The Other Schindlers (7 page)

Maas said that England was the best place for them and that he visited London each month to meet Quakers to make arrangements for people like Paul and his sister. However, when Paul asked if his mother could be included, Maas said the priority was children and young people. Maas asked about their financial
position
and when Paul admitted it was not good, he put 15
DM
on the table for him to pick up and said if he needed more whilst waiting to leave just to send him a postcard and specify the amount. ‘As I left, he told me he would contact me by post as soon as he had any information. I expressed my heartfelt appreciation and left with the deep impression that I had encountered an angel disguised as a human being.’
109

True to his word, Pastor Maas told them that Martha would leave on 12 June 1939, from Frankfurt, on one of the Kindertransports. Within a week they heard that she was safely installed with a Mrs Kennedy – a widow in Ayrshire. Meanwhile, Paul had all his papers ready except for the precious exit permit. As he became impatient, he returned to the Jewish Community Centre to seek help. The response of the official left Paul speechless:

Paul had to leave his mother behind hoping that he would be able to get her out later – but she was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. At the railway station as he left, he saw on the news-stand what he describes as ‘a typical Nazi send off. “We are happy to announce the departure from this country of the Jew Rosenzweig. Good riddance! One less mouth to feed.”’
111

One of the truly remarkable and brave things Hermann Maas did was to fix a Mezuzah
112
to the door post of his home, which indicated to all Jews that they would be safe with him. He wrote of that time: ‘with full consciousness I at that time wove my own life and fate closely into that of the terrible fate of the Jewish people.’
113
He was remarkably courageous and:

Pastor Hermann Maas was part of a network of Christians who, at enormous personal risk, helped those proscribed by the Nazis. The network was led by Heinrich Grüber, who was one of the leaders of the Confessing Church – the part of the German Christian Church that fought Hitler’s attempts to subvert their faith. ‘Hitler appeared to many inside the Christian church as the saviour of a nation threatened by godless Bolshevism and eroded in its confidence by bad government, international Jewish finance and the will of its former enemies to keep it in subjection.’ These Christians were happy to press for the adoption of the Aryan clause in the Church. ‘That clause, introduced to exclude from the civil service all of Jewish or partly Jewish descent, could now be used to extrude all Christian ministers having any Jewish blood at all. It was in opposition to this that Dietrich Bonhoeffer first took his stand.’
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Pastor Grüber was born of a Dutch mother in the Rhineland and in 1938, when he took the civil servant’s oath of allegiance to Hitler – now also demanded of the clergy – he added the reservation ‘as long as it does not conflict with the evident will of God’. He gradually found himself involved in helping non-Aryan Christians and after Kristallnacht he became fully committed to this work – eventually employing thirty-five people at his Büro Grüber. Bonhoeffer met George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (1883–1958), in 1933 and came to call him ‘Uncle George’. As a result of their friendship and mutual respect, in spite of the twenty-three-year age gap, Bonhoeffer regarded George Bell as one of the two major influences on him, and ‘it was to George Bell of Chichester that Bonhoeffer sent the last message of his life as he was led away to the place of execution’ on 9 April 1945.
116

As a result of this relationship, George Bell became a leading influence on British public opinion, and subsequently, in 1937, his sister-in-law Laura Livingstone went to work in Berlin on behalf of non-Aryan Christians and joined Heinrich Grüber’s Büro. She wrote about those times and concluded that whilst the November 1938 pogrom – her description of Kristallnacht – had terrible repercussions for Jews:

They worked extremely closely with the Quakers and, according to Brenda Bailey, Pastor Grüber’s ‘principal partner in Britain was Bertha Bracey’.
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Hermann Maas was one of his collaborators across Germany. In 1938 he warned a gathering of Confessional Church clergy that ‘Christianity in Germany had become quite as much an alien as were the Jews’.

On 19 December 1940 Pastor Grüber was arrested and confined at Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two and a half years. He was fortunate – his deputy, Pastor Sylten, was taken to Dachau in February 1941 where he died in 1942, and seven other members of Grüber’s staff also died.
119
Heinrich Grüber survived the war to be a witness at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
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Maas too was not forgotten. He was stopped from doing his parish work during the war and could not even visit schools, hospitals or prisons.

In 1944 the Nazis shipped the 67-year-old clergyman, his wife and younger daughter to a labour camp in occupied France. He was liberated by the Americans in 1945 and maintained his devotion to Jewish matters by
attending
the synagogue in Heidelberg on the High Holidays and even fasting on the Day of Atonement.
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Both Hermann Maas and Pastor Grüber became actively involved in the early years of the creation of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) and attended the first international conference in Oxford in 1946, whose report was called ‘Freedom, Justice and Responsibility’. There were 150
participants
from all five continents and it is recorded: ‘Among them were two Christian pastors from Germany, Probst. Grüber from Berlin and Hermann Maas from Heidelberg. Writing of their presence many years later one of the Jewish
participants
described it as “profoundly impressive – one might say traumatic”.’
122

The CCJ had grown out of the British Council of Christians and Jews, which in turn had been born out of co-operation between Christians and Jews in Britain to help the victims of Nazi persecution.
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It was altogether appropriate that these two courageous men should have been part of this innovative group, with their old friend Rabbi Leo Baeck now settled in London. In 1947 Maas wrote to Martha, expressing his delight in the success of her and Paul’s emigration to England. He ended the letter:

Hermann Maas was the first German invited to visit the new State of Israel in 1949, and in 1953 a small grove of trees was planted at Mount Gilboa in his honour which particularly pleased him.
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Hermann died in September 1970.

Martha herself was present with her brother Paul and her husband Ron Mower when the Hermann Maas Foundation was launched in Heidelberg in 1988 by four private individuals. She wished to express her feelings about him by saying, ‘I have travelled to Heidelberg to honour this man who was our friend when we so badly needed a friend.’
126

The foundation’s constitution specifies its aim ‘to foster Christian-Jewish
co-operation
on a broad international base’. One method was to grant a German theology student the opportunity to study at a university in Israel. Dr Meister, one of the founders, described Maas as ‘an admirable person with great charisma’.
127

It was subsequently decided that with the support of the Hermann Maas Foundation, the Hermann Maas Medal would be awarded every four years in Gengenbach, Maas’ birthplace. The recipients were to be individuals who had distinguished themselves in the promotion of understanding between Christians and Germans.

In 1995, in Heidelberg’s twin city Rehovot in Israel, a street was named after Hermann Maas.

Sadly, Ron Mower, my main informant, died in 2004, and Martha’s brother Paul, whose unpublished memoir proved invaluable, died in September 2009. However, I have had contact with his son Paul, who was pleased to hear that their story is being told.

Hermann was always modest about himself, and would no doubt be shocked by the level of attention and the honours he has received posthumously. When Alfred Werner asked him for additional biographical information in 1948, he sent it with a note which roughly translates as ‘Am I really worthy of so much effort?’

Valérie Rácz (1911–97)
, known as Vali, was a Catholic woman whose career as a singer had always been intertwined with Jews. She was also an actress and made twenty films between 1936 and 1956 and simply oozed glamour. She was known as the ‘Hungarian Marlene Dietrich’. Her father, Ferenc Rácz, was headmaster of a village school but had a peasant background, and her mother, Gizella Sohonyay, was a member of the old Hungarian gentry. They had moved to Gölle, a farming village in south-west Hungary, after their marriage in 1910.

Ferenc had run away from his family when he was 14. He was the youngest of twelve children and the only one who did not want a peasant’s life. He was taken in by a parish priest in another village who began to educate him, and eventually his parents relented and agreed to pay the priest to look after him and continue his education. When they moved to Gölle he became both teacher and cantor. ‘He was very religious, and this may have been at least partly due to the fact that it was the Church, in the form of his erstwhile priest-mentor, which had provided him with an escape route from the peasant life, and the alternative he so desperately sought.’
128

Vali’s career as a singer was very influenced by Jews. As a young woman she was a skilled pianist but it was her singing voice which captivated people. Soon after her graduation she was asked to entertain a guest in her parents’ home. He was Géza Wéhner, who was a professor at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, and also chief organist at Budapest’s vast Dohány Street synagogue. She so impressed him that he invited her to audition at the Budapest Music Academy, and in September 1932 she left her home village to embark on her remarkable career. Géza Wéhner was the first of many influential Jewish figures who played a decisive role in shaping Vali’s career. Another Jew who had a strong influence was Paul Ábrahám, a successful composer of operettas and film scores. It was through him that she got her first big break – singing at the famous Budapest haunt of the jet set: the Negrescó café. This led to a two-year stint at the famous Budapest revue theatre – the Terézkörúti. Here she was one of the few
non-Jewish
performers and worked with some of the most talented artists of the day. This period must have been formative in her attitude towards Jews.
129

The famous Jewish couturier Sándor Gergely offered to design a dress for her early in her career, on condition that if she liked it she would have all her stage dresses made at his salon. She accepted and the resulting dress was a sensation because it was so unlike other singers’ normal outfits. Gergely took her under his wing and ‘dressed her as if she were one of his models, in creations as stunning and flattering as anything to be found in Paris’. These dresses were the source of reminiscences for decades.
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Gergely was more perceptive than most of his co-religionists over the
introduction
, in 1941, of the Third Jewish Law: