Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (41 page)

Like Joseł Lewin, Cypa and Rywa Szpanberg thought that they had had enough of life amidst death. They were in Aleksandra, a small settlement not far from the city of Równo, in Volhynia. When Jews were ordered to the ghetto in July 1942, the two women decided to spare themselves the intermediate steps, and simply act in such a way that the Germans would kill them. In central Poland, in the Warsaw ghetto, Jews could still be fooled, or fool themselves, about what deportation meant. In places like Volhynia, however, where the public mass murder of Jews had been under way for a year, even false hope was close to impossible. So before the transfer to the ghetto, Cypa and Rywa found a place that was unknown to them, sat down together, cried, and waited for death.

The Pole who owned the land was a stranger to them. When he heard their sobbing, he took the two women to his farm in Trzesłaniec. Afterwards he took in eight more Jews. Would he have taken in any Jews at all if not for that chance encounter with two tearful women who had found their way to his property and were at his mercy? To be sure, most people in his situation did not behave nearly so honorably, and many behaved much worse. And yet without the decision of Cypa and Rywa to control the timing of their own deaths, the landowner would never have met them, and perhaps would never have undertaken to rescue Jews at all. His efforts were all the more difficult in 1943, when the UPA began to ethnically cleanse Poles from Volhynia. And yet nine of the ten Jews he sheltered on his farm survived.

There were indeed people, although precious few of them, who felt compelled by the simple need for help. Irena Lypszyc survived thanks to one such person. She was a Warsaw Jew who fled to the eastern regions of Poland to escape the German invasion of September 1939, only to find herself unexpectedly under Soviet power. Such refugees were initially helped by local Jewish communities, insofar as that was possible, but were helpless when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Almost all of the local Jews were then killed, and the proportion of already displaced Jews who died must have been close to a hundred percent. After all, they had no prewar connections with the place where they found themselves, and no knowledge of the terrain.

Like most such people, Irena Lypszyc did not know much about her new surroundings. She was in Wysock, in Polesia, when the German invasion came. When the Jews of the town were rounded up for execution in September 1942, she ran into the swamps with her husband. It does not seem that she had ever previously spent much time out of doors. The two of them lived on berries and mushrooms for a few days before deciding to risk making contact with the outside world. Irena decided that she would stand on the first road she found, hail the first person she saw, and ask for help.

The man approaching her had a double-barreled shotgun on his shoulder and agreed to her request without batting an eye. As she came to understand, he was a natural rebel, living from smuggling and moonshine far away from any center of power, opposing whichever political system claimed authority over him. In interwar Poland he had hidden communists; when the Soviets invaded he had sheltered Poles from deportation by the NKVD; and now that the Germans had come he was helping Jews. He did not really seem to see a difference between one sort of rescue and another.

Irena told his story but did not betray his name.

Other rescuers, with more orderly minds and more conventional ways of being in the world, exhibited a mysterious steadfastness, a silently understood need to remake a corner of the world, to transform the overwhelming difficulty of the task into a kind of normalcy, where the labor and its presentation become something like the preoccupation of an entire personality. A private choreography of warmth and safety defied the exterior social world of cold and doom.

Rena Krainik found herself by chance in the village of Kopaniny, in eastern Galicia, not far from the city of Stanisławów. Wearing rags, she knocked on the door of complete strangers, meaning to ask for shelter for a few hours and expecting to be turned away. Instead, the Zamorski family, a homemaker and a retired Polish army officer, took her in and treated her as one of their own for the rest of the war. As Rena remembered, “They didn’t ask me any questions, they didn’t demand any documents, they didn’t scrutinize my face to see whether I was Jewish. Mrs. Zamorska shared with me her very modest wardrobe, and the whole family shared with me every bit of food from the miserable portions allotted to the Poles.” Rena understood the risks that her hosts were taking and appreciated their virtue. “I was penniless, naked, and barefoot. The sacrifice was all the greater in a locality such as Kopaniny, where every new arrival attracted attention.”

In the city of Stanisławów itself, where almost all of the Jews were murdered, Janina Ciszewska took in eleven for most of the war. In a house downtown she owned two apartments that were connected by an interior door. She hid the Jews in the second apartment, the one that did not open onto the hallway. At first she took in four people on behalf of a friend. When the Jews’ money ran out, she took a job with the German civilian administration, in the office that provided for the social welfare of ethnic Germans. Janina spoke German and, at the Jews’ request, registered herself as an ethnic German. She stole clothes and shoes from her employers (some of which had likely been taken from the bodies of murdered Jews), took them to the countryside, sold them at markets, and used the money to feed her growing group of wards. She made light of all the difficulties. She was, as one of the Jews she rescued wrote after the war, a “brave, warm woman.” She kept on a bright, beaming face, so that the Jews, as she said, would believe that she “could do anything.”

When he received a request, years after the war, to provide information about his rescue of Jews, Bogdan Bazyli responded almost dismissively: “you won’t believe me, ask the Teitelmans in Israel.” The Bazyli family were Poles in the Pańska Dolina settlement, not far from the city of Dubno, in Volhynia. The Teitelman family had fled the murder of the Jews of Murowicz in September 1942. The Bazylis built them a dugout on the family property and kept them there for the rest of the war. Every morning, the Bazyli children brought food and took away a bucket of urine and feces. The Bazyli family took in a total of twenty-two Jews, all of whom survived the war. The Teitelmans supplied these facts from Haifa, but like most Jews they had little to say about the motives of those who saved them: “he who wanted to help in those terrible times did help.” From the new world of Israel the Teitelman family wished Bogdan Bazyli “a long and healthy life.”

Wanting to help was not enough. To rescue a Jew in these conditions, where no structure supported the effort and where the penalty was death, required something stronger than character, something greater than a worldview. Generous people took humane decisions, yet still failed. Probably most men and women of goodwill who were able to take the initial risk failed after a month, a week, a day. It was an era when to be good meant not only the avoidance of evil but a total determination to act on behalf of a stranger, on a planet where hell, not heaven, was the reward for goodness.

Good people broke. Mina Grycak found a peasant who sheltered her family for months and then finally yielded to the pressure. He first tried to kill the family in a clownish way that was bound to fail, and then threatened to kill himself. Had the war lasted for months rather than for years, his behavior would have been exemplary.

The nature of an encounter could end a rescue, just as it could begin one. Abraham Ṡniadowicz and his son stayed with a peasant for two months, and then began to share their place of shelter with two more Jews. They did not tell their host. When the peasant learned of the unannounced arrivals, he told all four Jews to leave. “I must emphasize,” said Abraham, “that this Christian was a very good person.”

It is very hard to speak of the motivations of the men and women who risked their lives to rescue Jews without any anchor in earthly politics and without any hope of a gainful future with those whom they rescued. To be motivated means to be moved by something. To explain a motivation usually means the delineation of a connection between a person and something beyond that person—something that beckons from the world of today, or at least from an imagined future. None of that seems pertinent here. Accounts of rescue recorded by Jews rarely include evaluations of their rescuers’ motivations.

What Jewish survivors tend to provide is a description of disinterested virtue. They tend to say, in one way or another, that their rescuers were guided by a sense of humanity that transcended or defied the circumstances. As Janina Bauman put it, “that we lived with them strengthened what was noble in them, or what was base.” Anton Schmid was an Austrian who employed Jews in the 1930s, defended them from repressions in Vienna after the
Anschluss
in 1938, and rescued hundreds from death as a German soldier. Those who knew him before and during the war tended to say that he was
menschlich
—humane. Joseph C., who escaped from the death facility at Treblinka, wept in his testimony when he tried to describe the one Pole who helped him in his distress. The word that he finally found to describe Szymon Całka was “humanity.”

Agnieszka Wróbel, who herself survived a German concentration camp, rescued several Jews from the Warsaw ghetto, at great risk to herself. Two of the Jews who lived with her wrote long and detailed accounts of her actions, but neither tried to explain how she was capable of such choices and actions. Instead, Bronisława Znider reflected that “the role of people such as Agnieszka Wróbel was not so much that they rescued people from death, but that in the hearts of people who were chased like animals, in the spirits of Jews who were doomed to die, she aroused a bit of hope that not everything good was lost, that there were still a handful of human beings worthy of the name.”

If Jews had little to say about the reasons why they were rescued, the rescuers themselves were even less forthcoming. They generally preferred not to speak about what they did. Olha Roshchenko, a Ukrainian in Kyiv, helped two of her friends to escape after the mass shooting at Babyi Iar. “I did not save them,” she said. What she meant was that other people also helped her friends, and that in the end her friends saved themselves. This was of course true, and indeed was almost always true. Jews themselves had to take the most exceptional actions if they were to survive, and those who helped them were almost always a large group of people. Olha’s friends reply in the same conversation: “There were a number of people who helped Jews, and don’t always speak of it.” And this was also true. People who did not rescue Jews claim to have done so, and people who did rescue Jews often keep their peace. There is an unmistakable tendency of rescuers, when they speak at all, towards a certain specific modesty, a diffidence that verges on a general attempt not to answer questions about motivation. When rescuers do say anything at all it is almost always uninteresting: a banality of good that is so consistent across gender, class, language, nation, and generation as to give pause.

Helena Chorążyńska, an uneducated peasant woman, provided this explanation of why she took in Jews and kept them alive: “I always said that when I grew up I would never let anyone leave my house naked or hungry.” Thus the idea of hospitality was extended to the furthest, darkest reaches of human experience. Was this imagination or a lack of imagination? The German (Austrian) soldier Anton Schmid was kind to people, including Jews. Kindness required ever greater personal risk as circumstances grew ever worse; Schmid did not change as the world changed, and was one of the few Germans to be executed for saving Jews. In the letter that he wrote to his family just before his death, he did not provide grand explanations for what he had done; he said he had simply “acted as a human being” and regretted the grief he would cause by not returning home to his loved ones. Feliks Cywiński, who helped twenty-six Jews, spoke of a sense of “obligation.” Kazimiera Żuławska recalled a “purely human sense of outrage.” Adam Zboromiski said that he needed to “feel like a human being.”

Karolina Kobylec: “That is just the way I am.”

Jan Lipke was a Latvian who aided dozens of Jews in and around Riga. One of the people who owed his life to Lipke said that the way he behaved was “far beyond the limits of heroism and common sense.” Lipke placed his own life in jeopardy several times, acting on behalf of people with whom he had no prior connection. He himself said that his chosen course was nothing at all extraordinary, that it was “normal.” Throughout Europe, this is what rescuers said again and again: that they were behaving normally. “We regarded it as the most normal thing to help those who needed help”—thus the verdict of a Polish family who sheltered two Jews for much of the war. They were not describing the normality that they saw around them, of course. They were not acting as others acted, or following the explicit or implicit prescriptions of those in power. Their sense of normality must have come from within, or from something learned and internalized before the war, since there were few or no external sources of the norms they exemplified.

Deep in the forests or swamps, rescuers might hide Jews without many other people noticing. But in the villages and towns, where every action was noticed and commented upon, slight alterations in the motions of everyday life could trigger everyday death. Jews could not be maintained inside a house without some change in behavior outside the house. Every transaction, every exchange, every purchase, everything that in normal times happened unremarkably at the cash nexus, carried in these times an additional social meaning. A family might be murdered because an illiterate peasant bought, as a kindness for the Jews in his home, a newspaper.

Rescuers were risking death, but not in the way people risk death in a moment of wartime heroism. There were moments, of course, when rescue resembled a battle, and these are the easiest to glorify. In the stateless zones of eastern Europe, to shelter Jews meant risking one’s own life and that of one’s family, at every moment, over the course of weeks, months, or even years. The choice to rescue was not a choice of the usual kind, to be followed by other choices that might undo or obviate the first. It was a choice that, once made, impinged upon every aspect of future life for multiple people over an indefinite period. It usually demanded a certain amount of planning and a capacity to think about the future in terms other than the conventional ones. A Belarusian peasant, near Minsk, chose which of his crops to sow in the spring with a thought to providing cover for his Jewish wards in the summer and fall.