Alumni Gazette

Honoring an Unlikely Hero

Michael Good ’83M (MD) grew up hearing firsthand stories of the Holocaust.

In 1941, his parents—Perlea (later Pearl) Esterowicz and Wowka Gdud (later William Good)—had been teenagers in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania, when the Nazis occupied the city that was home to an estimated 60,000 Jews.

Pearl and her parents were herded into the Jewish ghetto, where they managed to survive more than three years of periodic pogroms. Most of their relatives did not.

William and his brother escaped Nazi executioners and hid in the woods of Lithuania and Poland for three years while the war raged.

Good had heard the family’s history as a youngster in California, but it was only when he, his wife, Susan Possidente Good ’81N (MS), his parents, and other members of his family visited Vilnius in 1999 that he realized the stories “weren’t ancient fables or fairy tales.”

“This was a real place with real people,” he says.

One of the people who came alive for him was an unexpected part of the family history: Karl Plagge, a German officer and Nazi party member who, according to the stories his mother recounted on that trip, had protected her, her parents, and dozens of other Jews from the death squads.

Five years later, Good has transformed the story of Plagge’s pivotal role in his family’s life and the lives of other Jewish families into the book The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, published this year by Fordham University Press.

Thanks to Good’s research for the book and his leadership in an international effort to find out more about the German officer, Israel recognized Plagge last April as “Righteous Among the Nations,” a rare honor for a German—much less a Nazi party member.

In a ceremony last spring at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, Plagge’s name was inscribed in the wall in the Garden of the Righteous, and he was posthumously awarded the Yad Vashem Certificate of Honor, joining such honorees as German businessman Oskar Schindler and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

A family practice physician in Durham, Connecticut, Good says before the book, he had “only written the occasional editorial against smoking.” He relied on his grandfather’s, mother’s, and father’s memoirs for the history of Jewish life in Vilnius during World War II, but getting information on Plagge was harder than he expected.

“I thought I could find anything on the Internet, but there wasn’t much,” he says. “I sent out hundreds of e-mails, and eventually they landed in the right ‘in’ boxes.”

Good and his small network of international researchers discovered the legacy of a quiet, intellectual man who had joined the fledgling Nazi party under the illusion that it was operating on moral ideals that he believed in. When Plagge realized the truth, he regretted his decision. But by then he was conscripted into the German army, and he tried to oppose the system from within.

“He felt responsible because he helped to bring them to power,” Good says.

Plagge found himself in charge of a Vilnius slave labor camp that repaired military vehicles, and he used what influence he had to protect his workers by insisting that they were essential to his operation.

Near the end of the war, when the German SS came to take the Jews to the death camps and Plagge was powerless to stop them, he made a quiet speech, telling his workers that the SS was taking over—a thinly veiled hint to save themselves. Among those who did were Pearl and her parents. They hid for days in a dark crawlspace with dozens of others, their oxygen running so low that some began hallucinating, until the Soviets retook the city.

Good hopes that his book will not only shed light on the story of Plagge, but also encourage readers to examine the larger issues of human behavior and motivation in times of crises.

“The Holocaust isn’t just about Germans and Jews,” he says. “It’s about what we’re capable of doing to one another. We have a tendency to be fearful and cruel but also noble.

“Humanity is the same as it was 60 years ago, and we can use those lessons from World War II to examine our lives now: Should we follow our leaders or look to one another? Can an individual change the world?”

—Jayne Denker

For more about Good’s research, visit www.searchformajorplagge.com. Good encourages people with information on Plagge or Vilnius during WWII to contact him through his Web site.