Very few people who helped Jews were acknowledged for their actions directly after the war. Many did not speak about what they had done because they considered it a matter of course. Others were subjected to animosity or were even threatened. It was a long time before the helpers were recognized publicly as “silent heroes.” Many survivors helped their helpers by attesting to the Allied forces or German authorities about the support and aid they received.
Shortly before the Soviet troops entered Brünnlitz (Czech: Brněnec), Oskar Schindler fled the city. As a former arms manufacturer, the industrialist feared falling into the hands of the Red Army. Schindler saved more than 1,200 Jews. Former Jewish concentration camp prisoners who managed to survive with Schindler’s help wrote a letter of protection for him, attesting to his aid. He fled with his wife to the Swiss border, where he was arrested and handed over to the French authorities. Thanks to the intercession of Jewish survivors, Oskar Schindler was released. He moved to Bavaria, and in 1949 emigrated to Argentina.
After the Red Army took Warsaw in January 1945, Wilm Hosenfeld, a Wehrmacht officer, was taken as a Soviet prisoner of war.
Hosenfeld secretly transmitted a message from the POW camp to his wife. It included the names of people he had helped, who could exonerate him. One name listed was that of the Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman. With Hosenfeld’s help, Szpilman was able to hide in the attic of a building in Warsaw for two months in the fall of 1944. Hosenfeld’s wife and those he had saved interceded on his behalf, but it failed to have any effect.
Despite his extensive actions to aid people facing persecution, Wilm Hosenfeld was convicted as a war criminal on May 27, 1950, and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. He died on August 12, 1952, in a prison hospital in Stalingrad.
Starting in 1938, Consul General de Sousa Mendes represented Portugal’s interests in Bordeaux, France. Thousands of people suffering persecution tried to escape from France to Portugal, as Portugal was neutral and a non-participant in the war. From there they hoped to flee overseas. De Sousa Mendes wanted to help and resisted the government ban on letting refugees enter the country. Without authorization, he issued several thousand visas to Jewish refugees. Directly afterward, on June 20, 1940, he was dismissed from his position, and in October he was banned from his profession. He sold his house to support his family. Jewish agencies helped the destitute family after the war by providing food. After he died in 1954, his children spent decades fighting for his courageous deeds to be recognized. In the late 1980s, the Portuguese government apologized to his family. Aristides de Sousa Mendes was honored internationally for having saved Jews.
Klara Jung, a taxi driver from Berlin, was confronted with hostility after the war because she had helped Jews. In March of 1943 she took in her Jewish boyfriend, Erich Bloch, to protect him from imminent deportation. A short time later, Erich Bloch brought two Jewish women with him who had also gone underground. They also took refuge in the two-room apartment. When after a while it became too crowded, Klara Jung brought the two women to an apartment next door, but continued to provide food for them. All of them survived. In September of 1947, Klara Jung received an anonymous letter with a death threat. As recently as 1988, on the occasion of her death, an anti-Semitic flyer appeared that defamed her aid as “shameful deeds.”
