"Righteous Among the Nations" - A Personal Account

In 1953, the Israeli Knesset passed the Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Law, in which the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Authority was charged with establishing and perpetuating a memorial to "the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to save Jews." A permanent commission was established in 1962 to present and confer this title and its award, a Certificate of Honor and a silver medal to rescuers or surviving family members. In addition, rescuers' family names are engraved on a marble Wall of Honor at the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. The process of verifying and documenting these inspiring acts of heroism may very likely take many more years; it is an ongoing process, and the Remembrance Authority will pursue the program for as long as petitions for the Righteous title are received. To date, approximately 10,000 men and women have been recognized. The following account was written by Shelly Lescott-Leszczynski.

The annual commemoration to remember the Holocaust, Yom HaShoah, has special significance for our family. Last year in Toronto, at the May 4 Day of Remembrance Memorial Service at Earl Bales Park, the title of "Righteous" was conferred upon our family, in honor of my husband's late aunt, Maria Leszczynska Eckhardt, who hid a Jewish teenager, Kalina Kleinberg, in her home in Tarnopol from 1941 until the war's end in the eastern part of Poland.
The awesome hours of the Yom HaShoah services were rigidly formal. Without such formality, I wondered, how could people hold themselves together? "Whosoever saves a single life," the Talmud reminds us, "saves the entire universe." This ritual of grieving - for the known and the nameless - reawakens the memory of a grim and terrifying past; but it also fosters a sharing of that burden, offering both closure and awareness. So it is, I thought, at Passover, when every Jew must look upon the Exodus with the eyes of one who traveled through the Sinai. For it is said "we went out of Egypt. . . ." not "they" or "you." In this way, too, the experience of the Holocaust is passed on through generation to generation. It makes me realize that the pain inflicted by one group upon another should always be felt, and the memory of it shared, by the rest of humanity. I thought of Rwanda, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as I sat there. I tried to imagine a tortured humanity in places of which I was yet unaware, and also in familiar places, where such horrors are unthinkable. The lesson hits home. "There but for the grace of God . . . ," I found myself thinking.

The most emotionally satisfying moment of our visit was when my husband John and I met Kalina Kleinberg and her family at the Toronto airport. She is formidable, tall, elegantly groomed. As a teenager, this woman walked out of the Tarnopol ghetto and waited for a death that might have come at any time during the almost four years she spent in a closet-like cupboard in Maria's kitchen. Abraham Kleinberg, her husband, must be as tall as she; but he is stooped and slow-paced. I don't know his story; he says very little. The emotions and memories triggered by the event had sent him to the hospital the week before. Their daughter, Lonnie, is an entirely different matter. Her face, like mine, registers her emotions. She is talkative, "open" in such an American way - she could be my cousin, she seems so familiar.

While Maria was hiding Kalina in 1941, my husband's cousin Kostek was sent away to a small town to live with relatives. His mother feared for his life should she be caught hiding a Jew. She also feared that his young friends would notice there was someone else living in the apartment with them. And so he spent the frightening war years far from his mother.

Kostek was unusually quiet throughout our family reunion with the Kleinbergs. "I visited once at Christmas," he told Kalina.

"I know," she said.

"I always felt angry that you were with my mother and I wasn't. I was angry for a very long time," he said.

"I know," Kalina responded again.

Kostek asked how she found her way to his house. Kalina's explanation of how she got out of the ghetto was a surprise to all of us: "I knew the way to your house very well. Your brother, Adam, was my closest friend. Maybe we were sweethearts. I don't know what I would call it now. . . . When the soldiers came and told us to go to the train station because we were being transferred, a young German soldier took me by the hand and kept me aside. There was a lot of confusion around, and we weren't noticed.

"Where are you going?" he asked me.

"I have to go," I said. "They're moving us." "No one's moving you," he said. "You're all going to be shot - do you have a place to go?"

It seems my father had asked this German soldier to watch out for me. For some reason they had liked each other. So when he asked me that, I said, `Yes - Yes, I have someplace to go.' He then ripped off my yellow star and he brought me straight to your mother's house."

Much of the time in Toronto was spent in discussions of what happened to whom and when; dates took on a mystical significance; and "arguments" big and small occurred over alleged mistakes or faulty memories. (Maria's son Adam - Kalina's classmate - had been taken by the Soviets in an early roundup. He was about 16 or 17 at the time, and he managed to escape and eventually make his way to London, where he wound up flying Spitfires in the RAF for the Free Polish Government forces. In addition, Maria's brother, my husband's father, had been deported to Siberia in a similar roundup and sent to a slave labor camp. He never made it back.)

On the cold morning of the Yom HaShoah ceremonies there was a brunch with the Israeli Consul, Yehudi Kinar - himself a "hidden" child from the Netherlands - and with the Canadian Yad Vashem Committee. Two other Polish families were honored as "Righteous Among Nations." They, too, were being reunited with the generations they saved.

The atmosphere at the brunch was loud and cheerful; this prevailing mood was in stark contrast to the solemnity of the 1500 people who gathered afterward under the tent at Earl Bales Park. Until then, I hadn't realized how deafening the silence of more than a thousand people could be.

The silence was sometimes broken by the sound of someone weeping. I saw hundreds of people with their arms around each other, offering comfort and the solid feeling of a nurturing reality. In addition to the prescribed prayers for the dead, poetry was read, songs of freedom fighters were sung, and candles were lit in memory of the dead and in honor of the righteous. And, of course, the recitation of names of known Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

I couldn't help but think about the fact that Kalina and I, two Jews, have shared the lives of the same Polish Catholic family several decades apart. Two generations of righteous Leszczynskis and Eckhardts were gathered around Kalina, hugging and touching her. They must have been thinking. . . . "They are a part of us. We did this. They are here because of us." Maria's heroism and moral strength have become a focal point of family history, and an example of awesome import. My tears were falling, too, as the cantor sang the Kaddish and a shofar sounded. For a time, I was in a nameless place, like the unmarked graves of millions - in the utter blackness and void so poignantly expressed by the Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem. I was listening to Zachor: "We remember," the litany of the names of the dead, read at similar memorial services around the world. At Yad Vashem these names are read perpetually, lest we forget. Toward the end, I felt a panic. My own fear? I believe I lack Kalina's savvy, her survivor's instincts. Would I have made it? Would I have found someone to hide me? My husband, who had been sitting behind me, saw me shiver, he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and moved close.

"Don't worry," he whispered. "We would find a way. We would find a way."

Shelly Lescott-Leszczynski