The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  On 18 April 1943, three months after the January act of defiance, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt began—a high point of Jewish resistance in Europe. When the revolt was crushed a month later, and tens of thousands of Warsaw’s surviving Jews were sent to their deaths, the need for help from non-Jewish Poles became urgent for those who sought to evade capture. Several hundred did what they could to help, among them Wladyslaw Liszewski and his friend Jan Kaluszko, both of whom provided Jews with forged papers and money, built hideouts, extricated Jews from apartments that had been discovered, arranged alternative hiding places, and sometimes escorted Jews who left Warsaw by train. Liszewski equipped one girl’s hideout with everything she needed, and when he visited her, he escorted her to a park outside the city so she could breathe some fresh air and be slightly less lonely. Liszewski had grown up in a deeply religious family, and both he and his parents had had Jewish friends before the war. At the height of the German occupation and terror, backed by his parents and sisters, he ‘risked his life to rescue Jews for no material reward’.38

  A member of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Warsaw, David Klin, wrote of two non-Jewish sisters who gave persistent help to the Jewish fighters. One, living in Wola, a suburb of Warsaw, was Anna Wachalska, the widow of a railwayman. Klin recalled: ‘She was living with her sister Maria Sawicka, a socialist leader and a sportswoman. Their home was the meeting point of special couriers of the Jewish Fighting Organization and of the Bund in the ghetto, with the group acting on the Aryan side.’ The Bund was the Jewish Social Democratic Workers Party, which had been at the forefront of Eastern European and Russian Socialism since the turn of the century. ‘These women never considered the dangers to which they were exposed; whenever it was necessary to go somewhere, to carry something to warn someone, to pass a code message, letter or newssheets, they just went. When it was necessary to organize the stay of a few leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization or the Bund on the Aryan side, it was they who looked for a safe hideout, hired apartments in their own names, and organized them not only as a hideout for these leaders, but also as a point of undercover activity and contacts with the Polish socialist underground movement. To bring material assistance to Jews in hiding was their normal daily occupation.’39

  The two sisters had a nephew, Stefan Sawicki, who was seized by the Gestapo because of his contact with the Jewish Fighting Organization. ‘I was unaware of the arrest,’ wrote Simcha Rotem, ‘and I came to their apartment half an hour after the Gestapo had searched their apartment in Stefan’s presence. Despite this, I asked if I could stay there for the night. Anna answered: “If you think it’s not dangerous for you, please stay.” I stayed there since I had no other choice. Although Stefan was executed several days later, the sisters did not retreat and they continued to work for the Jewish Fighters Organization.’40

  In another life-saving act, Stanislawa Busold, a Catholic midwife, with links to the Polish underground, helped smuggle out of the Warsaw Ghetto a newborn Jewish child. The baby was named Elzbieta (Elizabeth). Her parents did not survive the war. Mrs Busold, who never revealed the secret, treated Elzbieta as her own child and gave her a Catholic upbringing. Only after the midwife’s death did Elzbieta find out about her origins. Shortly thereafter, she learned that some of her relatives were living in the United States. In 1978 Elzbieta visited her great-uncle in Miami.41

  Alex and Mela Roslan hid three Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. The three boys, Jacob, Shalom and David Gutgeld, had been left in the care of their Aunt Janke when their father had fled to Russia in the first weeks of the war, hoping to pave the way for the family to escape to Palestine. Their mother had died before the war. The Roslans brought the children into their home shortly before the Warsaw Ghetto revolt in 1943. They treated the children like their own and made every sacrifice for them, including moving apartments to ensure their safety. When Jacob and Shalom came down with scarlet fever, Alex made arrangements to have them smuggled into a hospital—where Shalom died. The following year, during the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, the Roslans’ own son was killed by a German sniper.

  After the evacuation of Poles from Warsaw in October 1944, Alex and Mela Roslan wandered with their charges from place to place for six months until the liberation. The family then moved to Germany in the hopes of being able to emigrate from there to the United States. In Berlin the Roslans discovered that the boys’ father had indeed reached Palestine, and since the British would grant Palestine immigration certificates only to the boys, the Roslans had to part company with them in 1947. Alex, Mela and their daughter later emigrated to the United States. It was not until 1963 that they saw Jacob again, and not until 1980 that they were reunited with David. The following year Alex and Mela were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.42

  As the Polish national uprising of 1944, in which more than a thousand Jews had fought, was crushed, those survivors who had not been captured and deported were forced into hiding once more. There were still non-Jews who, at grave risk, gave them shelter. In November 1944 a Polish doctor, Stanislaw Switala, took into his hospital and sheltered seven of the former leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, among them Tuvia Borzykowski, Yitzhak Zuckerman and his girlfriend Zivia Lubetkin.43

  Michael Zylberberg was in hiding with his wife in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. ‘We had been recommended to a religious Catholic family,’ he later wrote. ‘They were very poor but kind and anxious to help. The members of the family were an eighty-year-old grandmother, her daughter Mrs Klima, in her fifties, and a grandson aged about twenty-five. Their home, one room and a kitchen, was in a small house in the middle of a common, not far from the main street in the district. The rear of the house was occupied by a woman and her two daughters who often held wild parties. They entertained very dubious people, including uniformed Germans.

  ‘Our poor family’, Michael Zylberberg recalled, ‘were keen to have us without rent at a time when people were taking enormous sums to hide Jews. They had no previous knowledge of us but felt they had a sacred duty to shelter anyone in need. Of course, our existence had to be a closely guarded secret. During the daytime we crept on all fours so that no one should see us through the window of the little home. During the two months we were there, my wife and I scarcely spoke to each other, so that strange voices might not be heard by the neighbours. Mrs Klima had to buy food for us in a different shop from the one she normally used. Her own grocer and milkman would have guessed that she was buying for more than the usual three people. Both the grandmother and her daughter prayed frequently that God would help them and us. When we were worried that something might happen, they always assured us that they would stand by us and protect us. Their compassion was outstanding.’

  As Easter drew near, a new problem arose. As Michael Zylberberg wrote: ‘Mrs Klima said she had to go to confession and that she had to tell the whole truth. That included telling about us. She was afraid that the priest might not approve and regard this procedure as dangerous; she was at a loss what to do, and asked me for advice. I begged her to let us know what day she was going to confession, so that we could stay out of the house all day. Thus she would not need to mention us and would have a clear conscience. We kept out of the house that day, as promised, but Mrs Klima confessed everything to the priest! Happily for us and for her, however, the priest assured her that she was performing a noble service in helping those in danger. She returned home overjoyed.’

  Circumstances in hiding were ‘so hard’, Michael Zylberberg wrote, ‘and got so much harder as the days lengthened, that we decided that I would leave and my wife would stay. I went to Skolimow near Warsaw to work with friends, taking a job as a gardener. Nevertheless, my wife’s stay was also short-lived, for the following reason. One day, when only the grandmother and my wife were in the house, sitting as quiet as mice, Henrietta heard a conversation through the wall. The neighbour, Mrs Kaminska, and a relative of hers were talking. Mrs Kaminska said she had a feeling that a Jewess was h
iding next door. The relative said she should inform the Germans at once, and they would soon find out if it were true. When my wife heard this she ran out of the house in terror and never went back. The grandmother, old and deaf, had not heard the conversation, and seeing Henrietta jump up, signalled to her not to go outside. Henrietta quietened her by whispering in her ear that she would soon return. This was their only farewell. The next day the house was searched, and nothing was found.’44 Michael Zylberberg was never to see his wife again.

  In April 1943 Maria Wagman, having escaped from the ghettos of both Kolomyja and Lvov, reached Warsaw on the second day of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt. The ghetto was completely sealed off. Seeking somewhere to hide in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, she was directed by a Polish acquaintance to Walentyna Bialostocha, who gave her sanctuary; she also sheltered a young Jewish writer, Marcin Sarna, and his sister. Sarna was later arrested by the Germans and executed, but his sister survived. It is apparent from subsequent testimonies that a number of other Jewish fugitives were given refuge or assistance by Walentyna Bialostocha. These included two women from Chelm who hid in her apartment; a lawyer named Weinryb, who lived next door to her until his arrest and subsequent execution; Mieczyslaw Nojar, who was saved by her help; and Rysiek Radziejowski, who was caught in her house and executed. Walentyna Bialostocha was herself arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp north of Berlin, where she died in 1945, shortly before liberation.45

  Within Warsaw, individual churchmen also risked their lives to save Jews. Marceli Godlewski had been the priest at All Saints Church on Grzybowski Place since 1915. Among the Jews whom he saved was Ludwig Hirszfeld, a leading professor of medicine. Godlewski’s church was at the edge of the ghetto; he opened its crypt up to Jews making their way out of the ghetto, provided false papers, and hid small Jewish children under his robe to get them away to safety. Ironically, he had been known before the war as a member of the National Party, and was regarded as being close to the anti-Semitic movements of those years. In 1945, after the end of the war, Godlewski was killed while trying to clear the rubble of the part of his church that had been destroyed.46

  The testimonies submitted to Yad Vashem by those who were saved reveal the extraordinary determination of ordinary people to do what they could. Roma Eisenberg, who was saved in Warsaw, wrote forty years after liberation, on being asked for her testimony, that Jan Potrzebowski and his daughter had during the war years saved the lives of many Jews, including herself and her cousin Natalia. ‘He hid us in the attic, in the elevator pit. He treated us as a very good father, and he saved our lives.’47

  FOLLOWING THE WARSAW GHETTO revolt of April 1943, several hundred Jews managed to escape to the woods east of the city, in the region just to the west of the River Bug. Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the revolt, later recalled: ‘The people hiding in the woods were saved by a simple gentile, a member of Armia Krajowa, whom we called “chlop” (the Polish for peasant), and whose real name was Kajszczak. One day, one of the fighters left the woods to look for something to eat and came upon that gentile, a born and bred peasant who owned a flourmill. Later, we learned he was a member of Armia Krajowa, a sergeant or something in the underground. This man truly risked his life for us. We gave him money and he brought food and water. He also kept our people from getting shot. As I recall, his brother was mayor of the village; he didn’t tell his brother anything, but he always got information from him about what the Germans were planning to do. One day he came to warn us that people in the village were starting to complain about the Jews hiding in the woods. Once when I was there, there was an alarm; but it turned out to be nothing but peasants going out to gather branches. It was very dangerous there. You could be discovered and captured even by accident. We had to liquidate the hideout. That gentile managed to arrange a hideout in the village for Leyzer Levin, his son and brother-in-law.’

  The editor of Zuckerman’s memoirs, Barbara Harshav, adds of Bronislaw Kajszczak: ‘He hid Leyzer Levin and his relative in his home. He was denounced to the Germans who burned down his cottage. The fighters helped him reach Warsaw.’ A member of the Jewish Fighting Organization described him as ‘a good, warmhearted peasant’. He agreed ‘to supply food for the comrades. We would give him money and he would arrange his purchases in various places so as not to make the storekeepers suspicious. In the evening, he would hitch his horse to his wagon and bring them food. On his own initiative, he would always add something to drink, sometimes it was hot soup he cooked in his own home; he would bring the food and hot soup to the forest with the help of his children.’48

  One of those who helped Jews, Helena Balicka-Kozlowska, was the daughter of Zygmunt and Jadwiga Balicki, pre-war activists in the Polish Socialist Party. From the earliest days of the German occupation of Warsaw their apartment had served as a haven for their Jewish acquaintances. After the ghetto uprising, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, Sara Biderman, sought refuge with them. She had been shot and wounded by a German policeman, and her condition was pronounced grave by a doctor who was called in to examine her. The Balickis succeeded in getting Sara transferred to a nearby hospital where she was admitted under the pretence of being a Christian. An operation was performed which saved her life.49

  Maria and Zygmunt Rewkowska were professional actors in the prewar years. In awarding them the designation Righteous Among the Nations at a ceremony in London in 1980, the Israeli Consul-General, Ehud Lador, spoke of how ‘the couple selflessly risked their lives—and the life of their small daughter, Joanna—to shelter, for several weeks in 1943, a Jew who had managed to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto. The risk was enormous—should that Jew have been discovered by the Nazis, either through denunciation or by accident, it would have meant almost certain death for the Rewkowskas and their little daughter. Yet they took the risk, and helped that man—today a professor living in Sweden. And there were others, too. Even after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, when her husband was taken prisoner by the Nazis, Maria Rewkowska continued to risk her own, and Joanna’s life, by sheltering Jewish fugitives.’50

  Inside Warsaw, survivors of the ghetto revolt tried to live on the ‘Aryan’ side as non-Jews, with false papers, hoping their looks would not give them away either to the Germans or to Poles who might betray them. Others found refuge with non-Jewish families who knew they were Jews but took the risk of hiding them. An internationally renowned chemist, Professor Mieczyslaw Centnerszwer, was sheltered by non-Jews who knew of his work. But later he was denounced to the Germans, who executed him. Another leading pre-war figure in the world of science and academia, the economist Ludwig Landau, was also hidden by non-Jews, but then denounced and executed. In both cases the rescuer and the denouncer alike were Polish non-Jews. As Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, reflected in his memoirs, ‘You can’t generalize about the Poles. There were decent and pure people among them as among other nations, people who risked their lives and sacrificed their safety fully conscious of why they were doing that. Although there were also Poles whose motive was money and who took large sums for sheltering Jews, there were also people who knew that their job was to rescue, that that was their human obligation. Some of them were simple folk who were content to receive pennies and saved Jews simply out of human kindness; and even when the Jews ran out of money, they went on supporting them. And there were others who kept Jews as long as they could pay, extorted their last cent, and then turned them over to the Germans. Some were in cahoots with the Polish police, others were blackmailers who sucked the marrow of the Jews. There were all kinds of Poles.’51

  Forged documents were vital for Jews masquerading as non-Jews. The Jewish forgers were helped by both the Polish underground organizations, the Communist Armia Ludowa (People’s Army) and the London-based Armia Krajowa (Home Army; an integral part of the Polish Government-in-Exile), as well as by Zegota. In his memoirs, Yitzhak Zuckerman recognized this. ‘At a certain stage,’ he wrote, ‘we were forging documents ourselve
s, in cooperation with the AK cell that was willing to help us with that. So, with help from AL, as much as they could give, and Zegota, which did a lot in that area, we made our own stamps in 1944: we got forms from Waclaw for forged documents and we also made documents in the name of dead people or those who had sold their documents. We could get documents from the Polish underground. I got my document, for example, from the Armia Krajowa…’52

  Bernard Goldstein was fifty years old when Germany invaded Poland. A leader of the Bund, he had twice been arrested and sent to exile in Siberia under the Russian tsarist regime. In independent Poland he became a leading trades unionist with the Transport Workers Union. In November 1942 he managed to leave the ghetto for ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, where he found refuge with the Chumatowski family. Not long afterwards, however, a gang of Polish blackmailers, discovering his whereabouts, extorted a high ransom from him, and he had to find somewhere else to hide. He did so in an apartment at 29 Grzybowska Street that had once been part of the small ghetto where the Germans had rehoused non-Jews after the Jews had been driven out—most to their deaths at Treblinka.

  The apartment consisted of two rooms: a kitchen and a former photographer’s darkroom. Its new owner, Janina Pawlicka, had worked for many years before the war as a servant in the home of an Orthodox Jewish family in the town of Zgierz, near Lodz. She spoke Yiddish, and out of a sense of loyalty to her employers had moved with the family from Zgierz to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. They had been deported when the small ghetto was wound up. She gave sanctuary to three other Jews as well as Goldstein, who later recalled: ‘The neighbours knew that Janina Pawlicka lived in a darkroom and made a living knitting sweaters. About the rest of us, of course, no one was permitted to have the least suspicion. Our apartment was the small room, the former darkroom of the photographic laboratory, in which there was space for only a small bed and a tiny table. We slept on the floor, crowded together. Pawlicka gave up her bed to the old woman and slept on the floor with the rest of us. All of us, except Janina, remained locked in a little dark hole, forbidden to see the light of day.’53