Nagler Max

Nagler, Max Max Nagler worked for the German postal service; when the war broke out, he joined the Postschutz unit, which secured the mail service. He was stationed in Krakow, where he was housed in an apartment belonging to a Jewish family. Unlike others, he tried to help the extended Arzewski family, the previous owners of the apartment, and eventually became their rescuer. Stanislaw and Bronislawa Arzewski and their son, Mieczyslaw (later Michael), Bronislawa’s mother, Stela Stabryla, and her sister and brother-in-law, Lola and Jakub Feuer, all profited from Nagler’s help. In May 1940, 40,000 of Krakow’s Jew were expelled from the city in order to make the capital of the Generalgouvernement (an administrative unit established by the Germans in Poland in 1939) free of Jews, leaving only 11,000, who were soon incarcerated in a ghetto. After the Arzewskis were expelled from Krakow and had settled in a nearby town, Nagler maintained contact with them, visited them, and brought them food. When the liquidation of the ghettos in the area began in the summer of 1942, the Arzewskis decided to return to Krakow. Nagler, who had meanwhile moved to a different apartment, took the family of six and hid them in his home for over two years, from September 1942 until January 1945, when Krakow was liberated. “He was like a father to us,” declared Stanislaw Arzewski, immediately after the war. “He gave us moral support and never made us feel how much he endangered himself on our behalf.” When the Red Army approached, Nagler did not retreat with the German forces. The rescued Jews went with him to the Russian commander and declared that he had saved their lives. The Russians, however, arrested Nagler, and despite efforts to get him released, he was allowed to return to Germany only in 1949. Lola Feuer, who had moved to Munich with her husband, found Nagler’s wife and corresponded with her. In one letter she wrote that they would travel to Warsaw to try to obtain Nagler’s release. “Your husband earned that we should go through fire for him. He was the only decent German in the Generalgouvernement. . . . He saved six Jews.” In a statement written in 1968, Nagler described how 4-year-old Michael pleaded with him: “Help us, uncle.” Nagler added: “I helped wherever I could. . . . We fought for their lives against death.” Contact between Nagler and the Arzewskis, who had immigrated to the United States, had been lost, but Nagler remembered that Michael, despite his young age during the war, already had musical talent. In 2015 Yad Vashem managed to trace Michael Arzewski, a musician living in New York, and Nagler’s son, Günther, in Germany, and contact was reestablished. Based on Michael Arzewski’s testimony and the testimonies of Stanislaw Arzewski and Lola Feuer, which were found in the archives, the rescue case was submitted to the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous. On June 29, 2015, Yad Vashem recognized Max Nagler as Righteous Among the Nations.