Righteous among the nations and my father: rediscovery 78 years on

By and large, my father, Hersh David Fisher was a quiet person who kept his ideas to himself. He almost never spoke of his war experience. For example, we only found out from archive searches that he had been married, and had a 6 year old daughter, Elsa in Benjin, where they lived. Over time I learned my father’s mindset was of a pacifist. To my aggravation, I could not get him to say he would harm anyone in any circumstance—even if they were bloody murderers and about to shoot his children. This infuriated me. He never advocated or argued the point. That is just what he thought. He just told me that all life is precious; people are complex; he could not believe in absolute evil; people do evil things, but people aren’t evil.

He drove me half mad with this. I couldn’t understand his thinking. Me, I loved fighting. I was addicted to WWF. I watched war movies, westerns, crime shows. I watched professional wrestling, jointed the wrestling team as soon as I got to high school. I worked out with weights etc. so I could take on WWF meanies. Later I had a sense come to the house and ran Karate classes for all my kids. I went to Karate at least weakly and went on to black belt. I also studied Judo.

The only story from the war that I can remember my daddy telling me was illustrative of the goodness in people. The protagonist was a soldier or SS official, and that, quite frankly pissed me off every time he told it to me.

The story went something like this: during the war he had been working in a textile factory run by a German army officer or SS official. This official treated my father well often inviting him into his office where they would speak in familiar and intimate terms—as friends; this was unheard of between a Jew and a German, much less SS. It irked me to hear this. As the story went, my father, fluent in German, Polish and Yiddish, often acted as a translator and as a foreman and supervisor in the factory. Work there was good for the Jews as the SS official contrived to make sure they were not sent on transports, well fed, not beaten or abused, were often allowed to finish their work early on Fridays and given sporadic days off. Those days happened to coincide with Jewish holy days. Again, it irked me to hear this.

The Gestapo were not unaware of this. My father told me one day a number of trucks arrived at the factory. The Gestapo began grabbing Jews from the factory and loading them on the trucks. My father ran to his ‘friend’, the SS official and informed him what was happening. The official hastened out and ran up to the Gestapo agent in charge and ordered him to unload ‘his’ ‘ essential’ workers. After some very public and voluble argument where some paperwork was at issue, the Gestapo unloaded the Jews, to great relief and tears from the workers.

But over the next few days the Gestapo returned with ‘proper papers’ and loaded factory personnel onto the back of open lories, to the shrieks of wives and relatives, and drove off. The factory boss was very distressed and told my father there was nothing more he could do. The workers were driven off to Auschwitz or Treblinka to be gassed.

I asked my father if he ever tried to track down this humane officer after the war. My father said he did not know what became of the ‘officer’ and thinks he did not survive the war.

I did not know what to make of this story. Was he telling me this as an illustrative fable for his humanitarian sentiments? How much was exaggerated? Over time I became more skeptical as I made my way through Holocaust literature, where similar experience was not reported.

Today, (October 25, 2020) returning to historical topic after a number of fiction novels, I happened to be reading Peter Hays’ outstanding book “Why: explaining the holocaust”. During my early morning bike ride, listening to Chapter 8 where Hays recounts some attempts by gentiles to save Jews, he relates a story about Alfred Rossner, a German running a textile factory making army uniforms for the Nazis. I was thunderstruck by how close this was to the story my father had told me. I googled it and came up with the following stories from Yad Vashem https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/rossner.html also http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/sosbend.html sets the date of liquidation of the ghetto: ”In September and October [1943] the Jews employed in the tailoring workshops were transferred to labour camps in Upper Silesia. From time to time, the Gestapo sent groups of Jews, from the liquidation camp to Oswiecim. By December 1943, only 400 Jews had been left in Sosnowiec and about 150 in Bendzin.”

and JPost: https://www.jpost.com/christian-news/the-christian-german-who-saved-jews-speaking-yiddish-468915