[This post continues from Rescuers 1, which carries a brief explanatory introduction.]
A young French Catholic, Germaine Ribière, in the period before anyone in the Church hierarchy in France had spoken out against the persecution of the Jews there, committed her feelings about this to the diary she kept. 'I ache for them in my whole being, I ache for my Jewish brothers and sisters,' she writes when seven thousand Polish Jews are rounded up in Paris; and then, after she has visited two internment camps, 'Total contempt for the human being.' She speaks to a rabbi, saying she will help in any way she can. Another entry by her reads, 'Humanity is the body of Christ. One part of that humanity is being tortured... And we look on in silence as the crime is being perpetrated.' (Today, incidentally, Ribière tells her interviewer also, 'My mother raised us to have respect for life.') When finally a small number of bishops do break their silence, what do they say? They speak the same sort of language as Germaine Ribière. The Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules Gérard Saliège, writes in a letter of August 1942, 'it has been destined for us to witness the dreadful spectacle of children, women and old men being treated like vile beasts... The Jews are our brethren. They belong to mankind.' A few days later in a letter to be read within his diocese, the Bishop of Montauban, Pierre-Marie Théas, similarly proclaims, 'all men... are brothers, because they are created by the same God... all, whatever their race or religion, are entitled to respect... The current anti-Semitic measures are in contempt of human dignity.'
That was then. When therefore, now, another woman, Marie-Rose Gineste, who spent four days on her bicycle delivering Monsignor Théas's letter and then took charge at his request of the hiding of the Jews of Montauban, says, 'It was all about human justice...', how plausible actually is it to suppose she would have expressed herself very differently at the time? Or we may take the example of Pieter Miedema. He was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in Friesland. As he has been incapacitated by a stroke, his wife, Joyce, now speaks for him. The Miedemas hid Jews in their own home, and he, the minister, was also active in finding hiding places for them elsewhere in the area. He had to go on the run at one point in order to avoid arrest or worse. Pieter Miedema has declined to be honoured by Yad Vashem, having done only 'what everyone should have done'. Joyce Miedema now construes his thinking so: 'if you opt against opening your home and heart to an innocent fugitive, you have no place in the community of the just'; you choose 'the worst solitude a man can discover: his own exclusion from the family of man'. One might be tempted to take this for a merely second-hand sentiment - except that it was part of a sermon given by Miedema at the time, which his wife says will stay in her mind always, 'word for word'.
Or, again, there is the example of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka. A Catholic author and right-wing nationalist, she wrote a leaflet protesting against the murder of the Jews of Poland and helped to found Zegota, the organization for aiding them. She was caught and sent to Auschwitz where she spent nearly a year. On her release, she became active in the rescue of Jewish children. Szczucka's writings of the period give expression both to some anti-Semitic convictions and to an energetic appeal on behalf of the Polish Jews. In one piece, she writes that after the war they will be told, 'Go and settle somewhere else.' But now they 'are the victims of unjust murderous persecutions' and 'Christ stands behind every human being... He stretches His hand to us through a runaway Jew from the ghetto the same way as He does through our brothers.' In the protest leaflet, Jews are described by her as the 'enemies of Poland'; but also as 'condemned people' and 'defenceless people', 'insane from grief and horror'. Their present plight Szczucka calls 'your fellow man's calamity'.
That also was then. Today, another Polish Catholic writer and anti-Semite, Marek Dunski, explains himself as follows. His motivation arose from his religious convictions. 'One could not simply allow a person to die.' In wartime, he says, evidently generalizing from his own case, people recur to more basic things: 'They tend to see a person as a human being. This is what happened with the Jews. They were not seen as Jews but as human beings.' Or the individual Jew was seen simply as 'a hurt, suffering being'. Dunski speaks as well, in connection with the aid he brought to a threatened Russian soldier, of not having 'any special fondness for Russians', yet of feeling 'that a human being ought to be saved at any price'. Marek Dunski had a part in the rescue of several hundred Jewish children. His reasons as given do not strike me as any less to be relied on for having been articulated later than Szczucka's similar ones.
Some readers may be starting to wonder, secondly, why the material I have cited does not reflect (what we know to be the case...) that there were rescuers who helped their friends. It does not reflect it yet. Only because I have not got there yet. I was coming to them. Here is one category of such rescuers.
Bert Bochove and his first wife Annie (now deceased) hid a friend of Annie's when she came and asked for help. They then also hid thirty-six other people. Bochove says, 'it was easy to do because it was your duty', 'I got such satisfaction... from keeping people safe' and 'You help people because you are human and you see that there is a need.' Tina Strobos's family, social democrats and atheists, hid Tina's best friend who was Jewish. The family had a tradition of helping others - refugees, miners' children. During the war they hid about a hundred people, though never more than five at a time: 'Some we knew, some we didn't.' Strobos says she believes in 'the sacredness of life'; today she gives talks to schoolchildren and tells them 'we have to be careful not to hurt others who don't belong to our little group.'
Zofia Baniecka for her part would like children to know that there were people in Poland like Tina Strobos. Baniecka herself and her mother hid or found hiding places for Jews escaping from the Warsaw ghetto. One of these was a school friend - 'so of course I didn't turn her away'. But, as Baniecka also says, 'We hid at least fifty Jews during the war - friends, strangers, acquaintances, or someone who heard about me from someone else. Anyone was taken in.' Baniecka says she 'believes in human beings'. And then Jan Elewski. A Polish officer and leftist who protected his best friend from anti-Semitic persecution before the war, he also saved seven strangers during the war by moving them to a more secure hiding place and supplying them with food there. He speaks of a 'feeling of duty' by contrast with the self-centredness of others who did not help; and of the thought that his family would have disowned him for 'not helping people who were being destroyed'. And Roman Sadowski also. He was a member of Zegota. He tried desperately to contact Jewish friends in the Warsaw ghetto when the deportations to the death camps began, but he failed and they perished. He then gave aid mostly to strangers: 'whoever turned to me, and whomever I could find'. Why? 'Their being Jewish did not play a part at all. Regardless of who they were, needing help was the criteria [sic]... Human life was at stake.'
And Jean Kowalyk Berger. And Ada Celka. In the Ukrainian village in which the former lived, the Germans set up a labour camp and she saw there 'the cruelty... day after day'. She and her family agreed to hide a Jewish doctor who had earlier helped her. He arrived one night at their door, begging to be taken in. 'Then more people came during that night... If you could have seen my house... Everything was so difficult.' She describes how difficult. When she is asked why she helped, she says, 'When I saw people being molested, my religious heart whispered to me, "Don't kill. Love others as you love yourself."' Ada Celka, deeply religious as well, living in poverty in a one-room apartment with her sister and disabled father, took in the daughter of a Jewish friend. Herself a Pole, she also sheltered Russian partisans. 'What I did was everybody's duty. Saving the one whose life is in jeopardy is a simple human duty. One has to help another regardless of who this human being is as long as he is in need, that is all that counts.'
[Rescuers 3 is here.]