The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (21 page)

Forged documents were vital for Jews masquerading as non-Jews. The Jewish forgers were helped by both the Polish underground organizations, the Communist Armia Ludowa (People’s Army) and the London-based Armia Krajowa (Home Army; an integral part of the Polish Government-in-Exile), as well as by Zegota. In his memoirs, Yitzhak Zuckerman recognized this. ‘At a certain stage,’ he wrote, ‘we were forging documents ourselves, in cooperation with the AK cell that was willing to help us with that. So, with help from AL, as much as they could give, and Zegota, which did a lot in that area, we made our own stamps in 1944: we got forms from Waclaw for forged documents and we also made documents in the name of dead people or those who had sold their documents. We could get documents from the Polish underground. I got my document, for example, from the Armia Krajowa…’
⁵²

Bernard Goldstein was fifty years old when Germany invaded Poland. A leader of the Bund, he had twice been arrested and sent to exile in Siberia under the Russian tsarist regime. In independent Poland he became a leading trades unionist with the Transport Workers Union. In November 1942 he managed to leave the ghetto for ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, where he found refuge with the Chumatowski family. Not long afterwards, however, a gang of Polish blackmailers, discovering his whereabouts, extorted a high ransom from him, and he had to find somewhere else to hide. He did so in an apartment at 29 Grzybowska Street that had once been part of the small ghetto where the Germans had rehoused non-Jews after the Jews had been driven out—most to their deaths at Treblinka.

The apartment consisted of two rooms: a kitchen and a former photographer’s darkroom. Its new owner, Janina Pawlicka, had worked for many years before the war as a servant in the home of an Orthodox Jewish family in the town of Zgierz, near Lodz. She spoke Yiddish, and out of a sense of loyalty to her employers had moved with the family from Zgierz to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. They had been deported when the small ghetto was wound up. She gave sanctuary to three other Jews as well as Goldstein, who later recalled: ‘The neighbours knew that Janina Pawlicka lived in a darkroom and made a living knitting sweaters. About the rest of us, of course, no one was permitted to have the least suspicion. Our apartment was the small room, the former darkroom of the photographic laboratory, in which there was space for only a small bed and a tiny table. We slept on the floor, crowded together. Pawlicka gave up her bed to the old woman and slept on the floor with the rest of us. All of us, except Janina, remained locked in a little dark hole, forbidden to see the light of day.’
⁵³

Goldstein continued his account: ‘Janina had a difficult time buying food for five adult people. To do her marketing near Grzybowska would arouse suspicion. She was known to be a poor woman who lived alone, and such heavy purchases of food would be sure to excite local curiosity. She had to do her shopping in the more distant parts of the town, at illicit marketplaces, taking a chance on German raids against black marketeers. Preparing and cooking the food presented a similar problem. Too large a pot or too heavily laden a platter of food could betray us. She was on her guard not only against neighbours and chance visitors but also against the inquisitive little child who loved to follow her wherever she went. A pot of half-cooked food and our silverware and dishes would often descend into the cellar because someone had knocked at the apartment’s door.’
⁵⁴

Goldstein survived the war. In his memoirs he wrote of the woman who had saved him, and those in hiding with him: ‘She carried her burden as though it were a holy religious duty. She contributed her share to all the expenses, categorically refusing to allow us to maintain her. We were horribly filthy, crawling with lice. We did not have enough clothing or underwear. Janina washed, repaired, and patched our clothes. From her things, and from the proceeds of her knitting, she would give presents to our landlady to keep her happy.’
⁵⁵

Another astounding act of rescue took place at 11 Wielka Street, a house adjacent to the ghetto. In her five-room apartment there, another Janina, Janina S.—her surname is not given in Bartoszewski and Lewin’s book—hid up to seventeen Jews at any one time. She was the wife of a Polish army officer. Their daughter Eliza helped in this collective act. Eliza also took one of those in hiding, Hanka Peiper, the daughter of a Jewish barrister from Lvov, to a clandestine summer camp for Polish girls, to work there as a gardener. The other girls in the camp knew that she was Jewish, but said nothing.

Among those hidden at 11 Wielka Street was Salomon Jusym—whose surname means ‘orphan’ in Yiddish. Bartoszewski and Lewin write that he hid for nearly a year ‘in a bunker made of hampers in a recess in the flat. During his stay great precautions were taken since more than a dozen people (up to seventeen) lived in Wielka Street at the same time, without being registered. Usually a lookout was kept on the front balcony to watch for a car with the Gestapo that used to come very often after the destruction of the ghetto, sometimes every second night. When the Gestapo car stopped in front of the gate, Jusym was warned and would leave his niche through an aperture above the wardrobe in the adjoining room, wearing socks, and, if there was enough time, silently hide in the garret. At night he usually managed to reach there since it was quite some time before the porter woke up and unlocked the gate for the Gestapo. During daytime visits, he usually stayed behind the hampers, but knowing the danger, he maintained absolute silence, even holding his breath.’
⁵⁶

Two other Jews who found shelter at 11 Wielka Street were Anna Rotman from Lvov and her daughter Iza. Fifteen years after the end of the war, in 1960, Iza Rotman, then living in London, made a formal declaration about her time in hiding: ‘I testify that during the Nazi occupation Janina S. and her daughter helped countless people of Jewish origin to the best of their modest abilities. Fully aware of the possible tragic consequences of what they did, they never hesitated to come to the rescue and give shelter in their own flat. On several occasions my mother and I availed ourselves of their hospitality, and at other times their moral support gave us strength to endure and thus to survive. It is difficult to describe in a few sentences that period of fear, despair and hopelessness. If my testimonial will help to direct attention to what these two wonderful women did, my debt of gratitude will have been in some small part repaid.’
⁵⁷

In his book on Polish–Jewish relations published after the war, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of the individual Poles who had helped him, among them Teodor Pajewski, a railway worker who had helped to get him out of Trawniki, and Mieczyslaw Wolski, the gardener in whose hideout he had lived in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, and who was shot by the Germans after the refuge had been discovered.
⁵⁸
He also noted, with some bitterness, in the spring of 1944, that in the whole of Poland, including Warsaw, ‘there are probably no more than thirty thousand Jews hiding’.
⁵⁹

Jan Cabaj was an officer in the Polish army. Before the war, while living in Eastern Galicia, his two daughters had befriended two Jewish girls who went to the same school. After the German conquest of Poland, Cabaj, who then lived in the town of Garwolin, near Warsaw, was active in the resistance. By chance, the eldest of his daughters’ two Jewish friends, Miriam Gruenberg, was being deported from Warsaw to Treblinka when she managed to jump from the train not far from Garwolin. Making her way to the Cabajs’ home, she appealed to them for refuge. Miriam had an ‘Aryan’ identity card that had been obtained for her by friends, and she needed a roof over her head in order to find work in the city. Despite the risk, the Cabajs invited Miriam to stay. She remained with them until January 1943. Later that year, Jan Cabaj was arrested by the Germans and executed for his underground activities.
⁶⁰

In the autumn of 1943, to deter Poles from giving shelter to Jews, the Germans intensified their searches and arrests. ‘As a sort of object lesson,’ Vladka Meed recalled, they set fire to a house in Kazimierz Square in Warsaw, ‘killing the entire Gentile family living there because they had given asylum to Jews’.
⁶¹
Vladka Meed also recorded how a Pole called Dankiewicz, living in Pruszkow, south-west of Warsaw, hid a Jewish woman named Zucker in a large tile stove. The stove was hollow, and could be entered from the top, which ‘masqueraded’ as a metal flue. Despite frequent searches, the hiding place was never discovered.
⁶²

From the moment that the Warsaw Ghetto was established in 1940, Janina Kwiecinska, an actress, made her home available to Jewish acquaintances from the theatre who had escaped from the ghetto and used her connections with the Polish underground to provide Jewish refugees with permanent hideouts and ‘Aryan’ papers. Her three young daughters—Janina, Maria and Hanna—helped their mother by keeping her activity secret and by repeatedly performing dangerous missions, such as escorting refugees to hideouts that had been found for them in Warsaw and out of town. Zygmunt Keller spent nearly two years in hiding in Kwiecinska’s apartment and was given friendly, devoted, and unfailing care. Kwiecinska protected Helena Nowacka and her toddler son Seweryn in the same way between August 1942 and the beginning of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in August 1944: two years of unflagging support in an atmosphere of increasing fear and danger. After the insurgents surrendered and the population of Warsaw was expelled, Kwiecinska moved among nearby villages with her daughters and her Jewish wards for more than four months, until the Soviet army liberated the area in January 1945.
⁶³

Whole families hid Jews in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, and whole families were saved there. Because of the testimony of Jerzy and Aniela Krupinski, Yad Vashem gave an award to Ryszard Jachowicz, his mother Natalia (who had since died), and his fiancée, later his wife, Edyta (
née
Nestorowicz). Jerzy Krupinski had been at school with Ryszard Jachowicz. ‘When I arrived at his apartment,’ he recalled, ‘he did not recognize me until I told him my name. When I asked him whether he could help us, he consulted immediately with his mother, who said that she intended to sublet one room to a married couple, a daughter of her fellow worker. She offered the room to us for the same monthly rent, which was less than our people used to pay weekly for safe accommodation. When I suggested a higher rent, she refused, stressing that she takes us because we are in need. “The other couple will find a place.” Following this short conversation we moved in and lived in their apartment at Raszynska Street for almost two years without registration, unknown to the neighbours and to the house caretaker.’

Jerzy Krupinski went on to note that Aniela (going by the name of Pauline, which she took to sound less Jewish) very rarely left the flat ‘because her fear made her easily recognizable. I also limited my outings so that nobody would realize that an unregistered person was living in Jachowicz’s apartment.’ When Aniela had to see a doctor, ‘Mrs Natalia Jachowicz offered to escort her, indicating that a young woman with an elderly lady looks much less suspicious than in the company of a young man. She and her daughter-in-law, Edyta, also did all our shopping. They had to be very careful not to raise suspicions that they were buying food not only for their own family.’

A quite unexpected problem arose when, in Jerzy Krupinski’s words: ‘One day Ryszard arrived very embarrassed, telling us that he was getting married. His fiancée, Edyta Nestorowicz, was of German extraction, but her father had been sent to Auschwitz—for not signing the register of Ethnic Germans. Nevertheless, we understood that he could not expose her to such a danger, and assured him that we were very grateful for the help we had received up to now, and that we would look for another hideout. After a few days Ryszard came home beaming with joy. He spoke to Edyta (currently Mrs Olszewska) and she asked him, crying: “How can we ask them to leave? How do we know whether they have a place to go?” So we stayed with them for almost two years, treated not as Jews or even tenants, but as members of the family.’

Jerzy Krupinski also noted: ‘Pauline asked once Ryszard’s mother why she exposed herself, her son and her daughter-in-law to such a mortal danger. She answered: “Men can do so little one for another, and it is, therefore, his duty to do so for those who need help.” The whole Jachowicz family helped us not because we were friends or because they liked us. We were strangers in need. They believed that they should help those who are persecuted.’

In his letter to Yad Vashem, Dr Krupinski ended with a bitter reflection, similar to those expressed in his diary by Ringelblum: ‘If many more people would behave as Natalia, Ryszard and Edyta Jachowicz, your Department for the Righteous would be overwhelmed with work. Without their help we would not survive. In those times helping only one Jew was punishable by death. And if the punishment for helping only one was the same as helping many so the reward should be the same.’
⁶⁴

T
HE JEWISH COMMUNITY
of Cracow, in southern Poland, numbering at least sixty thousand at the outbreak of war, was proud of its traditions, which went back five centuries in a history distinguished by great rabbis, writers, teachers and doctors, among others. The coming of war, the establishment of the ghetto, the repeated deportations and the final liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943 destroyed that community, as the Holocaust destroyed all the Jewish communities of Poland.

In Cracow as elsewhere, without those non-Jews who risked their own lives, and those of their families, to save Jews, even a fragment of Polish Jewry could hardly have survived. Each Jewish family seeking to survive in hiding faced repeated risks and dangers, and was dependent on the goodwill, determination and bravery of a few courageous people. Janina Fischler-Martinho, in search of refuge at the time of the destruction of the Cracow ghetto, found herself in Olsza, a poor working-class suburb. She first sought help in a grocer’s shop from which Jews used to buy food. She remembered the young Pole in charge of the shop as ‘well disposed and helpful, always cheerful and smiling’. But when he saw her: ‘An expression of utter repugnance came over his face. He motioned, with his head, towards the door, as one might towards a filthy, importuning beggar or a mangy stray dog. I crept out. It was piercingly cold; the air as sharp as a whip.’

At the bottom of the pathway leading to the shop stood a man well known in Olsza. Janina herself had seen him many times. ‘We knew each other by sight.’ Locally, he was known ‘to be a bit simple. And maybe he was.’ He took her to his tiny ground-floor room. Not knowing what his intentions were, she was ‘rigid with fear’ but in fact she had found a rescuer: ‘He had some provisions on a shelf. He filled a mug from a kettle on the stove and flavoured the boiling water with a spoonful of jam. He brought the mug over to me. He then sat down on his bed by the stove. “I’ve got some bread here on the shelf. I’ll cut you a slice.” I shook my head. My vocal cords would not, could not, function. I closed my hands round the mug, trying to warm them against its sides. I sipped the scalding liquid very slowly, through clenched teeth—unable to unclamp them. He drew an enamel basin from under his bed, filled it with hot water from the kettle on the stove, added some cold water from the bucket, tested it with his hand and, judging it right, brought it over to where I was sitting, placed a sliver of laundry soap and a greyish cloth by it and said, “I’ll be off now.” He left the room. Nobody, ever, has done me as great a courtesy as that man did on the evening of 13 March 1943.’
¹

Rachel Garfunkel was nine years old when German troops entered Cracow in September 1939. Her sister was only nine months old. ‘We were given over to a nanny for safekeeping,’ she later wrote. ‘As the war progressed and all of Cracow became “Judenrein”, the situation became more dangerous. The Nazis were determined to find every last Jew in hiding. The man of the house, in a drunken fit of fury, yelled out the windows that there were two Jews here. I left that same day. By ringing doorbells in the neighbourhood, I succeeded in obtaining employment as a charwoman and a nanny to two very small children. My wages were a bowl of cabbage and bean soup once a day. I was twelve years old then. My four-year-old sister remained with the nanny and her husband. She and their own daughter were the same age and looked alike. They passed as twins. I hold no grudge for these people. I would not have had their courage even for one day.’
²

Courage was needed both to take in Jews, and to hand over a loved one to the care of someone willing to take them in. A Jewish couple in Cracow, Moses and Helen Hiller, decided that whereas, as a young couple, they might possibly survive deportation, their two-year-old son Shachne would surely perish. They had already made contact with two Catholics, Josef Jachowicz and his wife, in the nearby town of Dabrowa, and on November 15, Helen Hiller managed to leave the ghetto with her son, and to reach the Jachowicz home.

The Catholic couple agreed to take the child. Helen Hiller gave them three letters. One asked the couple to return their son ‘to his people’ in the event of their death. The other was addressed to Shachne himself, telling him how much his parents loved him, and that it was this love that had prompted them to leave him alone with strangers, ‘good and noble people’. The second letter also told Shachne of his Jewishness and expressed the hope that he would grow up to be a man ‘proud of his Jewish heritage’. A third letter contained a will written by Helen Hiller’s mother, addressed to her sister-in-law in the United States, in which she asked her sister-in-law to take the child to her home in Washington should none of the family in Poland survive, and to reward Josef Jachowicz and his wife—the ‘good people’, as she described them.

As Helen Hiller handed the three letters to Mrs Jachowicz, she pleaded: ‘If I or my husband do not return when this madness is over, please post this letter to America to our relatives. They will surely respond and take the child. Regardless of the fate of my husband or myself, I want my son brought up as a Jew.’ Mrs Jachowicz promised that she would fulfil the requests. The two women embraced, and Helen Hiller returned to Cracow.
³
She was never to see her son again; for Moses and Helen Hiller were among those deported from Cracow to their deaths. At the time of the deportation, their young son was in the safe hands of Josef Jachowicz and his wife in Dabrowa.

The historian of this episode, Yaffa Eliach, has written of how, when the young Shachne cried out for his father and mother, as he often did, Jachowicz and his wife feared that their neighbours would betray them to the Gestapo. ‘Mrs Jachowicz became very attached to the little boy, loved his bright inquiring eyes, took great pride in her “son” and took him regularly to church. Soon, he knew by heart all the Sunday hymns.’

A devout Catholic, Mrs Jachowicz wanted to have Shachne baptized. With this in mind, she went to see a young parish priest, Karol Wojtyla, who had a reputation for wisdom and trustworthiness. Revealing the secret of the boy’s identity, Mrs Jachowicz told the priest of her wish that Shachne should become a ‘true Christian’ and devout Catholic like herself. Wojtyla listened intently to the woman’s story. When Mrs Jachowicz had finished, he asked: ‘And what was the parents’ wish, when they entrusted their only child to you and to your husband?’ Mrs Jachowicz then told him that Helen Hiller’s last request had been that her son should be told of his Jewish origins, and ‘returned to his people’ if his parents died. Hearing this, Wojtyla replied that he would not perform the baptismal ceremony. It would be unfair, he explained, to baptize the child while there was still hope that, once the war was over, his relatives might take him.

Shachne Hiller survived the war and was eventually united with his relatives in the United States. Karol Wojtyla, the young priest who had ensured that the boy remained Jewish, was later to become Pope John Paul II.
⁴

Maria Klepacka was a Catholic woman living in Cracow throughout the war. At the time of the mass deportations in Poland in 1942, she had made her way to the city of Radom to collect a Jewish child whom she had offered to take back to her home and shelter. A young girl living in Radom at the time, Alicja-Irena Taubenfeld, later recalled how her mother, knowing that Maria Klepacka’s own child had already been murdered by the Germans, had approached ‘the totally unknown to her Mrs Klepacka’ and begged her to take with her in that child’s place ‘my (female) cousin and myself, aged respectively ten and twelve. Mrs Klepacka, in spite of the menace of death looming for those who sheltered Jews, agreed and took us with her and put us up in her half-a-room where she lived in Cracow.’ That half-a-room was in fact no more than a partitioned landing, ‘lacking sanitary equipment, with no facilities except for two folding beds. Mrs Klepacka assured all our needs receiving no remuneration but for a minimal reimbursement for our daily expenses. Following my mother’s wishes, she gave us Christian religious instruction, to enable us to pass for such.’

After a few months, Mrs Klepacka, ‘in order better to shelter us’, put the two girls in the care of nuns in a nearby convent. ‘An uncle of ours, still alive at that time, paid the nuns for our upkeep during all this period. However, when he, too, perished and no more monies were forthcoming, the nuns, claiming that they had received anonymous letters, denouncing their sheltering of Jews, commanded us to leave. In utter despair, not knowing anybody else, we returned to Mrs Klepacka, who in the meantime had hidden—against remuneration—two elderly Jews and consequently had no place available for all five of us. It was then that her magnanimous nobility showed itself outstandingly: she urged the elderly couple to leave: they were old and had sufficient financial means to pay for another hiding place. Her duty was (thus she argued) to shelter first of all the two children who had nothing and
could not pay
. This she had promised to my late mother.’

The elderly couple found someone else willing to take them in, for payment. Both survived the war—as did the two girls. Alicja-Irena later wrote that on a recent ‘pilgrimage’ to Poland she visited Maria Klepacka’s grave. ‘I would like to add that one of Mrs Klepacka’s sisters also sheltered Jews in Cracow and was for this “crime” sent to a concentration camp. She survived it, albeit her health has been gravely compromised.’
⁵

Janek Weber recently wrote of his own rescuers both inside and outside Cracow: ‘I came from a well-to-do family, and my father built a small apartment house, which was completed just as the war started. The caretakers of the house were a Polish couple by the name of Ludwig and Aniela Nowak. For the duration of the ghetto, whenever it was perceived that there might be danger for me, I was smuggled out of the ghetto and spent time with the Nowaks until it was felt that it was safe for me to return. This was also the case during the two major deportations when thousands of people were sent to their deaths in Belzec. It was particularly dangerous for the Nowaks to hide me as the whole building had been taken over by the Germans and turned into a military dental clinic. Some of the officers knew me from the days when I lived there with my parents before the establishment of the ghetto. It was difficult for the Nowaks to hide me as their living quarters consisted of just one room.’

Towards the end of 1942, when Janek Weber was nine years old, the Germans began the construction of Plaszow concentration camp. It was feared that in the near future the Cracow ghetto would be destroyed and its surviving inhabitants murdered. ‘In view of this,’ he recalled, ‘my parents discussed the possibility of hiding me with another Polish couple called Michal and Anna Wierzbicki, if and when the ghetto would cease to exist. By way of background; Mr Wierzbicki was the head of the planning department in the town hall in Cracow, and my father had dealings with him relating to the plans and construction of the apartment building. They lived just outside Cracow in a secluded villa.’

Like so many others, Janek Weber’s parents were caught unprepared on 13 March 1943 when the ghetto was surrounded by the SS, as a prelude to the deportation of the last two thousand Jews living there to Auschwitz. A few hundred Jews were taken to the slave labour camp at Plaszow; during the round-up, seven hundred more were shot down in the streets. ‘Due to my parents’ ingenuity,’ Weber wrote, ‘I was smuggled out of the ghetto in a suitcase, and escaped in miraculous circumstances.’ His father had persuaded a German wagoner to take a heavy suitcase out of the ghetto, not knowing what was inside it, and had bribed a German guard to let the boy out of the suitcase once the wagon was beyond the ghetto gate, when the driver was not looking. The last time Janek Weber saw his father was through the air holes that his father had cut in the suitcase.

The young boy was totally dependent for his survival on the Christian couple to whom his parents had sent him. ‘My parents told me to make my way to the Nowaks, and to remain with them, which I did. They took me in without question, and whenever there was a knock at the door, I would hide under the bed. After a week or so, my parents, who were both transferred from the ghetto to Plaszow, started to go out of the camp to their places of work. They made contact with the Wierzbickis, and one evening Mrs Wierzbicki came and took me to their home. The family consisted of two daughters (who were slightly older than me) and a son who was younger. They decided to conceal from their son my presence in the house. They felt that their son might talk to people about me and this could raise suspicions. I was therefore locked in a room which had belonged to a grandmother recently deceased. The boy was told that out of respect to the grandmother’s memory, the room would remain locked. It was imperative that I should remain quiet at all times, and never to approach the window. My food was brought to me at night, and I had a night pot in the room. I was in total isolation for almost two years, until Cracow was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945.’

Although Janek had ‘few memories as to how he spent those dark two years’, a British journalist, Sharon Jaffa, wrote, ‘he recalls reading the same couple of books over and over again, and sometimes simply remaining in bed. Even as an eight-year-old, he was acutely aware of the danger of his situation. He was so disciplined about keeping quiet that for a time he forgot how to speak.’
⁶

After the war, Janek Weber found out that his father had been taken from Plaszow to Gross Rosen concentration camp, where he was murdered. His mother had been evacuated from Plaszow, and was eventually liberated in Bergen Belsen, by the British army, in April 1945. She was the only surviving member of his family. ‘I was reunited with her in Cracow in the summer of 1945.’
⁷

Janek Weber and his mother kept in touch with both the families who had rescued them, helping them materially when they could. In Cracow fifty years later, on 19 June 1995, Michal and Anna Wierzbicki, and Ludwig and Aniela Nowak, were presented with their medals as Righteous Among the Nations. ‘Among my family present’, wrote Janek Weber, ‘were my wife, my two daughters, my son-in-law and my brother and sister-in-law.’
⁸
The medal was presented by the Israeli Ambassador to Poland, in the recently established Jewish Centre of Culture. ‘I was recently in Cracow,’ Janek Weber wrote on 24 September 2001, ‘and spent time with Wanda Wierzbicki (her older sister died a few years ago) and with Mrs Nowak who will be celebrating her ninetieth birthday later this year. Mrs Nowak retired as the caretaker some time ago, but she still lives in our building in the same room she occupied during the war. Wanda lives in the same house which was my hiding place.’
⁹