The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Franz Fritsch had been sent to Tarnow in Poland to set up a workshop making tailored uniforms. As shop director, he asked for Jewish workers and thus saved many from the concentration camps and certain death. ‘Do you recall,’ asked one of those whom he saved—a man called Oesterweiler—‘how you went to the Gestapo in Tarnow and asked for a list of people to be taken out of the transport? They gave you fifty names. You made it a list of two hundred and fifty names—and made it look official.’28

  An Austrian factory owner, Julius Madritsch, was also entrusted by the German authorities in the occupied eastern regions with production for the German war effort. In his textile factory in Cracow, which was managed by his fellow Austrian, Raimund Titsch, he employed many Jews who had no professional experience or training. To maximize the numbers of Jews he could protect, by insisting that their work was essential, he put three workers on every machine, although only one was needed. By this means he was able to employ eight hundred Jewish workers, enabling them to avoid deportation. He and Titsch also provided materials to keep another garment factory open, thereby employing another thousand Jews.

  Those who worked for Madritsch and Titsch stressed the extent to which these two men did their best to provide humane and comfortable working conditions. Every person received enough bread each day to enable him to sell part of it and buy other food items. They allowed Jews to make contact with Poles outside the factory. The kitchens fed more than a thousand Jewish workers with special food unobtainable in any other factory or labour camp. One kitchen was kosher and the other was ‘half-kosher’. This was made possible through the financial resources of the factory itself.

  Madritsch and Titsch bought up to a hundred extra loaves of bread a day, which were passed on by their Jewish workers to other Jews in a nearby labour camp, who needed food desperately but could not leave the confines of their factory.29

  Madritsch was also helped in his attempts to save Jews by Oswald Bosko, a police sergeant from Vienna. Bosko had managed to get a job as a member of the Cracow ghetto guard while his regiment was in Kolomyja, killing Jews. When the order was given to ‘take away’ all Jewish children from the Cracow ghetto, Bosko smuggled men, women and children through barbed wire and into the Madritsch factory: ‘Small children were anaesthetized and put in rucksacks so that they could not be endangered by crying,’ Madritsch later wrote. Many Poles, he added, ‘were prepared to hide the children’ in their homes, and ‘even men from the Wehrmacht, who were heading to Tarnow, took women and children with them’, to Madritsch’s factory there, where they were given protective employment.30

  Oswald Bosko was held in high regard by the Cracow ghetto inmates. As Yaakov Sternberg, who worked in Madritsch’s factories, wrote in his testimony: ‘Thanks to his straight character and sense, food was brought into the ghetto through all kinds of tricks. Lots of Jews survived thanks to Bosko by escaping from the ghetto before the deportations. Whenever they felt that something was bound to happen, Bosko made it possible for them to flee to Polish residents.’ In the end, Sternberg added, ‘The Gestapo found out about his help to the Jews. Bosko fled but was caught and executed. He was one of the World’s Righteous.’31

  Beginning on 25 March 1943, only twelve days after the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto, Madritsch and Titsch transferred as many of their Jewish factory workers as they could by train to Madritsch’s factories at Bochnia, twenty miles to the east, and Tarnow, a further thirty miles away. Not only men and women, but also children, were taken to the new workplaces, where they lived in the Bochnia and Tarnow ghettos. Whenever they could, Madritsch and Titsch also smuggled individual workers out of the ghetto and into ‘Aryan’ Cracow, and even to ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. They were helped in this task by Dr Adolf Leenhardt, another Viennese then working in Cracow.

  At the end of August 1943 the fate of the surviving Jews in the Tarnow ghetto was sealed by Amon Goeth, the sadistic commandant of the Plaszow slave labour camp. Having supervised the liquidation of the nearby Cracow ghetto, Goeth turned his attention to Tarnow, then the largest surviving ghetto in Western Galicia.

  In an attempt to stop Madritsch’s intervention on behalf of his workers, or his taking the sort of steps he had taken earlier to save Jews from the Cracow ghetto, Goeth hit upon a simple stratagem. On September 1 he invited Madritsch and Titsch to visit him at his house in Plaszow. ‘They went with mixed feelings,’ Madritsch later recalled (casting his account in the third person), ‘and indeed both of them were welcomed with the words “to the success of the evacuation of all Jews from the district of Cracow and you have to stay as guests here until tomorrow”. Madritsch and Titsch were not even given the possibility to answer because Goeth excused himself and left them with two SS officers to keep them “company”. These hours were a real torment since they could not even show or talk about their pain.’

  The two men were not released until five o’clock the following morning. Madritsch managed to enter the ghetto, and there saw his coworker, Dr Leenhardt, as well as Goeth, who assured him that nothing would happen to ‘his people’. Dr Leenhardt then separated the Madritsch workers from the mass of deportees being sent to a slave labour camp in Silesia, and, when they reached that camp, which was attached to a synthetic oil factory, put them to work building new workshops for the SS. Madritsch undertook this construction job, so that his workers could be kept alive.

  Some of the other workers were smuggled out of the camp in the trucks destined for the depot that was providing building materials. Leaving Tarnow, the trucks made a detour through another of Madritsch’s factories, at Piwnicza, from where the Jews were able to flee southward to the Slovak border, fifty miles away, and then make their way into Hungary. (At that time, Hungarian Jews were not yet being deported.) Other Jews were smuggled out when they were brought to Madritsch’s factories for the day: some, instead of going back to the camp, stayed at the factory and, at the right moment, set off, also via the factory at Piwnicza, for Slovakia.

  On 14 September 1943 Madritsch was authorized to move his factories to Plaszow slave labour camp, where he took on two thousand Jewish prisoners as workers. Again he determined to help them as much as possible, providing them with food, clothing and shoes. This involved his having to pay the SS for the food and other supplies.

  When Amon Goeth learned that almost a quarter of those employed by Madritsch were over the maximum age for slave labourers, he tried to reduce Madritsch’s workforce accordingly. Madritsch successfully insisted that these older people ‘were the most valuable ones’.32

  Yaakov Sternberg, who worked at the Madritsch factory in Plaszow, recalled the help which Madritsch’s manager, Raimund Titsch, gave to the Jewish workers. First there was the distribution of a loaf of bread at least once a week, which helped not only Madritsch’s workers but also the ten thousand other Jewish prisoners at Plaszow, because it lowered the price of bread. Second, Titsch passed on information on the Allied military successes from British radio broadcasts—listening to which was a serious offence. Third, he made food supplies available to Jews outside the camp, as well as facilitating the changing and transferring of money. Fourth, as much as he could, he tried to prevent the deportation of those working for Madritsch.33

  In May 1944 the SS declared that Plaszow was no longer a forced labour camp but a concentration camp. They then began to transfer the prisoners in Plaszow to Auschwitz. As part of the transformation, they announced that doctors were no longer needed in Plaszow. Madritsch acted immediately to save one of them, Dr Haim Wachtel, by getting him transferred to his factory as a works doctor. In his affidavit on behalf of Madritsch, Dr Wachtel later wrote: ‘The factory employees were given special conditions in the camp. The meals were much better and everyone received an amount of bread, which made it possible for them to sell part of it and buy margarine and sausages instead.’ Nearly all the food was smuggled into the factory in Madritsch’s trucks, hidden under bundles of cloth. ‘Madritsch and Titsch knew about it and only asked them to
be careful.’

  Dr Wachtel remembered the occasion when ‘a Jew called Leopold Lemensorf who was among us at the camp and worked at the storeroom—one day, he addressed himself to Madritsch, asking if he could enable a meeting with his daughter, who resided with Christians outside the camp. Madritsch found her, brought her to the camp and employed her as a clerk.’ During the periodic SS selections of Jews to be sent to other camps, Madritsch and Titsch ‘checked that nothing bad was to happen to the employees’.34

  Eventually the SS closed down the factories in the Cracow area, and deported all their Jewish workers to Auschwitz and Gross Rosen. Madritsch had no factories further west, and therefore nowhere to send his Jewish workers in order to continue to protect them himself. But he and Raimund Titsch were on good terms with a fellow German factory owner in Cracow who was about to open a munitions factory at Brunnlitz, in the Sudetenland, a hundred miles to the west. This man, Oskar Schindler, agreed to take sixty of Madritsch’s workers with him, together with his own workers.35 Schindler, perhaps the best known of all the Righteous, was, like Madritsch, a person for whom the German need for war supplies represented an opportunity to wield considerable protective power for his Jewish workers.

  Not far from Plaszow, in the Cracow suburb of Zablocie, was an enamel works which manufactured kitchen utensils. It had belonged to a Jew, but was on the verge of bankruptcy; shortly after the German occupation, Schindler bought it. Like all the German factory owners in German-occupied Poland, including Madritsch, he was allowed to employ Jewish workers. Like Madritsch, he knew that the Jews in Plaszow camp were being subjected to the sadistic whims of the camp commandant Amon Goeth, and that thousands had been murdered, or died of maltreatment and exhaustion. Schindler, whose relations with the Gestapo were outwardly amicable, even cordial, used his good connections with high German officials in the Armaments Administration to set up a branch of the Plaszow camp inside his own factory compound. There, he brought in nine hundred Jewish workers, including many unfit and unqualified for the labour production needs.36 ‘In the months ahead, fewer than two hundred were transferred elsewhere.

  Among the remarkable features at Schindler’s factory was the infirmary. Abraham Zuckerman, who worked for Schindler for a while, later wrote: ‘If anyone was sick, Herr Schindler saw to it that he was given good medical care, as much as was possible. In the other camps where I had been interned, this did not exist. If you went to the infirmary, you were a dead person. If you were not well enough to work, the Nazis would kill you. My friend Yekel Fuhrer became very sick at Plaszow. If it were not for his being in Herr Schindler’s Emalia camp, I don’t know whether he would have survived.’37

  When the Gestapo tried to transfer some of Schindler’s workers to Plaszow, he was able, by bribery and persuasion, to keep them. In the summer of 1944, seven hundred Jews were under his protection.38 As the Russian army advanced into Poland, and the German army began pulling back, these men were evacuated, on German orders, to the concentration camp at Gross Rosen, in German Silesia. In an attempt to save them from the cruelties of Gross Rosen, Schindler asked for them to be sent instead to his factory in Brunnlitz, in the Sudetenland. He submitted a list of seven hundred to the SS, noting against each name some impressive but purely fictional skill, describing them as engravers, locksmiths and technicians. This was ‘Schindler’s List’, immortalized in book and film.39

  The women from Schindler’s Cracow factory, three hundred in all, had been evacuated not to Gross Rosen but to Auschwitz. Schindler at once sought their release, going personally to Auschwitz and bribing the Nazi officials there to let him take the three hundred women to his Sudetenland factory. There they were able to rejoin their menfolk. Thus wives, daughters and mothers were saved.

  ‘Every day from 18 October 1944 to 8 May 1945 at midnight,’ Moshe Bejski later recalled, ‘Schindler helped. “I will not leave you until the last SS man has left the camp,”’ he told the Jews. ‘If a Jew lost his glasses,’ Bejski added, ‘Schindler went and bought glasses.’ Above the camp ration of a hundred grammes of bread, a bowl of so-called soup, and two cups of ersatz coffee each day, he provided extra rations. When a young Jewess became pregnant, an ‘offence’ punishable by death, Schindler went to the city of Brno, forty miles away, ‘and bought the necessary surgical equipment, and the doctor in the camp performed an abortion’.40

  On 29 January 1945, Schindler was told, by a friend of his who worked with the railways, of a locked goods wagon at Svitavy, the station nearest to his armament factory at Brunnlitz. The wagon was marked ‘Property of the SS’, and had been travelling on the railways for ten days, covered in ice. Inside were more than a hundred Jews, starving and freezing: Jews from Auschwitz who had been sent from there to the labour camp and quarry at Golleschau; Jews who had once lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Holland and Hungary.

  Schindler’s friend told him ‘that no factory would take these poor devils’.41 Schindler himself had no authority to take the wagon. But he asked a railway official to show him the wagon’s bill of lading, and while the official was momentarily distracted, wrote on it: ‘Final destination, Brunnlitz’. Schindler then pointed out to the official that the wagon was intended for his factory.42

  After Schindler had ordered the railway authorities to transfer the wagon to his factory siding, his Jewish workers broke open the locks. Sixteen of the Jews had frozen to death. The camp commandant ordered the bodies to be incinerated. At the request of the Jews already in the camp, Schindler stopped this, and made arrangements to allocate a special plot in the local Christian cemetery for their burial. ‘They were laid to rest in accordance with Jewish funeral rites,’ Moshe Bejski recalled. ‘Rabbi Menashe Lewartow, who was with us, recited the Kaddish. Oskar Schindler was concerned even with paying last respects to the dead.’43

  The rest of the Jews in the wagon were taken to a hall next to the factory, which was emptied in order to house them. ‘All, or at least most, of this transport were starving,’ Moshe Bejski wrote, ‘as they had been on the road for many days in sealed wagons without any food. It was Mrs Schindler who took it upon herself to prepare each day cereal in large pots for these persons, in order not to feed them the coarse food available for the inmates in the general kitchen. To the best of my knowledge, several more of these inmates whose strength was depleted due to physical exhaustion, died soon thereafter; however, most of them regained their strength within a few weeks, and were even assigned light labour duties’—as demanded by the camp commander, an SS Obersturmführer.44

  Not one of the survivors had weighed more than eighty pounds when Schindler rescued them. Those Jews already in the camp who saw the rehabilitation of the newcomers later stressed the help given to Schindler by his wife Emilie, who provided beds on which they could be nursed back to life. ‘She took care of these Golleschau Jews,’ Moshe Bejski later recalled. ‘She prepared food for them every day.’45

  Schindler himself recognized his wife’s extraordinary efforts on behalf of the Golleschau Jews. ‘My wife Emilie,’ he later wrote, ‘in spite of the cold’—the temperature was 16 degrees below zero—‘went to Mährisch-Ostrau (300 km) to barter vodka against ointments, medicine and vitamins.’46

  Judge Bejski later told the film-maker Steven Spielberg that the Golleschau incident (which was not included in the film Schindler’s List) ‘represents Schindler’s greatest rescue and humanitarian deed, as well as of Mrs Schindler’.47

  Schindler had one further act of protection to perform. As he himself described it: ‘I was trying to get permission for evacuating a Marine depot from the frontier into my factory, with the intention to supply my Jewish protégés at the end of the war with clothing. This permission I obtained with the help of some gifts. Eighteen big truckloads full with best worsted yarn, woollen material, material for underwear and accessories, enabled me to present every single man of my people with two suits, coats, underwear, etc., so that they may be properly equipped when taking the first steps into fre
edom.’48

  Between 1943 and 1945, Oskar Schindler had saved more than fifteen hundred Jews by employing them in his factories, and treating them humanely.

  In Piotrkow, Mr Christman took boys as young as five into his factory, saving them from deportation. Among them was five-year-old Israel Lau, a future Chief Rabbi of Israel. Another, Ben Helfgott, then twelve, later reflected: ‘Christman employed boys when no one else would. He saved our lives.’49

  In Lvov, Max Kohl ran a factory making leather coats for the Gestapo. He employed about fifty Jews—including Lili Pohlmann’s mother Cecylia—often bribing high-ranking Gestapo officers with leather coats, to spare ‘his’ Jews. Lili Pohlmann also recalled Irmgard Weith, a secretary in the local Nazi administration, who hid Lili, her mother, and another Jewish couple, for more than a year. Even when a high-ranking Gestapo officer unexpectedly came to stay, she kept them in her tiny larder for two weeks. ‘Had he found us he would have shot us all on the spot,’ Lili wrote. She and her mother were the only survivors of a family of more than a hundred. ‘I do not know “why we two?”—but what I do know is to whom we owe our lives and to whom our gratitude is eternal. They are our “unsung heroes”.’50

  Chapter 10

  Central Europe and the Balkans

  A JEWISH BOY LIVING in Prague, Frantisek Brichta, recalled a family who lived in the same apartment block. The mother and daughter were sent with one of the first transports from Prague to the Lodz ghetto; the father, a former Austro-Hungarian soldier, had died before the war. ‘A fellow officer who felt it was his duty to protect them volunteered to go with them. I am reasonably sure that he wasn’t Jewish. Such was the sense of duty of that generation.’1