Essays on Hitler's Europe

In Disguise

Of the thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust by disguising themselves as gentiles, Oswald Rufeisen, the subject of Nechama Tec’s In the Lion’s Den (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), may have been the most resourceful . I first heard of him in the early 1960s, when the Israeli Supreme Court debated the request of Father Daniel, a Carmelite monk at the Stella Maris monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa, to be given Israeli citizenship on the basis of the Law of Return. If this were granted, Father Daniel—formerly Oswald Rufeisen —would be identified on his Israeli passport as a Jew. One of the five judges was in favor of accepting Father Daniel’s claim, but the others turned him down, arguing that “a Jew who changed his religion cannot be counted as a Jew in the sense and the spirit that the Knesset (Parliament) meant in the Law of Return and as it is accepted among our people today.” Several years later I met a historian, a specialist in East European affairs at the University of Haifa, who told me how at the time of the Supreme Court case he had been asked to interview Father Daniel. He did not find him at the monastery—Nechama Tec tells us in The Lion’s Den that Father Daniel spends very little time there—so the historian talked to another monk, originally from Germany.“I don’t know why Father Daniel is creating such a commotion,” the monk said.“After all, I was born a Jew myself, but I didn’t mind petitioning the Israelis for Israeli citizenship and I don’t insist on my so-called rights.”“What kind of a person is Father Daniel?”the historian asked. Ein typischer Galizianer (a typical Galician), answered the monk—one of the nastier insults that a Western or Central European Jew might direct at an East European Jew. I N D I S G U I S E The original of this essay appeared as part of an article entitled“Witnesses to Evil”in the October 22, 1992, issue of the New York Review of Books. 47 In fact, Father Daniel did not fit the stereotype of the Galician Jew: he was not dirt poor, barely literate, and arrogant. As Nechama Tec, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, who herself once “passed” as a Catholic in wartime Poland with the help of non-Jewish Poles,1 shows in her fascinating and conscientiously researched account, Oswald Rufeisen came from a very modest West Galician family that had adopted the German-Austrian culture of the Habsburg monarchy of which Galicia was a part before 1918; at home the family spoke High German. This, more than anything else, later helped to save Rufeisen’s life. His father had served in the Habsburg army during World War I; he was wounded and became a Zugsführer, or buck sergeant (a far more modest rank than that of the position of platoon commander, which is usually held by a lieutenant, ascribed to him by Tec).2 In 1922, when Oswald Rufeisen was born, Galicia was already part of the Poland that had been re-created following World War I. Rather typically for the region and for its integrated families, Oswald first attended a Polish school where he was the only Jew and where he learned to recite Catholic prayers (which also helped him to survive later on); he then went to a Jewish school in which instruction was in High German; and finally to a Polish high school. He did not, he told Tec, suffer any discrimination in the Polish schools, and he had just graduated from high school when the Germans attacked in September 1939. The family fled east but only Oswald and his brother Arieh made it to Lithuania , at that time still a neutral and independent state. Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius ) was under Polish rule in the years between the two world wars but Stalin had recently turned it over to Lithuania, knowing well that the latter country would soon be part of the Soviet Union. In Vilna, Oswald worked for a shoemaker and learned the trade, another turn of good fortune that would soon save his life. In June 1940 the Red Army occupied Lithuania and, among its many crimes, deported to Siberia a number of Zionists and Bundists. Most Jews now tried to get out of Lithuania; Oswald’s brother Arieh and other members of their Zionist...