The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (10 page)

Other than his father, who survived incarceration in three camps, all of Harry Zeimer’s family perished. After training as an engineer in Paris, Zeimer left for Israel in 1960. His rescuer, Tadeusz Wojtowicz, his wife and children, went to Australia, where Wojtowicz became Professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Hobart, Tasmania.

Boryslaw was another East Galician town with a substantial Jewish population. Among those saved there was a future Speaker of the Israeli parliament, Shewach Weiss. On 1 July 1941, when the Germans entered Boryslaw, local Ukrainians, supported by the Germans, started a day-long anti-Jewish pogrom in which three hundred Jews were killed. To escape the slaughter, the Weiss family sought refuge with a Ukrainian couple, Roman and Julia Schepaniuk, who took them all in: the two parents, their sons—Aaron, aged thirteen, and Shewach, aged six—and their nine-year-old daughter Mila. When the pogrom was over, the Weiss family returned to their home. However, in late November 1941 the Germans started periodic anti-Jewish ‘actions’ in Boryslaw, and at the beginning of 1942, following two mass killings of Jews in the town, the five members of the Weiss family decided to leave the Schepaniuk home and seek shelter with the Goral family. Michael Goral had been a friend of Shewach’s mother, Genya, before the war. Fifty-five years later, Shewach Weiss recalled: ‘On the first night we hid under Michael’s and Maria’s beds in the bedroom. In the following nights, we hid alternatively in the barn and in the stable, between and in the stalls. One day we were hiding in the granary, deep inside the straw, when the Gestapo suddenly entered, with their Ukrainian collaborators. They searched through the straw, picking it with their bayonets, while the Goral family watched. They did not utter a word and did not give us away, despite the certain death they were facing. Later we hid in a small prayer house that was built near the family’s farm, as is the custom among devoted Catholics. There, on a concrete floor, I hid with my mother and sister. My sister and I were hiding under the crucifix’s out-spread arms, wrapped around my mother. To this day I remember the lizards running over the chapel walls, and the envy I felt to these free creatures. I prayed silently. Let God turn me into a lizard.’
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As German and Ukrainian searches for Jews in hiding intensified—as they were throughout Eastern Galicia—Aaron Weiss and his father went out to look for an alternative hiding place. ‘Mrs Gorlova, a Ukrainian peasant woman,’ as Shewach Weiss recalled, let them hide inside her haystack. ‘We were under the hay,’ he recalled, ‘and over our heads a German soldier checked the contents of the haystack with his bayonet.’
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The heightened searches and killings culminated in the ‘big action’ on 4 August 1942, when all the remaining Jews of Boryslaw were ordered to leave their homes and live inside the newly designated ghetto. The Weiss family gave their house into the care of the Schepaniuk family and moved into the ghetto. Some time later they decided to leave the ghetto and find a permanent hiding place outside it. Julia Schepaniuk immediately agreed to take them in again. This time, they built a hiding place in the double wall of the storeroom. Two more relatives of the Weiss family joined them there, and later an eighth fugitive, Israel Bakhman. All eight lived in the one hideout, under the Schepaniuks’ devoted care.
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Schewach Weiss’s father had managed to take two books with him to their hideout: Alexandre Dumas’
The Count of Monte Cristo
, and an encyclopaedia. ‘Thanks to the Count of Monte Cristo,’ Weiss later recalled, ‘I, little Shewach, could become a famous Count right there in the burrow. Thanks to the small atlas attached to the encyclopaedia I could add to my knowledge and roam all over the world. These two books gave me the loveliest moments of light in the darkness that reigned around me. Puntrzela, our good-hearted neighbour, sometimes brought us old newspapers that she had obtained. Through her we tried to guess what was happening in the world out there. I used the clay at the bottom of the burrow to mould my toys—tanks, motorcycles, animals and anything else that I saw through the window in the ceiling.’
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For her selfless act in housing the fugitive Weisses, Julia Schepaniuk, like all those who had helped the family to survive, was later awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
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Also in Boryslaw, a Jewish couple, Zygmunt Kranz and his wife Franciszka, together with their three-year-old son Henryk, were warned by a Polish friend, Jozef Baran, that a deportation was imminent. Baran and his wife Eleonora offered to shelter the family until the danger had subsided; so that night the Kranz family made their way to the Barans’ house. Thereafter, what had begun as a humanitarian gesture became a protracted personal obligation. Zygmunt, who believed that as a worker in the German arms industry he would be able to go on living in the Horodyszcze Hill labour camp even after the ghetto had been liquidated, paid occasional visits to his wife and son in their hiding place. When the danger of discovery increased, Zygmunt and Baran dug a pit under the floor of the house to serve as a refuge. Later, a second hideout was dug in the courtyard of the house, and in January 1943 Zygmunt escaped from the labour camp and joined his wife and son. The fugitives were penniless, but Baran bought them a little food in exchange for their possessions. Eleanora assisted her husband in all that he did; she grew vegetables in the garden, in order to be able to feed the Jews in her care, and kept their existence secret from her children.

After liberation, for many years, the Kranz family sent the Barans a monthly stipend in gratitude for their ‘heroic selflessness’.
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Among the Jews who had reached Boryslaw when it was under Soviet rule after the German defeat of Poland in September 1939 was Izabela Hass, known as Zula. She and her brother Eidikus had been sent to Boryslaw by their parents from Bialystok, for safety, to live with their two aunts. But on 1 July 1941, the Germans entered Boryslaw and, as Zula and her brother hid with their aunts, searched for Jews and led them to their deaths. When the Einsatzgruppen returned in the spring of 1942—having killed thousands of Jews four months earlier—Zula’s aunts, one of whom was a doctor, realized they must find a hiding place outside their home. Zula recalled: ‘Aunt Rachela scanned the list of patients in search of those who would be most likely to hide us in their homes. She had ruled out Mr Lemecki who had been overheard saying that the Poles ought to thank Hitler for getting rid of the Jews. But it was that Mr Lemecki who volunteered to hide all of us in trunks kept in his cellar! This time the Jews had anticipated the
Aktion
and many had hidden. The Germans then resorted to a trick: they discontinued the round-up for twenty-four hours, thereby luring the fugitives, including us, into a trap. My aunts, Eidikus and I immediately returned to the Lemecki residence. But when we knocked on the door, we overheard Lemecki’s anti-Semitic mother say, “Hide these dirty Yids again? Never!’ Yet Lemecki saved our lives once more. When we returned to Boryslaw after two days in Lemecki’s cellar, many of our friends were missing. All of them had been sent to the extermination camp of Belzec. My hopes for survival were completely dashed and I wondered if my parents would ever see me again.’

Zula survived in the Boryslaw ghetto. But with each ‘action’ the number of Jews who remained alive dwindled, from thousands to only hundreds. A hiding place was constructed in the cellar of her aunts’ home. But it was clear that sooner or later—possibly very soon indeed, as Ukrainian policemen initiated search after search—it would be discovered. Zula recalled: ‘Some time in February 1943, Mrs Kowicki walked into Aunt Rachela’s office. She was clad in black and she told my aunt about the tragic death of her fifteen-year-old daughter. My aunt then asked Mrs Kowicki if she would be willing to save the life of a Jewish mother’s daughter in memory of her own daughter. When the bereaved mother said yes, I became the Kowickis’ “niece”, and they took me into their home. To legitimise the enterprise, all kinds of original and forged Aryan documents were purchased for me. These documents included the birth certificate of a dead Polish girl and I became Irena Borek.’

Zula’s account continued: ‘I loved my “Uncle Emil” and my “Aunt Sophie” but my stay there became precarious. Uncle Emil built a hideout for me over the veranda whose boards would be moved in the evening so that I could come in for the night. But one day neighbours inquired if it was true that the Kowickis were hiding a Jew in their house. In view of this new danger, a decision was made to have me live with Uncle Emil’s relatives in the town of Sanok. On 3 June 1943, I was secretly baptized, given the rosary beads and prayer books of Janka, the Kowickis’ daughter, and taught the essentials of the catechism. I was told that St Mary would now save me. I was only fourteen years old and I had to pretend so many things. Would I be able to do it? I was now the daughter of Wladyslaw and Olga Borek née Partyka, Polish patriots whom the Soviets had exiled to Siberia.’

Danger lurked at every stage. ‘When Uncle Emil and I entered the train to Sanok, I found a patient of my aunt staring at me. Will she give me away? Please, St Mary, don’t let her do it! Then a German gendarme boarded the train, took one look at me and declared, “Du bist doch eine Jüdin!” (You surely are a Jewess!) Over and over, Uncle Emil insisted that I was a Polish Catholic girl, his niece. My papers were carefully checked while Aunt Rachela’s patient remained quiet. The documents passed the test, yet when I saw the quizzical expressions on the other passengers’ faces I thought, “They all know that I’m Jewish.” But I said, “This is not the first time that I’ve been mistaken for a Jew.” Then I stood by the window and felt nothing, nothing at all until we arrived in Sanok.’

Each moment of rescue could have its terrors, of the soul as well as of the body. ‘Walking uphill towards my new home, I saw that the pavement beneath our feet bore Hebrew inscriptions. When I realized that these were Jewish gravestones, my soul began to cry. Shocked by the bleak reality, I felt like a trapped animal. There stood an outhouse by the side of the road and I dashed to it, locking myself in. I saw no sense in going on and looked for ways to end my life. But Uncle Emil kept reassuring me that I would be safe. There were trees and flowers around the house, and within this serenity I began to believe that maybe I will survive. The following Sunday I went to church with my new family. I was a careful observer, mimicking the melodious prayers and the cadence of standing and kneeling. That afternoon I returned to the empty church and, standing in front of the statue of St Mary, I pleaded with her for my life, making vows of gratitude: “Save me…please save me…If you do, I will believe in you until the day I die.” Gradually, my fears disappeared. People treated me with kindness but, of course, they were not aware of my true identity. Time and time again, I saw Jews being led to their death. There were no longer any enclaves of Jews in Sanok, so I imagined with dread that they had been discovered in their hideouts in Polish homes.’

Liberation came in the summer of 1944 with the arrival of the Soviet troops. Zula remained with the family that had saved her life. Then, more than a year later, in October 1945, she learned that her sister Rena had survived the concentration camps in Germany. She had returned to Poland and was living with the two aunts, who had also survived, and then lived in that part of Germany annexed by Poland after the war. They wanted Zula to join them, but, she later wrote: ‘How was I, an ardent Catholic, going to live within a family of Jews? Since my parents and the rest of my Jewish family had all been killed, I decided to remain a Polish Catholic for the rest of my life. I went to Walbrzych and told my sister that I would not go with her to Germany and wherever else she would go from there. Rena and I parted our ways forever.’
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Zula Hass lived the whole of her post-war life as Catholic. She married a Polish Catholic, a future member of the Polish government and Minister of Public Works. Both their son and their daughter became leading Polish physicians. Only some fifty-five years after the war had ended did Zula reach out to her Jewish past. As her sister Rena—a retired high-school biology teacher in the United States—has written: ‘She has joined the organization of Children of the Holocaust in Warsaw and she has allowed us to tell her son and daughter the truth. The son alone chose to acknowledge his Jewish heritage. In August 1999, he joined his Jewish-American cousins in saying “Kaddish” at Majdanek’s mass grave, which contained the ashes of his Jewish grandfather.’
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For many Jews like Zula, rescue involved eventual conversion to Christianity, absorption in the new faith, and a sense of belonging to the religion of the rescuers. It was the price—the penalty, from a strictly Orthodox Jewish perspective—that was paid hundreds, even thousands, of times for the gift of life.

THE CITY OF
Brzezany lay in the centre of Eastern Galicia. The history of the relationship between Poles, Jews and Ukrainians in the town from 1919 to 1945 has recently been written by Shimon Redlich. He ends the acknowledgements to his book by thanking Karol Codogni and Tanka Kontsevych, ‘without whom I would not have survived to tell the story. It is to them, for their humaneness in the midst of barbarism, that this book is dedicated.’
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Shimon Redlich was five years old when the Jews of Brzezany were forced into a ghetto. At the time of one of the ‘Actions’ in which hundreds of Jews were rounded up and killed, he was hiding in an attic with his mother and his grandparents. After a while, the heat in the attic with its tin roof became unbearable, and the occupants began to leave, looking for better hiding places. ‘One night my mother took me by the hand and we walked into a neighbouring village,’ he later wrote. ‘The stalks in the wheat field were high, smelling with the ripeness of summer. We knocked on a few doors, but nobody wanted to let us in. We returned to the attic and stayed there.’ Many years later he read of what had happened to a young girl, Hermina, who was with them in that attic. ‘This girl went downstairs one day and was intercepted by people who came to loot the deserted house. She bribed them and they let her go. It’s a miracle that we weren’t denounced by all those who left the attic and were, probably, caught by the Germans. Remaining in the attic now was our foursome, another boy my age with his grandmother and a single old lady. Our immediate problem was finding food.’