The heroic actions of Gentile rescuers who risked their lives to shelter Jews from the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust was the focus of the Jewish Federation of Dutchess County’s annual observance of Yom Hashoah, the Day of Remembrance, held in the Aula of Ely Hall at Vassar College on the afternoon of Sunday, May 4.
A keynote address on this neglected subject by Dr. Suzanne Vromen, professor emeritus of sociology at Bard College and author of “Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews From The Nazis,” was the highlight of a program which also featured a candle-lighting ceremony in honor of the six million Jews who perished, musical selections, the taking of an oath of remembrance and individual moments of silence for the dead of the various death camps.
Opening the ceremony with an invocation, Rabbi Rena Blumenthal, the assistant director of the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life at Vassar, cited a traditional Passover prayer, which asks, “That all who are hungry are fed,” and called on the gathering to live up to it by linking past and present tragedies in an ethos of compassionate action.
“Do we mean what we say when we recite this prayer?” she asked her listeners. “Today we remember not only victims but those, who at great personal risk, fed the hungry and sheltered the persecuted. May the memories we invoke today cause us to open the doors of our hearts to the hungry and persecuted of our time.”
In his introduction to the commemoration, Lee Klein, the president of the Jewish Federation of Dutchess County, recalled the role of rescuers in the family history of his wife Michelle.
“My father-in-law spent his childhood in Chelm, Poland,” he explained. “He was one of three survivors out of 10 children. They lived only because they had been sheltered by righteous Gentiles. My mother-in-law survived in France because she was sheltered by righteous Gentiles.”
In her keynote address, Vromen said that the reasons that the subject of the righteous Gentiles have not been more fully explored are complex.
“Many worried that focusing on these remarkable exceptions to the many who did nothing to help would obscure the essential fact that six million Jews were murdered,” she said. “Rescuers themselves seldom drew attention to their deeds, saying if asked that they did not think that they had done anything remarkable, just what decent human beings should be expected to do. Also, in countries with strong anti-Semitism, they feared for their safety.”
Vromen explained that, by Israeli law, one of the functions of Yad Vashem, the State of Israel’s official place of remembrance of the Holocaust, is to commemorate rescuers, but this was not done there for almost 10 years after it was established in 1953.
She said that the capture of arch-Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 was the catalyst for finally giving rescuers their due.
“Paradoxically, while the Eichmann trial revealed the full scope of the evil that had occurred, it also called attention to the heroic good that had been done,” she said. “Many of the survivors who testified at the trial related how they had been helped by Gentiles, and so it was decided to honor them by means of the Avenue of the Righteous, where each rescuer is represented by a tree.”
Examples of courage
Vromen listed several little-known examples of people of different religions who sheltered Jews, such as the head of a village in southern France who, when asked by the Nazis where the Jews were hiding, answered, “We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men.”
In our time of great tension between Muslims and Jews, it was salutary to hear her account of how the rector of a Paris mosque, a man originally from Algeria, organized the sheltering and feeding of up to 1,700 Jews, saying to the members of the mosque, “These people are in exile like ourselves, they are workers like ourselves. We must help them.”
The motivating factors for such heroic compassion are difficult to ascertain, she said. “All rescuers had to have a sense of shared humanity, but that was not necessarily enough of a catalyst for action in and of itself. Often the response of rescuers was a spontaneous one to appeals for help. The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason.”
In closing her address, Vromen affirmed that in pondering the Holocaust, “The relevant question for all of us is not, ‘What would I have done?’ Instead, we should ask, ‘What can we do now to create a world where another Auschwitz will be unthinkable?’”