They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust

Introduction

When Felix Zandman knocked on Anna Puchalska’s door near Grodno in eastern Poland that cold afternoon in early 1943, he was looking for someone who would help to save a life—his. But Felix knew that the Germans would kill any non-Jew in Poland who helped Jews, so if Anna agreed to his request to hide him even for one night, she would be putting her entire family—her five children, her husband, and herself—in jeopardy. Still, Anna said more than yes. Instead of agreeing to hide Felix for a single night, Anna said he could stay until the war ended. In that welcoming act, Anna Puchalska became one of the rare individuals who helped to save Jews during the Holocaust. In the end she allowed not just Felix but also his uncle and several other people to hide for nearly a year and a half in a hole dug in the soil under a bedroom of her small home. In recognition of her actions Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial authority in Israel, has honored her as one of the “righteous among the nations.”1 How did it happen that a few Polish Jews like Felix managed to survive by finding a few Polish non-Jews like Anna to help save them from genocide?2 In trying to find an answer to this question, we traveled across the United States and Poland, interviewing such survivors and members of the families who helped to save them. And in this book we record some of their stories. Here you will find Zandman’s story, as well as stories of more than a dozen other Polish Jews who survived despite the staggering odds against them. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and almost immediately began to implement anti-Jewish policies, although it was not clear then that eventually the aim would become the annihilation of European Jewry.3 As time went on, the denial of rights became ever more severe for Jews as well as for other groups, including the mentally and physically disabled. The violation and abrogation of the rights of Jews happened incrementally in Germany, but in Poland, which Germany invaded on September 1, 1939, all of these anti-Jewish policies were implemented quickly. Hitler’s policy of genocide was not fully implemented until three years after World War II began. Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec describes how Jews needed the most immediate help when “the orders came to abandon their homes and move to these specially designed ghetto areas. . . . In a sense, then, Jewish rescue was a human response to the Nazi measures of destruction. The appearance of righteous [individuals] signaled an opposition to, an interference with, the German policies of Jewish annihilation.”4 Jews had been living in Poland for hundreds of years. The first immigrations started in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.5 By 1939, more Jews lived there 1 Introduction 2 They Were Just People than in any other country. Although Jews were killed soon after Germany invaded , most were murdered in death camps between 1942 and 1944, and the majority of those died in 1942 and 1943. In all, more than 90 percent of Poland’s Jews were murdered.6 We chose to focus on Poland for several reasons. The first was the huge numbers of Jews who were killed there. We selected Poland (using its boundaries as they existed in 1939) because the Germans established six death camps there: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.7 Poland attracted us also because some of the people whom Yad Vashem has honored as“righteous”lived there (though certainly in small numbers),8 despite the fact that punishment for helping Jews there and in eastern territories occupied by the Germans (which almost always entailed death) tended to be more uniformly and quickly executed. Poles now account for a little over six thousand of the nearly twenty-two thousand persons recognized by Yad Vashem as “righteous.” Those figures may not seem significant, statistically, but our hope is that the individual stories of rescue that they represent—and the stories we tell here—can be positive influences today as efforts to reestablish a Jewish presence in Poland move forward, and as Jews and non-Jews there acknowledge the bleak reality of history and seek to live together in peace. There were rescuers in many other countries too, where, instead of immediate death, the penalty for helping Jews usually was imprisonment and confinement in...