The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (26 page)

Ben Guterman was thirteen when war broke out. After the establishment of the Piotrkow ghetto, he worked in the headquarters of the city’s German police. There he befriended a German soldier, Private Gerhard Wurl. On several occasions, Wurl even went into the ghetto to Guterman’s home, where he got to know the whole family. As conditions in the ghetto worsened and the fate of the Jews became more uncertain, the soldier warned Guterman that ‘terrible things are going to happen,’ and that he, Wurl, would like to help him. He then issued Guterman with a certificate giving him a new name, Jan Stepian, born in the town of Sieradz, some sixty miles away. Wurl wrote on the certificate that ‘the Pole, Stepian’ had been working in the German headquarters for a long time, had been ‘very reliable, conscientious and hard working’, and that he should be given every help wherever he found employment. Wurl then took Guterman to Warsaw and found him a job in a factory employing Poles.

Soon afterwards Private Wurl was sent to the Russian front. From Warsaw, Guterman maintained a regular correspondence with him. The Poles in the factory had begun looking at Guterman with great suspicion, and this was exacerbated when one day they discovered that he was corresponding with a German soldier. There were whispers that Guterman was a Jew who had been specially planted among the Poles to spy on them. When Guterman informed Wurl about these suspicions, his benefactor arranged to come back to Warsaw on leave. He told Guterman that he had decided to take him to a friend’s farm in Germany, but in order to get into Germany, Guterman had to go through a medical examination, as did every Polish worker who volunteered to work in the Fatherland.

As a Polish doctor examined Guterman, Wurl hovered nearby. Noticing that Guterman was being questioned more thoroughly than others had been, he immediately went up to the Polish doctor, and asked if anything was wrong. The Polish doctor said, ‘I think he is a Jew,’ whereupon Wurl shouted at him: ‘I have no time to mess around here. This man is going to work on my friend’s farm. You had better sign quickly, before I do something to you.’ Cowed, the Pole signed the certificate.

On the way to the farm Wurl told him, ‘Whatever you do, you are the Pole, Jan Stepian. Never divulge to anybody who you really are, not even to my father, and definitely not to my brother.’ Wurl’s brother was a keen Nazi. Guterman worked on that farm for about two years, until the area was liberated by the Russians. After liberation, he returned to Piotrkow, where he met his sister, who had also survived with papers that had been provided for her by Wurl, enabling her to work in Cracow for a high-ranking Gestapo officer as a nanny for his children.
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A GERMAN ARMY
officer, 51-year-old First Lieutenant Albert Battel, a veteran of the First World War who had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1933, was stationed in the Polish city of Przemysl, on the border between Western and Eastern Galicia. On the morning of 26 July 1942 an SS and German police detachment was about to cross the bridge spanning the River San, which separated the ghetto from the rest of the city. Their task was to round up the Jews in the ghetto for deportation to Belzec. But Battel ordered the sergeant-major commanding the soldiers at the bridge not to let them cross. The sergeant-major brandished his revolver and threatened to order his men to open fire unless the SS men retreated. They did.

Lieutenant Battel had heard of the SS plans to send most of the ghetto population to a death camp. Only one day before the bridge encounter, he had used German army trucks to take Jewish workers and their families—between eighty and one hundred people—out of the ghetto to the other side of the river and house them under direct army supervision. In later arguments with the SS, there would be snide remarks about the German army ‘protecting Jews so that they could polish the boots and clean the quarters of its sergeants’.

As the deportation grew imminent, Lieutenant Battel persuaded his superior, Major Liedke, to declare a state of emergency, which would allow him to control all movements in the town. Although the Jewish population was normally under the jurisdiction of the SS, the army could assert its authority under certain conditions. Early that same afternoon, however, high-ranking SS officers arrived to persuade the army to open the bridge. Lieutenant Battel could do nothing against superior authority. The deportation of 3,850 men, women and children—the majority of the ghetto population at that time—took place the following day.

Two months earlier, Battel had already tried—unsuccessfully—to prevent the deportation of a thousand Jews who worked for the German army. Although there had been complaints against him, no official action was taken by the SS, ‘in order to preserve good relations’ with the army. ‘In the long run, of course,’ wrote Ernie Meyer, a journalist who had studied Battel’s file in Yad Vashem, ‘Albert Battel could not keep even the small number of Jews who continued working for the Wehrmacht in Przemysl out of the hands of the SS. No action was taken against him immediately, apart from a mild reprimand from his commanding officer.’ Not long afterwards, however, the story reached the highest level of the SS hierarchy, whereupon the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, wrote a letter to Martin Bormann, the head of the Reich Chancellery, saying that ‘right after the war Battel should be arrested’. Fortunately the power of the SS finished with the end of the war.

In the 1970s, Michael Gilad-Goldman, who during the war was a youngster in the Przemysl ghetto, recalled Lieutenant Battel’s activities. ‘I remember well hearing about the clash between the Wehrmacht and the SS on the bridge. The day was my sixteenth birthday, and although I never saw Oberleutenant Battel, we Jews knew that we had a protector in him. A few of the people he took out of the ghetto survived the war and are in Israel now.’
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In August 1942, at the height of the deportations from the ghettos in Poland, an SS officer, Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein, who had witnessed the gassing of several thousand Jews at Belzec a few days earlier, was on a night train from Warsaw to Berlin. So shaken was he by what he had seen that he described the whole mass murder process to a Swedish diplomat, Baron Göran van Otter, who was on the same train. Gerstein begged the diplomat to pass the information on to the Swedish government, and to ask them to make it known publicly, in an attempt to alert the whole German population to what was happening. Were the German people to know the truth, Gerstein believed, they would demand a halt to such horrendous mass murder. The Swedish diplomat passed on the information as asked, but the government in Stockholm decided, almost certainly in order not to damage its good relations with Nazi Germany, to keep the terrible information secret. Gerstein continued to do the work with which the SS had entrusted him, arranging for the shipment of poison gas to the death camps, including Auschwitz. But in the course of supplying the gas, he was able, certainly on one occasion, to delay and even divert a shipment.

In a book about Gerstein, the historian Saul Friedlander, a former hidden child whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, wrote that had there been in Germany thousands, even hundreds, of Gersteins—people in the Nazi apparatus who were prepared to divert or damage the shipment of the poison gas to the camps—‘then surely hundreds of thousands of the intended victims would have been saved. But there were none save Gerstein.’
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The historian Reuben Ainsztein has written of how, in Bialystok, there were a number of Germans and Austrians who helped Jews to survive. One of these, Arthur Schade, who had been a Social Democrat when Germans were free to choose their political allegiance, was the manager of a textile mill. Through a group of Jewish girls, led by Maryla Rozycka, Schade maintained contact with the Jewish resistance organization inside the ghetto and with the Jewish partisans in the forests, supplying them with arms, clothes and valuable information. After the liquidation of the ghetto he hid twelve Jews in his factory. All twelve survived until the arrival of the Red Army.
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Other Jews were saved by Schade at his home. In recommending him for an honour after the war, Shamai Kizelshtein, then an Israeli citizen, wrote to Yad Vashem that Schade had ‘performed a humanitarian deed of the highest degree by providing a hideout for my family—myself, Shamai, my father Beryl, my mother Raizel, my sister Mina, my cousin Mary, as well as for the Goldstein family that numbered three people—a couple with a child—on the roof of his house, and fed us and took care of us during our exceedingly difficult situation. After the “Action” in the ghetto ended and the danger passed, he brought us back in a truck hidden under raw materials delivered to a textile factory in the ghetto. In this way he saved us from cruel dangers at least for some period of time. Unfortunately, only I, my sister and my cousin survived, after much suffering.’ Kizelshtein added: ‘I must emphasize that Arthur Schade put his own life at risk as well as the life of his family in order to save us in that critical time.’
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Shamai Kizelshtein’s sister Mina recalled: ‘Once, Schade asked my father to find him a good housekeeper. I offered myself as a housekeeper, and since that day I saw Mr Schade every day and I had the opportunity to talk to him. One day Mr Schade ran into the kitchen and shouted in German: “I am ashamed of being a German!” When I heard these words from him, it occurred to me that this was a man who could help us.’

Mina Kizelshtein told one of the young leaders of the Jewish resistance in Bialystok, Haika Grossman, about this incident: ‘She asked me to check if Mr Schade would be willing to give her a letter confirming that she worked in his office. She would only use this letter to obtain an identity card of a Polish woman. Schade agreed, and thanks to him Haika received her Polish identity card.’

During the first anti-Jewish ‘Action’ in Bialystok, when Schade hid Mina Kizelshtein and her family, Mina recalled that ‘he personally cooked for us and brought the food to the attic where we were hiding. During the second “Action” he hid Mary Kaplan and me. After the summer “Action”, a German called Bole brought his Jewish wife to Schade, and Schade allowed her to stay at his place for a few weeks. The partisans from the woods came to him too, and he gave them food. I remember how the late Chaim Lapchensko left his house with a bag full of foodstuffs on his back.’

Several times, Schade drove to the woods in the factory truck, carrying under the bonnet weapons, ammunition, medications and food for the Jewish partisans. ‘Everything was wrapped in rags,’ Mina Kizelshtein recalled. ‘In order to avoid inspection, Schade wore a Nazi Party badge. In his house, meetings of the underground anti-Nazi cell were held, chaired by Haika Grossman, in which participated Otto Beneschek, Bole, and Arthur Schade. When the Germans retreated from Bialystok, Schade didn’t go with them, but joined the partisans instead.’ All the actions he took, she added, ‘were at great personal risk, out of his own humanitarian principles, and out of respect for human life’.
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As Mina Kizelshtein noted, another German who joined the anti-Nazi underground was Otto Beneschek, a Sudeten German and a Communist, who was in the city hiding from the Gestapo under a false identity. As manager of another textile mill situated on the border of the ghetto, he employed both Jews and Poles, and was instrumental in making it possible for Jews to smuggle arms into the ghetto. Beneschek also provided Jews with false documents and money, and introduced another Sudeten German, Kudlatschek, to the Jewish resistance organization.
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It was Kudlatschek who was in charge of the motor pool of all the textile mills in the city. A number of Jews left Bialystok in Kudlatschek’s own car, drove to partisan territory, and transported arms to the Jewish resistance organization in the ghetto, as well as making contact with Jews in Grodno and other distant, and for Jews, inaccessible towns.

The Jews of the Bialystok ghetto were also helped by a number of German soldiers stationed in the city, from whom they obtained a few weapons and several radios. Arms also reached the ghetto from Walter, a Viennese, and Rischel, a German, both of whom worked as storekeepers in the
Beutenlager
, or ‘booty stores’. Until they were posted to a front-line unit, they enabled the Jews working for them in the stores to take arms back into the ghetto. Two other Germans in Bialystok were sentenced to death for helping Jews.
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Another German, Otto Busse, was in charge of a painting shop attached to the Waffen SS units in Bialystok. Some of his employees were Jews from the ghetto; through them he learned what was happening to the Jews, and helped them to smuggle food and clothing into the ghetto. Later he recalled how one of his Jewish workers, Hassia Bornstein, had been terrified when he first told her that he believed her to be a disguised Jew, and how she subsequently wept in relief when he told her that he would help her and her friends. He also recalled how Hassia Bornstein and Haika Grossman had smuggled rifles concealed in old stove pipes to the partisans in broad daylight: ‘Together we faced death and extermination every day.’

When the Bialystok ghetto was liquidated, Busse supplied arms and medicines to Jewish partisans in the forests outside the city. As the Red Army approached the city in 1944, the partisans offered him their protection, but he declined to seek refuge from the Soviet victors, telling those who were keen to help him: ‘There is a collective German guilt, and I do not want to be an exception.’ Taken into captivity by the Soviets, he spent five years in a forced labour camp near Kiev before being repatriated to Germany.

Disillusioned with life in West Germany, in 1969 Busse moved to Israel, settling in a village in Galilee whose inhabitants were mostly Swiss Christians. In an interview with the
Jerusalem Post
, he revealed that after his story had been published in Germany some eight years earlier, ‘I was denounced as a traitor to the fatherland and Jew-lover.’ Things got ‘so bad’, he said, especially his treatment by ex-soldiers, that he had to give up his position as department manager in a Darmstadt store and leave the city.
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