by David Flint
What would motivate a man living in Nazi Germany to endanger his life and his family’s welfare by hiding Jews and helping them escape the country? What inspires this kind of courage? “I believe it was simply compassion,” replied Dr. Stephan Sell at a meeting this month of the Stephentown Historical Society. “He saw them not as Jews but just human beings in a terrible situation. He was just drawn into it by the circumstances.”
Dr. Sell, a Stephentown resident, related the story of how his father, Helmuth Sell, during World War II responded to the plight of Jews he was working with by hiding them in his home and assisting them to leave the country with forged papers. One of the persons he helped, 25 year old Ezra BenGershom, later nominated Helmuth Sell and his wife Anne Marie to be honored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, established in 1953 by an act of the Israeli Knesset. The Sells were awarded a medal posthumously in 1981 placing them with the Righteous Among the Nations, an honor intended to convey the gratitude of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. As Yad Vashem puts it, “In this world of moral collapse there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values.”
Another Jewish family that the Sells tried to help was the Lubovsky family. Mrs. Lubovsky was not a Jew but her husband was. He was a lawyer, but under the repressive laws of the Third Reich he was forced to work as a porter in the railroad station. As things got worse the Sells invited both of them to come live in their home – a gesture all the more remarkable as the Sells lived just across the street from an SS Obersturmbannfuehrer. Lubovsky was eventually arrested and sent to a concentration camp but survived.
Stephan Sell, who retired as a physician in the Schenectady area before coming to Stephentown a few years ago, was a teenager during the war years. As was required for all young boys at the time, he joined the Hitler Youth organization but was “well aware of the political realities” because his parents did not withhold information from him or his brother and sister. “They didn’t want us to be misled by propaganda.” He said his father had been an engineer for the Siemens Company, but when pressured to join the Nazi party he resigned and started his own business in Potsdam making hearing aids. Sell said things got progressively much worse for the Jews as “a nationalist frenzy replaced patriotism.” Propaganda against Jews, Communists and easterners became much more strident. Sell himself came to believe that it was in fact patriotic to hope his country would lose the war.
The young Sell was to some extent aware of what was going on with the Jews. He observed that the Jewish ladies at the neighborhood store at some point had to start wearing the Star of David prominently on their clothing. He observed too that a young Jewish couple at some point were no longer to be seen passing by his house on their daily walks with their retarded daughter to whom they were so obviously devoted. But, responding to a question as to how aware people were of the Holocaust, he said he believed that people probably did not know the extent of it unless they listened to foreign broadcasts on the radio, which was strictly forbidden. But beyond that, he thought that people lose their ability to think under such circumstances and in the face of such skillful propaganda. And part of it is a natural tendency to denial. “We want to feel that we are better than others, and that’s natural and OK if it doesn’t become arrogance,” he said. “But people don’t want to believe unpleasant things.”
Sell pointed out, however, that some 300 other non-Jewish Germans had been similarly honored by Yad Vashem. He believed that there were many others who did more but were never honored. He recalled the group of ladies in his neighborhood belonging to a Nazi women’s organization who nonetheless would collect ration coupons to give to needy Jewish families before they were taken away. There were other acts of heroism in the neighborhood as well. One of their close neighbors was General Carl-Heinrich von Stuelpnagel, one of those hanged in 1944 following the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life at his command post in East Prussia. Von Stuelpnagel, as military commander of occupied France, conspired with Claus von Stauffenberg and others, and on the day that the bomb was exploded in Hitler’s headquarters he rounded up SS and Gestapo forces in Paris and placed them under arrest. Hitler survived, however, and Stuelpnagel, after attempting suicide, was executed.
In 2000, Stephan’s son William came across the names of his grandparents in a book and the fact that they had been recognized by the State of Israel. Yad Vashem had been unaware that the Sells had any living relatives. The Sells flew to Israel that year and were joined by Stephan’s sister Renate, who lives in Germany, for a very emotional meeting with Ezra BenGershom. With him they visited
Yad Vashem and saw the tree that was planted in the Garden of the Righteous in memory of Helmuth and Anne Marie and their names inscribed on the Wall of Honor.
Later that year diplomatic officials from the New York City Consulates of both the State of Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany traveled together to a ceremony held in Niskayuna at the Agudat Achim Synagogue. There Stephan Sell was pleased to accept on behalf of his parents the medal that had been awarded posthumously 21 years earlier – a medal for their heroism and for, in the words of Yad Vashem, “choosing good in the face of evil.”