Holocaust tales of resistance and hope in unity

Unknown to each other, yet living only a couple of miles apart, Olga Dunning and Gillian Bessey have one terrifying thing in common — the Auschwitz death camp.

Olga’s mother was one of the survivors of the Nazis. Gillian’s father worked at Oscar Schindler’s factory — featured in the film Schindler's List — saving thousands of lives.

Both were living in the shadow of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp outside Krakow in the dark days of the 1940s. Both ended up making new lives in the mining and steel town of Rotherham.

For the first time, the stories of Olga’s mum Stephanie Kardasz and Gillian’s dad, Pawel Dlugai, can be brought together after a poignant meeting between the two women.

Amazingly, Ukrainian Stephanie escaped certain extermination because of her “beautiful blue eyes” which a Nazi guard thought meant she must be Aryan. It was the kind of life-or-death moment that Schindler’s Polish office boy Pawel knew only too well.

Retired librarian Olga (73), who grew up in Dalton and Thrybergh but now lives in Conisbrough, described her mother’s extraordinary life.

“My mum grew up in the Ukraine and was born in 1927, so not so long after the Russian revolution,” she said.

“Her dad died when she was a child. She had two baby brothers, and her grandparents brought them up whilst her mum worked. My mum’s grandfather had only one leg as he’d lost one fighting in the revolution.

“Her mum met and married a man who turned out to be be not only an alcoholic, but also abusive.

“He threw a brick at one of her brothers and hit him on the head... he was permanently brain damaged. When her mum was pregnant with what was to be my mum’s baby brother, he assaulted my mum’s mum and she ended up in hospital in Lviv.

“Meanwhile the Nazis fell out with Stalin’s Soviet government and invaded the Ukraine. My mum never saw her mum again as the Nazis shot all the patients in the hospital.

“My mum told about her having to look after her three brothers and begging for food. This was corroborated in 1996, when we visited her town, by a neighbour who remembered the family. My mum talked about picking nettles to cook for food. How hard must that have been?

“After the Nazis invaded my mum was selected to go to Germany as labour. She was taken on a cattle truck on a train to a concentration camp. On disembarking, they all had to strip off their clothes. Young people, children, old people.

“My mum, aged 12 to 13, had to queue in line. She said is was horrible. The Nazi questioner asked her nationality after taking her papers. She replied Ukrainian.

“He said ‘no, you are Aryan’ because she had beautiful blue eyes and jet black hair and then she went to the real showers.

“She told me about the screams...

“From that camp she was moved to Germany where, for the duration of the war, she was used as slave labour.

“When the Americans arrived to free her she was moved to a Red Cross camp. There she met another Ukrainian young man who wanted her to go back to the Ukraine with him.

“However horror stories had started to filter through so my mum said: ‘You go back and if it’s okay I’ll come.’

“Six months later he came back, but he was dying. He told her that the Russians were putting them in camps in East Germany and it was worse than the Nazis.

“So then my mum decided to come to the UK as a displaced person and there she met my dad, a Yorkshireman.

“Her story doesn’t end there though because in 1996 we went back to the Ukraine and to her town. “We met a neighbour who remembered the family and found out two of her brothers were dead. We never found her baby brother.”

Stephanie, who lived to 93, worked late shifts in a steelworks and if young Olga, who had a brother and sister, woke up she would start telling her about her family growing up near the Polish border with Ukraine.

Olga’s mum worked at steelworks and wire factories in Rotherham, doing heavy jobs. Her instincts were always with the oppressed.

“During the Vietnam war, she worked at Tinsley Wire making barbed wire and there was a contract with the US military or something... but she refused to do it,” Olga said.

“She retired from there when she was 60. She died in 2010 when she was 93. She survived Holocaust Memorial Day and died the next day. It was always something to commemorate in our house.”

Pawel Dlugai died aged 75 in Rotherham in 2000.

He had been just 14 — and celebrating his local football team becoming Polish champions again — when Nazi tanks invaded his homeland. It was the autumn of 1939 and so began the Second World War.

The Holocaust that followed saw the mass murder of six million Jews, as well as millions of gypsies and homosexuals and hundreds of thousands of trade unionists and communists, disabled people, Slavs and Jehovah’s Witnesses from across Europe.

The role of Pawel and his father Josef only emerged at the time of the UK release of the film Schindler's List — more than a quarter of a century ago.

His family's hometown was Wielkie Hajduki in Upper Silesia, a district of the city of Chorzów. After the Nazi invasion, Pawel worked on a farm in Germany for ten months from 1940.

Pawel’s unemployed dad, who’d been refused rations because he was regarded as politically unreliable, applied and got a job as a porter at Schindler’s Deutch Emalien Fabrick in Krakow. Later Pawel joined him.

It was Easter 1941 when Pawel started welding at Schindler’s factory, working ten-hour nights from Monday night to Saturday morning.

On weekends he and his father became couriers, transporting messages for the anti-Nazi resistance, and buying food and supplies for Jewish workers.

Pawel — later known as Paul — recalled in his memoirs: “Saturday every week one of us, father or I, used to go home. A lot of people from our district were in hiding in Krakow or in the surrounding district.

“So Father and I became the postmen or baggage carriers. It was thanks to Mr Schindler that we were travelling in [rail] coaches intended for Germans only.  

“Also, we were allowed to shop in German shops. My father got a green passport for the Krakow area and green ration cards through Mr Schindler’s warranty.”

Gillian (60), of Herringthorpe, said: “We’re very proud of our dad and grandad. They knew if they’d been stopped and caught at anytime they would have been shot.”

Schindler was a businessman and Nazi party member, whose story of saving more than 1,000 Jewish people was made famous by the 1993 movie — director Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s 1982 historical fiction novel.

Pawel remembered the gleaming gold Nazi party badges worn by Schindler and another boss called Fuchs (not featured in the film) who Pawel called “a Gestapo man” and a “real swine”.

After the Nazis invaded Poland, they stripped Jewish citizens of their property and forced them into ghettos. From there, the SS used them as free labour, including at factories like Schindler’s in Krakow.

As increasing numbers of German males were drafted into the military, these slave labourers were relied upon even more.

Schindler built a sub-camp constructed on the factory premises in 1943. Before that, SS guards would march them from the nearby Plaszów camp where they lived to the factory and back home late at night. In the sub camp the food was better. Males and females weren’t separated. SS guards were not allowed into the camp. They could stay in watchtowers, but couldn’t come in.

In the summer of 1944, as the Russian Red Army advanced, factory owners who made some armaments for the German military moved their factories westward. By autumn, Schindler had moved his operations from Krakow to Brünnlitz, in what’s now the Czech Republic.

That was when the famous list comes in. The people on it were sent to Brünnlitz to work, and so were saved.

Pawel had left in 1943 for an appendix operation and to avoid conscription. Later he worked as an interpreter for US troops. His father Josef, also a chauffeur, continued to work at the factory until 1944, survived the war and visited Pawel in Rotherham in the 1960s.

Pawel made his way to Garmisch before he decided to emigrate to Britain in 1948. He came to Rotherham because of its Polish community and went down the pit in the mining village of Treeton.

He also worked at Orgreave colliery and later as a delivery driver in the 1970s at Habershon’s steelworks. His health deteriorated and his last job was as a nightwatchman in the 1980s.

In the meantime, Pawel had met his English wife Rhoda and they brought up their family in the Kimberworth Park area.

Auschwitz is an hour’s drive from beautiful, historic Krakow. A former army barracks, it was originally used in 1940 as a work camp for Polish political prisoners.

But the first “experimental” gas chamber and crematoria was soon set up and the extermination of prisoners began a year later.

Only ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria chillingly remain after fleeing Nazi soldiers blew them up to try to destroy the appalling truth of what had taken place.

In 1942 the Nazis’ Final Solution was established at Auschwitz and the adjacent, vast Birkenau camp. Some 90 percent of those murdered were Jews, but 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and tens of thousands of people from other nationalities and groups that the Nazis deemed to be “asocial” — such as LGBT people — also perished there.

In March 1943, the Nazis cleared the Krakow ghetto and sent the city’s entire Jewish population to extermination camps. The story of the ghetto’s liquidation and Plaszow concentration camp is the story of Schindler’s List.

The Nazis gained power by playing on people’s fears and scapegoating sections of society, using racism and nationalism to divide and rule.

Thousands of Poles hid or helped Jews to escape at great risk. Stories of such resistance, like that of Pawel and his father, Jews and non-jews standing together, remind us that even in the darkest times unity can be forged against the racists and fascists.

That is why survivors of the Nazis, such as Stephanie, adopted the slogan “never again”.