Service to Others

An important part of the story of WWII, this article tells the story of a museum dedicated to telling the story of those who willingly risked their own lives to help hide the Jews.  It points out that it wasn't just the wealthy or well connected who did this, but ordinary-compassionate-people as well.  Something we would do well to remember!

An excerpt:

"........the story of Alice Lowenstein, who hid her daughters in Weimar after two hiding places in Berlin fell through; the younger daughter, barely out of toddlerhood, had a dangerous habit of telling strangers about the men who took her father away. In the summer of 1944, the girls, then aged 4 and 6, were denounced. A piece of period notepaper from the Landesarchive in Potsdam describes how the Gestapo dragged the girls back to their old building in Berlin, asking each of their neighbors if the girls were Jewish. All said no. And then, as they walked away, the building's concierge ran after the SS men and told them, "These girls are Jewish." At the end of the war, their mother returned to fetch them from Weimar, only to discover that her children had been murdered in Auschwitz.
"We wanted to present this in order to show that there are not only happy ends. That hiding often meant other family members didn't survive, and the survivors had a burden on them," said Kosmala, as I struggled, ineffectually, not to cry. A daughter born to Alice Lowenstein after the war donated photos, a doll once owned by her murdered sisters, and a diary her mother kept while on the run."