List of the Righteous Among the Nations
The list of the Righteous Among the Nations includes by country of origin listed persons responsible for the rescue of Jews during the Nazi era from the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations were honored.
Since 1953, the State of Israel has honored people as Righteous Among the Nations who took great personal risks between 1933 and 1945 and put their lives in danger in order to protect Jews threatened with deportation to labor or extermination camps . In Yad Vashem, a plaque is placed for each person in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations , and a tree was planted for each of the early honored people in the Alley of the Righteous Among the Nations , but this has become rare due to lack of space. As of January 1, 2019, the righteous number was 27,362 from 51 countries.
The sorting according to "countries of origin" is based on the classifications made by Yad Vashem. In a number of cases, a clear assignment is not possible or not useful, for example for people of binational origin, for people who have changed their nationality after the rescue act or for people who had to be assigned to states that did not exist at the time of their death .
Egypt
An Egyptian was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Mohamed Helmy | 1901 | 1982 | Lived as a doctor in Berlin and hid the Jewess Anna Boros there from 1942 until the end of the war. | 2013 |
Albania
75 Albanians have so far been awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Albania
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Refik Veseli | 1926 or 1927 | 2000 or 2003 | During the German occupation of Albania, he initiated the acceptance of two Jewish families in the house of the Veseli family. The families were welcomed with open arms, provided with food and housed in a room above the barn. Over time, other residents also began to hide Jews. During controls of the German occupiers, however, nobody said a word about this, despite intimidation on the part of the Germans. Even reward money for anyone who gave tips on the capture of hidden Jews could not induce the poor population of Kruja to denounce. | 1987 |
Armenia
So far, 24 Armenians have been awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Armenia
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Pran Tashchiyan | 1890 | Pran Tashchiyan and her husband hid two Jewish children from February 1942 until the liberation in April 1944. | 2002 |
Belgium
1,751 Belgians have so far been awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Belgium
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Hélène de Bie | Dec 11, 1896 | Oct 19, 1983 | Hélène Vandenbril volunteered in the Catholic scout organization run by sisters Marcelle and Madeleine De Meulemeester . After Belgium was occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1940 and the deportation of Jewish Belgians began, they decided to help save them.
In October 1942 Abbot Buisseret of the monastery in Saint-Gilles turned to the De Meulemeester sisters and asked for help for Henri Szlamovicz (born June 21, 1942), a five-month-old Jewish boy at the time. Hélène Vandenbril met her mother and her then nine-year-old daughter Rachel in Brussels. The mother gave this to her five-month-old son. The older daughter, Rachel Szlamovicz, was hidden in a monastery. She continued to visit her little brother for a while. The children's parents went into hiding but were arrested in October 1943. Henri Szlamovicz's mother was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 . The father Abraham Szlamovicz was initially imprisoned in the Fort Breendonk camp . Later he came to the SS assembly camp in Mechelen . Hélène Vandenbril married Benoît de Bie, a Belgian officer, and moved with him to Antwerp . The childless couple raised Henri Szlamovicz like their own son. He called them "Auntie" and "Uncle Ben". They always reminded him that they were not his birth parents and that they would bring him home. Abraham Szlamovicz brought his daughter Rachel to live with him after his liberation in September 1944. The trace to his son had been lost because Abbot Buisseret had since died. Rachel Szlamovicz remembered the De Meulemeester sisters who gave the father the Antwerp address of the de Bie couple. They now lived with Hélène de Bie's family in the country. Years later, the father met his son again there. |
2002 |
Bosnia
47 Bosnians have so far been awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Ahmed Sadik | 1884 | April 1, 1945 | Ahmed Sadik saved his Jewish friend Isidor Papo with his wife and two children. Without hesitation, Sadik brought the family home and obtained documents that enabled them to reach the Italian zone of occupation. Ahmed Sadik paid with his life for his heroism. He was denounced and deported. All members of the Papo family survived the war. | 1984 |
Brazil
Two Brazilians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Aracy de Carvalho Guimarães Rosa | Dec 5, 1908 | March 3, 2011 | Aracy de Carvalho was responsible for the visa department at the Brazilian consulate in Hamburg, where she worked as a secretary in 1938. In that capacity, she helped a group of Jews get visas to Brazil and helped them overcome financial difficulties before they could leave Germany for Brazil | 1982 |
Luís Martins de Souza Dantas | 1876 | 1954 | Was ambassador in Paris at the time of the occupation and issued illegal visas to Jews. When he was banned from issuing visas, he issued over 500 now backdated visas to Jews. | 2003 |
Bulgaria
20 Bulgarians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Bulgaria
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Dimitar Peschew | June 25, 1894 | March 22, 1973 | Dimitar Jossifow Peschew, a bourgeois national Bulgarian politician, prevented on March 9, 1943 in his capacity as deputy Bulgarian parliamentary president through his intervention with Interior Minister Gabrowski and with the Bulgarian Tsar Boris III. the evacuation of the Bulgarian Jews. On March 8, 1943, the wagons for deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp were made available in the train stations . In him was a delegation from his home constituency in the evening of March 8 Kyustendil reported. | 1973 |
Chile
Two Chileans were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Samuel Del Campo | May 23, 1882 | In his capacity as consul, he provided forged documents for several Jews | 2016 | |
Maria Errazuriz | Dec 11, 1893 | June 8, 1972 | María María Edwards Mac-Clure was known in Paris under the name of María Errázuriz or Aunt Marie. As a volunteer nurse in occupied Paris, she saved Jewish orphans who were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. Was captured and tortured by the Gestapo but escaped. | 2005 |
China
Two Chinese were awarded the title of "Righteous Among the Nations".
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Ho Feng Shan | Sep 10 1901 | 1997 | As the Chinese consul in Vienna , he saved hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jews by issuing visas for Shanghai , which were necessary as proof of emigration to leave the country. Known as the Schindler of China. | 2005 |
Pan Jun Shun | 1889 | 1974 | Lived as a Chinese citizen in Kharkiv , Ukraine, and hid and saved a Ukrainian Jewish girl. | 1995 |
Denmark
22 Danes were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Denmark
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Knud Dyby | 1915 | 2011 | Knud Dyby, a Danish police officer, was active in the resistance movement during the German occupation of Denmark in 1940 and participated in sabotage , espionage and the production of underground newspapers . In 1943 he participated in the escape of the Danish Jews . He used his contacts with fishermen, which he had established through sailing, to organize the passage of Jewish Danes to Sweden and even brought groups to Nordhavn, where they were received by seafarers or housed in private houses until the crossing. Since the Danish coast was guarded by the Danish police, he was able to find out in his function as a police officer in which direction the refugee boats had to leave in order not to encounter the German patrol boats. He also helped other people at risk to flee to Sweden. B. were threatened with arrest by the Gestapo due to sabotage or journalistic activity .
Dyba was able to save himself from capture in the course of the Möwe military action on September 19, 1944, during which the Danish police were disbanded and 2,235 police officers were deported to the Neuengamme and Buchenwald concentration camps. While his own police station was also manned, he succeeded in stealing around 400 identity papers, stamps and other material from a second building, which the Gestapo was not aware of, smuggled past the raid with the help of a taxi driver and made them available to the Danish underground . Copies of the identity papers forged with the help of these documents can be found in the National Museum of Denmark . From then on, until the end of the war, he remained in hiding in changing apartments to avoid being arrested by the Gestapo. |
2004 |
Germany
627 Germans were awarded the title "Righteous Among the Nations".
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Germany
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Elisabeth Abegg | March 3, 1882 | August 8, 1974 | People persecuted and persecuted in Berlin a. in her apartment, organized food, money and forged papers and secretly taught children and young people who were no longer allowed to be taught due to the Nuremberg Laws . | 1967 |
Albert Battel | January 21, 1891 | 1952 | In the summer of 1942, together with Max Liedtke , he rescued Jews who had fled the Przemyśl ghetto before deportation and temporarily prevented the SS from evacuating the ghetto. Later he had around 500 ghetto inmates transferred to barracks; in their cellars they escaped deportation to extermination camps. | 1981 |
Berthold Beitz | September 26, 1913 | July 30, 2013 | Classified several hundred Jewish forced laborers in Boryslaw - including those unable to work - as indispensable for the oil industry and employed them in the factories he managed, which prevented them from being deported. Together with his wife Else Beitz , he also hid Jews in his own house. | 1973 |
Hans Georg Calmeyer | June 23, 1903 | 3rd September 1972 | Was head of the “Internal Administration” department in The Hague , which also included the “ Judenreferat ”, in the occupied Netherlands . His task was u. a. the "clarification of racial doubts". He also knowingly accepted forged papers in order to enable people to be classified as “Aryans” or as “quarter” or “half Jews” instead of “full Jews”, and gave advice on how a possibly life-saving classification could be achieved. Even a warning from his superiors didn't stop him. In this way, he was able to save at least 3,700 people, while at the same time for about 2,000 Jews the classification as "cases of doubt" meant death by him. | 1992 |
Theodor Dipper | 1903 | 1969 | Organizer of the underground organization Württembergische Pfarrhauskette , which hid persecuted Jews in churches and private homes of pastors and their relatives. Husband of Hildegard Dipper. | 2008 |
Hans von Dohnanyi | January 1, 1902 | April 9, 1945 | In 1942, he made it possible for the Jewish Berlin lawyers Fritz Arnold and Julius Fliess and their family members to flee to Switzerland by posing as agents of the Abwehr Office. Through the alleged Operation U-7 he initiated, 13 people were able to travel to Switzerland after he had prepared them as refugees during a secret visit. | 2003 |
Wolfgang Frommel | July 8, 1902 | December 13, 1986 | Hidden from 1942 in Amsterdam a group of mostly young Jews from Germany and the Netherlands from the grasp of German occupying power , including Claus Bock and Friedrich W. Buri . | 1973 |
Auguste Gehre | October 2, 1898 | January 1972 | Auguste Gehre and her husband hid the family's Jewish general practitioner in their apartment in Berlin from 1943 and helped ensure that his relatives found shelter. They also provided them with food. | 1988 |
Wilhelm Hammann | February 25, 1897 | July 26, 1955 | As a communist he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp , where he was the “block elder” of “Children's Block 8”, in which Jewish children were imprisoned. When the news of the imminent deportation of the Jewish children leaked, he saved 159 children by removing the star from their prison clothes that identified them as Jewish children. | 1984 |
Helmut Kleinicke | November 19, 1907 | 1979 | Helped over a dozen Jews in Chrzanów to flee. He hid them in the basement of his official apartment or in the greenhouses of the district nursery and issued them false papers so that they could leave the country. | 2020 |
Bernhard Lichtenberg | December 3, 1875 | November 5, 1943 | After the state-directed riots against Jews and Christians of Jewish descent in the November 1938 pogroms, Lichtenberg publicly stood up for the persecuted. Lichtenberg hid Jews, arranged for Jewish children to leave for England and looked after prisoners. | 2004 |
Margarete Meusel | May 26, 1897 | May 16, 1953 | Social worker and member of the Confessing Church. From 1933 to 1936 she accepted Jewish welfare workers as interns. From 1941 onwards she placed women threatened with deportation to extermination camps in safe accommodation. | 2006 |
Fritz Niermann | September 24, 1898 | March 9, 1976 | Grocer Fritz Niermann kept four women hidden in his house at Markscheide 50 in Essen- Altendorf for four weeks until the Americans marched into Essen on April 11, 1945 . They fled on the way from the Humboldtstrasse satellite camp to work at Friedrich Krupp AG . Niermann also kept other Russian slave laborers hidden. | 1985 |
Karl Plagge | July 10, 1897 | June 19, 1957 | German officer in the Wehrmacht , last Major , who during World War II assigned him Jewish least 250 forced laborers before the assassination in the Vilna Ghetto of Nazism preserved. From 1931 until he left the NSDAP in 1939. As a major, from 1941 Plagge was in charge of the Army Motor Vehicle Park (HKP) 562 East in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Thanks to his constant efforts to bring Jews to his labor camp and also to keep families together, around 250 of over 1000 Jews imprisoned were able to survive the Holocaust. These - the others were tracked down and murdered - managed to survive in hiding places they had prepared themselves until the final occupation of Vilnius by the Red Army due to Plagge's warning about the takeover of the camp by the SS. |
2004 |
Gerhard Radke | February 18, 1914 | July 24, 1999 | Radke was stationed as a soldier near Belgrade . A Jewish family who had fled from Belgrade also lived in the house in which he was staying. Radke helped them get the passports they had left behind in Belgrade by driving them to their apartment in a military vehicle and breaking the seal. He then got them all the travel documents they needed to travel to Palestine before he was transferred to the Russian front. | 1977 |
Herbert Richter | August 5, 1901 | May 8, 1944 | Architect. For Harro Schulze-Boysen's resistance network , he obtained information from the General Staff of the Air Force High Command (OKL). Richter was one of the founders of the European Union resistance group in 1939, along with the doctor Georg Groscurth , the chemist Robert Havemann and the dentist Paul Rentsch . | 2005 |
Oskar Schindler | April 28, 1908 | October 9, 1974 | employed 1200 Jewish slave laborers during the 2nd World War and thus saved them from certain death. | 1993 |
Konrad Schweser | November 16, 1899 | February 28, 1975 | Schweser was a German builder who served as a town builder in Poland from June 1940 to October 1941, helping Jews by procuring additional food. He then worked for the Todt Organization in Ukraine until the end of the war. There he saved the lives of at least 44 Jews in Teplyk by hiding them from members of the SS. In 1971 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. | 1968 |
Armin T. Wegner | October 16, 1886 | May 17, 1978 | In April 1933, Armin T. Wegner protested against the persecution of the Jews in an open letter to Adolf Hitler. The letter was not published by any newspaper, whereupon Wegner sent it directly to the Brown House . Shortly afterwards, he was arrested, tortured and detained for several months for this. | 1967 |
Ludwig Woerl | February 28, 1906 | August 27, 1967 | As a camp elder in the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps , he provided medical care to prisoners and saved the lives of some. | 1963 |
Konrat Ziegler | January 12, 1884 | January 8, 1974 | Ziegler helped a Jewish friend to emigrate in Berlin in 1938 and was then sentenced to prison. Freed again and bombed out, he hid his former Jewish colleague Kurt Latte in Osterode. | 2000 |
Ecuador
An Ecuadorian was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Manuel Antonio Munoz Borrero | 1891 | June 18, 1973 | Consul of Ecuador in Stockholm since 1931, was dismissed in 1941 because he had sent 80 passports to Istanbul , which had been distributed there to predominantly Jewish Poles . As the consul post in Swedish but Stockholm remained vacant after his release and the Swedes not moved in the documents and stamps of the consulate as requested by Ecuador, these were owned by Manuel Borrero. At the request of the Jewish chief rabbi in Sweden, Rabbi Avraham Israel Jacobson, he illegally issued Ecuadorian passports for Jews in occupied Europe according to lists that the rabbi presented to him. These passports offered only limited protection for the persecuted, but most of the holders were murdered. For most of them they meant only a respite, but some survived thanks to the papers issued by Borrero. | 2011 |
El Salvador
A Salvadoran was given the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Arturo Castellanos | 23 Dec 1893 | June 18, 1977 | From 1941 to 1945 consul of El Salvador in Geneva , during this time confirmed the alleged El Salvadorian citizenship for approx. 40,000 Jews and thus placed them under the protection of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement . | 2010 |
Estonia
Three Estonians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Polina Lentsman | 1907 | June 22, 1990 | Polina Lentsman hid and saved the Jew Dina Kruglikova and her child. | 2003 |
Eha Masing | Together with her husband Uku, she supported the ethnologist Isidor Levin, whom they knew well, with food, clothing and forged documents during the German occupation . | 1996 | ||
Uku masing | Aug 11, 1909 | Apr 25, 1985 | Together with his wife Eha, supported the ethnologist Isidor Levin, whom they knew, with food, clothing and forged documents during the German occupation . | 1966 |
France
4099 French were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of France
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Madeleine Barot | 4th July 1909 | Dec 28, 1995 | Madeleine Barot was active in the Protestant youth movement and general secretary of CIMADE, the umbrella organization of this movement. The organization decided to help victims of the Vichy regime and occupation, most of whom were foreign Jews. Barot was mainly active in the Gurs internment camp in southern France. It resulted in the release of many camp inmates. She managed to bring children, sick adults and the elderly to facilities that she opened under the auspices of CIMADE, mainly in the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Barot's activities saved hundreds of Jews. | 1988 |
Jules Boucherit | March 29, 1877 | Apr 1, 1962 | During the occupation in World War II , Jules Boucherit, a famous violinist and music teacher, hid numerous Jewish musicians from the Gestapo . He taught them, looked after their material needs, and protected them. | 1993 |
Théomir Devaux | March 17, 1885 | Jan. 28, 1967 | Despite surveillance and several house searches by the Gestapo, Théomir Devaux managed to save over 400 Jewish children undetected from deportation to the concentration camps by the secrecy of the small circle of his helpers by the end of the Second World War . | 1996 |
Remy Dumoncel | Oct 28, 1888 | March 15, 1945 | Rémy Dumoncel gave financial support to writers who could no longer publish works in Nazi-occupied France and hid Alsatian Jews in the Dordogne department , where he owned a house. In his capacity as mayor, he issued false identity documents to Jews and other refugees and thus helped them to flee to unoccupied parts of France. | 1985 |
Jacques Ellul | Jan. 6, 1912 | May 19, 1994 | Jacques Ellul and his wife took in resistance fighters, Spanish refugees, escaped prisoners of war and persecuted Jews. He also warned a neighboring Jewish family of their impending arrest, and got them false papers
escorted her to Lezay (Deux-Sèvres), where Pastor Pierre Fouchier, a member of the same network, hid her with him and thus saved her life. |
2001 |
Louis Forestier | Apr 4, 1907 | Nov 7, 1973 | Hid Charlotte Grenèche Berger and Alice Pichon Radzyner, thus saving their lives. | 2009 |
Père Marie-Benoît | March 30, 1895 | Feb 5, 1990 | During the Second World War he helped about 4,000 Jews from southern France to flee to Spain, Switzerland and Italy. | 1966 |
Pierre-Marie Gerlier | Jan. 14, 1880 | Jan. 17, 1965 | At the end of August 1942, Pierre-Marie Gerlier, as the highest representative of the Catholic Church in the unoccupied zone , joined the open resistance against the deportation of Jews. He refused to hand over 84 Jewish children to the local Vichy authorities who had been accepted into Catholic children's homes after their parents had been deported in the previous weeks. The children were also to be deported to the extermination camps on the express orders of Pierre Laval . | 1981 |
Adélaïde Hautval | Jan. 1, 1906 | Oct 12, 1988 | At the end of January 1943, Adélaïde Hautval was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp as a “Jew friend” and was soon employed there as a prisoner doctor (prisoner number 31.802) in the infirmary of the main camp . The on- site doctor Eduard Wirths assigned them to the concentration camp doctor Carl Clauberg , among others , in order to assist him with forced sterilization . After Hautval discovered that female Jewish inmates had been sterilized by x-rays , had ovariectomies and had been subjected to medical experiments, she refused to take part in the series of experiments.
Without punishment for her refusal, she was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she worked as a prisoner doctor and supported fellow prisoners. In Birkenau she was supposed to assist in Josef Mengele's medical experiments , which she also refused. In August 1944, after suffering from typhoid fever , she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , where she was liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945 . After the liberation she looked after the sick prisoners in the camp and arrived in Paris at the end of June 1945 . She began to write down her experiences in the concentration camp and in 1946 was a witness in several military court trials against members of the concentration camp staff. |
1965 |
Father Jacques de Jésus | Jan. 29, 1900 | June 2, 1945 | Père Jacques de Jésus was a French priest of the Carmelite Order who was deported to the Gusen concentration camp for hiding Jewish children from the Nazi occupation forces in France . | 1985 |
Gabriel Piguet | Feb. 24, 1887 | 3rd July 1952 | Bishop Gabriel Piguet, a 1914-1918 war veteran, supported the rescue of Jews through Catholic institutions in his diocese. Numerous Jewish children were saved through his care. | 2000 |
Paul Ramadier | March 17, 1888 | Oct 14, 1961 | Paul Ramadier was a prominent socialist politician who became Prime Minister of France after the war. Ramadier and his wife Marguerite helped the Jewish professor Henri-Lévy Bruhl and his family during the occupation and thus saved their lives. He also supported Salomon Grumbach from Alsace, a Jewish socialist and MP who was wanted by the police. Ramadier put him in a safe hiding place and thus saved his life. Throughout the occupation, Ramadier stayed in contact with Jewish friends, including prominent politicians like Léon Blum , and provided all possible psychological and material support. | 1985 |
Suzanne Spaak | July 6, 1905 | Aug 12, 1944 | Suzanne Spaak was a member of the “Red Orchestra” secret service network and helped save the lives of numerous Jewish children who were threatened with deportation. In early 1943, information about the preparations for the deportation of Jewish children became known. Spaak actively participated in an operation initiated by Pastor Paul Vergara and Marcelle Guillemot that brought more than sixty children to safety. She protected some of the children in her home until they were all taken to people who were ready to protect them. With the help of her comrades, Spaak provided the children with ration cards and clothing at great personal risk. | 1985 |
Pierre-Marie Théas | Sep 14 1894 | Apr 3, 1977 | During the Second World War, Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas actively campaigned against the deportation of Jews from France in pastoral letters , was temporarily arrested by the Gestapo and spent a total of ten weeks in a concentration camp. | |
André Trocmé | Apr 7, 1901 | 5th June 1971 | Pastor and one of the driving forces behind the organized rescue of several thousand Jews in the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon region , which was therefore collectively accepted as the region of the Righteous Among the Nations. | 2010 |
Georgia
A Georgian was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Sergey Metreveli | Nov 10, 1906 | Oct 1, 1991 | Emil Zigler and Peotr Rabinivich hid and rescued in Kislovodsk . | 2004 |
Greece
355 Greeks were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Greece
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Damaskinos Papandreou | March 3, 1891 | May 19, 1949 | Damaskonos Papandreou studied law and literature in Athens before joining the clergy in 1917. In 1918 he was elected Metropolitan of Corinth and in 1938 Archbishop of Athens , an office which, because of his politically liberal attitude, he was only allowed to take up after the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in 1941, which he spent under house arrest in a monastery.
After the Wehrmacht occupied Greece in the spring of 1941 during World War II , Damaskinos became the most important figure in the non-communist resistance. He built a network of clergy to alleviate the plight of the population that followed from the occupation. He also spoke out against the deportation of forced laborers, hostage-taking and the threat to Greek Jews from the Germans. |
1969 |
Indonesia
Two Indonesians were awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Tolé Madna | May 12, 1896 | Sept 1, 1992 | In September 1942, shortly after the deportation of Jews to the Netherlands began, Johanna Madna was asked by her Jewish neighbor Gitla Munzer from Poland to hide her ten-month-old son Alfred. Gitla's husband Simche was already hiding in a psychiatric hospital and her two older daughters were housed elsewhere. At first Johanna hid the boy with her sister, but it soon turned out that her home was not safe enough. Then Johanna turned to her ex-husband Tolé Madna, who agreed to take in the boy and look after him in addition to his three children. Together with Mima Saïna, the housekeeper, Tolé looked after Alfred for almost three years, until The Hague was liberated in May 1945. | 2003 |
Mima Saina | Jan. 1, 1945 | 2003 |
Ireland
An Irish woman was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Mary Elizabeth Elmes | 1909 | June 3, 2002 | Mary Elisabeth Elmes, born in Cork, Ireland, who worked for the Quakers in Perpignan, faced the growing plight of Jewish refugees interned in detention camps in the Pyrenees.
Elmes joined the Jewish OSE organization and in particular Dr. Joseph Weill and Andrée Salomon, who worked to save Jews. Children could be legally released from the camps until mid-August 1942, but deportations of Jews from the Rivesaltes camp began on August 11, initially to Drancy near Paris and from there to Auschwitz. From that point on until the camp closed on November 25, 1942, the authorities no longer released any children from the camp. Elmes was fully aware of the importance of the deportations. She and her Jewish colleagues smuggled children out of the camp and took them to safe places. |
2013 |
Italy
714 Italians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Italy
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Giacomo Bassi | March 18, 1886 | 1968 | As the community secretary of San Giorgio su Legnano, hid a Jewish family of five in the local elementary school and provided them with food and false documents until the end of the war. | 1998 |
Vincenzo Fagiolo | Feb 5, 1918 | 22 Sep 2000 | Catholic priest who campaigned for persecuted Jews in his diocese of Rome . | 1983 |
Japan
A Japanese was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Chiune Sugihara | Jan. 1, 1900 | July 31, 1986 | As a Japanese consul in Lithuania from July to September 1940, contrary to official instructions, he issued thousands of handwritten transit visas for Jews, which enabled them to leave Lithuania before the German occupation, is often referred to as "Japanese Oskar Schindler ". | 1985 |
Croatia
118 Croatians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from Croatia
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Branko Bauer | Feb. 18, 1921 | Apr 11, 2002 | Bauer was already interested in film as a schoolboy. During the Second World War he also visited the cinemas in Zagreb, which were very popular with the Nazi occupiers . Together with his father, Čedomir Bauer, he hid their Jewish tenant Ljerka Freiberger 1942, the Ustasha . | 1992 |
Cuba
A Cuban woman was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Amparo Pappo | 1896 | Nov 19, 1987 | When the Germans occupied France, Amparo Otero, who came from Cuba, fled south from Paris to the unoccupied zone. She settled in Siran in the Cantal region, where her sister's family lived, and made a living from making hats. Despite her personal need, Amparo felt obliged to help others in need. She helped other refugees, organized events for children whose fathers were prisoners of war, and brought Jewish children into her home. | 2011 |
Latvia
138 Latvians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Latvia
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Jānis Lipke | Feb. 1, 1900 | May 14, 1987 | Jānis Lipke initially worked as a showman in the port of Riga. After witnessing discrimination against Latvian Jews by the National Socialists in July 1941 , he decided to work as a warehouse worker for the Air Force at the time in order to smuggle Jews out of the Riga ghetto and hide them under the guise of this function . In this way he saved about 56 Jews from murder by the Nazis until the Red Army marched in in October 1944. In addition to his wife Johanna and his two sons, around 25 helpers were involved in Lipke's rescue operation. | 1977 |
Lithuania
904 Lithuanians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Lithuania
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Elena Lukauskienė | Jan. 1, 1909 | March 17, 1959 | In 1944, Elena Lukauskienė's family took in two Jewish children from the Kauen concentration camp . | 2006 |
Luxembourg
A Luxembourger was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Victor Bodson | March 24, 1902 | June 29, 1984 | Made his house in Steinheim on the German-Luxembourg border available as a stopover on an escape route for Jews from Germany. About 100 refugees who had swum through the Sauer were cared for in his house and placed in safe hiding spots by Bodson. | 1971 |
Moldova / Republic of Moldova
79 Moldovans were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Moldova
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Gratina Plugar | Jan. 1, 1909 | March 17, 1959 | The Jewish Shargorodski family were the best friends of Kondrati and Gratina Plugar and their son Andrey, b. 1931, in Rybnitsa. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Shargorodskis tried to flee east. However, because of the rapid advance of the German army, they had to return to Rybnitsa. On August 5, 1941, the Germans and Romanians occupied Rybnitsa. When a ghetto was established in September 1941, the Shargorodskis had to move there with the other Jews in the city. The living conditions and sanitary facilities in the ghetto were poor. After a few months, a typhus epidemic broke out there that lasted for over a year and cost many lives. During their entire stay in the ghetto, the Shargorodskis were supported by the Plugar family. Gratina often sneaked into the ghetto to bring them food and clothes. The residents of the ghetto were allowed to go out for an hour twice a week on Sundays and Thursdays to buy goods in the town market. On those days Gratina came there to give Volko Shargorodski baskets full of groceries. All the help they gave them during the occupation was given free of charge. As the Rybnitsa Front approached, the Romanian units that controlled the city were replaced by German units that intensified the persecution of the Jews.
At that point, in February 1944, Gratina agreed to hide Frima, the Shargorodskis 'daughter, in her house while the parents and Frima's brother hid in other friends' houses. Frima stayed with the Plugars until Rybnitsa was liberated by the Red Army on March 30, 1944. After the war, the two families continued to live in Rybnitsa and had friendly relations over the years. |
2004 |
Montenegro
A Montenegrin was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Petar Zankovic | Apr 1, 1924 | June 17, 2002 | Helped hide and thus save the Zaltkovich family from 1942–1943. | 2006 |
Netherlands
5778 Dutch people were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from the Netherlands
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Willem Arondeus | 22 Aug 1894 | July 1, 1943 | Member of the resistance group of artists around the sculptor Gerrit van der Veen , involved in the attack on the Amsterdam residents' registration office in order to destroy identity papers and the like by destroying copies of ID cards. a. to facilitate for Jews. | 1986 |
Corrie ten boom | Apr 15, 1892 | Apr 15, 1983 | Founded an underground organization that saved numerous Jews during the occupation of the Netherlands, hid several families behind a shed in their own house. | 1967 |
Gerard Fleischeuer | Feb 25, 1889 | March 29, 1945 | Hid several persecuted Jews in his home. | 2000 |
Wolfgang Frommel | July 8, 1902 | Dec 13, 1986 | After the occupation of the Netherlands by the German Wehrmacht and the decision of the Quakers to give in to the pressure of the occupiers and banish Jewish children from Eerde Castle to an adjoining building, Wolfgang Frommel and Wolfgang Cordan tried to convince the school management to let the Jewish children go into hiding . When the school management opposed this plan and even threatened to report to the Gestapo, Frommel and Cordan decided to act on their own and to help the students who were close to them escape and hide them. All the hidden youth survived the German occupation - despite the omnipresent threat from raids by the German occupying power and their Dutch aid agencies. | 1973 |
Miep Gies | Feb 15, 1909 | Jan. 11, 2010 | In 1933 she applied to work as a secretary in Otto Frank's Dutch branch of the Opekta company . She received the post and a friendship developed with Otto Frank, his wife Edith and their daughters Anne and Margot .
When the threat to the Jewish population in the Netherlands increased, Otto Frank informed Miep Gies of his plans to go into hiding with the entire family. Despite the danger that this created for her, she immediately promised him her help. On July 5, 1942, Margot Frank received an order to report to a labor camp . Otto Frank then decided to hide the family and himself immediately in the rear building at Prinsengracht 263, which was actually only planned for a later date. Miep Gies initially accompanied Margot, later Otto, Edith and Anne to the hiding place. The van Pels family and Gies' dentist Fritz Pfeffer joined them later. In the following two years, Miep Gies helped the Frank and van Pels families and Fritz Pfeffer with food and newspapers, but also with friendly affection and encouragement. This time is given in particular detail in Anne Frank's diary . Among the helpers were still Johannes Kleiman , Bep and Victor Kugler . On August 4, 1944, the people in hiding were discovered and arrested by the “Green Police”. Miep Gies was also present, but escaped arrest by explaining to Inspector Karl Josef Silberbauer that she, like him, was from Vienna. Thereupon he refrained from reporting, but threatened to track her down if she should escape. She later tried to bribe Silberbauer with money in order to obtain the release of the Frank and van Pels families from prison, which usually meant death. The policeman rejected the attempted bribe because he was "not in a position" to "be allowed to decide". Miep Gies entered the Secret Annex the afternoon after the arrest and rescued the remaining personal belongings of the deported families, including Anne Frank's diary entries. In 1945 she gave this to Otto Frank, who was the only one to return to Amsterdam. |
1972 |
Walraven van Hall | Feb 10, 1906 | Feb 12, 1945 | Walraven van Hall became President of the Dutch Union ( Nederlandsche Unie ) in Zaandam in August 1940 . The aim of this movement was to unite the people of the Netherlands. It was banned by the German occupation forces at the end of 1941 . Van Hall reacted with concern to the anti-Jewish measures taken by the occupiers.
Walraven van Hall and his brother went underground . They helped raise money for strikers and seafarers' families. Van Hall kept in touch with the Dutch government in exile and ensured that the lenders had the security of getting their loans back from the Dutch government after the occupation ended. Van Hall could not openly write down the names of the lenders. So he handed out a worthless share to the lenders and noted down the code names of the recipients and the number of shares. The result was an underground bank that gave poor families and Jews in hiding not only money but also food cards and ID cards. With the approval of the Dutch government-in-exile, van Hall was able to receive 50 million guilders from the Dutch bank ( De Nederlandsche Bank ) by forging banknotes and having them exchanged for real banknotes in banks. Walraven van Hall became head of the National Support Fund. He supported many resistance groups and underground newspapers such as Trouw , Het Parool and Vrij Nederland . Walraven van Hall was nicknamed Olieman (oil man) because he could alleviate the differences of opinion between groups. The leaders of the resistance groups met every Friday , but on January 27, 1945, the location of the meeting of the German occupying forces was revealed. The leaders of the resistance groups were arrested. Walraven van Hall was shot dead in Haarlem on February 12, 1945 and after the end of the war he was reburied with many other resistance fighters in the Bloemendaal Cemetery of Honor . |
1978 |
Johannes Kleiman | 17 Aug 1896 | Jan. 28, 1959 | Johannes Kleiman had known Otto Frank since he founded a bank branch in Amsterdam in the early 1920s. In 1923 he became an authorized signatory in this branch, which was located at Keizersgracht 604. After this branch was closed again in 1924, Kleiman worked in his brother Willy's company from 1925.
In 1933 Otto Frank re-founded a company in Amsterdam, which moved to Prinsengracht 263 in 1938 . There Kleiman became an accountant for Opekta and Pectacon. On December 18, 1941, he officially became Frank's successor in the management of Opekta, as Frank was no longer allowed to run the company as a Jew. From July 6, 1942, the Frank family lived hidden in the rear building at Prinsengracht 263 and were looked after by Kleiman, among others. This suffered from serious stomach problems; on March 31, 1943 he had a gastric bleeding and in September of that year he had to undergo an operation. On August 4, 1944, Kleiman was arrested along with the Frank family and his colleague Kugler. Kleiman and Kugler were initially transferred from the SD headquarters in the Euterpestraat in Amsterdam to the prison on Amstelveenseweg, from September 7th to 11th they were in the prison on the Weteringschans in Amsterdam. They were then transferred to the Amersfoort transit camp, from which Kleiman was released on September 18, 1944 at the instigation of the Red Cross. In the post-war period he campaigned for the preservation of the house at Prinsengracht 263–267 in Amsterdam as a memorial. |
1971 |
Victor Kugler | June 5, 1900 | Dec 16, 1981 | In May 1938 Victor Kugler obtained citizenship of the Netherlands . In 1940, this and the fact that he was not of Jewish faith enabled him to prevent Otto Frank's expropriation of the Pectacon. He dissolved Pectacon and took over the management of the newly founded "Gies & Co".
From July 1942 to August 1944 he helped his colleagues Miep Gies , Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl to hide eight people in an officially sealed outbuilding of the company's headquarters in Amsterdam from persecution by supporters of National Socialism . Anne Frank was among them . On August 4, 1944, he was betrayed to the Gestapo by an unknown informant . Victor Kugler was interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters in the Euterpestraat in Amsterdam, then on the same day transported to a prison for Jews and “political prisoners” waiting to be deported. On September 7th, he was placed in a cell with people sentenced to death in Weteringschans Prison. Four days later, on September 11, he was transferred to the Amersfoort transit camp , where he was scheduled for transport to Germany. On September 17th, the Amersfoort train station was destroyed by a bomb attack. On September 26th, Kugler and about 1,100 other men were brought to Zwolle and forced to dig anti- tank trenches . Kugler was again transferred from December 30, 1944 to March 28, 1945 by the SA to Wageningen for forced labor . When around 600 prisoners marched from Wageningen through Renkum , Heelsum, Oosterbeek , Arnheim , Westervoort and Zevenaar with the intention of going on to Germany the following day, an air raid took place and Kugler used the confusion to escape. He was hidden by a farmer for a few days, borrowed a bicycle and made his way back to Hilversum. He reached the city in April 1945. There he hid until the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945 by Anglo-American troops. |
1973 |
Walle Nauta | June 8, 1916 | March 24, 1994 | He and his wife Ellie hid a Jewish girl in their apartment. | 2008 |
Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot | May 2, 1897 | Jan. 16, 1989 | Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot and her husband took in the Jewish girl Bertha Eveline (Bep) Koster, who thus survived the National Socialist occupation. | 2008 |
Aunt Truus | Apr 21, 1896 | Aug 30, 1978 | In the 1930s Geertruida Wijsmuller (Aunt Truus) began to work for the Dutch Committee for Jewish Affairs (Comité voor Bijzondere Joodse Belangen) and initially dealt with the transport of food and medicines to various distressed areas in Europe. She worked together with the Berliner Recha Freier to rescue Jewish children.
After the situation of the Jewish and non-Aryan population in Nazi Germany worsened, Geertruida Wijsmuller traveled several times to Vienna from November 1938 and did not give up until she was received by Adolf Eichmann , who at the time was the “ Central Office for Jewish Emigration ”and from whom she finally received at the beginning of December the promise that 600 children would be allowed to emigrate to England within five days if she could organize the transport within this period. When she surprisingly succeeded and the Kindertransport could take place via the Netherlands to Great Britain on December 11, 1938 , others followed, and finally more than 10,000 children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were brought to England until the action on September 1, 1939 - the beginning of the Second World War - came to an end. By then she had already organized 74 transports. But even during the war she continued to help Jews and other persecuted people. She traveled to Scandinavia, Belgium and France, organized trips, protected the persecuted and was involved in relief operations. |
1974 |
Bep Voskuijl | July 5, 1919 | May 6, 1983 | Bep Voskuijl was one of the helpers of the Frank and van Pels and Fritz Pfeffers families when they tried to escape from the occupiers of the Netherlands by "hiding" by hiding in what is now the Anne Frank House . | 1971 |
Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht | Sep 11 1912 | May 28, 2013 | Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht was the daughter of the Dutch geologist and lawyer Willem van Waterschoot van der Gracht and the Austrian Josephine Freiin von Hammer-Purgstall (1881–1955).
Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht moved to Bergen with her family in 1940 . Here she met the two German immigrants Wolfgang Cordan and Wolfgang Frommel in 1941 in the house of the poet and writer Adriaan Roland Holst . In the same year she was able to move into an apartment at 401 Herengracht in Amsterdam . A year later Frommel and Friedrich W. Buri moved into this apartment. Together they hid a group of mostly Jewish youths of German and Dutch nationality. The contribution of Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht to the survival of the hidden people during the German occupation and persecution was active and essential. In 1942 she became acquainted with Max Beckmann , with whom she was able to maintain contact even after his emigration to the USA. |
1998 |
Joop Westerweel | Jan. 25, 1899 | Aug 11, 1944 | After returning to the Netherlands, Joop Westerweel became a teacher in Bilthoven and soon afterwards began to take care of the reception and education of refugee Jewish children from Poland and Germany . In 1942 he founded the Westerweel group and became one of the leading figures in the Dutch resistance . The group was unusual in that it consisted of Jews and non-Jews who worked together to save Jewish lives by organizing underground hiding places, identity documents and escape routes. In total, the Westerweel group supported around 300 to 400 Jewish children and young people and saved the majority of them. Westerweel himself was arrested on March 10, 1944 while trying to smuggle two boys across the Dutch border into Belgium . He was taken to the Vught Concentration Camp and tortured, but did not reveal any information about his colleagues. He was executed on August 11, 1944. | 1964 |
Jan Zwartendijk | July 29, 1896 | Sep 14 1976 | As Dutch Vice Consul in Kaunas , Lithuania, he had issued visas to 2400 Jews to Curaçao and Dutch Guiana , which enabled them to obtain a transvisa to Japanese-occupied Shanghai from the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara . | 1997 |
North Macedonia
10 Macedonians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of North Macedonia
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Smiljan Franjo Čekada | 29 Aug 1902 | Jan. 18, 1976 | Smiljan Franjo Čekada was appointed Bishop of Skopje in Macedonia on August 18, 1940 . During the occupation by the National Socialists , he stood up for the Macedonian Jews. His efforts to save at least the converted Catholic Jews from deportation to Auschwitz were not very successful; however, he was able to save some children in monasteries. | 2011 |
Norway
67 Norwegians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Norway
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Per Roth | 1914 | A Norwegian political prisoner in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany named Per Roth, born in Stavanger in 1914, worked as a nurse in the camp hospital and saved the lives of 11 young Jews. They were brought from Auschwitz on June 24, 1943 to be used as guinea pigs for the medical staff under the direction of Dr. To serve Dohmen. | 1994 |
Austria
110 Austrians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Austria
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Wanda Bottesi | 26 Sep 1923 | Nov 2, 2008 | In the summer of 1944, Wanda Bottesi hid the two Jews Lorraine Justman-Visnicki and Mirjam Fuchs, who were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp, in her apartment in Innsbruck , while her friend Anton Dietz obtained forged papers. | 1980 |
Karl B. Gröger | 1918 | July 1, 1943 | Together with Coos Hartogh , Leendert Barentsen , Cornelius Roos u. a. Karl Gröger published a magazine in the Netherlands that propagated armed resistance against the occupation. Together with a resistance group led by Gerrit van der Veen , he carried out an attack on the residents' registration office in Amsterdam on March 27, 1943, in which papers were destroyed that were necessary for the organization of the deportations of the Jewish population. Gröger was executed for this three months later. | 1986 |
Irene Harand | Sep 7 1900 | Feb. 2, 1975 | Irene Harand was a co-founder of the "World Movement Against Racial Hatred and Human Need", known as the "Harand Movement". After their escape to the USA, she helped Austrian Jews obtain visas for the USA, which enabled more than 100 people to flee from Nazi persecution. | 1967 |
Ella Lingens | Nov 18, 1908 | Dec 30, 2002 | Ella Lingens hid ten Jews in her room in Vienna during the Night of the Reichspogrom ; from 1941 she and her husband Kurt repeatedly supported Jewish acquaintances, for example by helping them escape. In 1941/42 she hid a young Jewish woman in her apartment for several months, provided her with food and, with the help of the identity of her housekeeper, made it possible for her to see a doctor and have necessary operations. After denunciation by an acquaintance who pretended to help two Jewish couples flee, Ella Lingens was deported to Auschwitz together with her friend Karl Motesiczky in autumn 1942. There she was employed as a doctor and in this function saved some Jewish prisoners from being murdered in the gas chambers. After a death march from Auschwitz to Dachau, Ella Lingens saw the end of the war there. | 1980 |
Peru
Two Peruvians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Jose Maria Barreto | Aug 12, 1948 | Jose Maria Barreto, Peru’s consul general in Geneva, was prepared to issue Peruvian passports for Jews under German occupation, contrary to the instructions of his home country, and was then terminated. Trying to save Jews from death ended Barreto's diplomatic career. | 2014 | |
Isabel Weill (Zuzunaga) | Apr 10, 1895 | May 20, 1984 | Hid and saved Jack Szarfscher. | 2016 |
Poland
6,992 Poles were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from Poland
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Gertruda Bablinska | 1902 | 1995 | The Catholic nanny saved the life of orphaned Jewish boy Michael Stolowicki by raising him like her own son. After the end of the Second World War , she went with him to Israel. | 1963 |
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski | Feb. 19, 1922 | Apr 24, 2015 | Participated in the rescue of tens of thousands of Polish Jews as a member of the Council for the Assistance of the Jews (Żegota) . Also took part in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 . | 1965 |
Jerzy Bielecki | March 21, 1921 | Oct 20, 2011 | Jerzy Bielecki was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 while trying to flee to Hungary and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp on June 14, 1940 . There he was one of the first prisoners and was tattooed with the prisoner number 243. In July 1944, he managed to escape from the camp in an SS uniform and with a permit, together with a Jewish friend, Cyla Cybulska, whom he had met in the camp. In this way he managed to save his own life and Cyla Cybulska. | 1985 |
Jan Dobraczyński | April 20, 1910 | March 5, 1994 | Member of the Catholic National Party and head of the Organization for Abandoned Children in Warsaw, Żegota helped shelter and save Jewish children in Catholic monasteries. | 1993 |
Mieczysław Fogg | May 30, 1901 | 3rd Sep 1990 | At the beginning of World War II , Mieczyslaw Fogg appeared in front of the Polish army that was fighting against Hitler's Germany, as well as (while it was still in operation) on Polish radio. During the occupation he initially tried to sing in revues and cafes, but stopped these attempts after he realized that he was being watched by the Gestapo . He then worked as a waiter and joined the Home Army . In the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, he not only fought against the Germans with gun in hand, but also gave a large number of concerts in the positions, hospitals and on the barricades of the embattled capital. He was wounded several times in the fighting.
Fogg saved the lives of several Jewish friends who were friends during the occupation by offering them shelter in his apartment and obtaining forged travel documents. |
1989 |
Jan Karski | Apr. 24, 1914 | July 13, 2000 | The cover name Jan Karski was adopted by the young diplomat Jan Kozielewski in 1942 when he set off on his last and most dangerous mission for the Polish underground army Armia Krajowa (AK). Between 1942 and 1943 he informed the Polish government-in-exile in London as well as the British and US governments of the tragic situation in Poland and the systematic murder of the Jews . Karski reported as an eyewitness because he was smuggled into the Izbica assembly camp in a uniform of the Ukrainian militia , from which fully loaded freight trains left for a nearby Belzec extermination camp .
Karski got into the Warsaw ghetto through a tunnel of the Jewish resistance . There he saw the starved children and the dying Jewish population on the streets. One of the people who escorted him from the ghetto was the Jewish resistance fighter Leon Feiner. In July 1943, Karski met personally with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and told him about the situation in Poland and what he had seen. |
1982 |
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka | Aug 10, 1889 | Apr 9, 1968 | She experienced the beginning and the first years of the Second World War in Warsaw, where she was conspiratorial and charitable. She was at the head of the Catholic underground organization Front Odrodzenia Polski (Front for the Rebirth of Poland) and in this capacity she published a protest against the Holocaust in August 1942, which was based mainly on information from Jan Karski . The protest was recorded on microfilm compiled by the Home Army's Office of Information and Propaganda (BIP) to inform the English about the situation of the Jews.
She was the initiator of the Żegota , an organization that saved around 75,000 Jews from extermination. The leading activist in Kossak's "Konrad Żegota Committee" was the future Polish Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski , who was introduced to her in 1942 by Jan Karski. She was in contact with the secret, militant Catholic organization Unia and wrote for the underground newspaper Polska żyje ( Poland Lives ). In 1943 she was arrested and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, after which she was interned in the Warsaw women's prison “Serbia” . She was released in 1944 and took part in the Warsaw Uprising . |
1982 |
Jerzy Lerski | 1917 | 1992 | Even before the war, Jerzy Lerski, a student at Lviv University, was considered a staunch opponent of discrimination against Jewish students at Polish universities. Lerski organized the Polska Młodzież Społeczno-Demokratyczna (Polish Social Democratic Youth), a movement that fought against nationalism and anti-Semitism. Despite being beaten by anti-Semitic students in 1938, Lerski continued his activities. Lerski spent the German occupation of Poland in England, where he was active in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). In due course Lerski was sent to Poland as an envoy of the Polish government-in-exile. He was parachuted to Poland and reached Warsaw with a large sum of dollars for the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB). The money was given to Adolf Berman ("Borowski"), who introduced Lerski to the Jewish underground leaders in Warsaw and Cracow. During his stay in Warsaw, Lerski took part in dangerous missions to smuggle Jews out of prison and concentration camps. On his return to London, he presented a report to the leader of the Polish government in exile and to the Jewish representative Dr. Black beard. Lerski also took microfilms from the Jewish underground press in Warsaw to London. Lerski saw his underground activity as his contribution to the war against a common enemy and as an obligation to the Jewish citizens of Poland | 1985 |
Wanda Makuch-Korulska | Oct 12, 1919 | Apr 1, 2007 | Makuch-Korulska graduated from high school in 1938 and began studying medicine at the Medical Faculty of Warsaw University . During the Second World War she instructed military preparation courses for women for underground combat. During the German occupation of Poland , she worked with the Polish Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa , AK), with whose Order of Merit she was awarded in London , and also took part in the Warsaw Uprising .
Makuch-Korulska risked her life by entering the Warsaw Ghetto to help Halina Walfisz, her longtime friend. Makuch-Korulska was able to help Walfisz escape the ghetto by procuring Aryan papers for them. She found accommodation with Chaya Gutkowska, a Jewish refugee who received help from the Polish underground through Makuch's contacts. With her false information, Walfisz started working in a factory that made slippers. However, the Gestapo arrested her and in July 1943 she was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the evacuation of the camp and its liberation near Magdeburg, Walfisz returned to Warsaw in 1945 and remained close friends with Makuch. |
1994 |
Albin Małysiak | June 12, 1917 | July 16, 2011 | Albin Małysiak joined the Order of the Lazarists on April 12, 1936 and received his training in Poland and Lithuania . After completing his studies at the Instytut Teologiczny Księży Misjonarzy in Cracow, he made his profession on April 12, 1936 . During the Second World War he worked in the institute and the provincial administration. Because of the German occupation he was ordained a priest on May 1, 1941 by the Krakow Auxiliary Bishop Stanisław Rospond and was active in pastoral care in Krakow, among other places. In 1943/44 he and Sister Bronisława Wilemska DC, superior of the Helclów House, gave asylum to fellow Jewish citizens and got them forged identity cards and birth certificates. | 1993 |
Czesław Miłosz | June 30, 1911 | Aug 14, 2004 | Czesław Miłosz, the well-known Polish poet and author of the famous Campo dei Fiori poem about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and later Nobel Prize winner for literature, was known for his liberal views even before the war. During the occupation, Miłosz lived in Warsaw, where he worked in the ranks of the underground socialist organization Wolnosc (Freedom). As part of his activities inside and outside the organization, he extended his aid to Jews who were hiding in the city. At the same time, his brother Andrzej Miłosz, who lived in Vilnius, also organized in the Polish underground. In 1943, his brother Andrzej Seweryn smuggled Tross and his wife, hidden in a truck, into Warsaw. When they arrived in Warsaw, Czesław received Mr. and Mrs. Tross, found a place for them to hide and give them financial support. Czesław also helped Felicia Wołkominska, her sister and sister-in-law, Jewish refugees who fled Warsaw on the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Tross couple were killed in the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944, but Wolkominska survived and emigrated to Israel in 1957. | 1989 |
Igor Newerly | March 24, 1903 | Oct 19, 1987 | After the start of the Second World War , Newerly went underground. He was involved in finding hiding places for Jews who had fled the ghetto, and his house was always open to his Jewish friends to serve as a temporary shelter until a safe place could be found. He helped his colleagues from Mały Przegląd, Kuba Herzstein and Lejzor Czarnobroda, among others. Newerly was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and spent the time up until the end of the war in the Majdanek , Auschwitz , Oranienburg and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps . | 1982 |
Irene Gut Opdyke | May 5, 1922 | May 17, 2003 | Watched a German soldier throw a baby in the air and shoot it in 1942. Then decided to help people of Jewish descent and hid twelve of them, saving their lives. | 1982 |
Tadeusz Pankiewicz | Nov 21, 1908 | Nov 5, 1993 | When a “Jewish residential area” was set up in Krakow after the German occupation of Poland , Tadeusz Pankiewicz's pharmacy was found in the fenced off area of the Krakow ghetto . Since Pankiewicz successfully fought against the relocation of the pharmacy, including with bribes, the pharmacy survived the two and a half years of the ghetto from 1941 to 1943. Despite the danger to his own life, Pankiewicz used his pharmacy to actively seek help and rescue of the Jews. During one of the actions the Germans carried out in the ghetto, Pankiewicz hid Dr. Abraham Mirowski in his pharmacy and Irena Cinowicz (née Halpern), who had been imprisoned in the ghetto since 1942. The pharmacy survived the further war years and was nationalized in the People's Republic of Poland in 1951 . A small museum was set up in the 1980s. | 1983 |
Stefania Podgórska | June 2, 1921 | 29 Sep 2018 | After her father died in 1938 after a serious illness, Stefania Podgórska began working in Przemyśl in 1939 in the cloth goods shop of the Jewish family Diamant . During the German occupation of Poland in 1939–1945 , she hid 13 Jews in the attic of the house in which the shop was located - all of them experienced the liberation. In 1961 she emigrated to the United States , where she married Josef Diamant, one of those she had saved. | 1979 |
Franciszek Raszeja | Apr 2, 1896 | July 21, 1942 | After the end of the war , Franciszek Raszeja worked as a doctor in Warsaw from December 1939, teaching underground students at the Warsaw Secret University. He got in touch with Professor Ludwik Hirszfeld , who was in the Warsaw ghetto , and organized a blood donation service for the Jewish population. On July 21, 1942, despite the impending dangers, Raszeja went to the ghetto to treat a patient. He was shot dead by members of the SS in the patient's apartment with the patient, his family, two Jewish doctors and a nurse . | 2000 |
Cecylia Roszak | March 25, 1908 | Nov 16, 2018 | Religious sister . Together with other Dominican women, Cecylia Roszak gave a group of Jews, including Abba Kovner, shelter in their monastery in Vilnius . | 1984 |
Irena Sendler | Feb 15, 1910 | May 12, 2008 | Before the war , Irena Sendler worked in various departments of the Warsaw Social Welfare Office . After the occupation of Warsaw in September 1939, she continued her work and used it to help Jews. Together with her colleagues from the social welfare office, she forged hundreds of documents by entering Polish names instead of the names of Jews receiving social assistance.
When the Warsaw Ghetto on 16 November 1940 prohibited area concerned Sendler was declared, and their assistants for itself staff cards , belonged to the sanitary column to the task of combating infectious diseases. Together with helpers, this made it possible for her to smuggle around 2500 Jewish children out of the ghetto in order to place them in Polish families, monasteries and orphanages . The children received false papers through contacts within the Ministry of Welfare. Catholic parishes also helped: They obtained false birth certificates . From October 1942, the Germans tightened their controls so that further help through the social welfare office was impossible. From December 1942 Sendler worked with the underground organization Żegota and took over the management of the children's department. So she was able to continue to support her protégés financially. On October 20, 1943, Irena Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death. Under torture she was supposed to reveal the names and hiding places of the rescued children, but according to Anna Mieszkowskasie she did not reveal anything. The Żegota could Irena Sendler by paying bribes after 3 months ransom. An SS man knocked her down on the way to her execution and left her on the side of the road. She read about her officially executed execution in the announcements of the occupiers. Irena Sendler then changed her identity and lived under a false name in the underground until the end of the war. To enable the children to reunite with their parents later, Irena Sendler kept lists of names with their encrypted addresses and hidden them in jars under an apple tree in a garden. |
1965 |
Henryk Sławik | 1894 | 23 Aug 1944 | Henryk Slawik was a Polish politician, diplomat and social worker who saved 5,000 Hungarian and Polish Jews from Budapest from the Holocaust during World War II by issuing false Polish passports . | 1990 |
Rudolf Weigl | Sep 2 1883 | Aug 11, 1957 | After the outbreak of war in 1939 , Rudolf Weigl returned to Poland from a research stay in Abyssinia . After the invasion of the Soviet troops in September 1939, he continued the work of the institute in the now Soviet-occupied Lemberg . The building of the neighboring girls' high school was connected to the institute. The production of typhus vaccines has increased massively. After the German invasion of the city on June 30, 1941, the new occupiers shot a total of 25 professors from the university , including the former Polish prime minister and mathematician Kazimierz Bartel . In view of the increasing danger to his own life, Weigl agreed to continue working among the Germans, but refused to sign the German People's List .
For the next four years he headed the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research in Lemberg, an offshoot of the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research of the Army High Command in Cracow under Hermann Eyer . In this context, he saved the lives of numerous people (the number is estimated at several thousands) by describing their work as "vital to the war effort". Polish university professors such as Stefan Banach , Bronisław Knaster and Władysław Orlicz were among the employees . The employees fed infected lice with their blood, and the serum was obtained from the intestines of the insects. Among those rescued in this way were also Jews, such as his scientist colleague and sociologist Ludwik Fleck . |
2003 |
Henryk Woliński | 1901 | March 12, 1986 | Watched a German soldier throw a baby in the air and shoot it in 1942. Then decided to help people of Jewish descent and hid twelve of them, saving their lives. | 1974 |
Antonina Wyrzykowska | Aug 2, 1916 | Nov 29, 2011 | In the summer of 1941, the German authorities set up a ghetto in Łomża and imprisoned Jews from the area there. Despite the mortal danger, Antonina Wyrzykowska and her husband tried to help the Jews and provided them with food. The Łomża ghetto was liquidated on November 1st, 1942 and the inmates were deported to extermination camps .
In November 1942, the Wyrzykowskis set up two secret rooms under the pig and chicken coop and hid seven Jews there: Moses Olszewicz, Berek Olszewicz, Schmul Wasserstein, Elke, the bride of Moses Olszewicz, Israel Grądowski, Jankel Kubrzański and Lea Sosnowska. Some of them survived the Jedwabne massacres before . The German gendarmes searched the farm with sniffer dogs, but did not discover the hidden rooms. The Jews stayed there until the Red Army marched in in January 1945. Six out of seven Jews soon left the homestead, only Schmul Wasserstein stayed with the Wyrzykowski family. Two months later, on the night of March 13-14, 1945, Antonina Wyrzykowska was attacked and beaten by six neighbors. The bandits wanted to kill the rescued Jew Wasserstein, but could not find him, they only robbed the homestead. The next day the Wyrzykowskis fled with their two children to Łomża , where they found shelter with the rescued Jews. |
1976 |
Portugal
Three Portuguese were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Carlos Sampaio Garrido | Apr 5, 1883 | As the Portuguese ambassador in Budapest , he hid 12 Jews in a house rented by the embassy. After his recall in 1944, in consultation with his successor Alberto Carlos de Liz-Teixeira Branquinho , he organized over 1,000 documents from Bern, including 700 provisional Portuguese passports, for Hungarian Jews. | 2010 | |
Aristides de Sousa Mendes | July 19, 1885 | Apr 3, 1954 | As consul general in Bordeaux , contrary to the regulations of the Portuguese government, he distributed around 30,000 visas to persecuted people, including an estimated 10,000 Jews, enabling them to travel through Spain to Portugal. | 1966 |
Joaquim Carreira | September 8, 1908 | Jan. 1, 1981 | When Italy was occupied by the Germans in September 1943, Joaquim Carreira offered protection to a number of people persecuted by the National Socialists, including three members of the Jewish Cittone family: Elio, his father Roberto and his uncle Isacco. | 2014 |
Romania
66 Romanians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from Romania
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Traian Popovici | Oct 17, 1892 | June 4, 1946 | Traian Popovici was born in Udeştii (Suczawa District) as the son of a priest of the Orthodox Church. After high school, he began to study law , which he interrupted in 1914 for voluntary military service in the Romanian army and completed in 1919 with a dissertation . Then he worked as a lawyer in Chernivtsi. In June 1940 he fled the invasion of the Red Army to Bucharest , where he worked in the care of Romanian refugees. After the Romanian army recaptured northern Bukovina , he was appointed mayor of the city of Chernivtsi in early August 1941.
In October 1941, the city's 50,000 Jews were taken to a ghetto on the instructions of General Ion Antonescu . When they threatened to be deported to the Romanian occupied area of Transnistria a little later , Popovici, together with the German consul Fritz Schellhorn , protested to the governor General Calotesc against this order, arguing that it was indispensable for economic reasons. Antonescu granted a temporary exemption for 20,000 Jews. The selection was made by a commission from the Romanian army. Popovici himself issued residence permits (autorizaţie) for over 4,000 Jews. Most of the Jews initially rescued were nevertheless deported to Transnistria in the summer of 1942. Popovici was removed from the mayor's office in June 1942.When the Romanian army began to withdraw at the end of 1943, Popovici tried unsuccessfully to enable the Bukovinian Jews to return from Transnistria. Only a few managed to return home before the fall of Antonescu on August 23, 1944. |
1969 |
Russia
209 Russians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Russia
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Maria Skobzowa | Dec 20, 1891 | March 31, 1945 | During the German occupation of Paris, Maria Skobzowa tried to save Jewish refugees who were issued baptismal certificates from being deported to the concentration camps . In February 1943 she was arrested for this and first taken to the Royallieu concentration camp and later to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . On Holy Saturday , March 31, 1945, she was sent to the gas chamber after a selection . | 1985 |
Sweden
10 Swedes were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Sweden
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Raoul Wallenberg | Aug 4, 1912 | 1947 | Went to Budapest in 1944 as the Swedish legation secretary with a list of names of 800 Jews with ties to Sweden in order to save these people from the Holocaust. There he distributed large numbers of Swedish protection passports , which identified their bearers as Swedish citizens awaiting repatriation . With money from the US War Refugee Board , he rented 32 buildings for around 10,000 living Jews in Budapest, which he declared to be extraterritorial . At the risk of his life, he distributed his protection passports himself to people who were already on the train to Auschwitz . In the last days before the Red Army marched in , one of his people prevented the Hungarian Arrow Crossing plan to blow up the Budapest ghetto with thousands of Jews by negotiating with the last German general in Budapest . | 2006 |
Switzerland
49 Swiss people were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from Switzerland
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
August Bohny | July 9, 1919 | 18 Aug 2016 | He was co-founder and director of the Abric, Faidoli, Atelier Cévenol and Ferme Ecole houses in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he, together with Pastor André Trocmé and local refugee workers, helped save numerous children from raids and deportations. |
1990 |
Friedel Bohny-Reiter | May 20, 1912 | Dec 18, 2001 | She worked with her husband August Bohny for the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon children's home, worked with Emma Ott , Elsa Lüthi-Ruth and Elisabeth Eidenbenz from the Maternité suisse d'Elne and was able to manage numerous internees before they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp save. | 1990 |
Friedrich Born | June 10, 1903 | Jan. 14, 1963 | As a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Budapest, he set up hospitals, children's and orphanages and people's kitchens for the Hungarian Jews; Thousands of Jews escaped deportation in these shelters and through Born's work. | 1987 |
Paul Grüninger | Oct. 27, 1891 | Feb 22, 1972 | By pre-dating entry visas and forging documents, as a police captain he enabled more than 3,000 refugees to enter Switzerland. Grüninger was suspended from duty for this in 1939 and sentenced to a fine. He was only politically rehabilitated by the canton of St. Gallen in 1993. | 1971 |
Ernest Prodolliet | 1905 | 1984 | In his capacity as head of the passport department at the Swiss consular agency in Bregenz (April 1, 1938) he issued approx. 300 transit visas to Austrian Jews. He convinced the border officials to allow them entry without a visa. | 1982 |
Serbia
139 Serbs were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Serbia
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Katica Janosevic | Katica Janošević, a Serbian woman who lived on the outskirts of the Dorćol Jewish quarter in Belgrade, was a good friend of the Arueti family. After the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, various members of the Arueti family were murdered, including Anuška Arueti's husband, Solomon Danon, her father Avraham, and the brothers Maks, Josef and Jakov.
Through the dedicated efforts of Katica Janošević, Anuška (later Hana Pardo) survived the war and later emigrated to Israel. |
1964 |
Slovakia
602 Slovaks were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from Slovakia
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Pavol Peter Gojdič | July 17, 1888 | 17th July 1960 | Pavol Peter Gojdič was the only Slovak bishop to publicly protest against the Holocaust during the Second World War . In addition, he had hundreds of Jews pro forma baptized to save them from genocide. | 2007 |
Slovenia
15 Slovenes were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from Slovenia
Some of the honorees:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Ivan Breskvar | Apr 3, 1905 | May 7, 1986 | Ivan Breskvar, born in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, moved to Varaždin in Croatia in 1931, where he started a family and had three children. In Varaždin Breskvar worked as a textile engineer in a silk factory. Soon he was promoted to head of silk weaving, where he met Milan Blass, a Slovenian-born Jew who, as a chemical engineer, was an expert in silk dyeing. The two managed to save two Jewish children from deportation. Ivan Breshvar brought the children to the Kumrić family in Cerje Nebojse, a village about 50 km away. The children stayed here until the end of the war. | 1998 |
Zora Piculin | Zora Pičulin from Ljubljana, Slovenia, was employed in the house of the Jewish Gatenjo family from Skopje as a nanny for their only son Shaul. In 1941, when the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, Macedonia was annexed to Bulgaria, and on March 11, 1943 all Jews there were rounded up and taken to a transit camp in Skopje, from where they were sent to Treblinka. At the time, Shaul, two and a half year old, developed a severe ear infection and his mother was given special permission to take him to the hospital. Pičulin offered to take care of the boy. In the middle of the night, Pičulin took Shaul out of the hospital and hid with him in a monastery in Skopje. This was at a time when every Jew in the city was being deported and the Bulgarian fascists were searching extensively for Jews who were trying to escape. Pičulin left the monastery with Shaul and they wandered through the forest, where she fed the child berries and mushrooms. Looking for a place to hide, the two finally arrived at a small monastery in Letnica. Pičulin asked for accommodation for himself and the child and offered to cook and clean for it. The offer was accepted and despite the harsh conditions in which she worked and lived, she stayed with Shaul in the monastery for two years. After the war, Pičulin returned to Skopje with Shaul, where she discovered that all Jews in Macedonia had been murdered, including Shaul's parents. | 1975 | ||
Andreij Tumpej | 1886 | 1973 | Catholic priest who hid three Jewish girls in the monastery in Banovo Brdo . | 2001 |
Uroš Žun | March 6, 1903 | May 4th 1977 | Uroš Žun, the commissioner of the Yugoslav border police in Maribor, allowed a group of German Jewish youth to cross the border into Yugoslavia. Žun had received express orders from the government in Belgrade to forbid Jewish refugees from crossing the border, but he knew that returning the girls to Germany would be tied to a death penalty. This action was courageous and extraordinary at a time when Yugoslavia had a semi-fascist regime, and indeed Žun's determination and persistence over a two-week period helped convince the government in Belgrade. | 1986 |
Ivan Župančič | In the summer of 1942, more than a year after the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia and at the height of the policy of persecution and deportation of Jews, Roma and Serbs by the fascist Ustaša, the nine-year-old Jewish boy Dan Stockhamer was taken to Ivan's house and Ljubica Župančić in the town of Banja Luka (now in Bosnia-Herzegovina). The Župančić family looked after the boy for a few months and thus contributed to his survival. | 2002 | ||
Liubica Župančič | 2002 |
Spain
Nine Spaniards were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Martin Aguirre y Otegui | Martín Aguirre y Otegui, a Basque refugee who saved a Jewish boy. | 2011 | ||
Conception Faya Blasquez | 1905 | May 20, 1979 | Conception Faya (née Blasquez), originally from Spain, lived in Pamiers (Ariège) on the Franco-Spanish border in 1926, where she married and had four children.
When the Second World War began in France, Conception was imprisoned with other Spanish citizens in the Rivesaltes camp. She stayed there until November 1942, when she was taken to the Gurs internment camp. In Gurs, Conception met a Jewish family who had also been interned there: Elise Mizrahi and her two children Gisèle and Jacques. You and Conception became good friends. Conception was fired by Gurs in May 1943, and thanks to an aunt, Elise and her children were released soon after. Conception immediately took her into their home, a modest two-bedroom apartment. Elise later asked Conception to include her two nephews from Paris, Maurice and Régine Moreno. She agreed and traveled to Paris herself to keep the children safe. At times eleven people lived in Conception's small apartment, six of them under a false identity. The Mizrahi family stayed with Conception Faya until the liberation. |
2011 |
Eduardo Propper de Callejón | Apr 9, 1895 | 1972 | Spanish diplomat who, in collaboration with the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes , enabled thousands of Jews to flee occupied France to Portugal by issuing more than thirty thousand transit visas to Jews between 1940 and 1944. | 2007 |
Carmen Santaella | Feb. 14, 1913 | Feb. 27, 2012 | Carmen Schrader was born in Grethem, Lower Saxony , in 1913 . In 1936 she married José Ruiz Santaella and together they spent a few years in Spain . Then Ruiz Santaella was appointed agricultural attaché at the Spanish embassy in Berlin , which is why the couple moved to Berlin in 1942, and in 1943 they moved with their four children to the home of a noble family in a nearby village. There they hid Gertrude Neumann, who sewed for them, in 1944, and hired the children's nurse Ruth Arndt and her mother Lina Arndt under false names as nanny and cook, thus protecting them from persecution by the National Socialists until José Ruiz Santaella in September of the same year was transferred to Switzerland . | 1988 |
Jose Santaella | Oct. 4, 1904 | Jan. 1, 1997 | 1988 | |
Ángel Sanz Briz | 28 Sep 1910 | June 11, 1980 | Spanish diplomat who rescued over 5,000 Hungarian Jews by issuing Spanish passports in 1944. | 1991 |
Turkey
A Turk was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Selahattin Ülkümen | 1914 | June 7, 2003 | As consul general on the island of Rhodes , he issued around 50 Jews Turkish passports in 1944 and thus saved them from deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp . | 1989 |
Czech Republic
118 Czechs were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations from the Czech Republic
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Milena Jesenská | Aug 10, 1896 | May 17, 1944 | After the occupation by the National Socialist German Reich and subsequent destruction of the rest of the Czech Republic through the Munich Agreement , Milena Jesenská joined the anti-fascist Czechoslovak resistance in 1939 . She took up illegal work for the magazine V boj (In den Kampf) and organized the escape of Jews and Jewish and non-Jewish emigrants from Czechoslovakia. She helped functionaries of the KPC to hide from the Gestapo . In November 1939 she was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Dresden remand prison. A trial followed in Dresden, which ended in an acquittal . Nevertheless, she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp “for re-education” . | 1994 |
Ukraine
2624 Ukrainians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Ukraine
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Raisa Gnezdilova | 1907 | 1982 | The Gnezdilov family lived in the city of Kherson with two sons. The father was called up for military service in the German-Soviet war and fell into battle a year later. His widow Raisa and the boys were in an occupied city. In September 1941, Raisa witnessed the expulsion of her Jewish neighbors from their homes to a ghetto established in the Pankratovski Most district. Among the displaced were Esfir Mirochnik, her daughter Faina, who was married to the Russian Pyotr Babenko, and her granddaughter Lidiya, who was five years old. Raisa Gnezdilova and Pyotr Babenko. Esfir Mirochnik's husband, Esfir Mirochnik and her granddaughter Lidiya managed to save. | 2001 |
Hungary
867 Hungarians were awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Hungary
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Zoltan Bay | July 24, 1900 | Oct. 4, 1992 | Hidden Jewish colleagues from the National Socialists. | 1998 |
United States
Five Americans were awarded the title "Righteous Among the Nations".
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Varian Fry | Oct 15, 1907 | 13 Sep 1967 | Headed a network of helpers in Marseille that enabled more than 2,000 Jews to escape from the France of the Vichy regime , mostly on the way via smugglers' trails through the Pyrenees to Spain and from there to Portugal or by ship from Marseille to the French colony of Martinique , from where the onward journey to the USA was possible. | 1994 |
Martha Sharp | Apr 25, 1905 | Jan. 1, 1999 | Martha and Waitstill Sharp registered refugees in Prague, kept in touch with diplomatic embassies , found scholarships and jobs abroad for them and, despite many bureaucratic hurdles, organized the escape of many people. In one case Martha accompanied 35 refugees, including journalists, political leaders and two children whose parents had committed suicide, to England. In another case, in cooperation with the British organization “Movement for the Care of Children from Germany”, she was able to enable children to flee.
In May 1940 the couple was asked by the Unitarian Church to set up a branch in Paris. The German invasion of France, however, preceded them; so they set up their office in Lisbon . In cooperation with many people and organizations, for example another office of the Unitarian Church in the unoccupied Marseille , they made it possible for thousands of people to flee during this time, especially political refugees who opposed National Socialism in Germany or the Franco dictatorship in Spain as well as academics, scientists and intellectuals. For example, the escape of the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger , the Nobel Prize for Medicine Otto Meyerhof and the Austrian writer Franz Werfel succeeded . |
2005 |
Waitstill Sharp | 1902 | Jan. 1, 1984 | 2005 | |
Lois Gunden | 1915 | 2005 | Lois Gunden grew up in Goshen , Indiana , and went to southern France in 1941 to work for the Mennonite Central Committee . She set up a children's home in which she hid Spanish refugee children and Jewish children. She was arrested by the Germans in January 1943, but released on a prisoner exchange in 1944. | 2013 |
Roddie Edmonds | Aug 20, 1919 | Aug 8, 1985 | Sergeant Roddie Edmonds (born 1919) from Knoxville, Tennessee, served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He participated in the landing of the American forces in Europe and was captured by the Germans. Together with other American prisoners of war, including Jews, he was taken to the Stalag IXA camp near Ziegenhain. In line with their anti-Jewish policies, the National Socialists selected Jewish prisoners of war, and many of them on the Eastern Front were sent to extermination camps or killed. In some cases, Jewish prisoners of war were also separated from the others in the West. At some point in January 1945, all Jewish prisoners of war in Stalag IXA were supposed to line up the next morning. Sergeant Edmonds, in charge of the prisoners, ordered all prisoners of war, Jews and non-Jews, to stand together. When the responsible German officer saw that all the inmates of the camp were standing in front of their barracks, he turned to Edmonds and said: “You cannot all be Jews.” To which Edmonds replied: “We are all Jews.” The German held up his pistol out and threatened Edmonds, but Edmonds did not hesitate and replied, “According to the Geneva Convention, all we have to do is give our name, rank and serial number. If you shoot me you will have to shoot us all and after the war you will be charged with war crimes. ”The German officer gave up, turned around and left the scene. | 2015 |
United Kingdom
Twenty-two UK citizens have been awarded the Righteous Among the Nations title.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of the United Kingdom
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Frank Foley | Nov 24, 1884 | May 8, 1958 | In the 1930s, Frank Foley was sent to Germany as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, the British foreign intelligence service, in Berlin. To camouflage his work, he officially held the function of a passport control officer at the British diplomatic mission in the German capital, with the MI6 operations center in Berlin hidden behind the passport department of the embassy.
After his position was primarily concerned with monitoring the movements of Soviet spies and agitators in Central Europe, the increasingly aggressive politics of his host country moved into the focus of Foley's activities in the course of the 1930s. After 1945, he was particularly recognized for his efforts to support Jews living in Germany to evade persecution by the National Socialist system: he helped them in particular by interpreting the visa regulations of the Foreign Office very generously and even by forging papers issued to enable Jews to leave the German territory. Although he did not enjoy diplomatic immunity , he even took Jews out of concentration camps and hid them in his own apartment. |
1999 |
Vietnam
A Vietnamese was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Paul Nguyễn Công Anh | Jan. 31, 1919 | Born in Vietnam, he studied at the University of Nice from 1941 , where he met the Jew Jadwiga Alfabet and later married in order to save her from deportation as a French citizen. When Nice was occupied by the Germans in 1943, he not only hid his wife, but also her uncle and aunt and their baby, got them false papers and took them by train to Annecy , from where they were smuggled into nearby Switzerland . | 2007 |
Belarus
660 Belarusians were awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
See main article: List of the Righteous Among the Nations of Belarus
Including:
Surname | Born | Died | Reason for the honor | year |
---|---|---|---|---|
Elena Frolova | 1951 | Helena Frolova lived with her husband Ivan, a railroad worker, in the city of Borisov (now Barysau) in the Minsk district. Her only son was a fighter pilot and was called up after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war. Frolova was a devout Catholic and she believed that if she saved a helpless child, preferably a Jewish one, her son would return home safely. Frolova traveled to Minsk and went to a Russian children's home, which the Germans often searched for Jewish children. She picked up the two-year-old Galina Rubenchik, who had been placed in the children's home by her mother Hasia Rubenchik, a local ghetto inmate. Galina was a very sick child and Frolova took her home and cared for her with devotion. Frolova was exposed to considerable dangers, especially because all of the neighbors knew that she was hiding a Jewish girl. The Gestapo also arrested her husband during this period on suspicion of sabotage. He was brutally tortured and released home, where he died shortly afterwards. At the same time, her neighbors threatened to denounce her if she continued to host Galina. Due to the increased danger, Frolova left Borisov with Galina and went to the Grodno district, where she had relatives. There she officially adopted Galina and the child grew up believing that Frolova was her birth mother.
In 1944 they returned to the liberated Borisov and Frolova refused to part with Galina, despite her poor financial situation, poor health and the request of her son to take the girl back to an orphanage. In 1951, Frolova committed suicide, leaving Galina half of her house and property. When Galina (then Fradkina) was already married, she found her birth parents and siblings in 1964. Galina emigrated to Israel in the 1990s. |
1996 |
Some portraits
Bust of Albin Małysiak
Bust of Paul Ramadier
Pictures from the "Garden of the Righteous"
Memorial tree for Remy Dumoncel in Yad Vashem
Tree in the name of Gertruda Babilińska in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem
Pearl Good, rescued by Karl Plagge, points to the name Plagges on the wall of the righteous in the Yad Vashem
Some plaques and monuments
Memorial plaque in Berlin-Moabit (Krefelder Straße 7) for Mohamed Helmy
Memorial plaque for Luis Martins de Souza Dantas on his home at 45 avenue Montaigne in Paris
Memorial plaque for Ho Feng Shan in the Jewish Refugee Museum in Shanghai
Memorial plaque for Ho Feng Shan in Vienna, Beethovenplatz
Memorial plaque for Jacques de Jésus in the courtyard of the Carmelite Convent of Avon
Plaque commemorating Walraven van Hall in Gouda
Jan Karski Monument in Warsaw
Monument to Rudolf Weigl in Breslau
Memorial plaque for Sampaio Garrido at the former Portuguese embassy in Hungary
Statue of Dimitar Peschew in Kyustendil
Berlin memorial plaque for Elisabeth Abegg at the Tempelhofer Damm 56 house in Berlin-Tempelhof
Memorial plaque for Armin T. Wegner at the house at Kaiserdamm 16, in Berlin-Charlottenburg
Memorial plaque for Karl Gröger and others in Amsterdam
The 2010 monument to Irene Harand on the square of the same name
Statue commemorating Frank Foley in Highbridge, England
Monument to the Italian Giorgio Perlasca in Budapest, who saved the lives of around 5000 Jews there
Memorial plaque for Oskar Schindler in Regensburg
Wall of the Righteous in Paris
Overview of the number of righteous by country
country | number |
---|---|
Egypt | 1 |
Albania | 75 |
Armenia | 24 |
Belgium | 1,731 |
Bosnia and Herzegovina | 47 |
Brazil | 2 |
Bulgaria | 20th |
Chile | 2 |
China | 2 |
Denmark | 22nd |
Germany | 627 |
Ecuador | 1 |
El Salvador | 1 |
Estonia | 3 |
France | 4,099 |
Georgia | 1 |
Greece | 355 |
Indonesia | 2 |
Ireland | 1 |
Italy | 714 |
Japan | 1 |
Croatia | 118 |
Cuba | 1 |
Latvia | 138 |
Lithuania | 904 |
Luxembourg | 1 |
Macedonia | 10 |
Republic of Moldova | 79 |
Montenegro | 1 |
Netherlands | 5,778 |
Norway | 67 |
Austria | 110 |
Peru | 2 |
Poland | 6,992 |
Portugal | 3 |
Romania | 66 |
Russia | 209 |
Sweden | 10 |
Switzerland | 49 |
Serbia | 139 |
Slovakia | 602 |
Slovenia | 15th |
Spain | 9 |
Czech Republic | 118 |
Turkey | 1 |
Ukraine | 2,634 |
Hungary | 867 |
United States | 5 |
United Kingdom | 22nd |
Vietnam | 1 |
Belarus | 660 |
All in all | 27,362 |
Returns the award
- Henk Zanoli ( Netherlands ), returning the award in protest against the killing of six members of his families by the Israeli forces during Operation Protective Edge 2014.
literature
- Meir Wagner, Mosche Meisels: The righteous of Switzerland: a documentation of humanity. Tel Aviv 1999.
- Daniel Fraenkel, Jakob Borut (Ed. I. A. by Yad Vashem): Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations: Germans and Austrians. Wallstein Verlag , Göttingen 2005; ISBN 3-89244-900-7 .
- Yad Vashem (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations.
- Israel Gutman et al. a .: Europe (Part I) and Other Countries. Jerusalem 2007 (Austria, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United States of America).
- Israel Gutman et al. a .: Europe (Part II). Jerusalem 2011 (Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia).
- Dan Michman : Belgium. Jerusalem 2005.
- Lucien Lazare: France. Jerusalem 2003.
- Jozeph Michman, Bert Jan Flim: The Netherlands. Volume 1. Jerusalem 2004.
- Jozeph Michman, Bert Jan Flim: The Netherlands. Volume 2. Jerusalem 2004.
- Sara Bender, Shmuel Krakowski: Poland. Volume 1. Jerusalem 2004.
- Sara Bender, Shmuel Krakowski: Poland. Volume 2. Jerusalem 2004.
Web links
- Righteous among the peoples . on the side of the Yad Vashem memorial, u. a. with Names of Righteous by Country . (List of all persons, English).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at au av aw ax ay az ba Yad Vashem: About the Righteous Statistics . Retrieved January 13, 2020.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at au av aw Righteous Among the Nations Database with details on the reason for the honor
- ↑ Seev Goshen: Albert Battels resistance to the extermination of the Jews in Przemysl . Miscell. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . tape 33 , no. 3 . Walter de Gruyter, 1985, ISSN 0042-5702 ( ifz-muenchen.de [PDF; 671 kB ; accessed on September 17, 2018] detailed description of the actions).
- ↑ Quotation from Claus Victor Bock: In hiding among friends. A report, Amsterdam 1942–1945. 3rd, through Ed. Castrum-Peregrini-Presse, Amsterdam 1989, ISBN 90-6034-053-1 ; and Friedrich W. Buri: I gave you the torch in leaps and bounds. W. F. A memory report. Edited and with an afterward by Stephan C. Bischoff. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86650-068-6 .
- ^ Buchenwald Concentration Camp and the Rescue of Jews. (No longer available online.) In: yadvashem.org. 2013, archived from the original on April 16, 2013 ; accessed on April 13, 2019 (English).
- ^ Barbara Stühlmeyer , Ludger Stühlmeyer : Bernhard Lichtenberg. I will follow my conscience (= Topos pocket books. Volume 835). Butzon & Bercker (Topos plus Verlagsgemeinschaft), Kevelaer 2013, ISBN 978-3-8367-0835-7 .
- ↑ a b Walter Kern: Silent Heroes from Essen. Resisting the Persecution 1933–1945 . Old Synagogue Essen, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-924384-41-8 , p. 66-73 .
- ↑ Memorial plaque in Essen-Altendorf , formerly at House Markscheide 50.
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from March 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Protest against Gaza War: Dutchman returns Israeli award . In: Spiegel Online. August 15, 2014, accessed August 15, 2014.