Beneschek Otto

Beneschek, Otto During the Nazi occupation, Otto Beneschek was the manager of Bialystok’s textile factory Number 1, one of a number of formerly Jewish-owned factories in the city that had been appropriated by the German Reich. A socialist at heart, Beneschek joined a small anti-fascist underground group made up of Germans and Austrians. This group helped the Jewish textile workers in the Bialystok ghetto. In his own factory, Beneschek gave his Jewish workers considerable quantities of food and firewood, which he allowed them to take from the factory grounds into the ghetto. In this way, Beneschek’s workers were able to provide for other needy people inside the ghetto – help that meant the difference between life and death. In February 1943, when an Aktion took place in the ghetto, Beneschek hid some of his workers in his apartment, which was on the factory grounds bordering the ghetto fence. He hid Jews again when, on August 16, the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto began. After a week, he brought the hiding Jews to an apartment owned by Artur Schade* (see Germany), a member of Benescheck’s anti-fascist cell. Schade hid the fugitives until they could be transferred to the Jewish partisans in the forests surrounding Bialystok. Beneschek endangered his life by hiding Jews, a crime punishable by death. He did not receive any compensation for his actions. On October 9, 1996, Yad Vashem recognized Otto Beneschek as Righteous Among the Nations. Schade, Artur Artur Schade, a radical socialist by ideological conviction, joined the Nazi party at the outbreak of the war as a ruse to evade conscription by the German army. Some five months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the second occupation of Bialystok by the German army on June 27, 1941, Schade arrived in the eastern Polish town. He was assigned to take over the management of textile plants that had been confiscated from Jews. As a fierce opponent of Naziideology, Schade became involved with the activities of the local anti-Fascist resistance cell in Bialystok; other Germans, like Otto Busse*, Beneschek* (see Austria), and Bohle also belonged. Through the mediation of the chief Jewish textile expert in the factory, Berl Kiselstein, and his daughter Mina, who was employed as his housemaid, Schade also established a connection to the Jewish underground movement in Bialystok. He provided the Jewish resistance activists – among them the famous underground fighter Chajka Grossman – with forged documents. During the first anti-Jewish sweep, which the SS carried out in the Bialystok ghetto in February 1943, Schade concealed in his private apartment outside the ghetto two Jewish families, the Kiselsteins (mother, father, son, daughter, and a cousin) and the Goldsteins (mother, father, and a small son). He kept them hidden for a whole week in the attic of his apartment, and every evening he brought them food and drink. At the time of the final liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto, in August 1943, once again he concealed the Kiselstein daughter, Mina, and her cousin, Marie Kaplan, in his apartment. Subsequently, he helped them escape to a group of Jewish partisans active in the vicinity. He provided the Jewish partisan group “Kadima” with food, medicines, compasses, maps, and small arms, and, shortly before the liberation of Bialystok by the Soviet army, he actively joined it himself. After the war Schade settled in Leipzig, in the then German Democratic Republic. On July 19, 1995, Yad Vashem recognized Artur Schade as Righteous Among the Nations.