For decades, Pearl Good kept the secret of the motor repair shop on Subocz Street and of the German army officer who declared her an essential war worker when really she was just darning socks.
It was only when the 75-year-old Holocaust survivor returned to the street in Vilnius, Lithuania, six years ago that a tale of heroism began to be uncovered that has led to an unusual ceremony in Jerusalem on Monday to honour the commandant of a Nazi slave labour camp where hundreds of Jews died but many others were saved.
Israel’s Holocaust memorial council, Yad Vashem, will declare Major Karl Plagge righteous among the nations, alongside men such as Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, for an elaborate deception that saved about 250 Jewish lives.
But the honour has only been bestowed after a long campaign by Good’s son, Michael. Mr Good, a family doctor who lives in Connecticut, began exploring the story of Plagge after visiting Subocz Street with his mother.
”She never talked to us about how she survived, but there she told me about this mysterious officer, Major Plagge, who she said saved her life and the lives of her parents and 250 other Jewish prisoners,” he said.
”She was waving her cane and saying, ‘He was better than Schindler.’
”I was just very struck that a Wehrmacht staff officer, a major, would be trying to save Jewish prisoners.”
Plagge, an engineer, joined the Nazi party in 1931 in the belief that it would restore Germany’s fortunes but he became disillusioned with its racial ideology. By 1938 he was godfather to a boy called Konrad Hesse who had a half-Jewish mother, and had left the party.
At the outbreak of war he was conscripted and sent to oversee an army motor pool in Vilnius.
”During the summer of 1941 the Nazis murdered over 50 000 Jews in the area, so it was going on all around him,” said Good. ”He felt he had helped create this monster and that it was his duty to try to help these imperilled Jews.”
When word reached Plagge of the impending liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto, he swiftly set up the motor repair works for army vehicles on Subocz Street and shepherded in about 1 000 Jews. Some of the men were genuine workers, but Plagge also took in hairdressers, academics, kitchen staff and the elderly. He told the SS they were all skilled mechanics.
He also insisted that the men be allowed to bring their wives and children, saying it would be good for morale and production. In time, they too were certified as essential workers.
Good tracked down survivors and documents to put together a case for Yad Vashem to recognise Plagge’s heroism.
The organisation twice rejected his petitions because it was not certain why the major acted as he did. It also needed to be persuaded that he took ”a considerable and conscious risk” to save Jews.
”I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives. What more did you need?” said Good.
”By the third application, I was able to come up with cases and specific instances in which he surely was risking his life.”
Daniel Fraenkel, a member of the Yad Vashem committee that made the decision, said he had been persuaded by ”massive and multi-layered evidence”.
”More than half of the camp inmates were children and women,” said Fraenkel. ”He really got into a heated argument with the SS that without the children and the women the motivation of the workers would be very low, and so this would be injurious for production.
”The SS were no fools. The risk for Plagge was that he would be accused of favouring Jews, and this was really a very serious offence.”
Plagge once took an ailing Jewish prisoner to a hospital reserved for non-Jews, where she stayed until the end of the war. He also saved two people from execution by the SS by faking their beating.
But he could not prevent the SS from seizing 250 children from the camp and murdering them while he was on leave. On his return he made no secret of his disgust with what he called the latest ”achievements of my fellow Germans”.
As the Russians approached Vilnius in July 1944, the SS prepared to kill the Jewish workers. With an SS officer at his side, he told the inmates that they ”will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS, which, as you know, is an organisation devoted to the protection of refugees. Thus there is nothing to worry about.”
About 500 prisoners got the message and hid or made their escape that night. Good estimates that half survived.
Probably 95% of the 57 000 Jews who lived in Vilnius before the war were murdered. Of the rest, as many as 10% were saved by Plagge.
He was cleared of war crimes after survivors testified at his trial, but he insisted on being classified as a ”fellow traveller”.
Plagge’s godson Konrad Hesse will be at Monday’s ceremony, along with the Good family and survivors of Subocz Street. About a dozen plan to go on to the major’s home town, Darmstadt, to honour him there.
In a letter shortly before his death in 1958, Plagge told a friend: ”I never felt that this needed special courage. It required only the conviction and strength that anyone can draw from the depth of moral feelings that exists in all humans.” – Guardian Unlimited Â