46 Years Ago, the Moldrzyk Family Hid Two Young Jewish Women From Nazis. Now the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers Is Honoring Them as a Way of . . . : Giving Thanks

Life had been a daily struggle for Erwin and Gertruda Moldrzyk that winter of 1945 in Jastrzebie-Zdroj, Poland. January was bitterly cold, and the farmer and his wife worried about their crops. They had two young daughters to feed and clothe.

The Germans were in retreat, four months short of surrender. The Russians were advancing on Poland. But for peasant families like the Moldrzyks, there was one constant: poverty.

Good Catholics that they were, they put their trust in God.

One afternoon, the farmer went to his barn to milk his cows. There cowered two young Jewish women, Sima and Malka Dafner. Only hours earlier, the sisters had escaped their captors as the Nazis marched prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp through the village.

“He felt so sorry for us,” Malka recalls. “He took a bale of hay and covered us and said, ‘Don’t move around. Just stay there.’ ” The barn was off the road; there was a good chance they would not be found.

This was not the first time the family had helped those in danger. “They had a little hiding place, like a false wall in the barn,” Sima remembers. Sima and Malka slept there that night, waiting for the Nazis to march on. “The next day, Gertruda took us to the kitchen and gave us a hot bath and put us in real beds.”

For four months, Erwin and Gertruda embraced Sima, then 21, and Malka, 17, as family. They called them Anna and Hilda--non-Jewish names--explaining to villagers, and to the German officers who would take meals at the farmhouse, that the sisters were relatives who had fled from the Russians.

It was a simple act of compassion and kindness, one that Gertruda dismisses, 46 years later, as what any decent human being would have done.

But Sima and Malka never forgot. Just as they never forgot that in Poland in 1945, those caught sheltering or feeding Jews were routinely executed.

The Moldrzyks’ good deed has now been recognized by the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers. Since 1987, the foundation, a project of the Anti-Defamation League, has honored Christians who risked their lives, and the lives of their families, to save perhaps as many as 200,000 Jews. Each year, it distributes $500,000 among the rescuers.

So it was that Gertruda, a 78-year-old widow still living in Jastrzebie-Zdroj, was flown to Los Angeles to be honored at a black-tie dinner last week at the Century Plaza Hotel.

It was an occasion, said E. Robert Goodkind, foundation chairman, for a celebration “of the human spirit’s capacity to soar.” They also paid tribute to another Polish rescuer, Wladyslaw Misiuna, and, in spirit, to 800 other Christians in 15 countries who helped Jews during the Holocaust.

Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Encino, founding chairman of the New York-based foundation, spoke of the moral courage they had shown as a definitive rebuttal “to those who say there was no alternative to tacit complicity” in the face of Nazi terrorism.

The audience stood in respect as Gertruda, in her wheelchair, was helped onstage by her two daughters. Actor Maximilian Schell presented her with a commemorative plaque, then kissed her on both cheeks.

In Polish, she thanked everyone. It was, she said, her first, and probably her last, trip to America. As for what she had done to help two Jews in 1945, she said she had never been afraid. She believed that what she was doing was right.

Four of Sima Salzberg’s grandchildren came up to say thank you to the woman who had helped their grandmother and great-aunt Malka during a war they have only read about in history books.

Grandson Judah Hulkower, 11, told Gertruda: “As long as the generations of our family continue to live, so will you.”

Sima Salzberg, a plump, friendly woman with curly silver hair, greets a visitor in the foyer of her home in Beverly Hills. The house is vast, approached through black grillwork gates, on which are painted the gold initials “J S” for Jack Salzberg, Sima’s husband.

Please, she says, come and meet Gertruda, a saint in worn bedroom scuffs and a simple dark blue jumper. She helps the elderly woman maneuver her walker through the doors leading from the colonnaded pool-garden area and eases her into a chair.

Malka, who speaks little English, joins them. Gertruda and Sima talk animatedly, in Polish, like mother and daughter. The story of the three women unfolds.

In 1942, the sisters, together with the other Jews in their Polish town of Sosnowitz, were rounded up by the Nazis and moved into a ghetto. But because their father, a widower, was a businessman with contacts, they were smuggled out, given false papers and sent to live in separate German towns, where each worked as a housemaid.

In time, they were discovered by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where they spent seven months. In January, 1945, during a chaotic dismantling of the camp as the Russian Army advanced, Sima and Malka were among 100,000 Auschwitz prisoners marched toward Germany.

On the third day, the march arrived at Jastrzebie-Zdroj. Some prisoners were allowed a rest stop at the schoolhouse, where the townspeople brought them hot food.

“I was so ill, I couldn’t walk. The snow was so deep,” recalls Sima. Her feet swollen and frostbitten, her body weakened by malnutrition, she had needed help from girlfriends, who had kept her from falling as they marched 10 abreast.

Sima knew what happened to those who fell: “They were shot, or the dogs ripped them apart.”

Still, “there was no way that I could continue.” She and Malka decided to attempt escape. “If they were going to shoot me in the schoolhouse, or out in the street, it didn’t matter.”

Malka says she climbed through a rear window of the schoolhouse and dragged Sima out. Their guards were tired and had gotten careless. Sima says: “When the townspeople left with their pots and pans, we just walked with them, like we were part of them.” Across the road, they spotted the Moldrzyks’ barn.

Before being herded out of Auschwitz, women prisoners had been issued dresses with a slash of scarlet painted on the back “so we couldn’t escape,” Sima says. “The good luck was, Malka and I had other dresses underneath.” They shed the telltale dresses in the schoolhouse toilet.

Gertruda is describing her old farmhouse, which was later destroyed by Russian bombs. There was the big kitchen and, downstairs, a room where she and her husband slept. Upstairs, her daughters, Inga, 10, and Hildegarde, 2, shared their bedroom with Sima and Malka.

The newcomers pitched in, helping with planting and other farm chores. “They were good girls,” Gertruda says.

There were some terrifying moments ahead for them.

With Sima as her interpreter, Gertruda recalls: “The Germans were retreating towards Germany. Everybody had to give them lodging.” The officers established a command post in the schoolhouse and, Sima says, “they stayed for weeks.”

Often, the Germans, some of them SS officers, ate at the farmhouse, where Sima and Malka cooked and served their food. “Nobody suspected them,” Gertruda says. She smiles and says: “I think the soldiers were throwing eyes at them.”

The family gave the sisters long-sleeved dresses to hide their identifying tattoos from Auschwitz. Still fearful of detection, Sima and Malka tried to burn off the tattoos with caustic salt. “The pain was so terrible,” Sima says. They never were able to obliterate the telltale numbers.

The townspeople never became suspicious about the two young women. “They never knew, until three years ago,” Sima says. That year, Sima and Jack Salzberg made a sentimental journey to Jastrzebie-Zdroj, determined to find the Moldrzyks. The village of 500 people was now a coal-mining center of 35,000. Farms and cottages had been displaced by factories and apartments.

Sima says: “We walked my death march route until I found that schoolhouse. Then I found the barn,” burned-out and abandoned. “My husband was calling, ‘Anybody here?’ ” When a boy came to the window of the two-story apartment house that now stands in front of the barn, the Salzbergs asked if he knew the people who had lived in this place during the war.

He called his mother; it was Inga, one of the Moldrzyks’ daughters. She started screaming, “You can’t be Anna!. . .” She summoned Hildegarde. Carefully, they broke the news to Gertruda, by then a widow for 12 years.

“It was a beautiful reunion,” Sima says. She and Gertruda embraced, sobbing.

For more than 40 years, Gertruda and her daughters had believed that Sima and Malka had not survived.

When the Russians began bombing Jastrzebie-Zdroj, the Moldrzyk family fled to relatives in the next town. Sima and Malka decided to go back to Sosnowitz, about a 60-mile walk, “to see who had survived.”

When the sisters reached their hometown, they found it had been liberated. “Everybody was dressed up” to celebrate, Sima remembers. “We looked like beggars.” They were quickly reunited with their sister Pola. Another sister, a brother and their father had died at Auschwitz.

With the Russians there, Sima and Malka felt there was no future for them in Sosnowitz and decided to move on to Germany. They never did find relatives who lived in Germany but, Sima says, “I found my husband.” She and Jack Salzberg, a Polish Jew who’d been liberated by the Americans from a camp in Germany, married in February, 1946.

When the state of Israel was established in 1948, Malka decided to immigrate; she and her husband, Chaim Livne, and their two sons live there today. In 1951, with Jewish sponsorship, Sima and Jack Salzberg and their daughter, Reggi, arrived in San Jose. The next year, their son, Buddy, was born.

Jack Salzberg took a job as a service station attendant. Sima, looking around the palatial home she now oversees, laughs and says: “Business has improved a little bit.” Today, Salzberg is chairman of the board of First Charter Bank of Beverly Hills.

Sima Salzberg clasps one of Gertruda’s large hands in her own. It is the hand of a woman who has worked in the field. “It’s a miracle,” Sima says--to be alive, to be here with this woman. “I found her three years ago and I’m not giving her any peace.

“I had to beg her to come,” she adds. “She was bedridden. But she’s doing much better here. Look at her, she looks like a rose. . . .”

Since Sima found the family, life is a little easier for Gertruda. “We are helping them out financially,” she says. “They are OK again.”

Gertruda is thinking about Erwin, about “Anna” and “Hilda,” the young women who came into their lives all those years ago. She says: “My husband would have been the happiest man. . . . Whenever there was a holiday, when we sat down at the table, we left two plates for the girls.”