Nobody in Israel knew his story.
He arrived in 1945, one more Jewish refugee from Poland, and built a life with the methodical care of a man who had survived things that could not be discussed in ordinary conversation. He got a law degree at the Sorbonne in Paris — his doctoral thesis was on human rights in the Bible. He returned to Israel, passed the bar, built a reputation as one of Tel Aviv's most respected lawyers.
He became a judge. He taught law at Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. He was known, to those who knew him at all, as a serious and principled legal mind who had come to Palestine before the war, or perhaps had been born there.
None of it was true. He was Moshe Bejski, born in the Polish village of Działoszyce near Kraków in 1921, and he was number 531 on Schindler's List.
His parents and his sister had been shot shortly after the family was separated in 1942. His brother Uri — who had survived with him, who had made it through Płaszów and Schindler's factory and liberation and the voyage to Palestine — was killed by a sniper on the day the State of Israel was recognized by the United Nations. The day the Jewish people got their country, Bejski lost another member of his family.
He buried all of it and kept working.
In 1961, Israel put Adolf Eichmann on trial — the first public reckoning in Israel with the organized architecture of the Holocaust. Bejski was called as a witness. He took the stand and described the conditions of Płaszów concentration camp, where the commandant Amon Göth used prisoners for target practice from his bedroom window. He described helplessness. He described the fog of terror in which people existed. A prosecutor asked him — with the kind of question that stings now as it stung then — why the Jews had not fought back, why they had not defended themselves.
Bejski was shattered. He said: how could we? We were dressed in orange coats and carried chains.
After the trial, the silence he had maintained for sixteen years was broken. People knew now who he was. What he had survived. What he had carried.
He used what came next to build something.
The Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem had, since 1953, maintained a legal commitment to honor non-Jews who had risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust — the Righteous Among the Nations program. The process was run by a commission. The first chairman was Israel's most famous judge, Moshe Landau, who had presided over the Eichmann trial. Landau stepped down and nominated Bejski to succeed him.
Bejski became chairman in 1970 and held the position for twenty-five years.
When Landau had imagined the commission, he had envisioned a body handling a small number of significant cases. Bejski had a different vision. He intended to find everyone. Every person who had hidden a Jewish family in their attic, every diplomat who had issued a life-saving visa, every farmer who had concealed someone in their barn, every person who had made a choice — however small, however unrecorded — to stand between a human being and the machinery designed to destroy them.
The work required him to build a legal framework for moral judgment that had no precedent. He developed the principle of what he called the inherent consistency of the rescuer's gesture: that a person could only be recognized as Righteous if their actions had been driven by genuine humanitarian concern, not by payment, fear, or other motives. This sounded straightforward. In practice it produced questions that have no clean answers.
What about the woman who hid Jews in her home while conducting a relationship with a German officer? What about the Polish farmer who saved a Jewish family from conviction but held antisemitic beliefs? What about the man who helped dozens of people escape but later committed a crime? What about those who helped only when money was offered? Bejski sat with case after case in which the evidence was contradictory, the motives were mixed, and the outcome was that someone had lived who would otherwise have died.
He evaluated each one on the evidence. He built criteria. He tried to be fair to both the rescued and the rescuers, understanding that both had been people under impossible pressure — that the act of saving someone did not require sainthood, only courage in a specific moment.
By the time he retired in 1995, approximately 18,000 people had been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Their trees line the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem — carob trees planted in rows, each bearing a name on a small plaque. Irena Sendler. Raoul Wallenberg. Oskar Schindler. Corrie ten Boom. Miep Gies. Jan Zwartendijk. Chiune Sugihara. Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Jan Karski. Dimitar Peshev. Selahattin Ülkümen. Marion Pritchard. Every name in this entire series.
Bejski planted Oskar Schindler's tree himself. He had found Schindler in Germany in the early 1960s — broke, isolated, struggling — and had helped bring him to Israel, lobbied for his recognition, hosted him on his annual visits. He delivered the eulogy at Schindler's funeral in Jerusalem in 1974. He said of Schindler what could be said of very few people who had operated inside the Nazi system: that what he did was real, that the motives had become real, that whatever had motivated him at the beginning, at the end he was simply a man who would not let people die.
Bejski also fought, year after year, to convince the Israeli government to financially support the Righteous who were still alive — many of them elderly, poor, living in Eastern Europe with no pension and no recognition from the states that had once persecuted them for what they had done. He believed the moral debt was material as well as ceremonial. He wanted the trees and the plaques, but he also wanted grocery money for old people in Poland who had hidden Jewish families forty years ago and were now struggling to survive.
He died in Tel Aviv on March 6, 2007, at the age of eighty-five. He is remembered primarily for the garden he built.
What he built the garden from was the experience of a boy from Kraków who had wanted to be an engineer, who had been number 531 on a list, who had arrived in Israel on the day his country was born and his brother died, who had kept his past so completely hidden that nobody knew it until a prosecutor asked him a question in a courtroom in 1961 and he answered with a sentence that has never been answered better:
How could we? We were dressed in orange coats and carried chains.
Past Curiosities
