If you had been standing somewhere near where the railroad line from Cracow to Krynica winds through the Beskid Niski mountains on any number of August days over the past few years, you might have seen an elderly gentleman in sunglasses, accompanied by an elegant woman, walking slowly along the tracks. That would have been the Zimmermanns, from Haifa.

Henryk Zvi Zimmermann, once vice-speaker of the Knesset and ambassador of Israel in New Zealand, comes back to Poland each summer to take the waters at Krynica and to retrace the steps of his wartime odyssey. He is looking for places where mortal danger hung over his life and for the people who helped save him. At his initiative, some have received the Righteous Among the Nations of the World medal. 

Henryk Zimmermann keeps coming back because he regards himself as under an obligation to "bear witness." He has published this book, but there are still loose ends to tie up. For instance, he is still not certain of exactly where it was that, in order to escape Gestapo agents, he jumped from a moving train on the Cracow-Krynica line. So he retraces the route, hoping that some topographical detail will jog his sharp memory and allow him to say, definitively, "Yes, it was just here that I slid down the embankment." 

Born under the Austro-Hungarian emperor Francis Joseph (his father managed property belonging to Agenor Goluchowski, a Polish politician who held high office under the Habsburgs), Zimmermann lost his parents to disease during the First World War, but grew up in a loving, traditional extended family in the most easterly reaches of inter-war Poland (territory annexed by the Soviets in 1939, and now part of the Ukraine). 

In the late 1930s, he came to Cracow to study law. Classmates from Western Galicia contemptuously referred to easterners like Zimmermann as "Asians." He gained acceptance through a Zionist student confederation (roughly the equivalent of an American fraternity) noted for training its members in fencing so that, giving a twist to Central European mores, they could challenge anti-Semites to duels. 

While swordplay proved of limited utility, Zimmermann's other qualities, including most of all the faith and self-confidence in which he had been raised, came to his aid when the Nazis invaded. He survived the ghetto while working for the Jewish Social Services agency that, controversially, enjoyed a degree of Nazi sanction but, to its credit, supported the Jewish underground, including the fighters who carried out the bombing of the Cyganeria cafe, which eliminated several Nazi officers. 

Transferred to the Biezanow labor camp east of Cracow, Zimmermann escaped from a labor detail and, after a period in hiding on "Aryan papers," set out with help from the Polish socialist underground on his journey into the mountains. Just as he was preparing to board the train, he noticed a familiar face: a Jewish acquaintance from his student days who was now reputed to be a Gestapo informer. The suspicion that he was being set up led to his dramatic leap from the train. 

After wandering in the woods, Zimmermann finally met up with partisans who guided him to the Slovak border, and he crossed over--although, once again, he suspected that there was an informer in the party. He made his way across Slovakia where, to his astonishment, he found the synagogues open and the small Jewish communities active. 

Then he reached Hungary, which, while ruled by a pro-German satellite regime, was not yet under German occupation. In Budapest, Zionist organizations were active and confident of their safety. Zimmermann embarked on a mission of clandestine intrigue. His papers indicated that he was a non-Jewish Polish officer. He enlisted the help of the local representative of the Polish government-in-exile and of a Hungarian countess in organizing an escape route for Jews, but had difficulty persuading his fellow Zionists that they should heed the dreadful fate visited upon their coreligionists in Poland, and be ready for the worst. 

Zimmermann meticulously documents his tale of daring-do, in which he brushed up against some little-known facets of wartime history. In 1942, he traveled on an official pass to investigate the fate of the Jews deported from Cracow, and helped prepare the message conveyed to Jewish members of the Polish London government revealing the truth about the ghettos and the camps. In Hungary, he counseled against the illusory sanctuary that the Nazis offered to Jews in the notorious "blood for trucks" deal (years later, Zimmermann testified at the trials of both Adolf Eichmann and Joel Brand, who was accused of collusion in that deal). He organized the migration of Jews from Bulgaria to Palestine during the war and, in his assumed persona as a Polish officer, helped gentile Polish officers reach Palestine disguised--such were the twists of fate in occupied Europe--as Jewish refugees. His tale of how the Germans sank one such refugee ship in the Black Sea precisely because they learned that it was carrying Polish officers, and how Zimmermann and his friends managed to prevent the betrayal of the steamer they sailed on, is in itself enough to make this book a fascinating account. 
 
 
 

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