Fogelman - Conscience and courage: rescuers of jews during the holocaust

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION, FEBRUARY 1995

Copyright 1994 by Eva Fogelman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Anchor Books in 1994.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Anchor hardcover edition as follows:

Fogelman, Eva.
Conscience and courage : rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust / Eva Fogelman. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Righteous Gentiles in the HolocaustBiography.
2. World War, 19391945JewsRescue. I. Title.
D804.3F64 1994
940.53180922dc20
[B] 9334021

eISBN: 978-0-307-79794-0

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

To my loving father and mother
For their hope in life

AT SIX IN THE MORNING on March 20, 1942, Simcha Fagelman was already hard at work in the village bakery of Illya, a Byelorussian town a hundred miles east of Vilna. On this snowy, freezing March morning, he counted himself lucky that he had a warm, indoor job baking bread. Even so, the twenty-six-year-old Jew could not shake a sense of dread. Like a low-lying fog, a sense of doom hovered in the streets, seeped into doorways, and crept into the back of his mind.

Simcha was not a man given to fearful imaginings. He was a soldier, or rather, with the invasion and occupation of this part of Poland by the Russians, an ex-soldier turned baker. Chased away from his Vilna home by Lithuanian locals on a Jew-killing rampage, he lived in this little Jewish village with his aunt and uncle and a crowd of other relatives. Life in Illya under the Russians was harsh, but not unbearable. Simcha got along well with his Russian supervisor and sometimes invited him home for dinner.

But within the past nine months, Illyas fragile peace had been shattered by the Germans. They had rolled their tanks into town and issued an endless stream of restrictions, directives, and orders aimed at Jews. Then one morning after the invasion, the Germans intercepted the Jews on their way to work and marched them all off to the village square. But the soldiers had missed Simcha. He had already left for work.

At 7 A.M. that day, members of the German Gestapo burst into the bakery searching for Jews who had slipped through their roundup. At that moment, Simcha happened to be screened from view by a large oven. No Jews here, his Russian supervisor told the Germans confidently. The soldiers left.

Without a moments hesitation, the Russian baker hustled Simcha up to the attic, locked him in, and hid the attic ladder. To divert attention and deter closer inspection, he then turned on the bread ovens full blast so that the place became unbearably hot.

Through cracks in the planks in that cramped, breathlessly hot attic, Simcha looked out into the square. He saw Illyan Jews, including his aunt, uncle, cousins, and friends, crowded into the square, stripped of their clothes, and shot. The whole exercise was completed in less than half a day. Nearly all of Illyas Jewish populationone thousand Jewswere murdered. Of the dozen or so family members who had lived in Illya, only Simcha remained.

That night the Russian returned to his bakery and told Simcha what had happened. They both knew it was only a matter of time before the Nazis would find the attic hiding place. Simchas best hope was to head to the forest and hide.

Simcha found another Jewish survivor, Shraga Salemyanski, son of the towns flour miller. Together they ran into the forest. They wandered in the woods without food or water for several days, not daring to ask for help lest they be shot or reported to the Nazis by some enterprising peasant hoping for a reward. Eventually they had no choice. They were starving.

Picking a farmhouse at random, they rapped on the window. A strangers eyes peered out at them and then disappeared from view. Simcha and Shraga waited. Moments later, the face reappeared and a hand shoved a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread out the window. The fugitives grabbed the food and bolted.

Throughout that spring and summer, Simcha and Shraga lived on nerves, luck, and the charity of strangers. Their days were spent in the forest sprawled in a ditch they had dug for themselves and covered with leaves and moss. Their nights were spent scrounging for food. They survived on wild blueberries and walnuts. Every few days one of them ventured to knock on an isolated farmhouse door to beg for something to eat. They turned into seasoned scavengers. A bottle of milk and a half a loaf of bread supplied two or three days worth of meals.

As they escaped northward, Shraga headed to the houses of two farm families he knew. These families, afraid their neighbors would see them and have them all arrested, shooed the men off their property. That night various family members trekked into the woods to bring the two men food, give them clean clothes, and carry off their dirty lice-infested clothes to be washed. Aware that the fugitives could not survive the freezing winter temperatures in the woods, the farmers arranged for the Jews to meet a Byelorussian partisan group. The two men joined this resistance group and spent the rest of the war waging guerrilla warfare against the Germans.

Simcha Fagelman owes his life to the courage of a Russian baker and the generosity of farmers who shared their own scarce food to help a fellow human being. Simcha never forgot them. Neither did I. Simcha Fagelman is my father.

This book is my tribute to those who risked their lives to save my father and thousands of other Jews. It has been a long time in coming, and the route has been somewhat circuitous, involving as it does my familys history and how I came to view it. My father and mother met after the war, and I was born in a displaced persons camp in Kassel, Germany. A few months later, the family immigrated to Israel, and Simcha Fagelman began life anew as Simcha Fogelman.

In my eyes, Simcha Fogelman was a heroic figurea partisan fighter and a soldier in the Israeli army. I grew up fascinated by his wartime exploits, and I identified with his and our new homelands fighting spirit and vitality. It was not until I was in my twenties that I saw him any differently.

At the time, I was in Boston studying family therapy, and an offhand comment by a teacher that my father was a Holocaust survivor led me to view him through a different prism. I saw myself in a whole new lightas a child of a survivor. I began reading about

Not surprisingly, these group discussions left me with many questions about human behavior and motivation. I needed to know more. In 1979, I enrolled in a doctoral program in social and personality psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). There I was fortunate to study with Stanley Milgram, whose landmark experiments led to his ground-breaking book Obedience to Authority. Dr. Milgrams work promulgated the idea that most people surrender personal responsibility for their actions if those actions are dictated by an authority figure. Milgrams was the first psychological explanation of howand whygood, decent people could carry out horrendous deeds.