[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.''