The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (30 page)

Rahela and her family managed to escape to territory that was under the control of Yugoslav partisans. Risto visited them a number of times, bringing with him food, other things they needed—and hope.
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In the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, Mustafa Hardaga, a Muslim, was the owner of a building in which Josef Cavilio, a Jew, had a factory manufacturing steel pipes. Hardaga and his wife, and her father Ahmed Sadik, sheltered Cavilio and his family—defying the order proclaimed on posters on the streets of Sarajevo warning its citizens not to give shelter to Communists and Jews. After six weeks in hiding, Josef Cavilio, with his wife and children, managed to escape over the mountains to Mostar in the Italian zone.
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Tova Kabilio-Grinberg was three and a half years old when Susic Zayneba and his family gave shelter to her father in Bosnia: ‘They insisted that he stay, but to harbour a Jew was terribly dangerous. The Nazi headquarters were across the street from them and on the other side was the synagogue, which had been burnt down. My father realized how he was endangering the family so he soon fled and eventually met up with us on the Adriatic coast, where the Italians interned us until we were able to escape and join the partisans.’ Susic Zayneba also helped other Jewish families, ‘once pulling Jews off a death train, and another time giving a Jew a veil to disguise himself as a woman.’
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When the German army occupied Sarajevo in 1941, the city’s new commandant asked Dervis Korkut, the Muslim director of the city museum, to head the collaborationist Muslim community—which was to provide a Bosnian Muslim SS Division. Korkut refused. Not long afterwards, one of the receptionists at the museum announced that a high-ranking German officer wished to view the famous fourteenth-century
Sarajevo Haggadah
, a priceless ancient manuscript describing the Jews’ flight from Egypt. Sensing danger, Korkut hid the document under a display.

‘Alas,’ Korkut told the German colonel, ‘I regret to tell you that the book vanished two years ago.’

Less than a year later, a museum caretaker brought a young woman to see Korkut. Her name was Mira Papo, he said, and she had been in with the partisans. ‘Now with winter coming, Mira desperately needed sanctuary. Barely out of high school, she had no home, no identity papers or family. And she was Jewish.’ Korkut took her to his home. ‘She will be staying with us for a while,’ he told his wife, Servet. ‘We can say she is household help. She will pose as a Muslim and her name will be Amira.’

Servet knew that families harbouring Jews suffered the same penalty as the Jews—death. Nevertheless she agreed. ‘So Mira the Jewish girl began living the routine of Muslims. She had lost religion by then—she had become a communist—but she respected the Korkuts’ faith. Finally, as the war in Yugoslavia turned against the Nazis, the resistance reorganized. Mira bade her protectors farewell in mid-1943, when she joined the partisans.’
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South-east of Yugoslavia, across the Danube, Romania was never occupied by Germany, but its leader, the dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, headed a regime that was sympathetic to Germany, in terms of both mutual territorial ambitions and ideology. Of the eight hundred thousand Jews in Romania before the war, nearly half—three hundred and seventy thousand—were murdered, some by Romanian Fascist troops and Iron Guardists, others by German Nazis after the Romanians had deported them eastward. In the summer of 1941, in an outbreak of vicious Romanian anti-Semitism, five thousand Jews were packed into a goods train in the city of Jassy, and then sent southward, the doors sealed, without water or food. For eight days these Jews were kept locked in the train’s cattle trucks, as they were shunted from station to station. At one station, Roman, a local Christian woman, Viorica Agarici, head of the regional Red Cross, had the courage to insist that the German soldiers guarding the sealed train open the doors and allow her to bring the Jews water and food. A thousand were allowed off the train altogether; most of them survived. When the train journey came to an end at Kalarash, more than two thousand of its occupants were dead.

In 1994 a book was published in Romania about Viorica Agarici, entitled
The Gentile Who Saved a Thousand Jews
. It is estimated that several hundred Jews survived because of her rescue efforts.
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In Czernowitz, then the capital of the Romanian province of Bukovina, the mayor, Dr Traian Popovici, was the only senior Romanian official to protest openly against the establishment of a ghetto in the city. He also spoke out, endangering both his public office and his personal safety, when expulsion of the Czernowitz Jews, and their transportation to Transnistria to be slaughtered, were decreed. He addressed letters and memoranda to his superiors, pointing out the credit due to the Jews of Bukovina, and of Czernowitz in particular, for their massive contribution to the province’s cultural, industrial and communal development. He pleaded tirelessly with the Romanian authorities to persuade the Germans to modify the order of expulsion to exempt doctors, engineers, lawyers and judges, pensioners and others. On 15 October, a countermand came from Bucharest allowing about twenty thousand Jews, members of the learned professions listed by Popovici, to stay on in Czernowitz: this was their reprieve from certain death.

The mayor’s office was always crowded with Jews seeking help. He authorized payment to Jewish pensioners of the full sums that they had been given before the war. Daringly, he added thousands of names to official rolls of Jews declared exempt from transportation; as one of those who testified on his behalf wrote: ‘Dr Popovici saved souls wherever possible, in the full knowledge of the danger to which such actions exposed him.’
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The Papal Nuncio in Romania, Archbishop Andrea Cassulo, appealed directly to Marshal Antonescu to limit the deportations planned for the summer of 1942.
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His appeal was ignored; hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were deported to Transnistria.

Following the deportations, and the killings that accompanied them, the Queen Mother of Romania, Queen Elena, made repeated efforts to have Jews brought back from the extreme perils of the labour and concentration camps in which they had been incarcerated. Elena was a Greek princess who had married the Romanian King Carol, from whom she was divorced in 1930. When she learnt of the plight of the deportees she immediately sent them food—as many as a third of the deportees died of starvation. In October 1942, when yet another group of Jews were about to be deported, one of them, the famous Romanian philologist Barbu Lazareanu, asked a well-known doctor, Victor Gomoiu, for help. The doctor knew Queen Elena and appealed to her. It is said that she told her son Mihai, who had succeeded his father as King, that she would leave the country if this new deportation took place. Mihai secured the Jews’ release.
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Albania, on the Adriatic Sea, had a Jewish population of about three hundred in the interwar years. In February 1939 a hundred Jewish refugees arrived from Vienna. King Zog and his government allowed all of them to stay. When a further ninety-five Jewish families—three hundred Jews in all—arrived in March 1939, the King again gave them permission to stay.

In April 1939 the Italians invaded Albania; King Zog was overthrown and Italian rule imposed. Soon afterwards the Italians asked the Albanian puppet government to expel all foreign-born Jews—the four hundred or so refugees. The Albanian administration, in a brave display of independence, refused. Indeed, as many as four hundred more refugees arrived from Yugoslavia and Poland in the following years.

In April 1941, the Italian rulers of Albania took advantage of the German conquest of Yugoslavia to annex Yugoslavia’s Kosovo province, inhabited mostly by Ethnic Albanians. Four hundred Jews had fled there as the German troops drove through Yugoslavia.

In Pristina, the capital of the annexed region, the local authorities complied with German demands and gaoled sixty Jewish men. But a sympathetic local doctor, Spiro Lito, persuaded the mayor not to let the Germans take the sixty Jews to Poland and certain death. He also convinced the German authorities that the Jewish prisoners had typhus and that it was necessary to send them to hospitals in Albania to avoid an epidemic. The Jews were taken to Berat, given false documents and found refuge around Albania, mostly with friends of Dr Lito in Lushnja, Shijak, Kavaja and Kruja.

When Italy surrendered to the Allies in July 1943, German troops moved into Albania. From that moment the SS, determined to begin deportations from a new region, asked the Albanian government for a list of all the Jews in the country. The government refused, as it had refused to give up the Jews during the Italian occupation, and the Jews were taken into hiding.
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In the occupied province of Kosovo, however, the Germans paid no heed to the Albanian authorities, seizing all four hundred Jews who had fled there from other regions of Yugoslavia two years earlier, and sending them by rail to Belsen; only a hundred survived the war.

In Albania proper, successful efforts were made by individual Albanians, both Christians and Muslims, to protect Jews from deportation and death. Refik Vesili was sixteen years old when, in November 1943, he sought his parents’ permission to hide all four members of the Mandil family, as well as four of their cousins, in the family’s home in the mountain village of Kruja. His parents agreed, and all eight Jews were hidden there until liberation eleven months later.
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In Vlora, Nuro Hoxha hid seventeen Jews in his house. He also dug a ditch in which all seventeen could hide as precaution against a possible German raid. In the village of Zall-Herr, Hoxha Ferri found places of rescue for eighty Jews and Italian soldiers who had escaped when Italy surrendered. Nadire Bixhiu took more than eighty Jews into her home and found places of safety for them. One of several refugees from Germany who were saved from deportation, Irene Grunbaum, wrote in her memoirs that one day she would tell the world how the Albanians ‘protected a refugee and wouldn’t allow her to be harmed even if it meant losing their lives. The gates of your small country remained open, Albania. Your authorities closed both eyes, when necessary, to give poor persecuted people another chance to survive the most horrible of all wars. We thank you.’
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The Albanians remained true, despite German pressure, to their ancient tradition of hospitality: the person who seeks your help becomes your honoured guest, to be guarded and protected. The most recent encyclopaedia of the Holocaust recognizes the achievements of the Albanian people with regard to the rescue of Jews, noting that the residents of the town of Berat protected all the hundred or so Jewish refugees who found shelter there, and that others were saved in Elbasan, Valona, Debar and Shkoder, and in Tirana, where many were disguised as Muslims.
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An ‘overwhelming majority of the Albanian population,’ wrote Mordecai Paldiel, ‘Muslim and Christian, gave refuge to two thousand Jews in their midst, resulting in the almost total rescue of this Jewish community.’
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IN THE SPRING
of 1943 the Germans began the deportation of more than forty-five thousand Jews from northern Greece, which had been under German occupation for almost two years. The Greeks, for whom the German occupation was a harsh burden, did what they could to try to help Jews avoid deportation. Nikos Kilessopoulis, assistant mayor of the town of Katerini, was at the municipality building late one night with the other town officials when a telegram arrived from the SS instructing them to arrest the local Jews. Without hesitation he hurried to the Jewish houses and urged the Jews to escape to the mountains. Thirty Jews left. The few who could not endure the harsh conditions in the mountain villages returned, and were deported. The majority survived in the mountains.
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In reporting that deportations to Poland were continuing, Guelfo Zamboni, an Italian diplomat in Greece added: ‘Lately Jewish children have been given out for adoption to Greek citizens and foreigners.’
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On 22 September 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop, who five months earlier had destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto and crushed the Jewish uprising there, was appointed Chief of Police in Greece. His task was to carry out the registration and deportation of all Jews. His first instruction included the order: ‘Any Christian who hides a Jew will be shot.’
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The will to help could not always be turned into action. In the town of Janina nineteen hundred Jews were seized. Only five managed to escape deportation. An eyewitness recalled: ‘The Christian people of the city were deeply moved on the day of deportation,’ but they were powerless.
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In Athens, General Stroop summoned Archbishop Damaskinos, and asked for his co-operation in deporting the Jews. Damaskinos left Stroop’s office and immediately ordered the Greek Orthodox religious leaders to hide Jews, and not turn them over to the occupiers. The Jews were also helped by many Italian soldiers in the city, who were regarded by the Germans as traitors to the Axis. Thanks to their support and that of the archbishop and his church, most of Athenian Jewry was saved.
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Among those who did what they could to shelter Jews in Athens was Princess Alice of Greece, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria (and the mother of Prince Philip). She gave refuge in her own house in the centre of the city—opposite that of the archbishop—to Rachel, the widow of Haimaki Cohen, and to Rachel’s young daughter and son Michel. Princess Alice also helped Rachel Cohen’s other three sons, Jacques, Alfred and Elia, to escape from Greece and join the Allied forces. ‘She not only saved the lives of our mother, sister and Michel, but also the lives of all the rest of us,’ Alfred Cohen later wrote, ‘because we would never have dared to flee Greece while knowing the rest of the family were left behind totally unprotected.’
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