The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes Of The Holocaust - Plot & Excerpts
Polish-born Lea Goodman was seven years old when her parents were taken to Kostrze camp and factory near Cracow. Had she not been able to go with them, she would almost certainly have been deported to Auschwitz. The head of the camp, and owner of the light engineering factory where the inmates worked, was a German, Richard Strauch. ‘He was willing to have children with their parents for a while,’ Lea Goodman wrote. ‘These kind people made a difference, it was life instead of death.’ When children could no longer be kept at the camp, she was taken back to Cracow, to a Christian family, Mr and Mrs Soltisowa, who took her in without payment.1 In the Pawiak prison in Warsaw, a place of torture and execution, Julien Hirshaut recalled two of the Ukrainian guards. One, he wrote, was violent and cruel, but of the other he stated: ‘Barczenko was a true friend, a decent Gentile.’2 One of the most savage labour camps in German-occupied Poland was Skarzysko-Kamienna. Yet even here there was someone who tried to help: a factory manager named Laskowski, an Ethnic German who was employed by the SS.
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