The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  The moment of rescue, and the three years that followed, ‘were crucial for us mainly because they saved us from a certain and cruel death. But beyond that they afforded us the rare privilege of surviving the years of the Nazi horrors in an atmosphere of goodness and true sharing, and of witnessing a rare instance of a triumph of courage and generosity over fear and instinctive egoism, under extreme conditions.’

  Lydia Aran later wrote: ‘I think that our case is not typical even among those in which non-Jews did help Jews, because of the exceptionally noble motivation and the extraordinary courage of Krystyna, who did not hesitate to put at risk not only her own but also her little daughter’s life to do what she believed was right, who offered to shelter us in her home at her own initiative, and who, from the moment we came, accepted us as an equal and inseparable part of a four-member unit which would survive or die together.’4

  Samuel Bak was only eight years old when the German army entered Vilna. A child prodigy, he had the first exhibition of his drawings a year later, inside the ghetto. After his father was sent to a labour camp, he and his mother were taken in by Sister Maria, the Mother Superior of the Benedictine convent just outside the ghetto. ‘In time we became very good friends, Sister Maria and I,’ he later wrote. ‘I always waited impatiently for her daily visit. She supplied me with paper, coloured pencils, and old and worn children’s books, gave me lessons from the Old and the New Testament, and taught me the essential Catholic prayers. After several days Mother’s sister, Aunt Yetta, joined us; later her husband, Uncle Yasha, and Father, after they managed to escape the camp in which they had been long interned, were granted the same asylum.’

  Only the Mother Superior and one other nun knew that there were men hiding in the convent. Eventually, as so often, the threat of discovery or denunciation loomed, and a new hiding place had to be found. This was a former convent in which the Germans had housed the looted archives of a dozen museums and institutions in Vilna and the surrounding towns: ‘Trucks loaded with confiscated riches arrived daily to be unloaded in the ancient building’s courtyard,’ Samuel Bak recalled. ‘There the nuns, dressed now in civilian poverty, met a number of Jews who were sent every day from the ghetto to carry and pile the thousands of volumes, documents, and rare books that filled its rooms and corridors. One small group of them created a hiding place for the days that they foresaw would follow the final liquidation of the ghetto. The evening Mother and I arrived was a few months after that liquidation. Three Jewish families were now living buried under the books.’

  Sister Maria and Father Stakauskas, a Catholic priest and former professor of history who was employed to supervise and sort the looted material, provided the hidden Jews with food and other necessities. ‘Had the authorities discovered their selfless acts, they would have been tortured and executed,’ Bak wrote. ‘Their courage and devotion went beyond anything I have ever encountered. It was Maria who convinced the group in hiding to take in a woman and a child. She explained to them our state of total despair. Sending us back would have meant our death. The nine people had a hard choice to make, and they vacillated, as clearly we would take up a part of their space as well as some of the very limited portions of available food. Moreover, a few of them were afraid that our presence could increase their chance of being detected. But Maria made it clear how much she cared about us. The group could not afford to alienate her. All this came to our knowledge only later, but it provides one more link in our chain of miracles.’

  Sister Maria visited every night. ‘She would knock lightly on a wooden beam, three knocks that were the sign for us to dismantle the bundles of books inserted into our tunnel. She always came with some food, some necessary medications, and, most important, with good news that the German armies were losing on all fronts and that the days of our ordeal were numbered. Her optimism and her courage nourished the energies that were vital for our survival.’

  Father Stakauskas visited once or twice a week. ‘In his old black leather case that was stuffed with papers, he brought some hidden carrots, a few dried fruits, or a piece of cheese. But his main contribution to the boosting of our morale was his summary of the BBC news. A village friend allowed him to listen to a clandestine radio in the basement of his barn. The Germans were retreating on all fronts. A map of Europe of my own making and movable little red flags indicated to us all that the Third Reich was shrinking. It was a question of a few weeks or maybe a month or two. We had to hold out. The intensification of Soviet air raids confirmed our hope that the end was nearing.’5

  Jan and Zofia Bartoszewicz, a Polish Christian couple, were hiding in their cellar one of Vilna Jewry’s greatest poets and authors, Avraham Sutzkever. He had reached their door exhausted and starving. Having given the poet sanctuary, Zofia Bartoszewicz went into the city to find Sutzkever’s son-in-law, who was in a German labour gang, and managed to hand him a loaf of bread. She then walked every day to the ghetto gate, a distance of more than three miles, to arrange for bread, potatoes and even meat to be smuggled in to Sutzkever’s wife and mother.

  While in hiding, Sutzkever fell ill. Zofia Bartoszewicz and her husband took him from the cellar and, despite the risk of discovery, brought him into their own rooms. Calling a doctor, they said that the poet was their own son. When he recovered, they refused to let him go back into the cellar, but insisted he continue to stay with them. All went well until a neighbour caught sight of him. To protect his rescuers from denunciation, Sutzkever returned to the ghetto. Later he escaped, joining the partisans in the woods around the city.6

  Betrayal and denunciation were a constant danger: among those murdered at Ponar, outside Vilna, in September 1943, was a young Polish woman who had given refuge to a Jewish child.7

  Wiktoria Balul, a devout Polish Christian in her sixties, found sanctuary for a Jewish couple, Moshe and Chawiwa Flechtman, in the home of her son Antoni. With the help of her husband Wincenty, Wiktoria provided those in hiding with food from Polish farmers outside the city. Chawiwa Flechtman was pregnant when she was taken to Antoni Balul’s home. After the baby was born, the Baluls made sure that it was safely hidden. They also took in a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy, Jakow Jakubowicz, who had escaped from the ghetto. All four of those in hiding with them survived the war.8

  When David and Leah Gitelman decided to hand over their twenty-month-old baby girl, Getele—so named because she was born inside the ghetto—to a Polish woman, Wiktoria Burlingis, and her Lithuanian husband Pawel, the child was smuggled out of the ghetto in a sack while she was sleeping. The only language the child knew was Yiddish, which would quickly alert those for whom betrayal was a way of life (and a source of food, alcohol and money). Getele was quickly taught Polish, and then, as the risk of betrayal grew, a Polish nun, Aleksandra Drzwiecka, agreed to take the baby. She was already looking after a Jewish boy.9 The boy and Getele survived the war; their parents did not.

  Maryla Abramowicz-Wolska and her husband Feliks, both devout Catholics, took many Jews into their apartment, fed them and provided them with forged ‘Aryan’ documents. One of those whom they helped was the historian Dr Mark Dworzecki; another was the poet Shmerl Kaczerginski. For her work in saving Jewish lives, and in helping to cheat the Nazis of their aim of wiping out Vilna Jewry in its entirety, Maryla Abramowicz-Wolska was known as ‘The White Angel of the Vilna Ghetto’.10

  WITH THE LIBERATION of Vilna by the Red Army in July 1944, Pearl Good has written, ‘several hundred Jews hidden by Gentiles on the outskirts of the town returned to the city’. Among them was her future husband, Vova Gdud, who had found refuge with a non-Jewish family after escaping from the death pits at Ponar, where as many as a hundred thousand Jews were murdered by the Nazis between 1941 and 1944.11

  The courage of a few non-Jews, each one outstanding in his or her different way, had enabled a few individual Jews to survive. But Vilna Jewry had been destroyed.

  Chapter 4

  Lithuania

  LITHUANIA’S INDEPENDENCE WAS destroyed
when it was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. Within a year it was overrun by the German armies that attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Of the hundred and thirty-five thousand Lithuanian Jews who came under German rule, only six thousand survived the war. More than fifty Lithuanian towns had established Jewish populations; none escaped the killing squads and their Lithuanian helpers. Nevertheless, by 1 January 2002 more than five hundred Lithuanians had been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.1 They are also being commemorated by a series of volumes issued by the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in today’s Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. The story of these Righteous, writes Emanuelis Zingeris in his introduction to the first volume, is ‘about the spiritual people of Lithuania who opposed the infernal laws of the time in the name of thousand-year-long justice’.2

  Among the Lithuanian Christians who tried to help Jews was Bronius Gotautas, a monk in the city of Kaunas who changed the photograph on his own passport in order to save a Jewish doctor. In the village of Babrungas, a Lithuanian peasant woman, Julija Gadeikyte, and her brother Pranas hid six Jews in a hideout that they prepared for them underneath the hay in their barn. When it was safe for the Jews to come out for a while, Julija would enter the barn and quietly sing. Although it is possible that somebody in the village suspected that she and her brother were hiding Jews, nobody betrayed them.3

  The first two Lithuanians to be recognized as Righteous by Yad Vashem were Julija Vitkauskiene and her son Arejas Vitkauskas. Asked to hide Jewish children from the Kovno ghetto, Julija, who was having difficulty in providing for her own son, agreed to take in a Jewish infant, and feed and house her, commenting: ‘What is life for, if it is not to help other people?’4

  One of the Lithuanians chosen by Mordecai Paldiel for inclusion in the 1990 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust was Ona Simaite. At the time of the German occupation she was a librarian at Vilna University. Using the pretext that she had to recover library books that had been loaned to Jewish students, she obtained permission to enter the ghetto, and went there every day, bringing in food and taking out valuable Jewish books, which she then hid in the university library. She also managed to smuggle a Jewish girl past the guards on the ghetto gate, and then to find her several hiding places, until she was accidentally discovered.

  In the summer of 1944, Ona Simaite adopted a ten-year-old Jewish girl, registering her as a relative from another town which, she said, had been severely bombed. Enquiries were made by the authorities, who discovered that the story was false. Cruelly tortured, Ona Simaite revealed nothing about her many Jewish contacts, or about any of the hiding places of which she had first-hand knowledge. Sent to Dachau, she survived the war, though much weakened by her incarceration.5

  In Lazdijai, a Lithuanian priest was asked for help by a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, Guta Kaufman, whose family had been murdered during the slaughter of the town’s Jews. The girl had already been turned away by a former schoolfriend to whom she had turned for refuge. The priest took her in, and tried to persuade the schoolfriend to change her mind, but she would not. The priest then did what he could to help Guta, obtaining forged ‘Aryan’ documents for her, and in due course placing her in the home of Wanda Baldowska, an elderly Polish woman who, as a devout Catholic, regarded saving the Jewish girl as a religious imperative. Guta remained with Wanda until the area was liberated by the Red Army. With the aid of the priest’s housekeeper, Wanda supplied Guta’s needs out of her own funds. In the words of Yad Vashem: ‘She linked her fate with that of her Jewish charge, and cared for her with love and devotion.’6

  On 5 November 1943 the SS searched the Shavli ghetto for children to send to their deaths. Seven-year-old Ruth Kron and her younger sister Tamara were among 575 children—as well as 249 sick and elderly Jews—who were rounded up that day for deportation. Ruth was able to escape deportation as a result of the intervention of the ghetto doctor, who had earlier successfully treated the SS Commandant—who, in return, allowed one of the 824 deportees to be spared.

  A Lithuanian woman, Ona Ragauskis, who had recently lost her baby son to diphtheria, took Ruth Kron with her to her village ten miles from Shavli, where her husband Antanas was the schoolteacher. First, as the Canadian writer Keith Morgan has recorded, she had to ask her husband to agree to this. ‘I want to save her,’ Ona told her husband. ‘It is the right thing for Christians to do. I saw the hollowness in the eyes of the mothers who lost their children when the Germans came for them. I have lost a child and I know their pain.’ Having lost their baby son, she had only one remaining child, a two-year-old daughter, Grazinute. She continued: ‘But Antanas, you must know that if we take her now she could be with us for the rest of her life…we would have to feed her and educate her.’ Her husband replied: ‘I will love her as my own.’

  Ona Ragauskis returned to Shavli, where Ruth Kron’s mother Gita begged her, ‘Please take my little girl. We don’t have much time.’ Ruth was then smuggled out of the ghetto. Fifty-seven years later, Ona Ragauskis recalled how, during the journey to Kuziai, she was so frightened the driver would betray them that she made him drop them off a mile from the village.

  At the Ragauskis’ home, Ruth sat in a cupboard during the day so that none of the Lithuanian children would see her. By night, she could walk about and breathe the outside air. She slept in an outhouse at the back of the schoolhouse. Ona and Antanas Ragauskis fed her and did their utmost to keep up her spirits. Later, when it became too dangerous for the child to stay there, a priest, Father Kleiba, hid her in his home, where he was already sheltering a number of Jews.7

  Lithuanian priests who helped save Jews, or protested against the killings, are remembered by survivors to this day. One of those survivors, Joseph A. Melamed, has written with deepest appreciation of the elderly Father Dambrauskas from Alsedziai, ‘who did everything in his power to save Jews and was even punished for this by his Bishop’. He also wrote of Father Bronius Paukstis from the Jesuit church in Kaunas who saved many Jews in that city; of Father Lapis from Siauliai (Shavli) who attempted unsuccessfully to help Jews there; and of Father Jonas Gylys, a parish priest in Varena, ‘who delivered sermons against killing Jews, and tried to comfort the Jews whom the Lithuanian murderers concentrated in a synagogue before their murder’.8

  The largest number of Jews in Lithuania lived in Kaunas, known to the Jews by its pre-1914 Russian name, Kovno. Once the city’s thirty thousand Jews were confined in the ghetto, the only ones who left were those taken for execution at the nineteenth-century forts around the city, or those sent out each day to work in the nearby factories.

  A Lithuanian medical doctor in Kaunas, Elena Kutorgene, helped not only those Jews who had been her patients before the war, but also many other Jews who turned to her. When, before the arrival of the Germans in the city, Lithuanian mobs rampaged through the streets, murdering Jews, she hid seven or eight Jews in her surgery for the night. During the short period after the creation of the Kovno ghetto, when it was still open, she went there daily with food and medicines. When the ghetto was closed, and non-Jews barred from entering, she went to the fence to hand over her packages. ‘The situation in the ghetto is horrible,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I simply cannot bear to live while knowing that right next to me people are enduring such suffering and being subjected to such terrible humiliation.’9

  Also in Kaunas, a Lithuanian couple, Jonas and Joana Stankiewicz, gave sanctuary to a young Jewish child, Henia Wisgardisky, who had been hidden in the ghetto during the ‘Children’s Action’ of 1943, when the Germans embarked on the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish children in Kaunas, and then smuggled out. Before the war, Jonas Stankiewicz had been the foreman of the chemical factory owned by the young girl’s father. Henia survived the war, as did her parents, who were hidden by a Lithuanian potato farmer in his cellar.10

  In the village of Padrabé, the Tomkievicz family gave shelter to ten-year-old Mulik Krol, while the Wiszumirsky family found a place in their home for his mother�
��who hoped that, by putting her son somewhere different from herself, he might have a better chance of surviving. ‘These people could not even risk mentioning to their neighbours that they were hiding a Jew: at that time even a next-door neighbour could be an informer. Therefore, the Tomkievicz and the Wiszumirsky families, whose farms were four kilometres apart, did not know anything about the other’s night-time visitors and parcels of food left at designated places.’11

  It was not until 1992 that Mulik, then living in South Africa, began looking for his saviours in Padrabé. By that time, the parents of both families that had rescued Mulik and his mother were no longer alive. Jolanta Paskeviciene, a Lithuanian journalist, told Mulik’s story in an article in 2001: ‘Mulik felt that their children are like brothers and sisters to him. He and the Wiszumirskys’ elder son, Karol, used to tend cattle, they learned to ride a horse together, and tried to learn to swim. The Tomkieviczes hired him as a shepherd for several summers. Nobody suspected that the blond teenager was Jewish.’

  The Tomkieviczes’ daughter Olga Gulbinovicz recalled, at the age of eighty: ‘Although almost half a century has passed since then, I still recall the awful, paralyzing fear that went on for several years. I cannot say even now which of the two feelings was stronger; the fear you would be turned in, and all your family would be shot dead; or the pity we felt for the innocent tortured children, the elderly, the sick and the women. I can remember very well how my parents got on with Mulik’s parents, who ran a shop in town. We always shopped there. We could also buy on credit or borrow money from them. How could we possibly refuse them help in such a situation? My mother loved Mulik as if he was her own child. She would come to wake him up in the morning, but didn’t have the heart to disturb the little shepherd’s sweet sleep. So she would take the herd out to pasture herself. When Sara, Mulik’s mother, was shot in the forest, we all mourned her for several days, and could not bring ourselves to break the news to the child who was now an orphan.’12