Richard Hurowitz - In the Garden of the Righteous: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust

THE UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM HAD RECENTLY OPENED ITS doors on the National Mall when my parents took our family to Washington to see it. Most of my relatives had arrived in America in the nineteenth century from Austria, and the last to immigrate was my grandfather, who had fled the Russian pogroms when Theodore Roosevelt was president. The Holocaust always seemed something distant to me. I remember vividly knowing survivors as a childthe friends nanny who spoke in a thick German accent, and the owner of a local grocery store whose numbered tattoo terrified me. But other than the required reading of Elie Wiesels Night in school, I did not spend much time thinking about the Holocaust as a child.

Visiting the Holocaust Museum is a completely enervating experience. The darkness of the Shoah, quite intentionally, envelops you as you shuffle through the exhibit showing the enormity of the Nazis crimes. The boxcars into which the doomed were crammed, the striped pajamas in which they endured unimaginable cruelties, and the haunting images of the now destroyed world of the European Jews are suffocating. Particularly disturbing to me was the enormous pile of shoes that had belonged to concentration camp victims. Many of them were in small sizes, the property of some of the one and a half million children who perished.

At the end of the exhibition, a small gallery was devoted to a handful of those very few who had tried to save the hunted from the Nazis. On the wall there was a photograph of a young man in profile, not much older than I was then, smiling, a small pipe jauntily stuck in his mouth. He was Alexander Schmorell, a twenty-five-year-old medical student at the University of Munich and a member of the White Rose, a group of young German idealists who had dared to speak out against the Nazis. Their mesmerizing story was like a flicker of light penetrating just slightly the oppressive gloom of the Shoah, and it restored to me a faith in humanity. It has inspired me to this day, and ultimately inspired the writing of this book.

The White Roses founder and driving force was Hans Scholl, another medical student, who was joined in his effort by his younger sister Sophie. The siblings grew up in Ulm, a city on the Danube outside Munich where Albert Einstein was also born. Their home was both tolerant and religious. What I want most of all is that you live in uprighteousness and freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that proves to be, their father had told them.

Like many his age, Hans joined the Hitler Youth. But he had doubts almost immediately. He was horrified by the Nuremberg rallies and recoiled at rules that forbade him from singing certain songs, from flying a special flag designed by his troop, or from reading his favorite author, Stefan Zweig, who was Jewish. For her part, Sophie could not understand why her Jewish best friend could not join the Bund Deutscher Mdel (League of German Girls) despite her blond Aryan looks, while she, with dark hair, was welcomed.

Hans Scholl was a free thinker, dynamic and magnetic. With the outbreak of war, he was drafted and posted as a medic in France. When he returned to Germany, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Munich. He read widelyPlato, Socrates, Saint Augustine, and Blaise Pascaland decorated his dorm room with modernist French art. He soon attracted a circle of like-minded students: Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and Schmorell, the son of Russian immigrants. They found an intellectual mentor in Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy and religion and ardent believer in liberal democracy.

In the summer of 1942 Hans was inspired by the sermons of Clemens August Graf von Galen, the anti-Nazi bishop of Mnster. Finally, a man has the courage to speak out, he mused to his siblings. He began to distribute typewritten leaflets denouncing the regime. They were signed by a group whose name he took from a Mexican novel: The White Rose. Their language was incandescent. Every honest German today is ashamed of his government, Hans wrote. It had committed crimes that indefinitely outdistance every human measure. Those who stood by were complicitGuilty! Guilty! Guilty! All citizens should resist the Nazi state and its war efforts, including through sabotage, boycotts, and protests.

The White Rose also became among the first to publicize the Holocaust. In the groups second leaflet, Schmorell reported the news that three hundred thousand Jews had been murdered in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too, are human beings. They pulled no punches even when it came to the fhrer: Every word that comes from Hitlers mouth is a lie, they declared. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. Sprinkled with erudite references to Aristotle, Ecclesiastes, Goethe, Lao Tzu, Friedrich Schiller, and others, the leaflets concluded with a plea to circulate them. We will not be silent, concluded the fourth. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace.

The leaflets appeared in mailboxes and phone booths throughout Munich between late June and mid-July 1942 and spread to sympathetic students in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, and Vienna. Then Hans, Schmorrel, and Graf were suddenly, on a days notice, shipped east to the Russian front. On the way Hans saw a young Jewish girl in a labor brigade by the side of the road. Running from his train, he handed her a chocolate bar and a daisy for her hair. When he stopped in Warsaw, he was horrified by the ghetto. There are half-starved children whimpering for bread, he wrote home. A sense of doom is all around. Then while the young men were in Russia, the Scholls father was arrested and imprisoned for several months by the Nazis when an employee reported an anti-Hitler comment he had made.

At the front, the boys witnessed the defeat at Stalingrad and the first cracks in German invincibility. We will have to let the truth ring out as clearly and audibly as possible in the German night, Huber told his protgs when they returned home. The White Rose released two more leaflets warning that with the loss at Stalingrad, German defeat was inevitable. In a paean to freedom, they asked their countrymen, Are we forever to be a nation that is hated and rejected by all mankind? The pamphlets again circulated throughout Germany. One night green and black graffiti appeared in Munich declaring Freedom! and Hitler Mass Murderer!

On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie were placing neat stacks of leaflets in corridors at the university before the bell rang to let out classes. As they left, Sophie realized she had extra copies in the red suitcase they carried and headed to the top of the marble stairs, which overlooked an atrium three floors below. She hurled the remaining leaflets in the air and watched as they drifted down the stairwell. The maintenance man, Jakob Schmid, was also watching. An ardent Nazi, he immediately locked the doors and notified the authorities. The siblings were hauled to the Wittelsbacher Palace, the infamous headquarters of the Gestapo. Soon after, Probst, whose wife had had a third child weeks before, was also arrested. The three were interrogated for several days but refused to implicate others.