BYSTANDERS, PERPETRATORS, AND RESCUERS
TEACHING LESSON 8
HANDOUT 8A
PORTRAITS OF RESCUERS

A. Wladislaw Misiuna, Foreman, Poland
In the winter of 1944, many girls from the Lodz ghetto in Poland were sent to work on a rabbit farm. The workers raised rabbits whose skins were used to make coats, caps, and gloves for German troops on the Russian front. Although the work was not very hard, working conditions were very poor. Workers faced the constant threat of death from malnutrition or disease. Nineteen-year-old Wladislaw Misiuna was one of the three Polish foremen on this farm. He allowed the girls to take vegetables from the rabbits’ supply. When the girls told him his actions might mean a firing squad, he replied, “You are hungry human beings and therefore must eat.”

Almost worse than the starvation was the filth which bred highly contagious disease. One of the girls developed a skin rash and was covered with sores. The foreman feared the Germans would kill her and any others who became infected, yet he knew it was impossible for her to go to the camp doctor. The foreman infected himself, went to the camp doctor, and got the medicine to cure both himself and the girl.

One day, the foreman had the girls put all their clothing in a pot of boiling water. Just then, a group of SS soldiers came to inspect the farm. One of the SS officers asked what was in the pot. The foreman said it was food for the rabbits. But the officer uncovered the pot and saw the laundry. He became furious and ordered the SS men to shoot the girls and the foreman. The foreman reacted quickly, saving all their lives. “Don’t you believe in cleanliness and hygiene? Do you want us to fall ill with dreadful infections?” he said.

For a moment there was complete silence. Then the officer said, “Well, then, stay alive—you and these cursed girls!”

B. Joop Westerweel, Teacher, Holland
Joop Westerweel was a Dutch teacher and the principal of a school in Lundsrecht, Holland. He was married and the father of four children. As a young man, Joop had lived in the Dutch West Indies where he spoke out against the way the Dutch treated their Indonesian subjects. When the Nazis occupied his country, Joop rented apartments in his own name and allowed Jewish families to live in them. Then he and his wife quit their jobs and joined a Jewish underground group pledged to the rescue of Dutch Jewish children. They were the only Christian members of this group. The group, led by a woman named Joachim Simon, smuggled Jewish children into Switzerland. From there, the group’s leaders hoped the children could be sent safely to Palestine. The trail to be taken by the children and their guides cut through the Pyrenees Mountains from France to the border with Spain.

When Simon, the group’s leader, was captured by the Gestapo, Joop took over as group leader. He was then forty years old. After a year of this work, Joop’s wife was arrested, tortured, and sent to a concentration camp. Despite this, Joop continued his work. Joop and other members of the underground group went back and forth from Holland and France into Spain. For twenty months Joop recruited dozens of Dutch families to hide people or help them escape from Holland.

On March 11, 1944, he was captured by the Nazis while trying to smuggle two girls out of a concentration camp and into France. He was sent to the Vught concentration camp in Holland. There he was beaten and tortured, but gave no information about those who had worked with him. In August 1944, he was shot by the Nazis. His wife did survive the war. After fifteen months in a concentration camp, she was freed by the Red Cross.

C. Fiodor Kalenczuk, Farmer, Ukraine
Four people from Ukraine survived the war because of Fiodor Kalenczuk, a Ukrainian farmer. At peril to himself and his family, Kalenczuk hid these people on his farm for seventeen months. The survivors were a grain merchant, his wife, his ten-year-old daughter and the daughter’s friend. In 1942, the Nazis marched across Poland and Russia. The grain merchant’s family managed to escape from a ghetto to the Kalenczuks’ farm. Kalenczuk and the grain merchant had known, respected, and liked each other for five years, never imagining the troubles that would bring them together.

The farmer hid the fugitives in his home. Then he found a safer place for them in his stable, bringing them meals three times a day. The farmer himself had to struggle to support his wife and eight children. In 1943, he had to surrender part of his harvest to the Germans, yet he continued to feed the four people hiding in his stable. His wife feared that the Jews were endangering their own lives. But he refused to turn them out. In January 1944, the Germans were driven out of Ukraine and the refugees came out of hiding.  

• How did each person help save others?
• What risks was each person taking in helping others?
• Why do you think these people were willing to help others despite these risks?
• Would you consider any of these people “heroes”? Explain your answers.

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/