The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  The Matuszynski family was kept safe by its respective rescuers from 7 November 1942, the day of the final destruction of Jews in Ksiaz Wielki—when all five hundred Jews still in the ghetto were killed—until 5 May 1944, a period of eighteen months. What followed was cruel, but not untypical of the risks and dangers of hiding Jews in Poland. It began with the arrival of a platoon of men from the underground Home Army. Armed with machine guns, they interrogated the Konieczny family. ‘They beat Mr Konieczny and his sons Stach and Sender so mercilessly that they finally gave in and showed the secret bunker to the soldiers. These soldiers claimed they were partisans and that the hidden group would be taken as partisan members. But that was a lie. They took the entire before-mentioned group to the local forest in the village Adama. The soldiers told them to remove their shoes, boots, clothing. They placed the machine guns in a crossfire manner. This action alerted some members of the group to try to escape. My brother Jankiel Matuszynski, my brother-in-law Martin Hershkowitz, and Heynoch Leysorek, escaped. The rest of the members who had been sheltered by the Koniecznys were slaughtered.’

  The soldiers counted the dead. ‘Three of their intended victims had escaped. But twelve bodies lay in the forest. They had been told of seventeen members, and there were two more missing. Word went out to scour the countryside for the two missing members. Mr Wladyslaw Kukuryk came to my wife and me, and begged us to leave his bunker for two weeks. The soldiers would surely find us and then he and his family would be killed. We slipped out of the bunker during the night.’

  News of the massacre spread rapidly throughout the area. On the following day, 6 May 1944, it was the Gestapo that came to Joseph Konieczny’s property. ‘Mr Konieczny and his two sons were already in hiding for they had feared that the Armia Krajowa was out to search and kill them too. At home on the Koniecznys’ property the Gestapo found the men gone and only Mrs Konieczny together with her eighteen-year-old daughter and youngest baby girl of about two years. They took out Mrs Konieczny from the house and then shot her. The eldest, eighteen-year-old daughter saw this and ran towards her mother and the Gestapo shot her as well. The youngest baby daughter was miraculously spared.’

  Aron Matuszynski survived the war. His brother Jankiel also survived—but was killed six months after liberation by Polish anti-Semites.20

  Despite the dangers, those Poles who were able and willing to help Jews could go to extraordinary lengths to do so. In Czestochowa, a shoemaker named Borowczyk obtained the necessary papers for a Jew, Joseph Wisnicki, to pass as a Polish worker, enabling him to get work outside Poland. As Wisnicki had no money, Borowczyk paid for the documents, and then accompanied him across Germany to the Austrian town of Bludenz, where Wisnicki found work in a garden nursery owned by an influential member of the Nazi Party.21

  Also in Czestochowa, Genowefa Starczewska-Korczak gave sanctuary to a young Jewish girl, Celina Berkowitz, shortly before her parents were killed. When the Germans executed Genowefa’s husband, she was forced to place her Jewish charge and her own two daughters in a Catholic orphanage. But each weekend she brought all three girls home.22

  Helena and Waclaw Milowski hid a Jewish couple, Isaac and Bala Horowitz, and their son Gabriel, in their apartment in the centre of Czestochowa. Waclaw Milowski had collected them from the farm where they had been in hiding, but where the farmer had been attacked and robbed. There was one corner in the apartment, the couple who were saved later recalled, where they could walk upright, but in other parts they had to stoop so as not to be seen by somebody outside. If something unusual were to happen, they would have to go down to the cellar, most of which was full of coal: if forced to stay there, they could do so only in a sitting position, with hardly any air. In this hiding place they spent twenty-two months, without seeing even a patch of sky. Every day Milowski brought two buckets of water for washing and drinking; every day he emptied a bucket of their excrement, which was burnt in an oven. When Milowski was absent (because of work, visits to his family, etc.) his brother Lucek would bring them water; but since he was able to come only once a week, they had to make do with two buckets for a whole week. Milowski also used to bring them food which he bought with their money—bread and potatoes. It later emerged that Helena Milowski’s father had also hidden two Jewish women.23

  Uriel Reingold, who sent me the account of the Milowskis, and who is related to the Horowitz family, wrote about the Righteous: ‘My thoughts on the subject are, I presume, shared by many who feel, as I do, great admiration for all those who endangered the lives of their children, as well as their own lives, to save Jews. I have no doubt that they are the true heroes of this dark period. It is easy for me to reach this conclusion when I ask myself: “Would I act as they did?”’24

  In Tykocin, north-east of Warsaw, Marysia Rozensztajn was not yet three years old when the two Polish women who were hiding her and her mother were killed and her mother arrested and sent to Auschwitz, as a Polish political prisoner. The little child was found wandering in the street by a Polish couple, Lucyna and Waclaw Bialowarczuk, who, realizing she was an orphaned Jewish child, took her into their home and looked after her until the end of the war. Her mother, Bela, who survived Auschwitz and Belsen, found her daughter in Tykocin in 1946. Two years later Bela was killed in a traffic accident. Marysia was adopted by a Jewish woman, and later left Poland for the United States. Her two rescuers were later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.25

  In Wolomin, north-east of Warsaw, Anna Grabowska and her husband hid a Jewish woman in their home for more than a year. But in 1943 Polish hooligans attacked the house, smashing the windows, and warned the couple that they knew they were hiding Jews. Because of the threats, Anna Grabowska took the woman she was hiding to Warsaw, where her sister, who was involved with the Polish underground, could look after her.26

  Among those saved by non-Jews in Kielce was a young girl called Nechama Tec, who was later to write one of her first books about Christian rescuers in Poland.27 She herself was hidden with a Polish family, the Homars, who also gave shelter to her parents. ‘In day to day contact,’ she recalled, ‘they never took advantage of us, they never behaved cruelly or even inconsiderately, but treated us instead with respect and kindness,’ and she adds: ‘Considering our close quarters and the dangerous times, this was a real blessing. I often heard my parents say we were fortunate to come across such considerate people.’28

  Doba-Necha Cukierman was also fortunate. She and her family were hidden in Lublin by the Prokop family. ‘On the second evening,’ she recalled, ‘after Mr Prokop returned home from work, we sat around the kitchen table discussing the latest news of happenings in Lublin and reading the Glos Lubelski (‘Voice of Lublin’) newspaper. As we talked about the Nazi cruelty to the Jews, Mr Prokop revealed something that left me speechless and terrified. He said, “In principle, I am an anti-Semitic, but you and Jan are an exception. I like you both.” I felt as though a knife had been struck into my heart, but as it was nighttime and having nowhere to turn, I stayed—silence enveloping me again. I felt that the Prokops, although they proclaimed to be our friends, and had in fact risked their lives to help us on many occasions, wanted to see me elsewhere, not with them.’29 Anti-Semitic opinions were held by other rescuers as well; but being anti-Semitic did not mean that one could not save a human being from otherwise certain death.

  In their comprehensive study of the fate of non-Jewish Poles who tried to help Jews in the face of what rapidly escalated into rampant barbarism, the writer Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who himself was active in helping Jews, and his co-author Zofia Lewin, who survived through being hidden by Poles, give many examples of heroism, on the part of both individuals and husbands and wives. One such couple was the Malickis, who worked in the municipal population records office in Warsaw. Bartoszewski and Lewin record how, “Together with the local parish priest they forged entries in the register of births and deaths and gave us the Christian certificates of two deceased women. In order to prepare such documents
three persons had to collaborate. The Malickis had issued documents for numerous Jews. Unfortunately, one of the latter fell into the hands of the Gestapo who thus learned the names of these persons. The parish priest was shot, the Malickis were taken to Treblinka where the Germans broke Malicki’s arms and legs in order to force him to divulge the names of other rescued Jews. He did not betray anyone. Both Malickis perished in Treblinka.’30

  Every non-Jew who decided to hide and feed a Jew risked death. Bartoszewski and Lewin record an incident in the town of Wierzbica, where, on 29 January 1943, after learning through Polish informers that three families in the town were hiding three Jews, the Germans shot fifteen people, among them a two-year-old girl. For trying to save three people, fifteen people were murdered.31 In January 1943 at Pilica, in southern Poland, a Polish woman and her one-year-old child were shot for hiding Jews.32

  Local records suggest that active sympathy for Jews was widespread in certain villages. In Bialka, on the edge of the Parczew Forest, Jews took refuge with the villagers to avoid a German manhunt. On the second day of the hunt, 7 December 1942, the Germans entered the village and shot ninety-six villagers, all men, for helping Jews.33 Three days later, a few miles west of the Parczew forest, at Wola Przybyslawska, seven Poles were shot for concealing Jews.34

  Some—rescuers and rescued—were luckier. Jan Nakonieszny hid five Jews in a hen-house which was only two feet high, four feet wide and thirteen feet long. The fugitives were Henryk Sperber, his mother, his sister, his fiancée and his cousin. All five survived the war. So, too, did their saviour.35

  Jaffa Wallach and her husband Norris found refuge in the house of a Polish mechanical engineer, Jozef Zwonarz, who lived in Lesko. ‘He was the only link we had with the external world,’ Norris Wallach later wrote. ‘His wife and five children knew nothing about our hiding in that house.’ Jozef Zwonarz also hid Jaffa Wallach’s brother Pinkas and her sister Anna. He had already taken their four-year-old daughter Rena out of Lesko, on the eve of the deportation to Zaslaw, and found the child a home with a Polish ‘uncle’, Jan Kakol, who lived in the forest. ‘It is important to emphasise’, Norris Wallach wrote, ‘that Zwonarz, and the Kakols as well, endangered their lives for pure human motives without any financial gain nor expectations.’

  Those whom Zwonarz saved were to honour his memory for the rest of their lives; and to remember, too, how he would use his knowledge as a mechanical engineer, while ‘repairing’ German vehicles, to sabotage them—especially, Norris Wallach recalled, those that were about to set out ‘for hunting Jews’.36 In the course of seeking the award of Righteous Among the Nations for this rescuer, one of those whom he saved, Dr Nathan Wolk, was interviewed by Yad Vashem. His interviewer noted: ‘Jozef Zwonarz never received any compensation and he, too, lived in very trying circumstances. He could barely provide for his own family, but, nevertheless, he provided for the needs of those he rescued, as well. His wife wasn’t aware of his rescue mission at all. Only a month before liberation, when a bomb fell on the shop and it was impossible to stay in the pit under the shop, Jozef Zwonarz transferred all five of those he rescued to the cellar of his house. Thus, his wife learned that for two years he had been hiding Jews in the house.’ After liberation, Jozef Zwonarz returned to Dr Wolk ‘the ten dollars and a watch he had given him when he went into hiding’.37

  When two thousand Jews were murdered in the Rembertow ghetto in August 1942, Yehudis (Judith) Pshenitse was twelve years old. After the war she recalled how she was helped to survive. ‘I went to see the priest,’ she wrote, ‘who had known me as a small child, when I used to go into the church with our Christian maid. I wept and begged the priest to save me. I told him what had happened to my parents. He calmed me and promised me that he would give me as much help as he could. He hid me in his cellar. Every day I went to church with him, and I became one of the best singers in the church choir. After a time he gave me false papers, with my name listed as Kristina Pavlovnia. I began to feel like a genuine, born Christian.’

  That did not last long, however. ‘One day, when I was walking to church, a Christian stopped me on the street and said, “What are you doing here?” I ran away in terror. When I told the priest, he calmed me, telling me to go back into the cellar and be as quiet as possible. That same day two Germans went to see the priest, demanding that he surrender the Jewish girl whom he had hidden. He denied that there was anyone in his house. They threatened to shoot him, but he continued to insist that he was hiding no one. The Germans tortured him in various ways, but he continued to refuse to give me up until he fell to the ground covered with blood. His body was pierced in several places, and his face was unrecognizable. Then the Germans left him as he was and went away. Before he died, the priest asked his housekeeper to take me out of my hiding place and bring me to him because he wanted to bless me.’

  Her memory of this moment was terrifying: ‘All I saw was a pool of blood and the priest’s body, torn into pieces. I fainted. When I came to, he raised his crushed and broken hand and caressed me. Finally he told his housekeeper to give me over to trustworthy people, to behave toward me like a mother so that no one would suspect I was Jewish. Thus, leaning against him, I felt his body grow cold. Once again he asked that I be hidden in a safe place, and then he died. I can’t remember the priest’s name. He was a parish priest in Nowy Dwor. The housekeeper led me away from the priest and cleansed me of his blood. She changed my clothes, and at five in the morning she led me to Modlin. She left me there and disappeared.’ After that, living by her own wits, posing as a Christian child, Yehudis Pshenitse survived the war.38

  IN THE COURSE of investigations that led to more than five thousand Polish non-Jews being honoured for saving Jewish lives, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem received more than ten thousand notarized testimonies from those who were saved. In one case, however, there was at first no witness, only a story that was eventually authenticated forty-eight years after the war, when witnesses were found. At some time during 1941, an unknown Jewish woman arrived at the house of the Krasucki family in Minsk Mazowiecki, and asked if she could leave a newborn infant there for a few days. Irena Krasucki and her husband, who had two small children of their own, took the baby in, despite the danger of the undertaking. No one came to claim the baby, which had arrived with no financial support nor hope of such. After a time the Krasucki couple gave the child the name Bolek Strzycki, telling neighbours that he was a relative from a far-off city.

  In 1943, amid fears that little Bolek’s Jewish identity would be discovered, Irena passed the child on to her mother, Jozefa Baranowska, who agreed to care for him until the end of the war. After liberation, the boy was handed over to Jewish institutions, and resided in various orphanages until his official adoption in 1948 by a couple named Kurtz, who emigrated with him to the United States.39

  Nadja Goldberg and Heinich Laznik were married in July 1939, less than two months before the German invasion of Poland. Their daughter, Esther Rachel, was born in August 1940. The family were on friendly terms with a non-Jewish couple, Kazimierz and Janina Tworek. When the Jews of Piotrkow were confined to a ghetto, and compelled to labour in the city’s factories, the way to work for Nadja and Heinich went past the Tworeks’ house. Sometimes, as they passed by in the morning, the Lazniks would leave a note saying, ‘We need bread’ and on their way back that evening there would be some bread left out for them.

  When the deportation of Piotrkow’s Jews began in October 1942, Nadja Laznik managed to break away from the round-up, carrying her two-year-old daughter with her. Her husband also managed to escape the deportation. Their granddaughter, Lisa Garbus, later wrote: ‘After that escape, my grandmother asked a non-Jewish family they knew (I don’t know who that family is) if they would hide her and my mother. They were afraid to hide an adult, but agreed to take my mother. That family didn’t keep her for long, though. They left her in a train station with a note pinned to her. She was found and brought to a Catholic orphanage where she spent the rest of
the war as a Catholic child.’

  Lisa Garbus’s account continued: ‘A few months after hiding my mother, my grandparents went to the Pietrusiewiczes’ house in the middle of the night and knocked on the door. My grandparents told me that the father (I’ve forgotten his first name) opened the door, looked around to see if anyone was watching, and silently led them inside. “It was an unspoken agreement,” my grandparents told me. I think they were hidden first in the attic of the small house, and then, when that seemed too dangerous, Mr Pietrusiewicz fabricated a hiding place for them outside, underneath the outdoor dog kennel that was behind the shed in their large backyard. He even created a ventilation system with pipes that came up into some bushes. I saw the shed and the yard when I was there (another house now takes up half the yard). The hiding place and dog kennel are no longer there. They crouched in that hole for around two years, and I can’t imagine what it was like. My grandmother used to say, “Anne Frank, she lived in a castle compared to where we were.” Then she would add, “But we are alive, and she is not.”

  ‘The family would bring them food every day, making it look like they were feeding the dog. I think there was some signal for the dog to move to free the access to the hiding place. The Pietrusiewiczes had four or five children (all of whom knew my grandparents were there), and there wasn’t much food, but my grandparents told me that they always left a little food on their plate, so that the family would never think that they didn’t have enough. Mr Pietrusiewicz would sit with them sometimes, and I think my grandmother did some knitting. At night they would use the bathroom and walk around the yard, but that became too dangerous in the winter when their tracks in the snow might arouse suspicion. They washed once a week, and my grandparents always insisted that they were clean. When the Russians liberated Poland, Mr Pietrusiewicz wisely advised them to remain in hiding for another month or two, because it was still not safe. “Just because the Germans are gone doesn’t mean the Poles won’t kill you,” he told them.’40