(kan.org.il-Facebook-Hebrew) Antonia Yamin - Just as they speak of Oskar Schindler, a German who saved Jews during the Holocaust, several hundred Jews owed their lives to Nazi officer Helmut Kleinicke, who supervised construction at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Survivors say that in 1942 Kleinicke saved Jews from the nearby town of Czanow by recruiting them as workers at the camp, and he would not let anyone touch his Jewish workers. He warned them ahead of Nazi roundups, took them off transports to the extermination camps, hid them in the basement of his home, and smuggled many of them across the border to Czechoslovakia. Eventually, the Gestapo began to suspect that too many of Kleinicke's Jewish workers were disappearing and in 1943 he was transferred elsewhere. Several survivors who owed him their lives wrote to Kleinicke after the war, wanting to meet him again, but never received a response. Kleinicke passed away in the late 1970s. His daughter, Yuta Scheffzek, said her father kept the letters he received, but he always felt he had done too little. Recently, the Kan Israeli television channel arranged a meeting in Israel between Yuta and some of the people her father saved, closing the circle of a story set in motion over seventy years ago.
2017-07-28 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive