Black Earth(124)

Jurek returned to the flaming ghetto, where he was killed as Aryeh.

—

Oswald Rufeisen was a young Zionist from southwestern Poland who spoke German as well as Polish. His parents had been subjects of the Habsburg monarchy and enrolled him in a primary school where German was the language of instruction. He was then sent to live with an aunt in Bielsko so that he could continue his schooling in a German-language gymnasium. There he joined Akiba, a Zionist organization, and learned to ride horses with a Polish friend. Rufeisen’s family was integrated into Polish society; his father served for eight years in the Polish army. Young Oswald never experienced antisemitism. Nevertheless, the idea of Zionism—of a land for the Jewish people—gave him a sense of belonging during the years that he spent away from home. When the German army invaded Poland in September 1939, he fled eastward like hundreds of thousands of other Polish Jews, with the idea of eventually reaching Palestine.

Using the Akiba network, he tried to reach a Baltic port where he could catch a ship. He got as far as Latvia, by then a Soviet republic, but was sent back by the NKVD to Lithuania. He managed to escape the border police and make his way to Vilnius, by then the capital of Soviet Lithuania, where he looked for and found fellow Akiba members. Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees had joined the hundred thousand or so Jews who were native to the city. Rufeisen took up several trades, including shoe making, to sustain himself. He found that he liked Russians, but assumed that he and other Jewish refugees in Vilnius would eventually be deported by the NKVD, just as Jews from eastern Poland had been. Instead the Germans invaded in June 1941, and Rufeisen was arrested not long after by a Lithuanian policeman in the German service. When asked for his profession he said that he was a shoemaker; this spared him from being shot at Ponary, since the Germans happened to need shoemakers. In September 1941, he observed a roundup of Jews in Vilnius and decided to hide. Seeing an intoxicated German surrounded by Polish teenagers, he took a chance and helped the man find his way. The German confided in him that he and his comrades had shot 1,700 Jews that day; this was why he was so drunk.

Rufeisen now understood what was happening to the Jews of Vilnius and decided to leave the city. A chance acquaintance offered him work on his farm just beyond its outskirts, three kilometers from the killing site at Ponary. A Belarusian veterinarian who treated the cattle there told Rufeisen that he was welcome to join his family in a safer and more isolated place and wrote him a letter of recommendation. Rufeisen decided to go. The village was called Turets and was not safe; its Jews were all murdered in November 1941, shortly before Rufeisen’s arrival. He found a job as a janitor at the school, working for meals. He took some of the clothing of the murdered Jews when it was distributed among the villagers.

The Belarusian family with whom he was living asked him to register with the police, which meant the local Belarusian auxiliary policemen serving the Germans. The police commander was so impressed with Rufeisen’s German that he tried to hire him as a German tutor. Eventually, Rufeisen came to work as a translator between the Belarusian gendarmes and the German policemen stationed at Mir. He presented himself as a Pole with a German father. He was formally employed by the German police, and wore a German uniform. Much of the work was on horseback, and he had to be present at mass shootings of Jews. At some point he met a Jew from Mir whom he had known in Vilnius, and began to pass news to him that might help local Jews. From his new position inside the German police outpost, Rufeisen warned the Jews of Mir that they were all to be killed on August 13, 1942. He even smuggled them some weapons. Some three hundred Jews escaped Mir as a result.

Denounced to the police by a Jew from Mir as the person who had provided the warning, Rufeisen admitted to his German employer that this was the case. In the course of a conversation about his motives he admitted, of his own volition, that he was Jewish. The German policeman, shocked by this confession, treated him with a good deal of sympathy, saying that Rufeisen was foolish to admit such a thing. Rather than arranging for his execution, his superior made a vague remark about how Rufeisen might somehow survive and left him unattended. Rufeisen made a break for it, and although he was pursued by the men who had been his colleagues and even fired upon, he had the impression that not all of the policemen wanted to catch him.

As he fled, Rufeisen happened to see a nun, which gave him an idea. He slipped through the gates of the local cloister of the Sisters of the Resurrection. This was an unusual order, founded by a Polish mother and daughter and devoted to the particular Polish martyrological tradition of national sacrifice. He asked the nuns for help. They were afraid. They knew that Rufeisen was a Jew and that others in the area knew this as well. They told him that they would pray for guidance. That day the homily in the sermon happened to be the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), which the two women took as a sign from God. In the story a Jew is robbed and beaten and needs help, and he is aided not by one of his own but by a member of a foreign and hostile tribe, a Samaritan. The nuns could hear the parable of the Good Samaritan as simple guidance from a place of authority to help a stranger. But as they themselves must have understood, the parable had a deeper significance. Jesus recited it while discussing with his disciples a crucial biblical passage, Leviticus 19:18: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the LORD.” Jesus told his disciples that “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” after the duty to love God with heart, soul, and mind, was the most important of God’s commandments (Luke 10:27, Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31). The disciples then wanted to know whom they should regard as their people and whom they should regard as their neighbor. It was these questions that Jesus answered with the story of the Good Samaritan, of the stranger who helps a stranger. Then he asked his disciples who was the neighbor in the story, and they answered: “He that shewed mercy on him.” Jesus then told them: “Go, and do thou likewise.”