The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Olena Hryhorysztyn—for whom Donia Rosen later acquired a Righteous award—found hiding places for Donia, and took various jobs in order to be able to bring her food. When her fellow villagers discovered that she was hiding a Jew in her house they beat her severely, and then reported her to the Germans, who arrested both of them. Miraculously, the two escaped from the place where they were imprisoned. Undaunted by what had happened, Olena swore to do everything in her power to ensure Donia’s continued survival.

  Helped by Olena Hryhorysztyn, the young girl continued to wander from one hiding place to another, hiding even in wells in the woods. Olena camouflaged these hiding places for her, and brought her food. Several times she was caught and questioned about where she had hidden the Jewish girl. Severely beaten yet again, she never broke down, never spared herself, and sacrificed everything so that Donia would live.15

  Well aware that efforts to rescue Jews in Eastern Galicia were multiplying, the head of the SS and police in the General Government in Cracow wrote on 7 October 1943 to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin: ‘According to reports reaching us from the Galicia District, the number of cases immediately pending before the special court in Lvov, regarding people providing refuge for Jews, has in the last period increased greatly in number and in scope. The death penalty is the sole punishment under the law for this crime. In the present situation, the special courts have had on occasion to carry out successive death penalties. Judicial circles more or less oppose this. The nature of their criticism is that the death penalty should be implemented by the secret police. Nevertheless, everyone agrees that the death penalty is entirely necessary since under present conditions, the Jews in hiding have the legal status of pirates.’

  Philip Friedman, in quoting this report, comments: ‘It appears from this that many death sentences were carried out against Gentiles who concealed Jews. In fact, at the time of the report, SS and Gestapo personnel did not always wait for a trial, but sometimes murdered both the “guilty” Gentiles and the Jews they were hiding. Court-ordered executions, however, which took place amid great publicity, served the Germans to impose upon the Gentiles a dread of offering Jews any assistance. Particularly infamous was the death sentence carried out against Kazimierz Jozefek, who had concealed a few Jews in his house in the Kleparow suburb. This execution instilled fear in the Gentiles, and greatly disheartened the Jews who still remained in hiding.’ Friedman adds that dozens of Jews in hiding, or posing as Aryans, were caught every day, and either killed immediately or sent to Janowska camp and murdered there.16

  The threat of betrayal was ever present. Near the village of Tluste in Eastern Galicia, a Polish farmer took in Baruch Milch and his wife, as well as his brother-in-law and his wife, offering all four safety from the destruction all around. The farmer and his family had known the two brothers-in-law, both physicians, before the war. But this farmer—to whom Milch, in his testimony in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, refers to only as ‘B’—was not all that he seemed to be. While Milch and his brother-in-law went out in search for another shelter, they were betrayed. The two young wives were murdered, their bodies desecrated and then buried near a rubbish dump. ‘The saviour turned into traitor,’ comments Sara Rosen, herself a survivor, who translated Milch’s testimony.17

  A second family, by the name of Zielinski, who had not known Milch or his brother-in-law before the war, took them in, and kept them in hiding for nine months. In spite of the danger to their own lives, the Zielinskis gave the two grieving men both ‘moral support and love’, in addition to taking care of all their daily needs. Later, they found a hiding place for the two men in a convent near Tluste, run by three Sisters of Mercy and their Mother Superior. Baruch Milch later recalled: ‘These heroic women ran the religious services of the parish, conducted the choir, played the organ and managed the kindergarten. Later in the summer they opened a secret shelter for foundlings. Among these tiny outcasts were about six or eight Jewish children left by desperate parents roaming the fields and forests, or just found abandoned at the monastery’s threshold.’ On one occasion the three nuns found in their backyard a four-year-old boy, speaking only Yiddish. ‘They gathered him into their midst. As long as the murderers were unaware of what was going on behind the walls the self-sacrificing women shared their scanty provisions, fed their charges, cared for them and took them to the church.’18

  In Lvov, a professional thief, Leopold Socha, and one of his pre-war companions in crime, Stefan Wroblewski—both of whom were sewer workers in wartime Lvov—made it possible for ten Jews to survive the final round-up and executions in the ghetto on 1 June 1943. One of those who was saved, seventeen-year-old Halina Wind, later recalled how, as the Gestapo surrounded the ghetto that day, ‘We did not know what to do. We went down with a group into the basement through a pipe, steps, water, a tunnel, other pipes. Finally we were crawling in the sewers of Lvov. We heard a rush of water. Suddenly we were standing on a narrow ledge against a wall. In front of us flowed the Peltew River. Along this ledge very slowly and carefully people were moving. Sometimes there was a splash, when someone slipped and fell in or couldn’t stand the stress any more and deliberately jumped in.’19

  With the group was Leopold Socha, who, in his pre-war life as a thief, had long been familiar with the sewers as a hiding place for his stolen goods. Now, as a sewer worker, his interest was professional. Socha and his friend Wroblewski took twenty-one of the Jews whom he found in the sewer, including Halina, to one of his subterranean hiding places, telling them to ‘stay put’ and promising to bring them food on the following day. Halina Wind later recalled that the group included one whole family: Jerzy Chigier, his wife Peppa, their seven-year-old daughter Christine and their four-year-old son Pawel. ‘We were brought food every day,’ she added, ‘always by different manholes so as not to arouse suspicion.’ Another of those whom Socha sheltered was a pregnant woman, Weinbergowa. She survived childbirth in these grim conditions, but her child died shortly afterwards.

  Halina Wind also recalled how several of the group decided to leave that particular hiding place for some other refuge elsewhere in the sewers. ‘None ever returned. Three of them left one morning and we found their bodies the same evening.’

  Each week Leopold Socha would take the dirty clothes of those in hiding and return them washed. He also brought them a Jewish prayer book that he had found in the now deserted ghetto. At Passover, knowing that Jews could not eat leavened bread, he brought a large load of potatoes which he pushed down through several manholes. ‘We were careful of the potatoes,’ Halina Wind later recalled, ‘always eating the rotten ones first, until we realized that the rats were having a feast on the fresh ones.’ On the day that the Red Army forced the German surrender at Stalingrad, Socha and Wroblewski brought the fugitives vodka to celebrate.

  On 27 July 1944 the German army retreated from Lvov. Only a few hundred of the city’s once flourishing community of a hundred thousand Jews had survived. Among those survivors were ten of the Jews hidden by Socha. While still underground they heard the firing of the guns in the streets above. Then they heard Socha shouting down to them, ‘Get ready, you are free.’ Halina Wind later recalled: ‘The manhole cover was opened, and one by one we climbed out, some reluctantly, since they were still afraid.’ The manhole cover was in the courtyard of the house, inside which Socha’s wife Magdalena had prepared a table with cake and vodka.

  Some months later, Leopold Socha was accidentally killed, run over by a truck in the streets of Lvov. ‘As he lay on the pavement,’ Halina Wind recalled, ‘with the blood dripping into the sewers, the Poles crossed themselves and said that it was God’s punishment for hiding Jews.’20

  Halina Wind later emigrated to the United States, where her son, David Lee Preston, was born in 1955. As a reporter for the Kansas City Star, he was to press for recognition of the man who had helped to save his mother.21

  Throughout Eastern Galicia, there were non-Jews willing to risk their lives to
save Jews. In Kolomyja, Vasilien Petrowski, a Ukrainian, saved eighteen Jews, men, women and children, in a secret bunker in his home.22 Not far away, near the village of Rosochacz, a Jewish couple, Karol and Roza Bergman, and Roza’s mother, escaped from the liquidation of the Kolomyja ghetto in September 1942 and found refuge on a farm where a Polish couple, Jozef and Katarzyna Lazanowski, and their daughters Bronislawa and Anna, took them in without hesitation. As quickly as they could, they dug an underground shelter in the barnyard, protected from the rain and camouflaged with branches and soil. The three refugees spent their days in this shelter. At night they came out to wash and breathe the fresh air. They remained in their hideout, with the Lazanowskis’ sympathetic and devoted care, until the Soviet army liberated them in July 1944.23

  On the eve of the destruction of the ghetto in Zloczow, Helena Skrzeszewski, from the nearby village of Jelechowice, ‘came to us when we were outside the ghetto and took us to her home,’ recalled Selma Rossen: ‘us’ was seven-year-old Selma, her eight-year-old sister Edith, her parents Lipa and Samuel, and her grandmother. Helena Skrzeszewski took them to her farmhouse in the village and hid them in one of the rooms. ‘When we came, four other Jews were already there, all in the same room,’ Selma recalled.24 The door was kept locked whenever the Skrzeszewskis had visitors; the windows of the apartment were covered with heavy curtains to prevent anybody seeing in.

  Those in hiding were helped by Grzegorz Tyz and Marie Koreniuk—a teacher in the village.25 One of those hidden there, Efraim Sten, later recalled: ‘All of us—nine in all—lived in one room. In the event of danger we fled to a hiding place that was built near our room by Mr Tyz, and we entered the hiding place through a closet in our room. Mr Tyz wandered about the villages in the area and, bartering our clothing, bedding and other belongings, managed to bring us flour, barley and oil.’

  In November 1943 the nine who were in hiding discovered, by chance, that five other Jews were in hiding in the stables. Then, at the beginning of 1944, German soldiers were billeted in one of the rooms in the house. For the fourteen Jews in hiding the risk of exposure was ever present. ‘If our presence was revealed,’ wrote Efraim Sten, ‘we would all have been killed on the spot together with our rescuers.’ Such a fate had happened in nearby villages.26 It did not happen to them; all fourteen survived the war.

  One of the very few survivors of the destruction of the Trembowla ghetto was a thirteen-year-old boy, Arieh Czeret. Escaping from the ghetto on the day of liquidation, he sought a hiding place in the remote countryside. ‘On my way,’ he later recalled, ‘I stopped at the house of a Polish woman who used to work for my uncle. I stayed with her for about a week, but had to leave, as she was afraid to hide me. Towards evening I left to go towards my hometown. On my way three Ukrainian guards got hold of me and started interrogating me. They decided to hand me over to the German police. I managed to break free, and started running in a zigzag as they fired their rifles, but they missed, because it was already dark. That night I reached another farmer who used to work for us before the war, transporting goods to our store. I told him that I was the only survivor of my family. He gave me a hiding place in the barn.’

  Arieh Czeret stayed in that barn until the end of June 1943, hidden and fed by the farmer: ‘I asked him for a prayer book and learned all the prayers of the Ukrainian Church by heart. At the farm there was a worker about my age who came from the Carpathian Mountains. I made a deal with him. I gave him my boots and in return he gave me his identity document without a photo.’ After that, Arieh Czeret was able to masquerade as a Ukrainian until liberation nine months after he had been given refuge.27

  Not far from Trembowla, in the small town of Budzanow, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Ufryjewicz, saved a whole Jewish family by baptizing them and giving them baptismal certificates, and forging his parish register in such a way that he created for them a complete set of Christian forebears. With the false identities that he had created they were able to move from place to place, away from those who might know their real identities, and thus to survive.28

  In Turka, on the eve of the deportation of the Jews in August 1942, Sister Jadwiga, a nun who was also the head nurse at the local hospital, hid twelve-year-old Lidia Kleiman in one of the cubicles of the men’s bathroom, which was used as a broom closet. Lidia stayed hidden in the hospital for several weeks. Sister Jadwiga then took her to her own home and taught her Christian prayers in preparation for placing her in a Catholic orphanage in Lvov under the assumed name of Marysia Borowska. There she was put in the care of Sister Blanka Piglowska, who knew that she was Jewish. When a suspicion arose in the orphanage that Lidia might be Jewish, it was Sister Blanka who obtained new false papers for her, with a new name, Maria Woloszynska. She then transferred the girl to another orphanage, at the convent in the village of Lomna, where the Mother Superior, Sister Tekla Budnowska, was hiding many Jewish girls.

  In the early autumn of 1943, after an attack by Ukrainian national ists on the orphanage, Sister Budnowska received permission to transfer her girls to Warsaw, and to establish an orphanage in an abandoned building in the former ghetto there. In Warsaw, she accepted yet more Jewish children. After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, the orphanage relocated to Kostowiec, fifteen miles south-west of Warsaw.

  Lidia’s mother had been denounced to the Gestapo while travelling on false papers, arrested and killed; but her father had been hidden by a Russian Orthodox priest, and survived. Father and daughter were reunited after liberation.29

  EACH STORY OF rescue reveals a remarkable person, usually acting quite differently from his neighbours, not so afraid to risk death as to be prevented by fear from helping, and willing to work out a whole series of different stratagems to protect those whom he or she had taken in. In the spring of 1942, six Jews escaped from the ghetto of Stryj, making their way to the apartment of Boleslaw and Zofia Bialkowski, who lived in the town. The Bialkowskis took in the fugitives and hid them in their attic, in a narrow, dark cubicle no more than six square metres in size. The Jews were forbidden to speak among themselves in case the neighbours heard them, and betrayed them and their rescuers. To provide the fugitives with some light, Boleslaw Bialkowski made a small skylight for them in the tiled roof. In order to muffle their footsteps, the floor of the hideout was covered with straw, which also served as bedding. Each morning, Boleslaw Bialkowski removed the refuse from the cubicle. From time to time he brought them the local newspapers. His wife Zofia prepared meals for them and washed their clothes, hanging them up to dry in the apartment so as not to arouse the neighbours’ suspicions. As so often, financial reward or recompense were not a consideration; for a short time the fugitives paid for their keep, but when their money ran out, Bialkowski provided for their keep out of his modest earnings as a tinsmith.

  One day Bialkowski was visited by a Jewish acquaintance, Jakov Lewit, whose skills as an artisan were valued by the Germans. Lewit brought with him his four-year-old daughter, Erna, whom he asked the Bialkowskis to shelter; they agreed, and the child remained with them. Because she could not be expected to remain silent, the child was not placed in the attic with the six other Jews, but stayed inside the apartment. Erna became attached to the Bialkowskis’ four children and played with them. Whenever visitors came, she hid in the cupboard. With liberation, the little girl, and the other six Jews, were finally safe.30

  In his study of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the German occupation, the historian Philip Friedman, himself a survivor of the Lvov ghetto, wrote of testimonies gathered by the Yiddish writer Joseph Schwarz concerning a Ukrainian engineer, Alexander Kryvoiaza, from the East Galician town of Sambor, who employed fifty-eight Jews in his factory and helped conceal them during an anti-Jewish ‘Action’. Friedman also noted that in the nearby town of Zawalow, a forester, Lew Kobilnitsky, and his brother-in-law rescued twenty-three Jews.31

  Before the First World War, Brody had been the border town in Austria-Hungary through which hundreds
of thousands of Russian Jews had passed on their way out of Russia. Between the wars it was in the Polish province of Eastern Galicia. The Germans occupied it in June 1941. Many Jewish refugees from Lvov, fifty miles to the west, having tried to flee from the German advance, were in the town when it was taken. One of them was Ian Lustig, who later recalled that his mother, who had brought him to Brody, had spent her childhood there, where she had a number of non-Jewish friends, among them Marja Michalewska. ‘We lived there in fear and one day when nearly all our relations and Jewish friends had been taken away by the Germans, Mrs Michalewska found out that another “Aktion” was about to begin and she told us about it and found a place of refuge at a peasant’s house. I remember she took all our family at night to that peasant’s residence in a village. We found refuge in the loft of the peasant’s house. Mrs Michalewska told us she would do everything possible for us to keep alive and we knew she meant what she said. During the “Aktion” nearly all of my remaining relations at Brody were taken away by the Germans. After the “Aktion” we came back to Brody and Mrs Michalewska assisted us in our escape to Lvov. I was dressed as a girl and we went by train. I sat between Mrs Michalewska and her girlfriend and my mother was at the end of the carriage. In case anything happened to my mother, Mrs Michalewska would have taken care of me. Afterwards while we stayed in Lvov Mrs Michalewska sent us food parcels and brought my little cousin to us. She also took care of my aunts. Such exemplary help and assistance is not easy to forget.’32