It’s been a tough couple of weeks. Lots of dear friends laid low by illness, loss, betrayal. It’s a grand old world, but it turns on us, sometimes, with more than its share of unexpected wounds and casual cruelty.
Some days, it feels like no one’s willing to take responsibility for anything: a restaurant order, a clerical error, the future of our country. So many really have no problem at all stepping over suffering people, brushing past the souls aching around them. The heroes fade to a quiet, precious few, and all those nobler impulses of duty and sacrifice seem to fade with them.
In certain bleak seasons, the sadness and wrongs seem to suddenly accumulate, like dark clouds on a clear day, to make us yearn for heaven. And be especially glad of the glimpses we see of it here.
Which is why I was glad to stumble this week on the story of Emanuel Zima.
Eight decades ago, Emanuel was in his mid-sixties, working as a handyman at the Czechoslovak embassy in Budapest, Hungary. His main job was changing light bulbs. When the bulbs were all shining, he swept, mopped, dusted, tinkered with whatever was broken, and carried whatever needed carrying from one office or floor to another.
He was the last remaining worker of a large janitorial staff that had mostly been let go when the Nazis took over the building at the start of World War II. They made the embassy their local headquarters, and kept Emanuel around because it was a big building with a big, complicated heating system, and Emanuel seemed to be the only one who could keep the machinery working through the long cold winters.
It was all a lot of work for a man growing old, and the stress of pleasing Nazis didn’t help. What’s more, Emanuel’s wife was very ill; he came home from the long days at the embassy to long nights taking loving care of her. Eventually, it all caught up with him. He collapsed from exhaustion, and wound up in a local hospital.
A kindly doctor, Maria Flammova, managed to get him on his feet again. In gratitude, Emanuel said what a lot of people might say under those circumstances: “If I can ever do anything for you, let me know.” Unlike most people, Dr. Flammova took him up on the offer.
A year or two later, the Nazis suddenly began deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Within two months, they’d sent 400,000 to their death. Dr. Flammova was a Jew, and knew her time was coming. In desperation, she asked Emanuel if he could do anything to save her family.
An old Chinese proverb says, “In the heart of danger lies our safety.” Emanuel probably wasn’t up on his Chinese proverbs, but he got the idea. He only had one place to hide the doctor and her family, and that was in the embassy where he worked: an embassy overflowing with people organizing the extermination of Jews – and those who helped them.
But Emanuel, in his years cleaning up after the Nazis, had noticed two things. First, a five-minute interval, every day, when no soldiers bothered to guard a back entrance to the embassy. He could use those five minutes to hurry Dr. Flammova and her family into the building.
And second, that the cellar room where he kept the great pile of coal that supplied the vast, complicated heating system was just a little bigger than the pile of coal inside it. With some energetic shoveling, Emmanuel could move the pile forward a few feet, closer to the door … pile it higher than usual, in a way the Nazis might not notice … and create enough space behind the pile for three or four people to comfortably sit out the war.
Thirteen Jews took refuge in that tiny space.
Over the next few months, Emanuel and his son, Josef, found ways to smuggle the doctor and the others food, water, and medicine. The danger was unrelenting – people notice when you buy extra food during rationing. People ask questions, when you carry it around in busy corridors. One wonders how Emanuel and his charges managed the sleeping arrangements, the bathroom breaks, the endless tedium and constant suspense of those long, long days behind the coal pile.
Among the 13 in hiding were Aron Grunhut, and his wife and child. Mr. Grunhut, a prosperous Jewish businessman, had himself risked enormous dangers to get a hundred times as many Jews out of Austria, before the war, as now crouched beside him behind that pile of coal. Now, it was his turn to be rescued.
The months dragged by. But when Budapest was finally liberated in January, 1945, all 13 of those in hiding were still alive and undetected. The doctor’s gracious bedside manner had been amply rewarded, and the wealthy businessman knew something more than before about, “do unto others as you’d have done unto you.”
Emanuel, though, apparently never told the rest of his family what he had done. Nearly 70 years later, his great-great-grandchildren were astonished to learn of his heroism, when Israeli officials tracked them down to posthumously award him the “Righteous Among The Nations” award for his courage and kindness.
Emanuel himself was long past receiving worldly honors – even from the leaders of Israel. By then, he’d already met the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
I like the ironies and the turnabouts. That a doctor came to depend on the mercy and resources of her patient. A heroic businessman found – like the rest of us – that he, too, needed saving. And countless shrewd and brutal Nazis were outwitted, not by intrepid secret agents and brilliant military strategies … but by an aging man who shoveled coal and kept the lights on.
An old man, tired and weak, who found it in himself – so late in a losing game – to be brave, and smart, and to run a life-saving interference for a handful of people no one else knew or cared about.
In these darkening days, we could surely use more people like Emanuel. Wise. Courageous. Compassionate. Resourceful. Happily, history assures us that – by the grace of God – we have them – all around us.
We’d be glad and grateful if they happened to be, oh, the politicians leading our government … the titans directing our industries … the pastors standing in our pulpits. But in truth, “not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called.”
More likely, God has a lot of them in places we don’t suspect: the house across the street, the back pews of our church, the cubicle next to ours at work.
Or maybe down the hall, on a stepladder, changing lightbulbs.
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