My Righteous Gentile: Lord Wedgwood and Other Memories by Gabriella Auspitz Labson, Ktav Publishing House, 239 pages, $25.

Gabriella Auspitz Labson has performed at least three important services writing My Righteous Gentile: Lord Wedgwood and Other Memories.

In the first place, it is wonderful that she is passing on this account to her children, grandchildren, and all their future descendants.  Reading it, they cannot fail to understand and incorporate into their lives the timeless lesson that “to save one life is to save the world.”  

Had not Lord Josiah Wedgwood offered young Gabriella Hartstein refuge in England during World War II, she might have been murdered along with other members of her family during the Hungarian phase of the Holocaust.

It was a matter of chance that Wedgwood became her protector.  The well-known Christian Zionist came to meet Jewish Zionists in her town of Mukachevo in the Czech Republic.  (The town was known as Munkacs to the Hungarians, and later became part of the Ukraine).

As the elementary-school-aged granddaughter of  Rabbi Lajos Hartstein, Gabriella was chosen to present a bouquet of flowers as Wedgwood stepped off the train and to say a few unfamiliar words in English in welcome.  

The British visitor got off the train, but she muffed her lines, and began to cry. Wedgwood picked her up and kissed her on the cheek.

Years later, hoping to go to Palestine, she wrote to Wedgwood asking for his intercession with the British Mandatory government. He remembered the little girl with the flowers. However, he was unable to obtain permission for her to live in Palestine.  Instead, he offered to  provide her safe haven along with other refugees at his country estate, Modershall Oaks. She accepted the offer before the outbreak of World War II, in time to persuade Wedgwood to also provide temporary sanctuary for her brother.

The second service of this book is that she gives us insight into two historic figures—Wedgwood and U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy.

Wedgwood typically would return to his estate from London on weekends, and make a ritual of reading to his family and wards the Bible and the works of such English authors as Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning—not only reading but acting out some of the parts. 

“On Sunday mornings, Colonel Wedgwood visited the surrounding areas and spoke to the inhabitants—his constituents, I assumed—and most of the time he took me along.  I often wondered, why.

She met and accepted a marriage proposal from Harry Auspitz, an American known to her family.  Wedgwood insisted on interviewing the Famous Delicatessen owner  privately for two hours before consenting to the wedding.

Wanting to join her husband in Philadelphia, Gabriella went to the U.S. Embassy in London, where as Wedgwood’s ward, she had no difficulty arranging an interview at the U.S. Embassy in London, where she was greeted by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy (father of future President John F. Kennedy) in his spacious office.

“Ambassador Kennedy rose and came over to greet me.  He kissed my hand and gestured to a silk-covered chair. Joseph P. Kennedy was then a middle-aged man, tall and rather handsome. He was extremely polite and seemed interested in me. He observed that all Hungarian women were beautiful and possessed a special charm. He appeared ready to continue chatting in this vein but I was eager to leave.  ‘I don’t want to take more of your time,’ I said. ‘There are so many people outside waiting to have an audience with you.’ I thanked him, and he accompanied me to the door, kissing my hand again in a continental manner.”

The third service rendered by this book is that the author helps us to understand the phenomenon of survivor’s guilt.  Think of it!  A girl grows up, writes a letter, and as a result, is spared the horrendous fate in a gas chamber suffered by her parents, her sister Maca, and seven-year-old niece Naomi.

She wrote that she periodically dreams of her sister on a truck bound for the gas chambers pushing Naomi towards her, saying ‘You are an American now.  She will be safe with you.  But run quickly, quickly.”

In her dream, the author takes the child and runs and falls several times.  Then Lord Wedgwood appears, urging her to give the child to him.  “My dear Gabriella, I shall take her. She will be safe with me where I am,” says Wedgwood.  Not comprehending, she protests. “I promised my sister I would take care of her.”

Then Wedgwood looks sadly at her, and says, “Gabriella dear. Naomi is dead.  She is safe now with me…”

Next Labson dreams that she runs and jumps into a river—and she awakens, shivering, as the covers having been kicked off her bed.  

In another nightmare, “I see myself with my family in Auschwitz. We are all naked, entering the gas chamber, fully aware of what will happen, holding on to each other. Mother says to me, ‘Dear Kagyika, breathe deeply, it will be over soon.’  I awake.  My sinuses are clogged.  I breathe heavily and my chest is tight…” 

Labson today is a congregant of Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego. She and Auspitz had three sons—Josiah, named for her "Righteous Gentile," Stanley and Reuben. After Auspitz died, she married a gentle, elderly  Englishman living in San Diego, Harold Feldman, whose accent reminded her of Wedgwood. After being again widowed, she married Sam Labson, a retired pharmacist with a keen love of science.  

—Donald H. Harrison