The Other Schindlers (30 page)

Did these little old ladies end up hiding Jews? We don’t know about them. We do know about Henry Walton’s parents; we know about the Lovenheim book; we know about the people who were kind to Victor Klemperer and we
do
know that Mitzi did.

Victor Klemperer (1881–1960) was an academic who kept diaries of the Nazi years, which were published in 1999. Even though he had converted to Protestantism in 1912 and was married to an ‘Aryan’, he suffered the same gradual and serious deprivation as the other Jews. One of the Nazis’ first acts of
discrimination
was to remove Jews from the civil service, which covered education and universities. However, Klemperer was a decorated war veteran and was therefore allowed to keep his post until April 1935. By then, displaced Jewish academics had flooded the international arena and he found it impossible to find work
anywhere
. His diaries record the continual ‘mosquito bites’. ‘1,000 mosquito bites are worse than a blow to the head.’

He notes the loss of rights as follows: banned from library reading rooms (October 1936); forced to give up the telephone (December 1936); required to add ‘Israel’ or ‘Sara’ to given names (i.e. Klemperer must henceforth sign his name ‘Victor Israel’ – August 1938); restricted to shopping between 3 and 4 p.m. (August 1940); banned from owning a car (February 1941); ‘the milkmaid … is no longer allowed to deliver to Jews’ houses’ (March 1941); ‘new calamity: ban
on smoking for Jews’ (August 1941); required to surrender typewriters (‘That hit me hard, it is virtually irreplaceable’ – October 1941); banned from use of public telephones (December 1941); banned from the buying of flowers (March 1942); banned from keeping pets (‘This is the death sentence for Muschel’, their tomcat – May 1942); forbidden to provide for the teaching of Jewish children either privately or communally (July 1942); banned from purchase or possession of newspapers (July 1942); prohibited from purchase of eggs or vegetables (July 1942); prohibited from purchase of meat and white bread (October 1942). ‘Not a day without a new decree against Jews,’ Klemperer writes.

Yet at the same time he also notes the small acts of heroism he comes across from ordinary Germans. People greeting Jews on the street, visiting them at home, giving them ration coupons for the purchase of bread, helping to carry potatoes, slipping them something extra in a food shop, whispering a friendly word;
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small acts offering that small encouragement and hope.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn wrote of his father’s words about hope when they were incarcerated in Auschwitz. The prisoners in their block saved their precious
margarine
ration to enable them to celebrate Chanukah by lighting a home-made menorah. Hugo created wicks with the threads from an abandoned cap. On the first night of the eight-day festival everyone in their block gathered around, including Protestants and Catholics, and Hugo as the youngest there tried to light the wicks but they only spluttered and refused to light. No one had remembered that margarine does not burn. Hugo was distraught as much by the waste of the precious calories and turned on his father:

The current criteria for being recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations are very strict, involving having risked your life, but as we have seen many rescuers did a great deal without doing anything so risky. There is a whole gamut of help that ranges from leaving food on a doorstep at night to hiding someone for two and a half years like the Stenzels did with Else Pintus.

I came across the following text in 1997, written by Monia Avrahami, in the Beit Lohamei Haghetaot Museum, which is part of the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz. I have always found it very moving in describing the grades and levels of resistance and rescue:

The main impact of the small gesture was that it gave people hope and comfort, that they were not entirely alone in their dire plight. Rabbi Leo Baeck wrote a remarkable story about a package he received when he was in Theresienstadt: ‘Its contents had been removed and it was really only an empty cardboard box. But it gave me joy in the knowledge that someone had thought of me in exile. I recognized the sender, a Christian friend, by the handwriting, although he had used a fictitious name.’
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Ewa Berberyusz, a leading Polish journalist, born in 1929 in Warsaw, did not act and regretted it. She has written with disarming honesty of her failure to help Jews in the war, even though she was very young. She describes how twice she failed to help a Jewish child from the Ghetto when she had the opportunity. She adds that when she saw someone giving food to such a child, she felt relief that someone was doing the right thing, and when she saw her own mother doing it: ‘my morale soared again. It is interesting that we never talked about it at all. Was it just fear? Or was it just shame that nothing more was being done?’ In her 1987 essay, ‘Guilt by Neglect’, she reflects:

Leo Baeck’s comments on the economic boycott are significant and damning – they were also reflective, as they were written twenty years after the event. ‘In truth, justice was boycotted. The Jewish business community overcame that day a long time ago; the concept of justice has not overcome that day’. He continued:

The passivity and indifference of the authorities that day gave Hitler permission to undertake his next step against the Jews. Baeck felt the individuals did not fail and ‘The little people in Germany remained good’.
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Dr Frances Henry, a German-born anthropologist, returned to her birthplace in 1980. She conducted research in the small town which had 4,000 inhabitants in 1933, including 150 Jews. She protected her grandparents’ hometown by using the pseudonym Sonderburg, and many people spoke to her frankly because she was ‘Ostermann’s granddaughter’. She added: ‘If anything, their eagerness to talk to me was almost pathetic – as though they had never been able to discuss “those terrible times” with anyone before.’
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Henry discovered that before 1933, relations between the Jews and Germans were better than those between Catholics and Protestants.
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Yet when the Nazis came to power in January 1933, suddenly everything altered and Jews, in
particular
, realised that life had changed. Joshua Abraham had for many years met up with his male neighbours twice a week to play cards. ‘As soon as the Nazis came to power, I was no longer told when they were playing cards. Everything stopped. I would see them on the street and we pretended we didn’t see each other. Not one of them spoke to me.’
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In time, some non-Jews benefited from the persecution of their Jewish
neighbours
– Jewish homes and businesses were for sale at considerably less than their true worth. However, as life became more difficult for the twelve Jews who remained in Sonderburg after 1939, their neighbours started bringing them food, letters and other necessities until they were all deported in 1942.
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Dr Henry noted a variety of explanations for their behaviour:

Dr Henry found the post-war reality was that the non-Jews were very warm to returning Jews:

Willy Brandt wrote the foreword to Henry’s book. He commented that in the normal course of events these Jews and non-Jews would have got along well enough:

Dr Henry wrote that her research ‘shed light on some of the puzzling aspects of German behavior in the face of Nazism’. She concludes with what she calls a partial answer: ‘Perhaps in the long run we must be content with the basic explanation that some people are more humanitarian than others.’
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This opinion reinforces the views of Yehuda Bauer, who after examining the question of
rescuers
wrote: ‘In the end, beyond political and religious convictions, it was basic morality that counted. There were places where it was easier to be a moral person, moral in the sense that when you were challenged with, “thy brother’s blood is calling”, you answered, “I am here”.’
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The significant point is that Yehuda Bauer referred to ‘thy brother’, suggesting that no difference was made between the various peoples. He is suggesting that rescuers regard everyone as their brother. Men such as János Tóth certainly did not differentiate and, by his own admission, his action in saving Arnold Weinstock was so spontaneous that he had not considered the possible repercussions on himself and his family before defending Weinstock against a group of angry Hungarian Nazi soldiers.

When considering the proportion of bystanders to rescuers, it is important to realise that conditions for rescue varied in different countries. As Yehuda Bauer stated:

Yet even Bauer, with his considerable academic experience and knowledge, showed reservation about generalisations on the subject of rescuers:

The courage taken to defy both the Nazis and the peer pressure of the
community
should never be underestimated. As many historians have written, the Nazis had good supporters and collaborators, and in some cases the Nazis were shocked at the latter’s enthusiasm for the task: