The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (9 page)

Arieh Czeret stayed in that barn until the end of June 1943, hidden and fed by the farmer: ‘I asked him for a prayer book and learned all the prayers of the Ukrainian Church by heart. At the farm there was a worker about my age who came from the Carpathian Mountains. I made a deal with him. I gave him my boots and in return he gave me his identity document without a photo.’ After that, Arieh Czeret was able to masquerade as a Ukrainian until liberation nine months after he had been given refuge.
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Not far from Trembowla, in the small town of Budzanow, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Ufryjewicz, saved a whole Jewish family by baptizing them and giving them baptismal certificates, and forging his parish register in such a way that he created for them a complete set of Christian forebears. With the false identities that he had created they were able to move from place to place, away from those who might know their real identities, and thus to survive.
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In Turka, on the eve of the deportation of the Jews in August 1942, Sister Jadwiga, a nun who was also the head nurse at the local hospital, hid twelve-year-old Lidia Kleiman in one of the cubicles of the men’s bathroom, which was used as a broom closet. Lidia stayed hidden in the hospital for several weeks. Sister Jadwiga then took her to her own home and taught her Christian prayers in preparation for placing her in a Catholic orphanage in Lvov under the assumed name of Marysia Borowska. There she was put in the care of Sister Blanka Piglowska, who knew that she was Jewish. When a suspicion arose in the orphanage that Lidia might be Jewish, it was Sister Blanka who obtained new false papers for her, with a new name, Maria Woloszynska. She then transferred the girl to another orphanage, at the convent in the village of Lomna, where the Mother Superior, Sister Tekla Budnowska, was hiding many Jewish girls.

In the early autumn of 1943, after an attack by Ukrainian national ists on the orphanage, Sister Budnowska received permission to transfer her girls to Warsaw, and to establish an orphanage in an abandoned building in the former ghetto there. In Warsaw, she accepted yet more Jewish children. After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, the orphanage relocated to Kostowiec, fifteen miles south-west of Warsaw.

Lidia’s mother had been denounced to the Gestapo while travelling on false papers, arrested and killed; but her father had been hidden by a Russian Orthodox priest, and survived. Father and daughter were reunited after liberation.
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EACH STORY OF
rescue reveals a remarkable person, usually acting quite differently from his neighbours, not so afraid to risk death as to be prevented by fear from helping, and willing to work out a whole series of different stratagems to protect those whom he or she had taken in. In the spring of 1942, six Jews escaped from the ghetto of Stryj, making their way to the apartment of Boleslaw and Zofia Bialkowski, who lived in the town. The Bialkowskis took in the fugitives and hid them in their attic, in a narrow, dark cubicle no more than six square metres in size. The Jews were forbidden to speak among themselves in case the neighbours heard them, and betrayed them and their rescuers. To provide the fugitives with some light, Boleslaw Bialkowski made a small skylight for them in the tiled roof. In order to muffle their footsteps, the floor of the hideout was covered with straw, which also served as bedding. Each morning, Boleslaw Bialkowski removed the refuse from the cubicle. From time to time he brought them the local newspapers. His wife Zofia prepared meals for them and washed their clothes, hanging them up to dry in the apartment so as not to arouse the neighbours’ suspicions. As so often, financial reward or recompense were not a consideration; for a short time the fugitives paid for their keep, but when their money ran out, Bialkowski provided for their keep out of his modest earnings as a tinsmith.

One day Bialkowski was visited by a Jewish acquaintance, Jakov Lewit, whose skills as an artisan were valued by the Germans. Lewit brought with him his four-year-old daughter, Erna, whom he asked the Bialkowskis to shelter; they agreed, and the child remained with them. Because she could not be expected to remain silent, the child was not placed in the attic with the six other Jews, but stayed inside the apartment. Erna became attached to the Bialkowskis’ four children and played with them. Whenever visitors came, she hid in the cupboard. With liberation, the little girl, and the other six Jews, were finally safe.
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In his study of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the German occupation, the historian Philip Friedman, himself a survivor of the Lvov ghetto, wrote of testimonies gathered by the Yiddish writer Joseph Schwarz concerning a Ukrainian engineer, Alexander Kryvoiaza, from the East Galician town of Sambor, who employed fifty-eight Jews in his factory and helped conceal them during an anti-Jewish ‘Action’. Friedman also noted that in the nearby town of Zawalow, a forester, Lew Kobilnitsky, and his brother-in-law rescued twenty-three Jews.
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Before the First World War, Brody had been the border town in Austria-Hungary through which hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews had passed on their way out of Russia. Between the wars it was in the Polish province of Eastern Galicia. The Germans occupied it in June 1941. Many Jewish refugees from Lvov, fifty miles to the west, having tried to flee from the German advance, were in the town when it was taken. One of them was Ian Lustig, who later recalled that his mother, who had brought him to Brody, had spent her childhood there, where she had a number of non-Jewish friends, among them Marja Michalewska. ‘We lived there in fear and one day when nearly all our relations and Jewish friends had been taken away by the Germans, Mrs Michalewska found out that another “Aktion” was about to begin and she told us about it and found a place of refuge at a peasant’s house. I remember she took all our family at night to that peasant’s residence in a village. We found refuge in the loft of the peasant’s house. Mrs Michalewska told us she would do everything possible for us to keep alive and we knew she meant what she said. During the “Aktion” nearly all of my remaining relations at Brody were taken away by the Germans. After the “Aktion” we came back to Brody and Mrs Michalewska assisted us in our escape to Lvov. I was dressed as a girl and we went by train. I sat between Mrs Michalewska and her girlfriend and my mother was at the end of the carriage. In case anything happened to my mother, Mrs Michalewska would have taken care of me. Afterwards while we stayed in Lvov Mrs Michalewska sent us food parcels and brought my little cousin to us. She also took care of my aunts. Such exemplary help and assistance is not easy to forget.’
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In June 1943 the Podhajce ghetto was destroyed and almost all its inhabitants were murdered. A Polish shoemaker in the town, Wincenty Rajski, and his wife Stefania hid two members of the Herbst family, from whose leather store he had used to buy his materials before the war. The Rajskis took the risk involved even though they had two small girls of their own. Ziunia Herbst was three years old when she saw her father for the last time. She and her mother Sabina owed their survival, she wrote, most of all to ‘the courageous humanity of a Polish, Catholic family who hid us in the attic of their barn for almost a year. They risked their lives in order to save ours.’
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At the time of the round-ups, a few of the Jews in the Podhajce ghetto managed to escape to the nearby woods. From there, a group of twenty-three survivors approached two Polish brothers, Lewko and Genko Bilecki, and their teenage sons Roman and Julian, whom they had known before the war. The Bileckis agreed to help. Roman and Julian’s respective sisters, Jaroslawa and Anna, participated in the collective act of rescue. Lewko and Genko showed the Jews where to build a bunker in the woods and for almost a year provided them with food. That winter the snows were very deep, and in order to prevent the Germans finding the bunker, Roman and Julian would bring food to the Jews by jumping from tree to tree so as not to leave footprints in the snow. Despite all the precautions, the bunker was discovered not once but twice, forcing the Jews to flee; each time the Bilecki family showed the fugitives where to build their new bunker, until, in the spring of 1944, they were liberated by Soviet troops. The courage and commitment of the Bilecki family had saved the lives of twenty-three Jewish men, women and children.
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A Polish couple, Jozef and Antoine Sawko, and their daughter Malwina, went every Sunday into the countryside near Podhajce, taking with them food for two Jews, Israel Friedman and his daughter Berta, who were in hiding in the fields. Israel Friedman’s other two daughters, as well as his wife and father, had been murdered during the liquidation of the Podhajce ghetto in June 1943. That September, when the weather turned cold and the fields no longer provided adequate protection, father and daughter moved to the Sawkos’ farm (they had not wanted to hide there earlier, for fear of endangering their helpers). When winter came they dug a small hole under the pigsty. The hole, which the Sawkos covered with straw and wood, was not deep enough for them to stand up in: the water table was too high to dig any deeper, so father and daughter had to live in the hole in a sitting position. When it rained, they were waist-deep in water. In February 1944, when Soviet forces liberated the region, Israel and Berta Friedman stole away from their hiding place in the middle of the night, so that none of the farmers nearby would know that Jozef, Antoine and Malwina Sawko had given them food and shelter—and life itself.
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In discussing the story of the rescuers in Podhajce—which he described as ‘this terrible place full of anti-Semitism’—Glenn Richter, a leader of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in the 1970s who had befriended Berta Friedman (then Mrs Weitz) in New York, reflected: ‘It gives a sense of hope that there is something better among humans, that you can go far beyond yourself.’
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In the Zborow region of Eastern Galicia, two brothers, Kazimierz and Franciszek Barys, sheltered five Jews on their farm: Golda Schechter and her two children, Fryda, aged five, and Martin, aged one; Maria Nisenbaum; and another Jew by the name of Rozenberg. At first the brothers prepared a hideout in the attic of their home, but when they learned that the Germans frequently raided attics in their searches for Jews, they dug a bunker beneath the barn, and covered it with a box full of heavy tools. Taking care of the five Jews meant huge and sustained effort to bring food and drink each day, to ensure that they were clean and properly clothed, and to remove refuse from the hideout. The brothers had not known any of the five before they had sought shelter at the farm. Nor did they ask for any payment for the help they gave.

From time to time, German police and Ukrainian collaborators raided the house and farm buildings in search of Jews, but the hiding place was never uncovered. Then, in the summer of 1944, only a few hours before the village was liberated by Soviet troops, Rozenberg left the bunker; he was seen by a Ukrainian and shot on the spot. The Barys brothers were spared punishment for hiding Jews only because the Germans were already fleeing from the approaching Russians.
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When the ghetto of Brzezany was destroyed, Mark and Klara Zipper managed to flee to a nearby Polish village, where a Polish acquaintance directed them to the home of a basketmaker, Julian Baran, who lived with his wife and three children in one of the village houses. The Barans, devout Catholics, were extremely poor, but did not hesitate to take in the penniless couple who sought their help. Mark Zipper, who knew how to weave, helped the Barans with their work, repaying them to some extent for their kindness. In their testimony, the Zippers subsequently stated: ‘We consider Mr and Mrs Baran to be angels from heaven, and shall remain eternally grateful to them.’ After the war, the Zippers emigrated to the United States. They kept in contact with their benefactors, from time to time sending them money and parcels.
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The town of Drohobycz had one of the largest Jewish populations in Eastern Galicia—some twenty thousand. With the arrival of the German army on 1 July 1941, a ghetto was established; forced labour and near-starvation rations were imposed, and executions were frequent. Harry Zeimer, a survivor of that time of torment in Drohobycz, described how rare it was for any Jew to escape. The Catholic population in the surrounding area, ‘though hating the German invader, believed that God chose those “brutal Huns” as a tool to eliminate the descendants of the crucifiers of Jesus. Not more than a few per cent of Poles were thinking otherwise. But to think and to act were not the same thing: A Pole hiding a Jew, or helping him to escape, was simply shot by the Germans! Therefore, I consider my late friend Tadeusz Wojtowicz (a true Catholic Pole) as a hero, who has risked his own life to save mine. In addition, he refused my intention to get for him the Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) medal for “The Righteous People”: in his opinion, there was no glory but human duty in what he did!’

Before the war, Harry Zeimer wrote, he and his rescuer ‘were no more than schoolmates at the Polish State High School in Drohobycz. During the German occupation, his conscience didn’t let him be a passive witness of the Final Solution. As a true Christian, Tadeusz Wojtowicz could not decide to join the Polish underground forces, because to kill—even a German—was a sin. In 1942 he found his solution: he will risk his life to flee with me to Switzerland! The papers necessary to enter the Reich for an Aryan Pole, volunteer to work there, the dangerous twists and turns to get them were incumbent exclusively on my late friend, because I was too much known as a Jew in our small town. At the same time, I bought an Aryan identity card, and as soon as my friend got his papers—we succeeded to add there my (false) name…and we were gone. With a lot of luck, the two “volunteers” reached Singen-am-Hohentwiel, a German town near the Swiss border, where we worked for eight days. There were numerous Polish workers, ex-prisoners of war, a very solidarity-minded group, who helped us to organize our leap into Switzerland. Except my friend, nobody knew that I was a disguised Jew. Among these courageous, hearty young people, I could statistically confirm the deep effects of the anti-Semitic education by the Polish Catholic Church, during the centuries. On 1 November 1942 we were in Switzerland…’
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