The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (4 page)

Jasinski’s wife Emilia bandaged Szmuel’s injured hand, and gave the brothers clothes, and a mattress to sleep on in the barn. The couple asked for no payment. Instead, Jasinski let them dig a hiding place under the cowshed. A few days later, two more Jews who had escaped the massacre in the forest knocked at Jasinski’s door. They were Szaje Odler and Akiba Kremer, who were also given shelter and assistance.

After the hideout had been in use for two months, a rumour spread in the vicinity that Jews were hiding on Jasinski’s farm. The four fugitives were forced to leave and penetrate even deeper into the forest, where they remained until their liberation by the Red Army in July 1944. A month later, Akiba Kremer, Szaje Odler and Josef Liderman were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists.
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In the small town of Hoszcza a Ukrainian farmer, Fiodor Kalenczuk, hid a Jewish grain merchant, Pessah Kranzberg, his wife, their ten-year-old daughter and their daughter’s young friend for seventeen months, refusing to deny them refuge even when his wife protested that their presence, in the stable, was endangering a Christian household.
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In the last week of September 1942, five hundred Jews were murdered in Hoszcza. The Kranzbergs survived. Their rescue, in the circumstances of the East, had been a rare act of courage.

After some of the mass shootings a few—a very lucky few—of those who had been forced into the execution pits managed to survive the hail of bullets, and to crawl away once night had fallen. One of these survivors was Rivka Yosselevska. As she made her way, wounded and bleeding, across the field around the slaughter pits of Mizocz, in Volhynia, a farmer took pity on her, hid her, and fed her. Later he helped her join a group of Jews hiding in the forest. There, she survived until the Red Army came in the summer of 1944. Nineteen years after her escape from the pit, she told her story, including that of her rescue, to a court in Jerusalem.
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Following the destruction of the Jewish community in the eastern Polish city of Nowogrodek and the surrounding villages, most of the survivors were sent to a labour camp in Nowogrodek itself. In November 1942 fourteen of these slave labourers, including Idel (now Jack) Kagan, escaped, determined to join the Jewish partisan group headed by the Bielski brothers in the nearby forests. Their first refuge, in the Nowogrodek suburb of Peresika, was with the Bobrovskis, a well-known family of dog-catchers whose job it was to catch stray, unlicensed dogs wandering in the surrounding woods and countryside. ‘They lived in an isolated house, far from the town, which no one ever visited,’ Jack Kagan recalled. ‘But it was the Bobrovskis who felt compassion for the Jews’ bitter fate and helped as much as they could, smuggling food into the ghetto. The ghetto Jews knew about this humane behaviour.’ Every Jew who managed to escape from the Nowogrodek ghetto and reach the dog-catchers’ home was hidden for a day or two and supplied with food for the journey ahead. The Bobrovskis also kept in touch with the Bielski partisans, ‘and they would tell runaway Jews where they might be found’.

After resting for about an hour in the Bobrovskis’ house, the fourteen men went across the fields to where Boinski, a prosperous Polish farmer before the war, raised and sold pigs. He had many friends among the Jews of Nowogrodek. ‘At midnight we knocked on Boinski’s door,’ Jack Kagan recalled. ‘He came out, frightened, and told us that he lived in constant fear of the Germans, who paid him frequent visits. He agreed to hide us for one day. He led us into the barn and covered us with hay. At noon, the good man brought us some bread, potatoes and water, and when night fell we left the farm and made our way to the nearby road.’ Seven or eight miles down the road they reached the home of a White Russian, Kostik Kozlovsky, who was known to take messages and letters from the Bielski partisans to the Jews in the ghetto. ‘We arrived at dawn, exhausted. Kozlovsky said that no partisans had been there for several days, but that they might very well come that night. He suggested that we should wait for them in a nearby grove. We spent the whole day in that grove, lying in a trench from which we could watch the road, bustling with German military vehicles.’ At nightfall, several young Jews from the Bielski partisans arrived at Kozlovsky’s farm, and the fourteen escapees went back with them to the forest.
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There they joined the Bielski partisans—as at least twenty more Jews were to do with Kozlovsky’s help.

Jack Kagan later recalled how ‘the name Kozlovsky and that of the dog-catchers (Bobrovski) became known. The story was that if you were planning an escape, you should go six miles from Nowogrodek to Lida to Kozlovsky’s farmstead. He would then direct you to the partisans and of course everybody knew where the dog-catchers lived. And they also had contacts with the partisans.’ The Bobrovskis, the family of dogcatchers, paid a high price for their helpfulness. During a German raid on their home a Jewish family was found in hiding. Rescuers and rescued were all killed, and the Bobrovskis’ property burned down.
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We will never know how many Jews were hidden by Polish farmers in the Nowogrodek region, and how many were betrayed. As Jack Kagan noted: ‘Very few farmers wanted to risk their lives and the lives of their families to save a Jew. The penalty for just having contacted a Jew was death. But there were some good farmers who risked their lives and hid children or entire families.’ One of those saved was a baby, Bella Dzienciolska. ‘Her parents had entrusted her to a farmer to hide. She was blonde and she did not look like a Jewish child, but at two years old, she already spoke Yiddish. So the farmer made a hole under the floor and kept her there during the day for a year until she forgot to speak Yiddish. He then took her out and told the neighbours that a relative’s child was staying with them.’ Bella Dzienciolska survived the war, thanks to that unknown farmer. Fifty years later she was to return to the farm, and found under the floorboards the hole in which she had been hidden.
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IN BYELORUSSIA, IN
the early days of the German occupation, a group of women in the capital, Minsk, worked with Jewish resistance groups in the ghetto, smuggling Jewish children out of the ghetto and placing them in Christian orphanages. In the course of several weeks, seventy children were saved in this way.
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Twice, in Minsk, when Jews were being led out of the ghetto to their execution, Maria Babich managed to take a Jewish boy away from the march, hide him in the family home in the city, and then acquire papers for him as if he were a Byelorussian child. Maria Babich’s daughter Emma noted that ‘our neighbours could have been the reason of our death. If one of them or somebody else had informed the police of such an action we would have been immediately shot dead on the spot.’
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Emma also remembered that as a seven-year-old girl, she herself would go to the local German headquarters and beg for bread, in order to help feed the children.
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During the search for help in Minsk, a Jewess, known only by her first name, Musya, met Anna Dvach, a Byelorussian woman with whom she had worked in the same factory before the German invasion. Anna took her home, gave her food and shelter, and then sent her back to the ghetto with food for the other survivors. From that day until the arrival of the Red Army six months later, Anna Dvach ensured the survival of thirteen Jews.
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In the town of Radun, deep in the forests and swamps of Byelorussia, Meir Stoler was one of only a few survivors of the mass executions on 10 May 1942, when the two thousand Jews in the ghetto were killed. After being chased and repeatedly shot at by a German officer on horseback, the thirty-year-old blacksmith managed to reach the tiny Polish hamlet of Mizhantz, where the villagers took him in and gave him food. He survived the war and returned to Radun; fifty years later he was the only Jew living there.
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As many as twenty-six thousand Jews were living in the former Polish city of Brest-Litovsk when the Germans captured it from the Russians in June 1941. Almost all of them were murdered, many being taken by train to Bronna Gora, seventy-five miles to the east, on the Brest–Minsk railway line, and shot in huge pits specially dug to receive them. ‘A tiny percentage—about one person in a given thousand—survived the Holocaust in Brest,’ write John and Carol Garrard, historians of the destruction of the Jews of that city, and they add: ‘Given the terror inspired by the German occupying forces and the hostility expressed towards Jews by most of the Polish and Ukrainian population, it is a wonder that anyone agreed to help the Jews.’ Yet despite the fact that helping Jews ‘was a crime punishable by the death of the entire family involved’, the names of ten Righteous have been recorded. Among them were Pyotr Grigoriev, known to the Jews as a ‘precious human being’ Floriya Budishevskaya, who saved the life of a ten-year-old Jewish boy (she was later shot by the Germans for her connection with the Soviet partisans); and Polina Golovchenko, who saved two young sisters and a young boy, and also hid a brother and sister, Khemie and Lily Manker.

On one occasion Polina Golovchenko learned that neighbours had denounced her to the Germans for hiding Jews, and that the Gestapo were on their way. She immediately took the Mankers to another hiding place. The Garrards describe how, when the Gestapo arrived at her home, she ‘calmly handed them all her keys, and told them they were welcome to search her house and grounds. After combing her property for hours, they left, uttering more threats and imprecations.’ She then ‘went serenely to the hiding place, and brought the Mankers back into her home, even though she knew that she was under constant surveillance by neighbours seeking the bounty for handing over a hidden Jew’.
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After the destruction of the ghetto of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred Jews survived in hiding places known as ‘malines’, mostly in cellars and outhouses. Outside help was also essential for survival; a local couple, Ignacy Kurjanowicz and his wife Maria, helped the young Moshe Smolar to survive by giving him food to eat and to take back to his hiding place. ‘The Kurjanowicz family took me in for a week,’ he later wrote, ‘and I was invited to visit them once a week on a regular basis. For greater safety, and in order not to make me look too obvious in the streets of the town, he accompanied me to the ghetto fence and from there I sneaked into the den (malina). From that day, I came there regularly for a full day once a week, until 4 January 1943, when peasants discovered my hideout, and I had to leave it for good. Then the Kurjanowicz family, after discussing the matter, decided to keep me in their house until there was a chance to escape.’

Moshe Smolar’s account continued: ‘I remained in their house till March 20…about three months. Needless to say, all this time they were risking their lives every day. They did all this without any remuneration, financial or otherwise. On the contrary, keeping me in their home cost them a lot of money, and they had to cut down on their own rations to share their daily bread with me. When I ask myself what were their motives, I can only attribute their good deeds to their humanitarian feelings originating both from their compassionate feelings toward the Jews, deep emotional empathy with the persecuted, and truly deep and pure religious feelings. All these factors nourished their deeds, and helped them withstand the risk of paying a high price for what they did—if caught.’
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When Ignacy and Maria Kurjanowicz were being considered at Yad Vashem for a Righteous Among the Nations Award, someone noted on their file: ‘This is a story that touches the heart—a real and dear Righteous Gentile.’
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Moshe Smolar’s family did not survive the war: his father, mother, sister and two brothers (one of them with his wife and three children) were murdered during the liquidation of the Korzec ghetto.
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Richard Vanger was ten years old when he managed to find help in the eastern Polish town of Stolowicze, despite the hostility of many local Byelorussians to the Jews. It was a Polish family in the town who agreed to help him. His father, a book-keeper, had a Polish Catholic assistant, Mrs Teressa. Shortly before the liquidation of the ghetto, ‘my father approached Mrs Teressa, and she agreed to hide us, and also the Rabbi’s daughter, Gietl. We were hidden in Mrs Teressa’s barn. Her house was the last one in that particular road, the last house before the cemetery on the east branch of the crossroads. I think we were there about two days and nights and on the third the Germans came and started liquidating the ghetto. I remember hearing lots and lots of shooting. I think I was too young to realise what was going on but Gietl was a bit older than myself and she knew. She said to me that the Germans were practising, just shooting into the marshes, which were all around the village. After a couple of days there was no more shooting. It was all finished.’

As the Germans, helped by Byelorussian police, intensified their search for hidden Jews in Stolowicze, Mrs Teressa kept Gietl in hiding with her, and managed to find a Polish Catholic woman in a neighbouring village willing to hide the young boy. This new rescuer had three children of her own, including a daughter, Yasha, who used to bring him food in the barn. ‘I was always hidden, as they got frightened when I arrived. People began to ask questions. I was never really allowed to come out into the daylight. In fact I was in a locked room in the loft of the barn most of the time and sometimes things got worse because they had a relative who lived in Stolowicze by the name of Bruno who used to go and visit the family. When this happened I had to hide. Apparently in Stolowicze in the very early days of the German occupation he was in the police force and he was not one of the nicer people. Of course he would have recognised and remembered me very quickly.’

While he was at this Catholic family’s farm, Richard Vanger recalled, ‘I spent most of the days in the barn, sometimes the nights as well, but on cold nights I was allowed to sleep in the house. I remember that Yasha was the one who always used to bring the food to me in the barn. She would be coming over as if bringing food for the pigs or the chickens and in amongst it would be a plate for me.’ As time went on, ‘there was more and more trouble from the Byelorussians and it was getting dangerous for me to be there. There were one or two visits to the farm by the police searching for arms and luckily they did not take any notice of me. It was during the day time and they thought I was just a kid looking after the livestock, but the family decided I could not stay there any more.’