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- Herausgeber: The History Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Thanks to Thomas Keneally's book Schindler's Ark, and the film based on it, Schindler's List, we have become more aware of the fact that, in the midst of Hitler's extermination of the Jews, courage and humanity could still overcome evil. While 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, some were saved through the actions of non-Jews whose consciences would not allow them to pass by on the other side, and many are honoured by Yad Vashem as 'Righteous Among the Nations' for their actions. As a baby, Agnes Grunwald-Spier was herself saved from the horrors of Auschwitz by an unknown official, and is now a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. She has collected together the stories of thirty individuals who rescued Jews, and these provide a new insight into why these people were prepared to risk so much for their fellow men and women. With a foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the leading experts on the subject, this is an ultimately uplifting account of how some good deeds really do shine in a weary world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Dedicated to the memory of my beloved parents Leona and Philipp Grunwald
Epigraph
I felt the Jews were being destroyed I had to help. There was no choice.
Oskar Schindler, 1956
You are a shining light amidst the darkness of the Holocaust; your stunning bravery is a testament to all humanity.
HE Dror Zeigerman, Israeli Ambassador in London, when presenting Henk Huffener with his Righteous Among the Nations Medal 3 February 1999
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Rescuers with Religious Motives
2 Rescuers with Humanitarian Motives
3 Rescuers with Other Motives
Conclusions
Appendix I Righteous Among the Nations & Yad Vashem
Appendix II Tables
Table 1 Details of Rescuers and Informants
Table 2 Righteous Among the Nations and National Populations
Table 3 Details of Rescuers and Rescued
Bibliography
Copyright
FOREWORD
It gives me great pleasure to write these few words about Agnes Grunwald-Spier’s book about the rescuers. No one can read these pages without a renewed sense of admiration for those who risked their lives to save Jewish lives. Both the stories themselves, and the motives of the rescuers, are examined in this powerful, thought-provoking book, the product of many years of research and effort.
Each story is precious. Each story throws more light into the dark recesses of those evil times. Each story can inspire by its strength of moral purpose.
Agnes Grunwald-Spier makes reference to an important, unavoidable gap in the recognition of righteous deeds. There were many hundreds, even thousands of acts of rescue that failed, mostly through betrayal by a neighbour or a local collaborator, of which no testimony survives: individuals, and even whole families, murdered because they were caught saving Jews. Usually at the very moment of discovery the would-be rescuers and those they were seeking to save were murdered by a savage occupation authority for whom attempting to rescue a Jew was a crime punishable by death. Records of German-occupied Poland show how widespread these reprisal killings were.
Where the names are not recorded, the historian cannot piece together a narrative, and no honour can be bestowed; Agnes Grunwald-Spier rightly calls this a ‘tragic fact’.
But this is not in any way a negative book. Its stories are inspiring ones. There is great suffering in these pages, and also great nobility. Agnes Grunwald-Spier has written a book that can serve as a vista of hope for mankind, a modern-day manual for a code of conduct that contrasts with, and can redeem, the selfish, negative, destructive impulses that are still with us today in far too many areas of the globe.
Sir Martin Gilbert10 March 2010
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A ‘thank you’ seems inadequate to the large group of informants whose life stories have made this book possible. However, I am most grateful to them for their patience and time and also the information on which this book is based. I started my research in 1999 and so in many cases we have had contact over several years and developed a warm friendship. This book tells their extraordinary stories and I could not have written it without them. Sadly, some of my original informants have died since I initially consulted them but often other members of their family have taken over the role:
John Paul Abranches of California, for information on his father Dr Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a rescuer in Bordeaux. John Paul died in February 2009, but his nephew Sebastian Mendes has provided additional information.
Olympia Barczynska of Leeds, for information on her uncle Jozef Barczynski, a rescuer in Poland.
Judge Moshe Bejski for information on Oskar Schindler, who was himself on Schindler’s list and Gabriele Nissim from Italy, for information on Bejski himself and Yad Vashem. Judge Bejski died in 2008.
Primavera Boman-Behram of London and New York, for information on her mother Hilde Holger, and Dr Margit Granz of Graz University for information on her rescuer Charles Petras and exile in India during the Second World War.
Bertha Bracey’s relatives and friends – Alma Cureton, Brenda Bailey, Joan Bamford and Pat Webb – for information on the rescuer Bertha.
The late 11th Duke of Devonshire (1920–2004) for information on his father’s attitude to Jews.
Miriam Dunner of London, for information on her rescuers Jelle and Elizabeth van Dyk in the Netherlands. Miriam died unexpectedly in 2006.
Betty and David Eppel of Jerusalem, for information on Betty’s rescuers Josephine and Victor Guicherd in France. David died in 2008.
Charles and April Fawcett of London, for information on Charles’ work as a rescuer in Marseilles. Charles died in February 2008.
Otto Fleming of Sheffield, for information on Mitzi Saidler, a rescuer in Vienna, and Dr Ho’s visas to Shanghai. Otto died in 2007. His widow, Dorothy Fleming, a member of the Kindertransport, has provided additional information.
Milton Gendel of Rome, for information on the Costaguti family who were rescuers in Rome.
Lea Goodman of London, for information on Richard Strauch and other rescuers in Poland.
Rose Marie Guilfoyle of Brussels, for visiting Robert Maistriau to hear about his role as a rescuer and also telling me about Gisele Reich’s rescue, both in Belgium.
Gerda Haas of Freiburg, for information on rescuers and for first telling me of Else Pintus’ diary about being hidden in Poland.
Agnes Hirschi of Bern, for information on her stepfather Carl Lutz, a rescuer in Budapest.
Manli Ho of San Francisco, for information on her father Dr Feng Shan Ho, a rescuer in Vienna.
Henk Huffener of Guildford, for information on his family’s role as rescuers in the Netherlands. Henk died in 2006 but Philip Hardaker provided information on Henk’s post-war life.
Margaret Kagan of Huddersfield, for information on her rescuer Vytautas Rinkevicius in Lithuania.
Claire Keen-Thiryn of Belgium, for information on her family’s work in the Resistance and as rescuers in Belgium.
Josie Martin-Levy of California, for information on her rescuer Soeur St Cybard in France. Additional help was provided by Daniel Soupizet of Lesterps, Bernadette Landréa of Confolens and Louis Lacalle, great nephew of Soeur St Cybard.
Ron Mower of Hertfordshire, for information on Hermann Maas, who rescued Martha, his wife, and Paul, his brother-in-law, in Germany. Sadly, Ron died in 2004 and Paul in 2009. I am grateful to Ron and Martha’s son Paul for his support.
Henri Obstfeld of London, for information on his rescuers Jacob and Hendrika Klerk in the Netherlands, and Evert Kwaadgras, the archivist of the Grand Lodge of the Dutch Freemasons in The Hague for information on Freemasons.
Benedetta Origo of Sienna, for information on her mother Iris Origo who was a rescuer in Italy, and for telling me to contact Milton Gendel. Frank Auerbach for information on how Iris Origo saved him, and Kate Austin at the Marlborough Galleries for biographical details on Frank Auerbach.
Monica Porter of London, for information on her mother Vali Rácz, a rescuer in Budapest.
Jaap van Proosdij of Pretoria, South Africa, for information about his rescues in the Netherlands.
Maria Sanders of Poole for information on living in the Hague during the war, particularly the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944.
John Schoen of Glamorgan, Wales for information on his parents Joost and Anna, who were rescuers in the Netherlands. John died in 2007. I am grateful to his son Peter Schoen, his nephew Ed van Rijswijk of Amsterdam, and Arleen Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose mother was hidden by the Schoen family, for additional information.
Angela Schluter, for information on her mother Edith Hahn-Beer’s story of rescue in Austria.
Doris and Ernest Stiefel of Seattle, for information on Else Pintus and her rescuers in Poland.
Naomi Szinai of London, for information on her rescuers, in particular János Tóth, in Hungary.
Margarita Turkov of Oregon, for information on her paid rescuer Pani Borciñska in Poland.
Henry Walton of Worksop, for information on the rescuers of his parents, Siegmund and Grete Weltinger, in Berlin.
Professor Irena Veisaite of Vilnius, for information on her rescuer Stefanija Ladigiené in Lithuania.
Additionally, there are several other people I’d like to thank here. Three people in particular encouraged me through the long and difficult times between research and publication: Emeritus Professor Aubrey Newman of Leicester University was a kind advisor and also helped with proofreading; Kevin Patrick was a consistent support; and my dear friend Brenda Zinober held my hand through some difficult times. All three were always there for me when I needed their support.
I would also like to thank Sir Martin Gilbert for his support over many years and for kindly writing his generous Foreword when he was so busy with the Chilcot Inquiry.
Thanks go to the staff of the British Library, the Freemasons’ Library, the Friends’ House Library, the Wiener Library and Yad Vashem for their help, and Phil Jacobs, Tom Keve, Bernadette Landréa and Hamish Ritchie for their translations from Italian, Hungarian, French and German respectively.
This book would never have happened without the input and encouragement of: Robert Smith, who helped me write my book proposal and introduced me to Daniel Crewe, who pointed me in the right direction; my editor at The History Press, Simon Hamlet, and his team of Abbie and Christine, with Hazel, who aided the promotion of the book, who all gave me faith in my work and made publication a very pleasant process; my middle son Ben, who helped in many practical ways, as well as my other two sons Dan and Simon; all three encouraged me when I flagged. Finally, I remember with affection and gratitude my history mistress from Sutton High School, Miss Lucy Clarke (1903–93), who gave me a love of history which has enriched my life.
Inevitably, even with all this help, there will be mistakes and these, I am afraid, are mine alone.
Agnes Grunwald-Spier Sheffield and London
INTRODUCTION
One morning in Budapest, during the autumn of 1944, an unknown official in charge of deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz sent all the women accompanied by children back to their homes. My mother, Leona Grunwald, was one of those women – and I was a tiny baby in her arms.
I have no means of knowing who that official was and what his motives were for what he did. I cannot know his name or his fate, but it is chilling to think that but for his actions, on arrival at Auschwitz I would have been tossed into the fires with other babies – murdered before I was aware of life. His actions helped both of us to survive the Holocaust.
As George Eliot wrote in the final sentence of Middlemarch:
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.1
The actions of the Holocaust rescuers are truly one of the lights in that great darkness – many of the rescuers do lie in ‘unvisited graves’, unrecognised by Yad Vashem or anybody else. Their bravery will no longer be remembered with the death of those they rescued, merely with the passage of time or even because their rescue attempt failed with tragic results for all concerned. This book attempts to record their courage and understand the motivation of those who had the insight to know what was the right thing to do and the courage to do it, whatever the personal risks.
Stories of the heroism of rescuers have been told by many in the sixty-five years since the true horror of the Nazis’ policies became apparent. Even now, however, many still remain untold. There is very little time, as the baby born in July 1944 is now 65; anyone who was an adult witness to the Holocaust will be over 80. Time is running out: for example, Hilde Holger, who responded to my plea for information aged 95, died before I could meet her, but her daughter helped me instead (see p. 136). Additionally, many of those who provided information and stories have not lived to see this book published. Even the children of rescuers and survivors are ageing. It was vital that this task was completed before it was too late and I, as a fortunate survivor, felt an obligation to attempt a small part of it. Encouragement came from the Talmud:
Rabbi Tarphon said, The day is short, and the work is great, and the labourers are sluggish, and the reward is much, and the Master of the house is urgent. He also used to say, It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it.2
The question may be asked: what is the point of investigating such stories that are now over sixty-five years old? What is their validity in today’s world and for us in the twenty-first century? Certainly the story of the rescuers is one of the few optimistic aspects of the Holocaust. My interest in the subject was aroused by my dissertation on Varian Fry for my MA in Holocaust Studies at Sheffield University (1996–98). I had come across Varian Fry accidentally, through seeing a BBC documentary about him in June 1997, and became so interested in what he achieved that after I had completed the MA, I felt that the motivation of rescuers in general was a subject I should like to research further. I wanted to examine what moved rescuers to take enormous risks, risks not only for themselves but also their families, to save someone’s life at a time when normal moral standards of democratic life were suspended under the Nazis.
Varian Fry was not the stuff of which heroes are traditionally made. Yet he was for many years the only American recognised as a Righteous Gentile – he chose to involve himself in another continent’s woes. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become embroiled in Europe’s horrors. He was an unassuming man who, after the fall of France in June 1940, offered to go to Vichy France to rescue refugees for the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). He only offered to go if nobody else could be found and he went because nobody else was found. He was meant to rescue 200 artists and writers on a list produced by the ERC, using visas obtained by President Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor. In the end, he probably saved about 4,000 refugees. On his return to America, after thirteen months, he wrote about his experiences. When the book was finally published in 1945, he explained why he had agreed to go on such a perilous venture:
After several weeks of fruitless searching for a suitable agent to send to France, the Committee selected me. I had had no experience in refugee work, and none in underground work. But I accepted the assignment because, like the members of the Committee, I believed in the importance of democratic solidarity.3
However, he also had other reasons. He wrote about his warm sentiments towards many of the writers and artists whose work had given him pleasure:
novelists like Franz Werfel and Lion Feuchtwanger; painters like Marc Chagall and Max Ernst; sculptors like Jaques Lipchitz. For some of these men, although I knew them only through their work, I had a deep love; and to them I owed a heavy debt of gratitude for the pleasure they had given me. Now that they were in danger, I felt obliged to help them, if I could; just as they, without knowing it had often in the past helped me.4
Fry cited his sympathy for the German and Austrian Socialist Parties, based primarily on their excellent workers’ housing projects of the 1920s. ‘I had not always agreed with their ideas or their methods, but I knew when I saw those housing projects that their hearts were in the right place.’5
But earlier experiences as a journalist were highly influential. Fry had visited Germany in the 1930s and thus had an insight shared by few of his countrymen:
Finally, I knew from first-hand experience what defeat at the hands of Hitler could mean. In 1935 I visited Germany and tasted the atmosphere of oppression which the Hitler regime had brought. I talked to many anti-Nazis and Jews, shared their anxiety and their sense of helplessness, felt with them the tragic hopelessness of their situation. And while I was in Berlin I witnessed on the Kurfuerstendamm the first great pogrom against the Jews, saw with my own eyes young Nazi toughs gather and smash up Jewish-owned cafés, watched with horror as they dragged Jewish patrons from their seats, drove hysterical, crying women down the street, knocked over an elderly man and kicked him in the face. Now that that same oppression had spread to France, I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.6
Although some of this was reported in the New York Times on 17 July 1935, with the byline ‘Editor describes rioting in Berlin’, the most horrific incident was recorded by fellow American Mary Jayne Gold. Mary was a wealthy socialite who met Varian in Marseilles and funded some of his rescue activities:
At a café, Varian watched a pair of storm troopers approach the table of a Jewish-looking individual. When the poor man reached nervously for his beer, with a quick thrust of his knife one of the storm troopers pinned the man’s hand to the wooden table. The victim let out a cry and bent over in pain unable to move. The ruffian shouted something about Jewish blood on German blades, withdrew the knife, and swaggered away. Varian heard him say to his companion, ‘this day is a holiday for us.’
Varian told me the story in a low, mumbling voice, as he often spoke when he was deeply moved. I think the mental image of that hand nailed to the table beside the beer mug had something to do with his decision to go.7
My study of Varian Fry and his colleagues, such as Charles Fawcett, showed me that rescuers’ motives were not as simple as they sometimes claimed. Although they sometimes gave a single reason for their actions, in fact the background to their actions was far more complex. It also crystallised a simple and obvious truth which may become dwarfed in the statistics of the victims of the Holocaust – one person can make a difference.
Conversely, it also underlined the tragedy of the Holocaust. If more bystanders had become rescuers, then the millions of victims would actually have survived and flourished. Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jews and at the end of Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List, the descendants of these survivors appeared – they numbered around 6,000. I am no mathematician, but on the same basis, if the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis had survived they would now have 32 million descendants.
Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum and Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust,8 has now recognised 23,226 non-Jews as Righteous Among the Nations9 (see Table 2). It should be noted here that not only Righteous Gentiles helped Jews in the war. Belated recognition is now being given to Jews who helped Jews, but many others fought different battles. The Righteous scheme was devised specifically to recognise non-Jewish rescuers, and very strict criteria have to be met. It cannot reward other forms of courage, as in the controversy over Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who Yad Vashem acknowledges as ‘a martyr in the struggle against Nazism’ but has not yet been proved to have ‘specifically helped Jews’.10
On 2 February 1996 Varian Fry was named as the first American ‘Righteous Among Nations’ by Yad Vashem. The American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, acknowledging the posthumous honour nearly thirty years after Varian’s death in 1967, said: ‘We owe Varian Fry our deepest gratitude, but we also owe him a promise – a promise never to forget the horrors that he struggled against so heroically, a promise to do whatever is necessary to ensure that such horrors never happen again.’11
Walter Meyerhof, who with his parents escaped from France over the Pyrenees with Varian’s help, established the Varian Fry Foundation in 1997. Its purpose is to teach schoolchildren the lessons outlined by Warren Christopher and, as Walter explained to me, to demonstrate that ‘one person can make a difference’.12 Walter’s father, Otto Meyerhof, shared the 1922 Nobel Prize for Medicine with A.V. Hill, who was later to become Secretary of the Royal Society 1935–45. In 1933 Hill became involved in the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), which helped scholars and scientists from abroad escape the Nazis.
Many rescuers seem surprised that what they did was of interest to anybody else. Modest expressions such as ‘what they did was normal or anyone would have done the same’ are quite common; loyalty to old friends or good employers are frequent reasons, as is opposition to the Nazis’ policies, if not necessarily being the result of wanting to save Jews. Others saw such rescue as an integral part of being in the Resistance or the logical result of their parents’ upbringing. Many books have examined the background of rescuers and tried to find patterns of behaviour based on class, education or other similar sociological reasons. Perry London was one of the first to study this topic in the 1960s. He noted three main characteristics of rescuers. He specified a spirit of adventure, a sense of being socially marginal and intense identification with a parent of strong moral character. Such categorisation is unsatisfactory because for every rescuer who falls into the neat boundaries of his category, another one pops up who defies them. The most common reasons noted are religious beliefs or perceiving that it was one’s duty to help another who was in trouble. Other reasons are the sanctity of life, obeying one’s conscience or shame at not helping a neighbour.
By examining the motivation of several rescuers who may not previously have been written about, it is possible to establish why some bystanders to the Holocaust became rescuers and why so many remained bystanders. An understanding of what influenced their behaviour has relevance today, when the need to support each other in society still exists even if the circumstances are, thankfully, quite different. Naturally, I am aware that whilst the Jews were numerically by far the major target of the Nazis’ racial policies, many other groups were targeted for persecution and murder. My concentration on the Jewish Holocaust is not intended to diminish or ignore their suffering.
I was determined from the start to write about rescuers and the rescued whose experiences were not particularly in the public domain. As a single parent living in Sheffield, I therefore needed to find a way of making contact with people who had not necessarily been approached before. In August 2000 I targeted journals and magazines which would be read by people likely to have personal experiences of the Holocaust, or who might know of others with a story to record, and asked them to publish details of my research. These were:
Common Ground – the Journal of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ)
Jewish Telegraph – a regional Jewish newspaper published in Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester.
Menorah – a magazine for Jewish members of HM forces and small Jewish communities.
Information – The Magazine of the Association of Jewish Refugees.
I also attended two major events where I arranged for each delegate to receive a copy of my project details in their conference pack. These were the Oxford Holocaust Conference Remembering for the Future, held in July 2000, and the European Council of Jewish Communities Presidents’ Conference, held in Barcelona in May 2000. One of the Italian delegates at the latter conference wrote an article for Shalom, the journal of the Rome Jewish Community.
Additionally, contact was made with the South African Jewish community through my friend Brenda Zinober, and all the members of the Leeds-based Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association (HSFA) were also circularised.
In 2002 the London Jewish Cultural Centre held an exhibition called ‘Visas for Life’ about diplomats who between them saved about 250,000 Jews from the Nazis. The opening event gave me an opportunity to meet John Paul Abranches, son of de Sousa Mendes,13 who lived in California, and Agnes Hirschi, stepdaughter of Carl Lutz,14 who lives in Switzerland, with whom I had been corresponding for some time.
Other rescue stories were accumulated through the press, in particular TheJewish Chronicle and obituaries in The Times. Some have been purely as a result of social conversations and sheer coincidence. I attend a lot of meetings and when, in response to enquiries about what I do, I tell people about my research, quite often they can name someone I should contact. There has certainly been a snowball effect over the last few years. I was surprised at being criticised for stating that these stories were collected at random – I find this odd. Collecting stories about Holocaust rescuers cannot be done in the same way as researching the consumption of fish fingers. Extraordinary stories turn up in the most unlikely ways.
In July 2004 I was in Brussels for a meeting at the EU and wondered if someone bilingual would speak to Robert Maistriau,15 a rescuer who only spoke French, for me. One of the EU secretaries consented and subsequently in conversation told the driver assigned to us what she had agreed to do for me. He quite spontaneously told her that his mother, Gisele Reich, had been saved from deportation to Auschwitz at the age of 5 in 1941 because the Nazi officer at the transit camp at Malines (Mechelen) felt sorry for her – she was a sickly child who suffered from a lung disease. The driver had never mentioned this to anyone outside his family before and the story would not have come to light but for my request for help and this chance conversation.
My efforts resulted in the creation of a group of about thirty rescuers/rescued from a variety of countries, where I have had personal contact with either the rescuer or the rescued, or their child or other close relative. This has enabled me to pursue the question of motivation directly, by questioning someone extremely close to or actually involved in the events described. Some of these people have also written books about what happened and these have been referred to in the text. Nevertheless, additional specific information has always been obtained by interview (face to face or by telephone), e-mail or letter, and these are all detailed in the footnotes.
The book consists of four parts. The first three contain the narratives of the rescuers and those they rescued. These are categorised by their expressed motivation – religious convictions, humanitarian motives, being a member of the Resistance, feelings of loyalty to the rescued and paid rescuers. The final section discusses the relevance of these events to our lives today and attempts to understand what turns a bystander into a rescuer.
This book is a personal attempt to show the general reader the reality of the Holocaust. This is particularly important now, when the Holocaust is being regularly denied and its scale continually trivialised. Additionally, we are seeing a swing to extreme right-wing politics. When I talk to young people about the Holocaust I ask them to remember four things:
This book aims to record the remarkable stories that were entrusted to me. Indeed, many of my informants have died since they contacted me. I hope that I have been able to do justice to their stories and also offer some insight into what made this remarkable group of people turn from being passive bystanders into rescuers during one of the darkest periods in human history.
On 10 March 2010, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown honoured a pledge he made on a visit to Auschwitz last year. He recognised twenty-eight British Heroes of the Holocaust who were awarded a silver medal engraved ‘in the service of humanity’ above clasped hands. I was delighted to be present as, aided by some forceful lobbying by me, Bertha Bracey (see p. 21) and Henk Huffener (see p. 107) were included on the list. Bertha’s great niece Pat Webb, with her husband Donn and daughter Delia, received Bertha’s medal, and Henk’s daughters Clare and Josephine, who I only tracked down on Friday 5 March, received Henk’s medal.
As I revised my research for publication during the closing months of 2009, I was awaiting the birth of my first grandchild and inevitably I thought about my parents and their experiences in the Holocaust. I also wondered about my maternal grandfather, Armin Klein, who refused to leave his native land, and was murdered in Auschwitz around the time of my birth. James Harry Spier (Jamie) was born in London on 1 January 2010 – the great-great-grandchild of Armin and Rosa Klein, and Eugenie and Malkiel Grunwald, and great-grandchild of my beloved parents. Had the unknown official not sent my mother and me back, our line would have ended in 1944. With this in mind, I ask the reader to follow the Biblical exhortation, which Jews everywhere read every year at the Passover meal, telling the story of the flight from Egypt. In the book of Exodus (13:18) it is stated: ‘And you shall tell your son on that day …’ If the true horror of the Holocaust and the amazing courage of the persecuted and their rescuers is remembered and re-told to the next generation, is it not possible that people may consider their own views and attitudes, and perhaps create a far better world for everyone?
My father, Philipp Grunwald, was so embittered by his experiences as a forced labourer that he wouldn’t bring any more children into the world after the war and he committed suicide in 1955, leaving my mother Leona to bring me up alone. However, I am blessed with three wonderful sons, Daniel (father of James), Ben and Simon, and a lovely daughter-in-law, Michelle. I can only hope that the world in which they bring up their families will never see such horrors again. Perhaps then all the victims of the Nazis – like my grandfather Armin Klein – and all those other millions may not have died in vain?
Notes
1. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 838.
2. ‘The Ethics of the Fathers’, Chapter II, verses 20–21, in The Authorised Daily Prayer Book, trans. Rev. S. Singer (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1962), p. 258.
3. Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1997), p. xii.
4. Ibid., p. xiii.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseilles 1940 (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. xvi.
8. www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/index.asp
9. Yad Vashem’s Department for the Righteous among Nations, 1 January 2010.
10. Marilyn Henry, ‘Who, exactly, is a Righteous Gentile?’ in Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, 29 April 1998, www.jpost.com/com/Archive/29.Apr.1998/Features/Article-6.html, accessed 13 December 2002.
11. Walter Meyerhof, Prospectus for the Varian Fry Foundation, Stanford University, August 1997, p. 1.
12. Walter Meyerhof, notes of meeting with writer in London, 22 September 1997.
13. See p. 54.
14. See p. 34.
15. See p. 120.
1
RESCUERS WITH RELIGIOUS MOTIVES
Quakers were amongst the most active group of rescuers which saved Jews in the Holocaust. This was recognised in 1949 by the award of a Nobel Prize for their humanitarian efforts to both the British Friends Service Committee and its American counterpart.16 The Quakers, so named by Judge Bennet of Derby because they trembled at God’s word, have a history of helping social causes and those in need of humanitarian support. They look only to the Almighty for guidance and have no priests or hierarchy of clergy acting as the conduit to God:
Fundamentally, Quaker worship precluded all hierarchy and transcended principles of political governance. The primary quest was for divine enlightenment, not secular liberty, the overriding belief being that the divine spirit can touch and communicate, ending any separation between the individual and God. Without sermons or sacraments, without clerical intercession, each participant in the silent meeting speaks in his heart to God and, at the same time, to his neighbor. Quaker theology begins and ends as personal experience.17
The Quaker religion is different to most, lacking a formal structure; followers take responsibility for themselves. They do not wait to be told what to do or be led by a clergyman; neither do they assume that someone else will deal with a problem.
Bertha Bracey OBE (1893–1989) was a Quaker Englishwoman who had a profound influence in rescuing Jewish children from the Holocaust in what became the Kindertransport. She was born and brought up in Birmingham where she became a Quaker when she was 19 years old.
When I joined Friends I was deeply grateful for the joyous discovery of the Quaker business procedure, which at its best combines the virtue of democracy, and is yet theocratic. Our lives as human beings are set in two spiritual dimensions. Upwards toward God, and outward toward the community and the life of our world.18
She was the seventh of eight children. All the family were intelligent, but it was only Bertha who received an education because by the time she was born the family had a bit of spare cash. Additionally, all the children except one inherited their father’s character. He was very forthright and always knew he was right.19 No doubt these qualities stood Bertha in good stead in the years ahead.
She attended Birmingham University and spent five years as a teacher. In 1921 she left teaching to go to Vienna to help Quaker relief workers who ran clubs for children suffering from deficiency diseases. Whilst there, her German improved and in 1924 she moved to Nuremberg as a youth worker. From 1926–29 she was based in Berlin. She was subsequently recalled to Friends House in London to do administrative work relating to Quaker centres in Europe. She was to become the central point of a network of help for persecuted Jews coming to Britain.20
Because of her time spent living in Germany, Bertha had a very clear view about the situation there. As early as April 1933 she reported: ‘For the moment the forces of liberalism have been defeated, and in the March elections fifty-two per cent of the electors voted National Socialist.’ She was perhaps more perceptive than many commentators when, within weeks of Hitler’s election, she commented on the tragedy of the Jews in Germany based on her own recent visit to Frankfurt for the German Quaker Executive Committee:
Anti-semitism is a terrible canker which has been spreading its poison for decades in many Central European countries. It came to a head in Germany on April 1st, when Germany dropped back into the cruelty of the ‘Ghetto’ psychology of the Middle Ages. The very yellow spots used to indicate Jewish businesses and houses is an old mediaeval symbol. Words are not adequate to tell of the anguish of some of my Jewish friends, particularly of those who have hitherto felt themselves much more German than Jewish; who had in fact almost forgotten their Jewish blood. What cruel fate is this that suddenly snatches them up from German soil and leaves them aghast, hurt and rootless, to find themselves ringed about with unreasoning hatred and calculating cruelty? Jewish doctors, teachers and social workers who have given generously of their skill and devotion suddenly find themselves treated as pariahs cut off from any means of livelihood.21
This showed a very full understanding and enormous empathy for the plight of the persecuted Jews. Her close friendship with the Friedrichs influenced her knowledge. Leonhard Friedrich, from Nuremberg, had an English wife called Mary. They had met when he was working in England before 1914 and were married at the Sheffield Friends’ Meeting House on 3 August 1922. They were active Quakers and involved in a Quaker relief centre funded by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), set up through the intervention of President Hoover, himself a Quaker, who was worried about the impact on Germany of the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. These reparations caused great hardship and malnutrition and President Hoover asked the AFSC to organise a large-scale school feeding scheme and 11,000 centres were opened. This help was badly needed and continued as the hyper-inflation of the 1920s aggravated the situation.22
The Friedrichs suffered considerably for their faith and their daughter, Brenda Bailey, has described her mother’s response to early anti-Jewish activity:
On 1 April 1933 Hitler ordered a boycott against all Jewish businesses. My mother, Mary Friedrich, decided this was the day on which she would show solidarity with Jewish shopkeepers. We both walked into town. That day it was easy to recognise Jewish stores because they were marked with a yellow circle on a black background, and a brown uniformed SA man stood guarding the entrance. As we tried to go in he would warn us of the boycott, but Mary passed by him, saying she needed to speak to the owner. That evening the cinema showed newsreel film of the boycott, where Mary and I were seen entering shops and the commentator saying that some nameless disloyal people chose to defy the boycott.23
This was an extremely courageous act by Mary Friedrich, but further difficulties were to follow. Quakers were sympathetic to the Jews so early on, as, in 1933, many German Quakers lost their jobs because they would not sign the loyalty oath; amongst them was Leonhard Friedrich. A welfare fund was created to help such unemployed Quakers and those still in work contributed.
Bertha was very active in Europe in the 1930s. ‘It was Bertha’s task to interpret what was happening in Germany to the world outside. So she travelled three or four times a year to listen and to strengthen Quaker links in Germany, Holland, France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden.’24
Her experiences led her to become involved in the creation of the remarkable Kindertransport enterprise. It became apparent from Germany that desperate parents were willing to send their children away if this would save them from the Nazis. Wilfrid Israel, a member of a wealthy Jewish retail family that owned N. Israel, one of Berlin’s oldest and best-respected department stores, was involved in the early planning. His mother was English and that meant that when German Jews were in danger, he was able to exploit both his business and English contacts to help them flee.25
Jews seeking to flee could try the Jewish Agency’s Palestine Office to get to Palestine, or the newly created umbrella organisation Reich Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden), finally set up in September 1933 and led by common agreement by Rabbi Leo Baeck. The two largest groups were the Central Committee for Relief and Reconstruction and the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden (Assistance Organisation for the German Jews). The Hilfsverein helped Jews with the procedure of emigration, advice on visas, contacting relatives abroad and, if necessary, finding money for tickets and so on. Wilfrid Israel was one of the most prominent members of the Hilfsverein.26 Rabbi Leo Baeck’s nephew, Leo Adam, was one of Wilfrid’s employees in the store. One of his friends was Frank Foley, whose job as passport control officer was a cover for his real role as MI6 head of station in the German capital. Wilfrid and Frank had been friends since the 1920s when Frank, as a junior consular official, had helped Wilfrid’s father, Berthold Israel, obtain a visa to join his wife in London, where their daughter Viva (Wilfrid’s sister) was dying. Their friendship was to prove extremely useful for the fleeing German Jews, and Foley himself is now credited with saving 10,000 Jews.27
On 15 November 1938 Wilfrid Israel cabled the Council for German Jewry in London and gave them ‘details of the problems facing the community, and proposed the immediate rescue of German-Jewish children and young people up to the age of seventeen’. As a result, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was approached and, although he was non-committal, the proposals were discussed in the Cabinet the next day. The council decided someone needed to meet Wilfrid Israel, and because it was unsafe for a Jew to travel to Germany, five Quakers agreed to go instead and meet him in Berlin. Ben Greene, who was one of the five, accompanied Bertha Bracey to the meeting with the Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, on 21 November 1938. ‘Greene testified to the plea of the German parents and their readiness to part with their children.’28
That very night, in the House of Commons, Samuel Hoare announced that the government had agreed to the admission of the refugee children using Ben Greene’s evidence, and the first party of 200 children arrived from Germany on 2 December 1938. Meanwhile, Ben Greene returned from a second visit to Germany and reported that ‘the Jewish suicide rate was now so heavy that “the Mainz town authorities have turned off the gas in every Jewish house”’.29
Bertha herself noted her efforts more modestly:
After the pogrom in November 1938, I went with Lord Samuel to the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, and obtained permission to bring ten thousand ‘non-Aryan’ children to this country. When concentration camps were being opened up at the end of the European War, I went with Mr Leonard Montefiore to the War Office and persuaded them to put at our disposal 10 large bomber planes, which, with the bomb racks removed, enabled us to bring 300 children from Theresienstadt, Prague, to England.30
The UK and its government had no excuse, even in pre-war 1939, for claiming not to know what was happening in Europe. As early as 1936 a book detailing ‘the outlawing of half a million human beings: a collection of facts and documents relating to three years’ persecution of German Jews, derived chiefly from National Socialist sources, very carefully assembled by a group of investigators’, was published by Victor Gollancz. Its introduction was written by the Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson. He concluded on 12 February 1936:
As one who has had rather special reasons for holding Germany in high regard, who has an unfeigned admiration for her intellectual achievements, who has often in the past visited with delight her historic cities, and recalled the wonders of her history, I cannot bring myself to believe that the persecution of minorities, and among them specially the Jews, which now stains the national name, can be more than a passing aberration. The publication of this book will, I think, hasten the return of sanity by making yet more vocal and insistent the protest of the civilised conscience itself, that protest which not even the most passionate nationalism can permanently resist or will finally resent.31
The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs had published a Command Paper in 1939 which included several documents listing the horrors occurring in Germany. The introduction refers to the excuse provided by the German government when His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin made a complaint in 1933 about the ‘violence and brutality of the Nazis’. They claimed they regretted the incidents ‘but regarded them as unavoidable in the first ardour of revolutionary fervour’:
This plea cannot be put forward to excuse events that occurred five years after the advent to power of the National Socialist Party. It is evident from the published documents, which cover only the period from 1938 onwards, that neither the consolidation of the regime nor the passage of time have in any way mitigated its savagery.32
However, even this evidence failed to find overwhelming support. The Daily Express commented, ‘there is crime and cruelty among the citizens of every nation’, and the extreme right-wing weekly Truth hinted that it might all be ‘a Jewish invention’.33
After 1939 Bertha’s role changed and she dealt with those refugees that had arrived in the UK and were being interned as enemy aliens. Government policy changed following the fall of France, Belgium and Holland. There was greater fear of invasion and what was called ‘fifth column’ activity, which led to thousands being interned, and this included both men and women, some of whom were sick. This caused those refugees tremendous personal problems and the refugee bodies combined to create a Central Department for Interned Refugees (CDIR). Bertha Bracey became the chairman and dealt with different government departments to resolve these issues, such as ‘the unsuitability of ordinary prisons for internment, the possibility of children joining their mothers as aliens, the provision of married quarters, and the whole business of relief from internment’.34
The most important area was the Isle of Man where most aliens were interned – there was a maximum of 10,000 internees during the Second World War. Bertha visited the two women’s camps to see for herself the true situation. She found there were only six members of staff dealing with hundreds of internees and suggested they should use volunteers as an interim measure. She also found that those released did not have the money for the journey back to the mainland, and the elderly and infirm, or those who spoke little English, needed help on arrival.
Bertha persuaded the CDIR to help out and this resulted in those with special needs receiving financial assistance. Bertha Bracey was a courageous woman who had an unerring instinct for what needed to be done. She had started her work in Europe as a young woman in the early 1920s: ‘Her main challenge was to encourage youth in exploring new attitudes towards international peace and personal responsibilities in the new democratic Weimar republic.’35 Her faith as a Quaker made her strong and one of her favourite phrases was ‘hold on tight’.
The phrase ‘hold on tight’ might be recalled as a mother’s behest to her child or a needed instruction in the early days of the motor car; but Bertha would urge it is also a reminder that there are times in our lives when we need to hold on tight to our faith. And, as we reflect on the dark times she lived through, we know that she spoke from the depths of experience.36
Her knowledge of Germany gave her great influence in the early days of Hitler’s regime. ‘Bertha was one of three or four British Friends who were able to exert pressure through eminent people in church and state both in Britain and Germany in order to secure the release of individuals in political custody.’ She was awarded the OBE in 1942 in recognition of her work for refugees, and she was generally recognised as having achieved much in creating the Germany Emergency Committee (GEC) as its secretary from April 1933. On 25 April a Case Committee was appointed, and it reported on 3 May that it had eighteen cases under review. By September 1939 it had 22,000.37
Her work with the GEC from April 1933 was summed up:
Bertha Bracey had borne the chief responsibility for building up the organisation and for directing its work. Her creative vision, her sympathy for the friendless and persecuted, which she invited many others to share, and her wide knowledge of the refugee problem had had an influence far beyond the confines of Friends House and Bloomsbury House, and had brought her the gratitude of large numbers of those she had helped.38
Towards the end of her long life – she was 95 when she died – she wrestled with Parkinson’s disease, and when it was particularly troublesome she referred to it light-heartedly as ‘Mr Parkinson’s visiting again’.39 Her family did not know a great deal about her doings. There is mention in family correspondence of Bertha going to Poland after the Nazi occupation and bringing out mothers and children. Her niece Alma has written:
Bertha was very reticent and never talked about her self-imposed commitments. This last episode – re Poland, cannot be verified I don’t think – it’s sort of word of mouth. Friends certainly backed her and her rescue team but it was all obviously hush hush and the family really knew nothing about her activities … A brave and far-sighted woman with remarkable organizing ability. She had high standards.40
She was an inspiration to many, even towards the end of her life. A letter sent to her, dated 1 April 1988, refers to the words of one of her carers in the nursing home: ‘She is wonderful, we are supposed to minister to her but she ministers to us. Whenever I feel a bit low a visit to Bertha bucks me up in no time.’41
‘Is there anything I can bring you?’ asked a visitor of hers in the nursing home during her last days. Bertha roused herself from a partial slumber to the alertness we remember so well. ‘Yes,’ she responded, ‘bring me glad tidings of great joy.’42
In July 2001 a sculpture representing the family was installed and dedicated in the courtyard of Friends House in London. It was sculpted by Naomi Blake, one of the victims of the Nazis saved by the Kindertransport. Its plaque reads:
To honour Bertha Bracey (1893–1989) who gave practical leadership to Quakers in quietly rescuing and re-settling thousands of Nazi victims and lone children between 1933–1948
Charles Fawcett (1919–2008) was born in Virginia in the USA into a privileged family. He had a difficult start as the family home was burnt down five days after his birth and his mother died when he was 5, followed by his father two years later. He was therefore brought up as an Episcopalian by his mother’s sister – Aunt Lily Shumate – in Greenville, a small town in South Carolina. The family were originally Huguenots who arrived in Virginia in the 1660s. Consequently, he grew up as a Southern gentleman of the old school:
His romanticism, sense of honour, attitude to women, enormous charm, modesty, old-fashioned courtly manners, are all a product of the acceptable face of the old South. His accent remains that of the Virginia gentleman and he has sincerely subscribed to its rigid honour code all his life – the reverse of the narrow bigotry often attributed to the South.43
Charles, who lived in Chelsea for many years, told me he was brought up to help people and to be a Good Samaritan. He said his hometown was a place of just one religion, where although there was segregation, black people were well treated because there were no plantations. Charlie recalled that his aunt had two black servants who lived in the family home, and when he came back from school he went to see them before he saw his aunt. Everybody in the sleepy little town had the same ethics and he grew up knowing he had to do the right thing. The people of Greenville ‘were really good people who helped each other’.44
