Their Brothers' Keepers

Philip Friedman

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789124682
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia judía

This book documents the tales of scores of Christian heroes and heroines from all walks of life, in various European countries, who aided the oppressed escape the Nazi terror.Christians in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, France, Italy, Hungary and Eastern Europe defied Gestapo truncheons to be their brothers' keepers. Fully documented addition to material which has not been treated before in this way."...One of the most thrilling stories of our generation, excitingly written and well-documented...it serves as an inspiration for all those who have the courage to express their love to their fellowman..."—The Very Rev. JAMES A. PIKE, Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York"...a major document of human solidarity, this story testifies to the survival of the spirit of heroism, as well as of martyrdom, in behalf of humanitarian ideals."—Professor SALO W. BARON, Columbia University"...I commend this work to all who are interested in seeing how people reached up gentle hands and took Christ's law of love out of the sky and...put it into practice...I hope it is read by millions."—Rev. JOHN A. O'BRIEN, University of Notre Dame

CHAPTER ONE—THE HEART OF WOMAN

Emanuel Ringelblum on more than one occasion recorded the valorous deeds of Jewish women whose capacity to love, endure, sacrifice, and fight during the years of the Nazi Locust will inspire poets and historians alike for many years to come. The hymn to the heroic non-Jewish women who risked their lives for the victims of Nazi barbarism is yet to be written and the song is yet to be sung. It would require more than can be told in the pages of one book to call the roll of the women of many nations, political persuasions, and varying social strata who gave their time, their wealth, even their lives for those who had been marked by Hitler for extermination. Behind each proud name cited in these chapters stand the nameless, anonymous legions of women whose inspiring acts will live as long as the conscience of mankind is disturbed by the remembrance of the murderous Hitler era.{7}

Anna Simaite was a Lithuanian, rather on the stout side, with a broad peasant face, and flaxen hair which she parted in the middle and braided into a coil to crown her head. In her early childhood Anna had many Jewish friends and classmates. Among her favorite authors was the famous Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa, who wrote a number of stories about Jews and whose distinguished novel Meir Ezofowicz treated the Jew with compassion and love. Her grandfather, a liberal, broad-minded man, taught the girl to consider the Jews objectively and not through the distorted vision of bigotry and anti-Semitism. When Anna entered high school in Riga, she joined a Social Revolutionary underground organization aimed at destroying the tsarist regime that spread its tentacles from faraway St. Petersburg. Later, she studied at the Teachers’ Seminary in Moscow, and after graduation became completely absorbed by the plight of the underprivileged, choosing to devote her life to the children of the poor.

But soon after the outbreak of World War II, we find Anna Simaite in charge if the cataloguing department of the old and famed Vilna University. She was counted among the best literary critics in Lithuania; her position and reputation were secure if she chose to remain silent. But Anna Simaite chose to fight. Ten years later, after the guns had been stilled and weeds had grown high over the shattered brick and mortar of the walled-in ghettos, Anna explained her compulsion to act. “When the Germans forced Jews of Vilna into a ghetto, I could no longer go on with my work. I could not remain in my study. I could not eat. I was ashamed that I was not Jewish myself. I had to do something. I realized the danger involved, but it could not be helped. A force much stronger than myself was at work.”

Obsessed with the notion that only by helping the Jews could she fulfill herself as a human being, Anna Simaite turned toward the ghetto. Non-Jews were prohibited from entering this reservation where the Jews of Vilna had been immured to suffer briefly before they were exterminated. Anna, the non-Jew, was determined to breach the ghetto walls, to offer her services, to declare her oneness with the sufferers. She appeared before the German authorities and presented them with a singularly innocent plan. In the ghetto were books that had been borrowed from the University library some time before by Jewish students. Would the Germans permit her, a conscientious librarian, to go behind the barbed wires and high walls in order to rescue the priceless volumes? The Germans granted her request, and for a few weeks Anna enjoyed a limited immunity. She prowled among the crowded hovels of the ghetto, which had been the slum area of Vilna before the war, offering her aid to the hapless Jews. When the Germans declared that she was taking too much time reclaiming her valuable books, Anna contrived new schemes. As time went on, she became completely absorbed by the feverish life of the ghetto. She visited friends, ran to amateur theatricals and concerts, attended lectures, art exhibits, and teas. She could not get over the fact that the Jews, whom the occupying power had sentenced to death by starvation, torture, and deportation, spent all their waking hours celebrating life.

As Anna went back and forth, she got in touch with people in the Aryan part of the city, people who might risk taking in an old friend languishing in the ghetto. There were those who nodded quick assent, and others who wavered while Anna pleaded with them and tried to infuse them with the courage she possessed in such abundance. And there were those who spat in her face. But she was not to be insulted, intimidated, or diverted from her mission. She sought out hiding places for Jewish children whom she later helped spirit out of the ghetto. She obtained forged Aryan papers for Jews who determined to scale the ghetto walls. She proudly enlisted as a courier, smuggling letters from leaders of the ghetto Underground to their compatriots outside, letters that could not under any circumstances be sent through the mails. Assisted by a small, valiant group of friends, among them the well-known Lithuanian poet Baruta, Anna carried food to the starving Jews. For those among the decimated ghetto-dwellers who resolved to make a last stand against the enemy, she brought small arms and ammunition. It goes without saying that each article Anna smuggled inside the reservation, she carried at the risk of her life, were it a small gun hidden on her person, or a bouquet of roses for some beauty-starved woman of the desolate ghetto. She came always laden with things and thus did she leave, carrying precious archives, rare books, documents, and scraps of diaries of the martyrdom of the walled-in people to be preserved for another time. She hid the precious objects in the vaults of the Seminar for Lithuanistics at the University.

In April of 1942, Jacob Gens, the commander of the Vilna ghetto, cautioned Anna Simaite that the Gestapo was becoming suspicious of her activities. This warning came at the time when the Germans were launching their campaign for total extermination of the ghetto-dwellers. Anna scorned the commander’s warning; her own fate seemed inconsequential in the face of the disaster threatening the Jews. She organized a rescue group in the Aryan sector of the city, determined to save as many Jewish children as possible. She worked tirelessly, bribing guards, wheedling, cajoling, her life as much in danger as the lives of the skeleton children she snatched from the ghetto to hide among non-Jews. For a short time she evaded the Gestapo net by taking shelter among members of the Underground, but in the summer of 1944 the inevitable happened: Anna was seized by the Gestapo. Threatened, beaten, starved, still she betrayed no secrets. Finally she was sentenced to death.

Without Anna’s knowledge, the University interceded on her behalf, bribing a high Nazi official. The death sentence was commuted, and Anna was deported to the notorious Dachau concentration camp and later transferred to a camp in Southern France, where the Allied armies found her barely clinging to life. Following the Liberation, she went to Toulouse, penniless, her health shattered. After a period of convalescence in a hospital, Anna found a job as dishwasher in a small restaurant. Despite the fact that she lived the withdrawn life of a refugee, word mysteriously got around that Anna Simaite was in France and in need of help. Messages with offers of aid began to arrive at her flat. The offers came from organizations like the Union of Lithuanian Jews of America, and from individuals to whom her name had become a legend. Determined to earn her own livelihood, Anna Simaite declined the aid. When the job as dishwasher came to an abrupt end, she went to Paris and found employment first in a laundry, then as a doll seamstress, and finally as a librarian.

Anna might have remained in Paris to live out the rest of her days if the news of her survival had not reached some of her former “children.” Letters began to arrive from many parts of the world. All of her “children” implored her to come and live with them. One of the most persistent of correspondents was Tania Wachsman, a mother of two children, who lived in a kibbutz in Israel. “My dear Mother,” Tania began each letter, “when will you finally come to us?” Anna hesitated—she did not want to be a burden—but in the end yielded to Tania’s pleas.

She arrived in Israel in the spring of 1953. Everywhere in the new republic she was received with flowers and applause. She was feted by the Association of Lithuanian Jews and by the editorial staff of the largest Hebrew daily newspaper, Davar. The government of Israel granted her a pension, an honor she refused but eventually agreed to accept. What impressed Anna more than the receptions, flowers, and emoluments was the welcome accorded her by the “children” whom she had helped to survive the ghetto. “It is not possible for me to tell you how much I appreciate this warm-hearted reception,” she said. “I have not the words. I am here...among my kin.”{8}

And there she lives, among her “children,” in a place called Petah Tikvah—the woman with the peasant face, her gray hair parted smoothly in the center—writing essays, memoirs and articles.

“For me, as a Lithuanian,” she says, “it is a very sad thing to admit that not all of my co-nationals, during the years of the Jewish ordeal, showed compassion for the victims. To my great sorrow, it must be admitted that some elements among the Lithuanians even collaborated in the extermination of the Jews.” As for the Vilna ghetto where she virtually lived in those terrible days, she has this to say: “How the Jews stood it, I do not know. The Jews of the Vilna ghetto and all other ghettos were great heroes, even if they themselves did not realize it.”

It is not possible to call to memory the Vilna ghetto without also invoking the name of Anna Simaite, who stormed its walls, clutching a gun for resistance and a crushed flower for the comfort of some beauty-starved soul.

*****

The small nunnery was located not far from the Vilna Colony railroad station. During the German occupation there were only seven sisters in this Benedictine convent, all from Kraków. The Mother Superior, a graduate of Kraków University, was a comparatively young woman of thirty-five at the time when the Jews were driven from their homes. Although the convent was too far removed from the ghetto for her to hear the cries of a tortured people, the Mother Superior seemed always to be gazing in that direction, as though she were waiting for a summons. She found it hard to keep her mind on the work which had previously claimed all her time and love, the ministering to the poor and the miserable.{9}

One day she decided that the time had come to act. She summoned the other nuns and, after prayer, they discussed the subject of the ghetto. Not long afterward, as a result of this conversation, a few of the sisters appeared before the gate of the ghetto. The guards did not suspect the nuns of any conspiratorial designs. Eventually contact was established between the convent and the Vilna ghetto, and an underground railroad was formed. The seven nuns became experts in getting Jews out of the ghetto and hiding them at the convent and in other places. At one period it seemed as if the small nunnery were bulging with nuns, some with features unmistakably masculine.

Among those hidden in the convent were several Jewish writers and leaders of the ghetto Underground: Abraham Sutzkever, Abba Kovner, Edek Boraks, and Arie Wilner. Some stayed a long time, others returned to the ghetto to fight and die. When, in the winter of 1941, the Jewish Fighters’ Organization was formed, the Mother Superior became an indispensable ally. The Fighters needed arms, and the Mother Superior undertook to supply them. Assisted by the other nuns, she roamed the countryside in search of knives, daggers, bayonets, pistols, guns, grenades. The hands accustomed to the touch of rosary beads became expert with explosives. The first four grenades received gratefully by the Fighters were the gift of the Mother Superior, who instructed Abba Kovner in their proper use, as they were of a special brand unfamiliar to him. She later supplied other weapons. Although she worked selflessly, tirelessly, she felt not enough was being done. “I wish to come to the ghetto,” she said to Abba Kovner, “to fight by your side, to die, if necessary. Your fight is a holy one. You are a noble people. Despite the fact that you are a Marxist [Kovner was a member of Hashomer Hatzair] and have no religion, you are closer to God than I.”

Her ardent wish to enter the ghetto to fight and, in the end, to die the martyred death of the Jews was not realized. She was too valuable an ally, and was prevailed upon to remain on the Aryan side. In addition to supplying arms, she also acted as a liaison between the Jewish Fighters’ Organization inside the ghetto and the Polish Underground with which they were desperately trying to establish a military partnership. The partnership was never achieved, but this failure was not her fault. And although the battle was lost, she was not the loser. Her heroism was enshrined in the hearts of those who would remember.

*****

Janina Bucholc-Bukolska was employed in the small firm of Rybczynski on Miodowa Street in Warsaw. The tiny office, which specialized in translations, was always overcrowded. Papers and documents were piled on desks, shelves, and cabinets. The papers were not even remotely connected with translations; they were, in fact, birth certificates, marriage records, school diplomas, food ration cards, letters of recommendation from employers, and all manner of documents and forms. Mrs. Bukolska was a large woman, awkward in movement. Wearing the thick glasses she depended on, she sat calmly in the midst of this chaos of papers and attended busily to her work. Her work, among other things, consisted of supplying false identification cards to Jews. A German policeman would sometimes pass outside the window and gaze curiously at the picture of industry and prosperity inside. Customers were always coming and going. The males among Bukolska’s clients invariably wore bushy mustaches and the women displayed peroxide-blonde hair. In fact, not one person entered the office who did not have a Nordic appearance save Mrs. Bukolska herself, and she was the only Gentile in the crowd. All the others had been Aryanized, in appearance at least, before they came to her. They brought with them photographs, fingerprints, and other pertinent information, most of it spurious. Janina Bukolska then had the Aryan identity papers known as Kennkarten made up by an expert.

The customers entered her office as Jews and left as Gentiles. But they seldom went out without consulting with Bukolska about a possible place to hide in the Aryan sector. She took down their names. Finding places for the new Aryans to live was one of Bukolska’s occupations. This was far from easy, as the Germans offered ten pounds of sugar and a pint of vodka as a reward for surrendering a Jew hiding in the Aryan sector of the city. The punishment for hiding a Jew or helping one to find a place to hide was death.

Mrs. Bukolska shrugged off all obstacles placed in her way. After a busy day at the overcrowded office, she spent her evenings visiting around, ringing doorbells, inquiring whether the good people of Warsaw would consider giving shelter to one of her new Aryans. On occasion she met with a bit of good luck, as she did when Dr. Jan Zabinski, director of the Warsaw zoo, offered her clients some cages vacated by animals that had perished for lack of food. But in most instances she met with reticence, refusal, and abuse; often she was threatened with the Gestapo. Her labors continued, however, and her “business” prospered until the last ghetto hovel had been put to the torch by the Nazis and the last Jew murdered. And even then Pani Janina carried on, for her work was not finished. It came to an end only when the Hitler hordes were driven out of her beloved country.

*****

A roll call of heroic women who risked their lives to help a cause that appeared lost would not be complete without the mention of Sophia Debicka, Jadzia Duniec, Irena Adamowicz, Janina Plawczynska, and Rena Laterner. Sophia Debicka came from a family of Polish intellectuals and was related to the veteran Socialist leader, Stephanie Sempolowska. She hid several Jewish women in her house, camouflaging them as nurse, seamstress, cook, and maid. She seized a little Jewish girl from a transport, declaring the child was her daughter. Her home became an operational base for the Jewish Fighters’ Organization of Warsaw. She alerted her friends in the Postmaster’s office who examined letters addressed to the Gestapo, to intercept those containing tips from informers about Jews hiding in the Christian sector.{10}

Jadzia Duniec, a Catholic girl of Vilna, did not leave behind a long record of deeds which would memorialize her. She died too young. But for a brief period before the Gestapo captured and executed her, Jadzia served as a courier and liaison between Jewish underground organizations and the outer world. She supplied weapons to the Szeinbaum fighting group in Vilna, and she was often sent to Kaunas and Shavli on errands for the Fighters. She died as she lived, courageously. Her name deserves to be remembered, for she was one of a small, valiant group.

Irena Adamowicz belonged to the same small group. Irena was not so young as Ja...