29: Righteous Gentiles

Many thousands of non-Jews risked -- and in many cases lost -- their own lives to save a Jewish life. Some non-Jews -- Christians, Muslims, atheists, men and women of all nations -- saved more than one life. There were those who saved whole families and even several families.

Non-Jews who were caught helping Jews faced execution. The Polish Jewish historian Szymon Datner, who had escaped from the Bialystok ghetto to fight with a Jewish partisan unit, recorded after the war just how severe reprisals could be: "In thirty-eight cases of Jews being saved by Poles, as established on the basis of one source, the Nazis murdered ninety-seven Poles, including thirty women, fourteen children and one infant."

From other documents and enquiries, Szymon Datner established that 343 Poles had been shot in the Bialystok region for helping Jews. Among those shot were forty-two Polish children under the age of thirteen.

At Belzec, the monument to the 600,000 Jews murdered there also honors 1,500 Poles "who tried to save Jews," and were killed at Belzec.

On August 19,1953, the Israeli Parliament -- the Knesset -- passed a law making it the duty of the state of Israel to recognize the work done by non-Jews in saving Jewish lives during the Second World War. An "expression of honor" was awarded, in the name of the Jewish people, to every non-Jewish person or family who took the risk of hiding and saving Jews. The Hebrew phrase chosen for those to be honored was Sderot hassidei umot haolam (the Righteous among the Nations of the World). They became known as "Righteous Gentiles."

A committee of eighteen Israeli judges and experts examines the evidence of rescue activity. This evidence has to be put forward, where possible, by the individual who was saved. At the Israeli Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, an Avenue of the Righteous was begun in 1962. Every non-Jew honored for helping Jews escape deportation and death plants a tree, or has a tree planted in his or her name. Righteous Gentile medals and diplomas are both awarded.

One of the four Righteous Gentile awards given to Norway was a collective one, in honor of all the members of the Norwegian resistance movement, which was active in helping Jews escape across the border to Sweden. The medals given to the Danish citizens included one that was made to the King of Denmark in honor of the whole Danish nation, for enabling almost all of Denmark's Jews to be taken across the sea to Sweden on the eve of their intended deportation to the death camps. The Danish wartime underground also asked that members who participated in the rescue of Jews should be honored as a group, not individually.

Inspired by their pastor, Andre Trocme, the French Protestant villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon gave sanctuary to more than three thousand Jewish adults and children, and helped disperse them to other hiding places, and to safety in Switzlerland. Andre Trocme's cousin Daniel, who was caught hiding Jews, was sent to Buchenwald, where he died in April 1944.

In Holland, 250 families in the town of Nieuwland acted collectively to take in Jews, and feed, house, and hide them until liberation.

When, in July 1944, the Germans rounded up all 1,500 Jews on the island of Rhodes, the Turkish Consul-General on the island, Selahattin Ulkumen, presented the local German commander with a list of fifty Jews whom he claimed were Turkish nationals, and demanded their release. The commander agreed, not wishing to antagonize neutral Turkey. Ulkumen was recognized as a Righteous Gentile in 1990. Also made a Righteous Gentile was Princess Alice of Greece, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria -- and the mother of HRH Prince Philip -- who hid and saved Jews in her home in Athens.

Many non-Jews put forward plans to help Jews escape from Nazi-dominated Europe. On September 3, 1944, as a result of a suggestion put forward by Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, the evacuation began, by air, of 650 German, Austrian and Czech Jews from the partisan-held areas of Yugoslavia to Bari, in Allied-occupied Italy.

Also in Italy in 1944, in the German-held port of Fiume, the Germans arrested a senior Italian police officer, Giovanni Palatucci, who had helped more than five hundred Jewish refugees who had reached Italy from Yugoslavia, giving them "Aryan" papers and sending them to safety in southern Italy. Palatucci was sent to Dachau where he died.

Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsw Zoo, sheltered Jews in the zoo's abandoned animal cages. Eventually he and his wife Antonina found them permanent places of refuge in "Aryan" Warsaw. Three hundred Jews were saved this way. The Zabinskis also hid twenty Jews in their house on the zoo's grounds. When Zabinski was taken prisoner by the Germans after taking part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, his wife continued his work, and helped bring food to Jews hiding in the ruins of the city.

Five countries resisted German pressure to deport the Jews living in their midst. As a result -- in two cases only until direct German military intervention -- they were successful in saving their Jewish populations. The German ability to put pressure on sovereign states, even those that were linked to them by alliances or ideological sympathies, had its limitations. In the last resort, it required the arrival of a German army of occupation to enable the deportation of the Jews to be put into effect.

Finland

In August 1942, while on a "private unofficial holiday visit" to Finland, Himmler persuaded the Finnish leaders to deport all two thousand Jews then in Finland. Most were refugees who had left Germany and Austria before 1939. In February 1943, the first eight Jewish deportees were sent from Helsinki to Auschwitz, a journey of more than twelve hundred miles. Only one survived.

When news of the deportation of the eight Jewish refugees became known in Finland there were public protests by the opposition Social Democratic Party, by several Lutheran clergymen and by the Archbishop of Helsinki. As a result, the Finnish Cabinet refused to allow any further deportations.

Denmark

Following the German occupation of Denmark in the spring of 1940, the Germans embarked on a policy of co-operation with the Danish authorities. But growing Danish resistance to the German occupation led the Germans to declare martial law on August 28, 1943.

The SS hoped to use martial law to deport all of Denmark's Jews, and also "half-Jews" (who were so designated by the Nazis because they had one Jewish parent). Opposition to the deportation was voiced publicly by King Christian X and by the heads of the the Danish churches, who used their pulpits to urge the Danes to help the Jews. All Danish universities were closed down to enable students to help in the rescue effort.

The deportation was planned for the night of October 1-2, 1943. Warned in advance, Danish sea captains and fisherman ferried the endangered Jews across the Baltic Sea to neutral Sweden. In this way, 7,906 were saved -- 5,919 Jews, 1,301 "half-Jews" and 686 Christians who were married to Jews. On searching for the deportees, the Germans found only 500 Jews, mostly old people too frail to make the sea journey. They were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Each month the Danish authorities asked about them, insisting that they should not be harmed. As a result of this sustained scrutiny, 423 of the 500 survived the war.

The Danish Jews who had been ferried to Sweden survived unmolested, as did a further 3,000 Jewish refugees who had reached Sweded before the outbreak of war, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Italy

As long as Mussolini ruled Italy, no Jews were deported to the death camps on Polish soil. They were protected, at times by Mussolini himself, but mostly through the determination of his military commanders in Italian-occupied Croatia, Greece, Albania and the Italian-occupied areas of the South of France. Only when Germany occupied Italy in 1943 were SS units able to move in, and the deportations to Auschwitz began.

The Vatican

On October 16, 1943, the Germans searched Rome for the Jews of the city -- more than 7,000 -- to be deported. A few days before the search, Pope Pius XII had personally ordered the Vatican clergy to open the sanctuaries of the Vatican to all "non-Aryans" in need of refuge. Four hundred and seventy-seven Jews were given shelter in the Vatican itself and in its sovereign enclaves in Rome. An additional 4,238 Jews were given sanctuary in more than a hundred monasteries, convents and Church institutions throughout Rome.

On the morning of October 16, when the round-up began, 5,615 of Rome's Jews could not be found. The 1,015 whom the Germans did discover were deported. The Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, then asked for a meeting with the German military commander in Rome, General Stahl. After this meeting, Stahl sent a message to Himmler, warning that any further round-up of Jews in Rome would disturb Stahl's military plans to reinforce the German troops fighting the Allies in southern Italy. Himmler then ordered a halt to the deportations.

Bulgaria

On February 23, 1943, SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, an emissary from the Reich Chief Security Office in Berlin, signed an agreement with the Bulgarian Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Alexander Belev for the deportation of the 48,565 Jews of prewar Bulgaria. Starting on March 10, 12,000 Jews from the Bulgarian-occupied zones of Thrace (formerly Greece) and Macedonia (formerly Yugoslavia) were deported to Treblinka and murdered. But when the deportation order became known there was an outcry from the Bulgarian people, including many Orthodox church leaders.

In northern Bulgaria, farmers threatened to lie down on the railway tracks to halt the deportation trains. The King of Bulgaria, Boris III, also intervened. Although he was German, from the royal family of Coburg, he was opposed to the anti-Jewish measures then in force in Bulgaria. All Jews in custody were released, and the government rescinded the the deportation order.

One influence on King Boris in his oppo
sition to German demands had been the former Apostolic Delegate in Sofia, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the godfather to Boris's son. He urged the King not to allow the Jews of Bulgaria to be sent to Germany. From 1958 to 1963 he was Pope, as John XXIII. King Boris, summoned to Berlin by Hitler, died on August 29, 1943, three days after his return, in mysterious circumstances. He was forty-nine years old.
Bulgaria was the only country in Europe whose local Jewish population in 1945 -- 49,172 -- was larger than it had been before the war.

Hungary

On April 17, 1943, a month after Bulgaria's refusal to allow Bulgarian Jews to be deported, Hitler summoned the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to Salzburg, and urged him to allow the Jews of Hungary to be "resettled." Horthy refused. "The Jews cannot be exterminated or beaten to death," he insisted. Hitler then set out his own virulent anti-Semitic perspective. But Horthy rejected Hitler's arguments and pressure and returned to Budapest. The Jews of Hungary remained in Hungary. But when the German Army occupied Hungary in March 1944, bringing in its wake Eichmann and the SS, the 750,000 Jews then living within Hungary's extended borders were in immediate danger. Horthy's earlier refusal to deport them could not protect them from direct German and SS intervention.

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Just outside the edge of the Cracow ghetto was a factory that manufactured kitchen utensils. It was run by a German Catholic named Oskar Schindler who, like all German factory managers in the neighborhood, was allowed to employ Jewish workers. Schindler, whose relations with the Gestapo were outwardly cordial, had always sought to protect the Jews who worked in his factory. When the Gestapo tried to transfer some of this workers to the neabry slave labor camp at Plaszow, he was able, by bribery and persuasion, to keep them. Thousands of Jews were murdered in Palszow.

By the summer of 1944, more than five hundred Jews were under Schindler's protection at his factory. With the evacuation of the Cracow and Auschwitz region, as Soviet forces approached in January 1945, Schindler transferred his factory to Brunnlitz in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, taking his Jewish workforce with him.

On January 29, 1945, while at Brunnlitz, Schindler was told of a locked goods wagon at Brunnlitz station. The wagon was marked on the outside, "Property of the SS." It had been travelling on the railways for ten days, covered in ice. Inside were more than a hundred Jews from Birkenau who had been at the labor camp at Golleschau, Jews who had once lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Holland and Hungary.

Schindler had no authority to take the wagon, but he was determined to try to save those Jews and asked a railway official to show him the Bill of Lading. When the railway official was momentarily distracted, Schindler wrote on the Bill of Lading: "Final destination, Brunnlitz." Schindler then pointed out to the official that the wagon was intended for his factory, and ordered the railway authorities to transfer the wagon to his factory siding. There he broke open the locks and found that sixteen of the Jews had frozen to death. Not one of the survivors weighed more than thirty-five kilograms. Schindler fed and guarded them, helped by his wife Emilie, who provided beds on which they could be nursed back to life.

"She took care of these Golleshau Jews," a survivor of Schindler's factories, Moshe Bejski, later recalled. "She prepared food for them every day."

Between 1943 and 1945, Schindler saved more than fifteen hundred Jews by employing them in his factory, and by treating them humanely. He died in Germany in October 1974. At his funeral, which was held in the Latin cemetery in Jerusalem, on the slope of Mount Zion, more than four hundred of the Jews whom he had saved paid him their last respects.

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On March 25 and 26, 1943, at the time of the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto, Julius Madritsch, an Austrian from Vienna, had taken 232 Jews -- men, women and children -- from the Cracow ghetto into his clothing factory at Tarnow.

Like Oskar Schindler, Madritsch protected these Jews from deportation. Five months later, on August 31, the commandant of Plaszow, Ammon Goeth, went specifically to Tarnow to prepare for the destruction of the Tarnow ghetto. That night he ordered Madritsch to pay a large sum of money to protect "his" Jews. He did so, and the Jews were saved.

In Berlin itself, a German brush manufacturer, Otto Weidt, had a small factory. To protect Jews from deportation, he employed several hundred in his factory, insisting in his discussions with the Gestapo that the work they did was essential for the German war economy. Those whom he employed were blind and deaf mutes. He also helped fifty-six men who were in hiding, with food and false documents.

Weidt was always under suspicion, and Gestapo searches were frequent. A plaque at his factory records his persistence and his courage. Its last line reads: "Many men thank him for their survival." Tragically, of the several hundred whom Otto Weidt helped, only twenty-seven survived the repeated Gestapo round-ups.

The number of Germans and Austrians who helped the Jews in the Polish city of Bialystok was exceptional. One of them, a German Social Democrat named Schade, was the manager of a textile mill. Through a group of Jewish girls, led by Maryla Rozycka, he maintained contact with the Jewish resistance organization inside the ghetto and with the partisans in the forests, whom he supplied with arms, clothing and information.

After the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto, Schade hid twelve Jews in his factory. They survived until the arrival of the Soviet Army. On several occasions, guided by Jewish partisans, he traveled into forests to meet, and help, the Soviet partisan commander in the region.

Another German in Bialystok, Beneschek, from the Sudetenland, was a Communist in hiding from the Gestapo under a false identity. He was also the manager of a textile mill, located on the border of the ghetto employing both Jews and Poles. Beneschek also made it possible for Jews to smuggle arms into the ghetto. He also provided Jews with false documents and money.

Beneschek introduced another Sudeten German, Kudlatschek, to the Jewish resistance organization. Kudlatschek, who was in charge of the motor pool of the textile mills, put his own car at the disposal of the local Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. A number of Jews left Bialystok in his car and traveled to partisan territory. Kudlatschek also transported arms and munitions to the Jewish resistance organization in the Grodno ghetto.

Another German, Stefan Blume, rescued twenty Jews from Bialystok prison. Jews were also helped in Bialystok by a number of German soldiers stationed there. From them the Jews obtained a few weapons and several wireless sets.

Another German in Bialystok, Otto Busse, was in charge of a painting shop attached to the SS units. A practicing Christian, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, left it in disgust in 1935 and rejoined under pressure in 1939. He helped the Jews employed in his shop to smuggle pistols and several rifles inside the old stove pipes into the ghetto.

In 1961, Busse visited Israel. On his return to Germany it became known locally that he had helped Jews. "I was denounced as a traitor to the fatherland and Jew-lover." Things got so bad, especially from former Wehrmacht soldiers, that he had to leave his home at Bendsheim near Darmstadt and his job.

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The phrase "Righteous Gentile" has sometimes been seen as patronizing. For Jews, the word "gentile" has the simple connotation of "non-Jew." In order not to sound patronizing, or specifically Christian, the phrase "Righteous Gentile" was replaced in 1998 by "Righteous Person" in Yad Vashem's publications.
The total number of Righteous Gentiles -- or Righteous Persons -- honored between 1962 and 1999 was 16,552. By country:

Poland: 5,264
Holland: 4,184
France: 1,786
Ukraine: 1,216
Hungary: 475
CzechoSlovakia: 418
Lithuania: 414
Russia & Belarus: 402
Germany: 327
Italy: 240
Greece: 211
Yugoslavia: 189
Austria: 82
Latvia: 65
Romania: 55
Albania: 53
Switzerland: 23
Moldova: 22
Denmark: 14
Bulgaria: 13
Great Britain: 11
Norway: 7
Sweden: 7
Armenia: 3
Spain: 3
China: 2
Brazil: 1
Estonia: 1
Japan: 1
Portugal: 1
Turkey: 1