The Lithuanian day of remembrance was set for March 15, because on this day, in 1966, Ona Šimaitė was the first Lithuanian woman to receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
She was a librarian. In 1940, she settled in Vilnius. She dealt with, among others cataloging books, she was the head of the old prints department at the university library. She was taught kindness towards Jews and a passion for Jewish culture by her grandfather. During the German occupation, she did not remain indifferent, she supported the inhabitants of the Vilnius ghetto, organized fundraisers to help Jews, helped in obtaining documents, smuggled food, medicine and weapons, organized escapes, and finally – hid Jews.
She entered the ghetto under the pretext of looking for books from the university library that Jews had not returned. Thanks to this, she saved not only human lives, but also important Jewish documents and literature. She paid for her activities by staying in concentration camps in Dachau and Leudelange. After the war, she did not return to Lithuania. She spent the last years of her life in a shelter for the elderly in Corme near Paris.
In turn, the National Day of Remembrance of Poles who saved Jews under German occupation was established by the Polish parliament in 2018. It reminds of the crime that has become a symbol of the martyrdom of Poles murdered for helping Jews – the murder of the Ulma family and the Jews they were hiding by the Germans.
Józef and Wiktoria Ulma from Markowa in Podkarpacie took in two Jewish families from Łańcut and Markowa probably at the end of 1942. As a result of a denunciation by the “blue policeman” Włodzimierz Leś, the hiding place was discovered by the Germans. On March 24, 1944, military policemen from the police station in Łańcut murdered Józef and Wiktoria, who were heavily pregnant, and their six children. The oldest of them was 8 years old and the youngest one and a half years old. Eight hidden Jews from the Goldman, Didner and Grünfeld families also died, including two women and a child.
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| photo. Marian Paluszkiewicz
Death for helping Jews
The law punishing with death the Jews leaving the ghetto and the Poles hiding them in parts of the Polish territories occupied by the Germans entered into force as early as October 15, 1941. The occupation governors of the individual districts of the General Government specified what it meant to help a Jew. It was not only hiding Jews, but also giving them food, transporting them, trading with them, etc. Those helping Jews risked not only his own life. Responsibility was also borne by all persons present in the premises during the search, i.e. first of all the immediate family. The principle of collective responsibility was particularly often applied in the countryside. There, the death penalty could also apply to neighbors.
In Siedliska near Miechów (Lesser Poland), the Germans appeared on March 15, 1942, after intercepting letters of Jewish families in contact with each other. They found five hiding Jews, tailors from Miechów, at the Baranek family. Łucja and Wincenty Baranek were shot in the back of the head in their own barn. In the same place, shortly after them, their sons, 12-year-old Henryk and 10-year-old Tadeusz, were shot dead. A similar event took place in Ciepielówka and Rakówka, two neighboring villages, where during two days, on December 6 and 7, 1942, the Germans murdered 33 Poles for helping Jews – neighbors and friends who had lived in Ciepielówka before the war. It was e.g. the Kowalski family of seven, 14 people from the Kosior family, 6 people from the Obuch family and the Skoczylas family. They were burned alive or thrown into a fire after being shot. After the war, the names of 900 people who were murdered for helping Jews were established.
In the areas that the occupiers called the Reichskommissariat East – which included Lithuania – there was no similar regulation, but this does not mean that helping the Jewish population did not mean putting their lives at risk. It was not uncommon for the occupation authorities to issue the death penalty for helping the Jewish population.
In times of war, the court did not necessarily have to decide what repressions would befall a particular family, much depended on the decisions of the unit commander, soldiers or officers. This is how Polina Taraszkiewicz was murdered in Porudomina near Vilnius for helping a Jewish child. According to her relatives, she was tortured to death.
Sending to a concentration camp was also associated with a huge threat to life. In fact, for most prisoners it was merely a postponement of death, which came weeks or months later as a result of exhaustion or spreading pestilences. Meanwhile, when the ghetto zones were radically separated from the Aryan zones, there was no shortage of people who had the courage to cross these borders. And yet the difficult time of the German occupation was not conducive to cultivating values.
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| photo. Museum of Poles Saving Jews during World War II The Ulma family in Markowa/FB
Not just individual help
The stories of the Righteous Among the Nations are stories of individuals or families. However, speaking of Poles helping Jews in danger, it is worth recalling that during the occupation there was also help organized by the Polish Underground State. The activities were included in the budget, diplomacy, executive structures, intelligence and propaganda.
From the end of 1942, assistance was provided through the Polish-Jewish Council to Aid Jews “Żegota” established by the Government Delegation for Poland, which – supported by Jewish organizations in the USA – provided five types of assistance to Jews: legalization, financial, housing, medical and children’s assistance, mainly in Warsaw.
Some Poles risked their lives to tell the truth about the tragedy of Jews in the German-occupied country. The most famous among them is Jan Karski, who risked his life to obtain information about the Holocaust, enter the Warsaw Ghetto and the German transit camp in Izbica Lubelska. He made an attempt to get to the West and pass information to the Allies.
Far fewer people remember Henryk Grabowski, a Warsaw scout who in 1941 cycled several hundred kilometers to inform his friends in the Warsaw Ghetto about the mass murders carried out in Lithuania. The shocking Diary 1941-1943 by the Vilnius journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz, who kept records while observing the murders in the Ponary forest, is still not widely known, so that years later no one could deny the crime.
Ona Šimaitė is the first Lithuanian woman to receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations. During the war, she entered the Vilnius ghetto under the pretext of looking for books from the university library that Jews had not returned. Thanks to this, she saved not only human lives, but also important Jewish documents and literature.
| photo. Vilnius University archive
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The numbers don’t tell the whole truth
In a situation where helping Jews was punishable by death and at the same time there was no shortage of people ready to report to the occupier, efforts were made to ensure that no one found out about the hidden Jews. This silence about the help provided in many cases lasted for a long time, also after the war.
Since 1963, those who showed selfless help to Jews during the Holocaust have been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Institute of Remembrance of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes “Yad Vashem”. The act on the basis of which the title is awarded describes the Righteous as those who not only saved Jews, but also risked their lives to do so, which became the basic criterion for awarding the title.
The list of the Righteous is not exhaustive and does not exhaust the history of help provided to Jews by Poles or Lithuanians during the war. After all, the memory of those who provided good to those at risk did not always survive, and their help was not always duly documented after many years.
There are currently 7,232 names on the Polish list of the Righteous Among the Nations, the largest number among all nationalities. In Lithuania – 924, which, considering the small area of the country and the number of inhabitants, is not a small number. The scale of the aid documented by Poles and Lithuanians can be seen even more if we compare it with neighboring countries. The title of Righteous Among the Nations was awarded to: 680 Belarusians, 138 Latvians and 3 Estonians.
The Righteous is another part of the history that connects Poland and Lithuania, especially there is no shortage of testimonies about the cooperation of Poles and Lithuanians in helping Jews. However, while in Poland their memory has long been alive and constantly maintained, in Lithuania it is only slowly beginning to be a part of historical memory. Although the scale of aid in Lithuania was really huge, the wartime heroes are still overshadowed by criminals and collaborators, who were also numerous among Lithuanians.
The new day of remembrance established by the Lithuanian Seym may become a good way for Lithuanians helping Jews to appear in the public space, and with them a conversation about the Holocaust, which – regardless of the perspective from which it is presented – will never be an easy topic in Lithuania.
Article published in the magazine “Kurier Wileński” No. 12(35) 25-31/03/2023
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