root@att.att.com (11/24/89)
One woman told of stealing passports to provide Jews fleeing hitler with false identity papers...another, a nun, described how the sisters in a Warsaw Catholic orphanage saved Jewish children from the nazis...said another: "If only the Frank family had a hiding place like we did, perhaps they would have survived." These were among the stories told at a luncheon in New York City marking the 50th anniversary of the beginning of World War II and hosted by the Anti-Defamation League's Jewish Federation for Christian Rescuers. The event brought together 17 men and women from the tri-state metropolitan area who shared an unusual bond. All were former Europeans, Gentiles who had helped save Jews from the nazi Holocaust. This unique foundation searches out and provides recognition, direct financial help, and other support to more than 100 Christian rescuers now living in Europe, Israel, Canada, and the United States. The mood at the luncheon was bittersweet as the rescuers met each other and some of the survivors they had helped. Memories were shared and unanswerable questions--"Why didn't more people help the Jews?"--were voiced as they gave their names and briefly recounted their experiences. The luncheon meeting was opened by E Robert Goodkind, chairman of ADL's Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers. In a welcoming address, Abraham H Foxman, the agency's national director and himself a Holocaust survivor, told now he was saved from the nazis as a baby in Poland by a Christian nursemaid who claimed him as her own and had him baptized a Catholic. "I am alive," said Mr Foxman, who is today an observant Jew, "because 47 years ago, a Christian Polish lady had the decency, compassion, and courage to save me. I cannot thank her," Mr Fox said (she is no longer living), "but I can thank others who did as she did." Discussion Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust, Mr Foxman asked, "If there had been 100,000 Wallenbergs, how many more Jews would have been saved?" The ADL leader welcomed the words of Pope John Paul II repudiating hatred toward Jews in his apostolic letter marking the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. "At the same time," Mr Foxman went on, "how sad to hear the crude and classic antisemitism of Jozef Cardinal Glemp, the Catholic Primate of Poland." The Cardinal's words, in a sermon related to the controversial Catholic convent at the Auschwitz concentration camp, "can only fuel antisemitism and trigger pogroms," Mr Foxman asserted. He noted that "the bright light" of a front page editorial by the Polish Solidarity newspaper _Gazeta Wyborcza_ condemning Cardinal Glemp's message and said "it gives us hope." "Why I Got Involved" was the topic of a panel featuring four of the rescuers and moderated by Dr Hadassah Rosenaft, a Holocaust survivor and member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Liliane Gaffney, who now lives in Northvale, NJ told of her childhood in Belgium where she was a high school student when the war broke out. As with many of the rescuers, Mrs Gaffney said her family's efforts began with helping just a single family. "Eventually," she continued, "we had as many as 30 Jews staying with us before we found them 'safe homes.' We gave them false identity papers using the names of our many relatives living in what was then the Belgian Congo. We told the authorities our relatives had come for a visit. "It was my mother [Germaine Belline, also a guest at the luncheon] who took the initiative," she said. "I followed her. My mother is the most courageous person I have ever met. The Germans would order her to stop and she would answer, 'No, my children need me' and they would let her go." Mrs Gaffney told of a woman who stayed in their home throughout the war who spoke only Polish and Yiddish, no French or Flemish. "She posed as a deaf-mute, even fooling my grandfather, who lived with us. On liberation day, she spoke for the first time and my grandfather thought it was a miracle!" Elizabeth Fuerst read the recollections of her mother, Marianna, who now lives in Westport, NY, and could not attend the luncheon. In measured tones, she recounted her mother's anti-nazi activities and how she credited her grandfather, a free-thinker and a socialist, for her early understandings of the evils of hitler and his followers. Her mother worked in a department store in Stuttgart, where she passed false identification papers, money, and travel tickets to endangered Jews. "Most of our work was indirect," Mrs Fuerst had written. "We knew as little as possible about the people we helped and they knew little about us. It was protection for all of us." Jean Kowalyk Berger of Yonkers, NY, said of the years that her family in Zorotowyci, Ukraine, sheltered 14 Jews, "we were just humans helping other humans." But it was far more complicated. Suspicious neighbors sent the gestapo to check the household. One of the men they were sheltering died and had to be buried. A Jewish child revealed her identity to children she played with on the street. Food was scarce for the number of people under their roof. At one point, while smuggling food to inmates of a labor camp near her home, she was shot in the leg by a nazi guard. Tina Strobos of Amsterdam, who is now a psychiatrist in Larchmont, NY, told of stealing passports to provide false identity for the 100 Jews her family sheltered. She recalled the maid who threatened to tell the gestapo about the family's activities. "She stole from us...took food and money and we could do nothing." At one point, the maid was arrested, Dr Strobos said, and they had to remove all traces of their secret guests in case she told. "The gestapo visited our house eight times, looking for Jews," she said. "It was a time of terror." Dr Strobos told of the network her family and others developed to help the Jews. "A carpenter came to our house and built a secret hiding place in the attic, large enough to hide four people. If only the Frank family had had a network, a hiding place like ours, they might have survived." Sister Janina Jadwiga Skalec of Woodbridge, NJ, frail, 78-years-old and wearing her traditional white nun's habit, told of the orphanage in Lodz, Poland, where she worked and helped to hide Jewish boys by dressing them in girls' clothing--the nazis checked on boys they deemed suspicious by examining them for circumcision. Some 15 children were saved. Responding to the difficult question, "Why didn't more people help?" Johtje Vos, now of Woodstock, NY, recalled that it was so dangerous that "even the Jews were afraid to let us help them." Mrs Vos and her husband, Aart, had four children of their own in their Amsterdam home when they were sheltering 32 Jews and four non-Jewish victims of the occupation. "There were listeners everywhere," she said, "looking for information to turn people in to the gestapo. Even in doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms, informers listened to others conversations." The stories went on and on...Toma Gheorghe of Queens, NY, who with his parents hid 15 Jews in the basement of their house in Rumania...Helen Orchon of Brooklyn, who found safe haven for her Jewish husband, her sister-in-law and brother-in-law in Warsaw, and used her own home as temporary shelter for others...brother and sister Orest Zahajkiewicz and Halina Melnyczuk of Cranford, NJ, who sheltered Jewish neighbors in their western Ukraine town of Peremyshl for as long as two years despite the fact that nazi headquarters were across the street from their home. "We were very scared," Jean Berger told one of the reporters in the room. Trembling with emotion, she softly added, "thank G-d we all survived." Jane R Ornauer ADL Bulletin National Publication of the ADL October, 1989 reprinted with permission