A nationwide Upstanders Canada keynote lecture to mark Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) last month reminded the Zoom audience that the belief that Jews simply cowered, while the atrocities around them were being committed during the Second World War, is erroneous.
“The idea of Jewish passivity is part of the narrative, but it is not the truth. Jews, individually and collectively, engaged in acts of resistance and rescue,” said Pat Johnson, founder of Upstanders Canada, at the start of the event.
That people should know this fact “is crucial,” said Johnson, “because it corrects a flawed narrative. It is crucial additionally, not only for Jews but for every person and every people in the world, to see the potential for resistance and courage against authoritarianism hatred and inhumanity.”
The April 27 event, titled Jews Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust, was presented by Rinat Dushansky-Werbner. She was introduced by Moshe Gromb, author of a 15-volume series with the same title, which Dushansky-Werbner and Pnina Jacobi-Yahid translated into English from Hebrew. In her talk, Dushansky-Werbner, a member of the Action Committee for Recognizing Jews Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust, highlighted several Jewish heroes during the Shoah – their names not widely known.
“There were operations inside the death camps. There were people smuggling people across borders. They were hiding children in monasteries. They were falsifying documents,” Dushansky-Werbner said.
“The Jews were very, very creative, and tried to think of any possible way to save their brethren. Sadly, many of these Jewish rescuers were caught and murdered by the Nazis. Even though they could have escaped and saved themselves,” she said, “most of them decided not to do so. [They] decided to stand where they are, and try and rescue as many people as possible.”
The people discussed represented a range of backgrounds, ages, geographic locations and levels of religious observance, and were but examples from a much larger number of Jews who took on tremendous risks and used remarkable ingenuity to rescue other Jews during the Holocaust. Thus far, Dushansky-Werbner’s action committee has collected information on more than 2,500 Jewish rescuers and documented more than 50 rescue methods.
Many of the Jewish rescuers, Dushansky-Werbner said, did not see themselves as great heroes, but rather as people who did what they were compelled to do, and saddened they could not do more.
“There is something very humble about these people,” she said.
Jews rescued other Jews wherever the Germans operated – throughout Europe, North Africa and even the Philippines – and their operations began once the Nazis rose to power and continued throughout and after the war. Often, their operations involved collaborations with non-Jews.
In Belarus, four brothers named Bielski – Tuvia, Zus (Alexander Zeisal), Asael and Aron – founded a partisan unit, a wandering communal rescue army, that established a family camp in the Naliboki Forest. The camp operated for more than two years during the war, moving occasionally from place to place in the forest, and included a synagogue, a school, a courthouse, a clinic, an armoury and more. It is estimated that the Bielski brothers rescued 1,236 Jews in what became known as the “Jerusalem of the Forests.” Their story is among the more celebrated of Jewish rescuers and was turned into a 2008 film, Defiance, starring Daniel Craig.
In France, the Loinger family, led by George, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 108, smuggled hundreds of Jewish children across the border to Switzerland, while his wife, Flora, managed the houses in which they hid Jewish children.
George would play soccer with the children. When the ball flew over to the other side of the border, one or two children would be sent to safety to the other side without the local guard noticing, Dushansky-Werbner explained.
George’s sisters also helped. Fanny hid children in monasteries; Emme prepared abandoned monasteries for Jewish orphans and ran one of the children’s houses; the youngest, Ivette, 13, rode with Jewish children on trains, hiding their money and keeping them calm during the journey.
French pantomime Marcel Marceau and his brother Alain – who were George’s cousins – forged papers for Jews on the run and helped George smuggle Jewish children out of France.
“Marcel would help keep them calm and would just basically be the clown. He would be like a mother, a father, a brother, and he would make them laugh. And this is how many of them stayed calm and agreed to go from one place to another,” said Dushansky-Werbner, who went on to share another story of heroism.
In Volos, Greece, Rabbi Moshe Shimon Pesach was ordered by a German commander to draw up a list of all the Jews in the city. He turned to his friend, Metropolitan Joachim Alexopoulos, who recommended the Jews leave the city immediately.
At the age of 74, the rabbi gathered the members of the community and led them to the hills surrounding Volos with the help of the metropolitan and the city’s mayor, and hid them in homes and other buildings. This effort would save 746 of the 882 Jews in Volos.
Dushansky-Werbner ended her talk with the words of Marion Pritchard, a non-Jew who rescued Jews in the Netherlands: “If we do not acknowledge the bravery of those Jewish rescuers who, if caught, were in graver danger than the Righteous Among Nations, that would be a distortion of Holocaust history. It also adds to the false notion that the Jews were led like lambs to the slaughter as cowards. This is far from the truth,” said Pritchard.
Upstanders Canada is a national organization that seeks to mobilize primarily non-Jewish Canadians to stand with the Jewish people and against antisemitism. For more information, visit upstanderscanada.com.
Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.
