How a Jewish girl went into hiding with a Nazi family
It is the last winter before Germany’s capitulation. The seventeen-year-old Anni Gmitruk walks alongside a man wearing a swastika armband. It’s dark, and the snow crackles under their shoes. They have just been to the cinema in Zerbst, a small city deep in the Third Reich, to see Heimkehr, a classic among Nazi propaganda films.
The pre-feature short, in particular, has some explicitly anti-Semitic content. On their way home, the man bemoans the holdup in ridding themselves of ‘those cursed Jews’.
‘Like the Jews in the film?’ the young woman asks cautiously.
‘Child, you have no idea,’ the man replies. ‘They’re far worse’, he says: they are liars, con artists, thieves. The girl asks if he knows any. ‘Of course not,’ he answers defensively.
What he does not know then, and will never find out, is that she, the blonde teenager he treats like his own daughter, is herself Jewish.
Anni Gmitruk was born in 1926 as Mala Rivka Kizel into an orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter. She would be the only family member to survive the war, by constantly taking on a new identity, posing under various names and claiming diverse circumstances – in a time when one’s identity was a matter of life or death.
Now, at age 93, she lives in Amstelveen, a southern suburb of Amsterdam. I have visited Mala – ‘Mrs. Shlafer’ for me – several times in her cosy row house in the typical residential neighbourhood. I asked her about events, people and places from her extraordinary life story. I travelled to the relevant locales and looked up descendants—including the grandson of Otto Möller, the man with whom Mala walked home from the movies through the snow. The grandson remembers her well. He is surprised to learn she was not a Volksdeutsche at all, but a Jewish runaway.
She never did tell them, she confirms back in her house in Amstelveen.
Mala is slightly built, neither slender nor stout. More like robust. She’s got well-kempt, wavy white hair and a keen, alert face. She receives me at a round table with coffee and biscuits. With astounding levity, she relates incidents that lay bare the abyss of human nature. Most of the events took place not in Germany but in Poland, the epicentre of World War II. One-sixth of the population perished. For the Jews, the statistics are even grimmer: of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews, three million were murdered.
How, then, did Mala manage to survive? Mazel – luck – as it was with most Holocaust survivors. But in her case, there was more. To start with: her physical appearance. Mala’s entire family was blond; she has blue eyes. Also, her mother died when Mala was eight years old, and as her orthodox father was uninterested in educating his daughters, she was able to attend a school with multi-cultural ideals, a sort of charity project, and thus remain under the radar. The school accepted both Jewish and Catholic children, and having registered late, Mala was assigned to a Catholic class. Anti-Semitic classmates taunted her; during recess, the Jewish students were pelted with snowballs or worse. And yet, she would never have survived the war without that school. She learned to speak fluent Polish, allowing her to pass for a Catholic Pole during the war years. She learned Catholic prayers, bluffing her way through interrogations by Polish policemen during the German occupation. Likewise, she learned a few long, entertaining Polish poems, which more than once saved her life. ‘Whenever Polish girls my age became suspicious,’ she says, ‘I would just rattle off one of those poems. They ate it up.’
When the Luftwaffe began its relentless bombing of the Polish capital in 1939, the schools shut down. Mala was taken in by an aunt while her father and brothers remained in the partly ruined family home. The Germans cordoned off the Jewish quarter, but her command of Polish, her appearance, and her audaciousness made Mala the perfect person to smuggle food into the ghetto.
When life in the ghetto became unbearable, Mala, two of her sisters, and a brother-in-law escaped to the countryside in south-eastern Poland. She worked as a labourer for farmers who, she says, were ‘too backward to be anti-Semitic.’
But a single anti-Semite is enough to seal your fate. So when German troops passed through the town, shooting as they went, Mala and her sister fled into the woods. After several cold nights, famished days, and particularly unpleasant encounters with farmers, their dogs and their pitchforks (‘You’re Jews!’), she saw only one way out. She found a priest who was willing to draw up a fake baptism certificate, reported to the German authorities in nearby Lublin as a Polish Catholic, and asked to be brought to Germany in order to work for the Reich. ‘This took them by surprise because normally, the Germans rounded people up from the streets to be shipped off to Germany as forced labour.’ But they agreed. She went to Bremen and later to Wolmirstedt. For months things went smoothly: everyone believed she was a Catholic Pole, and she wore the purple ‘P’ patch (denoting Polish forced labourers) on her chest. She warded off suspicion by reciting her poems, to the delight of the mostly illiterate girls in her work team. During the day Mala—now known as Janina Gmitruk—was one with her new identity. But not at night. She did not have her dreams under control. One morning at breakfast, Ivan, a Ukrainian labourer, looked straight at her and said, ‘You’re a Jew!’ He had heard her talking Yiddish in her sleep.
Mala was taken away under police escort to the Magdeburg camp for slave labour, a kind of prison. She continued to deny she was Jewish, claiming she had rebuffed Ivan and he retaliated by falsely accusing her. When she was released a few months later—the authorities believed her, and not Ivan—she could hardly believe it. ‘I knew I was the guilty one.’
She noticed that the prison director liked her. On the day of her release he asked if she wasn’t in fact a Volksdeutsche, an Eastern European with German roots. After all, she spoke fluent German, and her mother’s (invented) surname sounded German. She was eager to confirm this notion. ‘Even if they’d asked if I was Chinese, I’d have said yes. Anything to get out of that place.’
Following skull measurements, an interview and a blood test at the Einwandererzentralstelle, a sort of Nazi immigration control centre, a panel of eight SS officers in doctor’s jackets concluded that her pedigree passed muster: she was a Volksdeutsche, an Aryan.
And as such, she was racially too superior to work as a forced labourer and was placed in the care of a family of fervent National Socialists under the name Anni Gmitruk.
The patriarch, Otto Möller, was eager to do his part for the German race. The Möllers had already lost two sons on the Eastern Front and were glad to take a Volksdeutsche from Poland into their home. Mala was given the younger son’s bedroom and, later, his bicycle. By now, she was a young woman of eighteen. ‘It was painful for me to realise the Möllers were far more loving to me than my own parents. I so longed for affection. My father only took my hand when we crossed the street: he was an orthodox Jew, and you didn’t touch girls. When my mother was not busy running the household, all her attention was focused on her sons.’
Spring 1945. A few weeks after Hitler’s suicide, Mala decided to return to Poland in the hope of locating surviving family members. She took the bicycle the Möllers had given her. Halfway home, a Soviet soldier forced her to exchange it for his horse. Not long thereafter, she arrived in Poland, where she learned that her entire family and all her friends had been murdered. A year later, she returned to Germany—Jews were safer there than in Poland—and set herself up in an agricultural collective with fellow Jewish-Polish war survivors.
For the past four years, I have gone in search of present-day corroboration of Mala’s survival story from a distant past. After all, the journalist’s golden rule is: a one-source story is not a story. I managed, but with more difficulty than I had expected. Because of the way the memory works, certainly, but mostly because of the grim history of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. Much of what I sought had simply been destroyed decades ago. To give just one example: the village where Mala stayed in the summer of 1942 (in present-day Ukraine) was razed in the summer of 1943. Every last inhabitant was murdered. Not by the Germans but by the Ukrainian nationalists. The church where Mala finagled her faked baptism certificate had been burnt down.
There are countless Holocaust stories, many of them recounted and published. Why add yet one more to the list? Because of its topicality. Mala’s story brings into focus today’s discussion of identity politics: she grew up in a world that was dominated by forces who believed in negative attributes inherent to an entire folk, in ethnically-determined characteristics that could be categorised and hierarchies by origins, nationality and race. ‘Polish people were raised as anti-Semites,’ says Mala. ‘My Polish girlfriends could say the most terrible things about Jews. But at the same time, I have to say that the orthodox Jews would have no truck with the Poles. My father, for instance, told me that Catholics had no such thing as a conscience. I believed that.’
Group mentality, the back-and-forth ‘blame game’ and an obsession with origins and even race: these things are not just a thing of the past. They might even be making a comeback on both the left and right wings of the political spectrum. The Ghanaian-English philosopher Kwame Appiah, in a reaction to the exaggerated claims of the uniqueness and even exclusivity of our identity, says we need a ‘lighter hand’ with identity.
Mala’s story vividly underscores this advice, even though she would not say so herself. She even says she was disappointed—put out, even—that the man she eventually married refused to keep a kosher home. Why, I asked her many times, because it seems so contradictory: Mala was angry that her Jewish husband wouldn’t stick to the orthodox conventions of her youth, while in fact, she had preferred to remain in Germany with her lover, who had no idea of those conventions in the first place. Because in addition to having been taken in by a Nazi family in Germany, she had fallen in love with an engineer, a German man who wore a typical Tyrolean hat. It was mutual. Until the very last weeks of the war, the man worked in an underground aircraft factory in Halle. She never told him she was Jewish. Mala lost his address during the extensive bombing of Magdeburg in the winter of 1944-45.
‘How could you hold it against your husband?’ I ask, ‘while you were prepared to marry Erik, a man who wore a Nazi lapel pin?’
Mala: ‘Well, I thought I could make a Jew out of him!’
The grin on her face appears to betray at least some self-deprecating irony. But that was meant mostly for her father, not Erik. ‘My father would have been horrified by a non-orthodox Jew, let alone a Catholic Pole, and worst of all, a German.’
Getting the two of them to sit down together was a pipe dream. And in a dream, she did succeed in the spring of 1945. In it, her German boyfriend was in her family home in Warsaw. ‘Erik and my father carried on a lengthy, friendly discussion about beliefs and religion. In my dream, he had payos, you know, those sidelocks. Light blond.
Written by Pieter van Os, author of Hiding in Plain Sight: How a Jewish girl survived Europe’s heart of darkness
Published by Scribe
this is awesome to be able to talk to her and see what she went thru and was actually there.