One Clear Conscience, 60 Years After Auschwitz
By ROGER COHEN

Published: January 30, 2005


As the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is marked with solemn exhortations never to allow the infamy of the Nazi death camps to return, I find myself thinking of a Pole with a bad leg and dirty fingernails who did not need such lessons in the nature of evil.

His name is Miecyslaw Kasprzyk. He lives in a shack atop a hill outside the southern Polish town of Wielicka, near Krakow. Clucking chickens are his principal companions. Now 79, Mr. Kasprzyk stands ramrod straight. He squints at the world through thick spectacles and he likes his vodka, but he sees clearly enough, always has.

His bad leg dates to 1936, when it was broken in an accident. Then, in 1941, the leg was injured again: He was shot while trying to smuggle a message to his father in the Polish underground. Without that leg, I might not have found him.

I am pleased that I did, pleased that I witnessed his reunion with a Jewish woman, born Amalia Gelband, whose life he saved by hiding her from the Nazis during World War II. Over more than 50 years, a lot is forgotten, but Mr. Kasprzyk's limp stuck in Amalia's mind, an awkward mnemonic.

She was 11, a child adrift in the Nazi-terrorized Europe of 1942, when Mr. Kasprzyk, risking his life, hid her in his family's farmhouse outside Wielicka. Her mother, Frimeta, was already dead, killed that year by the Germans. Her father was overseas, unreachable.

Mr. Kasprzyk took her in, along with her older brother, Zygmunt. Encouraged by his mother, he hid them in the attic of their isolated home. The children were known to him through an uncle who knew their uncle Pinkus Sobel, a horse trader. "How can you not help, if a child asks?" Mr. Kasprzyk said to me.

How indeed? How can simple humanity be drained from so many people? But it was. Millions of Germans, and those complicit with them in countries the Nazis overran, must have known that what they were doing, or allowing to happen, was vile and unconscionable. It must have occurred to them to try to stop the mass murder.

But almost every one of them, after whatever internal debate occurred, acting out of fear or opportunism or anger or for simple convenience, sided with complicity, active or passive. They knew and nodded, or they knew and looked away, or they told themselves they really did not know.

Not Mr. Kasprzyk. Soon after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he understood. Polish police officers ordered him to bring a small group of Jews to a local Jewish cemetery in his horse cart. The Jews were stripped and shot dead, their jewelry distributed to local officials.

"It was the first time I had seen a naked woman," said Mr. Kasprzyk, who was 14 at the time.

The episode stuck in his throat. "Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing," he said. "In fact, such a person belongs in a mental institution."

When the attic hiding-place seemed too vulnerable, Mr. Kasprzyk ushered Amalia to greater safety. Late in 1942, he helped her and her brother find work on two farms near Pleszow, on the outskirts of Krakow.

Amalia assumed the name Helena Kowalska, went to church every Sunday, slept on the kitchen floor, peeled potatoes, and told anyone who asked that she was a Catholic whose father was a prisoner of war and whose stepmother had driven her out. The Gebala family, who put her to work, never knew her true identity. In 1945, when Poland was liberated, Amalia, alias Helena, left the farm and found refuge with her brother in a Jewish orphanage in Krakow.

War's end brought no relief from penury for the modest Pole who protected them. People, he noted, talked for a while about the missing Jews, but soon the blur of discomfiting names was lost in silence.

Hidden in the woods above Wielicka stands a monument to the town's murdered Jews. No road or path leads there. Weeds and nettles advance. An inscription records the slaughtered "Polish Jews." Somebody has tried to scratch out the word Polish.

Forgotten Jewish cemeteries, defaced headstones and crumbling little monuments to dead Jews dot Poland and Hungary. I saw a monument last year in Goncz, Hungary, that listed each of the town's Christian World War II dead by name; at the bottom it mentioned that 168 Jews also died. These Hungarian Jews were nameless, citizens of a different class.

Mr. Kasprzyk, a righteous Pole, should have his name widely known. He did not do well after the war: The same nonconformism that led him to defy the Nazis with decency also led him to defy Communist authority. "I was never a member of the party, and you had to be to get ahead," he said. "I do not belong to anyone, not even Christ. I do not like anyone to give me orders."

Instead of all the pious speeches surrounding this 60th anniversary, I wonder why Europe does not clean up some of those little monuments in towns like Wielicka and Goncz, and does not honor the likes of Mr. Kasprzyk.

As Fritz Stern, the great historian of Germany, said recently: "Even in the darkest period, there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial not to appease our conscience, but to summon the courage of future generations."

In this particular case, I confess to a personal interest in the memorializing of Mr. Kasprzyk. I see him limping toward Amalia as they met again after almost six decades. I see their embrace serenaded with clucking. I hear his tender words: "Malvinka, Malvinka."

The "Malvinka" he saved, now Amalia Baranek, a Brazilian citizen, is the mother of my wife.


Roger Cohen writes the "Globalist" column for The International Herald Tribune.