Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Lustiger Counts Prostitute as ‘Righteous’

In dire times, some people are given the opportunity to display what is best in human nature. Such is the message of a new book by Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews” and many other historical works including “Rescue-Resistance: Europe’s Rescuers of Jews in the Nazi Era” which was published by Wallstein Verlag in September.

In a 2005 speech at The Bundestag, Germany’s federal legislative body, Lustiger opined that his adopted country — born in Będzin, Poland in 1924, he is longtime resident of Frankfurt where he made a career in the clothing industry — does not honor its own rescuers of Jews sufficiently. Even Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem only honors 495 Germans as Righteous Among the Nations, which Lustiger feels is too few.

He told a recent interviewer, “In Berlin alone there were thousands of Germans who helped their Jewish fellow citizens.”

Whereas Hollywood has brought posthumous fame to Oskar Schindler, “Rescue-Resistance” tells of less internationally acclaimed industrialists, such as Berthold Beitz, one of the aforementioned Righteous, now 98. Or Eduard Schulte, Robert Bosch and Ernst Leitz II.

There were also humble people such as Hedwig Porschütz, a Berlin prostitute. When not receiving clients in her cramped apartment on Alexanderstraße, the woman whom Lustiger nicknames “Saint Hedwig” hid Jews. Whenever her customers gave her food stamps, she bought provisions and sent them to Theresienstadt, where deported Berlin Jews were starving. Claiming no honors after the war, only in 1956 did Hedwig, by then living in poverty, claim the status of a “victim of the Nazi regime,” which was refused by the German government because she was a prostitute.

Lustiger considers this a “great injustice.” For years, eager to move on with his life from his own status as Nazi victim, Lustiger downplayed his wartime travails, and when his young children asked why a number was tattooed on his arm, he replied: “Oh, that’s just my phone number because I’m so forgetful.”

In 1985, the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz revived memories, and since then Lustiger has energetically worked to keep historical tragedy fresh in people’s minds. In a 2000 speech in Stockholm, Lustiger had harsh words for such authors as Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt and Bruno Bettelheim who minimized the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, views which Lustiger termed “insulting clichés” and “merciless nonsense.” Analyzing the Jewish resistance across Nazi-Occupied Europe in previous books, Lustiger has now reminded us that in this Resistance, Jews had non-Jewish allies.

Listen to Lustiger describe his new book on a March 11 German radio broadcast.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.