance to escape.’

  Moshe Smolar’s account continued: ‘I remained in their house till March 20…about three months. Needless to say, all this time they were risking their lives every day. They did all this without any remuneration, financial or otherwise. On the contrary, keeping me in their home cost them a lot of money, and they had to cut down on their own rations to share their daily bread with me. When I ask myself what were their motives, I can only attribute their good deeds to their humanitarian feelings originating both from their compassionate feelings toward the Jews, deep emotional empathy with the persecuted, and truly deep and pure religious feelings. All these factors nourished their deeds, and helped them withstand the risk of paying a high price for what they did—if caught.’32

  When Ignacy and Maria Kurjanowicz were being considered at Yad Vashem for a Righteous Among the Nations Award, someone noted on their file: ‘This is a story that touches the heart—a real and dear Righteous Gentile.’33 Moshe Smolar’s family did not survive the war: his father, mother, sister and two brothers (one of them with his wife and three children) were murdered during the liquidation of the Korzec ghetto.34

  Richard Vanger was ten years old when he managed to find help in the eastern Polish town of Stolowicze, despite the hostility of many local Byelorussians to the Jews. It was a Polish family in the town who agreed to help him. His father, a book-keeper, had a Polish Catholic assistant, Mrs Teressa. Shortly before the liquidation of the ghetto, ‘my father approached Mrs Teressa, and she agreed to hide us, and also the Rabbi’s daughter, Gietl. We were hidden in Mrs Teressa’s barn. Her house was the last one in that particular road, the last house before the cemetery on the east branch of the crossroads. I think we were there about two days and nights and on the third the Germans came and started liquidating the ghetto. I remember hearing lots and lots of shooting. I think I was too young to realise what was going on but Gietl was a bit older than myself and she knew. She said to me that the Germans were practising, just shooting into the marshes, which were all around the village. After a couple of days there was no more shooting. It was all finished.’

  As the Germans, helped by Byelorussian police, intensified their search for hidden Jews in Stolowicze, Mrs Teressa kept Gietl in hiding with her, and managed to find a Polish Catholic woman in a neighbouring village willing to hide the young boy. This new rescuer had three children of her own, including a daughter, Yasha, who used to bring him food in the barn. ‘I was always hidden, as they got frightened when I arrived. People began to ask questions. I was never really allowed to come out into the daylight. In fact I was in a locked room in the loft of the barn most of the time and sometimes things got worse because they had a relative who lived in Stolowicze by the name of Bruno who used to go and visit the family. When this happened I had to hide. Apparently in Stolowicze in the very early days of the German occupation he was in the police force and he was not one of the nicer people. Of course he would have recognised and remembered me very quickly.’

  While he was at this Catholic family’s farm, Richard Vanger recalled, ‘I spent most of the days in the barn, sometimes the nights as well, but on cold nights I was allowed to sleep in the house. I remember that Yasha was the one who always used to bring the food to me in the barn. She would be coming over as if bringing food for the pigs or the chickens and in amongst it would be a plate for me.’ As time went on, ‘there was more and more trouble from the Byelorussians and it was getting dangerous for me to be there. There were one or two visits to the farm by the police searching for arms and luckily they did not take any notice of me. It was during the day time and they thought I was just a kid looking after the livestock, but the family decided I could not stay there any more.’

  Richard Vanger returned to Stolowicze where, despite the great danger, Mrs Teressa agreed to take him in again. ‘I was able to go into the house where I spent part of the time under the bed and part of the time in the loft in the barn. When I was hiding under the bed or in the loft I kept occupied as Mrs Teressa taught me how to knit. She showed me how to make a sock with wool and four needles. I used to knit something like a metre of sock, perhaps more, then undo it and start all over again. I also did a lot of reading…Mrs Teressa played the piano very nicely and every evening she used to play. Somehow or other I used to read these books and there was for me an association with the music. Even today when I hear certain Chopin pieces—and Chopin is what she mostly played—I immediately remember those particular stories.’

  Richard Vanger remained with Mrs Teressa until liberation. In 1946 he was taken to Britain, where he had an aunt and uncle. In 1970 he went to live in Israel. Returning to Poland in 1991, he learned from Mrs Teressa’s daughter Litka that, shortly after he had left Stolowicze for another village, two Polish policemen and an SS officer had, after a tip-off, gone to the barn in Stolowicze where he and Gietl had been hiding, and where Gietl remained. Pointing to Gietl, they asked Mrs Teressa: ‘What is this Jew doing in your place?’ As Mrs Teressa hesitated, Gietl said to her: ‘Thank you very much for all you have done for me,’ whereupon the SS officer took out a revolver and shot Gietl on the spot, in front of Mrs Teressa, her sister and Litka. ‘He then pointed his revolver at Mrs Teressa and said: “Now I will kill you,” whereupon Litka and her aunt started crying and they threw themselves on to Mrs Teressa. They said: “If you kill her, you will have to kill us as well,” and somehow he did not shoot them. The SS officer said: “You are not to bury this Jew—leave her rotting there on your doorstep so that you will know what a Jew smells like.” The men then left.’

  At their meeting in 1991, Litka told Richard Vanger that four months before the end of the war Mrs Teressa had been arrested and taken to the concentration camp in Koldiczewo, four miles from Stolowicze. There she was questioned and tortured. ‘Litka would not tell me the real reason why her mother had been arrested, but said: “Partly they were questioning my mother about you but there were other things too.” That is all she would tell me. Mrs Teressa was beaten very badly at this place. She was made to stand in barrels of cold water and the month was March, which in Russia is very cold. Also, together with Mrs Teressa, a neighbour was arrested and this woman was shot about a month before the war ended. Obviously had the war gone on for any longer period Mrs Teressa would also have been killed.’

  The war ended and Mrs Teressa was saved, although she was by then very sick. She died in 1952, ‘perhaps as a result of her injuries from the beatings and the treatment she was subjected to in the concentra
tion camp’. She was forty-two years old when she died, and was buried in the White Russian town of Slonim. Richard Vanger added: ‘No words of mine can adequately express what a wonderful, courageous and special person Mrs Teressa proved to be during those years of the Second World War. If it had not been for her and her family I would not be here to write my story.’35

  YAD VASHEM HAS recognized 1,755 Ukrainians—inhabitants of present-day post-Communist Ukraine—as Righteous Among the Nations.36 A far larger number turned their weapons and their venom against the Jews. This made the acts of rescue all the more remarkable, and all the more dangerous for the rescuers, who were often betrayed, and killed together with those whom they were sheltering. Among those who risked their lives to rescue Jews in Ukraine were an Armenian, Arakel Mkrtchyan, who lived in Kharkov with her son, Vartan. They took into hiding in their house, where three of their cousins also lived, a Polish Jew, Iosef Trashinski, who had managed to escape eastward at the time of the German invasion of Poland in 1939. After the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1941 he was once more on the run. Vartan Mkrtchyan obtained forged papers for him, and he stayed with them for more than a year, until the city was liberated by the Red Army in August 1943. At that point, the two men, Iosef and Vartan, joined the army. Vartan was killed in action. Iosef completed his military service, returned to the Armenian family that had rescued him, and married one of the cousins who had helped save him, Knarik Shakhbazyan.37

  Also in Kharkov lived Pan-Jun-Shun, an elderly Chinese labourer who, as a devoted Communist, had chosen, many years before the war, to live in the Soviet Union. At the start of the two years of German occupation he took in ten-year-old Ludmila Dvorkina and her mother, hiding them until liberation.38

  In Kiev, a Russian Orthodox priest named Aleksey Glagolyev, the dean of the Pokrovsky Church, saved five Jews by hiding them in his home.39 In the remote village of Yaruga, on the River Dniester, Fedor Kryzhevsky, whom the Germans had appointed the village elder, but who secretly organized local resistance, ensured, in an impressive act of compassion, that all four hundred Jewish families, as well as Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia who had found refuge in the village, were found hiding places by their Ukrainian neighbours. Kryzhevsky also persuaded the local German administration to allow a number of Jews to live openly, as specialist winemakers, in a region where winemaking was an important part of the economy. To feed the large numbers of Jews in hiding, Kryzhevsky organized a secret food store. For eighteen months, the hidden Jews remained undiscovered: when the Romanian authorities took over the administration of the region from the Germans in late 1942 they ignored the Jews, whose survival was thereby assured.40

  SEVENTY-NINE RUSSIANS (defined as those living in the post-Communist Russian Republic) have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.41 In the Russian town of Novozybkov, as the Germans rounded up the Jews for execution in 1942, the Safonov family determined to save as many as they could. Digging a hole under their cattle shed, they hid nine Jews there, in almost total darkness. Three of them were their neighbours, the Mogilevskyis; three were members of the Gutin family, and three from the Uritskyi family. At night, under the security of darkness, the nine Jews would emerge from the hole for fresh air. The Safonovs fed them and cared for them for several months, after which Vasilyi Safonov and his sister Nadezhda led them to the forest, where Russian partisans protected them. Mrs Mogilevskyi, however, was too sick to make the journey to the forest; she stayed behind on the farm, and when she died was buried in the Safonovs’ garden.

  Mogilevskyi and his son fought with the Russian partisans: the son was killed in action against the Germans. Nadezhda and Vasilyi Safonov also fought with the partisans. Their parents were betrayed to the Germans, and shot—because they had hidden Jews. Mogilevskyi adopted Vasilyi as his son, and they fought side by side until the end of the war.42

  By the end of 1942, German forces had overrun much of the Caucasus. In the north Caucasian town of Piatigorsk, the Germans announced that all 6,300 Jews in the town were to be deported. When a Russian sister and brother, Kira and Dmitry Belkov, went to say goodbye to their Jewish friends the Litovskys, the daughter of the house, Masha Litovsky, a classmate and close friend of Kira’s, feared the worst and asked her friends to hide her. They took Masha home and asked for their parents’ permission to save their friend.

  That night, the entire Jewish population of Piatigorsk, men, women and children, were loaded on trucks, taken to the outskirts of town and murdered. Masha’s parents were both killed during that mass execution, but her older sister, Fira, managed to escape from one of the trucks and came to the Belkovs seeking shelter. The two sisters were hidden in the cellar. Kira and Dmitry took care of Masha and Fira, sharing food and clothing with them. It was, however, too dangerous to keep two Jews hidden for long in such a small town, so Dmitry Belkov helped the two girls escape to the town of Armavir, 150 miles away, where they made their way to the home of two Russian sisters, Adel and Zoya Zagurska, and their mother Mihalina, whom they had known before the war.

  Without hesitation, Adel, Zoya and Mihalina took them in and provided them with food and shelter. The Zagurskas were able to obtain forged identity documents for Fira and Masha, and found jobs for them working in the local hospital. The five women shared a one-room apartment for over five months. There was little to eat and they lived in constant danger of being denounced. They knew from the notices all over town that the penalty for hiding Jews was death. In 1943, the Red Army liberated Armavir. Fira and Masha returned to Piatigorsk to find that they were the only members of their family to have survived. But at least they had survived.43

  Ironically, German records sometimes reveal acts of would-be rescue. On 16 January 1942 the Einsatzkommando unit at Kremenchug reported that it had shot a Red Army officer, Major Senitsa Vershovsky, because he had ‘tried to protect the Jews’.44

  In the late summer and early autumn of 1941, on their drive to Leningrad, which they besieged but never captured, the German army overran both Latvia and Estonia, then independent Baltic States. Yad Vashem has recognized ninety-three Latvians as Righteous Among the Nations.45 In the Latvian capital, Riga, the forty-year-old Janis Lipke, who worked as a loader in the German air force stores in the city, was charged by the Germans to take a group of Jews from the ghetto each morning to the storehouse, and to supervise their work. Outraged by the massacres he had witnessed in the first weeks of the German occupation, Lipke was determined to find ways of helping as many Jews as he could. During his daily journey into the ghetto he would smuggle in food and medicine. He also befriended two Latvian drivers working for the German air force, Karl Yankovsky and Janis Briedys, with whom he planned to rescue as many Jews as possible from the ghetto.

  On 15 December 1941, with the help of Briedys, Janis Lipke smuggled ten Jews out of the ghetto, finding hiding places for six of them in the cellars of houses belonging to his friends, and taking the other four to his own house.

  When a further six Jews were smuggled out of the Riga ghetto, Lipke again took three of them to his home. It was then that he decided to build a special hiding place underneath a shed near his house. Using logs and cement, and building a hen-house above the entrance to the hideout, Lipke provided a secure haven, helped in his task by his wife Johanna and their eldest son, Alfred.46

  As the German occupation continued, and the treatment of the Jews worsened, Janis Lipke continued to devise methods of rescuing those imprisoned in the ghetto. One Riga Jew, Isaak Dryzin, later recalled that Lipke approached him and his brother, an engineer, while they were working in one of the work ‘commandos’ outside the ghetto. Lipke told the two brothers to go to the ghetto gate on the Day of Atonement, October 10. That morning, Lipke approached the guards at the gate. ‘Give me some Yids to work in my kitchen garden,’ he said, in what Isaak Dryzin later recalled as a tone of ‘drunken familiarity’, adding: ‘Here, take two packets of cigarettes.’

  For these two packets of cigarettes, Lipke
received the Dryzin brothers, as well as a third Jew, Sheyenson, all three of whom had been waiting at the gates. Lipke took them to the nearest doorway out of sight of the guards, removed their yellow stars, gave them peasants’ hats to put on and drove them out of Riga, to a farm of another friend. There, like the Jews whom Lipke had earlier taken from the ghetto, they were hidden in barns and haystacks.

  His mission accomplished, Lipke told the Dryzin brothers: ‘Tomorrow I will go to the ghetto again and will keep bringing people here every day.’ That same night he began to plan a similar rescue, which he was able to carry out on the following day.47

  After the war, it seemed puzzling to many of Lipke’s neighbours that he and his family had saved Jews. ‘Many of their countrymen saw them as traitors,’ the writer Jeffrey Goldberg recalled. ‘When I met the Lipkes in their hut in the winter of 1986, there were even rumours afoot in Riga that they were part-Jewish. How else to explain their inexplicable behaviour during World War II, when they rescued Jews from the Riga ghetto, a ghetto maintained—and then liquidated—with the enthusiastic help of the Latvian people?’ Of Latvia’s pre-war Jewish population of more than eighty thousand, only around three thousand survived the war. Since then, ninety-three Latvians have been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, Lipke among them. ‘Lipke is known as the Latvian Wallenberg,’ writes Goldberg, adding that of the fifty or sixty Jews whom he smuggled out of the ghetto, ‘only a dozen or so survived, many of the others having been betrayed by Latvians in the countryside.’ Asked why he had done what he did, Lipke told Goldberg that he was a ‘man of action’ who ‘could not sit idly by’.48

  Another Latvian, Yanis Vabulis, was a former officer in the Latvian army, who worked during the war in a construction company. On the eve of a night in which ten thousand Jews of Riga were slaughtered in a single massacre, Vabulis sheltered a Jewish woman, 21-year-old Zelda Shelshelovich, in an apartment in the city left empty by Jews who had been forced into the ghetto. Later he gave her refuge in his own apartment, where she masqueraded as his non-Jewish girlfriend. In that apartment Vabulis would often entertain his fellow Latvian officers, who would describe with glee the mass execution of Riga’s Jews in which they had participated—and in which Zelda’s entire family had been murdered. Vabulis made sure she was hiding in another room when the boasters came to call. After the war they were married.49