What Do We Owe the Righteous Gentiles?
DRUCKER, MALKA
What Do We Owe the Righteous Gentiles? MALKA DRUCKER In Israel recently, I interviewed 21 "righteous gentiles"—those who reached out to us, those who saved Jewish lives, those who were not silent...
...One of the people on the program was Shoshana Rocynski, a Jewish survivor who had been rescued in Poland by her husband, Stefan...
...When the Germans took him to a work camp, he was only 14...
...A Jewish * See "How Do We Measure Up Morally to the Rescuers...
...When Stolowitzky's parents were deported, his mother asked Pablinska to take Stolowitzky and raise him as a Jew...
...For many survivors, only by closing the door on the unbearable past can they create new lives for themselves...
...Because she was married to a non-Jew she was somewhat protected, but this protection didn't extend to her family...
...Pablinska not only took on the responsibility of supporting and caring for Stolowitzsky by herself, she brought him to Palestine after the war...
...Her husband died a few months later...
...They worry that their aged rescuers need help...
...Irena, who lives with her daughter, Chava, didn't remember much of her own story, but Chava and her three sons, who grew up with stories of the war, helped the elderly Irena to piece together fragments of memory...
...Its archives don't even include up-to-date records of where the rescuers live or whether they are still alive...
...Janina Pawlicka worked as a maid for a Jewish family in Poland before the war...
...They told me they believed that religious differences were responsible for the persecution they had witnessed...
...The Poles, however, helped to change their minds...
...When the war ended, Pawlicka couldn't get a job because many Poles wouldn't hire someone who had helped the Jews...
...He couldn't come, he said, because he couldn't leave work...
...This gave them a chance to meet one another...
...she had saved three lives, not two...
...This may explain why some survivors have chosen to separate themselves from the rescuers...
...Hang on," Vranitic tells Michalov, "someone will help soon...
...MALKA DRUCKER In Israel recently, I interviewed 21 "righteous gentiles"—those who reached out to us, those who saved Jewish lives, those who were not silent when even God could not be heard...
...His parents, still living in Warsaw, couldn't afford to come, but she dreamed of their child's coming to the ceremony to see the honoring of the rescuer to whom he owed his life...
...Such marriages, in which one person saved another, possess a special quality that is stronger than affection— the partners cherish one another...
...But Yad Vashem's connection with these good people ended once they had been awarded a certificate and had a tree planted in their honor on the Avenue of the Righteous...
...Michael Michalov lives in Jaffa on the ground floor of a decrepit building in a working-class area...
...Many of the people I interviewed told me religion was not important to them...
...Budnik now has a heart condition, and he still has nightmares and awakens screaming...
...As she described how she tried to amuse the child with books and by knitting lessons, the "little girl," now a woman in her late forties, sat nearby, her eyes filling with tears...
...Not all survivors have ignored the righteous gentiles, however...
...When I asked him why he was willing to harbor Maria's entire family—18 Jews—he replied, "If I was going to die for having a Jewish wife, I might as well try to save many people...
...To Kowalska, this seemed a miracle...
...Pawlicka accepted the offer, grateful to have a new home and a new family in Israel...
...Ironically, 16 years ago Stolowitzky moved to Miami...
...His neighbors are unaware that when he was honored at Yad Vashem, 20 Jews testified to his rescue efforts in Bulgaria...
...Peotr Budnik stands out as a rescuer who is living a full life...
...Neighborhood children torment Michalov because he is a Christian...
...Henryka Kowalska, another rescuer, told me that she had hidden a young couple in a farmhouse in Poland, and while they were in hiding, the couple had had a child...
...They no longer feel alone...
...Stolowitzky was seven years old when his parents were killed...
...for him, nothing can ever erase the past, with its terrifying risks that now seem so difficult to imagine...
...Because they aren't Jewish, the rescuers weren't entitled to the benefits given to Jews who immigrate to Israel...
...There have been several marriages between rescuers and survivors...
...Sometimes a survivor was present at my interview of his or her rescuer...
...When her child was nine, a wave of anti-Semitism swept through the village...
...She hid him for more than a year in the hospital where she worked...
...During the war, Pawlicka remained in Warsaw and helped dozens of Jews in the ghetto...
...Perochi was Grossman's nanny in Budapest before the war...
...Through the network established as a result of this meeting, rescuers who have a problem can call Danny or a fellow rescuer...
...The child, now a man, lives in Haifa...
...One thing was clear to me: Just as we cannot forget the Holocaust, we must never forget those courageous individuals whose humanity transcended it...
...They came to Israel because they knew it was the one country that wanted them and their Jewish children...
...Yet because the survivor may feel there is no way to make reparation, he or she may feel a need to escape the past—to try to forget it and its hurts...
...Irena's father had worked for a Jewish family, the Landaus...
...In 1947 she remarried, again to a Jewish man...
...Whether anything is ' 'owed^ to the rescuers is a difficult question...
...Their apartments in Israel were small, shabby, often in bad neighborhoods...
...Ivan Vranitic, a Yugoslavian rescuer who lives nearby, often visits Michalov...
...Michalov wants to move but doesn't have the large down payment required to change apartments...
...When they did arrive, they knew no Hebrew and had to struggle to find work and a place to live...
...Perhaps it is simply too painful to remain connected to someone who knew you when you were most vulnerable, frightened and weak: the rescuer is a living reminder of those dark, helpless feelings and those desperate times...
...Pablinska, a Polish-speaking Catholic, cleaned houses and lived in a Jerusalem garret without a toilet for 18 years so that she could raise Stolowitzky in his homeland...
...I found the rescuers through Danny Rogovsky, a young bus driver who became interested in the rescuers after seeing them on the Israeli TV show...
...They lived in the same village where Budna-Widerschal grew up...
...When the whole world was mad, they knew what was right and had the courage to carry it out...
...The most distressing question to me was why these people were now living in such poor conditions...
...Some saved one life...
...In their youth, the rescuers had done what I had dreamed of doing...
...Although I always asked that the rescuer's children sit in on my interviews, only in a few cases did they attend, so it was difficult to draw conclusions about them...
...Yad Vashem's province is to honor the hero and the deed, not to provide welfare...
...Despite their financial need, these rescuers were fortunate: by saving someone whom they loved and who loved them, they were the beneficiaries of their good deed...
...It wasn't so much that I was in the presence of exceptionally virtuous "good" people...
...Zev left his chores on the moshav to join us for a time, as did Budnik's son Yossi...
...Even though Chava was born after the war, she knew of her mother's heroism...
...First his wife, then his 11-year-old grandson, then a granddaughter...
...One afternoon, the young girl failed to come home from school...
...He tells Pablinska that he will return to live in Israel one day, and he does visit twice a year...
...Although Grossman's mother survived the war, he never forgot Perochi, his "other" mother...
...The burden of the debt is immeasurable...
...Saving the world was part of my agenda...
...She had been pushed onto a train track by some older children and was killed by a passing train...
...Gradually the family joined us...
...It also gave them the feeling that they had not been forgotten...
...Nor were they encouraged to come to Israel...
...his son Yossi, and his grandchildren...
...Each of them had been acknowledged by Yad Vashem as a righteous gentile, a rescuer of our people...
...She attends church every Sunday, and her family occasionally goes with her out of respect and love...
...Some of the people were isolated and alone...
...Despite the diversity of the rescuers, they shared "the ability to transcend fear . . . to tolerate risk...
...many had to wait several years before they were allowed to immigrate...
...Veronika Perochi, now 80 years old, is living in Ramat Gan with Yitzhak Grossman, the person she rescued, and his family...
...When the war ended, most of Maria's family went to the United States, but the Tarnavskis decided to stay in Poland...
...Two years ago, an Israeli television program revealed their plight...
...in fact, they were quite ordinary people...
...A few of the rescuers I talked to were bitter that they had not received the same help as Jews, but all stressed that what they did for Jews was not for payment...
...Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Temple Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, feels differently...
...He escaped but couldn't find his family, so he naturally ran to Perochi...
...As a result, the government increased its meager financial assistance so that the rescuers now receive the same welfare payments as Jewish citizens...
...The mother and daughter were killed...
...Wilhelm told me that the Nazis inscribed their belt buckles, "God is with us...
...Once the rescuer knew what was happening to the Jews, the rescuer was compelled to help, even if it meant risking his or her own life...
...Chava converted to Judaism, but not Irena: her husband said that she had already "sacrificed enough...
...After the death of her child, Budna-Widerschal and her husband despised Poland so much they decided to immigrate to Israel...
...Indeed, are they owed anything, or is the good deed itself the reward...
...Danny arranged a picnic in Herzliya for the rescuers...
...In four months, they found 40 righteous gentiles...
...At the funeral another mother told Budna-Widerschal, "It's better it was your child than ours...
...But the rescued person may not be able to go even that far...
...Irena, her husband, his son and their daughter Chava immigrated to Israel in 1957...
...However, Irena Landau's altruism served as an example not only to her daughter but to her grandchildren...
...Soon he was surrounded by family members listening intently to his stories...
...Although she never came to feel at home in Israel, what matters most to Irena is that she is near her family...
...He looks every inch a Gary Cooper hero—tall, handsome, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, with a shy smile...
...But she is lonely without him...
...p. 56...
...One couple, a survivor and a rescuer, described themselves as two nations who live in peace...
...But the Tarnavskis deeply mistrusted religion, perhaps a mark of their wartime experiences...
...When Yad Vashem honored Kowalska, she sent him an invitation to attend her tree-planting ceremony...
...How can one repay another for saving his or her life...
...Irena tried to save the entire Landau family, but succeeded in saving only the son and his father, who married her after the war...
...Still, Budnik said, life for him in Israel has been "more than good...
...Adela's brother, Zev, a young boy during the war, also owed his life to Budnik...
...Danny contacted Shoshana and together they tried to track down rescuers who were in Israel...
...Many rescuers risked not only their own lives, but the lives of their children...
...When the occupation began, the Nazis forced her to work as a maid...
...For three years they lived together and survived the war...
...We sat eating grapes grown on the moshav, still frosty with yeast, and enjoyed the sweet air of the country...
...Perhaps the past was less haunting for them because they survived together as partners sharing the fear and hardship...
...The stories I heard from the rescuers tell what lies behind the rabbi's efforts...
...Sitting on his porch with his lifelong mate beside him, and watching his children and grandchildren work and play in his fields is a satisfying life for him...
...They can never take their lives for granted...
...Finally, Wilhelm said to Maria, "We have to leave Poland so the children don't grow up with this...
...It was more what Eva Fogelman has described as "the ability to transcend fear . . . and the ability to tolerate risk...
...Somehow, the survivor's presence gave added meaning to the rescuer's words...
...Budnik told us how he had taken Adela's family from the Warsaw ghetto and hidden them in the forest...
...I listened to stories of death, loss and courage, and by the end I was exhausted, overwhelmed from trying to absorb so much personal history against the backdrop of the Holocaust...
...I visited him at his moshav, Kfar Warburg, where he has lived since 1957 with his wife Adela, whom he rescued...
...Nevertheless, many of them are still in need...
...Wilhelm Tarnavski, a Catholic, married Maria, a Jew, in a civil ceremony in Warsaw in 1938, before the war...
...Shoshana was outraged over the way the rescuers had been treated in Israel...
...Perhaps it is too painful to remain connected to someone who knew you when you were most vulnerable, frightened and weak...
...She later married a Jew and then went to the ghetto to get her husband's five cousins out...
...Neither Wilhelm nor Maria was safe, but together they became courageous partners in hiding Maria's family for two years...
...survivor whom she met after the war offered to take Pawlicka to Israel with his own family...
...One theme was repeated by almost all the rescuers...
...Agnieszka Budna-Widerschal was a peasant woman from northern Poland, with a nominal Catholic upbringing typical of the rescuers I interviewed...
...some saved hundreds...
...In the fall of 1945, Budna-Widerschal gave birth to a daughter...
...Children are naturally dependent upon adults, and maybe that's why a child-turned-adult can look back more easily upon the nightmare time without rejecting the rescuer...
...the civil rights movement claimed me...
...During several interviews of rescuers married to Jewish survivors, the survivor supplied the emotion often missing in the rescuer's account of what happened...
...Perhaps all of us—because the rescuers redeemed our faith in humanity by demonstrating that goodness does exist...
...If you yourself didn't live through the Shoah, you can't know what it was and what it did to the human spirit...
...I grew up in the 1960s and was part of liberal Jewish youth movements...
...The rescuers themselves don't feel the Jewish community owes them anything...
...The Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians steadily receives mail from survivors wanting help in finding their rescuers...
...He settled himself in a large recliner in the center of the room, and began to talk...
...One rescuer told me that she would be satisfied if the person she had saved simply remembered what had been done and occasionally called or wrote...
...ifii * Eva Fogelman, "The Rescuers: A Social Psychology Study of Altruistic Behavior During the Nazi Era," unpublished doctoral thesis, 1987...
...Despite the diversity of the rescuers, they shared a common characteristic...
...If something is owed, who owes it...
...She had no family to turn to, and those whom she had saved had left for Israel or America...
...In fact, I did little but participate in a few sit-ins and frequently sing "We Shall Overcome...
...He's the best son in the world," 86-year-old Gertruda Pablinska proudly says of Mickey Stolowitzky, whose photographs fill her room in an old-age home in Haifa...
...As one rescuer said when asked whether she had been afraid, "At such times it is normal to be afraid...
...Of all the couples I interviewed, they seemed the least marked by the war...
...In 1962, he brought her to Israel to live with him...
...Stolowitzky was her reason for being in Israel, and she never made a personal connection to the country...
...The Christian governesses I interviewed spoke warmly and gratefully about the children they saved...
...Last year, Schulweis established the Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians in order to ' 'retrieve the meaning of their act, discover their fate, and sweeten the remainder of their lives...
...Although it was thrilling to meet them, it was also disquieting—they reminded me of what I have yet to do...
...Pablinska worked for Stolowitzky's family in Poland before the war...
...In Haifa, Sofia Wieczorek calmly told how she and her mother took in six Jews, one of whom was a little girl...
...Anti-Semitism didn't vanish when the war ended, and their young daughters encountered it repeatedly...
Vol. 13 • April 1988 • No. 2
