The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (31 page)

The Princess’s Greek staff said nothing about those who were in hiding: their loyalty was not in doubt. The greatest danger came when, as a matter of courtesy, German officers came to call on the Princess. But her secret was kept, and Rachel and Michel Cohen survived the war, as did Jacques, one of those whom she enabled to escape to Turkey.
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Also in Athens, Roger Millieux, director of the French Institute in the city, hid two Jews in the Institute itself.
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In Salonika, a Greek couple, Lina and Vittoria Citterich, gave a safe haven to Rena Shaki after the deportation of her parents. Later they enrolled her in a Roman Catholic convent school in the city, the Sisters of Saint Joseph. Her parents, taken to Auschwitz, never returned.
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At the time of the German occupation of Athens, the Levis family had been warned by a pre-arranged signal from Dimitrios Vlastaris, Director of the Aliens Department of the Greek police, who was a friend of the family.
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As a result of his warning, wrote Jeff Levis (then Pepos Levis), ‘my whole immediate family went into hiding. We remained in hiding during thirteen months, until the liberation of Athens by the Allies in 1944. We were fortunate enough to be in the small minority of Greek Jews who survived. We owe our survival, by and large, to Greek Christian friends of the family who either hid us in their homes or arranged for us to hide in other places.’

The principal rescuer of the Levis family was Michael Mantoudis, the Director of the Department of Culture and Fine Arts in the Greek Ministry of Education. His wife, Adamantia, was Mrs Levis’s best friend. Jeff himself was hidden in the study of their home. ‘During the thirteen months that we were in hiding,’ he writes, ‘we had various close escapes from the German army and the SS, as well as from Greek Quisling units.’
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At Volos, on the Aegean coast of mainland Greece, Rabbi Pessah, through his contact with the resistance, obtained shelter for more than 752 Jews in the mountain villages east of the town. When the Germans came to deport them, only 130 were found. In nearby Trikkala, 470 Jews found refuge with Greek villagers in the mountains; only fifty were captured. In Patras, the German consul wrote to his superiors that ‘after the newspapers announced the obligatory registration of all Jews, they disappeared.’
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On the Greek island of Zante, sixty miles from Corfu, the Mayor, Lucas Karrer, and the leading churchman, Archbishop Crysostomos, not only alerted the Jews to danger but sent 195 of them to remote villages in the hills. Unfortunately sixty-two Jews, all of them elderly, who could not make the sudden journey into the rough terrain, were seized by the Gestapo in Zante and taken to the port. ‘If the deportation order is carried out,’ Crysostomos declared, ‘I will join the Jews and share their fate.’
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But by a remarkable chance, when the boat arrived from Corfu it was already so packed with Jews that it did not stop.
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MORE THAN
forty-eight thousand Jews were living in Bulgaria when war broke out. A further seven and a half thousand came under Bulgarian rule in 1941 in Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, and four thousand more in Bulgarian-occupied Thrace. During 1941 the Bulgarian government sent many Jews to labour camps inside Bulgaria. Although there was no question of deporting them to Germany, conditions in the camps were harsh. When, on 24 May 1942, there was a mass round-up of Jews in Sofia for deportation to the camps, a young Bulgarian, Rubin Dimitrov, hid twenty Jews in his grandmother’s bakery, sheltering them until the raid was over. When the Bulgarian police learned what he had done they beat him so severely that his eyesight was permanently damaged.
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On 22 February 1943 the Bulgarian government agreed to a German request to deport the Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia: eleven and a half thousand men, women and children, from twenty-three communities, were deported to Treblinka and murdered. On February 28 one of the leading Bulgarian churchmen, Metropolitan Stefan of Sofia, was on a visit to the town of Dupnitza when he saw the arrival of deportation trains, carrying Jews from Thrace to Treblinka. He protested to King Boris.
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A few days later, the Germans prevailed upon the Bulgarian government to issue a deportation order for all the forty-eight thousand Jews of Bulgaria proper. On March 10 the seizure of Jews began in the city of Plovdiv, home of the Metropolitan Kiril: fifteen hundred Jews were arrested that night. The historian Uriel Tal has described how Kiril ‘got up early in the morning when it was still dark and rushed to the rescue of the arrested Jews’.
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Again, Metropolitan Stefan wrote at once to the King: ‘The cries and the tears of the slighted Bulgarian citizens of Jewish origin are a lawful protest against the injustice done to them. It should be heard and complied with by the King of the Bulgarians.’
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In the northern part of Bulgaria, farmers threatened to lie down on the railway tracks to prevent passage of the deportation trains. Speaking at a session of the Bulgarian Holy Synod three weeks later, Metropolitan Kiril told the church dignitaries about the Jews seized in Plovdiv: ‘They were detained in a school and had to be transported to Poland, just like the Jews from the newly liberated territories and Aegean Thrace. In the morning I was told what had happened. I did not know what was going on and thought that maybe the Jews in the whole country had been arrested that night. A special train to transport them was expected to arrive at the station. The citizens’ indignation was enormous.’

Kiril went on to stress that the internment that had started as a prelude to deportation ‘is extremely unjust and cruel. It should be underlined that the Holy Synod is unanimous in its position on that issue. I hope the head of state will be notified of our attitude. As a last resort, we could express our view from the pulpit and could instruct the parish priests what to do.’

Speaking after Kiril, Metropolitan Stefan noted that it was the duty of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to ‘bring consolation to all who suffer’. Whenever Jews sought shelter within the confines of the Church, ‘we cannot turn them back. Their suffering is inhumane.’ When someone ‘comes to your house and tells you to pack up things in two hours and be ready to leave for some place unknown—this is unheard of and unseen in our country.’ As well as Kiril and Stefan, eight other senior churchmen, among them the highly respected Neofit of Vidin, signed a formal protest to the King on behalf of all the Jews of Bulgaria.
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The Vice-Speaker of the Bulgarian parliament, Dimiter Peshev, angered by the earlier deportations from Bulgarian-occupied territory, on German orders, organized a petition on March 17, opposing the deportation of the Jews from Bulgaria proper. Fifty members of parliament signed, whereupon the government rescinded its order of a week earlier and released those Jews who had already been taken into custody. Their release came to be known in Bulgaria as a ‘miracle of the Jewish people’.
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Hitler did not have the means to occupy Bulgaria and organize the deportation using German troops and police. Thus the Jews of Bulgaria survived the war. In a report to Berlin on 7 June 1943, Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, the German Ambassador to Sofia, looking back on the failure of the German deportation plans two and a half months earlier, lamented the fact that the Bulgarian people ‘lacked the ideological enlightenment that we have’, and that the Bulgarian man in the street ‘does not see in the Jews any flaws justifying taking special measures against them’. Fifteen years later, when Beckerle was on trial for wartime crimes, German jurists acting for him noted that ‘in Bulgaria there was no anti-Semitism in the conventional sense of the word.’
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O
N THE OUTBREAK
of war in September 1939 there were seventeen hundred Jews living in Norway, most of them in the capital, Oslo. Two hundred of them were German and Austrian refugees who had found sanctuary in Norway after 1933. In April 1940 the German army invaded Norway; two months later the Norwegian army surrendered, and power passed to the German Reichskommissar, Josef Terboven. At his beck and call, as Minister-President, was a former Norwegian army officer, Vidkun Quisling, the head of the pre-war Norwegian fascist movement. The first anti-Jewish action took place in April 1941, when the synagogue in Trondheim, in northern Norway, was seized and vandalized. Immediately afterwards, the leading churchman in the city, Dean Arne Fjellbu, privately warned the local Norwegian Nazis that if the synagogue action presaged a general persecution of Jews, ‘I can assure you that the Church will sound the alarm from one end of the country to the other. Here the Norwegian Church stands one hundred percent united. Such a thing we will not tolerate.’

The head of the Methodist Church in Trondheim, Pastor Einar Anker Nilsen, offered the Trondheim Jews the church attic for their synagogue services. The two Torah scrolls that had not been vandalized were transferred there. So that nobody could see that Jews congregated in the church, comments the historian of Norwegian Jewry during the war, Samuel Abrahamsen, ‘members of the congregation were instructed to arrive and leave the church one by one, or not more than two together in order not to attract undue attention. This functioned very well, although it was dangerous.’
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The first mass arrest of Jews in Norway took place on 25 October 1942. One of the Norwegian non-Jews active in helping Jews avoid deportation was Sigrid Lund. She has described in her memoirs how she and a friend learnt the news: ‘On October 25, the telephone rang. A male voice said: “It will be a large party tonight. But we only want to have the large packages.” Then he hung up. At first I was in doubt as to what it meant. Myrtle and I spoke about it for quite some time. Then we said almost simultaneously: “This must be about the Jews. And the large packages must be the men.” They were at risk of being arrested immediately.’

The two women agreed that they should warn as many men as possible ‘without daring to use the telephone. The problems were how to locate the men and obtain access to their homes. Many Jews were warned but did not believe persecutions could happen in Norway on any large scale. For others the warning came too late. The Norwegian police had already been there.’
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Einar Follestad was an active member of the Pentecostal movement. When he learnt on October 26 of the arrest in Oslo of his friend Josef Raskow, a Jewish shop-owner, he immediately went to the house of Raskow’s brother, Herman, and his wife Fanny, who was then six months pregnant, in order to help them. From that moment, the whole Follestad family—Einar, his wife Agnes, her parents and her sister—became actively involved in preparing the rescue of their two friends. An escape route was worked out whereby the Raskows were able to cross into Sweden. Four Norwegians had taken part in this single act of rescue.’
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In Norway, as elsewhere, people under occupation could choose to collaborate with the authorities or help the Jews. Two Norwegian policemen arrested a Jewish schoolboy, Selik Mahler, in his classroom at the Cathedral High School in Trondheim on October 27; but two farmer’s sons lent his brother Salomon a pair of skis and accompanied him to the Swedish border two days later.
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In February 1942, all seven bishops of the Norwegian Lutheran Church had resigned in protest against the isolation and persecution of the Jews in Norway. Following the deportations of October, all seven sent a letter, dated 10 November 1942, to Norway’s Minister-President, Vidkun Quisling—whose name had by then become synonymous with betraying one’s own people. In the letter they stated that for the previous ninety-one years the Jews had possessed a legal right to reside and earn a livelihood in Norway. But under Quisling’s rule, the bishops noted, the Jews were being deprived of their properties without warning, and being punished as the worst criminals ‘wholly and solely because they were Jews’.

The seven bishops reminded Quisling that he had on various occasions emphasized that his party would protect the basic Christian values. One of those values, the bishops pointed out, was being endangered: the Christian commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’, which they described as ‘the most elementary legal right for any human being’. The bishops went on to say that they were motivated in writing by the deepest dictates of conscience; they did not want the Church, by silence, to be ‘coguilty’ in ‘legalized injustice’ against the Jews. ‘The Church has God’s call and full authority to proclaim God’s law and God’s Gospel. Therefore, it cannot remain silent when God’s commandments are being trampled underfoot. And now it is one of Christianity’s basic values which is being violated; the commandment of God which is fundamental to all society…Stop the persecution of Jews and stop the race hatred which, through the press, is being spread in our land.’

This protest from the bishops was supported by many respected theologians, nineteen church organizations and six non-state church religious societies. A total of over sixty signatures from all sections of Norway’s Protestant communities endorsed the letter. On two consecutive Sundays, November 15 and 22, prayers were said for the Jews from the pulpits, and in most cases the text of the protest letter was read. The pulpits of the Protestant churches had become an effective means of anti-Nazi communication during the occupation.
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On November 25 the administrator of the Oslo Jewish Children’s Home received a warning about the impending arrest of both the children and their guardians. She immediately contacted members of the Norwegian resistance, among them Ingebjorg Sletten and Tove Tau, who managed to take all the children to a villa in the suburbs. Later they were smuggled across to neutral Sweden, and safety, by a route north of Kongsvinger, to the east of Oslo. Among these children were thirty-seven Czech refugees whom Sigrid Lund had helped bring across Europe from Prague in October 1939.

The first deportation of Jews from Norway to Auschwitz took place on the night of 26–27 November 1942 from Oslo, when 523 Norwegian Jews were taken by ship to Stettin, and then on by train. At the quayside, many Norwegians had gathered, hoping somehow to help the Jews, but stood powerless as men, women and children were forced on board.
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Many Norwegians, however, took part in smuggling Jews across the border between Norway and Sweden. Among them was Odd Nansen, the son of the polar explorer and friend of refugees, Fridjof Nansen. Odd Nansen was arrested by the Gestapo, incarcerated near Oslo, and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. He survived the war.
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Several hospitals in Oslo, and also in Lillehammer, had become centres for hiding Jews until rescue could be arranged. Doctors, nurses and hospital administrators falsified the records of these ‘patients’ and failed to report the release of Jewish patients to the state police, as ordered by the Quisling government. Even Jews who had been hospitalized with legitimate illnesses were spirited safely across the Swedish border on stretchers. The Carl Fredriksen Transport Organization used two trucks five evenings a week from October 1942 to January 1943, rescuing hundreds of Jews.
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On the night of December 3, Henriette Samuel, the wife of the Chief Rabbi of Norway, and her children were among forty Jews taken in two trucks to the Swedish frontier. As the trucks were officially meant to be carrying potatoes, the escapees had to look like tubers covered by tarpaulins, and to keep strictest silence lest the Germans discover them in routine searches along the way. The children were given sleeping pills, the adults forbidden to speak. The last stage of the transit, led by the Norwegian resistance, was impassable to trucks and had to be undertaken on foot, with the temperature down to twenty degrees below freezing. The children were woken up and all forty Jews were then smuggled across the border into neutral Sweden.
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On December 21 another thirty-four Norwegian Jews crossed into Sweden, assisted by Norwegians who had provided them with food and clothing. A United States Office of Strategic Services report, sent secretly from Sweden eight days later, stated: ‘The Norse are infuriated by the anti-Jewish attitude of the Germans and Quislings, and in order to frustrate the maltreatment of Jews risked their own lives. In one case, that of Dr Henri Zellner, 74-year-old escapee, he stated that his wife, who was paralysed, refused to leave Norway, and she was carried across the border bodily by the Norwegians.’
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Samuel Abrahamsen comments: ‘Sweden was not easily accessible on foot. The border patrolled by German troops was an area of thick forest, mountainous terrain, difficult to cross in snow and frost.’
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In his book
Justice in Jerusalem
, Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor at the Eichmann trial, expressed his and Israel’s appreciation of the Norwegian underground’s efforts in transporting eight hundred Jews across Norway to safety in Sweden ‘under especially perilous circumstances’.
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Perhaps forty Jews managed to survive the war inside Norway, living with false ‘Aryan’ papers in hospitals, nursing homes and homes for old people. One lived through the war in a small cabin in a remote forest.
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IN FINLAND, SEVERAL
hundred local Jews—whose families had lived there since the time Finland had been part of the Tsarist Empire—had been joined after 1933 by a further two thousand refugees from Germany and Austria. In August 1942, at the request of the SS, eight of these refugees were deported to Germany, and then sent on to Auschwitz. All but one of them were murdered. The SS then demanded that all the remaining German-and Austrian-born Jews in Finland be handed over. Protests were immediate, from senior clergymen and from the minority Social Democratic Party. The Finnish Cabinet, which that August had agreed to deport Finland’s Jews to Germany during a private visit to Finland of the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, changed its mind and refused to allow any further deportations. Thus two thousand Jews were saved.
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A SIMILAR PUBLIC
protest took place in Denmark, where the SS were also cheated of their prize—one they had coveted for more than a year and a half, since the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when Denmark’s seven thousand Jews had been designated for deportation and death in the lists meticulously prepared by Adolf Eichmann. Following the occupation of Denmark in the spring of 1940, the Germans had pursued a policy of co-operation and negotiation with the Danish authorities. As a result, the Jews had been left unmolested. But growing Danish resistance to the German occupation slowly undermined any chance of continued co-operation, and on 28 August 1943 the Germans declared martial law.

The SS hoped to use this opportunity to deport Denmark’s Jews. They were forestalled by the actions of a German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and been posted to Denmark before the German conquest by German military intelligence. Following the German conquest of Denmark he had made contact with the leaders of the Danish Social Democrat Party, with whom he was on good terms. Learning of the deportation plans on 11 September 1943, Duckwitz flew to Berlin two days later to try to have the plan set aside, but was told it had already been approved by Hitler. On September 25 he flew to the Swedish capital, Stockholm, saw the Swedish Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson, and discussed with him the possibility of Denmark’s Jews being smuggled across the narrow belt of water to Sweden. Returning to Copenhagen on September 28, Duckwitz passed on details of the imminent deportation, and the possibility of a safe haven in Sweden, to three of the leaders of the Social Democrat Party (one of them a former Prime Minister, the other two future post-war Prime Ministers). The information he gave them was precise: the round-up would take place on the Friday and Saturday night of that very week.
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Forewarned of the planned deportation, Danes and Jews took immediate action, as did Per Albin Hansson, who had promised Duckwitz that the Swedish government would help in the effort to rescue Denmark’s Jews. As Leni Yahil, the historian of the rescue of Danish Jewry, has written, ‘all groups of the Danish population went into action in order to save the Jews. Dozens of protests poured into the offices of the German authorities from Danish economic and social organizations; King Christian X expressed his firm objection to the German plans; the heads of the Danish churches published a strong protest and used their pulpits to urge the Danish people to help the Jews; and the universities closed down for a week, with the students lending a hand in the rescue operation. The operation went on for three weeks, and in its course all 7,200 Jews and some 700 non-Jewish relatives of theirs were taken to Sweden. The costs of the operation were borne partly by the Jews themselves and to a large extent by contributions made by the Danes. The Danish resistance movement grew in size and strength as a result of the successful rescue effort and was able to keep open a fairly reliable escape route to Sweden.’ When Rolf Gunther, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, travelled from Berlin to Copenhagen to organize the deportation of the Jews, the Danish police not only refused to co-operate with him but issued an order prohibiting German police from breaking into apartments in order to arrest Jews.
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The Germans did not have the personnel to enforce martial law.

Among individual Danish rescuers was Dr Jorgen Gersfelt, a physician in Rungsted, who helped more than a thousand Jews across The Sound from the harbour at Snekkersten. One of those whom Dr Gersfelt helped rescue, Sam Besekow (later a well-known Danish theatrical personality), recalled how Gersfelt ‘mobilized all available fishing boats and motor launches, even row boats were not spurned. Jorgen discovered the whereabouts of my parents—he was as dear to them as he was to me—picked them up himself and saw them on to the train to Snekkersten. This train was so crammed with Jews that, at a glance, anyone would have guessed what was going on, what with heavy luggage, children crying in the arms of frightened mothers—a Gypsy caravan on rails.’ During the first few days, eleven hundred people were saved; ‘then the Gestapo got the idea and arrests and captured ships followed. Jorgen was magnificent, turning his private home into a bedlam of refugees on the run, sleeping everywhere on the floors and in the hallways—and he personally escorted my parents to the coast of Sweden, just as he dispensed sedatives to the children to prevent them from making noises that might arouse the suspicions of the Germans.’