The Avenue of the Righteous records 19 141 names of gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from Hitler’s murderers.
Among those honoured are some made famous by film, their own tragedy or the sheer scale of their actions — Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, the entire Danish resistance.
But this week the Israeli courts waded into the process of selecting who to include on the list of righteous gentiles at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem amid a campaign to add two Germans — one of them a convicted war criminal who was at the centre of a recent Hollywood film — and to strike off a Ukrainian who Jewish survivors say has no place among heroes.
The court case centres on Yad Vashem’s refusal to proclaim a German Protestant minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a righteous gentile.
The lawsuit was brought by the world body of reform Jews which claims that Bonhoeffer publicly criticised the Nazis and helped save Jews by sending them to Switzerland, ostensibly as spies for Germany, before he was arrested and executed in 1945.
Rabbi Uri Regev leads the campaign in Israel.
”Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi regime because, among other reasons, he wrote a letter in an attempt to improve the conditions of a Jewish professor. Doesn’t that prove that he acted to save Jews?” he asked.
Yad Vashem says not. The chairman of its directorate, Avner Shalev, says the only Jew that Bonhoeffer tried to save was a woman who converted to Christianity and rose to a senior position in the church.
”Not only was the man an anti-Semite at the beginning of his public career — although he does appear to have changed his ways — not only did his opposition to Hitler stem from his fear for the fate of the church and have nothing to do with the Jews, but he also never actually saved a single Jew,” Mr Shalev said.
But Yad Vashem’s refusal to make public the information and discussions on which it selects righteous gentiles has prompted unusual legal challenges that threaten to taint the image of the organisation responsible for preserving the memory of the Jewish people’s darkest hours.
This week, a judge ruled that the memorial council is accountable to the Israeli public and that it must open its files under the country’s freedom of information law.
The campaign to win recognition for Bonhoeffer has implications for a case built around the success of Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist — the story of a Jewish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, in the Warsaw ghetto.
Szpilman’s son, Andrzej, has for years sought recognition for the German officer who helped his father, Wilm Hosenfeld.
Szpilman says that Hosenfeld’s diary is evidence of his assistance to Jews.
”I just cannot understand how we have been able to commit such crimes against defenceless civilians, against the Jews. I ask myself again and again, how is it possible?” Hosenfeld wrote.
Mordechai Paldiel, the director of the Righteous Among the Nations department, rejected the application because Hosenfeld was a uniformed German soldier who served on the Russian front at a time when atrocities against Jews and non-Jews alike were widespread.
After Hosenfeld was taken prisoner by the Russians at the end of the war he was convicted of war crimes against Polish civilians. He died in captivity in 1952.
Andrzej Szpilman says the Russians fabricated the accusations.
Yad Vashem is facing a second, potentially more embarrassing lawsuit, to strip someone of their place among righteous gentiles.
Stefan Wrzemczuk submitted his own application for recognition on the grounds that when he was a child he helped his mother lead Jews from Ludmir ghetto – then in Ukraine, now in Poland — to the protection of partisans in the surrounding forests.
After Wrzemczuk had his name added to the wall of Righteous Among the Nations he emigrated to Israel in 1995 and received a regular government stipend. Four years ago, a group of Ludmir survivors denounced the story as a fabrication.
”Out of the 22,000 Jews of Ludmir, only 58 survived,” the leader of the campaign, Moshe Margalit, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.
”Not a single one was saved by Wrzemczuk. The partisans we fled to never heard of him either. After so many people from our town were murdered, it pains me that a bastard like him should falsely receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations.”
Yad Vashem admits that there was a flaw in Wrzemczuk’s application for recognition because it was not accompanied by the testimony of a Holocaust survivor. But Yad Vashem says that just such a person later came forward to back up his account.
Others have been stripped of the honour including a German who was discovered to have helped Jews in return for sexual favours, and a Dutchman was removed from the list when it was discovered he was himself Jewish. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001