How Do We Measure Up Morally to the Rescuers?
SCHULWEIS, HAROLD M
ON MY MIND How Do We Measure Up Morally to the Rescuers? Extraordinary human beings are living today who, caught in the hell of Nazidom, refused to collaborate and instead succored the victims. I...
...They remind us of the possibilities of working for a better future and a healthier society...
...Others, still anonymous, deserve to be searched out, raised up and celebrated...
...When foundation directors learn of rescuers in need, they use a network of volunteers to provide social and emotional support as well as the foundation's financial and medical help...
...Penniless, Alex Roslan sold his apartment to obtain the bribe money...
...It looks terrible," the hospital attendant agreed...
...Yet as we hunt down the sadistic torturers of innocence, we must also search out the men and women of flesh and blood who protected, hid, healed and saved the persecuted...
...Do I have any obligation to the still unknown Roslans, wherever they may be today...
...I learned the many forms altruism assumed in those hellish times...
...These remarkable spirits who would not betray the image of God in them must be helped through our friendship to live out their remaining years in dignity...
...Until recently, there was no systematic search to identify these people and investigate the episodes in which they risked life and fortune, their own and their families', in order to feed, hide and in countless ways protect pursued and hounded Jews...
...We owe them a modicum of the protection they gave our relatives...
...For a while the medicine seemed to help Shalom, but then he grew sicker and finally died...
...The Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians is now under the organizational auspices of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, which is providing a 8100,000 annual budget, but the foundation's activities will depend on contributions.* * Contributions can be sent to the Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians, 823 United Nations Plaza, 10th floor, New York, NY 10017...
...One woman who hid Jews and took food to others in a concentration camp is publishing her story with the foundation's help...
...The ploy worked, the operation was successful and a few days later, the sofa and its hidden human content were carried out of the hospital...
...Compared to Nazi sadists and their collaborators, I am unarguably morally superior...
...I am convinced that those who see in the eyes of their neighbors only manipulation, exploitation and betrayal have not looked deep enough...
...In this sense goodness is harder to confront than evil...
...It is a demoralizing revelation that men who can quote Goethe, Kant and Hegel, who can play Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, can then push the button that releases Zyklon B gas, suffocating innocent children...
...The Gilat boys lived in constant fear that they would be discovered either by the Gestapo predators, by the Polish police or by any informer who was promised sugar, vodka and cigarettes for turning a Jew over to the Nazis...
...Masurik...
...No one who has entered the cave of shoah can emerge with that innocent trust...
...We Jews have in our collective memories recollections that possess restorative powers for the traumatized conscience of post-Holocaust generations...
...The news was greeted by some Polish neighbors with contempt...
...He was buried in a cellar in a sitting position...
...He was rescued by the Roslan family— Alex Roslan, a gentile shopkeeper of fabrics, his wife, Mela, and their two children, Yurek and Marissia, then 10 and 8. First Jacob Gilat, next his older brother Shalom and finally his younger brother David were harbored by the Roslans...
...But we are taught that ten righteous people alone would have spared the inhabitants of Sodom (Genesis 18:32...
...A weakened Jacob was carried by Alex Roslan and his son Yurek in a hollowed-out sofa, covered with cushions...
...In time, they may come to see that heroes imply villains...
...And he doesn't like it," Alex Roslan replied...
...the hospital officials asked...
...The Roslans moved away and are now living out their years in Tampa, Florida...
...And how to enter a Jewish youngster into a Warsaw hospital...
...He needed an ear operation in a hospital...
...On November 10, 1941, the occupation government in Warsaw issued a decree warning the Polish population that "offering a Jew a night's lodging, food, or taking them into vehicles of any kind" would be punishable by death, adding that this ordinance ' 'shall henceforth be applied with pitiless severity...
...All the gentiles I knew either looked away or worse, informed against me and my family...
...The Roslans shared—voluntarily undertook to share—the same fears...
...Yes...
...The time is short but with whatever powers we have, we must let these rescuers and the world know that they are not alone...
...I have learned of the heroism ofhuman beings—not of my people's faith or fate— who chose to gather food and drink, find hideouts, camouflage, falsify identification papers, aid the sick and bury the dead...
...Other survivors acknowledge the existence of heroic rescuers but are so pained by the enormity of the Nazi crime that the slightest shaft of light seems to compromise the depth of the darkness...
...That omission is compounded by the reports that many of those who rescued Jews suffered vilification from their countrymen after the Nazi defeat...
...as rivulets of water in dry places and as shadows of a great rock in a wary land" (Isaiah 32:2...
...These morally courageous rescuers— these men and women who saved us— may encourage us to educate children of the post-Holocaust generations, Jews and non-Jews, to follow in their footsteps...
...The naive faith that education can immunize society against the diseases of xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism is mocked by the record of Hitler's professors and cultured theologians...
...It entails a moral imperative to cherish and protect goodness...
...Of course not...
...Hakarat halov—the recognition of goodness in the world—is an affirmation that human nature goes beyond selfishness...
...Jacob Gilat tells of being hidden in cabinets and behind the sink...
...I have learned that a conspiracy of goodness permitted the rescue of hunted Jews, a conspiracy that required passive and active collaboration of milkmen, servants and policemen, and the courage to bite one's tongue when interrogated...
...Through the lives of the rescuers, I have learned the lameness of the alibi that there were no alternatives to complicity with the Nazis...
...There are many more Christians and other gentiles whose altruism towards Jews is unknown and unrecorded...
...After the war, the Roslans left Poland for the United States...
...Would I be prepared to house those hunted innocents of another faith, another tradition, another ethnicity, knowing that discovery would mean my imprisonment, my death and the destruction of my loved ones...
...In knowing these extraordinary, yet ordinary, people and how they acted, we are tested...
...Some of these heroic spirits today live isolated lives in dire need of help: economic, medical and emotional...
...No gentile helped me...
...It is not always easy for survivors to accept a sense of obligation to these people...
...Yurek was sent to the Warsaw hospital for help...
...their daughter Marissia is married and lives in New Jersey...
...Their inclusion depends upon the initiative and good will of surviving witnesses and the economic and physical capacity of the rescuers to come to Jerusalem...
...Of course, Shalom could not be sent to a hospital...
...they found themselves and their children harassed, ostracized and even assassinated by anti-Semites...
...Ironically, the memory of evil and the record of its acts are better known than the memory of goodness and its deeds...
...the foundation is investigating the possibility of facilitating the surgery...
...The second half was for Shalom...
...The son of a rescuer in Poland reportedly needs a heart operation that cannot be performed there...
...After Auschwitz, the pre-Holocaust conceits of automatic progress, the goodness and perfectibility of human nature cannot and ought not be resurrected...
...When the nurses at the hospital handed Yurek his medicines, however, the child divided them in half, pouring some of the powder into a small envelope beneath his pillow, and taking the remainder with water...
...That evil should be enshrined in our annals while goodness is ignored or barely footnoted is a tragic miscarriage of justice...
...There are those who cannot bear to remember murderers...
...Masurik, who needed 100 zlotys to bribe members of the staff to help him perform the operation...
...Someone had told Alex Roslan that Jews are buried with their knees bent beneath them so that when the Messiah comes they can leap forward out of the grave toward redemption...
...Some 6,000 persons have been recognized as ' 'righteous among the nations" at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem...
...Alex and Yurek were prepared with an answer: they were delivering the sofa for Dr...
...There are persons and events that will be doomed to oblivion unless Jewish memory offers testimony...
...The righteous, whatever their number, must be held up and celebrated so that others will be inspired to emulate them...
...As one neighbor put it: "So what if there had been 6 million and two Jews killed...
...Harold M. Schulweis...
...Perhaps they may find it easier to recall the rescuers...
...A woman who bears the scars of Buchenwald told me, "I myself saw nothing of such heroism...
...There are people who made themselves "as hiding places from the wind, and shelters from the tempests...
...The contrast between the evil and good done is so disproportionate that the evidence of good seems negligible...
...What do Alex and Mela Roslan mean to me as a Jew...
...Jacob's scarlet fever soon caused an infection in his ear...
...Their son Yurek had been murdered by the Nazis for his activities in the Polish resistance movement...
...Wasn't that the sofa you delivered to Dr...
...Today Jacob Gilat is a nuclear physicist and David is a professor of mathematics, both in Israel...
...I have met some of these righteous gentiles through those they rescued and I have heard their stories...
...Goodness is a more powerful challenge and inspiration to people than evil...
...Masurik's office...
...No Christian hid me...
...Nor is hakarat hatov simply a passive acknowledgment of goodness...
...It is the effort to make ourselves aware of human kindness and self-sacrifice...
...passed the admissions desk, where they were questioned about the sofa...
...Jacob Gilat is now an Israeli nuclear physicist...
...But it is essential, if we mean to raise a generation that will not repeat yesterday's moral betrayal...
...It is incumbent on us to remember goodness and to add some measure of joy to the rescuers among us...
...I have met them and have felt their life-affirming human energies...
...They are a self-effacing lot...
...They settled in Clearwater, Florida, where news of their rescue of the Gilat boys got out...
...His wife cried, "You take the roof over our heads...
...So the heroic may enable the frightened and the ashamed to open their eyes to the catastrophe without cynicism and despair...
...After the war, Jacob and his brother David made their way to Israel to join their father...
...In a note, Yurek wrote out the nurse's instructions for Shalom...
...We were alone and there was no rescuer...
...We do not hear from them...
...But how am I compared to Alex and Mela Roslan...
...But on what scale are these acts to be measured...
...Guidelines are being developed for allocating the available funds...
...But it was done...
...The foundation plans to produce films and educational" materials about the righteous gentiles...
...He remembers when scarlet fever broke out and afflicted him and his brother Shalom as well as the Roslans' son Yurek...
...Do I mean to transmit to my children such altruistic character...
...They are models for the education of our young...
...They * Mordecai Paldiel in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 23:1, Winter 1986...
...Another rescuer, now living in poverty in the United States, is receiving financial help and companionship through the foundation...
...These names have been gathered slowly...
...Hakarat halov is not a denial of the presence of cruelty in human society, but a refusal to be blinded by cynicism and despair...
...As a child of seven, he and his two brothers were stranded in the Warsaw ghetto, left to fend for themselves...
...Where and how could the Roslans raise the money...
...The Roslans arranged for the operation with a Dr...
...How many rescuers there were is not known, in part because an active search for them has not been part of the Jewish agenda...
...To find these people, to supplement their incomes, to have them enter our lives, to have our children know that such people lived and acted with such nobility, those are the primary concerns of the Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians...
...Still in its infancy, the foundation has begun to encourage rescued Jews to identify their rescuers and have them honored, and to collect oral histories...
Vol. 13 • April 1988 • No. 2
