I know some 20th century European history and unfortunately for sleep hygiene, about half of my knowledge of those 100 years is focused on the 12 nightmare years 1933 - 1945.
The experience of the Holocaust in the various nations of Europe was so disparate that you have to almost wonder if there was something genetic about the non-Jewish response to the mass-murder of their Jewish neighbors.
On one side of the scale you have Denmark where between 98% and 99.3% of the Jews were saved and on the other side, Lithuania where 95% -96% of the Jews were slaughtered.*
Among the more populous countries France managed to save 75 - 77% of their 300,000-330,000 Jews.
And then there was Poland. The country with the largest European Jewish population in 1939 and the country where the German Nazis set up their industrial murder/extermination camps:
Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek/Lublin, Treblinka, Auschwitz - Birkenau.
If you ask your average 1983 - 2023 college graduate what happened at Treblinka you'll get the same look a cow gives when asked the importance of Newton's second law.
Between 750,000 and 900,000 were murdered at Treblinka, second only to the ~1.1 million toll at Auschwitz. And because it was not in operation as long as Auschwitz the murder rate was higher at Treblinka, over 1,000 per day for two years. [edited, an earlier version had the comma in the wrong place and read 10,000]
With that longer than average introduction, here's a story from the BBC four weeks before Hamas went on their Jew-killing rampage:
A beatification Mass service has been held in Poland for a Catholic family murdered by Nazis for hiding Jews during World War Two.
Poland's president and more than 30,000 pilgrims attended the outdoor service, led by Pope Francis' envoy.
This was the first time an entire family has been beatified, a great honour and a step towards sainthood.
They were executed in 1944 with the Jews they sheltered in south-eastern Poland, after they were betrayed.
In late 1942, motivated by their Christian values, farmers Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their six young children - Stanislawa, Barbara, Maria, Wladyslaw, Franciszek and Antoni - hid eight Jews in their farmhouse in the village of Markowa.
Saul Goldman, 70, was hiding with his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Mojzesz. Also there was Golda Grunfeld and her sister Lea Didner with her daughter Reszla, according to Poland's state Institute of National Remembrance.
Unlike in Nazi-occupied western Europe, the penalty for aiding Jews in occupied Poland was summary execution.
In 1944 a Polish police officer is thought to have betrayed the family by informing the Nazis of their secret.
German gendarmes shot the Jews hiding in the attic and then took the Ulma family outside, shooting Jozef and Wiktoria, who was seven months pregnant at the time, in front of their young children - the oldest was eight, the youngest 18 months. The children were then shot dead.
Several months later, members of the Polish underground resistance executed the police officer who is believed to have denounced the family....
*Lithuania is such an horrific case that it really does make you wonder if the hatred for the Jews went deeper than just sociology. The Germans required a lot of help from the locals to get that extraordinary percentage. There are lower estimates of the percentage killed but those differences mainly arise from the denominator used, the total number of Jews in Lithuania when the Nazis and their collaborators began killing. The Soviets had sent many, over 10,000 but no one is really sure of the exact number, had sent many of the Lithuanian Jews to Siberia before the Germans arrived. Those were the lucky ones.
This is a story of seven Jewish women rescued in Telšiai (Yiddish: Telz). They are: Lija Šapiro (Leye Shapiro), Eta Piker, Nija Miselevič (Niye Miselevich), Maša Richman (Masha Richman), Anna Levi, Zlata Chatimlianskaja (Chatimliansky), and Leja Šif (Leye Shif).
But it is first and foremost a story of “the aftermath”: What happened to the Lithuanian rescuers when the war ended?
On December 11, 1944, these rescued Jewish women wrote a document on how it was that the family of Sofija and Antanas Laurinaitis had rescued them. Anto Eimutis also helped the rescuers. Secondly, according to the Yad Vashem website, publicity of the rescue had grave consequences to the family (document MAB F.159, folder 58, page 3). The family’s neighbors had a negative attitude to the rescue and Sofija Laurinaitienė had to emigrate from Lithuania to Poland together with her children. Sofija was Polish, but Antanas Laurinaitis, who later came back from Germany, where the Nazis had deported him for forced labor, was not allowed by the Soviets to rejoin her and remained, alone and lonely, in Telšiai.
Lithuanian readers may have encountered this story in Ir be ginklo kariai (Soldiers Without Weapons) (ed. S. Binkienė, Vilnius, 1967). The name of the story is “Gėlės” (“Flowers”). To put it briefly: at first, Sofija Laurinaitienė accepted Lėja Šif to her home in the summer of 1941. That fall, she brought back Lija Šapiro from the Telšiai ghetto.
As the Telšiai ghetto was being liquidated in December 1941, Nija Miselevič came to Laurinaitienė. Later, they were joined by Eta Piker (Gering). To get money for food, the women made flowers from wood shavings, sold by Sofija’s brother Anton Eimutis who, as an insurance agent, could travel. Furthermore, he managed to make connections with the Šiauliai ghetto, from which he brought back Zlata Chatimlianskaja and Anna Levi to the hideout in Telšiai; another woman, Maša Richman, was brought to the Laurinaitis family by German soldier Kurt Trepner. The women’s situation became even worse after the Nazis deported Antanas Laurinaitis to Germany for forced labor.
However, they managed to successfully wait it out until the Soviet army came to Telšiai.
The rescued Jews considered Laurinaitienė a heroine and composed and signed the document on her heroic deeds. However, the people around them did not like it. There were many antisemites in Telšiai. In the summer of 1941, the funeral of Telšiai prison inmates who had been murdered by the Soviets in Rainiai, turned into an anti-Jewish riot, during which Jews were beaten up.
Tens, if not hundreds of people appropriated the wealth of murdered Jews. At the Telšiai hospital alone, a long list of twenty-three people applying for certain Jewish property was compiled (Document LCVA R1075, folder 2, book 18, pages 544–545), and it was not the only document of its sort. The people who profited from the death of Jews suddenly felt unsafe. Laurinaitienė was in danger, too, since she was Polish.
After the war, the Soviets tried to relocate the Vilnius region Poles to Poland. The circumstances of emigrating to Poland were favorable. To save herself from the suddenly arisen threats, Sofija Laurinaitienė hurriedly picked up her children and emigrated. In Poland, she stayed in Wroclaw using the Polonized name S. Lawrynowicz. Her brother Antoni Eimont emigrated, too. At the time, her husband had not yet been back from Germany. When Antanas Laurinaitis came back to Telšiai, the Soviets did not allow him to rejoin his family in Poland. One can find their story on the Yad Vashem website.
Zofija Lawrynowicz (Laurinavičienė) and her husband Antanas Laurinavičius were recognized as the Righteous Among the Nations on October 19, 2010. Antoni Ejmont was recognized as the Righteous Among the Nations on November 23, 2010, File No.: M.31.2/11795/1.
Some may say that the threat that destroyed the Laurinaitis family was not real. Lithuanian forests at the time were full of armed Lithuanian nationalist guerrillas (“the Forest Brothers”). Their attitude towards Jew rescuers is well illustrated by the famous fact: due to the guerrillas’ actions, Telšiai Bishop Borisevičius was forced to go to Alsėdžiai and negotiate with the guerrillas so that they would stop killing Lithuanians who had rescued Jews.
The aforementioned book Ir be ginklo kariai contains several stories of rescuers of Jews from the Holocaust who perished at the hands of the Forest Brothers in the years after the war....
....MUCH MORE
