Holocaust Hero Honored

Recently, Yad Vashem, the people’s memorial to the Holocaust, and the Israeli Government honored Werner Wilhelm Von Biel posthumously, as “Righteous Among the Nations,” for his selfless and courageous actions saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
Manfred Alexander, of Kew Gardens, whom Von Biel saved during the Holocaust, offered the keynote address. William Jacob Cook, Von Biel’s grandson, accepted his honor. Ambassador Arye Mekel, Consul General of Israel in New York, and Consul General Uwe-Karsten Heye, of the Federal Republic of Germany, also gave remarks.
Alexander, who was raised and educated in Berlin, was deported to the Minsk Ghetto, where his parents died and he was forced into labor on the railroads. By hiding under a heap of coal in a train, Alexander escaped from Minsk to Berlin, where a friend put him in contact with Von Biel.
Von Biel hid Alexander in his second apartment, across from a police station, where he stayed for several months. Alexander snuck out several times to secretly visit his fiance, Lohse Gottberg, who established ties with a communist resistance cell that smuggled people out of Germany. In the summer of 1943, Alexander, Gottberg, and her mother slipped out of Germany into Belgium and Luxemburg, equipped with fake documents supplied by the resistance cell and winter cloths and shoes they received from Von Biel.
Alexander recalls, “Werner’s reason for saving me was that he considered me his brother. He would have given his life for mine, and he indeed risked his own life for mine — If he was to get caught giving shelter to a Jew, the minimum he could expect was to be sent to a concentration camp — and the Germans were looking for me after I disappeared from work on the railroad. As long as I was in Berlin, after coming back from Russia, he was risking his life by hiding me, and he did it without a hint of hesitation… My life was entirely dependent on him.”
Alexander and Gottberg’s escape route brought them through France to Switzerland, where they married and stayed until the end of the war. When the war ended, Alexander and his new wife emigrated to the United States.
After Alexander left Von Biel’s custody, Von Biel was recruited into the Wermacht and was captured in the Italian front. Von Biel died after the war. Alexander, who has since lost his wife and his brother and has no children, decided to nominate Werner Wilhelm Von Biel as “Righteous Among the Nations.”