Who Chooses the Righteous
Gentiles?
Court enters row about
non-Jews honoured for Holocaust
heroism.
By Guardian
Newspapers, 11/13/2002
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The Avenue of the Righteous records 19,141 names of
gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from
Hitler's murderers.
Among those honoured are some made famous by film, their
own tragedy or the sheer scale of their actions - Oskar
Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, the entire Danish
resistance.
But this week the Israeli courts waded into the process
of selecting who to include on the list of righteous
gentiles at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in
Jerusalem amid a campaign to add two Germans - one of
them a convicted war criminal who was at the centre of a
recent Hollywood film - and to strike off a Ukrainian who
Jewish survivors say has no place among heroes.
The court case centres on Yad Vashem's refusal to
proclaim a German Protestant minister, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, a righteous gentile.
The lawsuit was brought by the world body of reform Jews
which claims that Bonhoeffer publicly criticised the
Nazis and helped save Jews by sending them to
Switzerland, ostensibly as spies for Germany, before he
was arrested and executed in 1945.
Rabbi Uri Regev leads the campaign in Israel.
"Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi regime because,
among other reasons, he wrote a letter in an attempt to
improve the conditions of a Jewish professor. Doesn't
that prove that he acted to save Jews?" he asked.
Yad Vashem says not. The chairman of its directorate,
Avner Shalev, says the only Jew that Bonhoeffer tried to
save was a woman who converted to Christianity and rose
to a senior position in the church.
"Not only was the man an anti-Semite at the beginning of
his public career - although he does appear to have
changed his ways - not only did his opposition to Hitler
stem from his fear for the fate of the church and have
nothing to do with the Jews, but he also never actually
saved a single Jew," Mr Shalev said.
But Yad Vashem's refusal to make public the information
and discussions on which it selects righteous gentiles
has prompted unusual legal challenges that threaten to
taint the image of the organisation responsible for
preserving the memory of the Jewish people's darkest
hours.
This week, a judge ruled that the memorial council is
accountable to the Israeli public and that it must open
its files under the country's freedom of information
law.
The campaign to win recognition for Bonhoeffer has
implications for a case built around the success of Roman
Polanski's film The Pianist - the story of a Jewish
pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, in the Warsaw ghetto.
Szpilman's son, Andrzej, has for years sought recognition
for the German officer who helped his father, Wilm
Hosenfeld.
Szpilman says that Hosenfeld's diary is evidence of his
assistance to Jews.
"I just cannot understand how we have been able to commit
such crimes against defenceless civilians, against the
Jews. I ask myself again and again, how is it possible?"
Hosenfeld wrote.
Mordechai Paldiel, the director of the Righteous Among
the Nations department, rejected the application because
Hosenfeld was a uniformed German soldier who served on
the Russian front at a time when atrocities against Jews
and non-Jews alike were widespread.
After Hosenfeld was taken prisoner by the Russians at the
end of the war he was convicted of war crimes against
Polish civilians. He died in captivity in 1952.
Andrzej Szpilman says the Russians fabricated the
accusations.
Yad Vashem is facing a second, potentially more
embarrassing lawsuit, to strip someone of their place
among righteous gentiles.
Stefan Wrzemczuk submitted his own application for
recognition on the grounds that when he was a child he
helped his mother lead Jews from Ludmir ghetto - then in
Ukraine, now in Poland - to the protection of partisans
in the surrounding forests.
After Wrzemczuk had his name added to the wall of
Righteous Among the Nations he emigrated to Israel in
1995 and received a regular government stipend. Four
years ago, a group of Ludmir survivors denounced the
story as a fabrication.
"Out of the 22,000 Jews of Ludmir, only 58 survived," the
leader of the campaign, Moshe Margalit, told the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz.
"Not a single one was saved by Wrzemczuk. The partisans
we fled to never heard of him either. After so many
people from our town were murdered, it pains me that a
bastard like him should falsely receive the title of
Righteous Among the Nations."
Yad Vashem admits that there was a flaw in Wrzemczuk's
application for recognition because it was not
accompanied by the testimony of a Holocaust survivor. But
Yad Vashem says that just such a person later came
forward to back up his account.
Others have been stripped of the honour including a
German who was discovered to have helped Jews in return
for sexual favours, and a Dutchman was removed from the
list when it was discovered he was himself Jewish.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited
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