Black Earth(133)

Helena Chor??yńska, an uneducated peasant woman, provided this explanation of why she took in Jews and kept them alive: “I always said that when I grew up I would never let anyone leave my house naked or hungry.” Thus the idea of hospitality was extended to the furthest, darkest reaches of human experience. Was this imagination or a lack of imagination? The German (Austrian) soldier Anton Schmid was kind to people, including Jews. Kindness required ever greater personal risk as circumstances grew ever worse; Schmid did not change as the world changed, and was one of the few Germans to be executed for saving Jews. In the letter that he wrote to his family just before his death, he did not provide grand explanations for what he had done; he said he had simply “acted as a human being” and regretted the grief he would cause by not returning home to his loved ones. Feliks Cywiński, who helped twenty-six Jews, spoke of a sense of “obligation.” Kazimiera ?u?awska recalled a “purely human sense of outrage.” Adam Zboromiski said that he needed to “feel like a human being.”

Karolina Kobylec: “That is just the way I am.”

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Jan Lipke was a Latvian who aided dozens of Jews in and around Riga. One of the people who owed his life to Lipke said that the way he behaved was “far beyond the limits of heroism and common sense.” Lipke placed his own life in jeopardy several times, acting on behalf of people with whom he had no prior connection. He himself said that his chosen course was nothing at all extraordinary, that it was “normal.” Throughout Europe, this is what rescuers said again and again: that they were behaving normally. “We regarded it as the most normal thing to help those who needed help”—thus the verdict of a Polish family who sheltered two Jews for much of the war. They were not describing the normality that they saw around them, of course. They were not acting as others acted, or following the explicit or implicit prescriptions of those in power. Their sense of normality must have come from within, or from something learned and internalized before the war, since there were few or no external sources of the norms they exemplified.

Deep in the forests or swamps, rescuers might hide Jews without many other people noticing. But in the villages and towns, where every action was noticed and commented upon, slight alterations in the motions of everyday life could trigger everyday death. Jews could not be maintained inside a house without some change in behavior outside the house. Every transaction, every exchange, every purchase, everything that in normal times happened unremarkably at the cash nexus, carried in these times an additional social meaning. A family might be murdered because an illiterate peasant bought, as a kindness for the Jews in his home, a newspaper.

Rescuers were risking death, but not in the way people risk death in a moment of wartime heroism. There were moments, of course, when rescue resembled a battle, and these are the easiest to glorify. In the stateless zones of eastern Europe, to shelter Jews meant risking one’s own life and that of one’s family, at every moment, over the course of weeks, months, or even years. The choice to rescue was not a choice of the usual kind, to be followed by other choices that might undo or obviate the first. It was a choice that, once made, impinged upon every aspect of future life for multiple people over an indefinite period. It usually demanded a certain amount of planning and a capacity to think about the future in terms other than the conventional ones. A Belarusian peasant, near Minsk, chose which of his crops to sow in the spring with a thought to providing cover for his Jewish wards in the summer and fall.

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Miron Lisikiewicz, who rescued Jews, asked: “What is money compared to the life of a human being?” The notion of acting in one’s own economic interests—for money—has little or no place here. Again and again Jews stressed that the people who aided them were, apart from everything else, either losing money or risking their lives to get the additional money they needed to keep extra mouths fed. A Polish sewer worker fed ten Jews who were hiding in the sewers of Lwów; to pay for the food, his wife sold her clothes. Jan Lipke in Riga would get angry if anyone so much as mentioned money. Bronis?awa Rozmaryn, who was given shelter in Warsaw by Helena Kawka, remembered her rescuer this way: “She risked her own life and that of her two beautiful little children in order to be able to rescue us. She did this entirely without any material motivation, wanting only to save four little Jewish children, who were wandering the streets of Warsaw without any shelter.” Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, believed that “there is not enough money in the world to make up for the constant fear of exposure.” In other words, some other consideration had to be at work aside from fear and greed.