My Human Sense Of Duty Demanded…
Conscience
“Whoever saves a single life,
it is as though he has saved the lives of all.”
The Koran
“Whoever saves a life,
it is considered as he saved an entire world.”
Yerushalmi Talmud
On Sunday, October 10, 2021 one of the four highest ranking members of the Congress of the United States went over and above himself in a desperate attempt to avoid exercising political courage.
Appearing on his party’s once quasi-official cable news network, he was asked not once, not twice, not three times, but for times “Do you think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump?… specifically making this charge that the election was stolen… So you think the election was stolen?... Do you think the election was stolen?... Do you think the election was stolen?”
The blatherskite chose the coward’s route – obfuscating, dodging, sidestepping and evading.
To exercise courage - to tell the truth that an election was not “rigged” or “stolen” or that desperate refugees fleeing drought, poverty and murderous drug cartels are human beings deserving respect and safety – can be costly. Courage - not the courage of the battlefield or the first responder, but political, ethical, moral courage - demands a price – in rejection, isolation and the loss of personal security and financial stability. To risk everything in order to do what is righteous is lonely and may provoke consequences that last a lifetime.
Even a politician who has twice lost the popular vote in national elections can frighten the cowardly with bluster and lies.
For a United States over-whelmed by deceptive and fabulist politicians too terrified to speak the truth, for a nation struggling to treat immigrants with Justice and lived-Charity, Paul Gruninger stands as a model personal courage.
In reality, Switzerland’s enduring reputation for openness to foreigners and neutrality in times of conflict is not quite idyllic. It began in the mid-Sixteenth Century with the arrival of French Huguenots and started to unravel with the Great Depression (August 1929 – March 1933). In August 1938, Heinrich Rothmund, head of the Federal Police for Foreigners, cited two challenges to the Swiss tradition of tolerance: Uberfremung – “foreign overpopulation,” an expression that captured the post-Great Depression anxiety among Swiss citizens that foreigners might take their jobs; and Verujudung – “Jewification,” portrayed as a virus that could produce unwelcome side effects that might metastasize and spread. Rothmund, objected “with all seriousness … to Jews being smuggled in … with the help of the Viennese police.” Switzerland, he believed, needed Jews “just as little” as Germany did. “We haven’t spent the last twenty years using the Immigration Police to fight against the increase in foreignization [Überfremdung], and especially the Jewification [Verjudung] of Switzerland, to let immigrants be forced on us now.”
Paul Gruninger
Born in the Swiss city of St. Gallen, ardent footballer Paul Gruninger served as a lieutenant in the First World War before joining the local police force, where he was promoted to the rank of captain and served as the president of the Swiss Policemen’s Association. With the Anschluss – Nazi Germany’s military annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938 – once famously neutral Switzerland stiffened its immigration policies. Germany, acting on the request of Swiss authorities, began marking all Jewish passports with a large “J” in order to restrict Jewish immigration to Switzerland. As a result, beginning in the Spring 1938, even refugees with work permits were taken into custody for “looking Jewish” and returned to their countries of origin. After August 19, 1938 anyone who crossed the Swiss border without proper papers was denied entry “without exception.”
After the Anschluss, half of Austria’s 192,000 Jews fled – many through the Swiss-Austrian border where Gruninger led the Swiss border police. On September 7,1938, the Swiss Federal Police and Justice Department issued a “Very Important and Strictly Confidential” directive:
All owners of Austrian passports who cannot show an entry visa to Switzerland are to be turned back upon their arrival. Those who manage to cross the border between checkpoints are also to be sent back to the country from which they came to Switzerland immediately upon their seizure… if the passport was issued after 15 August 1938…. those who are Jews or probable Jews are to be turned back… The passports are to be marked with ‘turned back’… Once they are in Switzerland, it is almost always difficult to get rid of them.… If they are immigrants to Switzerland, they are to be turned back by the border police….”
Gruninger was expected – required – to comply with the “Very Important and Confidential directive.
He quietly defied the order “Those who are Jews or probable Jews are to be turned back.”
Refugees in the camp of Diepoldsau in August 1938
From August 1938 to April 1939 – eight months, he dated documents to make it seem that Jewish immigrants had crossed the Swiss-Austrian border before August 15, 1938, submitted false reports about the numbers of refugees crossing the border, and hindered efforts by Swiss authorities to track down and expel Austrian Jews; aided the Swiss Association of Jewish Refugees; helped establish a refugee camp near Diepoldsau, and order officers under his command to be lenient with Jews who were cold, hungry, in a state of shock and mourning the lives they had left behind; and bought clothes for Jews who had crossed the border without anything. He is reported to have assured one refugee, “Chin up, lass! You’re in Switzerland now. You’re free.”
He also procured entry visas for the relatives of those who had already found refuge in Switzerland, including issuing summons to detainees in Dachau. Refugee Susi Mehl, whose parents were murdered at Dachau, described him as “A man in whose company you did not have to tremble. He behaved like a father and a friend.”
Historians estimate he saved 3,000 to 3,600 Jewish lives.
Unhappily, the suspicions of Heinrich Rutland and the Gestapo concerning the Swiss border guard were confirmed in the most innocent of mistakes.
Having reached safety in Switzerland, a German woman wrote to family in Vienna “There is a wonderful police captain called Paul Gruninger. He promised he would look after my jewelry and bring it to me…”
By Spring 1939, Gruninger was dismissed without notice and deprived of his pension; after a trial that lasted two years, he was sentenced by the district court to a hefty fine for “breach of duty and falsification of documents.”
More than a decade later and at the request of a friend he would write, "On the contrary, I'm proud to have saved the lives of hundreds of people who were being severely persecuted! Anyone who witnessed, time and again, as I did, the heart-rending arrivals, the complete breakdown of those affected, the wailing and cries of mothers and children, the threats of suicide and actual suicide attempts – no one could have withstood that… It was a matter of saving people whose lives were under threat. In such circumstances, how could I have concerned myself with mere bureaucracy and numbers?”
“I am not ashamed of the court’s verdict,” said Grüninger.
“The opposite is true: I am proud of having saved the lives of hundreds of oppressed people. The help I gave Jewish people was rooted in my conception of being Christian…The case for saving human lives threatened by death is a fundamental one. Therefore, how could I have taken into serious account bureaucratic rules and ‘considerations’? It is certainly true that I knowingly crossed the limits of my authority and, with my own hands, falsified documents and certificates. However, I did this with the sole aim of allowing the persecuted entry to this country. In comparison with the cruel fate of these thousands [of persecuted Jews] my own wellbeing was so insignificant, and of such little importance, that I did not even take it into consideration.”
Although Gruninger’s fate affected his whole family, his wife remained faithfully supportive. “She supported my father,” his daughter Ruth Roduner reported in 2014. “We didn’t feel in danger. For her too, it was important that the refugees arriving at night in the fog were brought to safety and looked after.” With her father’s dismissal from the border police, Ruth, then a student at Lausanne, was forced to abandon her studies, branded the daughter of a criminal and had difficulty finding a job before being taken into a textile company run by Jews.
Her father was never again able to find a permanent job.
Without his police pension, Gruninger lived the rest of his life in poverty, working intermittently as a labourer, fabric trader, carpet salesman, driving instructor, manager of a raincoat factory and, eventually, as a teacher, until his death in 1972. He always maintained that if he had been faced with the same situation again, he wouldn't have acted any differently: ““It was basically a question of saving human lives threatened with death. How could I then seriously consider bureaucratic schemes and calculations?”
The heroism of the man who had risked everything to save 3,600 Jewish was not recognized in Switzerland.
Nonetheless, a year after his death Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to European Jewish victims of the Holocaust, declared him one of the “righteous among the nations” and noted that he had “paid a high price for the choice he made. In the struggle between his sense of duty as a police officer and dedication to the concepts of humanity, the latter triumphed.”
In 1970, after intense public pressure, the Swiss government issued a letter of apology; in 1995, twenty-three years after his death and fifty years after the end of the war, his trial was reopened and Paul Gruninger was exonerated. In a 1972 Swiss national television interview, Gruninger was asked if he was aware that he was defying the orders of his superiors.
“Yes, I was certainly aware of that. But my conscience told me that I could not send them back. Also, my human sense of duty demanded that I keep them here.”
“Would you act in the same way if the situation were the same?” asked the interviewer.
“Yes, of course. I would do exactly the same.”
Today, one must wonder how - fifty years from now - the cowardly blatherskite will respond when asked if the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Will he – whose personal worth is estimated as at least three million dollars and who will forever enjoy healthcare and a pension paid for by the citizens of the United States – be a modern-day Heinrich Rothmund, continuing to obfuscate and perpetuating the Great Lie of a stolen election or might he – perhaps next week, please God – find the courage to say “The election was fair and honest. Trump lost.”
Americans, the people of our World, the People of God deserve leaders who – without fear or kowtowing – can say “’I am not ashamed… my conscience… my human sense of duty demand’ that I speak the truth.”