[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 31 (Friday, March 18, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 18, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                     UNSUNG HEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST

                                 ______


                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, March 18, 1994

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit for the Record this 
excellent article from the U.S. News & World Report, March 21, 1994 
issue which tells the story of some of the many unsung heroes of the 
Holocaust.

           [From the U.S. News & World Report, Mar. 21, 1994]

The Other Schindlers--Steven Spielberg's Epic Film Focuses on Only One 
                         of Many Unsung Heroes

                        (By Richard Z. Chesnoff)

       Schindler's List has been searing the souls of moviegoers, 
     and next week Steven Spielberg's epic film about the German 
     who rescued 1,200 Jews from Nazi death camps could garner as 
     many as 12 Academy Awards.
       But there were other Schindlers, other courageous non-Jews 
     whose sense of outrage and decency moved them to risk their 
     own lives to try to save European Jews from the furnace of 
     hatred that was the Holocaust. They are the subject of Tzedek 
     (Righteousness), a four-hour French documentary to be 
     premiered at this May's Cannes Film Festival.
       Written, directed and movingly narrated by prize-winning 
     French author Marek Halter, himself a childhood survivor of 
     the Warsaw Ghetto, Tzedek focuses on 36 courageous 
     lifesavers--a number Halter chose because of the Talmudic 
     belief that the world's fate rests on the shoulders of 36 
     righteous souls.
       No one knows just how many rescuers there were. Using the 
     testimony of grateful survivors, historians at Jerusalem's 
     Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial have carefully preserved and 
     honored the stories of some 11,000 ``Righteous Gentiles.'' 
     Many are celebrated by Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum 
     and at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. There may 
     well have been more.
       The 36 chosen for Halter's film are Christians and Muslims, 
     French farmers, Dutch housewives, Spanish diplomats, Polish 
     nuns, even German soldiers. ``The ultimate question Tzedek 
     raises,'' says Halter, author of the 1986 novel The Book of 
     Abraham, ``is not why these righteous showed such humanity 
     but why others didn't, why so many remained silent, why so 
     many did worse. Anne Frank, after all, was betrayed by a 
     Dutchman, not a German.''
       Elementary compassion, says Halter, was the most powerful 
     unifying strength that enabled these quiet heroes to battle 
     evil: ``Jewish tradition has no saints, only humans. Our 
     sages teach that those whose merits surpass their vices, they 
     are the righteous; that when you save one life, you have 
     saved a universe.''
       Some of the heroes of Tzedek:


                 POLAND: BERTHOLD BEITZ, OIL EXECUTIVE

       Beitz saved Jews by employing them in the Nazis' crucial 
     petroleum business.
       Like Oskar Schindler, Berthold Beitz had a life-giving 
     list. The son of a wealthy Nazi-sympathizing family, Beitz 
     was a 27-year-old junior executive at Royal Dutch Shell's 
     Hamburg office when the war broke out. One evening in 1941, 
     his grandfather, a Nazi notable, took him to dinner at the 
     lavish home of German munitions magnate Alfried Krupp. Among 
     the guests was Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's senior 
     henchmen. Germany had just attacked the Soviet Union, and the 
     Wehrmacht, Heydrich noted, was taking over oil refineries in 
     western Poland. Enthusiastically, the young Beitz offered his 
     services and was named a director of the Karpaten Ol company 
     in Boryslaw, Poland.
       Beitz soon found that while there was relatively little oil 
     in the mountain region, there were a lot of Jews--almost 50 
     percent of the population. Most were in ghetto work camps, a 
     fact that Beitz admits didn't bother him at first. When death 
     trains began running to Auschwitz and Treblinka, though, his 
     conscience was stirred. It was ``those children sitting in 
     the station, with those enormous eyes, looking at you,'' he 
     recalls.
       Beitz began to save Jews by hiring them. ``I should have 
     employed qualified personnel. Instead, I chose tailors, 
     hairdressers and Talmudic scholars and gave them all cards as 
     [vital] `petroleum technicians.'''
       Beitz and his young wife also hid a Jewish child in their 
     own home. And like Schindler, Beitz often went to the train 
     station to pull his Jewish workers off the death trains. 
     ``Once I found one of my secretaries and her aged mother,'' 
     Beitz recalls. He got them out, but the SS would not be 
     fooled. They judged the mother too old, and forced her back 
     on the cattle car. ``The daughter turned to me. `Herr 
     Direktor, may I [also] return to the car?''' Beitz never saw 
     her again.
       When the Nazis finally fell, more than 800 of Beitz's Jews 
     were still alive. Now, at 81, the courtly Beitz says: ``I am 
     proud of what I did out of a sense of humanity. . . . I 
     passed through that period, as you cross through a dark 
     forest: with self-assurance and with incredible luck.''


                  poland: irena sendler, social worker

       She gave nearly 2,500 children new identities, and buried 
     their real names for safekeeping.
       When Hitler built the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 and herded 
     500,000 Polish Jews behind its walls to await liquidation, 
     most Polish gentiles turned their backs--or applauded. Not 
     Irena Sendler. A Warsaw social worker, Sendler wangled a 
     permit to enter the teeming ghetto and check for signs of 
     typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the 
     ghetto.
       Shocked by what she saw, Sendler joined Zegota, a tiny 
     underground cell dedicated to helping Jews, and took on the 
     code name ``Jolanta.'' The deportations had already begun, 
     and although it was impossible to save adults, Sendler began 
     smuggling children out in an ambulance. ```Can you guarantee 
     they will live?''' Sendler recalls the distraught parents 
     asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they 
     stayed. ``In my dreams,'' she says, ``I still hear the cries 
     when they left their parents.''
       Sendler successfully smuggled almost 2,500 Jewish children 
     to safety and gave them temporary new identities. To remember 
     who was who, she wrote the real names on sheets of paper, 
     burying them in bottles in her garden. Finding Christians to 
     hide them was not easy: ``There weren't many Poles who wanted 
     to help Jews, [even] children.'' But Sendler organized a 
     network of families and convents ready to give sanctuary. ``I 
     would write, `I have clothing for the convent'; a nun would 
     come and pick up children.''
       Arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo, Sendler was tortured and 
     sentenced to die. Underground colleagues bribed a guard to 
     free her at the last minute and list her as ``executed.'' She 
     continued her work from hiding. When the war ended, Sendler 
     retrieved the bottle in which she'd hidden her index of names 
     and began searching for the real parents. Few had survived.
       The children had known her only by her code name. But years 
     later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her 
     picture appeared in a newspaper. ``A man, a painter, 
     telephoned me,'' says Sendler, now 82 but still brighteyed. 
     ```I remember your face,' he said. `It was you who took me 
     out of the ghetto.' I had many calls like that!''


              france: mary jayne gold, american socialite

       A party girl ended up saving some of Europe's greatest 
     artists and intellects.
       Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold descended on Paris in 1930 
     with a hefty trust fund, a pilot's license and a private 
     plane for holidaying in the Alps and on the Riviera. Europe 
     was a playground. But when German troops occupied the French 
     capital in 1940, the glamorous Gold--and tens of thousands of 
     others--headed south for unoccupied Marseilles. There she met 
     Varian Fry.
       Fry too was an American (a ``Harvard man and a bona fide 
     WASP just like me,'' recalls Gold, now 84). He was also a 
     reporter and had witnessed Nazi brutality early on. When 
     Vichy France signed an armistice obligating it to turn over 
     any non-French citizen the Nazis requested, Fry knew what 
     that meant: Thousands of German, Austrian and other European 
     exiles--many of them Jews--would be shipped back to their 
     deaths.
       As war raged around them, the dapper Fry organized 
     Marseille's ``Emergency Rescue Committee,'' enlisting friends 
     like Gold to help him. Operating out of rooms at the Hotel 
     Splendide, then eventually from a villa called Air Bel, they 
     procured phony passports and real visas, sheltered refugees 
     and organized escape routes to Spain and Portugal. ``Women 
     weren't taken too seriously in those day,'' says Gold, who 
     helped bankroll the operation. But when someone had to charm 
     the commander of a French prison camp into freeing four 
     German members of the anti-Hitler underground, Gold was sent 
     to do the job.
       Hounded by the French police and harassed by the American 
     State Department, which feared the committee's activities 
     would damage relations with the Vichy government, Gold 
     finally left in 1941. Fry was deported soon after and 
     returned to America, where he died in 1967 at 59. Through 
     their work in Paris, these Americans helped some 2,000 people 
     escape the Nazis. Among them: painters Marc Chagall and Max 
     Ernst, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, authors Franz Werfel, 
     Hannah Arendt and Hans Habe, and Nobel prize-winning 
     biochemist Otto Meyerhof.


                  hungary: giorgio perlasca, sales rep

       An Italian fascist used Spanish consular credentials to 
     help the Jews of Budapest.
       Italian Giorgio Perlasca was a good fascist. So good that 
     he volunteered in 1937 to go fight on Francisco Franco's side 
     in the Spanish Civil War.
       His Madrid connection helped him become an intermediary for 
     Spanish and Italian companies and, eventually, Budapest 
     representative of a corporation supplying canned meat to the 
     Italian Navy. When Mussolini fell, Perlasca remained in 
     Hungary, acquiring a Spanish passport in 1944--by then a 
     safer bet than his Italian one.
       It was the last full year of the war. Germany was in 
     retreat on all fronts save one--the liquidation of the Jews. 
     A relentless Nazi official named Adolph Eichmann demanded 
     Hungary start shipping its more than 800,000 Jews to 
     Auschwitz. Spain, sensing the coming allied victory, withdrew 
     its diplomatic representatives from Budapest--but not, 
     however, before the head of mission gave businessmen Perlasca 
     a card identifying him as a Spanish consular official.
       Jews were frantically begging to be placed under the 
     protection Franco had offered Sephardic Jews who could trace 
     their roots back to 15th-century Spain. Moved by their 
     plight, Perlasca found a set of consular stamps and without 
     asking anyone in Madrid began issuing his own ``Spanish 
     refugee cards'' to Jews--Sephardic or not. He also took steps 
     to personally protect the more than 3,000 already sheltered 
     in Spanish-owned ``safe houses'' around the city. ``The Nazis 
     would come to take them away, and I would say, ``You must 
     leave this place. I am here. Here is the Spanish flag.'''
       It was a desperate tug of war, with Eichmann on one end and 
     Perlasca and the diplomatic representatives of four other 
     neutral states--Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the 
     Vatican--on the other. ``The Swede and I would go to the 
     train station and bluff until we got Jews away by claiming 
     they were our nationals.'' The Swede was Raoul Wallenberg.
       Some 600,000 Hungarian Jews eventually died in the 
     Holocaust, but tens of thousands may have been saved by the 
     efforts of Perlasca and the other Budapest diplomats. Shortly 
     before his death in 1993 at 82, Perlasca told Marek Halter: 
     ``These people were in danger and I asked why must someone 
     die because they are of another faith? I had a chance to do 
     something. I couldn't refuse.''


                     france: Rene Raoul, Shoemaker

       An entire village took up the cause of European Jews 
     fleeing the deadly Nazi roundups.
       When a trickle of refugee families began arriving in the 
     isolated southern French village of Le Malzieu in 1942, 20-
     year-old shoemaker Rene Raoul and his family asked few 
     questions. ``They were people seeking shelter; we provided 
     it.''
       Little by little the strangers revealed their stories. They 
     were Jews, many of them foreign born and all desperately 
     trying to escape the ruthless Nazi rafles (roundups) that had 
     already resulted in tens of thousands being shipped by cattle 
     car from Paris and Lyon to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. ``The 
     Radaczes, the Rothbards, the Brombergs, I remember them 
     all,'' say Raoul, now 73.
       The trickle soon became a stream. By 1943, more than 100 
     Jews had found sanctuary in Le Malzieu, a tiny farming town 
     of barely 900 souls. It was a dangerous business that few 
     French were ready to risk. But for the villagers of Le 
     Malzieu, it became a noble conspiracy of silence and 
     salvation. When German troops or French gendarmes neared the 
     village, Raoul himself would make the rounds by bicycle 
     warning Le Malzieu's ``guests'' to go to appointed hiding 
     places in basements, attics and barns. Other villagers 
     occasionally dressed Jewish children in the uniforms of the 
     fascist Vichy youth organization, then mingled them with 
     their own. The local priest hid families in the church 
     belfry.
       ``I could not bear the idea that people who had done 
     nothing were hunted,'' explains Raoul, who stays in touch 
     with some of the families he once helped save. ``My children 
     knew Jews hid among us during the war. But I never spoke to 
     them of my role. Why should I? What I did was natural. I 
     would do it again for anyone.''


                  bosnia: mustafa and zayneba hardaga

       Muslims and Jews were entangled in a skein of persecution 
     and altruism.
       The Jewish Cavilios and the Muslim Hardagas had been 
     friends in pre-World War II Sarajevo. When German bombs 
     destroyed the Cavilios' home in 1941, the Hardagas urged them 
     to move in with them. ``You are our brothers and sisters,'' 
     Mustafa and Zayneba Hardaga told them. ``Everything we have 
     is yours; this is your home.''
       Even after the occupying Nazis invoked brutal antisemitic 
     laws and a mob sacked Sarajevo's Great Synagogue, the 
     Hardagas refused to turn away their Jewish friends. A photo 
     taken at the time shows Zayneba wearing a Muslim veil, 
     walking on a Sarajevo street together with Rivka Cavilio and 
     her young daughter, Tova. Rivka is using her pocketbook to 
     shield the yellow Jude star the Nazis forced all Jews to 
     wear.
       As conditions for Jews--and the people who sheltered them--
     worsened, Yosef Cavilio managed to smuggle his family to the 
     safer Italian-occupied zone of Yugoslavia. Yosef himself, 
     fearing for his Muslim hosts, left the Hardaga home and hid 
     at a local hospital. He was soon arrested and scheduled for 
     shipment to a death camp. Even then, the Hardagas refused to 
     turn their backs. Walking in chains to prison, Cavilio saw a 
     veiled woman staring and crying. From that day on, Zayneba 
     Hardaga found ways to smuggle food to Yosef and several other 
     Jewish prisoners. Not long after, her own father, Ahmed 
     Sadik, was executed by Nazi collaborators for sheltering yet 
     another Jewish family.
       When the war ended, the Cavilios, like many other Holocaust 
     survivors, emigrated to the new State of Israel. But they 
     never lost touch with the Hardagas. In 1985, testimony from 
     Yosef Cavilio resulted in Zayneba and Mustafa Hardaga's being 
     honored in Jerusalem as ``Righteous Gentiles.''
       Then, this year, as Sarajevo struggled under another 
     holocaust of sorts, the story came full circle. ``When I saw 
     on television what was happening in Bosnia,'' says Tova 
     Cavilio Greenberg, now a 56-year-old Israeli teacher, ``I 
     knew what I had to do.'' After a few frantic phone calls, the 
     Hardagas' daughter Aida, her Serbian husband and their 10-
     year-old daughter were brought to safety and new homes in 
     Israel. And last month, Zayneba Hardaga, now a widow, was 
     evacuated to Tel Aviv. ``I have come from hell to the Garden 
     of Eden,'' the 76-year-old woman told the crowd greeting her. 
     Had she not been afraid to do what she had done during World 
     War II? ``Compassion,'' Zayneba Hardaga said, ``knows no 
     fear.''