Heroes and Villians

A hundred and twenty years from now, I will go the way of all mortals and face my Final Accounting.  I’ll float up to those Pearly Gates, be greeted by Saint Peter, who will take one look at me and shout out: “Hey, Elijah! This is one of yours!”

How does it all work? I’m not sure if it’s midrash or bubbe meise, but this is what was explained to me so many years ago in Hebrew School. It turns out that the Almighty isn’t really suited for judgement.  The thing is, He’s just too compassionate to decide.  Since He knows everything about your history, your frailties, and your motivations, He’s just too quick to forgive. And here’s the solution: rather than judge, the Almighty acts as chief witness for the defense and the prosecution.  The decision is then left to a jury of ten righteous men.  I’m not sure why our sages didn’t include their mothers and sisters, but that’s beside the point for now.

So, when it’s just me and Elijah, he’ll look at me grimly and sigh: “Well, this is how it is. You didn’t do that much bad, but you were capable of so much better. Frankly, most of the boys were giving you the thumbs down, but you know how KBH is. He really insisted. Bottom line: no Eternal Damnation for you. Welcome to Olam Habah.”

I’m sure I’d be grateful, but just imagine the tsuris I put the Almighty through. With all His wisdom and all His understanding, He doesn’t trust Himself to make up His mind about me. And if the Almighty has trouble with judgement, how much more difficult must it be for me? I have no way of comprehending the full context of someone else’s life. I can’t tease out good and evil among all those shades of gray.

This recalls a detail from Sefer Bereshit, the Book of Genesis.  To be sure, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all revere the story of Noah’s Ark. I don’t know how it’s taught in churches and mosques, but virtually any rabbi will focus on Noah being “good for his age.” Meaning, Noah was not necessarily such a paragon of virtue, but his generation was so evil that he was good in comparison. This has always fascinated me.  After all, times change, attitudes evolve, and knowledge increases. Maybe someone did something a few centuries ago that is horrible by today’s standards, but just wasn’t so bad way back then. Or maybe it was just as horrible. How can I judge?

Let’s consider the following: suppose you were living in the Antebellum or Jim Crow Deep South.  It’s the middle of the night, and you hear a pounding on the door. You check it out, and it’s a frightened black man, running from a lynch mob.  If you hide him in your basement, or find a way to help him escape, then certainly you be considered good for your age.  Really, you’d be good for any age.  Conversely, if you attack him and then help with the hanging, you’d be evil for any age. But what if you just slam the door. When the mob shows up, you deny having seen him.  Arguably, that might make you good for that miserable age.

Admittedly, that’s all a bit theoretical.  How about something that happened with some frequency during the Holocaust?  Desperate families would go to great lengths to save their children. Some were lucky enough to get their kids out of the war zone entirely. Others turned to sympathetic Gentile neighbors. And some youngsters survived under the loving protection of Catholic priests, monks, and nuns.

After the war, many of these children were reunited with their families, at least, what was left of them. But the Church refused to give up many of their charges, who were now baptized as Christians and could no longer be given back to the Jews. Some of the survivors were shuffled around from monastery to nunnery as the Church fought court battles to retain custody. One young man who was ultimately returned to distant cousins in Israel said that he was taught that Jews were all going to hell.

It shouldn’t surprise any of you to hear that this brings my blood to a furious boil. You’d think that Edgardo Mortara’s experience was so nineteenth century. Still, how does this compare to Pope Pius XII and the rest of the hierarchy? Although there were some notable exceptions, Church archives opened in 2020 show that the Vatican knew about Nazi atrocities in great detail and did nothing to prevent or even slow down the murders.  Sure, they would occasionally call for baptized Jews to be imprisoned separately from rest of the Christ killers.  But the only institution in Fascist Europe that really could have made a difference just turned away.

At least the priests, monks, and nuns I mentioned above kept children alive. Maybe that qualifies as good for the age.

Or maybe not.  All this gray area stuff is just way above my paygrade.  It makes my moral center hurt. So for this stemwinder, I’m going to stick to the endpoints.  I’ll try to contrast some examples from the Righteous Among Nations with some of the worst of the Nazi perpetrators. This might lead to some mental whiplash, but it really is important to see how different choices were made in the most hideous chapter of human history.

But it does leave me with a problem.  Walk into a library with a Holocaust section, and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a book full of evil.  On the other hand, stories about saving Jews and other victims are not as well-known as they should be. Sure, Yad Vashem has a lot of useful information available for online searching, but I came across something much more suited to my limited intellect.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes do Amaral e Abranches was the greatest Portuguese hero since Vasco da Gama, and probably even greater.  He may have saved even more Jews from the Shoah than did Raoul Wallenberg. I was lucky enough to meet his son and granddaughter about twenty years ago.  They set up a foundation to honor his memory.  If you go to the Sousa Mendes Foundation’s website (https://sousamendesfoundation.org/) and click on “Store”, you too can become the proud owner of “Heroes of the Holocaust – Rescuer Playing Cards.” Which I did. So with no further ado…

Let’s start with Johan Westerweel, the Ten of Hearts. According to his card: “A Montessori educator, he formed a rescue team that arranged for members of a Zionist pioneer organization to escape through Belgium and France toward the Spanish border, on the hoped-for way to Palestine. He was arrested by the Germans and executed. His daughter Marta later settled in Israel and said, ‘In the Netherlands I was a fatherless child. Here in Israel I became my father’s daughter. I know the survivors endured terrible tragedies, but in a way, I envy them, because they knew my father.’”

Going to the other side of the moral spectrum, here’s something I picked up in William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” Dr. Sigmund Rascher was attending a medical course by the Luftwaffe where he learned that there was no good research into the effects of high altitudes on pilots. He wrote to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler saying, “no tests with human material had yet been possible as such experiments are very dangerous, and nobody volunteers for them.”  The Good Doctor asked the Good Reichsführer if he could “make available two or three professional criminals for these experiments.” To which Himmler replied: “prisoners will, of course, be made available gladly for the high-flight research.”

Here is one of Rascher’s observations: “The third test was without oxygen at the equivalent of 29,400 feet altitude conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general condition. Respiration continued for 30 minutes. After four minutes the TP [test person] began to perspire and roll his head. After five minutes spasms appeared; between the sixth- and tenth-minute respiration increased in frequency, the TP losing consciousness. From the eleventh- to the thirtieth-minute respiration slowed down to three inhalations per minute, only to cease entirely at the end of that period. About half an hour after breathing had ceased, an autopsy was begun.”

An Austrian inmate who worked in Rascher’s office describe the experiments “less scientifically”: “They would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream.”

Two hundred prisoners were subjected to this treatment.

But back to the heroes: Elisabeth Abegg, the Two of Hearts: “A schoolteacher dismissed for her anti-Nazi beliefs, she provided her Jewish students with meals in her Berlin home and found them sheltering places in various locations. She sold her jewels to defray costs for those planning to flee to Switzerland.” Furthermore, “She was a German teacher who saved her Jewish students and their families. She said, ‘Nazism has brought with it a lot of evil, and I am a firm opponent of this regime.’ According to Ludwig and Steffy Collm, who were saved by her, ‘People like Elisabeth Abegg gave us back our faith in mankind and proved to us again and again that true humanity has not yet died in the world.’”

There’s a strikingly comprehensive book in our library, although it leaves out any mention of Sousa Mendes: “The Holocaust Chronicle – A History in Words and Pictures.” Here’s what it says about Otto Ohlendorf: “From June 1941 to June 1942, Otto Ohlendorf commanded Einsatzgruppe D. This extermination squad operated in the Crimea-Caucasus region, where Ohlendorf ordered the slaughter of 90,000 people. Justifying his actions at his trial in 1947, he asserted his utter conviction in the ‘military necessity’ of the killings. ‘Jews,’ he argued, ‘posed a continuous danger for German occupation troops and might someday attack Germany.’ As for murdering children, he reasoned they ‘were people who would grow up and, being the children of parents who had been killed, would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents.’ To ease ‘the immense psychological burden’ of personal responsibility, he ordered his executioners to shoot simultaneously at victims. During the trial, women sent flowers to the cell of the handsome defendant, who was sentenced to hang for his crimes.”

Simon Gallay, the Five of Hearts: "A Catholic priest in Evian-les-Bains, he helped many Jews and non-Jews to flee illegally from Nazi-occupied France into neutral Switzerland. One family that he helped was that of Mordecai Paldiel, who later became a world expert on Holocaust rescuers. This priest saved Dr. Mordecai Paldiel and his family, among many others. Hinde Wajsfeld, Dr. Paldiel's mother, said: “I was crying and wanted to give him my wedding ring in return for his good deed, but he said to me, ‘My dear lady, keep the ring. Just remember me.’ I remember him to this day — his lovely and friendly face.” "

Something else from the “Holocaust Chronicle”: “As dawn broke on July 13, 1942, Major Wilhem Trapp. 53, the beloved commander of German Reserve Police Battalion 101, addressed his men near Jozefow, a village with 1800 Jews in the Generalgouvernement of Nazi-occupied Poland. Mostly middle-aged family men who had been in Poland less than three weeks, the members of the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) heard the teary-eyed major explain that the battalion had been ordered to round up Jozefow’s Jews. They were to select the able-bodied males for labor, and then shoot everyone else – women, children, and the elderly. Trapp’s explanation included a significant option: Those Ordnungspolizei who could not perform the task did not have to kill. Murder, in other words, was not mandatory. About a dozen members of the 500-man battalion accepted this offer. The rest murdered 1500 of Jozefow’s Jews. By the end of 1943, Reserve Police Battalion 101 – in conjunction with other Order Police killing units – had shot 38,000 Jews and helped to deport another 45,000 to Treblinka.”

Irena Sendler, the Queen of Hearts: “A social worker, she was allowed visits inside the Warsaw ghetto, supposedly for sanitation purposes. She smuggled hundreds of children out of the ghetto in coordination with Zegota, a clandestine Polish organization created to help Jews survive.”

One last bit from the “Holocaust Chronicle,” this one about women camp guards: “The SS included within its ranks female volunteers who guarded female inmates at the concentration and death camps. Relatively few in number, these women sometimes exceeded their male counterparts in cruelty. Irma Grese, nicknamed the ‘Belle of Auschwitz,’ became a guard as a teenager and rose through the hierarchy to oversee nearly 20,000 women prisoners. Grese took special pleasure in watching the doctors at Auschwitz perform disfiguring surgeries on women. The Ravensbrück, Germany, concentration camp for women contained a training camp to prepare women to become camp supervisors. Some 3500 women who trained at Ravensbrück served as guards at other camps. Hildegard Mende worked at Theresienstadt. While a few guards exhibited kindness towards their prisoners, most followed the harsh camp rules, and beat and humiliated their prisoners. Few sought to intercede on inmates’ behalf. Some guards even competed with one another in cruelty, believing that was the route to promotion and respect from their male superiors. One prisoner reported that women were even worse than men in commanding their dogs to brutally attack inmates. Another prisoner attested that a female guard requested permission to watch the gassings at Auschwitz, a pastime she particularly enjoyed.”

Nicholas Winton, the King of Hearts: “A London stockbroker, he organized the life-saving evacuation of 669 Jewish children from Prague to England, where he found families to host them throughout the war years. He lived until the age of 106 and was widely honored.”

Dimitar Peshev, the Seven of Clubs: “After the government agreed to turn over Bulgarian Jews to the Germans for deportation, as Deputy Speaker of the Parliament, he got 43 deputies to sign a letter of protest to the prime minister and the king. As a result, the deportation was voided, but he was punished and fined.”

Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, the King of Clubs: “A US army sergeant, and a prisoner of war in Germany, he refused a Nazi officer's demands to point out the Jews among the US war prisoners. He defiantly and courageously replied, ‘We are all Jews here.’”

Chiune Sugihara, the Ace of Clubs: “As a diplomat stationed in Lithuania, he issued Japanese transit visas to thousands of Jews, enabling them to leave Lithuania to go to Japan, via the Soviet Union, from where they would travel to other destinations. Today he is a national hero in Japan.”

Panandreou Damaskinos, the Three of Hearts: “As head of the Greek Orthodox church, he publicly protested the persecution of Jews and ordered his church to help Jews avoid deportations by various rescue actions including shelter in church institutions.”

Andree Saloman, the Six of Hearts: “A leading rescue activist in the OSE (Jewish children welfare organization), she is credited with saving hundreds of children, by either organizing their escape from French internment camps and their hiding with false identities or their flight into neutral Spain and Switzerland.”

Lorenzo Perrone, the Seven of Hearts: “A bricklayer whose company was assigned a work detail in Auschwitz, he met there a fellow Italian prisoner, the writer Primo Levi, and decided to help him survive with food stolen from the workers' kitchen, warm clothing, and contact with his family in Italy.” “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today”, said the writer Primo Levi, “for his having constantly reminded me by his natural plain manner of being good that there still existed a just world outside our own for which it was worth surviving. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.”

Gustav Schroder, the Nine of Hearts: “A German ship captain, he saved over 900 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis, defying orders to return them to Nazi Germany after they were denied admission into Cuba and the United States. Instead they were discharged in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK.”

So, where am I going with all of this?  It seems I can in fact paint in broad strokes.  Even without rabbinical ordination or a master’s degree in theology, I can tell the difference between good and evil, if the chasm is gaping enough. But it’s not always so simple.

Here’s something I read in an excerpt from the recently published “Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century” by Tobias Buck. This took place in West Germany in the 1950’s.

“The ten men on trial in Ulm had belonged to the Einsatzkommando Tilsit, and stood accused of murdering more than 5,500 Jewish men, women, and children in the border region between Germany and Lithuania in 1941. The case came to light not because of diligent work by police and prosecutors but because the most senior member of the group, a former Nazi police chief by the name of Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, had been too brazen even by the standards of 1950s Germany.”

“The Tilsit killings were remarkably well-documented, as was the cold-blooded eagerness with which some of the accused had taken part in the slaughter: in one instance, the men had even posed for souvenir photos after the shooting was done. Fischer-Schweder had put together an execution squad from forces under his command on his own initiative (he had in fact only been asked to supply men to guard the surrounding area). The verdict made clear that he also played a key role in the actual shootings, checking on victims after the first salvo and providing the coup de grâce to those still alive.”

“Even though Fischer-Schweder was a senior SS officer and a committed Nazi, who had volunteered for the mass killings and fired his own gun, the court found him guilty only as an accessory, a minor figure who had merely helped carry out the crime. ‘All of the accused who took part in the shootings at Garsden… acted in response to an order, not with the will of the perpetrator but the will of the accessory,’ the judges found. The men had not wanted to commit the crime ‘as their own’ but had wanted to support someone else’s crime. They were, the verdict said, nothing but ‘tools of the Führer.’ Fischer-Schweder was sentenced to ten years in prison. The other nine defendants were given prison terms of between three and fifteen years.”

I guess the court thought these guys were good for their age, or at least not so bad for their age.

I recently watched “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris, which was based on the experiences of Lale Sokolov. The production is fictionalized and has been criticized as ahistorical. This may have been due to Morris’s embroidery, but it seems clear that Sokolov was burdened by some of his actions.  For example, after Sokolov is chosen by the SS for his new duties, a young man who had saved Sokolov’s life is selected in his place for the gas chamber. Is that detail accurate?  It hardly matters.  When the Nazis were looking for a specific number of victims to fill the day’s quota, it was very much a zero-sum game. Sokolov performed special tasks for his captors in return for some small, albeit lifesaving, privileges. Surely, he faced resentment from the other prisoners. Fairly or not, they might not have viewed him as good for his age. Whatever survivor’s guilt Sokolov suffered, the most important thing is that he did survive.

After the war ended, a number of “Jewish Honor Courts” were established throughout Europe. Understandably, it was necessary to fend off vigilante justice as well as reestablish Jewish civil society. From what little I know, these courts performed their function well. Still, I can’t imagine the pain that must have surrounded these proceedings. Clearly, some Jews rightfully deserved punishment, which usually meant ostracization. But some claimed that any cooperation with the Nazis was beyond the pale. Given what we know now, it is easy to see that the Nazis had been intent on extermination for years. It might not have been that obvious to some Judenrat member who felt he was helping his community, or to a parent trying to keep children alive for just another day.

Before I conclude, I need to come clean about something. Several years ago, I took a class with Professor Alan Cooper.  He is the Elaine Ravich Professor of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. But more important than any of that: he was with Sha Na Na when they performed at Woodstock.

Well, he has a different take on that whole “good for his age” business. If you remember, a little bit before Noah gets his first mention, some divine creatures came down from heaven and diddled human women, which gave rise to some mixed offspring. Not part of the Almighty’s plan at all.  Applying the methods of source criticism, Professor Cooper compared the Noah story with other ancient writings and concluded that our sages were just wrong. Rather than a comparison of antediluvian moralities, being good for his age was just a way of saying that Noah was, happily, of pure human blood. No divine creatures in his family tree!

Does this invalidate everything I’ve expressed here?  Haven’t a clue.

Now, go and study.