A Glimmer of Humanity in a Dark Chapter of History
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“I never thought that for doing something good but normal, the humane thing, one can receive any compensation in this world.” These were the words of Bronislawa Bakun, aged 90, last week upon hearing that she would be recognized by the Claims Conference Righteous Rescuer Pension Fund.
Bronislawa lives near the small village of Janów, Sokolka, in Northeast Poland, the former shtetl from which my grandfather came. It was on a visit that I made to the village last year that I first met her. She is not a Holocaust survivor; she bears a title even more rare. She is a Righteous Rescuer. This small population of people are non-Jews who saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust, risking their own lives and the lives of their families in the process. The round-up by the Nazis of 950 Jews from Janów took place on November 2, 1942. As Bronislawa describes it, “The Germans ordered the Poles to load these poor people onto carts and take them to a transfer point, from where they were to continue on to Kiełbasin-camp.” The fate of most of the inhabitants of Janów was described in testimony given in 1947 by Abraham Lipcer, aged 16, one of a small number of survivors of the shtetl. Six weeks after the roundups, many were transported to their death in Treblinka.
“Some Jews escaped, and some of them ended up first with our neighbors and then with us,” Bronislawa said. “During the day, they hid in the woods. At night they came to our house … Józef (the neighbor) and my father cooperated all the time in hiding Jews. There was a forest between our farm and theirs, quite a young forest, with two-meter pine trees growing there. Father and Józef dug a ditch there so that the Jews could hide in case of emergency … There were always six or eight of these people. It was very crowded there, but they would stay there all day and come to us at night. Because it was quiet at night. … The hardest time was in winter, when it snowed, because then the Jews left footprints in the snow. Józef and my father always had to sweep them so that it wouldn’t be visible. You had to take a horse, put on a plough and ride over these tracks. Another neighbor once came to us and asked my father why he rode his horse in the field in the winter? Dad replied that it was because the mare had a foal and it needed to be taught to walk in the field, preferably in winter. In those times there was a lot of denunciation, because everyone thought that if one was hiding a Jew, you had money because they had great treasures. But they came in torn clothes. What did they have? What could they? There were poor Jews living in Janów, they had nothing.”
Later, when it got too dangerous, Bronislawa’s father brought the hidden Jews to partisans in the forest. Many Jews hiding in the forest were killed.
My grandfather left Janów around 1920 as a young man, about 16, making his way across Europe to end up in Ireland. He left behind his parents, as well as his sister and her family. He tried in vain to bring his niece, Mottel, to join him. A visit to Janów in 1938 was the last time he would see them. A photo from that visit shows him sitting amongst the family that remained in Janów, Mottel standing squarely in the back, hands on his shoulder.
During my visit last September, I walked the streets where the Jews had lived, the wooden houses long burnt down, together with the magnificent wooden synagogue that once stood in the former Jewish area of the village. Probably it was at that bimah where my grandfather had stood at his bar mitzvah. The cemetery today is overgrown. Among the grass there are a few dozen fragments of weathered matzevot (gravestones), on some of which the barely legible Hebrew writing can be made out.
Before the Holocaust, Jews composed a majority of the village. A register from 1929 lists all the businesses there, many of them with Jewish names including butchers, bakers and the pharmacist. My grandfather’s father and brother-in-law, both tailors, are listed there. Research turned up a greeting from 1926 by students of the second grade of the school in Janów. There is Mottel’s name signed along with her classmates. Fifteen postcards and letters spanning 21 years in cramped Yiddish handwriting from his family in Janów to my grandfather tell a story of a hard life right up to the last postcard dated March 24, 1941.
Eighty years later, there is not much left of the former Jewish community. After visiting the cemetery, we heard of an older woman whose family, the Jelski family, had helped the Jews of the town during the Shoah. We arranged to meet her, and after a drive through rolling hills we pulled up to a farm. A wiry woman, Bronislawa, sitting outside the house in the sunshine greeted us with a big smile.
After telling us about the happy time that she spent as a nanny with a Jewish family in Long Island many years before, she then shared with us the story of a darker chapter of our collective history.
A story hidden for decades emerged. Heroes who risked their own lives to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust were first acknowledged through a support program established by the Claims Conference in 1963 known as the Hassidei Umot Haolam program. In 2001, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous began administering the program and today plays a critical role in helping rescuers and educating the world about what they did. In June 2019, the Claims Conference negotiated with the German Foreign Ministry to establish the Righteous Rescuers Pension Program, ensuring dignity and honoring those worthy. Bronislawa’s heroism is now recognized under this program.
Last week, I spoke again with Bronislawa in a moving virtual reunion while Claims Conference staff member, Gosia Quinkenstein was visiting her to present her with the formal recognition. A Zoom conversation from New York, the city with the largest number of Jews in the world, reconnected me once again to a tiny village in Poland and brought us back to a dark time when fear and death reigned.
Since I first met her, I could not help but wonder, might one of those Jews who fled Janów and found temporary shelter with Bronislawa’s family have been Mottel or one of my other family members? Bronislawa remembers some of the names but hers is not among them. Was she one of those cold hungry Jews who found temporary sanctuary in a desperate effort to survive amidst the horrors of the Shoah, only later to perish? Like so many others, only fragments of her story remain.
In a world of rising antisemitism, growing intolerance and emerging threats against the Jewish people, connecting with Bronislawa is, for me, also a time to take a moment to remember that the world still contains people who represent the very best of humanity.
Gideon Taylor
The Righteous Rescuers Pension Fund
is an extension of the Claims Conference’s commitment to supporting those who risked their lives and the lives of their families to save Jews during the Holocaust. This program is facilitated through a collaborative agreement with the German Foreign Ministry.
The act of saving one life is revered as equivalent to saving the entire world – embracing this ethos, the Claims Conference chose to administer this program to honor the bravery of “Righteous Rescuers – non-Jews who saved Jews during World War II.
Over the years, Righteous Rescuers have been recognized by many organizations, most notably Yad Vashem and the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous.
