St. Joseph Church
Bristol, Connecticut

Deacon Robert M. Pallotti
Pastoral Minister

It is estimated that almost six million Jewish people were exterminated during the Nazi Holocaust of 1933-1945. There were also another 5 million Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, clergy, Gypsies and members of other groups also killed in the killing factories and policies of the Third Reich. Many German and other national Christians turned their backs on the Jewish people or participated in aiding in the killings. However, there were some that resisted the policies and practices of the Nazis in order to save the lives of Jewish men, women and children. This section of the Christian Peacemaking in the 21^st Century page will celebrate the risk and sacrifices of some of those that offered compassion and help to the Jewish people during their ordeal. The people that this section will discuss are honored as members of the Righteous Among the Nations in the Vad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust victims in Israel.

In 1953, the Knesset legislated that Israel would build a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust that would be called the Vad Vashem. Eventually the memorial would include those that helped to save some of the Jewish people from the horrors of the death camps during the Holocaust. To be inducted in the memorial as one of the Righteous a person had to meet the following criteria:

The very attempt by a non-Jewish rescuer, including his, or her, personal participation in a serious attempt to help at least one Jewish person to survive, irrespective of whether the rescue operation proved successful or not;

At a time when the Jewish person was helpless and, in order to survive, had to rely on help by others;

And in that undertaking, the rescuer placed his, or her own life and well-being in jeopardy;

The rescue act not having been preconditioned on the receipt of a substantial monetary or other tangible reward and compensation;

The humanitarian motivation proved to be the rescuer’s principal incentive;

The rescuer not having, before and during the rescue operation, been in a position to directly or indirectly cause physical harm to Jews and/or other nationalities;

Verification of the story exists through elaborate and convincing testimonies by their rescued party/or incontestable documentary material.

All of those listed below fit or come close to the aforementioned criteria.

Born in 1905 to a nationalist-minded father, Kurt Gerstein received his university degree in 1931 in mining engineering. He was also very interested in religious matters and had considered studying for the ministry in the Protestant church. It came as surprise to many that only five months after the Nazis came to power he joined the Nazi party. Soon after his joining the party he began to have doubts about the Nazis as a result of their continued efforts to infiltrate the Protestant churches. His efforts to prevent some of this from happening ultimately led to his being expelled from the party in 1935.

Gerstein became interested and involved in the Confessing Church of Germany, which consisted of those Protestant ministers who refused to take an oath to Hitler and opposed the Nazification of the churches. In 1936 he was arrested and a search of his home revealed thousands of pamphlets of the Confessing Church, critical of Nazi anti-Church policies. He was later release due to the efforts of his father. In 1938 Gerstein was arrested again and spent six weeks in a concentration camp. Sometime later he reapplied to become a Nazi party member but was refused. In 1940 he applied to the SS in order to gather information on whom was responsible for the mass killings of the Jews being performed by the SS. On March 10, 1941 he was admitted to the Waffen SS.

Gerstein was assigned to the SS Hygiene Department, in Berlin, where he headed a project dealing with constructing and improving decontamination facilities in prisoner-of-war and concentration camps. He found out that over 10,000 a day were dying in the camps of Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Maidanek. In Belzec, he witnessed the mass gassing of Jewish men, women and children. He noted that many were murmuring their last prayer as they were whip-lashed into the dark gas chambers. He noted in his post-war testimony the following:

I prayer with them…and cried out to my God and theirs. How glad I should have been to go into the gas chambers with them! How gladly I should have dies the same death as theirs! Then an SS officer in uniform would have been found in the gas chambers. People would have believed it was an accident and the story would have been buried and forgotten. But I could not do this yet. I felt I must not succumb to the temptation to die with these people. I now knew a great deal about these murders.

The following day he related what he saw to a Swedish diplomat and begged him to tell the Swedish government and the Allies about the atrocities in the camps. Later he tried to destroy shipments of Zyklon B gas that would be used for the extermination of thousands of Jewish people.

Though Kurt Gerstein has not been award the title of Righteous, he stands as an example of what one person could do in the midst of the horror of the times.

Stefan Sawa

The following story is of a Polish rescuer whose humanitarianism resulted in his assassination at the hands of his own people. Sawa was a Polish national and Catholic that helped Jews that were held in the Kielce Ghetto in Poland during the Holocaust. He would smuggle food and clothing to the Jewish people in the ghetto. In 1942, the Germans liquidated most of the Jews of Kielce, allowing only a small group to survive to serve as laborers in a German factory. It is at this time that Stefan Sawa began to hide Jews in safe houses.

In early 1944, a unit of the Polish underground headed by a man known by the code name "Barabash" searched the house where some Jews were hiding. Stefan Sawa had placed the Jews in this home. The Polish underground told Sawa that he would have to expel these Jews from the house because if the Nazis found out that they were there the village would suffer reprisals from the SS. The men of the Polish underground left but returned to find the Jews still in the house. They set fire to the building and all the occupants died in the inferno.

Stefan Sawa was accepted as a member of the Righteous by the Vad Vashem who was referred to as "a Polish knight of the spirit of the highest caliber".

Marie Taquet-Mertens ran a home for Jewish children. She was appointed an administrator of the facility with her husband by the head of the Brussels government. She and her husband help to save many Jewish children from deportation to the death camps during the Holocaust period. The Chateau du Faing was located in the village of Jamoigne-sur-Semois, some 10 kilometers east of Florenville.

The Chateau was a welcome haven of safety for the Jewish children during the war. Mrs. Taquet-Mertens made each child feel welcome and would steer the local Gestapo away from the Chateau in order to guard the identities and safety of the Jewish children. In September of 1943 the Germans arrived at the home looking for Jewish children. Mrs. Tanquet-Mertens refused to acknowledge that Jewish children were on the premises and worked to see that no German patrols would find out about the children. During the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, she hid all the children in underground caves tending to each one of them with affection and care.

Compiled by Deacon Robert M. Pallotti, D. Min.
Created 02/07/2001