Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
The Other Schindlers (32 page)
On his return he was appalled to find Hertha dressed in black. She said that five days after he had left, former local SS men had heard that the Fuchs had sheltered Jews. They had shot Mr Fuchs and one of the other Jews also being sheltered. The second Jew had survived to go to Israel. In 2002 Roman returned to see Mrs Fuchs with a television crew – she was 94. He asked her then why she had taken the three Jewish fugitives in when it had cost her so dear with the loss of her husband:
She answered that both she and her husband felt they had to do it. ‘You see although we are Germans, we were not Nazis; our minds were not poisoned by the twelve years of propaganda, and all the Nazi screeching against the Jews. It was our impulse to do this, to take you in and save you. You would do the same, I think, Roman.’
Roman has written:
I replied that after the wonderful example she and Kurt had shown, I would like to think that I would do the same. But I know that it is easier to say yes than to do it. I often ask myself if I would have the courage, the sense of what is right and is wrong; the humanity to take in strangers and save them, when such an act was punishable by death for all. I would like to believe that I would.
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The veteran war reporter Max Hastings has written: ‘Some of us feel too
uncertain
of how we ourselves would have behaved under occupation to pass merciless judgment on France’s aesthetes for their dalliances with tyranny.’
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When we read about rescuers, we always assume we would not hesitate to do the same – but would we? Would we also risk the lives of our children or, like Vytautas’ wife, protest about the danger they were being put in. Personally, in my own life, I have found myself involved in a discussion of this subject twice, not instigated by me on either occasion. Both times were when I lived in a Worcestershire village, and was conspicuous as the mother of the only Jewish family. On one occasion Vicky, a very devout Christian woman, volunteered that she and her husband would have, or even would, hide me and my sons. Sadly, she died aged 45 of breast cancer. On the other occasion, a woman, whose children were of similar ages and good chums of my three young sons, casually remarked that she would not risk her kids to protect me and mine. It is perhaps a perfectly
reasonable comment that any mother might make, but I know I felt stunned and numbed. Rightly or wrongly, I never felt the same about her again.
Philip Gourevitch, the child of Holocaust survivors, and a staff writer on the
New Yorker
, has commentated on the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwandan massacres. He admits he was very critical of the creation of the Washington Holocaust Museum.
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He declares that nobody knows how they would respond in a similar crisis:
You cannot know. People like to go to the Holocaust Museum and say, that’s who I relate to, the guy who did right. Either they relate somehow to the victim and feel bad about themselves and sorry for themselves, or they relate to the good guy. Very few go in there and say, oh yeah I probably would have been just like an ordinary conformist Nazi murderer, right? But probably the great majority of people who go through that museum would have been, because that’s what the great majority of people in Europe were. They were either bystanders, collaborators, or in some other way morally reprehensible positions which are all too understandable.
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J.D. Salinger, author of
Catcher in the Rye
, was a liberator of Dachau concentration camp, which had a profound impact on him. Margaret Salinger quotes him as saying: ‘anyone could turn out to be a Nazi – your neighbor, your babysitter, the man at the post office – anyone. And anyone could be a hero; you never knew until it happened who would be a hero and who would be a coward or traitor.’
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An American professor posted some ‘mischievous questions about the Holocaust’, of which the third was about the paucity of rescuers given the risks:
And now, turning inward, if we ask ourselves who among our relatives or friends – not strangers, which the Jews often were in the misfortunes of war, but people close to us – if we ask who in this circle of ours we could rely on for such help if the penalty were probable death for the person and possibly also for his family: how large would this number be? To what extent could we honestly include ourselves in this?
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It is important, however, to remember the context in which these events occurred. It is misleading for us to nonchalantly glance backwards from the safety of 2010. Ian Kershaw reminds us that we are studying extraordinary times:
For an outsider, a non-German who never experienced Nazism, it is perhaps too easy to criticize, to expect standards of behaviour which it was well impossible to attain in the circumstances. I have consciously strived to avoid making
over-simplistic
, moralizing judgements. And where I have been critical, I have still tried
above all to understand sympathetically the position of ordinary people living under such a regime, to recognize the art of the possible.
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He describes his book as being about the ‘muddled majority, neither full-hearted Nazis nor outright opponents’:
But I would claim it accords much more than most depictions of Nazi society with the unclear attitudes and inconsistent behaviour of ordinary Germans during the Nazi tyranny. I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about.
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Christopher Browning, an eminent Holocaust historian, has written about the behaviour of Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg, whose task was to shoot Jews in Poland in 1942 – he was able to see the papers regarding 210 men out of less than 500 sent to Poland in June 1942. He shows that the battalion over the period of July 1942 to November 1943 was responsible for shooting a minimum of 38,000 Jews and deporting a minimum of 45,200 to Treblinka in the period August 1942 to May 1943.
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Readers should be aware that it has been calculated that 50 per cent of the victims of the Holocaust died in the six main extermination camps; 25 per cent in the ghettos, labour and other camps, and death marches; and the remaining 25 per cent were shot.
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Browning wrote:
Never before had I encountered the issue of choice so dramatically framed by the course of events and so openly discussed by at least some of the perpetrators. Never before had I seen the monstrous deeds of the Holocaust so starkly juxtaposed with the human faces of the killers.
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I found much of what was done extremely upsetting and have chosen not to reproduce it. There are also descriptions of the infamous ‘Jew Hunts’ in rural areas where any discovered Jews were made to lie on the ground naked and were shot in the neck:
I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader – both were human – if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving.
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He concluded with difficulty as the story made him uneasy:
This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.
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As the letter from the regional German civil administrator Carl Slutsk
demonstrates
, not all Germans chose to be involved in such barbarity and opted out. Even on the Reserve Police Battalion’s first task dealing with the 1,800 Jews of Józefów there was no compulsion. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was struggling with his emotions when he told his men they had to take the men of working age to a work camp, but ‘The remaining Jews – the women, children and elderly – were to be shot on the spot by the battalion. Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him he could step out.’
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However, in time, the use of alcohol and becoming accustomed to their task desensitised the men. Browning considers the influence of peer pressure on men who opted out and the others who volunteered readily.
Another study referred to the dehumanising of the Jews, desensitising the
perpetrator
. A rescuer called Otto described how he asked a guard in a camp whether he had used his gun to kill anyone. The guard said: ‘Once I had to shoot six Jews. I did not like it but when you get such an order, you have to be hard.’ He added: ‘You know, they were not human anymore.’ Otto speculated that the conditions of filth and starvation in the camps, where the Jews had no names or dignity, made them ‘skin-colored skeletons’. The guard was right; ‘It is much easier to kill non-humans than humans’.
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We can now read about individuals who tried to change the course of history and persuade powerful bodies to speak out against the atrocities – of course we now know they were unsuccessful, but they tried. We can only speculate on what would have happened had their efforts met with success.
Such cowardice contrasts with the courage found in the actions of James Grover McDonald, an American diplomat who was the High Commissioner for Refugees at the League of Nations 1933–35, and who protested about the situation of the Jews in the mid-1930s. His papers were recently presented to
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by his daughters, Barbara McDonald Stewart and Janet McDonald Barrett, in April 2004. His importance is twofold – partly because his long diplomatic career led him to meet most of the key players on the world stage over a long period, but also because he noted every meeting in his diaries, which he kept assiduously from 1922 to 1936 and then again from 1946 to 1951. He dictated his entries to his secretary and so the
collection
consists of over 10,000 typed pages and 5,000 pages of correspondence.
The Times
reported McDonald’s note of the views of Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1928–42), whom he met just before the Second World War. Lang had suggested that the Jews themselves ‘might be responsible for the excesses of the Nazis’. In a similar vein, Nancy Astor, the leader of the ‘Cliveden Set’ which had favoured appeasement of Hitler, asked him: ‘Did I not after all believe that there must be something in the Jews themselves which had brought them persecution throughout all the ages?’ She suggested it was really their fault. McDonald noted: ‘To this I took violent exception.’
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His views on Roosevelt were generous as he described him as being keen to do more, but with the Depression and high US unemployment it was difficult for him to open the doors to many immigrants.
He became aware of the reality of Nazi policy very early. On Tuesday 4 April 1933 his diary records a meeting with two Nazi officials, ostensibly to discuss their economic programme. After fifteen minutes’ discussion they:
drifted back to the subject of the Jews, which seems to be an obsession with so many of the Nazis … The casual expressions used by both men in speaking of the Jews were such as to make one cringe, because one would not speak so of even a most degenerate people.
When I indicated my disbelief in their racial theories, they said what other Nazis had said, ‘But surely you, a perfect type of Aryan, could not be unsympathetic with our views’ … I had the impression that they really do set unbelievable store by such physical characteristics as long heads and light hair.
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McDonald would not have been surprised at Pope Pius XII’s subsequent controversial behaviour, because when he met him in 1933, when he was Cardinal Pacelli, the cardinal was more concerned with the plight of Bavarian Catholics than German Jews. What was not recorded in
The Times
’ article was that McDonald resigned from his post as High Commissioner for Refugees (Jewish and Other) Coming from Germany at the League of Nations on 27 December 1935 because of the League’s failure to respond adequately to the situation of the Jews in Germany.
He had written in his diary on 25 November:
I then explained to him [Viscount Robert Cecil, a League of Nations founder] what I had in mind in connection with my letter of resignation [as High Commissioner] to the Secretary General, that I intended in that to speak with complete frankness about affairs in Germany which are making for the destruction of the whole of the Jewish people and in addition a certain number of non-Aryans.
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His letter of resignation was published the day he delivered it and runs to six manuscript-sized pages, explaining his concerns over what was happening to ‘non-Aryans’ in Germany. In addition, there was a thirty-four-page annex which McDonald described as ‘containing an analysis of the measures in Germany against “Non-Aryans”, and of their effects in creating refugees’.
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The annex is quite remarkable in detailing the Germans’ gradual deprivation of rights of German citizens who were regarded as members of the ‘non-Aryan race’, and giving details of all the legislation. There are also two tables showing how one’s Jewishness would be determined from baptised Jewish parents and from a mixed marriage. According to these tables, the fourth generation from baptised parents would be Aryan but the third generation was Aryan from a mixed marriage.
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