Savior: The Polish Countess

May 7, 1976, Friday Forum – firsthand account “God Still Has a Word to Say” by Sophie Lubomirska-Humnicka, who with her husband Count Stefan lived during WWII on two estates in Poland.

Countess Sophie’s account begins in August 1942 in Losice – “a sleepy little town in Eastern Poland” with a population 90% Jewish through which she and her nephew on a rescue mission drove while the Gestapo were engaged in a brutal action to murder the Jews. She and her nephew drove on to another town, Mordy, where the Gestapo were also engaged in murdering Jews. And then she and her nephew drove on to their destination – Siedlce, the district capital:

To our great horror, panic and despair, Siedlce, too, was having its great ‘action’ of ‘the final solution,’ with the only difference being that here the massacre was on a much larger scale. Literally hundreds of bodies of the dead and the dying littered the streets and the marketplace of the ghetto, where thousands of helpless Jews – men, women and children – were forced to lie on the cobblestones in the squalor of the heat and dirt, terrorized by constant shooting at them and mass killings.

Years later she was inspired to write her account while reading “The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust” by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewin. Among the names of Poles who risked their lives helping Jews she saw her husband’s name: “E. Feinzilber of Tel Aviv, Israel, wrote that ‘… a rich landlord, Count Stefan Humnicki, saved from deportation 50 Jews, giving them employment on his estate and helping many to escape after the last deportation …’”

It was because of those 50 that she drove to Siedlce that day.

As she explained in her firsthand account, the Nazis had taken over much of the private property in Poland, yet they allowed her husband to keep his lands to provide food for the Germans. When a request was made to grow vegetables and they did not have enough workers, the German officer making the request agreed to assign Jews to do the work.

That day in August 1942 her husband was away when she was awakened by a phone call from Siedlce – “They’re slaughtering the Jews here and recalling all those working on private farms.”

Once in Siedlce she managed to convince a German officer not to take her Jews or she would be unable to harvest the produce she had been ordered to deliver to the Germans. He agreed to allow her to keep her Jews for now and she asked for his permission in writing.

He scribbled, signed, handed me the paper. I clutched it as if it were a life line. It was one …at least a lease on life for 50 human beings. As I walked out of the office, I felt sweat trickling down my spine, though the day was not particularly hot.

As the Jews in their part of Poland were rounded up, Countess Sophie and Count Stefan would feed those who came to their door and give the Jews money and advice on how to get into the nearby forest. Her husband was able to obtain “Christian” identification papers for some of their farm workers, who then slipped away from the estate.

I lived in constant fear for my husband’s life, but I simply could not let people be killed for the one reason – which was no reason – that they were Jews. I had to do whatever I could to save them.

Countess Sophie and her husband continued to help Jews until …

In the early hours of a cold and frosty morning in late November, 1942, some Germans, aided by the Polish police from a nearby village, unexpectedly came with a number of farm carts. The shouting and cursing armed men broke down the door and began dragging, pushing and herding the men, women and some children onto the waiting carts.

They were all taken away to Losice, where the Germans brought in all the Jews who had been rounded up in that region. From the nearby railway station they were sent to Siedlce in goods cars; and from there they went on their last journey – ‘the final solution’ – to the gas chambers of the nearby infamous extermination camp – Treblinka.

Later she learned that two teenage girls had gotten away from the carts, but a few days later they were caught by the Germans in a nearby village and shot. One of her relatives found the foreman of the Jewish workers hiding on the estate after jumping off the speeding train just before reaching Treblinka. They arranged “Aryan papers” for him and he left for Warsaw.

Then one of her trusted employees inspected the former quarters of the Jewish workers, where he found a young Jewish boy hiding in the bread oven. The child of 10 or 12 years was persuaded to come out from his hiding place. When he saw her with tears in her eyes, “… he said, quite calmly, ‘Please don’t cry, I know I must die.’”

She determined that he would not die – and hid Aron Perelman in a room shut off during remodeling. She took a tremendous risk for her life as well as Aron’s was if he were found.

Only she and one trusted manservant saw to the boy. “We got the boy in good shape physically, but he could not get over the shock of having watched his parents’ murder.”

During the following months they were several times warned through the local grapevine that their house was to be searched by the Germans. Each time Aron was taken to the forest and then brought back afterwards.

At the end of the war she and her husband fled before the advancing Russian troops, leaving Aron in the manservant’s care. Then 30 years later she in Brazil and Aron in Israel were unexpectedly reconnected through another of her Jewish workers who had miraculously survived.

The letter Aron wrote her from Israel said in part: “… and found the person dearest to me, the one who was like a mother, the one for whom I had searched in vain for nearly 30 years. The news of your husband’s death hits me hard, may he rest in peace. I want so much to do something to keep the memory of this brave, fine man alive. Dearest Countess, if only I could see you and really express my feelings, my gratitude.”

The countess ends her firsthand account with this:

I think of the avenue in Israel I read about, lined with trees, one for every person who helped save a Jewish life during the Holocaust. There must be a great many with Polish names, names of many less fortunate than my husband and I, those who did not succeed and paid with their own lives for trying to save the lives of their neighbors, believing that we are all each other’s keepers.

Click here to read the formal proposal for the Holocaust memoir SAVIORS AND SAVIORS, in which the above firsthand account is included.

© 2017 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller