The Other Schindlers (17 page)

Margaret and Joseph got married in the Ghetto before they left. When I asked Margaret about her marriage she said it was a civil ceremony conducted by Avraham Tory (1909–2002), a young lawyer who was appointed secretary of the Kovno Jewish Council set up by the Nazis. He subsequently became well known when his meticulous diaries covering 1941–44 were published as
Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary
. He was one of the few Holocaust diary writers who survived to publish his work after the war.
98
Apparently the Jewish Council was authorised to carry out civil marriage ceremonies because religious
ceremonies
were banned.
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Eventually, in November 1943, the three of them went to the hideout where they hid for 300 days. Meanwhile, her brother Alik found someone to hide his mother but it was becoming much harder to leave the Ghetto. In July 1944 she was deported to Stutthof concentration camp where she perished in November.
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The trio continued hiding in the factory and each day Vytautas came to bring them food and tell them when they could move around. He also dealt with their personal waste. They had to be quiet during the day when the factory was operational and were therefore only active during the hours of 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Margaret describes the difficulty of obtaining water and how they poured water through a towel into a bucket to cut down the noise.
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Vytautas was a wonderful support throughout the difficulties of living that half-life:

One difficulty was his wife, Elia, whom he had tried to protect by not telling her what he was doing:

Once she knew, she proved to be extremely supportive, but understandably worried whether as parents they were right to risk their own child’s life. Margaret describes Elia as a generous and kind-hearted woman. However, because of these reservations poor Vytautas could not share his worries about the project with his wife or the Kagans.
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These difficulties were exemplified the day the
bookkeeper
, Mr Garkauskas, was arrested and the Kagans and Vytautas did not know whether or not it was related to the Kagans. Fortunately, the next day ‘an
exceptionally
agitated Vytautas came to tell us that Mr Garkauskas had managed to smuggle a letter out of jail to tell us that his arrest was unconnected with us’. But their relief was short-lived when they heard the truth:

Vytautas continued his care for them and even arranged a brief ‘holiday’ with some Lithuanian friends for Joseph’s mother when the claustrophobic conditions became too much for her.
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As German defeat became more likely in the summer of 1944 there were concerns that the retreating Nazis would blow up the factories. Vytautas arranged with Alik’s foster family for Joseph and his mother to go to them. Margaret was to follow a few days later but had to stay in the loft because of her Jewish appearance. Vilijampole was liberated by the Russians on 31 July 1944. The Ghetto was set on fire by the Germans as they left and the surviving
inhabitants
met a horrible end. Finally, Vytautas installed the three of them in his own home which seemed like a palace after all their privations. After finding a flat to rent they tried to come to terms with what had happened to Europe and its Jews.

In January 1945 they set off to try to find Joseph’s father who had gone to England before the war. The subsequent Cold War years prevented contact but Margaret saw Vytautas in 1964 and recalls: ‘Words failed us both at this
indescribable
moment, but our emotions mingled in a long silent embrace.’ In 1972 Margaret and Joseph met Vytautas in Moscow, with his daughter Vitalija, and the couple who hid Alik. The rescuers all died before Lithuania gained its
independence
: Marija and Antanas in 1979 and 1980 respectively, and Elia Rinkevicius in 1981. Vytautas died in 1988. Both couples were recognised as Righteous Among the Nations in 1976.
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In 1989 Vitalija was able to visit London with her husband, and at the House of Lords – in the presence of Dr Kahle, Chaplain of Westminster Cathedral, family and friends – the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jakobovits, made a moving speech and
presented
the medal of a Righteous Gentile to Vitalija.

Vitalija’s words were few but memorable. Naturally she was happy and grateful for this honour to her parents and thanked everyone; but above all she wanted to convey what she felt sure her father would have said on this occasion: ‘I am no hero, I have done nothing out of the ordinary; nothing other than any normal human being would have done.’
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When Margaret’s husband died in January 1995, Tam Dalyell wrote an obituary in which he referred to Vytautas. He wrote that Kagan had told him that ‘one day he noticed that Rinkevicius was angry when he saw a boy being beaten up and he decided on the spot that he could trust him and confided his plan of hiding his fiancée’s family behind a wall in the factory’. Dalyell reminded his readers that the penalty for helping Jews was summary execution for the offender and his family.
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When I asked Margaret what she thought about his motivation, she wrote to me: ‘simple human decency – cannot really explain’.
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Jaap van Proosdij (1921– )
was only 21 when, in 1942, he helped rescue about 250 Dutch Jews. His Resistance group was so successful that they almost rendered genuine baptismal certificates useless because:

Everything was fine until ‘One day the Jewish Council phoned and said it had genuine Church certificates in its possession, but these had been refused by the SS because they did not have this particular stamp on them’.
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From then on they had to put their fake stamp on all genuine documents to ensure their acceptance by the SS. Unfortunately, Jaap told me the stamp was lost some years ago and cannot be reproduced here.
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Jaap was born in 1921, the second of five children, to an independently minded advocate in Amsterdam and he too eventually became a lawyer. He describes his mother as having a strong personality but his father as being the main
influence
. ‘He loved his profession, had a very independent spirit and cared for his clients more than his fees.’
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As a young man he knew nothing about Jews,
having attended both a Protestant school and university. The law firm he joined in 1942 was called Van Krimpen & Kotting. The Sephardi Jewish community had approached the firm to get some sort of protection from persecution for its members. Dutch Jews were being deported regularly from Amsterdam and whilst the firm started the work acting legally, eventually it became clear to Jaap and his colleagues that the only effective way to save Jews from the Nazis was to prove that they were not Jewish, and accordingly they began acting illegally.

The Germans had invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. After vicious air bombardment the country capitulated on 14 May, Queen Wilhelmina and the government having fled to London. A civilian German administrator, the Austrian Artur Seyss-Inquart, was installed on 18 May 1940 and
independent
Dutch control ended.
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There were 140,000 Jews in Holland at this time, of whom 30,000 were refugees from Germany and Austria, and the
majority
– 80,000 – lived in Amsterdam. Seventy-five per cent of these Jews were murdered by the Nazis and a major tool was the
Joodsche Raad
(Jewish Council), created under duress on 12 February 1941, ostensibly to prevent disturbances between Jews and Dutch Nazis. On 9 May 1942 the wearing of the yellow star was made compulsory.
116

Jaap has explained that Holland had very detailed population records. ‘It had a meticulous population register which traced most people back to the time of Napoleon’ and they therefore realised the only chance of success was to prove to the German authorities that people were not Jewish. In one particular case, Jaap even managed to convince them that a man who was chairman of his synagogue was not even remotely Jewish.
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This work was based on the fact that:

Jaap had been asked to help Dr Hans Georg Calmeyer, the civil administrator during the occupation of the Netherlands, who dealt with racial classification. Calmeyer ultimately decided whether someone was Jewish or not. His decision determined who was sent to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork and then on to labour or death camps.

Before he got involved, Jaap made several visits to The Hague to meet the officials who were dealing with this vital documentation:

Jaap was plausible because he was young, blonde and innocent-looking. Calmeyer approved of Jaap initially because he prepared a list of people who he felt were not worth saving. This impressed Calmeyer who believed in Jaap’s ‘“honest and loyal” work, and he trusted me as a professional, honest and trustworthy person from that time until the end of the War. (Little did he know that the names we gave him were of people who no longer existed.)’
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After the war, Calmeyer refused to accept he had been misled by Jaap. ‘But van Proosdij was always honest and had no part in those lies,’ he claimed.
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In 1942 the SS started urging Calmeyer to hasten the process of classification and fill a weekly deportation train holding 1,000 people. This policy was
relentlessly
pursued, reducing the Netherlands’ population of 140,000 Jews to 40,000 by September 1944, when the Arnhem allied offensive destroyed the railway lines. Jaap van Proosdij recalls one horrific occasion when, in desperation to fill their weekly Tuesday ‘quota’, the SS rounded up every man, woman and child – whether patient, medical staff or visitor – in the Jewish psychiatric hospital at Apeldoorn, and herded all 1,500 of them into the death train.
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Looking back, Jaap admitted they used an excellent forger and ‘faked marriage certificates, entered false birth certificates in church registers, and forged
baptismal
certificates and counterfeit papers attesting to secret adoptions which showed that the person had not been born Jewish’.
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This was all done at great personal risk; had he and the rest of the team been discovered at any time, they would have been executed. One particular girl whom he saved from Westerbork grew up to become a paediatrician and visited him in South Africa in the 1960s. He said it was a very emotional time and they talked well into the night about what had happened. He commented that it was the first time he had felt safe to talk about what he had done.
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Even before the war was over, Jaap was planning how to restore Jewish
property
to its owners. He set up a committee which, in effect, drafted the legislation and subsequently handled many cases. ‘We handled a lot of those cases – you should have seen how irritated the top lawyers got with me, this cheeky young upstart who had specialised in these laws.’
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Restitution work became his
speciality
until he emigrated in 1951. In South Africa he had to re-qualify and then had what he describes as ‘a low key practice’.
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With the war over, Jaap married his sister’s best friend in 1947. In 1951 they emigrated to South Africa – a country which in due course became a pariah state because of its racial policy. He notes: