Pierre Piprot D’Alleaume
France
A devout Catholic and a highly educated man, PIERRE PIPROT D’ALLEAUME opened a hotel school in Marseilles to save about 15 Jewish girls whom he took in as employees. Among them was LORE BEITMAN, who now lives in Wilmington.
She was born Lore Bermann in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, in what is now West Germany, in 1925. In the first deportation in Europe, Lore was deported from the Pfalz region with her mother and other relatives, and sent to the Gurs camp in the Pyrenees, where her grandmother died of malnutrition.
When the large deportation started in September 1942, Lore’s mother was sent to Auschwitz, and died either there or along the way.
In early 1943, Lore was taken in by Pierre Plprot D’Alleaume and given an assumed name to make it seem that she had come from the Alsace-Lorraine region. Lore became Jeanne Durst. She was 18.
To cover up his employment of the Jewish girls, Piprot took in an equal number of French non-Jews. Piprot’s hotel was an island of sanity and freedom amidst a sea of horror. With the Germans positioned on the mountains overlooking Marseilles, Piprot nonetheless was able to protect Lore and the others from even hearing of the Nazi barbarism and slaughter of the Jews. The girls felt completely free.
The Unknown Righteous Gentile
Among untold numbers of Jews who survived the Holocaust because of the actions of Unknown Righteous Gentiles, DOROTHY KRAUSE FINGER of Wilmington was hidden by a Christian man in a barn in Stanislavov.
Most Righteous Gentiles remained anonymous for self preservation: If they had been found out, the Nazis would have killed them and their families. Others wished to stay anonymous for various personal reasons.
Born in Stanislavov in August 1929, Dorothy Krause was locked up in the attic of a barn for three days in March 1943 while the city was being rid of Jews. She and 11 other Jews, including her mother, had paid the man to hide them there.
Their lives thus having been spared during the Nazi purge of their city, Dorothy and the other Jews left the man’s house at night and ran to another small city which still had a ghetto.
Dorothy subsequently survived through the war in three ghettoes, a labor camp and the forest near Przemyslany in Galicia.
Living a nomadic forest existence, she lived in the forest with six other Jews for exactly a year, from July 27, 1943, until the area was liberated by the Russian army on July 27, 1944.
Odille Ceulemans-Gryson and Betty Shain
Louis And Odille Ceulemans-Gryson
Belgium
LOUIS CEULEMANS, a carpenter, and his wife, ODILLE CEULEMANS-GRYSON, lived in the countryside near Brussels, where they saved a Jewish baby named Betti Blaugrund, who grew to become BETTY SHAIN of Wilmington.
Betty was born in Brussels in July 1942. A month later, the Nazis began raiding and rounding up the Jews of Brussels, storming into their homes and removing them in masses to be taken to their deaths.
To survive, Jews went into hiding. Because babies cry and make noise, it became dangerous for Betty’s parents to keep her with them. They were advised to hide her.
Through some friends, Betty’s parents located a police chief who had a sister-in-law living in Aaroschot, a small country village in the Belgian province of Brabant. Her name was Odille Ceulemans-Gryson. She and her husband, Louis—who were in their 40s and had a married daughter who was about 20—were willing to take in a child.
The couple fed Betty well, gave her the best care. Every month, at the risk of their lives, the couple took Betty to her parents, who were hiding in Brussels, so they could see her.
The couple told others that Betty was a child of working people in the city. They could never tell a soul that Betty was Jewish.
The couple kept Betty until the war ended, constantly showing her the photographs of her real parents. The pictures were kept in a cupboard in the house. Betty began referring to her parents aMother s Cupboard and Father Cupboard.
Betty was 2 years old when Belgium was liberated in September 1944.
Many documented cases exist of Christian families who adopted Jewish children during the Holocaust, in order to convert them from the religion of their birth. But Louis and Odille Ceulemans-Gryson, both of whom were Catholic, never attempted to convert Betty. As soon as the war ended, they willingly returned her to her parents.
Louise Ceulemans passed away a few years ago, but his wife is still alive in Belgium.
Noel Barrot
France
In the small town of Yssingeiux in the Haute Loire region of central France, a pharmacist named NOEL BARROT took the responsibility to save BLANKA FALEK and her son, GEORGE, from the hands of the Nazis.
Born Blanka Israelovitch in Tarnow, near Karakow, Poland, she studied at the University of Krakow, then moved to France in 1935.
With George, who was 4 years old, Blanka moved from place to place in 1942 as the Nazis began deporting Jews from France. In the mountains around Marseilles, Blanka befriended a Mr. Malecinski, a Polish diplomat who had been a military attaché in Moscow before the war, and his wife. Because he was a high military official, he and his wife were protected in a Polish camp in Marseilles. Mrs. Malecinski, a Polish aristocrat, told others that Blanka was her cousin.
Through Mr. and Mrs. Malecinski, Bianka and George met Noel Barrot, who gave them a room next door to his pharmacy in Yssingeiux, where they stayed in 1943 and 1944. In addition to making sure they had enough to eat, Barrot provided moral support to the young mother and her child. Barrot saw to it that Blanka obtained a document saying her name was Irakovitch. No one bothered her, because she was in the company of Barrot.
Barrot instructed Blanka to knock on the wall between the two buildings if trouble approached, and he would come to her aid. Several times, the Gestapo came to the town. But they did not bother Blanka and her son.
Bianka’s brothers, sisters, and about 70 other members of her family, all were murdered in Poland. But Bianka and George were saved because of the courageous action of Noel Barrot.
After the war, Barrot became mayor of Yssingeiux, then was elected congressman from the Haute Loire region in the De Gaulle government. His son, Jacques Barrot, became minister of health under Giscard-D’Estaing.
During a 1964 session of the French National Assembly, Noel Barrot suffered a heart attack and died in the arms of a colleague.
Blanka Falek lives in Dover, where she is retired from a teaching career at Dover High School. Her son, George, lives in Wilmington.
Leopold Socha and Stefan Wroblewski
Poland
Under the city of Lvov, ten Jews lived in a sewer for fourteen months, never able to stand up, never seeing the sun. Although the sewer systems of European cities served as hiding places and passageways for many Jews during the Holocaust, these 10 Jews constitute the only group known to have survived such existence for that length of time. They are probably the only group ever to have lived in a sewer for so long.
Among them was a young lady, barely in her 20s, named Halina Wind. Although she weighed 70 pounds when she emerged from the sewer on July 27, 1944, her strength gradually returned to her. It was that strength which enabled her, as HALINA WIND PRESTON of Wilmington, to teach the Holocaust to all who would listen, for more than 30 years.
She never forgot those who perished. Likewise, she never forgot those Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. And so, in November 1981, when she arranged a tree-planting ceremony in front of Wilmington’s Jewish Community Center to honor Righteous Gentiles, she saw to it that two of the trees honored two Christian sewer workers who had saved her: LEOPOLD SOCHA and STEFAN WROBLEWSKI.
Socha was the leader of a three-man sewer worker team that toiled in the area of the Jewish ghetto of Lvov. A deeply religious Catholic, Socha made a deal with a Jew named Ignacy Chigier to save a small group of Jews, including Chigier’s wife, Pepa, and their two children, Pavel, 4, and Kristina, 7.
On the night of the liquidation of the Lvov ghetto, Halina Wind found herself among more than 200 people who went down into the sewers. Most of them drowned, or were caught and shot. On the following day, Halina was among the 21 survivors.
For 14 months, Socha and Wroblewski faithfully provided for their Jews, moving them when their safety was danger, feeding them, washing their clothes, visiting them every day except Sunday.
“Finally, the money ran out. Someone suggested that since it had been Chigier’s money, he should stay in the sewer with his family, and the others should go. But Socha said: Either you all survive, or nobody. As long as you are under my jurisdiction, and I am responsible for you, you are all equal. How do you know which one of you is destined to survive?’
Only 10 of the original 21 survived the 14-month ordeal. A few were unable to take it anymore, and chose to be shot on the outside rather than to live with rats in the sewer. The oldest among them, a grandmother died quietly in the night, and they let her body float away. The youngest, a baby who was born in the sewer, was left to die because they could not risk the noise of a crying infant.
After the Russians liberated the city, Socha came to liberate the 10 Jews from the sewer.
“They came out slowly. When it was Pavel’s turn, he began to cry. He was now little more than 5 years old, and he had forgotten what the sun and sky looked like. ‘I’m afraid, I’m afraid,’ the boy said. ‘I want to go back to the sewer.’*
But none of them ever had to spend another night in a sewer.
Socha and Wroblewski are honored at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as Righteous Gentiles.
Socha was run down by a truck in Gliwice, Poland, in 1946. His wife still lives there.
Wroblewski and his wife also are living in Gliwice.
Halina Wind Preston died a year ago, on Dec. 2 1982, after open-heart surgery at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia. She was 60 years old.
*© 1983 The Philadelphia Inquirer. From A Bird in the Wind by David Lee Preston, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, May 8, 1983.
King Christian of Denmark, the Danish Church and the Danish People
Denmark
Copenhagen’s Freedom Museum stands today to tell the dramatic story of the Danish resistance during the German occupation from April 9, 1940 (when the Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter headlined the news of the invasion “Germany Saves Scandinavia”) until the Allied victory in 1945.
When the Danes were not blowing up ships and railroads, radioing intelligence to the Allies and otherwise defying the Nazis, they were busy smuggling Jews out of the country or hiding them in the homes of Christians.
Because of the heroic stand by the Danish king and his countrymen, most of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews escaped arrest by the Gestapo and deportation to the concentration camps.
Raoul Wallenberg
Hungary
Because of the great numbers of Hungarian Jews whom he saved through personal intervention with the Nazis, the Swedish diplomat RAOUL WALLENBERG stands alone among Righteous Gentiles, occupying a special place in the annals of heroism and in the hearts of our people.
In Wallenberg’s name, a tree stands in Wilmington’s Garden of the Righteous Gentiles, planted by VERA LORANT of Wilmington, one of the estimated 100,000 Jews whom he rescued from certain death in Budapest at the hands of SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief logistician of Hitler’s Final Solution. Wallenberg performed a heroic role of legendary proportion in what was the last substantial urban Jewish community left alive in Nazi-dominated Europe. Eichmann was determined to deport all the Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz; Wallenberg was equally resolved to rescue as many as possible—a task he had volunteered to carry out on behalf of the U.S. War Refugee Board.
In a bitter twist of fate, this fearless young man was arrested as spy by the advancing Russian liberators on Jan. 17, 1945, while trying to approach them about helping the Jews of Budapest. According to reports, he may still be alive today in the Siberian Gulag. If he is, he would be 71 years old.
Sent to Budapest by the Swedish. government to extricate as many victims from Hitler’s grasp as possible, Wallenberg created special passports—which he designed—and for a time the Nazis were thwarted. Soon he had a staff of 400 “protected” Jews working for him, their offices spread throughout the city.
Wallenberg biographer Kati Marton provides a glimpse of one confrontation between the Swede on the one side and Eichmann and Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann’s deputy in Budapest, on the other:
“…A voice, unemotional, strong, with just a trace of an aggressive edge, a voice ready to do battle, had spoken. Eichmann and Wisliceny spun round. ‘I’m Wallenberg, Swedish Legation” was all the explanation he provided.
” ‘You there!’ The Swede pointed to an astonished man, waiting for his turn to be handed over to his executioner. ‘Give me your Swedish passport and get in that line,’ he barked. ‘And you, get behind him. I know I issued you a passport.’ Wallenberg continued, moving fast, talking loud hoping the authority in his voice would somehow rub off on these defeated people. Eichmann did no relish public confrontations. He preferred a quiet, well-ordered passage from life to death. He would have to spare a few bodies for this strange, determined Swede.
“The Jews finally caught on. The started groping in pockets for bits of identification. A driver’s license or birth certificate seemed to do the trick. The Swede was grabbing them so fast; the Nazis, who couldn’t read Hungarian anyway, didn’t seem to be checking. Faster, Wallenberg’s eyes urged them, faster, before the game is up. In minutes he had several hundred people in his own convoy. International Red Cross trucks, there at Wallenberg’s behest, arrived, and the Jews clambered on. Wisliceny resumed his interrupted head count. ‘Funf and vierzig, sechs and vierzig…’
“Wallenberg jumped into his own car. He leaned out of the car window and whispered, ‘I am sorry,’ to the people he was leaving behind. ‘I am trying to take the youngest ones first,’ he explained. ‘I want to save a nation'”**
By January 1945, Eichmann had fled the city.
Oct.5, 1981,President Reagan signed the resolution by which Wallenberg joins the Marquis de Lafayette’s descendants and Winston Churchill in being thus distinguished. It is more than a symbolic memorial. The members of Congress hope to have more impact on the Kremlin when pressing for further information regarding the whereabouts of an American citizen.
Born Veronika Scheer in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1926, VERA LORANT of Wilmington owes her life to the personal intervention of RAOUL WALLENBERG.
Living with her parents in suburban Budapest, Vera was in her final year of gymnasium when her father received a call from a Jewish friend in the early morning hours of March 18, 1944.
The message was deliberately cryptic. The professor had found out that the Germans were on their way to Hungary, and he wanted Vera’s father to bring his family out of the suburbs immediately.
Vera’s parents did send her to Budapest on the first train, but unfortunately they decided to stay behind for a couple of days to put their house in order. Vera, who was 17 and an only child, never saw her parents again.
In Budapest, Vera took a job in the professor’s hospital, where he trained her and his daughter as surgical nurses.
Vera’s cousin, his wife and their son rented a house from the Swedish embassy in Budapest, next-door to the
embassy. They knew Wallenberg well. When they told him that Vera’s mother had been arrested, Wallenberg went to find her. He went to a camp in the outskirts of Budapest where Jews were being gathered for transport to Auschwitz. Armed with schutz-passes, or passports, which he had created to make all the Jews in the camp Swedish citizens, Wallenberg arrived at the camp — only to find that the previous night the Germans had moved 1,500 people to Auschwitz. Among them was Vera’s mother.
Vera continued working at the hospital until the Germans took it over in August 1944. Vera’s cousin then brought her to the Swedish embassy set up by Wallenberg, where she took a job.
Wallenberg twice saved Vera from death at the hands of the Arrow Cross. One of the close calls happened as follows:
Wallenberg had set up his organization to assist with food and medical care and security at Swedish protected homes along a five-or six-mile stretch from his embassy. Vera and the other workers were expected to arrive at checkpoints along the way for security reasons. If someone did not show up, a search party would be sent out.
In late December 1944, Vera was two blocks from her destination in this area when she was caught by Arrow Cross thugs who refused to accept her identification. They took her to the banks of the Danube, where Jews were being shot.
Wallenberg, alerted to Vera’s absence from the checkpoint, rushed to the river, where he was able to rescue her.
Acknowledgements:
© 1981 John Bierman, Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Mission Hero of the Holocaust (The Viking Press, New York)
** © 1982 Kati Marton, Wallenberg (Random House, New York)
Ger And Gerard Van Raan
Holland
“We did it because we felt we ought to do it.”
That is how GER VAN RAAN matter-of-factly sums up the valor of herself and her husband, GER, during the Nazi occupation of their native Holland, when they protected two Jewish boys in their home in The Hague.
The Van Raans, who now live in Ardentown, Del., north of Wilmington, are true heroes in our midst, and they are honored with a tree in our Garden.
In 1942, the Van Raans were newlyweds.
Ger was a nurse, and one of her friends was a nurse in the Underground. This friend, who found shelter for Jewish children and took food coupons to people who harbored Jews, approached Ger and Gerard and asked if they would care for a Jewish child.
Despite the tremendous risk involved, the newlyweds said they would.
RUDOLF KLYNKRAMER was 8 years old when the Van Raans picked him up from his parents in Amsterdam.
Then a couple of months later, the young couple were asked whether they also would take in an 8-month-old boy, RUDOLF LIEBKNECHT. The Van Raans agreed to accept this added responsibility.
The Van Raans told others that these two children were sons of Gerard’s oldest brother, who they said was in Indonesia and unable to return to Holland because of the war. They said the man’s wife was ill in a hospital and thus unable to care for the boys.
Because both boys were named Rudolf, the Van Raans gave the baby the name of Peter to distinguish him from his “brother.”
Still, there were many close calls.
The Van Raans had a friend who was engaged to a Jewish man, to whom they gave Gerard’s identification card in case the Nazis should grab him.
One day, while Gerard was in bed with pneumonia and Rudy was fishing in the park, this friend came to the Van Raan house in tears.
“Last night my fiance was picked up from a trolley car and sent away,” she said urgently. “You have to go.”
Because the man had been holding Gerard’s identification, it would be unsafe for the Van Raans to remain. They picked up and went to stay with an aunt of Ger’s in a little village for a few days.
Later, after they returned home, they found out that the Jewish man produced no papers at the police station. Wisely, he had discarded Gerard’s identification. This man never was seen again. His name was Sigmund Boekdrukker.
And so, in an ironic twist of fate, the Van Raans owned their lives to a Jew whom they had tried to save. When they had a son of their own later, the Van Raans named him Sigmund.
The baby, Peter, now resides in Israel, where he is known by his true name of Rudolf.
Also honored were Terry Danemann of Dover, Josef Tunkewicz, now deceased, of White Russia, an Mr. Krivienko of Poland.
Mrs. Dannemann, born in Przemysl near the Carpathian Mountains in Galicia, was saved by an unknown Christian. Tunkewicz saved the live of at least 10 Jews. Krivienko and his wife saved the life of Minna Kassow Kraut, now living in Philadelphia.
Thanks to many contributors to the Halina Wind Preston Holocaust Education Committee who made this memorial possible.