In August of 1942 my mother was one of the last survivors of the Lutsk ghetto in Poland. A young girl, not yet 20 years old, her life was saved by the miraculous appearance of one righteous Christian after another. No one could ever know why she was spared and her parents, her brothers and other family members were so brutally murdered. Evangelical Christians, farmers and peasants, each arriving at a precise life-saving moment, hid her in attics, cellars and chicken coops.
Fania Paszt's story began on 1942Aug19 when a Christian peasant came into the ghetto and proposed a plan to hide my mother's family in the town. Not wanting to jeopardize her entire family with a risky plan, my mother tore off her yellow Jewish star patch, covered her head with a shawl, and set out with the peasant to test the escape route. She left behind her entire family.
While leaving the ghetto she noticed an unusually large number of Ukrainian police, German soldiers, SS and Gestapo. Luck was with her and the escape route worked. The next morning, she attempted to return to the ghetto and smuggle out the rest of her family. The Ukrainian police, certain that she was a Ukrainian Christian, informed her that it was no longer possible to enter the ghetto - "something was about to take place."
Jews had lived in Lutsk since the tenth century and had flourished with the city as it became a political and economic center in the mid-sixteenth century. But on the morning of Aug.20, an order had been given to end that history once and for all. In the next two days, 17,000 Jews from the ghetto were led to the Polanka Hill on the outskirts of the city and thrown live into pits and machine gunned to death. Every Jew was murdered, including the leaders of the Judenrat and the Jewish police.
Having lost everything and everyone, my mother stayed hidden in the flue of the peasant's country oven.
But on 1942Dec24, Fania Paszt's luck seemed to run out. The Ukrainian peasant who had saved her life understood the risk to his own by continuing to harbor her, and threw her out of his house. This time there was no savior. She wandered the dirt roads of the Polish countryside, freezing cold in her tattered dress. As night descended, she knew her life was at its end. She recognized the home of the county warden and began to walk up its path. The warden's dogs jumped on her, ripped her dress and bit her. The warden, alerted by the barking, came out with a gun in hand.
Please shoot me,my mother begged.
Let me share the fate of my family.
I cannot kill you tonight,responded the official. He took her inside, fed her, gave her a new dress and a place to sleep.
The next morning, fearful that he could be killed for saving a Jew, he took her into town and gave her over to a Christian family.
Three more righteous Christians were to appear magically in her life until she descended from an attic during the Russian liberation of Lutsk in 1944.
Only decades later did I learn of the Polish expression,
On Christmas Eve, even a stray cat is allowed to live.
Though a series of six righteous Christians had appeared miraculously to try and save my mother's life, on the evening of Dec24, my mother was abandoned like a stray cat in the Polish countryside. At that precise moment, God had to invoke Christmas Eve to save her life.
I am proud of my rich Jewish heritage and of my calling as a rabbi, but I will never forget the legacy that Christmas saved my mother's life. On this, the Eve of Christmas, peace on earth, goodwill to all men.
Merry Christmas, from a rabbi.
Rabbi Abie Ingber
[I got this from my mother so it is probably from a Cincinnati newspaper in the 1980s-1990s.]
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