A rabbi who immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union has called on the German public to help him find an unknown Wehrmacht officer who, the rabbi said, risked his life to supply bread and other food to starving inmates at a Nazi forced labor camp during World War II.
According to the West Berlin daily Morning post, Rabbi Zvi-Elimelech Schoenfeld, recalls the incident in a book he has written on his wartime experiences. He does not know the name of the humanitarian officer but is convinced that he was “an emissary of God.”
Schoenfeld was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 where he lost his wife and two sons. He was among a group of inmates later sent to a military camp near the town of Brzece in Poland. He recalled that a few days after his arrival, a Wehrmacht officer knocked on the door of his prison barracks and told him he would leave bread and other food on a window sill each evening. “When it gets dark, take it from there and share with your friends,” Schoenfeld said the officer told him, and then disappeared. During the eight months of his incarceration at the camp, the promised food was left almost every evening and made possible his survival and the survival of the other inmates, the rabbi said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
