The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (14 page)

ON
12
JULY
1944 the surviving eight thousand Jews in the Kovno ghetto were ordered to assemble, and were then taken by train to the concentration camp at Stutthof, near Danzig. Hundreds tried to evade being taken and hid, only to be dragged out of their hiding places by German soldiers and hostile Lithuanians. Many were murdered in the streets. In the midst of this carnage, Jan Pauvlavicius, a Lithuanian carpenter, who had already taken several Jews into hiding, including a four-year-old boy, dug an underground hiding place next to his cellar for yet more Jews. He equipped the cellar with two bunks, on which eight people could lie, and made a small opening to the vegetable garden above, to provide the hideout with air.

Dr Tania Ipp, one of those whom Pauvlavicius saved, later recalled: ‘He was like a father to us—a man only to be admired.’ As well as hiding nine Jews in the hole that he had dug next to his cellar, Pauvlavicius also found refuge elsewhere for two Soviet prisoners of war who had escaped from a German camp, and for another young Jewish boy.
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One of those whom Pauvlavicius saved was a Jewish woman, Miriam Krakinowski, who had managed to break away from the line of deportees in the confusion of the moment. On reaching Pauvlavicius’s house she had been taken into the cellar, whereupon Pauvlavicius took a broom, swept aside the wood shavings covering a small trapdoor, and knocked on the floor. ‘I saw a small door being pushed up,’ Miriam Krakinowski later recalled. ‘He told me to go down the steps. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I didn’t say anything. Gradually the room became lighter, and I found myself in a very small, hot room filled with half-naked Jews. I began to cry as they asked questions about the fate of the ghetto.’

The Jews hidden in Pauvlavicius’s cellar remained there for the next three weeks, until the day of liberation. ‘After liberation,’ Miriam Krakinowski recalled, ‘Pauvlavicius was killed by Lithuanians who hated him for saving Jews.’
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He was actually murdered by one man.

That someone should be murdered by his fellow villagers, his fellow nationals—his fellow human beings—for an act of kindness (some would say, nobility) is hard to contemplate. Yet such incidents were repeated again and again. The story of Mykolas Simelis—as narrated by an American of Lithuanian origin, Benjamin Lesin—is another blot on the landscape of modern civilization. ‘During the war, fourteen Jews, mostly strangers, found their way to Simelis’s farm. He hid them and fed them, while he could barely feed his own family. He took care of their needs at great peril to himself and his young family. Indeed, his five small children, the oldest only eight years old, were robbed of their childhood because they could no longer play with the neighbourhood children. They had always to stay near their own farm in order to warn of any approaching neighbours or strangers.’

Benjamin Lesin, after recounting the family’s story, writes: ‘Had this been all their sacrifices, it would have been significant and noteworthy. However, this was only the beginning. In 1944 Mykolas’s wife, Jadvyga, became pregnant with their sixth child. Not to further complicate life on the farm with their fourteen guests, Jadvyga chose an abortion. She died of complications in April 1944. After the War with the reoccupation of Lithuania by the USSR, bands of Lithuanian Nationalists roamed the countryside. They were convinced that anyone who rescued Jews had to be Communist, an enemy. In July 1945, Mykolas Simelis was murdered by them. The children grew up in an orphanage.’
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A
S THE KILLINGS
in the East continued, in those parts of Poland conquered by Germany in 1939 the Jews remained confined to ghettos, segregated from the local population and forced to wear a distinctive Star of David badge; their food was reduced to such meagre rations that thousands died every month. Not only was any Jew leaving the ghettos there ‘liable to the death penalty’—in the words of a decree of 15 October 1941—but, the decree added: ‘The same penalty applies to persons who knowingly shelter such Jews.’
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That penalty was ruthlessly applied throughout the territory of the General-Government, the German-ruled administration established after the conquest of Poland, with its capital in Cracow. ‘My parents suffered death for having kept Jews,’ recalled Henryk Woloszynowicz of Waniewo. ‘My father was murdered on the spot, my mother was taken and murdered at Tykocin.’
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The memorial book for the town of Skierniewice recorded: ‘Sometimes a mere gesture of sympathy shown to those persecuted could easily cost a life. Thus, the Germans organized a public execution of fifty Jews in Mlawa in April 1942. All the inhabitants of the town were herded together to watch this grim spectacle for the purpose of “racial education”. One of the Poles who could not control his feelings began to shout: “Down with Hitler! Innocent blood is being shed!” The Germans seized him and shot him dead on the spot.’
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A month later, in the town of Czarny Dunajec, in the Nowy Targ district, a local notice recorded: ‘Three persons (a Pole from Wroblowka and two Jews from Czarny Dunajec), names identified; shot by the Gestapo; the Pole for supplying food to Jews. Bodies buried in the Jewish cemetery.’
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In Sosnowiec, Frieda Mazia witnessed the public execution of two women, one a Christian and the other a Jew. A Jewish mother had bought an egg from a Polish peasant, determined that her child would not die of hunger. This normally innocuous act was seen and reported to the German authorities, and both the mother and the peasant woman were hanged. The two bodies were left hanging in public for a few days, ‘so one couldn’t avoid seeing them—if we wanted to go out we had to pass them.’
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Such terrifying punishment did not deter those whose instinct was to save. Also in Sosnowiec, Maria Dyrda protected a five-year-old girl, Mira Rembiszewska, whose parents had been deported. She kept the young girl safe until liberation, when her parents returned to claim her.
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Many Polish-born survivors of the Holocaust express scepticism about the extent of Polish help to the Jews, and unease at too great a focus on the Righteous. During a discussion about the Righteous in Poland, Benjamin Meed, an eyewitness and a survivor of the German attempt to destroy Polish Jewry, commented: ‘More Jews were saved by Jews than by non-Jews.’ In Warsaw, he added, ‘most of the bunkers on the “Aryan” side were built by Jews. They could not trust the Poles to bring in materials.’ Ben Meed’s wife Vladka, also a survivor, reflected: ‘The percentage of the Righteous was so small compared with the numbers of Jews who were killed.’
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Poles who risked their own lives to save Jews were indeed the exception. Yet they could be found throughout Poland, in every town and village. The memorial at Belzec death camp commemorates not only six hundred thousand Jews but also fifteen hundred Poles ‘who tried to save Jews’.
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In as many as a thousand locations, often small, insignificant places on the map through which today’s tourist drives quickly, almost without noticing them, someone, some family, was willing to risk their life.

Wladislaw Misiuna lived in Radom during the war. He was eighteen when it began. ‘This man surely did something that is against human nature,’ writes Baruch Sharoni, who served on the Yad Vashem committee that designates the Righteous, ‘as he decided to infect himself with a terrible skin disease, in order to go to a Polish doctor and get medicines, to share them with a Jewish girl, and save them both.’ Misiuna also stole food for the ten Jewish girls who were working under his supervision in a rabbit-breeding farm belonging to the commander of an ammunition factory in the city. Misiuna also did the girls’ laundry in order to avoid the spread of infectious diseases.
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In the village of Bobolice, near the town of Zarki, Andrzej Kolacz, his daughter Stanislawa, his son Joseph, his daughter-in-law Helena and his one-year-old granddaughter opened their small dwelling to Jews desperate to avoid deportation and death. One of those Jews, Joseph Dauman, later wrote: ‘The entire house consisted of one large room, an adjacent chicken coop, a barn where a horse and one cow were placed. We, my sister Rachel and myself, stayed in the adjacent cubicle that had only an opening for light and air instead of a window. In the month of June, a third person joined us, this was our older sister Cywia Jonisz. About 7 August 1943 came three more family members.’

In September 1943 two more members of Joseph Dauman’s family, having escaped from the concentration camp at Pionki, asked Andrzej Kolacz to take them in. As there was no room for the two newcomers, he took them to his sister’s house in the same village. Still more Jews in flight sought refuge at the Kolacz home. In August 1944 Joseph Dauman’s sister Zissel arrived, with her two sons, Eli and Mendl, and her daughter Tsila. The burden on the Kolacz family was considerable, and increasing. Their one cow gave only a small amount of milk a day. Joseph Dauman recalled: ‘There was no water well in that village, Bobolice. The nearest well was two kilometres away in the village of Mirow and in summer and in winter, rain or snow, the fourteen—later fifteen and sixteen—year-old girl, Stanislawa Kolacz, was carrying water pails to provide the family and us with water. One had to be careful that neighbours should not wonder at the Kolacz family using too much water, a sign of perhaps hiding some people. The same fear was in acquiring food. Apart from the difficulties to buy food, we knew how careful the Kolacz family had to act when buying food, as well as bringing water to the house.’
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The family continued to feed and protect those in hiding until the day of liberation. Yet, as one of the youngsters saved, Eli Zborowski, later recalled, the family that had saved twelve Jews had to leave the village after the war ‘because of the attitude of the population, who were furious with them for hiding Jews. That is why they are no longer living in Bobolice.’
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Many rescuers lived in poverty. Before being taken in by the Kolacz family, Zissel Zborowski, her two sons Eli and Mendl, and her daughter Tsila had been hidden for twenty months in another village by the Placzek family. ‘They were very poor people,’ Eli Zborowski later recalled. ‘We paid for the basic foodstuffs. Since they only had coupons for the three of them, it was very difficult to feed seven mouths.’ Yet this peasant family did just that. Josef Placzek, a builder, built them two hiding places, a wooden one in the attic with a double wall, and one in the cellar with a double brick wall. There was no window, Eli Zborowski recalled, ‘only an opening the size of two bricks for light and air. As difficult as it was to feed a family of three, the Placzek couple and an eight-or nine-year-old daughter found ways to get food for us. The food was very, very limited but thanks to their dedication we did not starve, even though we often felt hungry. While it was fraught with danger, the little girl was entrusted with the fact that Jews were hidden in the house. Once a day, in the evening, at curfew time, Mr Placzek would come up to the attic to tell us some news and empty the chamber pot.’

In August 1944 a German policeman warned the Placzeks ‘that neighbours were carrying rumours about Jews hiding in the Placzek home. One week after we left the place, German and Polish police came to the Placzek home looking for the Zborowski family. How lucky we were!! We know, all too well, what would have happened to us and to the Placzek family had the police come a week earlier and found us there.’
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Another peasant couple, Jan and Maria Wikiel, took into their farm near Wegrow a young Jewish couple, Lonia and Sevek Fishman, who had married in the Warsaw Ghetto, and then managed to escape. ‘With bloody fingernails,’ Lonia Fishman later recalled, ‘we dug a dank cellar “grave”—lined it with straw, and lay motionless in the hole, concealed from danger for eighteen months. Jan and Maria risked their lives by bringing us food and emptying our chamber pot every day. Once a week they sponged us down.’ After liberation, the young couple had to relearn how to walk after their long confinement.
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Polish peasants could take the gravest risks to save a total stranger. Kazimierz and Janina Bialy were impoverished farmers in a remote village in the Lomza district of eastern Poland. When a Jewish woman, Estera Klejnot, escaped from a deportation train to Treblinka and arrived, utterly exhausted, at their small farm, they took her in without hesitation, and hid her in their barn. Soon afterwards a Jewish family whom the farmers had known before the war, Arje Chazan, his wife and three children, also came to their door. When Mrs Chazan and her eldest son went into a nearby village to look for food, they were spotted as Jews, denounced by local Poles and killed. After this, the Bialys insisted that the husband and younger children stay with them. Arje Chazan later recalled: ‘They scarcely had food for themselves, but nevertheless they gave us bread and a little soup in the evenings. I remember them as angels, devout people who loved their fellow men. They always said that history would not forgive our murderers.’ From time to time, when the danger became acute, Kazimierz and Janina hid the children with the Stokowski family, farmers who lived in the same village. The Stokowskis paid for their generosity with their lives: neighbours set their house on fire and murdered them. The Bialys also gave food and clothing to other Jews who came to their door.
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In another village in the Lomza district, Jozef and Jadwiga Zalewski hid Felicja Nowak in a niche in the attic of their barn. Every day they brought her food, and news of the course of the war; and on Christmas Eve 1942 they took the risk of inviting her into the farm for a festive dinner. They refused to accept in payment the few pieces of jewellery that Felicja offered, which she had been given by her mother. ‘I was experiencing the grace of compassion,’ she later wrote, ‘which flowed from the faith of those people who had taken me under their roof. They were deeply religious folk, and what they did for me, they did in the understanding that it was the commandment of God and their religion.’
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In the village of Czerniejew, in the Siedlce district east of Warsaw, it was another poor peasant woman, Stanislawa Cabaj, a widow, who gave shelter to two Jewish girls, Batja and Ester, sisters who had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and wandered for several months through the Polish countryside. Their elder brother Janek, aged fifteen, had already been murdered by a Polish farmer to whom he had gone for bread; and their thirteen-year-old sister Halinka had been killed by the Germans while in hiding in a forest.

Fearing betrayals, Stanislawa Cabaj took Ester, aged eleven, and Batja, a mere five-year-old, for sanctuary to Sister Stanislawa Jozwikowska, in the Heart of Jesus convent near the village of Skorzec. ‘I was dirty, ill, weak, full of lice,’ Batja later recalled. ‘The nuns washed me thoroughly, put me into soft pyjamas, and put me in a clean bed.’ The Mother Superior, Beata Bronislawa Hryniewicz, nursed her back to health. ‘She fed me, she strengthened me.’ After she recovered, the young girl attended the local school, as did her sister. ‘Once the headmaster checked my file and did not find my baptism confirmation. He asked my sister about it. My sister claimed that the church we had been baptized in, Bielany, a northern suburb of Warsaw, had been bombed, and hoped her answer would be acceptable. But the headmaster was a Polish nationalist, he did not give up.’ He informed the local Polish police chief, and also the Mother Superior, ‘who summoned my sister to the monastery and questioned her. Finally my sister confessed that we are Jewish. Ester knew that Mother Superior Beata Bronislawa Hryniewicz loved me a lot and she also would do everything not to harm us.’

At that time, half the convent was occupied by German soldiers. The Mother Superior, determined to strengthen the young girl’s self-confidence, sent Ester on ‘various tasks in the afternoons—precisely when the Germans were active around—as to deliver something to other nuns, to feed chickens, to watch bees, etc.’

Nobody knew the two girls were Jewish except the Mother Superior and Sister Stanislawa Jozwikowska, who had brought them in. After the war, the Jewish organization which found the girls wanted to pay the convent for having looked after them, but Beata refused to take the money, saying: ‘I did my duty as a Christian, and not for money.’ Sixty years after having been given shelter, Batja reflected: ‘Mother Superior Beata Bronislawa Hryniewicz healed me; she recovered my soul by great love; she pampered me as her own child; she dressed me nice and neat; she combed my hair and tied ribbons in my plaits; she taught me manners (she was from an aristocratic noble family). She was strict, but fair with my duties; to pray, to study, to work on my character, to obey, etc., but every step was with love, love, love!’ On liberation, Batja had refused to leave the Mother Superior Beata, ‘but I was forced to. In autumn when I was nine—in 1945—I left the monastery.’ At that moment, separated from her rescuer, ‘I lost my childhood forever and pure human love.’ From 1946 until the Mother Superior died in 1969, they were in correspondence. ‘I always longed for Mother Superior and even wanted to go back to her…Years after her death I told my story, and she got the medal of Righteous Among the Nations, in Warsaw. Sister Stanislawa Jozwikowska died on 7 December 1984, she also got the medal. Mother Superior Beata Bronislawa Hryniewicz is always in my heart, and I still miss her very much.’
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