The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (25 page)

Being a member of the Sanitation Department of the Kripo (Criminal Police) and a frequent guest in the prison kitchen, Rudl Moser ‘was quite aware of our presence and questionable fate. He tried to reassure us, by expressing his personal animosity towards the regime and—by promising help. Sitting now in the cozy dining room with Frau Maria Stocker and Rudl Moser, we gratefully acknowledged our good fortune. We slept that night in Mrs Stocker’s bedroom, and remained there in hiding the next day. “The girls aren’t too safe here,” sighed Moser, when he returned from work. “We have to secure another shelter.”’

On the following day the two girls met Frau Stocker’s lifelong friend, Frau Maria Petrykiewicz, and her daughter Wanda. ‘Full of admiration for our daring escape from under the noses of the Nazis, they resolved to take us into their home.’

Rudl Moser came to see them each night to make sure that all was well. When the Allied bombing drove the inhabitants of Innsbruck into their shelters, ‘we implored Frau Petrykiewicz and Wanda to join their neighbours. But, they wouldn’t hear of leaving us alone in the fourth floor apartment. They believed strongly that God will protect us, and as well them, from evil.’

Eventually their Austrian rescuers managed to get the two girls false papers, so they could set off on their own, masquerading as foreign workers. ‘The moment of parting arrived. In the apartment of Frau Petrykiewicz, on a small table, in front of a picture of Saint Antony, patron of fugitives, candles flickered. The women prayed, as they felt fit to turn to God for the protection of their new adopted, two Jewish girls…We kissed Frau Maria Stocker and Frau Maria Petrykiewicz, and we all shed tears. Apprehension hung in the air, as our lives were again in deadly danger.’

Wanda Petrykiewicz and Rudl Moser brought the two girls to the deserted station of Rum, a small town near Innsbruck. ‘It seemed safer this way, since the police and the Gestapo of Innsbruck diligently proceeded with their hunt for us.’ Their last words were: ‘Goodbye, Herr Moser, and thanks for all!’

The two girls survived the next few months on the move with their false papers. With the coming of the Allied armies in the first week of May 1945, they returned to Innsbruck, to the Petrykiewicz apartment. ‘There was rejoicing and jubilation.’
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T
ENS OF THOUSANDS
of Germans lived and worked in the occupied areas beyond the borders of the Third Reich during the Second World War—as soldiers and administrators, businessmen and factory owners. There were also the Volksdeutsch, the local, German-speaking Ethnic Germans who had long lived as minorities throughout eastern Europe, and who expected to be among the main beneficiaries of German rule.

The Germans living outside Germany included many who had no sympathy for the Nazi regime. Some were former Communists or Socialists; most were ordinary decent human beings, repelled by the murder of Jews. In the East Galician town of Drohobycz, a German army major, Eberhard Helmrich, was put in charge of a farm at the Hyrawka labour camp nearby. His job was to supply food for the German army. More than half his almost three hundred workers were Jewish, many of them teenage girls. At the time of the deportations from Drohobycz—on 6–8 August 1942, when two thousand Jews were deported to Belzec in three days and killed, and again on August 17 when a further three thousand were rounded up and murdered—Major Helmrich hid some of his workers in his home, and secured the release of others who had already been rounded up for deportation by insisting that they were needed ‘for the proper functioning of the farm’.

There was a third deportation from Drohobycz in October, when another two thousand Jews were arrested. The ghetto was then almost empty. In an effort to save as many of his remaining workers as he could, Helmrich and his wife Donata—who had remained in Berlin—devised a plan to get some of the girls out of Poland altogether. Having provided them with false papers, which Helmrich prepared himself, the women were sent to Germany in the guise of Ukrainian and Polish housemaids, to work for German families inside the Reich. In Berlin, Donata Helmrich made sure that the Jewish women were not placed in domestic positions near ‘real’ Polish and Ukrainian women who might suspect their true origins.
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In Vilna, Major Karl Plagge was in charge of the large workshops where German military vehicles were repaired, the HKP (Heeres Kraftfahrpark or Army Motor Vehicle Repair Park). In the First World War he had fought on the Western Front in the battles of the Somme, Verdun and Ypres, before being taken a prisoner of war by the British. A pharmacologist by profession, he joined the Nazi Party in 1932, before Hitler came to power, hoping for better work and pay, but was soon disillusioned by Nazi ideology, and allowed his Party membership to lapse before the outbreak of war. After Kristallnacht he had shown his contempt for the racial laws of Nazi Germany by becoming godfather to the son of a friend of his, Kurt Hesse, whose wife Erika was Jewish.

On the outbreak of war in 1939, Plagge was drafted into the German army, becoming an engineer officer with the rank of major. According to some sources, one of the first things he did on reaching Vilna—and seeing the harsh situation of the Jews in the ghetto there—was to ask his superiors if he could set up a special labour camp for his Jewish workers next to his Motor Vehicle Repair Park, in order to protect them from the regular raids on the ghetto, and the frequent deportations to the death pits at Ponar, a few miles outside the city.

Word spread through the ghetto, recalled Perela Esterowicz (later Pearl Good), then fourteen, that Plagge ‘went all the way to Berlin with this request. And that he had argued the war effort needed his skilled Jewish workers. He was much loved and respected, because we knew if not for Major Plagge, we would be dead in concentration camps.’ In the work camp he ‘saw to it we were treated decently and had food’. Pearl Good was certain she and her parents, Ida and Samuel Esterowicz, and many others, owed their lives to Plagge.
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Heinz Zeuner, the German who was Plagge’s deputy in charge of food distribution, recalled how his boss ‘was very worried about the food rations and whether all his people were really satisfied and so I met with him almost daily…I observed especially his great sense of justice, he always required that there would not be any injustice in his park, particularly when it was against Jews.’ With his knowledge, Jewish men, women and children hid in the Motor Vehicle Repair Park for weeks at a time.

Another of the Germans who worked under Plagge, Christian Bartolomae, later testified about him: ‘During my time serving in Vilna in September 1941, he gave me the order to liberate the Jews Zablocki and Trananricz from the Lukiszki prison. A few days later I got the order to free the parents of two Jewish haircutters from the SD prison. During the same time he accommodated thousands of Jews with wives and children in the park territory. He fed them and protected them from death and persecution. After that he gave them “passage tickets” in order to have the liberty to go to the city without fearing persecution. The Jewish doctor Wolfson and his father were employed as workmen in order to save them from execution. Doctor Wolfson was thus able to continue his work as a physician.’

Another of Plagge’s German employees, Lieutenant Alfred Stumpff, recalled how an SS sergeant at the Repair Park who had threatened a Jewish worker and physically attacked him was reprimanded by Plagge, who then transferred the sergeant to a section of the workshops where he would not come in contact with Jewish workers. Lieutenant Stumpff also testified that Plagge employed Jews in the repair workshops as barbers, shoemakers, tailors and cooks, cleaning workers and gardeners: ‘naturally, the Park wasn’t allowed to employ such people, and Mr Plagge could have got into serious trouble by doing so. The people were camouflaged to the outside as professional workers of the Motor Vehicle Repair Park.’
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Three days before the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, Plagge took a thousand people out of the ghetto to a work camp on the outskirts of the city. There they remained under his command, safe from deportation, and well treated, from September 1943 to July 1944. Only when the SS took over the workshops was Plagge’s protection stripped away; thereafter he was no longer able to help them. His last act was to call them all together, as recalled by William Begell, one of his Jewish workers. ‘Plagge said that we all must have heard that the front line is moving west’ and that the Motor Vehicle Repair Park’s assignment was to always be a certain number of miles behind the front line. It was therefore being moved away from Vilna. As a result, Plagge told them, ‘you the Jews and workers will also be moved. It is natural to think that since all of you are highly specialized and experienced workers in an area of great importance to the German Army, you will be reassigned to a Motor Vehicle Repair Park unit. I cannot assure you that it will again be my unit, but it will be a Motor Vehicle Repair Park unit. You will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS which, as you know, is an organization devoted to the protection of refugees. Thus there is nothing to worry about.’

Begell went on: ‘This is my recollection of the speech. I have repeated it to myself hundreds of times over the years. I also remember thinking that this overt warning to us that we were about to be killed (by mentioning the SS as an organization for the protection of refugees) was made with a human stroke of the pen, so to say, because—and I repeat—because he didn’t have to say it at all. These thoughts have been in my mind since that time and I stand by them. What is important now, I believe, is that Plagge tried to communicate the impending danger to the HKP Jews during his speech. That, again in my opinion, is a proven fact. Plagge had warned us in no uncertain terms. I know that the group of us (about three dozen) who escaped through the window in the machine shop knew exactly what we are escaping from and we were totally aware of Plagge’s role in warning us.’

Two days later, the SS entered the camp and began to kill all the prisoners. As a result of Plagge’s warning, however, between a hundred and fifty and two hundred of his workers and their families, including Pearl Good and her parents, were able to hide in specially prepared hiding places—known as malines—or escape from the camp altogether. ‘These survivors and their descendants’, writes Pearl Good’s son Michael, ‘are certain that Karl Plagge, a man whom they knew to be decent and caring, had saved them twice from almost certain death: first when the ghetto was being liquidated in September 1943, and again in the days before liberation when he warned them again of the impending arrival of the SS.’
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In Vilna, a German army sergeant, Anton Schmid, was in charge of a camp near the main railway station where German soldiers awaited reassignment to new units. A large number of Jews from the Vilna ghetto were assigned to various labour duties in Schmid’s workshops: upholstering, tailoring, locksmithing and shoe-mending. Schmid, who had been shocked by what he had learned of the mass killings at Ponar, decided to do whatever he could to help Jews survive. His many good deeds included securing the release of Jews incarcerated in the city’s prison, and surreptitiously supplying food and provisions to Jews inside the ghetto.

In three houses in Vilna that were under Sergeant Schmid’s supervision, Jews were hidden in the cellars during various ‘Actions’. Schmid also became personally involved with the leaders of the Jewish underground and co-operated with them. He helped some of them reach Warsaw and Bialystok (where they reported on the mass killings at Ponar) by transporting them over long distances in his truck. Some of these underground fighters met, planned activities and slept in his home. He sent other Jews to ghettos that were relatively more secure at that time, including Lida and Grodno.

Anton Schmid was arrested in January 1942 and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. He was executed on 13 April 1942.
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‘
MY BOSS WAS
a fine, middle-aged German army man, named Baker,’ wrote Mania Salinger. In charge of a labour camp factory in Radom, where thirty Jewish women worked outside the ghetto, he was ‘a warm, caring person who a while later saved our lives. He patiently taught me office procedures, corrected my German, my typing. He was a great friend.’ Baker shared his lunches and food parcels from Berlin with his Jewish labourers. ‘This kind of generosity was, of course, forbidden.’ Baker called his workers ‘my children’.

After she had acquired a forged Polish passport, Mania Salinger consulted Baker. Several of her friends had escaped to other cities posing as Christians; should she attempt the same thing? ‘Mr Baker was all for it; he strongly advised me to take advantage of it, even offered counsel where it was best to go, how to act.’

Baker learned in advance about the imminent second deportation from Radom, ‘and without any explanations, ordered us to get home, pack a few belongings, valuables, and ordered us to return to work immediately. He claimed emergency work orders at early morning hours so he ordered us to stay at work for the night.’

All thirty girls stayed overnight in a deserted warehouse. ‘Mr Baker stood outside all night with a shotgun in his hand, guarding our safety. We kibitzed and teased him about his over-concern. Little did we know that he practically stole us without any orders or permission, defying instructions from higher echelons and risked his life to save ours. About 5 a.m. we started hearing shots and screams coming from the ghetto area. Our first instinct was to run back to our families, but Mr Baker forced us to stay and to keep silent. Thousands were killed that night, or taken by train to what turned out to be the gas chambers of Treblinka. If I had been in the ghetto that night, I would definitely have gone with my mother to Treblinka.’

Shortly after this, Mania Salinger and several others from her work group were transferred to a safer work environment—a farm in Wsola. ‘Mr Baker visited us there, I am sure he arranged the transfer. Hard to believe—a German soldier! I tried to find him after the war ended, but I was unsuccessful. I regret to this day never seeing him again and getting to express my gratitude.’ Baker, she added, was ‘exceptional, but there were other Germans with whom we were in contact while working in Radom, Wsola, or later in Pionki, that were warm, friendly, understanding and helpful. Even much later while in Germany in concentration camp, we encountered many incidents of concerned German civilians, especially women, who openly showed us compassion and contempt for their country’s regime.’
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Arnold Boden was an Ethnic German whose family had lived in Poland for many generations. Yehudis Pshenitse—whose rescue by a Catholic priest was recounted in chapter 5—later recalled the grim conditions in the ghetto of Rembertow, where she and her parents were living: ‘Conditions grew steadily worse, my father lay sick in bed and my mother was swollen from hunger. That was when I became the breadwinner for the family. Bearing a sack and a letter from my father to Arnold Boden, asking him to help us out with some food, I set off along various paths for Nowy Dwor,’ a distance of twenty-five miles.

Her quest was not in vain. ‘Arnold Boden was a good friend of my father. I gave him the letter, and he responded with sincere concern. He filled my sack with food, and I started back to my parents, who awaited me impatiently. Unfortunately, my route back was impeded. The German guards detained me, took my sack of food, gave me a few heavy blows, and sent me back to Nowy Dwor. Once again I went to see Arnold Boden; once again he gave me food, and this time he accompanied me back to Rembertow.’

Three years later, at the time of the liquidation of the ghetto, the young girl—by then eleven years old—was being driven with hundreds of other Jews towards specially dug pits when she saw Arnold Boden again. ‘He said to me, “Leave your grandmother here. She is old already, but you are still a small child. I want to get you out of here.” At first I didn’t want to follow him, preferring to stay with my grandmother, but eventually he convinced me and led me away. Suddenly before my eyes I saw ditches being dug, and people being thrown in alive. When I saw my grandmother being pushed, I burst out weeping and tried to run to her, but Boden dragged me away by force. I don’t even remember how I made it back to Nowy Dwor.’
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