The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (49 page)

The German major, whose name does not survive (he may well have been killed in the fighting in the city a few days later) was also recalled by Paul Friedlaender. ‘On one occasion,’ he wrote, ‘an older officer, a doctor from Hamburg, indicated that he guessed who the children Sztehlo was sheltering were and expressed his admiration for him. The same officer assured Sztehlo that no Hungarian Fascist was allowed to set foot in his sector of the front. He gave us practical help in the form of an army truck and driver to collect food from the Swiss Red Cross stores in Buda Castle.’
⁶⁰

At one moment, as the battle raged around them, a shell embedded itself in the villa roof. It did not explode, and Sztehlo went up to the roof to remove it and bring it down. He then buried it under a lilac tree in the garden.
⁶¹

ON
6
JANUARY
1945 the Arrow Cross renewed their systematic raids inside the International Ghetto, once more driving many Jews from the protected houses to the Danube, where they killed them. On the following day, Lutz, Perlasca and Wallenberg obtained a hundred Hungarian soldiers to protect the International Ghetto. On January 8, Peter Zürcher learned of an imminent Arrow Cross plan to order the evacuation of all Jews from the Swiss safe houses in the International Ghetto and to kill them. He immediately intervened with a representative of the Arrow Cross government, denouncing the plan as a violation of international law and demanding an immediate end to Arrow Cross attacks on the safe houses. The government representative finally yielded, and the thousands of Jews who were living under protection were spared.
⁶²

But this protection could no longer be relied upon in the face of increasing fascist aggression. On January 8, all 266 Jews who had been given sanctuary at the Swedish Legation food-supply building were taken out by the Arrow Cross and murdered. Still the protectors persevered. That same day, after 161 Jews were seized by Arrow Cross men and taken to the Danube to be shot, Wallenberg intervened, and they were given sanctuary in another Swedish-protected building. Four days later, on January 12, learning of a planned Arrow Cross massacre of all sixty-nine thousand Jews in the Big Ghetto, Wallenberg went to see a senior German SS officer in Budapest to urge him to prevent it, warning him that retribution for war crimes was imminent. The massacre was averted.
⁶³

On 16 January 1945 Soviet troops reached the International Ghetto. The twenty-five thousand Jews in its safe houses were freed. That day Wallenberg was seen in Budapest for the last time; for reasons that are still not clear, he was then seized by the Russians and taken to Moscow. He was never seen again.
⁶⁴

Two days later the Big Ghetto was liberated by Soviet troops, and within a week Pest followed. In Buda, where fighting continued until mid-February, many Jews found a safe haven in the bomb shelter in the basement of Lutz’s Legation: the building above was reduced to a ruin.
⁶⁵

Of the hundred and fifty thousand Jews who had been in Budapest when the German army and the SS arrived in March 1944, almost a hundred and twenty thousand survived to the moment of liberation at the beginning of 1945. Of those survivors, more than sixty-nine thousand were in the Big Ghetto, twenty-five thousand in the International Ghetto, and another twenty-five thousand in hiding in Christian homes and religious institutions. As a result of the collective efforts of many individuals—both local Hungarians and foreign diplomats—the SS were denied a final victory.

W
ITHIN THE MANY
hundreds of labour camps in which the Germans enslaved their captive peoples, some kindnesses were offered to Jews even by the German supervisors who ran them. Polish-born Lea Goodman was seven years old when her parents were taken to Kostrze camp and factory near Cracow. Had she not been able to go with them, she would almost certainly have been deported to Auschwitz. The head of the camp, and owner of the light engineering factory where the inmates worked, was a German, Richard Strauch. ‘He was willing to have children with their parents for a while,’ Lea Goodman wrote. ‘These kind people made a difference, it was life instead of death.’ When children could no longer be kept at the camp, she was taken back to Cracow, to a Christian family, Mr and Mrs Soltisowa, who took her in without payment.
¹

In the Pawiak prison in Warsaw, a place of torture and execution, Julien Hirshaut recalled two of the Ukrainian guards. One, he wrote, was violent and cruel, but of the other he stated: ‘Barczenko was a true friend, a decent Gentile.’
²

One of the most savage labour camps in German-occupied Poland was Skarzysko-Kamienna. Yet even here there was someone who tried to help: a factory manager named Laskowski, an Ethnic German who was employed by the SS. One of the Jewish prisoners at Skarzysko later recalled: ‘Laskowski wasn’t so bad. He never beat me. I never saw him beat anyone. Other Meisters were beaters. People in other divisions were beaten a lot.’

Despite his slight stature, Laskowski looked intimidating. ‘He never smiled. He came to inspections a lot of times. He never looked at a person straight in the face. He looked at you sideways.’ Another inmate at Skarzysko, Etka Baumstick, commented: ‘He didn’t do anything for anybody personally as far as I know, but I didn’t see him hit anybody. If he was around, I would thank him now.’

To protect the women from the blows of the guards, Laskowski placed them in a barracks and instructed them to look busy and to start sweeping and cleaning if any guards or Nazi officials came by. When he found the women weeping during the first few days, ‘Laskowski came in and explained to us that we shouldn’t cry, that we should work. He said that he didn’t have it so good. He said his wife died, he had two sons on the front. He gave us a little hope. He said maybe the war would end and we would be free.’
³

One of the most feared German concentration camps was Lvov-Janowska, on the outskirts of Lvov, where thousands of Jews perished as a result of the harshness of slave labour and the brutality of their guards. Elias Gechman, who was practising medicine in Lvov when war broke out, was put to work at Janowska loading coal on to trains bound for the Eastern Front. ‘We were allowed one bath in three weeks,’ Dr Gechman later recalled. ‘One day the camp commandant upbraided me for being a dirty Jew and—as a doctor—setting a bad example for the other prisoners. He sentenced me to be hanged the next day.’ Before the sentence could be carried out, Polish workers in a neighbouring camp gave Dr Gechman some of their clothing. He removed his yellow star and merged with the Poles in their camp. Later he escaped from the camp altogether and was hidden by a Polish railwayman who had been his patient before the war. This man dug a hole underneath the floor of his kitchen and kept Dr Gechman in hiding there until liberation.
⁴

Also at Janowska, Leon Wells recalled an SS sergeant who behaved decently. He saw him first when he entered one of the workshops in the camps, ‘a whip in his hand’. He was, Wells recalled, the supervisor of the workshops, an Austrian named Czekala. ‘He first turned his attention to me, the newcomer, and asked me how I had come to be here. He listened to my story with such an open expression of dejection, his head nodding in such sincere regret, that I simply could not regard it as a pose on his part. I learned later that he was a very good sort, and had never been known to strike a man in the workshop. It was only outside, in the course of inspection, that he struck out like the others, and then he did it only to save his face in the presence of the senior authorities.’
⁵

In the concentration camp of Majdanek, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered, as well as tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and many Poles, there was a Polish prisoner, Stanislaw Zelent, whom Jews in the camp remembered with gratitude. One of them, Paul Trepman, later recalled: ‘If a Polish prisoner was near collapse, Zelent came to his aid. If a Jewish inmate was in need of help, Zelent was also there. The Jews blessed him and called him “The Angel of Majdanek”. He had a smile for everybody, even for the Germans, though there his smile was a little bitter, I suppose. His face radiated kindness and compassion; more than one of us confessed to an impulse to kiss him, as one would a gentle, loving father. Stanislaw Zelent, or Stasiek, as we called him, brought a ray of hope and sunshine to hundreds of sick, broken spirits in the living hell that was Majdanek.’

Stanislaw Zelent was the foreman of a labour battalion assigned to various tasks inside the camp. He was in charge of the work that had to be done on barracks, sewers and electrical installations, and also supervised the carpentry and locksmith shops. ‘Most of the chores assigned to Stasiek’s supervision were comparatively easy and uncomplicated, requiring no more than twenty men at a time,’ Paul Trepman recalled, ‘but Stasiek always requested authorization to draft 120 prisoners. He would then select his crew from among those Poles, Russians and Jews who seemed to him the weakest and therefore unlikely to survive in the battalions that did hard labour outside the camp under the clubs and whips of the Kapos.’

Zelent had been given a small hut to use as a toolshed. ‘We privately called the hut “Zelent’s Sanatorium,” for whenever he saw a prisoner who looked especially bad, or one who was recovering from an illness, Zelent would assign him to the toolshed, officially for the purpose of cleaning the shovels, spades and picks used by the rest of the crew. At least that was the notation entered in the camp’s work records. In fact, however, the only work that the prisoner would be asked to do was to light the oven in the toolshed while Zelent went to the kitchen to “organize” some ersatz coffee, potatoes, or dried peas. When Zelent returned with his loot, the prisoner would prepare soup and coffee to share with fellow inmates who would come in from the biting cold outside when the guards were not looking. In this way, again, Stasiek saved dozens of human lives.’
⁶

Zygmunt Freifeld was among tens of thousands of Polish Jews in Plaszow camp. He had a job at the camp’s railway station. In a letter to the Polish weekly newspaper
Tygodnik Powszechny
(‘Universal Weekly’), which was published on 19 April 1964, he wrote of a vicious German railway clerk there, who ‘picked me out for special discrimination during the whole day of very heavy, murderous, and often useless work. He disliked my looks and took exception to my spectacles. I was helped by a Pole, Alojzy Kramarski, aged twenty-three, a junior railway official. He persuaded the German that an additional worker was needed for checking the store of printed notices and that I, knowing German, was suitable for the job.’

The German agreed to this suggestion. ‘From this moment onward my life changed a great deal for the better,’ Zygmunt Freifeld recalled. ‘My benefactor frequently visited me in the storeroom, keeping my spirits up and also my body, as he would bring me something to eat whenever he could. Another kindness was to allow my family (who at that time were still in Sosnowiec) to write to me under his name and address.’ The German ‘would always bring me their letters discreetly, almost gloating with enthusiasm, and he always cheered me up. I might add that he was rendering services to all Jewish prisoners working at the station, as did several Poles also employed there.’
⁷

Among the Polish deportees in the German ammunition factory at Telgte was one Jewish girl, Lea Kalin. Although the Polish girls in her barrack knew that she was Jewish, they kept her identity secret.
⁸
In a labour camp in Dukla, southern Poland, one of the German truck drivers, Fritz Zachmann, was remembered by a Jewish worker, Abraham Zuckerman. ‘He felt compassion for us’, Zuckerman wrote, and he added: ‘My strongest memory of Fritz Zachmann is from several nights after the deportation of the Jews of Dukla. I felt I could trust him, so I asked him if he would take me back to the house where my family had lived. I didn’t have any clothes with me other than what I was wearing, and I wanted to get some more clothing. He agreed to drive me over in his truck. He took a chance by doing this. He ran an enormous risk, but it did not seem to concern him much. He did it, I suppose, because he thought it was the right thing to do. He was violating the rules by taking a prisoner out of the camp. If we had been stopped, we both would have been severely reprimanded or punished. We could have been killed for what we were doing.’
⁹

Among the hundreds of thousand of Jews in the slave labour camps that dotted every region of Greater Germany in 1944 was Zwi Glazer, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy from the Polish town of Zdunska Wola. He was later to set down his recollections of a moment at Ridelau, a slave labour camp in southern Germany, when death seemed very near—but when a German guard gave him the will to live. Day after day, he and those with him were marched to their place of work. ‘The weather was stormy in the forest and whatever did not fall on us from heaven came from the treetops. My breath shortened, my head wobbled and I felt my toes turn numb. I could not move my fingers. I did not realize what had moved me or what had pushed me. The trees, the branches, the people around and everything seemed to me as one mixture into which I was being whipped. Thus, while I was carrying a tree trunk heavier than my body (or that was what I imagined) my fingers lost all their sensitivity, a mixture of snow and rain seeped into the cement sack that I wore over the “striped pajama”, my feet sank into the mud and I was moving like a sleepwalker and dragging myself and the tree trunk with an inhuman thrust. I collapsed.

‘I found myself in a wooden shack when I opened my eyes and wiped the snowflakes that were still glued to my lashes. I noticed in front of me an elderly guard, the age of my grandfather. The snow on my face started to melt. I melted inside as well. I held my guts from bursting. Then suddenly I could not hold anymore and my eyes were dripping like the clouds outside in what turned to be an outpouring that could not be stopped. My bones rattled like the trees in a storm. I cried. Unbelievable. I was not ashamed. I did not care what would happen to me and I surrendered myself to self-pity, which I had not done for years…

‘The details of this event are carved in me like an inscription on a monument. I remember that I felt a touch on my shoulder. It was the elderly German guard. He told me to take off the paper sack and put it near the stove, which stood in the middle of the shack. After that he pointed to my shoes, to take them off as well, and the rags that were wrapped around my feet, so that they would dry. While these were steaming above the iron stove, the guard brought me hot and sweet tea in a tin mug.

‘Then, when the paper sack was dry, he motioned me to take off my “striped pajamas”, which were still dripping, and put on the sack. He was very scared in speaking. From time to time he looked out as if to ensure that he or I might be endangered. When everything was dry, including the shoes, which steamed like a boiling kettle, he took out of his haversack a slice of white bread, a big piece with some spread on it, handed it to me, and motioned to eat it. I would have preferred to take away this delicacy and to indulge, chewing it slowly and licking my lips. But I realized that I had to eat it there and then, and so I did. The guard was observing me with satisfaction, as a hospital attendant looks at a patient who has come out of a coma. I finished chewing the last piece, wishing it were the first bite and not the last, and that my temporary paradise would last a little longer. I dragged myself and dressed, stood up, bowed properly and said: “Thank you so much” and left.

‘To my astonishment, when I returned to work, the soldier who guarded us at work just looked upon me and said nothing. My co-prisoners told me that I was on the verge of death, and therefore I should move as little as possible and that they would take over my working quota. When you are in a jungle, humanity is sevenfold conspicuous. On that evening when I returned to the block I pondered a long while on the piece of white bread which I did not taste a long time and I was thinking about the elderly guard who saved me even before he gave me the slice of bread and the hot sweet tea. He probably has a grandson my age and the war is a cursed thing for him as well. Suddenly it occurred to me that there is a righteous man in Sodom, a German different from those that I got to know starting with the Ethnic German in my home town, Zdunska Wola, to the monsters in the concentration camps, the gas chambers and crematoria—a German with a human image, a German with a human face.’
¹⁰

IN THE WINTER
of 1944–5, Hana Lustig, who had earlier been a prisoner at Auschwitz, was working as a slave labourer at Neugraben, near Hamburg. She and her fellow prisoners had been put to work clearing rubble from bombed-out buildings in the suburbs of Hamburg, repairing frozen water pipes and labouring in brick and munitions factories. ‘Because we were working in the open countryside, where there were only a few scattered houses, and since there were no toilets, we were allowed, from time to time, to run into the surrounding area to relieve ourselves among the trees and bushes. One day, while out of sight of the SS men and women who guarded us, I mustered all my courage and knocked on the door of a house—its chimney puffing smoke into the cold grey air.

‘After the second knock, an old woman opened the door bewildered at what she saw, but no more frightened than I, while words pleading for food came out of my mouth. The woman, after a few moments of hesitation, during which I nearly died of fright, beckoned me in. Guiding me into her kitchen, she spoke briefly to her husband, who sat in a corner repairing shoes. She took out a soup bowl and poured some hot liquid into it. I ate in haste, not wanting to be missed by the guards, for punishment for such a breach of discipline was harsh. I thanked them both and ran. As I was leaving, the old lady whispered to me, “Come again when you can.”’