From late 1941 on, if Jews in hiding were discovered they were usually deported to an extermination camp. In the German-occupied countries of Eastern Europe, many were shot directly after their hiding places were discovered or their false identity was exposed.
The helpers generally did not know the precise consequences that their assistance could have. They nevertheless reckoned with long prison sentences or deportation to a concentration camp. In some of the occupied countries, the penalty for aiding Jews was death. In Poland, for example, public notices to this effect were posted as a deterrent.
A woman in Berlin reported her neighbor Hulda Reichert to the Gestapo for hiding a Jewish woman in her apartment. On the same day of the denunciation, Lotte Blumenfeld, the woman in hiding, was arrested and taken to Berlin’s pre-deportation assembly camp on Große Hamburger Straße. Blumenfeld, nearly fifty years old, was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on the transport of August 24, 1943, and presumably murdered immediately. The arrest of Lotte Blumenfeld led to a series of arrests within a circle of Christian helpers in the Dahlem district of Berlin. Hulda Reichert’s fate is not known.
The Bogaard family in Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands, were farmers. They hid roughly one hundred Jews on their farms and organized hiding places elsewhere for another two hundred. During a raid in 1942, eleven Jews in hiding were discovered by the Dutch police. They were later deported, and Johannes Bogaard was incarcerated for ten weeks. The family nevertheless continued to give assis- tance. In October of 1943, German regular police arrested another 34 people in hiding. Johannes Bogaard was interned for a month in Herzogenbusch concentration camp in Vught, but still the Bogaards kept up their aid efforts. Johannes Bogaard, his son Willem, and his grandson Antheunis Bogaard were deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Only Willem Bogaard survived.
The Ulma family, Polish farmers from Markowa, experienced the deportation and shooting of the Jewish population in the summer of 1942. Although the family itself suffered hardship due to the war, they nevertheless took in eight Jews: Saul Goldman, his four sons, his daughter Lea Didner and her daughter, and his daughter Genia Grünfeld. The penalty in Poland for hiding Jews was death. The Ulma family was denounced. On the night of March 24, 1944, German police shot the Jews who had been in hiding and the entire Ulma family—Józef Ulma, his pregnant wife Wiktoria, and their six children.
