One of my father’s favorite sayings was “Al tistakel bekankan eila ma sheyeish bo – Don’t look at the barrel but at the wine in it.” In other words, don’t judge a book by its cover. One of the unfortunate traits of many people is to judge a person by his or her outward appearance, nationality, or ethnicity. Gypsies or “Roma,” as they prefer to be called, are often thought to be dishonest, uncouth, and utterly outside the norms of society. They are said to have originated in northern India, but they have wandered around Europe for around 1500 years. They live a nomadic lifestyle and have their own language and practices. But, we err if we prejudge people in that way. To quote Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, “…There are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the ‘race’ of the decent man and the ‘race’ of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.”
I would like to share a story from a book in the Holocaust Library at Shomrei Emunah entitled Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the Final Solution, by Mordecai Paldiel. It tells the story of the Gypsy woman honored by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. The story is very moving.
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The Balkans is that area of southern Europe that today comprises the countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia. During World War II, much of the area was part of Yugoslavia. That region has long been a hotbed of internecine strife, including conflicts that were going on at the time of the German invasion of Yugoslavia, 1941. During the 1990s, the Clinton years, there were several civil wars going on as well. It was during that very period that a survivor of the Holocaust contacted Yad Vashem to help her find the family that saved her life.
Sefardic Jews have long lived in the Balkans. The Baruch family lived in Pristina, the capital of the Kosovo region. When the Nazi sympathizer Croatians took over that area at the start of World War II, the Baruch parents fled to the hills and joined the partisans, leaving their one-year-old daughter, Esther, with her grandmother.
Esther’s parents had employed a Gypsy woman, Hajrija, to help with cleaning and child care. One day, Hajrija came to check up on her former employers’ family and didn’t find them at home. Discovering that the grandmother and the little girl had been taken away by the Croatians to a labor camp, Hajrija went there. She found the grandmother, who pleaded with her to take the child away. She implored, “Please care for Esther as your own child. If her family returns, they will take her back. If not, keep her as your own daughter.”
Hajrija took the child to her tribal village and treated her with kindness and love, raising her with her own five children. At night, the gypsy family spread some hay on the floor and lay down to sleep. Esther, now called Moradia, was always placed among the other children, never on the outside, to keep her safe. Moradia grew up in the family. She spoke the language of the Gypsies and acted like any other Gypsy child – a way of life quite different from that of a Sefardic family living in a city. Gypsies often moved around and their standards of hygiene were not the same either. But this little girl was only a year old and had no memory of her former life.
I think you will see how special this Gypsy woman was. Despite the fact that she loved the child, in 1945, towards the end of the war, she sat her down and told her a story which she had to memorize: “You know your name is really not Moradia but Esther Baruch, and I am not your true mother. Your mother was Bokica, and she probably died fighting with the partisans.”
This story meant little to the young girl. She was a Gypsy and knew no other life. In fact, at age four, she was shown the boy who, it was decided, would later be her husband. If the story had ended here, there is no way little Moradia could have ever found her way back to the Jewish people. But, fate intervened.
Hajrija’s husband had a feud with a neighbor over a parcel of land. The neighbor became a “moser: He went to the Yugoslav authorities, and told the police that his neighbor was illegally keeping a Jewish child. Maybe he intimated that she had been kidnapped or something like that. Baruch Hashem, this was shortly after the Nazis were defeated. Otherwise, she would have been killed.
This was 1945 and the war was barely over. The police asked several surviving members of Pristina’s Jewish community to accompany them to the gypsy village. Arriving there, it was obvious that one of Hajrija’s six children had a much lighter complexion than the other five. “Is it true that you are hiding a Jewish girl?” she was asked. Hajrija readily admitted it but added. “I am not hiding her. She is mine,” She told them the story of the Baruchs and of the grandmother who had turned the child over for safekeeping.
One must remember that Gypsies live outside the mainstream and were not treated well by regular society. They suffered discrimination and generally lived in dire poverty. This may explain why Hajrija’s cries meant little to the authorities as they dragged the screaming child away from the only mother she had ever known.
Moradia was a very stubborn girl. Besides the fact that she was dirty and her hair was covered in lice, she refused to eat the food put before her. She was uncontrollable. The Pristina authorities sent her to a child center in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia. I would assume there were many other orphans after the war. Besides her defiant behavior, no one understood the particular Gypsy dialect spoken by the child. Such a child could have ended up in an orphanage, as who would adopt a Gypsy child whose behavior was atrocious. But, Hashem, again, saw to it that Esther was not lost forever to her people.
The Yugoslav authorities again turned to the Jewish community to figure out what to do with this wild child. Someone told them that there was a certain woman who had some knowledge of Gypsy talk. This woman was invited to try to communicate with the out-of-control little girl. She asked the girl in Gypsy talk what was her name. What happened next is a quote directly from Esther, herself.
“Like a parrot, I repeated what I was told, that my mother was Hajrija but that I had another mother, who was already dead, and her name was Bokica, and I mentioned the other names of my family. As I was talking, the woman fell flat on the floor and passed out. When she regained consciousnesses, she said, ‘I have found my daughter. This is my daughter.’”
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This is not some fictional story. This is a genuine case as researched by Yad Vashem. It turned out that Bokica had survived the war and, having lost her husband, had remarried. The revelation did not change Esther-Moradia’s attitude. This rebellious attitude went on for two years, but her mother did not give up. In the meantime, Bokica visited the Gypsy village to thank her former housekeeper and support her. They stayed in touch, and several years later, when Esther was happy in her new life, Hajrija came to visit her in Belgrade. Esther, by now, was scared that Hajrija had come to take her back to the squalid Gypsy village. No, all Hajrija wanted was to cuddle the child and reassure herself that she was being well cared for.
In 1948, Bokica, her husband, and Esther left for Israel. Esther later learned that Hajrija had died in poverty, but she wanted to reconnect with the family. Yad Vashem helped her locate the family in the midst of the chaos and war in Kosovo. Esther wanted her children to know that Hajrira had been proclaimed a hero by the Jewish people, the only Gypsy so honored. Her name was engraved in stone in the Garden of the Righteous, at Yad Vashem, for her heroic part in saving a Jewish child during the Holocaust. This was the least Esther could do to repay a moral debt to her rescuer.
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This story is very relevant to current events. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head not only in Europe but now also in North America. One never knows who will help us if we face danger. From the story of Hajrija, we can see that good people, altruistic people who have a moral compass, can be found among every group and strata of society. We cannot let the legitimate concern of the hour cause us to put all people into any single category.
The recent Siyum HaShas provides a way of fighting anti-Semitism. It is called making a kiddush Hashem. We have all read the accounts of how the non-Jewish authorities were amazed that the thousands of participants at the Siyum HaShas were polite and said thank you. No one was drunk or disorderly. There is the story of the highway patrolman who stopped a car that was weaving in and out of lanes and was about to give him a ticket. The policeman saw that the man was a chasidic Jew and asked him, “Did you read your page today?” When the befuddled driver answered in the negative, the policeman said, “Well, I will let you off with a warning if you promise to go read your page.”
We must honor all who saved Jews, or who died trying to save Jews. Let us not forget that there are tzadikei umos ha’olam, righteous gentiles, each of whom is unique. Hajrija was certainly one of them. A simple Gypsy woman, she had a good heart, and the family that employed her had obviously treated her in a way that caused her to be fond of them. You never know what will result from making a kiddush Hashem.
