The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Also in Przemysl, in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a ten-year-old Jewish girl, Maria Klein, was given refuge. She later recalled ‘thirteen very frightened’ other Jewish children accepted, like her, ‘with grave risk’. The fact that she was Jewish was known only by three of the nuns: Sister Amelia (the Mother Superior), Sister Ligoria and Sister Bernarda. They gave her a key to the church so that ‘if the Germans made a search, I was to hide inside the altar where the Holy relics were kept’.20

  On 1 January 1967 a Polish weekly newspaper published a letter from Roza Reibscheid-Feliks, a Polish Jewish woman then living in Tel Aviv. She wrote: ‘my conscience would not leave me alone if I kept silent about the deeds of these “Righteous”. Some helped me for a whole year, others for two months, some for a few days only, but I shudder to think what would have happened if they had not held out their helping hand just for those few days! Even he who gave me shelter for one night only—may he be blessed! I should be grateful to you, sir…if in any way open to you, you would transmit my thanks to my saviours.’21 Roza Reibscheid-Feliks then listed nine individuals and two families, each of whom had helped her to survive. Among them were two churchmen: Canon Wojciech Bartosik from the village of Wawrzenczyce, near Miechow, and the Revd Dr Ferdynand Machay, from Our Lady’s Church in Cracow.

  TRAGICALLY, MANY OF those who gave shelter to Jews were caught—usually through betrayal—and killed, as were those whom they sheltered. Nobody can calculate the numbers, but some evidence of such betrayal and execution has survived. In September 1944, shortly before Soviet forces entered Przemysl, a Jewish survivor, Yosef Buzhminsky, saw in a courtyard in the city ‘a little girl six years old playing there. Gestapo and SS men arrived, surrounded the courtyard. It was a Polish family consisting of eight people. They began whipping the girl, and then they executed all of them right there in the courtyard.’ This Polish family had hidden the Jewish girl.22

  The balance of fear, indifference, betrayal and rescue is hard to measure; the scale of the rescue efforts less so. Yehuda Bauer, a pioneer of research and writing on the Holocaust, tells a story from his personal experience in Israel after the war which throws light on this. ‘On my kibbutz,’ he writes, ‘there lives a man whom we shall call here Tolek. All he knows about himself is his name. He was born near Cracow, or in Cracow, prior to World War II, and he was three when the war broke out. He was in an orphanage, probably because his father had died and his mother could not support him. A Polish woman took this circumcised man-child to her home and raised him there during the Nazi occupation, in alliance with a Catholic parish priest. When the Nazis came searching Polish homes for hidden Jews, the woman used to hand over Tolek to the priest. Tolek still remembers how, at the age of five and six, he used to assist the priest at Mass, swinging the incense around, walking behind the priest through the church. They survived the war, and when liberation came, the woman took Tolek to a Jewish children’s home and said, “This is a Jewish child, I have kept him throughout the war, he belongs to your people, take him and look after him”. Tolek does not know the name of the Polish woman, nor does he know the name of the priest. There are not very many such women, and there are not very many such priests, and therefore there are not a great many Toleks around. But there are some of each.’23

  Chapter 8

  Germany and Austria

  IN GERMANY, THE central fortress and ideological base of Nazism, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of ‘ordinary’ Germans helped Jews to survive the war. More than three hundred have been recognized by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.1

  Countess Maria von Maltzan, one of whose brothers was in the SS, lived in Berlin. As Hitler imposed increasingly repressive measures against the Jews, the Countess made contact with members of the Swedish Protestant church in Berlin who were systematically smuggling Jews out of Germany. She forged visas, ration books and other official documents and drove vegetable lorries full of refugees out of Berlin. Her relaxed, aristocratic manner helped her to hoodwink officials and to outwit the Gestapo, who frequently called her in for questioning. After the start of the Second World War, she began hiding Jews in her own home, among them the writer Hans Hirschel, who hid inside a hollowed-out sofa when the police searched the house.

  During one search, the Gestapo told von Maltzan that they knew she was hiding somebody and that they would turn the house upside down until they found him. When they threatened to shoot with their revolvers, she laughed—and warned that she would insist on full compensation for the damage done. ‘I told them I wanted that set out in writing first and then watched as they backed down. People like that are always terrified of overstepping their position,’ she later recalled.2

  Another German aristocrat, Marie Therese von Hammerstein, was the daughter of a general. Her son Gottfried later recalled that, as the dangers intensified in pre-war Germany, ‘my mother began to warn Zionist friends of hers who were about to be arrested. She would take Jews to Prague.’3 In 1934 she married Joachim Paasche, who was Jewish. She did so, her son writes, ‘in part as an act of defiance to the new Nazi order’.4 The couple then left Germany for Palestine. In old age, Marie Therese lived in a Jewish Old Age Home in San Francisco, only the second non-Jew to be admitted there, in what one of her obituarists called ‘a testimony to her family’s history of helping Jews in Germany’.5

  In Berlin, Pastor Heinrich Grüber, Dean of the Protestant Church in the capital, set up a rescue operation in the city in 1935, from which he organized escape routes for Jews to cross into the Netherlands. It became known as the ‘Grüber Office’ by those Jews seeking to use it to leave Germany. ‘The valiant churchman preached by day against Hitler’s Jewish policies and operated escape routes for the Jews by night,’ wrote Henry Walter Brann, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, when Grüber was made an honorary citizen of Berlin.6

  On 15 February 1940 the Germans deported a thousand Jews from the Baltic port of Stettin. In Berlin, Heinrich Grüber was determined to do what he could to protect as many of those Jews as possible. Twenty years later, as a witness in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, he recalled: ‘That same night a courier brought me news of what had happened. I would like to state that I had branches in all the major German cities, confidential agents, men and women, who did work for me throughout the country, and so the same night I was notified of what had happened. I assume that the Court is aware of those events. As soon as I heard that, I went to all the offices to which I had access. I went to the Führer’s Chancellery. I was at the Chancellery of the Führer’s Deputy, I also tried to contact Goering, but unsuccessfully, and then I wrote a very lengthy report to Goering.’

  In that report, Grüber recalled, ‘I tried first of all to show him that this also affected persons who had been seriously wounded in the First World War, and received high military decorations in the First World War, as well as very old people, including war widows. And I know that two people came back. One was a war cripple with an outstanding decoration, and the other was an old woman for whom we already had a visa for England. We then tried to stay in touch with these people through the supply of medicines, with letters, and so on. I would like to say that a few days later, on a Sunday, the Stettin general sent me his adjutant and asked me to make representations, because it was general knowledge in Germany that I kept taking steps in such cases. I was unable to stop myself from saying to the gentleman that if I had been the Stettin Commanding General, not a single carriage would have left for Poland with Jews.’7

  Angered by Grüber’s efforts, Adolf Eichmann summoned the pastor to his office. ‘He said: “Why do you care about the Jews at all? No one is going to thank you for your efforts.” I replied, because I believed that he, as a former Templar, had known this country: “You know the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Then I said: “Once on that road there lay a Jew who had fallen amongst thieves. Then a man passed by, who was not a Jew, and helped him. The Lord, whom alone I obey, tells me, ‘Go thou and do likewise’: that is m
y answer.”’

  At the end of 1940, news reached Berlin of the conditions in the Vichy-run concentration camps in southern France, to which German Jews had been deported from the Rhineland. ‘From this camp, Gurs,’ Grüber recalled, ‘we had—in Berlin—very bad news, even worse news than reached us from Poland. They did not have any medicaments or any sanitary arrangements whatsoever.’ Grüber added: ‘With the help of two friends from the Counter-Intelligence, Colonel Oster and Hans von Dohnanyi—both of whom were hanged after the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life—I was able to send money, medicines and so on via foreign countries to the Camp de Gurs. Using documents which the Counter-Intelligence would get for me, I wanted to go by a roundabout route to the Camp de Gurs, in order to be close to the people.’8

  Grüber’s attempt to reach Gurs—‘perhaps that will give the people some strength’—failed; instead he was arrested and sent as a prisoner first to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau. In 1943, after a serious heart attack, he was released. He survived the war, to give evidence at the Eichmann trial.9

  Since Kristallnacht in November 1938, the pastor of Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, Bernhard Lichtenberg—who had been a military chaplain in the First World War—closed each evening’s service with a prayer ‘for the Jews, and the poor prisoners in the concentration camps’. On 23 October 1942 he offered a public prayer for the Jews who were being deported to the East, calling on his congregants to observe the Biblical commandment ‘Love thy neighbour’ with regard to the Jews.

  Lichtenberg was denounced to the authorities, arrested, put on trial and sentenced to two years in prison. He was sent to Dachau, but died ‘on the way’.10

  In the summer of 1942 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr—the military intelligence service of the High Command of the German army—and his deputy, Hans von Dohnanyi, managed to save the lives of fourteen German Jews by sending them to Switzerland, on the pretext that they were being used as counter-intelligence operatives. To save these fourteen had taken a year of careful planning and subterfuge, culminating in persuading the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, that the departure of these Jews was in the German national interest.11

  Adolf Althoff, the head of the Althoff Circus, was approached by a Jewish woman seeking refuge at the time of the deportation of German Jews in 1942. He gave her a job walking elephants, and also helped hide her mother and sister. ‘I had to help them. I could not leave them to the Nazis,’ he said. ‘To be honest, I have no idea how I did that. Others knew they would be fired if they talked.’12

  At the end of November 1942, a total of 179 Jews from Pomerania, most of them from Stettin and Stolp, were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. Only a few Pomeranian Jews were not deported. They owed their survival, writes the historian of Pomeranian Jewry, Stephen Nicholls, ‘either to the loyalty of their Christian partner or to the bravery of those who were prepared to hide single Jews. For example, Joachim Pfannschmidt, vicar of Gross Kiesow near Greifswald and an active member of the German Confessional church, hid Gertrud Birnbaum in his vicarage from 1939–1944. This pharmacist from Berlin survived the war.13

  In December 1942 Maria Nickel, a devout Catholic, was shopping in Berlin, pushing her baby son in his pram, when she saw a pregnant woman with a yellow star sewn to her coat. Maria couldn’t help thinking of her own namesake, the Virgin Mary, with no room at the inn. ‘Let me help you,’ she whispered, pushing her pram up behind the woman; but the woman, afraid, ran away. The next night, Maria saw her again, and again the woman ran off. Merely talking to a German could get a Jew into trouble. Gradually Maria won her trust and learned that her name was Ruth. She gave Ruth the telephone number of the bakery where she worked.

  A few weeks later, Ruth’s sister Ella came to see her, to warn that the Gestapo were rounding up men and women on their street to be taken for forced labour. Ella was captured on her way back to her apartment.

  The writer Barbara Sofer has described the sequel:

  ‘Ruth cut the yellow stars off her own coat and her husband Walter’s. They walked out briskly, like a German couple out for a stroll. Ruth went bareheaded in the hope that her blond hair and blue eyes would keep the Gestapo from asking for papers. When the temperature turned sub-zero, Ruth and Walter huddled in a phone booth. Suddenly Ruth felt cramps. Don’t let it be tonight, she begged fate. The Berlin Jewish hospital was still open, but Ruth had heard the rumours that newborns were taken away by the Nazis to be gassed. In desperation, she and Walter retraced their steps to their silent apartment.’

  Any moment the SS could return. ‘Walter tried to deliver the baby himself, but he was no doctor. He risked going to a phone booth and calling a physician. Amazingly, one agreed to come. In those darkest of times, Ruth gave birth to a beautiful girl, Reha. But their only chance of survival would be to go underground. For that they would need a new identity. Walter dialed the bakery.’

  Maria Nickel agreed to help. ‘With aplomb she went to the post office, asked for internal travel papers and handed the clerk Ruth’s photograph. When the clerk questioned the photo, she didn’t miss a beat. “I looked different when I was pregnant,” she said. Carrying Maria Nickel’s ID card and Willy Nickel’s driver license, Ruth and Walter made their way to the train station, pushing a baby carriage they’d found in a bombed building. Inside, their newborn daughter sucked on a wine cork.’

  The metal wheels creaked in the snow. ‘With every sound, Ruth feared they were attracting attention. The station was crowded with Germans fleeing the bombing and with Nazi soldiers. As they got on the train, a soldier leapt to his feet. Ruth nearly keeled over. “For you, Fraulein, and the baby,” the soldier said.’

  With Maria’s continued help, Ruth, Walter and the baby survived the war.14

  ON 6 MARCH 1943 Josef Goebbels was indignant that when the deportation began of Berlin Jews from an old age home, there were what he called ‘regrettable scenes…when a large number of people gathered and some of them even sided with the Jews’. Three days later, Goebbels wrote in his diary again: ‘The scheduled arrest of Jews on one day failed because of the shortsighted behaviour of industrialists who warned the Jews in time.’15

  From Freiburg, Gertrud Luckner, a member of the long-banned German Catholic Peace Movement, organized the despatch of food packages to Jews who had been deported to Poland. She also travelled by train to many German cities, including Berlin, bringing such help as she could to Jewish families in need. During one of her train journeys the Gestapo arrested her; she was imprisoned for the rest of the war at Ravensbrück concentration camp.16

  Protest reached the German authorities in Berlin even from the General-Government in Cracow. On 25 March 1943 an anonymous letter, written by a German, was forwarded by the head of the General-Government, Hans Frank, to Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin. In the letter, the writer described with disgust the liquidation of an eastern ghetto, and told of how children were thrown to the ground, and their heads deliberately trampled on with boots.17

  THE SITUATION OF Jews in Berlin was both precarious and special: precarious because the headquarters of the Gestapo, of Eichmann’s office, and of the SS were all in the city; special, because there were thousands of non-Jews in Berlin willing to take the risk of hiding Jews. While a hundred and seventy thousand of Berlin’s pre-war Jewish population either emigrated or were deported and killed, it is estimated that some two thousand survived the war in Berlin itself—almost all of them with the help of non-Jews. In a recent article, Peter Schneider noted that Ludwig Collm, a teacher who went into hiding in October 1942, remembered twenty hiding places. Inge Deutschkron recalled that she and her mother changed hiding places twenty-two times. Konrad Latte, who after the war became the conductor of the Berlin Baroque orchestra, named fifty non-Jews who had protected him at different times. Peter Schneider wrote: ‘We will never know how many Berliners had the decency and courage to save their Jewish co-citizens from the Nazis—twenty thousand, thirty thousand? We don’t need to know the
number in order to pay homage to this untypical, admirable minority. While many individual Germans have been honoured for protecting Jews, thousands of ordinary Germans have remained generally unrecognized in the city where many of them did their good deeds.’18

  Thirty years before the publication of this article brought the story of the rescuers of Berlin to a wide public, Inge Deutschkron had written to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recalling ‘the people who risked their heads to help us’. Emma Gumz and her husband ‘were the first to take us in. They hid us for four weeks, continued to give us food throughout the two years and four months of our underground life. I also worked in her laundry as an ironer during that time.’ Another rescuer was Lisa Holländer. ‘She hid us for over nine months. Her husband was Jewish—Paul Holländer—and was killed in concentration camp, long before the deportations started.’ Then there was Käthe Schwarz, who both hid another Jewish woman and ‘for some months supplied us with food’. Another German couple, Walter Rieck and his wife, ‘were more or less in charge of our underground living. Whenever we did not know where to turn he helped out. The Riecks looked after us ever since 1938 when we needed someone to hide things or help us in other difficulties. It is also hard to describe in a few lines what Walter Rieck has done for us.’ Among other things, Walter Rieck employed Inge Deutschkron’s mother, ‘although he knew that she lived underground. He also gave her ration cards.’19

  In a German television documentary in 1973, Albert Jurgens, a former Berlin policeman, spoke of how he had given shelter in his home to a Jewish couple (‘I had met the man at the railway station, and we got to talking’). He procured false papers for them, and travelled with the couple to the Swiss border where he smuggled them across. Jurgens lost his job as a result of this act of compassion. Lili Bat Aharon, an Israeli journalist, noted that he ‘recounted his tale with utter simplicity, as if his actions had been quite ordinary’.