Holocaust Rescuers

True Holocaust Survivor Stories Of The Liberators Of Auschwitz: Accounts Of The Holocaust Rescuers

Book 2

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1:  Nancy Wake – The White Mouse Of France

Chapter 2:  Albert-Marie Edmond Guerrisse – The Good   Doctor

Chapter 3:  Nicholas George Winton – The Jewish     Stockbroker

Chapter 4:  Oskar Schindler – The Good Industrialist

Chapter 5:  Witold Pilecki – The Good Volunteer

Chapter 6 – Varian Fry – A Real-Life Captain America

Conclusion

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Introduction

I want to thank you and congratulate you for downloading the book, “Holocaust Rescuers: True Holocaust Survivor Stories Of The Liberators Of Auschwitz: Accounts Of The Holocaust Rescuers”.

“Never before had a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced that a specific human group, including its aged, its women and its children and infants, would be killed as quickly as possible, and then carried through this resolution using every possible means of state power” – Eberhard Jackel, German Historian on the Holocaust

Every so often, an event happens that yanks the reigns of the ever-churning machinery of time and stops the world in its tracks. The repercussions of such an event may send shock waves that can be felt in every nook and corner of our sphere.

These events and happenings will vary in the actual magnitude, but their lasting effect can be immeasurable in the manner they influence humanity till posterity. One such event for instance, was the Holocaust.

In the most elemental of terms, the Holocaust is a phrase used to collectively refer to the biggest mass murder in the history of the world. During the course of which a staggering 11 million unarmed and helpless men, women and children were slaughtered mercilessly by the Nazis and their collaborators. And the most shocking and brutal fact was that this number included more than 6 million Jews.

Suffice to say that the actions of the Nazis almost pushed the Jewish race to certain obliteration. The fundamental logic behind this inhuman eruption of atrocities was the unfounded and groundless notion of Aryan Supremacy. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was the purest and the most superior race in the world.

So they set out to exterminate the impure ones and establish a sort of Aryan Supremacy where the world would be ruled and dominated by the Nazis. What followed was madness, albeit one with an eerie tinge of system and method. The Nazis unleashed death and carnage on the Jews and other minorities of an intensity never before witnessed by the world.

The world at large remained passive to the plight of the Jew till the last possible moment; we all know how the intervention by the Allied forces brought down the Nazi empire. But even before that, love and compassion drove some individuals to sacrifice everything and put their lives on the line to oppose the might of the Fuhrer’s forces and save as many Jews as possible from the certainty of death.

This book is a compilation of the heroic and poignant stories of such individuals, based on the true accounts of survivors of the Holocaust, whose courage, valor and compassion truly transcended the boundaries imposed by the tyranny of men. I thank you for purchasing this book and hope that it helps you appreciate to the fullest extent, one of the most significant pages of human history.

 Copyright 2015 by Cyrus J. Zachary - All rights reserved.

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Chapter 1:

Nancy Wake – The White Mouse Of France

In this chapter we shall be looking at the story of Nancy Wake, nicknamed “The White Mouse” by the German forces. From being a lonely and poor child growing up in New Zealand to becoming a high-life social hostess and personality in France. Finally becoming one of the most decorated wartime servicewomen in the history of the Allies.

She had indeed come a very long way from her humble origins to become one of the most effective weapons that the Allies had in their arsenal against the Nazis, saving countless human lives. She took up the cause of fighting for the oppressed Jews when she was in Paris.

When Nazi Germany invaded France, she became a courier for the French maquis or guerrilla resistance fighters operating out of the remote forests of Southern France. She ran many dangerous missions in and through the city until she became the most wanted fugitive of the Gestapo with a large bounty on her head.

She fled to Britain when her survival in France became extremely tenuous and became a Special Operations Executive. Nancy came back to France and became the leader of the marquis fighters. By the end of the war, she commanded a group of more than 7000 men, fought more than 22000 Germans, killed 1400, and endangered her life on many more occasions than what one can count. So let us look at the life of Nancy Wake in a bit more detail.

The Early Years

She was born Nancy Grace Augusta Wake on the 30th of August 1912 in Wellington, New Zealand as the youngest of five children. To say that her childhood was different would not be too far from the truth. In fact her early days were quite troubled. Her mother was a religious zealot and very conservative in her outlook.

On the other hand her father, who was a journalist and a much more liberal person, was close to her. She was quite distant from her siblings too, mainly due to the substantial age difference between them. In the year 1914, the whole family relocated to North Sydney in Australia, but in a short while her father went back to New Zealand, leaving his wife to raise the children all by herself. On top of this, he sold the family home, thereby dealing a heavy blow to the family.

With the family being abandoned by her father, times were truly harsh for them. Perhaps all these adverse conditions were a huge contributing factor in making Nancy who she became years later. The hardships of her younger days played a major role in instilling in her the grit, determination and courage that she demonstrated during the war.

In Sydney, Nancy eschewed other more common routes of education and pursued Home Science at the North Sydney Household Arts School. At the age of 16, she decided that she had enough of formal education and left school to become a nurse. But Nancy was an out and out rebel at heart and the position of nurse was not held for as long as she would have expected in the beginning.

In fact she quit her job exactly four years later. At around that point in time, she might have felt that there wasn’t much she could do in Sydney and decided to leave. In the year 1928, armed with the 200 Pounds that she had inherited from an aunt, Nancy journeyed half way around the planet and reached the city of New York. And her fate was forever changed.

War Time Exploits

After reaching New York, she decided not to stay there and instead moved on to London. It was in this city that she found her professional calling as a journalist. She interned at a few newspapers and taught herself the rest. In the mid-1930s she moved to France and started working in Paris on a few dailies and publications, before settling down in Hearst as the in-house European correspondent.

And it was in the city of Paris, where the fire inside her was lit. Nancy quickly took to the Parisian high life and the vocation of a journalist was a conducive element in this. Even before her marriage, she was rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty.

This was evidenced by the fact that one of her very first journalistic assignments was to interview the Fuhrer. In fact we can comprehend that Nancy was really in the eye of the storm when the power of the Nazi empire was building up to a crescendo.

She was a first-hand witness to the political tempests raging across Europe at that time. Her journalistic assignments carried her across the length and breadth of Europe. Almost everywhere she went, Nancy was shocked by the unmentionable atrocities inflicted upon the Jews by the Nazis.

The biggest cities of Europe that had always boasted of being the center of art and culture, became nothing more than a mere shadow of their former selves due to the widespread persecution carried out by Hitler’s forces. One such incident that left an indelible mark in her mind and which she recounted years later happened in the city of Vienna.

The city became a slaughter ground for the German troops where they mercilessly tortured and killed the Jewish inhabitants. One day, Nancy saw a group of Nazi Storm troopers who had tied up innocent Jewish people onto giant wheels that were being rolled down the streets.

The soldiers were whipping the people, who included old men and women and children, brutally like animals. The whole exercise was, seemingly a lighthearted revelry for them. On that day, at that very moment, Nancy vowed that she would do something about this. And a few years later, she did.

Life at that time for Nancy was indeed quite fast paced and hectic. She was a regular at the elite parties and soirees of Paris, in addition to shuttling back and forth between various European cities on professional commitments. In the year 1937, she met Henri Edmond Fiocca; an extremely wealthy industrialist from France and the couple were married by the end of 1939.

After marriage, Nancy and her husband settled down in the town of Marseilles. The very same year, Nazi Germany invaded France.

France fell into German hands swiftly and that was the tipping point for Nancy. She resolved that this was her time to take action and make some difference. She started working as a courier for the French Resistance. In the beginning she was a small player but quite quickly her role increased as she began making use of her social status and connections to facilitate rescue missions.

She was quite proficient at smuggling in supplies and rations to the underground resistance fighters. A major reason for her success here was her indomitable combination of striking good looks, persuasive character and the freedom of movement that her social status afforded her.

At around that time, an alarmingly large number of British airplanes were being shot down by the German artillery. Those English pilots who survived these crash landings were sitting ducks for the German Army that patrolled the woods and forests. Nancy managed to save many hundreds of these downed pilots by hiding them in her car and taking them through German check posts.

She was so focused on her goal that she was not hesitant to pull any trick on the Germans, no matter how low it may seem. She flirted and played with the German soldiers and cultivated an image of the rich and spoilt high-society lady who was the wife of a prominent businessman.

Charismatic by nature, she charmed the guards no end and took advantage of this to get past the checkpoints. But this could not go on forever. The Gestapo were aware of the fact that somebody was being exceedingly successful in fooling the German troops and smuggling both British pilots and Jewish refugee families to safety.

She had been doing this for a little more than a year by then. So infamous was she that the Gestapo gave her a nickname – the White Mouse. And then they went ahead and placed a bounty on her head of 5 million francs. In spite of the increased risk, Nancy Wake continued performing her missions until she became convinced that any more missions would be akin to walking into a German trap.

By the year 1942, the Gestapo had figured out her identity and mounted a full-scale search for her. There was a reason for the sudden increase in the Gestapo actions against Nancy. By the end of the said year, the Wehrmacht had managed to completely occupy the Southern region of France.

The presence of the German troops gave the Gestapo unprecedented levels of access and hence the increased threat to Nancy. Nancy was prudent enough to realize this and decided to shift bases and flee to Spain. She made an unbelievable 6 attempts and finally made it. But back home in Marseilles, matters turned really sour.

Once they had ascertained the identity of Nancy and her family, the Gestapo arrested her husband in order to get to her. He was subjected to torture but he maintained his silence as to the whereabouts of his wife. This silence eventually earned him his death as the torture ended in execution. Nancy was not aware of the death of her husband till the end of the war.

Upon reaching Spain, she took the decision to give her activities a more formal nature by joining the Allied forces in some official capacity. With this intention, she proceeded to England. But she had to face adversities even in that. When she reached England, she was informed that there were no combat positions open for women.

So she turned her sight on Special Operations Executive. She was willing to undergo the grueling training that was required to achieve her aim. The instructors and officers at the Special Operations Executive who got to interact with Nancy remember her as an ebullient Australian with seemingly endless levels of enthusiasm and energy that she effortlessly turned into vivacity, grit and determination.

Her training reports of that time made it clear that in addition to her innate intelligence and charm, she was an absolute crack shot with a gun and had exemplary field skills. Her training over, she was raring to go back to the European theater of war. At midnight of 29th April 1944, Nancy parachuted into the Auvergne in the Forest of Troncais.

Her mission was to be the liaison between the British and the maquis fighters. The maquis were a force of French rebels, or marquisards, who were quite a formidable enemy of the Germans. Nancy was mainly entrusted with the duties of managing the finances and administration of the maquis groups.

In the beginning, the fighters did not really respond to Nancy and her tactics. But with time, they realized that she was an imminently capable leader whose care and love for the men under her, had no bounds. She took many steps to bond with the men, especially by taking part in communal drinking parties that made the men feel that she was truly one of them.

Her bravery and selflessness made sure that the loyalty of the men never wavered. Under her leadership, the maquis grew in leaps and bounds in terms of numbers and efficacy and became a 7000 men strong force to be reckoned with. She ensured that the Resistance fighters were well trained and better equipped than ever.

The end result of all this was that the maquis fighters under Nancy managed to kill more than 500 Nazi soldiers while losing only 100 men from their side. During her time with the French fighters, Nancy was personally responsible for providing safe passage for more than 10 000 Jewish refugees and Allied pilots and other stranded airmen.

These were huge numbers that even full-fledged infantry units struggled to achieve. Her bravado and valor in the line of duty shamed trained soldiers. Ever the resourceful person that she was, Nancy bribed and flirted and acted her way out of encounters with German troops who were not aware of her true identity. There are many stories of her courage and military acumen that came to light once the war was over.

During one of her missions to storm a German prison, with the objective of freeing some high profile inmates, Nancy displayed her physical acuity that left her male followers flummoxed with admiration. When the maquis group were creeping up on the prison compound, an extra-vigilant guard discovered them.

While the men sat shell shocked at the sudden hindrance, Nancy leapt up in a second and delivered a debilitating Karate chop to the guard’s neck, killing him instantly. Asked about the incident later in her life, all she said was that she had simply employed a self-defense tactic that had been picked up in the Special Operations Executive training.

In another similar incident, Nancy displayed her capacity to endure extreme levels of physical exertion. Continuous and heavy bombing and shelling had wrecked the radio operations in France. Certain key military messages had to be delivered inside the enemy lines and there was no alternative but to deliver them by hand.

When her maquis group was approached with this task, Nancy volunteered to perform the task herself. Her reasoning was that a lone woman on a bicycle would not be perceived as a threat at the countless German check points that would have to be passed in order to deliver the message.

In the end she cycled a little more than 500 kms in the span of 3 days. She flirted with any guards who showed any suspicion and put her life on the line on more occasions than can be counted. By the end of the third day, Nancy returned back to base a battered woman, with tears of victory and physical pain streaming down her cheeks.

Her love and compassion towards fellow human beings in suffering was rivaled only by her ruthlessness towards the enemy. Once, a patrol of maquis fighters captured a little German child spying on the movements of the maquis fighters for the German soldiers. In spite of the evidence being overwhelmingly against the child, the men were reluctant to kill her because of her age.

Nancy sensed the hesitation amongst her men and accepted the task of taking the child’s life. Her reason was that if left free, the child would report on her troops and cause heavy casualties.

Post War

Nancy Wake was one of such people who never went after fame even when she deserved it the most. During the war, Nancy was the brain and on most occasions the brawn behind many raids on German check points and Gestapo offices. She conducted her duties in an impeccable fashion that garnered the admiration and appreciation of her superiors and subordinates alike.

After the war ended, a slew of medals and honors came her way. These included a number of prestigious ones such as the George Medal from Britain, the Medal of Freedom from the United States of America and the Medaille de la Resistance from the French Government. In addition to this, she was also the recipient of the Croix de Guerre thrice.

Nancy was devastated when she learned that the Gestapo had tortured and killed her husband when he had refused to give out information relating to her whereabouts. So intense was her remorse that she blamed herself for his death until her last moment.

Nancy found work in the Intelligence Department of the British Air Ministry after returning from France. In the capacity of her new job, she was posted at the embassies in Prague and Paris. Her exemplary command over the French language and other similar European languages that she had picked up in the course of her wartime activities in France had really come to her assistance during her post war vocations.

But Nancy felt that her true calling was in an avenue that involved more interaction and service to the common populace – politics. But the most surprising aspect of this decision was the fact that she had decided to go back to Australia.

In the Australian federal elections held in the year 1949, Nancy Wake was the candidate for the Liberals. Her main opponent for the Barton seat of Sydney was Dr. Herbert Evatt. He was the Deputy Prime Minister in the Labor Government of Ben Chifley, where he was also the Minister for External Affairs and the Attorney General.

The election was an interesting one. Chifley lost his government to his opposition Robert Menzies. But in Barton it was a different story. The first timer Nancy Wake won against Dr. Herbert Evatt by an impressive 13 percentage votes but Evatt managed to retain his seat by taking shelter under the two-party preferred basis.

The federal elections of the year 1951 witnessed an encore of the Wake-Evatt fight of 1949. This was a repeat performance in every sense. Both Wake and Evatt won almost similar votes with him inching ahead with a mere 250 votes.  The near misses in the two elections were a huge deterrent to Nancy’s political aspirations and she returned to England after the events of the 1951 election and picked up where she had left off.

She continued her position in the Air Ministry, but this time as an intelligence officer in the office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff. During this time, Nancy got married again to a RAF officer, John Forward in the year 1957. In the same year Nancy Wake retired from active service.

After retirement the couple moved to Australia in the early 1960s. In spite of her not so successful previous venture into politics, she maintained an interest in the field and subsequently was presented as the Liberal candidate in the 1966 election. This time around, she competed for the Kingsford Smith seat of Sydney.

But the results were bittersweet again as Nancy won 6.9 % more votes than her rival but yet suffered an overall defeat. This was the last time she contested for an active seat. In the year 1985, Nancy and her husband retired to Port Macquarie in New South Wales, Australia.

This was where she wrote her auto biography named “The White Mouse” which, after publication garnered rave reviews and became a best seller. In the year 1997, John Forward passed away and Nancy was left alone again. It was then that she made the decision to move to England again.

Finally in 2001 Nancy went back to London and took up residence at the Stafford Hotel at Piccadilly. Two years later, she made the decision to move into the Royal Star and Garter Home for Disabled Ex-Service Men and Women in Richmond.

On the evening of 7th August, 2011, the White Mouse passed away at the Kingston Hospital at the ripe old age of 98, where she been admitted for a minor chest infection. Before her death, she had requested that her ashes be scattered in the Central French region of Montlucon. And with that, the illustrious chapter of Nancy Wake came to an end.

Chapter 2:

Albert-Marie Edmond Guerrisse – The Good Doctor

In this chapter we shall be looking at Major General Count Albert-Marie Edmond Guerrisse, a doctor from Belgium who went under the moniker of Pat O Leary. Though a doctor by trade, he did much more than what a doctor was bound by oath to do in order to save humanity.

He was a member of the Belgian Resistance who was adroit at arranging escape routes for Allied pilots who had been shot down and other Jewish refugees. In the course of his extra ordinary services, he had been caught and tortured by the enemy quite a few times.  Here, we shall go over these events in detail.

The Name Change to Pat O Leary

He was born in the city of Brussels on the 5th of April 1911. He was a doctor trained at the famed University Libre de Bruxelles.  When the Second World War broke out, Guerrisse was attached to a Belgian cavalry regiment as a captain in the Medical Branch (Medicin- Capitaine).

When his infantry had to surrender to the Germans, he managed to escape to England via Dunkirk. In England he joined the ship Le-Rihn, which was renamed as HMS Fidelity and deployed in the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean for secretive missions. And due to this, Guerrisse's commission into the Royal Navy was in the form of a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.

His role on the HMS Fidelity was that of a conducting officer. Basically what he had to do was accompany agents of the British SOE and other similar departments onto the shore, making use of small boats and dinghies, while the HMS Fidelity would be moored far from the shore.

This kind of work was extremely dangerous as it involved exposure to two major risks. One was the peril of nighttime navigation without any lights or beacons and the other was the danger of being spotted by enemy patrols.

During one such mission, Guerrisse had to escort agents of the British Special Operations Executive to the Collioure shore on the Roussillon coast of France. He had successfully completed his task and was returning to base when the weather changed and the small and lightweight skiff in which he was traveling, overturned.

Tossed into the sea, he was quite far from the ship and was closer to the shore. Guerrisse knew that his only chance of survival would be to swim to the shore and that is exactly what he did.

He was caught by the French Coast Guard almost as soon as he touched the beach. Guerrisse told them that his name was Pat O’Leary. The inspiration for the name was his Canadian friend who went by the same moniker. In fact he identified himself as a Canadian Airman.

He figured that the Canadian identity would explain his English accent that was not exactly British and his French accent that was not quite as fluent as a native French speaker.

Work in the Escape Network

After capture he was taken to a stronghold at Saint Hippolyte-du-Fort near Nimes. He was imprisoned along with other people who had been captured under similar conditions. In Saint Hippolyte-du-Fort, he met a Special Operations Executive operative by the name of Ian Garrow.

Garrow was an Officer with the British Highland Light Infantry. Garrow arranged for the escape of O’Leary into the city of Marseilles. This was the first step in the induction of O’Leary into the cloak and dagger world of escape lines.

Garrow had been operating an escape line from Marseilles to ensure safe passage for downed allied pilots and other operatives and refugees who had to get out of areas under the control of the Nazis. In spite of escaping the authorities in Saint Hippolyte-du-Fort, Guerrisse decided to retain the name of O’Leary because he felt the alias would help him in the present endeavors.

As he later recounted after the war, O’Leary had imagined his stay in Marseilles to be only a short one; till he could get back home to England. However there was something else in store for him.

During the beginning of his operations in Marseilles, he was an assistant to Garrow in running the escape lines. He had immediately taken to the job since it was quite similar to the one he had been performing prior to being caught. But the real test of his expertise came when Garrow was arrested in the month of October 1941, by the Vichy French police.

It was time for O’Leary to take command of the escape lines. The escape lines developed at an unprecedented rate under the leadership of O’Leary. He was a leader who understood and empathized with the people under him. The escape lines being an activity built solely on trust and understanding of their functioning, thus benefited under the stewardship of O’Leary.

The line began being known as the “Pat Line” and was comprised of men and women from a multitude of backgrounds. They functioned like a well-oiled machine that contributed to the immense success that the lines enjoyed.

The escape lines under O’Leary expanded its reaches exponentially and at one point in time covered the entirety of the occupied and unoccupied France. The expanded escape lines were successful in ferrying more than 600 people to safety. Being a true leader, O’Leary himself traveled the lines on a frequent basis and took part in rescue operations.

He covered the region between the Dutch border and Southern France and escorted numerous Allied pilots and refugees. These and other similar actions instilled a huge amount of confidence in the hearts of those working on the escape lines.

Garrow who had been arrested by the French police was sentenced to 10 years hard detention in the Mauzac concentration camp. O’Leary now started devising a plan to rescue Garrow. He viewed this as an opportunity to pay back the kindness that Garrow had shown by rescuing O’Leary from Saint Hippolyte-du-Fort.

O’Leary managed to get an extra pair of German guard uniforms delivered to Garrow inside the concentration camp. Finally, on the 6th of December 1941, in the early hours of the morning, Garrow walked out of Mauzac wearing a uniform, along with the night shift guards. But the role of Garrow in the escape lines was over.

His identity was known to the Germans and more than that, he was now a camp escapee. As soon as he had walked out, instructions came from London that Garrow was to return to England as soon as possible.

Betrayal and Incarceration

Disaster struck when the lines were betrayed from the inside. The perpetrator was a French man by the name of Roger le Neveu.  He was a close associate of various leaders of the escape lines, and hence had in depth knowledge about the various ploys and tactics that the Resistance used in order to get around the German blockades.

Even more damaging was the fact that he had the complete and absolute confidence of the escape line leaders vested in him. However Roger le Neveu changed sides and betrayed O’Leary to the Germans. The Germans did not sit on the information at all and made an arrest in the month of March 1943.

The capture took place in the city of Toulouse and O’Leary was arrested along with a few other members of the escape lines. But this multiple arrest turned out to be a blessing in disguise. While being transported to an intermediate prison, he hatched a plan to convey news of the arrest. He helped the youngest member of the arrested group, a young man by the name of Fabien de Cortes, to make an escape from the transport van and establish contact with the other members and warn them.

He was transported to a number of prisons and concentration camps where the Gestapo indulged in inflicting inhuman and barbaric torture methods on O’Leary in order to gain information about the escape lines. They knew that this time, they had caught a really big fish in their net and any bit of information gleaned from O’Leary would prove to be extremely useful in crippling the escape of Allied soldiers and Jewish refugees out of Nazi controlled areas.

But the barbarity of the torture techniques of the Nazis was rivaled only by the resilient diffidence and determination of O’Leary in not divulging even a morsel of information. He was determined to maintain his silence until death if need be. The Nazis kept transferring him from one camp to another until finally he was taken to the feared Dachau concentration camp. I

n Dachau, he was subjected to renewed levels of torture in order to obtain information regarding the names and duties of the various members of the escape line network. He would be beaten mercilessly for hours on end and then starved, but O’Leary took all the responsibility on himself and never gave out the name of another soul.

In the end, the Nazis passed a sentence to execute him at Dachau. Fortunately before the execution could be carried out, the Allies won the battle and the Dachau camp was surrendered to the Allied forces.

Post War Life:

The indomitable spirit of Dr. Guérisse did not end with the war. He went back to Belgium and served in the Belgian Army. He again saw action in the Korean War and was wounded while attempting to extract and rescue a fallen soldier. He received many awards during the course of his career and was made the head of the Medical Services of the Belgian Army. Eventually he retired as a major general in the year 1970.

Honors and titles were innumerable in the case of Dr. Guérisse. He received more than 35 medals for bravery alone from many countries. The British Government awarded him the George Cross in the year 1946. And later on he was bestowed an honorary Knighthood.

The King of Belgium conferred the title of Count on Dr. Guérisse. General Count Albert-Marrie Guérisse passed away on the 26th of March 1989 in the city of Waterloo.

Chapter 3:

Nicholas George Winton – The Jewish Stockbroker

In this chapter I shall cover the amazing story of how a common stock broker working at the London Stock Exchange rescued 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, who would have otherwise have faced a cruel death at the hands of the Nazis, and arranged to relocate them to the safety of the United Kingdom.

This is the awe-inspiring story of Sir Nicholas George Winton, the brain and brawn behind the famed Czech Kindertransport. What is even more amazing is that the rest of the world found out about the service of Winton after nearly 40 years! Simply because Winton never chose to advertise his achievements in search of fame.

Life Before the war

Nicholas Winton was born in the city of Hampstead in London on the 19th of May 1909. His parents were Rudolph Wertheim, a bank manager and Barbara Wertheim. The family were originally German Jews who had relocated to Britain 2 years before his birth. The family name of Wertheim was changed to Winton when they changed their religion and adopted Christianity.

This could be seen as an attempt to mix into British society in a more seamless fashion. In fact Nicholas was baptized when he was born. Right from his childhood, young Nicholas wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and enter the profession of banking. This was made apparent by the fact that he chose to attend night school so that he could proceed with an internship at the Midland Bank.

After that Nicholas shifted bases to Hamburg where he gained a position at the famous Behrens Bank. After working in Hamburg for some time, he moved to Berlin when faced with a much more attractive offer from the Wasserman Bank.

But his stint in the banking sector of Germany did not last much longer because he moved to Paris to work in the reputed Banque National de Credit. He stayed in Paris long enough to earn a formal qualification in banking.  Eventually he returned home to Britain to work for the London Stock Exchange as a stockbroker.

Although he belonged to a neutral profession, Nicholas was a staunch socialist and even belonged to a circle of high profile left wing individuals who were against the rising threat of the Nazis.

The kindergarten transport

For the Christmas of 1938, Winton had decided to make a trip to Switzerland for a festive season of skiing. But before he could embark on the trip, he received a call from Martin Blake, a close friend who was in Prague as part of the refugee program being conducted by the United Kingdom in Czechoslovakia.

The country had been partially occupied by Nazi Germany and Martin wanted Winton to come and render some help in the rescue of Jewish families stuck in the city.  Hence the decision to forego the vacation in the Alps. Eventually Winton ended up providing much more help than had been imagined by Blake.

What he did was establish an organization that would help the children of Jewish families, facing execution at the hands of the Nazis, to relocate to Britain and other similar European countries that were willing to provide refuge to these children. He was singlehandedly responsible for setting up the operations with this objective.

His office was set up on the dining table of a hotel room in Wenceslas Square where he was staying. His operations got a huge moral boost when the House of Commons in Britain passed a resolution that allowed Jewish refugee children below the age of 17 to enter Britain.

But this was subject to two conditions; One they should have a clear and definite place to stay in Britain and a security of 50 Pounds had to be deposited guaranteeing that they would eventually return to their home countries after the war. The House of Commons had taken this decision in light of the horrible atrocities that were committed by the Nazis during the Crystal Night.

Nicholas Winton devised a transport route that had to pass through Holland since the children had to catch a ferry from Hoek Van Holland.  This proved to be a major obstacle to his plans. Although Holland had adopted a somewhat neutral stand pertaining to the Jewish situation, after the events of the Crystal Night, the Dutch government wanted to appease the raging Nazis and hence closed its borders to Jews.

Any Jewish person trying to sneak in would be caught by the guards and handed over to the Nazis.  But Winton succeeded in assuring safe passage for his children by relentlessly negotiating with the Dutch based on the guarantees that the British Government had given.

In total Winton had managed to transport 669 children to safety in Britain. He had come extremely close to capture and persecution by the Nazis for his actions but decided to stick with his plan and see it through. A last batch of 250 children was to start their journey but could not make it out of Prague because Germany mounted a full-scale attack on Czechoslovakia on the very same day and most of the children perished in the attack.

It was later established that, of the 669 children who had made it to Britain in Winton’s train, an overwhelming majority would have lost their parents and siblings and relatives to Hitler’s concentration camps, especially the one at Auschwitz. These children were aided in finding establishments in Britain by Winton’s mother, who actively assisted her son in finding foster homes and hostels and boarding schools all over Britain.

They continued their concentrated efforts for finding a suitable home for these children. They placed advertisements in magazines and ran stories in daily newspapers. Winton went a step further and wrote multiple letters to world leaders and politicians asking them to provide a haven for these rescued children.

This included letters to the President of the United States of America and those of other neutral European countries. Winton had maintained that more than 2000 children could have been rescued had other countries evinced interest in harboring them. Once the Second World War was underway, Nicholas Winton joined the Royal Air Force in the year 1940 in the office of the Administrative and Special Duties.

He was commissioned on the 22nd of June 1944 as a sergeant.  He received further promotions and retired with the title of flight lieutenant. After the War, many honors came the way of Nicholas Winton. He had suppressed the facts about his wartime exploits to avoid the celebrity and limelight. But that was until his wife chanced upon a scrapbook that he had maintained with the details of all the children.

She published it and that was when the world sat up and acknowledged the greatness of this unassuming man. In the year 1983, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire and in the year 2002, he was knighted. In 2010, the English Government named him the British Hero of the Holocaust.

Another feather was added to his cap in the year 2014, when on the 19th day of May, the Czech Republic conferred on him their highest honor; the Order of the White Lion. On the 1st of July 2015, Sir Nicholas George Winton passed away peacefully in his sleep and the final curtains fell on a life exceptionally well lived.

Chapter 4:

Oskar Schindler – The Good Industrialist

This name does not need a few introductory lines or other rhetorical statements to drive in the point that the man about whom we will be talking in this chapter is someone who can be credited with saving the most number of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Oscar Schindler and his story has been covered in detail in books and television shows and has even spawned a celebrated motion picture. But all that coverage has only served to brighten the happenings and not make it jaded. So let us get on with it and try to grasp the magnitude of his selfless acts and the number of lives he saved.

A Brief Overview

Oskar Schindler was an ethnic German industrialist who was also a member of the Nazi party and intelligence service, but who was solely responsible for saving the lives of 1200 Jews during the Holocaust. He did this by employing them in his ammunition and enamel factories that were situated in Poland, Bohemia and Moravia.

He was a member of the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the Wehrmacht. By virtue of this he was also a member of the Nazi Party and carried out extensive spying activities in Czechoslovakia and had been arrested for espionage as well.

He had acquired an enamel factory in the city of Krakow that employed more than a thousand Jewish workers. He made it a point to prevent his workers from being taken to concentration camps. In the beginning, the intention was monetary but then as time passed Schindler was so focused on saving the lives of his workers that he devoted his time, resources, money and influence to this sole objective.

He began heavily bribing the Nazi officials and gifting them expensive items so that they would turn a blind eye towards the workers in his factory. And this was during a time when the Nazi Government was cracking down on any privately held factory that employed Jewish workers.

By the end of the war, Schindler had completely exhausted his financial resources to ensure the safety of the 1200 Jewish men and women working under him, who later came to be known as “Schindler Jews”.

After the war, the completely bankrupt Schindler moved to West Germany where he lived on the financial assistance provided by Relief organizations that were set up for the assistance and rehabilitation of Jews. But he did not stay there for long and made an unsuccessful attempt at farming in Argentina.  In 1963, he was given the honor of “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Israeli Government.

Pre War Days

Oskar Schindler was born to a Sudetan German family in Moravia, Austria-Hungary on the 28th of April 1908. His father Johann Schindler was the owner of a farming machinery manufacturing business that was quite a big company in that region. Not really interested in the conventional methods of education, Schindler enrolled in an institute teaching technical courses, after his primary schooling.

He did graduate from the institute, but did not pursue any further college or university education. Instead he moved to the city of Brno and took various courses such as one in machining.

After marrying Emilie Pelzl, Schindler went through a series of jobs that included tenure at a company called the Moravian Electrotechnic and a brief stint in the Czech Army for about 18 months. In the army, he rose to the position of a Lance Corporal in the 10th infantry Regiment.

After this, in the year 1936 Schindler joined the German Sudetan Party and became a spy for the Abwehr, the Nazi Intelligence Agency. He had later admitted that he became a spy for the Abwehr in order to make some extra money since his alcoholism paired with his low earnings put him in perpetual debt.

His tasks included gathering information about the movements and installations of the Czech Army so that the Nazis could be well prepared for an invasion. He was arrested and imprisoned for espionage by the Czech government but was immediately released since he was a political prisoner as per the Munich Agreement. He applied for Nazi party membership and was immediately accepted.

The Emalia:

“Emalia” was the nickname given to the German Enamelware Factory that belonged to Oskar Schindler. In the year 1939, Schindler had moved to Krakow in Poland. He had arrived there on Abwehr business. In those days, all businesses and properties that had belonged to Polish Jews were seized by the Germans and were run by the government directly or Nazi party members and officials were allowed to take over the business and run it for the Nazi war effort.

During his stay in Krakow, he met a Jewish accountant named Izhak Stern. He befriended Stern and asked him his opinion on acquiring an enamel factory that had filed for bankruptcy. Stern advised him to lease the business and run it himself instead of letting the Nazi government run it.

Schindler saw a big opportunity and wasted no time in acquiring the factory and business. On the 15th of January 1940, Oskar Schindler became the proud owner of the enamelware factory which he renamed a Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik or German Enamel Factory.

In the initial days of the factory it had only 7 Jewish workers and about 250 Non-Jewish Poles. However the numbers underwent a grand reversal in due course and by 1944, the company had close to 1700 employees out of which more than a 1000 were Jewish. He also acquired am armament factory that manufactured bullet casings and the like.

There were two reasons why he preferred to employ Jews in his factories. On one hand they were much more hardworking than other Polish workers and on the other hand they demanded a much lesser wage. But this attitude of Schindler changed over time and he became more and more affectionate towards his Jewish employees.

Especially when he saw the plight that Jews had to face under the Nazis. His ties with the Abwehr and Wehrmacht, the personal wealth and diplomacy meant that he went to any extent to protect his Jews. The scenario changed in such a way that, as the war progressed and the plight of the Jews worsened across Europe, the focus of the business run by Schindler shifted from making profits to saving the lives of his employees.

When the concentration camp of Plaszow came up near his factory, Schindler was forewarned about the plight of the Jews by way of his informers and contacts in the Wehrmacht. When the tyrannical camp commandant Amon Goth wanted all factories in the vicinity to be shifted inside the concentration camp, Schindler managed to obtain exemptions for his Jews.

He bribed and gifted and sweet-talked and charmed his way through every obstacle that was thrown up.  In fact not only were his Jews treated well, they had sufficient space to live, were well fed and also had the freedom to engage in their religious practices.

Suffice to say that Oskar Schindler did everything in his capacity and more to ensure that the men, women and children, who were supposedly “employees” in his factory were safe from the tyranny and evil of the Nazis.

Life after the War:

As I had mentioned earlier, by the time the war ended, Schindler had exhausted all his financial resources in bribing the Nazi officials. He was completely bankrupt and the condition of the post-war German economy did not help either. He moved to the cities of Munich and Regensburg to try finding a job but was unsuccessful.

He had to depend on assistance provided by Jewish organizations that had recognized the selfless service that he had rendered to the Jewish community. Finally in the year 1949, Schindler and his wife migrated to Argentina like so many ex-Nazi officials of that era, in order to find work. He tried his hand at the business of raising chickens and other fowl but that was a failed venture.

He then started rearing nutria, a small rodent like mammal that was valued for its fur. But that business also failed to earn any return. Bankrupt in Argentina also, he made his way back to Germany, where he tried his hand at another slew of unsuccessful business ventures.

By this time his health had also deteriorated and he had to undergo hospitalization for months on end. He remained in contact with the “Schindler Jews” including Stern, who sent him donations whenever they could. Finally, on the 9th of October 1974, Oskar Schindler passed away.

The German government had awarded him the Order of Merit while the Israeli government had bestowed on him the honor of Righteous Among the Nations.  After his death his body was buried in the holy city of Jerusalem on Mount Zion. To date he remains the only Nazi party member to be given this honor.

Chapter 5:

Witold Pilecki – The Good Volunteer

The Holocaust showcased the best and the worst of humanity. On the one side, the Nazis were marching around all of Europe, cornering innocent victims and slaughtering them like cattle. And on the other side, the Allied Forces came together to try and rescue those poor people, the different countries of the world setting aside their differences to protect the innocent.

As spectators, we never really take the time to think – what would have happened if the Allies had not been formed? What if they had never believed the many Europeans who were undergoing the Holocaust? What if it had been too late before they took action against Hitler’s insane ideology?

It was Witold Pilecki who convinced the Allies that the Holocaust was happening and it is to him that we owe the Second World War and the liberation of hundreds of thousands of people. Born on the 13th of May in the year 1901, Pilecki was a polish soldier who voluntarily stationed himself at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, to gather intelligence and remit it to the outside world.

He is most famous for his report – Witold’s Report – that enabled the underground Polish government to convince the Allies that the Holocaust was, in fact, taking place. Pilecki’s life was meant to be embroiled in politics from his early life. His parents and his family had been forcibly resettled by the Imperial Russian authorities after Poland’s January Uprising had been suppressed by them.

They were forced to move to Karelia; in fact, his grandfather had been exiled for seven years in Siberia because he had been part of the uprising himself. When Pilecki was barely 9 years old, however, the family moved to Wilno, where he completed school. An older Pilecki moved once again, this time to Orel in Russia, where he joined a local ZHP (Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego or the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association) Scouts Group.

Witold Pilecki did not stay on the sidelines even during the First World War; he joined a ZHP Scouts section of the Polish fighters, before signing up for the Army and fighting the Polish-Soviet War. He served under the Uhlan Regiment in the Battle of Warsaw and took part in the liberation of Wilno.

His bravery won him the Polish Cross of Valor, not once, but twice! Soon after the Polish-Soviet War ended though, he went back to civilian life and focused on passing his high school exams. The call of battle was too hard to ignore however, and he signed up for the Army again, though this time he accepted a non-commissioned officer position.

Once his officer training courses were completed, he was assigned to a cavalry regiment as an ensign. Since his role was little more than that of a reserve, he spent his time supporting local paramilitary training activities, while working on rebuilding his family fortune, which had been lost in the First World War.

Pilecki spent the interim period between the Two World Wars trying to serve the community he lived in. He worked on farms and painted on his days off, selling his paintings to the locals and spending time with his family. In the year 1931, he met and married Maria Ostrowska, with whom he would later have two kids – Andrzej and Zofia.

And then the Holocaust began. In the year 1939, Pilecki was picked to be a cavalry platoon commander, assigned to the 19th Infantry Division of the Polish Army. The invasion of Poland had begun in earnest and he and his unit were almost destroyed in the fight against the Germans.

They fought in the September Campaign, during which time Pilecki and his men brought down seven German tanks and three aircraft – one shot down from the sky and the other two taken down on land. Unfortunately, the victory was short lived; the Soviets invaded Eastern Poland and a number of his men were forced to surrender. Pilecki and his commander, though, returned to Warsaw under great peril.

Even before he snuck into Auschwitz, Pilecki was taking on the Nazis and the Soviets who were occupying Poland. He helped found the Secret Polish Army (Tajna Armia Polska or the TAP), which was one of the first underground Polish organizations and expanded to include over 8000 men. It was later incorporated into the Union for Armed Struggle, renamed as the Home Army that spearheaded the Polish resistance against the Germans.

It was in the year 1940 that Pilecki decided to ‘volunteer’ at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rumors were flying about that were rather disturbing; the Germans were building gas chambers to kill the inmates en mass and the world didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Pilecki offered to sneak in and gather intelligence as most of the outside world believed that Auschwitz was not a death camp and that the rumors were false. Armed with a fake name and identify – that of a Tomasz Serafiński – Pilecki went undercover.

He went outside during a street roundup in Warsaw and was taken into German custody, along with other civilians. The prisoners were taken to the detention center in the Light Horse Guards Barracks, where they were tortured and beaten up. Pilecki was then packed off to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was inmate number 4859.

Conditions at the Nazi concentration camps were hardly what we would call luxurious. In fact, they were downright disturbing – the prisoners were given little to eat, forced to work at breakneck speed and tortured daily by the prison guards. Pilecki had to gather intelligence even as he faced malnutrition, starvation, torture and the like.

Worse still were the epidemics; boxed in such close quarters as they were, it was inevitable that the inmates would catch some disease and typhoid, cholera and pneumonia were common occurrences. Pilecki himself faced the last of the three, but he went about his job quietly and efficiently, refusing to give in to the demands of his weakened body.

He worked in various kommandos, where he made contacts and managed to organize an entire underground military organization, the Zwiazek Organizacji Wojskowej or the ZOW, which then expanded. Their purpose was to connect to the outside world as well as work with the inmates inside. They kept the morale of the prisoners up by providing food, clothing and other necessities smuggled in from the outside.

They even set up smaller intelligence networks and trained members to take over and protect the camp whenever there were relief attacks by the Home Army. The ZOW became a major source of intelligence for the Allied powers, which were then as yet unaware of the Germans’ obsession with murder. The Polish underground collected the ZOW’s reports, and from March 1941, Pilecki’s reports were forwarded by the Polish resistance to the British government.

In a few short months, they began to convince the Allies that the Second World War had to happen; Pilecki, along with a few of his fellow inmates, built a radio transmitter, through which they sent out the number of prisoners who arrived and were killed in the camp.

For over 7 months, this secret radio station was run, using parts that were stolen or smuggled and broadcast to the outside world the horrors that were taking place within the walls of the concentration camp. The horrendous living conditions, the daily murders and the slaughter, the pain and the suffering – the world listened, horrified, as the Holocaust was well under way.

The station was taken down only in the autumn of the year 1942, when Pilecki’s men began to fear that one of their own was betraying them and they took it down lest they be killed by the Nazis. These reports – which would later come to be known as Witold’s reports – were the gospel for the Allies’ invasion of the concentration camps.

They provided invaluable information that not only convinced the Allied Forces that the Holocaust was happening, but also the details they would need to mount an attack on Auschwitz and thereby liberate the innocent prisoners there. Pilecki, stuck on the inside and having been there for more than a year now, was desperate for rescue.

He hoped that the Home Army would organize an assault that would liberate not just him, but the many inmates who had been captured through no fault of their own, except that they did not meet the ideals of a madman.

Unfortunately for him, however, the Allied Powers could not rush into such an attack of so vast a magnitude. They had to plan and be careful, or innocent lives would be lost. To make matters worse, the Gestapo had come to know of the ZOW and they were taking steps to ferret out the members.

They killed a huge number of them and their efforts convinced Pilecki to finally break out of there. He had to convince the Home Army that a rescue attempt would not fail – he was confident in his ability to lead them through an invasion of the camp. Pilecki did not escape the Auschwitz concentration camp alone – he saved two other lives as well.

They were fellow ZOW members who would follow him to the bitter end. Pilecki saw a chance and took it when he was assigned a night shift at the camp bakery outside the fence. His comrades helped him take down the guard and then cut the telephone line so that the Germans would not be able to contact anyone for backup. Together, the three men escaped into the silence of the night, carrying with them valuable information in documents they had stolen from the German barracks.

It took them several days of careful travel to get away from the Germans’ clutches; if they had been discovered, they would have been killed instantly. When finally, on the 25th of August 1943, Pilecki returned to the Home Army, he approached his superiors to try and convince them to mount an attack on the Auschwitz camp.

They were not very enthusiastic about the idea, however – too many lives had been lost in the reconnoitering and reconnaissance of the concentration camp. Fortunately, that did not mean that they were not going to take down the Nazis at all – they simply felt that the Home Army alone did not have the strength to do so by itself. This meant that they would have to reach out to the world and ask for help.

The very detailed report that Pilecki had made of his time in the camp and everything he knew about the Holocaust made its way to London. Unfortunately for the Home Army and the inmates stuck in the camp, the world still refused to believe the horrors that were conducted daily at the hands of the Nazis.

They refused to believe that people could be so cruel – the numbers, which indicated that the Nazis had murdered close to 5 million people in the span of just 5 years, were thought to be too grossly exaggerated. The British turned down the Home Army’s request for personnel to mount an attack on the camp.

No doubt millions of lives could have been saved had they offered their help. But the world did not want to believe that humanity could be so merciless and it cost too many people their lives. Pilecki found himself at the heart of an ideological battle; people would rather turn a blind eye to cruelty than face it, their fears incapacitating them.

He refused to give up the fight, however, and when even the Home Army decided not to storm the camp, Pilecki continued to work with the ZOW. He offered them what assistance he could, sneaking out prisoners whenever possible and smuggling them food and other items they needed. His efforts were limited, but he risked his own life time and again to keep them fighting.

In the month of February in the year 1944, Pilecki took the position of cavalry captain with the Home Army and went on to join an anti-communist organization called the NIE that functioned secretly within the army itself. Their goal was to prepare resistance for a possible occupation by the Soviets who were making their own hue and cry along with the Germans.

And then came the Warsaw Uprising. Here is a quick background on the Uprising for those who don’t know much about it – the Warsaw Uprising was a major World War II operation by the Polish resistance. As the name suggests, it was an attempt to liberate the city of Warsaw from the German occupation.

The Uprising was timed such that it coincided with the approach of the Soviet Red Army to the eastern suburbs of the city. Unfortunately for the Home Army – which mounted the liberation attack – the Soviets’ advance stopped short, and the Germans were able to regroup and take on the Polish soldiers and defeated them. The Polish resistance did not go out quietly – for a full 63 days, they held out, fighting to their last breath, without outside help.

But in the end, they were defeated. As is obvious, the Warsaw Uprising was the largest single military effort by any of the European resistance groups in the Second World War.

Pilecki played an important role in the Uprising. He fought in the northern city center, refusing to tell the other soldiers that he was a ‘Warszawianka’ of the National Armed Forces, which was a rather high rank.

When too many officers fell to the might of the powerful German forces and they had no one to lead them, he reluctantly revealed his identity and took command, gathering the forces together and trying to mount an offensive against the Nazis. They fortified and held the ‘Great Bastion of Warsaw’, which was a partisan redoubt.

Pilecki and his men fought fiercely, proving themselves an insistent thorn in the German supply lines, holding out for two full weeks against constant attacks by the Nazi infantry. When finally the uprising was quelled by the Germans, Pilecki was taken into custody by the Gestapo. Strangely enough, he was not killed immediately by the Germans as one would expect – he spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps at Murnau and Lambinowince.

When the war ended, Pilecki was liberated, but he did not return to his civilian life. He had seen too much, suffered too much and he itched to be back on the front lines, serving his country. He joined the 2nd Polish Corps, stationed in Italy, where he took to writing a monograph on Auschwitz.

The government in Poland was still unstable – the Second World War may have come to an end, but there was no peace established. The Polish Committee of National Liberation, which ran the territory taken back from the Nazis, was controlled by the Soviets, who had turned on Germany during the latter half of the War.

Their relationship with the in-exile Polish government was not the strongest and it wasn’t long before Pilecki was sent undercover to Poland to gather intelligence against them. Pilecki went as ordered and organized an intelligence network within Poland. But the in-exile government could not hold out for long.

They soon decided that the political situation was beyond their ability to salvage and sent out orders to all the partisans still resisting the Soviets that they were to either flee to the West or get back to their civilian lives. Pilecki was informed that he had to leave immediately – his cover had been blown and the Russians would be coming for him at any time.

Pilecki, brave and stubborn man that he was, refused to do so, and continued his mission of collecting evidence against the Russian atrocities, even as he had done with the Nazis. The Russians were persecuting the Poles as the Germans had done the Jews – it made Pilecki’s blood boil, and he would see justice done at any cost.

Unfortunately, the cost would prove to be his own life. On the 8th of May in the year 1947, he was taken into custody by the Ministry of Public Security. He was tortured, beaten again and again, interrogated by the most savage the Russians had to offer, until they finally sent him to trial.

Pilecki, ever the humanist, refused to reveal any information – he would not give up the men who had served with him and sought to save their lives even at the expense of his own.

The trial conducted was one that was mostly for show; he was prosecuted by Jozef Cyrankiewicz – a man who himself was an Auschwitz survivor. That he would not have lived through the Holocaust without Pilecki’s involvement did not seem to matter.

He presented evidence of what were perceived to be the man’s transgressions against the Russian-occupied Polish government. Accused of using forged documents, carrying illegal arms, crossing borders without permission, espionage and even a ludicrous claim to the preparation of an assassination of Ministry officials, Pilecki was put on the spot, his bravery and daring only leading to certain death this time.

Pilecki refuted the assassination and espionage charges, but plead guilty to the rest – he was not afraid to admit the roles he had played within the wars. He had saved lives, and he was not going to be ashamed for it. But his courage was not rewarded; he and three of his comrades were sentenced to death on the 15th of May. Ten days later, he was executed at the Warsaw Mokotow Prison.

Even then, his love of his country never faded – his last words were “Long live free Poland.” His executioner was none other than PiotrŚmietański, who had been nicknamed the ‘Butcher of the Mokotow Prison’. The city of Warsaw, which Pilecki had defended with his own life, could only watch in quiet horror as the man’s life was snuffed out for real this time.

Pilecki was not alone in his death; a number of the Home Army members had been caught and executed by the Communist government soon after the war was over. It is a sad truth that none of these men who fought so hard for the liberation of their country could breathe the free air for long. But justice would be served; the prosecutor of Pilecki’s trial, a CzesławŁapiński, and several others were tried in the year 2003 for their role in the deaths of these brave soldiers.

In 1995, Pilecki was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta posthumously and the Order of the White Eagle was also bestowed upon him in 2006.

Witold Pilecki would not be forgotten by the world – he had brought out the horrors of the Holocaust to the real world and in doing so he had saved millions of lives. A number of books, outlining his life were published and his report of Auschwitz was published in English and hailed by The New York Times as one of the most important historical documents of all times. Films were made, as were documentaries, and songs were written in his honor.

Without a doubt, Witold Pilecki was one of the bravest men the world has ever seen, his dedication to his country remains unparalleled. He risked his life time and again to make sure that his fellow Polish people could breathe freely and in the end, died for a free Poland he would never see.

Chapter 6:

Varian Fry – A Real-Life Captain America

A real life Captain America if there ever was one, Varian Fry was an unassuming young man who saved more innocent lives than we can count. Born Varian Mackey Fry in the city of New York in 1907, he was an American Oskar Schindler, one who faced danger both at home and on the battlefront. His sympathies lay with the innocent who were persecuted for no fault of their own.

They made him a target for the Anti-Semitic careerists within the US State Department where he worked, as well as the Germans who would have killed him instantly. Even as a child, Fry was doing what he could to ease other people’s pain.

His parents were relatively well off – his father’s occupation as a stock broker kept them all firmly in the upper-middle class category – and during the First World War, a young Fry was raising money for the American Red Cross by ticketing small shows and street fairs on the roads.

His wealthy status meant that he was sent to an elite private school; however, he left when he bore witness to the severe hazing practices prevalent there, his intolerance of injustice strong even at such a young age. Despite his actions, Fry managed to secure a spot at Harvard University, where he excelled academically.

He even began a student magazine, influenced as he was by famous writers, thinkers, and philosophers. He was an intellectual, if there ever was one. What is very interesting about Fry is that he was more than just a brave soldier or an academic intellectual. He is famous for his role in the war and he saved countless innocent lives – but he was also a man who was mentally unstable, battling illnesses that would leave a normal man reeling.

At school, he often displayed erratic behavior, even having to repeat his senior year. It wasn’t until experts studied his life later that people realized the man was sick – at the time, he was simply written off as a disturbed prankster beyond help. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after the war was over, and it was an illness he would take to his grave.

Another interesting fact about Fry was his homosexuality, which again, did not come out until after his death. In and of itself, homosexuality was often considered to be a mental illness, when it was not cast by religious fanatics as ‘sin’ in the days when Fry was a youngster.

Hiding his true sense of self from everyone in his life took a heavy emotional toll on Fry – no wonder he was mentally ill. But his many internal struggles did not stop him from becoming a war hero – he saved millions of lives, not giving a thought to his own. Graduation from Harvard led him to his first job as a journalist.

On assignment, he went to Berlin. Hitler had just come to power and his campaign was spreading atrocities that the rest of the world still was not quite ready to believe. Fry was one of the first writers to describe in clear detail the true nature of the Nazis’ power regime, refusing to hide the truth.

His article, published in The New York Times in 1935, can perhaps be described as his most famous work. In it, he spoke of a rally, which took place in Kurfurstendamm, where innocent Jews were persecuted and butchered like animals. He described the way in which the Nazis dragged the Jews out of their homes and the cars they were traveling the roads in, and then beat them up if they could not provide identification as a proper ‘Aryan’.

To quote from the article –

"At times, a chant would be raised … ‘the best Jew is a dead Jew' — precisely like a Christian liturgy, with a leader speaking the lines first and the crowd chanting them over and over again, line for line, after he had finished. Everywhere the people were in a holiday mood; in fact, one German youth said to me, ‘This is a holiday for us.' Old men and young men, boys, Storm Troopers, police, young girls of the domestic servant type, well-bred women, some even in the forties and over — all seemed to be having a good time."

As you can see, Fry did not mince words. He wanted to tell the world the truth and he did not hide behind a political agenda when he did so. Berlin was a place of chaos and madness and on his travels in the area Fry became convinced that the Nazi regime was not going to calm down anytime soon. What cemented his conviction was a personal meeting with one of Hitler’s inner circle.

One of Fry’s fellow Harvard graduates – an Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl – was a personal friend of Hitler’s. He had returned to Germany after the First World War had ended and had become infatuated with Hitler and his ideologies, taking up with him as soon as he could.

Fry himself met Putzi on his travels in Berlin and the two became sort of friends. Putzi believed that Fry was a friend to be trusted though Fry himself showed no such inclinations. They sang Harvard songs together at a party, and later, Putzi told Fry of the Nazi’s inner secrets.

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit of information that he passed on to the young journalist was the divided opinion about the treatment of the Jews. While all the Nazis agreed that Jews were to be persecuted, they were divided as to the nature of this persecution.

One group believed that these innocents should be deported out of Germany and to some remote island like Madagascar, where they would be forced to live out the rest of their lives in solitary confinement. Hitler and his men, on the other hand, wanted to exterminate the Jewish community, though he was stopped from making this dream a reality.

Say what you will about the diminutive man – he knew strategy, and he knew that putting ‘The Final Solution’ to ‘The Jewish Problem’ into action at the time would prove disastrous for a Germany still under the eye of the Allied Powers after the First World War.

Putzi had no idea that he was talking to a journalist and a lover of justice at that. Dry wasted no time in reporting all this; he published articles in The New York Times, as well as another paper he was writing for. Putzi would later betray Hitler and defect to the side of the Allies, even going as far as to help the American Office of Strategic Services compile a psychological report on the leader of the Nazis.

Soon after Fry's articles were published, Hitler’s persecution of the Jews began in earnest. The Holocaust was well under way and the world was just beginning to sit up and take notice. Fry, however, was already on the move – he had recruited a bunch of artists, journalists, writers and other intellectuals who had a good social standing to his cause, and together, they raised money for the European refugees who fled to the United States in hopes of escaping the Nazis.

Fry’s own mental health did not stop him from doing what was right. He had exposed the Nazis for the monsters they were and took steps to protect and empower a large number of their unsuspecting victims. But soon, even just protecting those refugees was not enough for Fry.

He wanted to do something more, something that would make a true difference, and he did not hesitate to become intimately involved in the war effort when America joined the war. Even before America became an Ally, he – along with a few other influential Americans – formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC).

Their primary mission was to arrange for safe passage for all those trying to leave the Nazi territory and bring them to a safe place where their rehabilitation could begin. Fry and his team have often come under heavy criticism, despite the fact that they saved many lives.

He was often accused of saving only those the ERC deemed intellectual, and not the regular people. In fact, their stated purpose was to save the members of European society from the barbarism of Nazism. What the critics of Fry often overlook, however, was that it was a difficult choice that Fry and his men had to make. Much as they tried to save as many as they could, they were not always successful.

They tried to bring home people whom they felt the world would listen to – as intellectuals who had survived the Holocaust, and often open critics of Hitler, their voices would be heard in a way that normal prisoners would not be. That’s not to say that what Fry did was justified, only that his actions made a difference even when they fell somewhere between the lines of right and wrong.

Fry also defended himself later when questioned by claiming that these were men and women had kept him going during those tough times as a young man. Having hidden his true identity and left lonely and unattended, it was no surprise that Fry felt connected to these writers and intellectuals, whose voices reached him when others could not.

He wanted to repay them, he said, “…I (Fry) felt obligated I felt obliged to help them if I could; just as they, without knowing it, had often in the past helped me.”

It was this conviction, which led him to volunteer for a mission in France. There was a settlement between the French and the Germans when France was conquered. It was a weak and unstable alliance that left half the country under German control and would soon crumble in the face of their might. The Jews had to get out while they could, before persecution began in earnest.

They reached out to the ERC, which agreed to help immediately. They needed a man in the field, however, and Fry did not hesitate to sign up. His skills made him an ideal candidate – he spoke a number of European languages, knew how the Nazis worked and was well traveled.

He set up base in the city of Marseilles, where word quickly spread underground that an American was quietly helping the refugees get out of the Nazi occupied territory. His being an American protected him in a strange way.  America, still not part of the Allied Resistance, was looked at with suspicion but not open hostility.

This meant that the Vichy police in charge of the city, who held it for the Germans, kept an eye on Fry. They suspected he was up to something, but since they had little proof, they could do nothing for fear of upsetting the US government.

Fry, in the meantime, had built up a strong network with the ERC’s help. There were French, Americans, Jews and even Polish members who were spread out throughout the Nazi territory, who risked their lives to gather intelligence and protect the innocent. Fry coordinated the efforts of the whole network, trying to save as many people as he could.

The most important and difficult part of the operation was securing a French exit visa, which would allow the refugees to exit the country. The Nazis kept a close eye on those leaving the country. Fry used his pull with the US government to get a few hundred-entry visas into America.

He sent the people he saved with these to the United States, though not all of his superiors approved of his actions. His bravery, however, won him the sympathy of the younger diplomats in the government, and they went behind their superiors’ backs when he needed new such visas made. The Anti-Semitic superiors could hardly do anything to stop them when they did not even know what was going on.

It was on the French side of things that Fry faced most difficulty. He bribed a number of French policemen and turned to the French organized crime lords for forged visas. He refused to back down in the face of their threats and slowly, managed to earn their trust enough to get them to work for him for a price.

During the day, he went about openly as an American journalist or an aid worker – he drew attention to himself enough that the police would not suspect that such a man was involved in helping refugees escape.

What they could not have known was that he worked to get food to the refugees, find them safe housing, and at night, tried his best to get them out of France. He and his staff spent long hours, poring over papers to create good cover identities, plan safe escape routes, arrange for supplies and did everything they could to get a number of men and women to safety.

What was worse was few of the escapees were athletes and the safest passage out of France was through the mountains. Fry managed to get hundreds of men and women through the mountains and into Spain and Portugal, which were relatively neutral to the war then.

These refugees then made their way to the US and other places via planes and ships, owing their lives to a small slip of a man battling mental disease himself, but refusing to back down from doing what was right. For the next thirteen months, Fry remained in France and carried out his secret work.

He was charted to get home after just one month of undercover work. When he saw the number of desperate people needing to escape the persecution of their entire race, he could not force himself to leave them behind and instead stayed for the next year to get them all to safety.

But his actions were not going to go unnoticed. He had already been taken into custody and interrogated a number of times, always let go due to lack of evidence. His American citizenship could only protect him for so long. His villa was searched and then seized too many times.

Things began to spiral out of control before long. Having to negotiate bribes, deal with the criminal gangs he was in bed with, coordinate the efforts of the refugees who grew in number by the hour – it took a heavy toll.

What was worse was having to turn a number of refugees away. The ERC were to help only those in immediate danger of arrest or deportation by the Nazis and not those who may be persecuted later on. Too many people were turned away and the guilt of it added to Fry’s burden. He knew that many of those whom he had no choice but to leave behind would probably die – it was a choice that haunted him for the rest of his life.

By September 1941, the US State Department in France had had enough of him and his actions. In their opinion, he was causing too much trouble and stirring up tension between America and the Vichy controlled French areas. A large part of this decision was driven by the anti-immigration attitudes these diplomats carried.

They were Anti-Semitic too, which was ironic, given the huge role America played in the liberation of the millions of Jews being tortured in Nazi concentration camps. In any case, the State Department in Washington DC ordered that American visas be given out under more restrictive circumstances – Fry could no longer arrange to bring the refugees out of Nazi territory.

And before he himself was taken into custody, he had to return home as soon as possible. Strangely, the Vichy police aided his return. Fry’s passport had expired a long time ago, and he had long since overstayed his welcome in the country. The French chief of police in Marseilles ordered that he be deported back to America. Fry, for once, did not protest – he was taken back home.

In the end, Fry and his ERC men had saved the lives of more than a thousand people from being persecuted by the Nazis, among them famous people like Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and the like. Still, Fry himself did not feel like he had made much difference at the time – he had finally bowed down to authority, and he hated himself for it.

In saving himself, he had left behind many more in need of help and it was a thought that would haunt him for the rest of his life. What cannot be denied is that he risked himself again and again, in the middle of enemy territory to save the thousand lives he did, even if he himself did not feel worthy of the gratitude he received.

In the year 1994, Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations – his bravery and his sacrifices kept hundreds alive, even as he himself battled personal demons concerning his very identity.

Conclusion

Thank you again for downloading this book!

By now you must have understood the fact that even in cases of absolute inhumanity and the disintegration of moral values, the flame of love and selfless caring is kept burning by a few individuals who take it upon themselves to object to the evil and protect the oppressed.

These are the men and woman who are beacons of humanity and the torchbearers of a better tomorrow that let us hope against the face of adversity. This book was about a handful of such men and women.

I hope you enjoyed this book, thank you and good luck!

Other Books Written By Me

Below you’ll find some of my other popular books that are popular on Amazon and Kindle as well. You can visit my author page on Amazon to see other work done by me. (Cyrus J. Zachary).

World War 2 Women

World War 2 Women – Book 2

World War 2 Submarines

World War 2 Submarines – Book 2

Holocaust Survivor Accounts

Holocaust Survivor Accounts – Book 2

Holocaust Rescuers

Holocaust Rescuers – Book 2

If the links do not work, for whatever reason, you can simply search for these titles on the Amazon website with my name to find them.

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