'They read my mother's letters to me': stories of those who saved Jews from the Holocaust by risking their lives - ForumDaily
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'They read my mother's letters to me': stories of those who saved Jews from the Holocaust, risking their lives

Belarusian family, a nurse from Ukraine, emigre priests in Paris. The present time and the Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance in Moscow tell the stories of the Righteous Among the Nations of the World — people who saved Jews during the Holocaust by risking their own lives.

Фото: Depositphotos

“Dear Grisha! I am writing this letter to you at a time when I need to part with my only joy (our son). I took this step because I want to save at least his life, my life has been lived and now I have to wait for death every minute. ... I leave Lyovochka with the Russian Creusots. They gave me their word that they would raise him as their son. If you return, I ask you to thank them properly and also raise your son well. Lisa".

Anna Krezo and her 18-year-old daughter Nadezhda lived on Oboinaya Street in Minsk. In 1941, it became part of the Jewish ghetto set up by the Nazis, and Crazo had to move to the Russian quarter nearby. They maintained relations with their former neighbors, tried to help them as much as they could.

One night they knocked on the door: on the threshold stood Nadia’s friend Maria and her mother. They climbed under the barbed wire and fled from the ghetto during the pogroms.

“People tried to hide and sat in dark basements for several days in a row, they were forced to drink urine instead of water. In one small cellar a child began to cry. In order not to give away her whereabouts, his mother accidentally strangled the child,” Nadya retold their story many years later. The young girl and her mother came to ask not for themselves. They begged Anna to hide the little boy, the son of Leia Samuilovna Ruderman. The night's guest, Leah Ruderman, was her cousin.

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“We knew that hiding Jews would result in execution. But since we moved to a Russian region, where no one knew us before the war, we agreed to take the boy,” said Nadezhda.

Anna Creuzot and Nadezhda Solovyova (before marriage - Creuzot) - Righteous Among the Nations. In 1963, the Israeli national memorial of Holocaust and Heroism, Yad Vashem, began to call those who saved Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe. During the Holocaust, saving or simply hiding information about Jews was punishable by death or deportation to camps.

Two letters and mother portrait

The Minsk ghetto, where little Lenya Ruderman found himself and his mother, was one of the largest in Europe. In the occupied territory of the USSR, the ghetto ranked second in the number of prisoners after Lviv, more than 100 thousands of Jews passed through it.

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Leia Ruderman brought her two-year-old son to Creusot’s home in March, 1943. She left two letters - to her husband and Nadezhda Crazo - and her own photo.

Note for husband left by Leah Ruderman to Nadezhda Krezo. March 1943 of the year. Source JewishGen, Inc.

“I remember how she fell and sobbed over her son, she understood that it was the last time she would see him. My heart was breaking with grief and melancholy,” Nadezhda recalled years later.

A few days later, another pogrom took place in the ghetto, and since then no one has ever seen Leah Ruderman. After the end of the occupation, her death in the Minsk ghetto was officially announced.

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The houses of the inhabitants of Minsk near the ghetto were periodically searched: the police searched for hidden Jews. Therefore, for several months, little Leonid moved: a relative of Anna was a forester and lived in a forest not far from Minsk. Then the boy returned, but he lived in a dugout dug in the basement so that the neighbors would not see. At night, Nadia and her mother took turns taking him upstairs to get some fresh air.

Note by Nadezhda Solovieva from Lea Ruderman. March 1943 of the year. Source JewishGen, Inc.

When Minsk was freed from the Nazis, Anna Crazo began to look for Leni's father, Grigory Khanovich of Ruderman, but it turned out that he was killed at the front in June of 1944.

Nadezhda said that after the end of the war, Leni had distant relatives who agreed to take the boy. “But we became very attached to him - we survived the war together and risked our lives. He was like a son to my mother, and like a brother to me.” In 1945, Anna Creuzot became the official guardian of orphan Leni Ruderman.

Leonid Ruderman. December 12, 1945. Photo: Yad Vashem

Leonid Ruderman said that he always considered Anna Nikolaevna Crezo and her daughter Nadya his family. “These women not only saved my life, but also raised me, educated me and always treated me like their son and brother. When I got older, they told me the story of my escape from the ghetto: how I got to them, how they hid me in the basement and how they took me to the forest where I lived with relatives. They read my mother’s letters to me and showed me her photograph. Later they enlarged the photo of my mother and it always hung above my bed.”

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Leonid all his childhood lived in the same house where his own mother had led him. He retained his nationality and surname. He graduated from school, got a profession, got married, had a daughter. It is known that even in 2012, Leonid Grigorievich Ruderman lived in Minsk.

Anna Creuzot after the war. Photo: Yad Vashem. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center

The Creuzot family was awarded the title of righteous people in 2000. In total, according to 2017 data, Yad Vashem recognized 26 people from 513 countries as Righteous Among the Nations.

Kindergarten goes to church

Alexandra Shulezhko was a nurse by profession, but she was not hired as the wife of an “enemy of the people”: her husband had been serving time in Kolyma since 1937. Just before the war, Alexandra was able to get a job as a kindergarten teacher. When Cherkasy was occupied by the Nazis, the kindergarten was disbanded, but Shulezhko managed to create a shelter for homeless children in its place. She knew German well and was able to convince the leadership of the occupation administration that such a shelter was needed.

Alexandra Maksimovna Shulezhko. Photo: Yad Vashem

Erlen Baranovsky was 11 years old when he ended up in an orphanage. “I ended up in the Cherkassy orphanage on November 7, 1941, after the execution of my grandmother Roza Zaslavskaya. All homeless children were accepted into the orphanage, some were brought, others themselves came and asked for shelter, he recalled many years later. – I remember some of them by name: Burkovskaya Lena (she ended up in an orphanage after her mother was shot, now deceased), Chizhik Arkady and Chizhik Volodya - brothers (in 1944 they were 5 and 7 years old), Krama Volodya, Nadtochiya Kostya (came to us after shooting his aunt, a dentist).”

Volodya Pinkusovich was four. His parents hid under Russian names for some time, but they were recognized and given to the police.

“In 1942, my mother, grandfather, grandmother and uncle were brought from the village of Tubeltsy in the Kyiv region to Cherkassy prison. My mother, who was holding me in her arms, my grandmother, grandfather, and uncle were put against the wall to be shot. But suddenly one woman ran up to my mother and took me away. A shot was fired and all my relatives were shot. From that time on, my mother Shulezhko Alexandra Maksimovna appeared and brought me to the shelter,” he said after the war.

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70 children gathered in the orphanage, of which 25 came from Jewish families. In the documents of Alexander recorded them Ukrainians, Greeks, Tatars.

“When we went to the shelter, we saw a dead woman on the road, and a girl next to her. Later I found out that her name was Lena, I forgot her last name, since then I had a “sister”. I don’t know the further fate of the “sister”; she was older than me,” recalled Vladimir Pinkusovich.

To feed the children, Alexandra Shulezhko and other teachers asked neighboring villages for food. Alexandra’s daughter Larisa recalled that at some point the shelter was allowed to pick up whey from a local dairy. “Even though I was four years old, I went with the older children to the dairy,” she said. – And the students also worked for the German landowner Schwartz, who received land and a cannery near Cherkassy from the occupation authorities. On weekends, the girls earned extra money by singing in the church choir.”

Over time, they began to grow potatoes and other vegetables on the territory of the orphanage, brought chickens, goats, and piglets.

From right to left: Alexandra Shulezhko, her daughters Alla and Larisa, orphanage teacher Polina Osipenko. Photo: Yad Vashem

When policemen recruited from local residents began to come to the shelter with checks, Alexandra Shulezhko again managed to convince the administration not to do this, as she once had convinced of the need to create an orphanage. She was lucky: the gebiecommissar turned out to be an orphanage and the checks stopped.

Later, daughter Shulezhko told how her mother thought of a way to remove suspicion from children once and for all. She led the pupils to be baptized in the Trinity Church, having previously agreed with the priest. Back the children returned with candles in their hands, so that the whole city could see - the children in the shelter were baptized, which means they were not Jews.

For security reasons, they did not allow anyone to go outside the shelter and talk to strangers, so that one of the citizens would not inform the police. And when the pupils and staff of the shelter decided to come to congratulate the Gebitskommissar with the New Year, Alexandra found out about this in advance and managed to prepare. To disguise Jewish children, they made costumes with wigs, false mustaches, and glasses. After the matinee, the gebiecommissar distributed gifts to the children and left.

When the Red Army approached Cherkassy in 1943, the Germans ordered the residents to evacuate, and they even provided the shelter with transport. Alexandra was able to place some children in nearby villages, and 30 people with her reached Vinnitsa, where the Red Army was already present. There Shulezhko and the children were separated - under the pretext that “no one authorized her to collect street children.”

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Interrogations began: investigators accused Aleksandra Shulezhko of collaborating with the Germans. She was not sent to the camp, but she was forbidden to work with children.

“For the Soviet government, she became an enemy of the people,” said her daughter. “To feed my sister and me, my mother had to donate blood. Then it became a habit. Her total result over more than 20 years is 150 liters of blood. That's 15 buckets! Mom is a twice honorary donor of the USSR.”

Returning to Cherkassy, ​​Shulezhko got a job at the clinic’s reception desk. Some children were also returned to Cherkasy to an orphanage, but they were not allowed to see “mother,” as they called Alexandra. Vladimir Pinkusovich recalled how he ran to her clinic, and for this he was deprived of lunch or dinner. “When we were taken to school in formation, Alexandra Maksimovna often left the clinic and watched us go, and the teacher held me by the hand so that I wouldn’t run away, and told me that this was not my mother, but a bad aunt.”

Alexandra Shulezhko was already 61 years old when the authorities’ attitude towards her suddenly changed. It turned out that the priest of the Trinity Church, who baptized the children from her orphanage in occupied Cherkassy, ​​was an underground member, and partisans were hiding in the orphanage itself. The priest was awarded the Order of the Red Star, and Alexandra Maksimovna was given a certificate stating that she was a participant in the partisan movement.

All the children from her orphanage survived. After the war, some of them were found and taken in by relatives, some were adopted, but many Jewish children remained in the city orphanage and left after school. Erlen Baranovsky and Vladimir Pinkusovich maintained relations with “mother” Alexandra until her death in 1994.

In 1996, Yad Vashem awarded Alexandra Shulezhko the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations. A memorial plaque appeared on a house in Cherkassy, ​​where an orphanage operated during the Great Patriotic War.

Saints from Paris

When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, the boarding house of the nun’s mother Maria (Skoptsova) became one of the centers of the French Resistance. In the shelter lived single women, and his head, mother Maria, visited patients in psychiatric hospitals, helped Russian immigrants. She also hid the archive of Ivan Bunin from the ruined Turgenev Library in Paris.

Mother Mary was 48 years old, and already then it was possible to lay down legends about her fate. The pupil of the Bestuzhev courses in St. Petersburg, Elizaveta Pilenko (that was her name before marriage and before being tonsured as a nun) was friends with the poet Alexander Blok and joined the Social Revolutionary Party. Even before the revolution, she left for Anapa, where in 1917, she became deputy mayor, and then was briefly elected to the post of head of the city. When Anapa was taken by Denikin, Elizabeth (then she bore the name of her first husband, Kuzmina-Karavaeva) was tried for cooperation with the Bolsheviks, but was given only two weeks of arrest.

Her second husband was the Kuban Cossack Daniil Skobtsov, with whom, after the defeat of the white movement in the Kuban, they moved to Georgia, and from there to Constantinople, Serbia and, finally, to Paris. After the death of her daughter Anastasia from meningitis in 1926, Elizaveta Skobtsova turned to religion, became an active participant in the Christian movement of Russian emigrants, and in 1931 she divorced her husband and a year later became a nun. But she didn’t go to the monastery: she believed that serving “in the world” would bring more benefits.

Mother Maria (Elizaveta Yuryevna Skobtsova). 1932–1933. Photo: Yad Vashem. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center

In 1937, Father Dmitri (Klepinin) became a priest in the church at the shelter of Maria's mother. The fates of the nuns and the priest were similar: they both fled from Soviet Russia to Europe in the early 1920's through Constantinople and Belgrade. Only Klepinin, before returning to Paris, managed to live in the United States - he studied theology in New York.

Dmitry Klepinin. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

In 1940, with the advent of the Nazis, mother Maria and father Dmitry began to help not only the wards of their shelter, but also, for example, prisoners of the Compiegne concentration camp: they gave them food and warm clothes. Father Dmitry issued certificates to Jews indicating that they belonged to the Russian Orthodox community. “At all times, the church was a refuge for those who became victims of barbarism,” his former wards recalled his words.

Mother Mary sought safe and lasting shelter. And found. The story of the participants of the events that 17 July 1942 of the year, the day after the mass arrest of Parisian Jews, nun Maria was able to pass to the Vel d'Ives stadium where the detainees were kept, and with the help of the janitor in the garbage cans, took out three children.

In 1943, the priests were reported. The magazine “Communion” published a story in 2004 about what preceded their arrest. Evidence of how mother Maria and father Dmitry helped the Jews was collected by a German officer named Hoffman. Having called the priest, he prepared to interrogate him for a long time and was surprised when Father Dmitry himself openly told him about everything he had done.

Then Hoffman allegedly asked: “And if we free you, will you promise never to help Jews again?” The priest replied that he could not say anything like that: “I am a Christian and I must act as I must.” Then Hoffman hit Father Dimitri in the face and shouted: “How dare you talk about those pigs as a Christian duty!” And the priest took the cross that was hanging on his chest and pointed it right in Hoffman’s face. “Do you know this Jew?” he asked quietly.

It is difficult to say how accurately the words of the arrested priest and his persecutor were conveyed. It is known for certain that Father Dmitriy and son of the nun Maria Yuri Skobtsov were arrested and deported to Buchenwald, and from there to the concentration camp Dora-Mittelbau.

Father Dmitry died in the Dora camp in February 1944. Buchenwald survivor Fyodor Pyanov recalled what his death was like: “He died of pneumonia on a dirty floor, in the corner of the so-called “reception room” of the camp, where there was no medicine, no care, no beds.”

Mother Mary died in the gas chamber of the Ravensbruck concentration camp 31 in March 1945 of the year.

In 1985, Yad Vashem awarded Elizaveta Skobtsova (mother Maria) and Dimitry Klepinin (father Dmitry) the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations. In 2004, they were canonized by the Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

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