Unsung heroes of the Holocaust

Larry Schwartz  
AFTER Eugenia Renot had been run over by a horse and cart near the family farm in Wengrow, Poland, her father promised her in prayer to the Catholic church.

He vowed that just as Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son Isaac, so he would give his 13-year-old daughter to God, if only she might live. Eugenia recovered, and true to his word, her father sent her off to a convent just two months after matriculation from a local school.

Weeks later, Sister Alphonsa, as she became known, arrived to take charge of children at a Catholic orphanage in Przelmysl, near the Ukrainian border. At dawn on 1September, 1939 _ soon after she arrived _ German troops invaded Poland.

Blessed with an optimism and steely determination, she would risk her life, concealing 13 Jewish children, some left at the orphanage gates by desperate parents. Few of the parents would survive to see their children again, the oldest of whom was 11, the youngest just 17 months.

Sister Alphonsa would later quit her vocation to become a nurse, marry, and as Eugenia Renot, migrate to Australia in the early 1960s. Now a widow, she lives in suburban Melbourne, with memorabilia including photographs of her mustachioed father, aged 90 when he died a few years ago, and the children who owe her their lives.

A sprightly 72 with a passion for oil painting, she is one of about 20 such unsung heroes of the war living in Australia. Eleven are expected to attend a dinner in Toorak tomorrow, after the official opening of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia.

The “Courage to Care” exhibition marks the 80th birthday of Raoul Wallenberg, the missing Swedish aristocrat who rescued nearly 100,000 Hungarian Jews.

ATTACHED to the embassy in Budapest, he designed and printed thousands of citizenship papers for neutral Sweden, housed fugitive Jews in 43 houses and four apartments he bought, got food and clothing to those on deportation trains, and removed many from death marches, with official-looking, bluff documentation, some of which is on display at the exhibition.

Last seen in the custody of the Russians on 17January, 1945, his subsequent fate is unknown. Many of the people he helped save now live in Australia. Some believe Wallenberg is still alive.

His courage highlights the deeds by the many who put their lives on the line to save Jews. “Hasideai Umot Haolam _ the Righteous Among the Nations” they are termed by Yad Vashem, the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, which has so far honored 10,000 of the righteous.

Among them are Poles, Germans, Belgians, French and others. Several on the guest list tomorrow are from Holland, where 25,000 Jews were hidden by their compatriots or helped by a strong underground network and the Dutch Reform Church. Many were denounced to the Nazis. Only a third to a half of the Dutch Jews who were hidden survived the war.

Mrs Gus Kaminski, among those living in Melbourne, was one of the brave. Her father co-ordinated the local Dutch underground, using his four children as couriers.

From 1942 to 1945, Mrs Martha Barmentloo-Nagtegaal and her family sheltered a Jewish family in their home in Rotterdam. Also in Rotterdam, Mrs Pieternella (Nell) Van Rangelrooy and her husband, John, hid five Jews in their home.

Mrs Van Rangelrooy told me some years ago after she had been honored by Yad Vashem, that despite fears for her family, she never considered asking her guests to leave. “Oh no,” she said. “Look, they couldn’t get away. Where had they to go? You couldn’t do that because they did not have a place to go.” Eugenia Renot puts it this way: “I knew I was risking all our lives to protect them, but what kind of a Christian would I have been if I put my own safety first.” Polish-born Mrs Jadzia Kostanski will take one of her two sons, Andrew, and his daughters Laura, 12, and Erin, 9, to the dinner. She wants them to learn about the heroic deeds of her husband, Jan, now overseas, and his 83-year-old mother, Wladyslawa. Together, mother and son saved four Jews, among them Jadzia Kostanski, who married her rescuer after the war.

Mrs Kostanski’s mother died when she was young and her father later married Jan’s mother Wladyslawa. During the war, Mrs Kostanski referred to the woman who became both her mother-in-law and stepmother as “mum”.

It was to Jan and his mother that Mrs Kostanski, her late father and her brother, Wierzbicki, were able to turn for help while living in the Warsaw ghetto and escape the horrors of the Holocaust.

When the transports began taking people to the Polish death camp, Treblinka, Jan Kostanski’s mother bribed Ukrainian guards to let Jadzia and her family out, along with a 17-year-old boy, Walter Cykiert, now a builder living in America. Now in her 60s, Mrs Kostanski cannot forget the day they left the ghetto, 22July, 1942.

For a time, they were able to hide in Warsaw but eventually had to move to a ghetto at a small village called Otwock, 25 kilometres away. They were living there when German soldiers arrived with Ukrainian guards to transport the community to Treblinka.

She remembers sitting near the railway station from 8am until 7pm. There was nothing to eat and it was a hot day, even hotter in the packed railway carriages which each carried up to 140 men and women. Officially each carriage held only eight horses or 40 soldiers, but these people were Jews and this was the Poland of August, 1942.

Jan Kostanski’s younger sister was living with Jadzia’s family at the time. They sent her home to “mum” with word of their plight. It was so hot in the train, scalding water dripped from the ceiling. People were dying about them, Mrs Kostanski says.

The train was to stop at Warsaw en route to Treblinka, which was at one stage receiving “5000 members of the Chosen People” a day, according to a letter written by a senior German SS officer.

Mercifully, her family never reached the dreaded destination. Jadzia Kostanski says her father, a powerful man, was able to force out the wire on a tiny window in the train and, close to Warsaw, they squeezed out, scantily clad and shoeless, into the cold night.

They were unfamiliar with the suburb but knew that Jan’s uncle lived nearby. Despite being dressed in only a thin nightdress, Jadzia emerged from hiding to ask directions of an old man guarding the patch of tomatoes he had grown. “Oh my God,” he said. “Are you not a ghost?” The old man not only told them how to get to the
street they sought, but warned them that they were likely to meet German soldiers around the block. This was 3am or 4am; the curfew lasted until 7am.

They were able to avoid the soldiers, and even the caretaker at the block of apartments who was drunk and had forgotten to lock the main entrance. Jan’s uncle was away but his wife and child were there. They contacted “mum”, who found them a flat where they could remain hidden until the end of the war.

The family migrated to Australia in 1958. At 4pm on 29April, 1984, the Israeli Ambassador presented certificates to Jan Kostanski and his mother, Wladyslawa.

Mrs Kostanski says Wladyslawa was “touched” to be honored in this way. “My children know what I went through and it means a lot to them. They are very proud of their father and what he did in the war.” Mrs Kostanski is by no means alone in her debt to others’ courage.
Melbourne survivor Harry Better owes his life to a Polish couple who kept him in their home, where he pretended to be retarded.

Born in Pawel-Mala, a village near Zjeviec in southern Poland, Mr Better was one of three children transferred with their mother to a ghetto at Sosnowiec, near Katowice, after their father had been taken to Siberia by the Russians.

A family friend managed to get Mr Better and his two sisters off a train from the ghetto she knew was heading for the death camp at Auschwitz.
Until the end of the war, he lived with the couple, Stanislaw and Anna Skowron. A young female cousin hidden with him died of pneumonia after six weeks. The Skowrons put the body in a sack and risked their lives to bury her in the Jewish cemetery one night.

Mr Better remained with the couple he called “aunt” and “uncle”. He spoke little, never went to school and, according to an account he has given to the museum, would dash out of room when people came in.

He would hide in the attic, where he had a pet mouse, in the cellar or behind a cupboard. He would often hide under a couch in the cold December of 1944 when, with the approach of the Russians, the town was declared a “war zone” and German soldiers were billeted in the house.

The Skowrons took an extraordinary risk, calling a doctor to attend the young, circumcised boy, at one stage. Devout Catholics, they took him to church but never tried to convert him. He was sent to a children’s home in Krakow at the end of the war, and was soon claimed by relatives.

Melbourne survivor Ilse Arnhold fled Amsterdam and was hidden from September 1943 by a Dutch couple, Herman and Marie van den Brink, and their children, Ap, then eight, and six- year-old Bep. The museum has recorded her experience.

THE Van den Brinks gave Ilse the main bedroom, instead sleeping in an attic, with their children in a double bed on the landing. Ilse would never venture outside the small house in daylight and very rarely at night. The children were told, “Tante Jo” had come from “the hungry city”. They knew not to inform.

Ilse busied herself doing dressmaking for them. All doors were locked at night and they would sit down to a meagre meal around a woodstove and read the Bible in the light of a kerosene lamp. “They are the best friends I ever had, completely selfless people, who risked their lives to save mine,” she said in an interview for the museum 46 years and three happy reunions later.

Eugenia Renot has a painting she copied meticulously from a postcard on the wall of her suburban home. It is a portrait of a girl, the daughter of the painter, Peter Paul Rubens. She says she painted and repainted the eyes 30 times before they were just right.

As Sister Alphonsa, she attended to Jewish charges in the orphanage with similar care. Sleeping behind a partition in the same cramped room, she nursed them through their illness with fox-gloves, valerian herb tea and, in one case, leeches.

At one stage all the children prayed for a young Jewish girl they believed was dying of pneumonia. They told themselves she was going to heaven soon, but as two of the 13 were boys and circumcised, no doctor was called during the entire war.

Sister Alphonsa begged for scraps of food for the children, and never let on that the bones of horses had been used to make the soup they drank. She even ventured into a German military hospital looking for sauerkraut, charming the officers with her bright demeanor.

Her signature was on a document with authorities, claiming all the children were Catholic, and she was at risk if found out. But she tried to put worries out of mind, even when a young Jewish girl went missing while looking for her parents and was almost caught by a woman who recognised her.

Eugenia Renot speaks a faltering English, revealing an attitude that enabled her to act as nobly as she once did. “I am a person who will never cry,” she says. “I am a person who never breaks down.” She even hid an antique Hebrew bible in the bottom of a desk, worrying that the mice as much as the Nazis might get at it. Mrs Renot later was to marry a Polish Jew, Sorbonne-educated Felix Renot who fled France for Russia, working as a shepherd for part of the war. He died in 1976. “Six foot two,” she says, showing a photograph, “a handsome man.” Four years later, Mrs Renot visited Israel to be reunited with some of the children she saved and to be honored at Yad Vashem. She shows a photograph of a grown man, once a 17-month-old left in her charge. A bearded kibbutznik, he has two young children with him.

In Tel Aviv, she was embraced by the wife of another, the oldest boy who had arrived at the orphanage when 11 years old. “Every night, I pray for you,” the younger woman said.

The Sunday Age, 28-Jun-1992