People-Smuggler and Saviour

John, Kevin, Tony and Julia, as well as the overwhelming majority of my fellow Australians, vehemently agree on one thing: people-smugglers are the lowest form of life. I demur. All animals may be equal, but all people-smugglers are definitely not.

Let me take you back to the beginning of 1944, to German-occupied Europe. The Nazis are militarily doomed, but they have achieved one of their war-aims: the overwhelming majority of Europe’s Jews have already been exterminated. The few survivors are either dying in labour camps, like the Plaszow hell depicted with uncanny accuracy in Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, or hiding in the forests with the partisans, or living under false Aryan identities like hunted vermin. The blue-eyed, non-Semitic-looking family of the three Sternhells take this route: I am being sheltered by a Polish family under the Aryan identity of a fictitious thirteen-year-old, “Severyn Korytowski”, in my home-town of Lwow, the principal city of south-eastern Poland. My mother is working as a mistreated, falsely Aryan but nevertheless subhuman Polish housemaid for the family of an SS officer in Vienna and my father is, also under a false identity, in Hungary, a German ally but where the Jews have not (yet) been subjected to systematic extermination. The three of us are in three different countries! Some aspects of normality, such as postal service, survive and we are in touch via carefully worded letters.

Early in January 1944, my father wrote to my guardian that a guide (that is, people-smuggler) has been lined up to take me over the Carpathians to Hungary. As I shall later find, a number of Jews were saved in this manner, as described by Anna Porter in her 2008 book Kasztner’s Train. It was decided that another member of my guardian’s family, a twenty-two-year-old aspiring poet and a member of the Polish underground, Roman, should accompany me. We set out for the main railway station of Lwow with two very light backpacks, a small handful of occupation money and a sturdy fifteen-centimetre kitchen knife (you never know …) up my sleeve. Roman, by the way, had been unaware of my Jewish identity till this moment, despite our sharing living quarters for fifteen months—I was apparently a convincing (if deliberately vague) “son of a high ranking Polish officer, killed by the Germans” (or was it the Bolsheviks?) “early in the war”.

Roman and I got to Stanislavov, more than two-thirds of the way to the Hungarian frontier, and after hanging around for a day in an inn drinking vodka, eating bread and sausage and sleeping on the concrete floor of the railway station, boarded the previously designated train to Worochta, once a skiing resort in the Carpathians—railway timetables were another thing that worked normally under German rule.

Worochta was the penultimate station before the Hungarian frontier and we needed no special permission to reach it, relying on ordinary identification papers to deal with standard train inspections, which in fact did not materialise on this particular train. Worochta was also the designated location and time to meet our people-smuggler, who turned out to be a slim, athletic man of about thirty-five who lived in the village called Woronienka, just short of the frontier. I never discovered much about him, but in spite of the fact that he was a “mountain man” from one of the poorest parts of Poland, he came across as a “city speaker”—in Poland villagers spoke various versions of regional Polish, which could be easily identified. Besides Roman and me, the guide also met two Jewish sisters on Aryan papers, eighteen and fourteen years old, who were the daughters of the murdered owners of the biggest cinema in pre-war Lwow.

A problem instantly arose: only inhabitants of Woronienka or people carrying special permits could travel on the local train from Worochta and the guide knew for certain that every train was inspected, fortunately by a sole Schupo (ordinary local policeman) rather than the deadly SS. The guide, who had obviously handled this situation before, explained the following plan of action: the train contained only one carriage and had about six compartments—as it turned out, we five were the only occupants. The guide and the two girls took the first compartment and planned to delay the Schupo with a bottle of vodka and female company for the entire short journey between Worochta and Woronienka. Plan B was for Roman and me to jump the Schupo as he entered our compartment. Roman was to grab the Schupo from behind in a bear-hug and I was to stick my knife in his chest, before dumping the body out of the window into the snow.

Fortunately, Plan A worked and we reached the guide’s house, a few hundred metres away from the station in the snow-covered landscape, at about midnight. We met the last member of the party, a middle-aged Jewish man on Aryan papers who had somehow got there before us, and were given a meal and a twenty-four-hour rest with a serious admonition to get as much sleep as possible.

Some things remain the same under all circumstances: Roman, the girls and I, instead of sleeping, spent the time chatting excitedly (flirting?) before setting out about ten o’clock in pitch darkness and knee-deep snow on March 17, 1944, aiming for Hungary. Our guide marched on without hesitation, through gently undulating and lightly wooded terrain until we came to a railway line which we set out to cross by proceeding through a culvert. The area was clear of snow but covered by thin sheets of ice which crackled loudly under our boots.

Suddenly the guide gestured us to stop. In the silence we could hear German voices above us: we had run into a patrol. Somehow our guide worked out that there were only two of them and that they were just chatting and smoking instead of pursuing the enemies of the Reich. After the longest two or three minutes of my life they tired of the spot and walked away (perhaps urged by Archangel Gabriel) allowing us to march on.

The country steepened, the snow deepened, and our lack of condition became obvious, but we struggled on, hallucinating with exhaustion through the night and dawn, to arrive eventually before midday in Hungary at the top of a clear slope from which we could see a railway line going south with its little station and the parallel highway. We also got a shock: the highway was choked with a long line of German trucks, tanks and artillery pieces. They represented no threat to us and we did not realise their significance, but March 18, 1944, was the day Hitler decided that his ally Hungary was unreliable and had to be occupied. It was also therefore the moment when the last sanctuary for European Jews ended and most of the 800,000 Hungarian Jews disappeared into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Unknowingly, we had jumped from frying pan into frying pan.

That was in the near future. Most immediately our guide, who spoke fluent Hungarian, simply bought us tickets at the little station and accompanied us on our journey to Budapest where he handed Roman and me to my father in a little café at 11 Kiraly Utca (King Street) in central Pest as arranged. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this was not the end, or even the beginning of the end, of my wartime odyssey, and Archangel Gabriel was still required more than once, but I will always admire people-smugglers. One man’s lowest form of life is another man’s life-saver.         

Sev Sternhell is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney.