Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Righteous Gentiles

It was not the entire world that turned away, unwilling to rouse themselves to aid people at a time of great tribulation, agony and massive collective murder. There were individuals who witnessed the horrors, and did what they could to alleviate the atrocity for as many as they could manage.

Their efforts were anything but modest. From the farm families of limited means who took in a few Jewish children and did their utmost to conceal their identities and feed them when food was scarce for their own families, to the official diplomats of foreign countries who issued life-saving visas.

Those dedicated humanists, people who understood their obligations to others at a time of inconceivably monstrous inhumanity, outdid themselves in their efforts to disprove that no one cared. For they did. And they dedicated themselves passionately without thinking too deeply of the fact that their mission to save a few, or a hundred, or a thousand Jewish lives, contravened the direct edicts of their countries which maintained a strict stance of non-involvement.

From the Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, who, defying his diplomatic orders, issued 3,400 transit visas and saved 6,000 Jewish lives, to the most famous diplomat of all, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish envoy to Hungary who after saving thousands of Jews by issuing passports to them, disappeared into a Russian prison never to be seen again.

And the German industrialist whose story was made famous through a book and a film, Oskar Schindler, credited with saving over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factories.

The story of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who was stationed in France during the Second World War, yet another "unsung hero", who helped countless Jews escape the Nazi death camps. It is estimated ten thousand Jewish and other refugees were assisted by Mr. de Sousa Mendes to flee 1940 France for safety.

Among them, Peter C. Newman, Salvador Dali and authors Hans and Margret Rey, of the children's series, Curious George.

What so many of these courageous humanitarians who acted when no one else would, seemed to have in common, aside from their belief in their need to save as many human lives as possible, was their actively pursuing this mission in the face of denials and counter orders from their superiors.

Their manifest destiny in pursuing a heroic mission of salvation for those whom the world had abandoned to the mass slaughter designed for their deliberate obliteration, also assigned to them, post-war, a life of official disgrace, poverty, and early death.

In the face of the degradation of the universal human spirit that chose to look away from the desperate need of people targeted for political-ideological annihilation, these were the outstanding heroes - ordinary people with extraordinary convictions of the equality of humankind, who treasured human life, and in so doing restored dignity and honour to the human race - to them we are indebted beyond repayment.

And, to the credit of the world at large, despite the uncountable numbers that did nothing to distinguish themselves as decent human beings, there were many who did, as can be attested by the listing below:

Leaders and diplomats

  • Per Anger - Swedish diplomat in Budapest who originated the idea of issuing provisional passports to Hungarian Jews to protect them from arrest and deportation to camps. Anger collaborated with Raoul Wallenberg to save the lives of thousands of Jews.
  • Władysław Bartoszewski - Polish Żegota activist.
  • Ilustrissimo Dom Roberto de Castro Brandão - Brazilian diplomat and nobleman (Marquis?), who issued diplomatic visas and passports to Jews in Marseilles, France. He was later deported, along with his daughter Maria-Theresa Marchioness Siciliano di Rende and later Lady Pretyman, née de Castro Brandão, and his son, current Brazilian Ambassador, D. Guy Marie de Castro Brandão, as a diplomatic prisoner in the Rheinhotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg where Hitler used to go regularly. He stayed there until the end of the war and was exchanged with German soldiers imprisoned by the Allies.
  • Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg - Swedish diplomat, who negotiated the release of 27,000 people (a significant number of which were Jews) to hospitals in Sweden.
  • Jacob (Jack) Benardout - British diplomat to Dominican Republic before and during World War II. Issued numerous Dominican Republic visas to Jews in Germany. Only 16 Jewish families arrived in the Dominican Republic (the other Jews dispersed to countries along the way, e.g. Britain, America) and so created the Jewish community of the Dominican Republic. [this citation is unsupported by evidence from any other source and should be treated as dubious until further evidence is provided]
  • Hiram Bingham IV - American Vice Consul in Marseilles, France 1940–1941.
  • José Castellanos Contreras - a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva from 1942–45, and in conjunction with George Mantello, helped save at least 13,000 Central European Jews from Nazi persecution by providing them with false papers of Salvadoran nationality.
  • Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz - German diplomatic attaché in Denmark. Alerted Danish politician Hans Hedtoft about the imminent German plans deport to Denmark's Jewish community, thus enabling the following rescue of the Danish Jews.
  • Frank Foley - British MI6 agent undercover as a passport officer in Berlin, saved around 10,000 people by issuing forged passports to Britain and the British Mandate of Palestine.
  • Rafael Leónidas Trujillo - Dominican dictator Promised to receive 100,000 Jewish refugees into the Dominican Republic in 1938 when Franklin D. Roosevelt organised an international conference in Evian to discuss the persecution of the Jews. Dominican Republic was the only nation accepting Jews immigrants after the conference.[28] The DORSA (Dominican Republic Settlement Association) was formed to settle Jews on the northern coast. 5,000 visas were issued but only 645 European Jews reached the settlement. The refugees were assigned land and cattle and the town of Sosúa was founded.[28] 5000 dollars in gold from Jewish International in New York were paid for each person taken by the Trujillo.[28] Other refugees settled in the capital Santo Domingo.[29]
  • Albert Göring - German businessman (and younger brother of leading Nazi Hermann Göring) who helped Jews and dissidents survive in Germany
  • Paul Grüninger - Swiss commander of police who provided falsely dated papers to over 3,000 refugees so they could escape Austria following the Anschluss.
  • Kiichiro Higuchi - Japanese lieutenant general who saved 20,000 Jewish refugees.[30]
  • Wilm Hosenfeld - German officer who helped pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew, among many others.
  • Prince Constantin Karadja - Romanian diplomat, who saved over 51,000 Jews from deportation and extermination, as credited by Yad Vashem in 2005.[31]
  • Jan Karski - Polish emissary of Armia Krajowa to Western Allies and eye-witness of the Holocaust.
  • Necdet Kent - Turkish Consul General at Marseille, who granted Turkish citizenship to hundreds of Jews. At one point, he entered an Auschwitz-bound train at enormous personal risk to save 70 Jews, to whom he had granted Turkish citizenship, from deportation.
  • Zofia Kossak-Szczucka - Polish founder of Zegota.
  • Carl Lutz - Swiss consul in Budapest, managed to provide safe-conducts for emigration to Palestine to many thousands of Hungarian Jews.
  • Luis Martins de Souza Dantas - Brazilian in charge of the Brazilian diplomatic mission in France. He granted Brazilian visas to several Jews and other minorities persecuted by the Nazis. He was proclaimed as Righteous among the Nations in 2003.[32]
  • George Mantello (b. George Mandl) - El Salvador's honorary consul for Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia - provided fictive Salvadoran citizenship papers for thousands of Jews and spearheaded a publicity campaign that eventually ended the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.[33][34]
  • Paul V. McNutt - United States High Commissioner of the Philippines, 1937–1939, who facilitated the entry of Jewish refugees into the Philippines.[35]
  • Helmuth James Graf von Moltke - adviser to the Third Reich on international law; active in Kreisau Circle resistance group, sent Jews to safe haven countries.
  • Delia Murphy - wife of Dr. Thomas J. Kiernan, Irish minister in Rome 1941–1946, who worked with Hugh O'Flaherty and was part of the network that saved the lives of POWs and Jews in the hands of the Gestapo.[36]
  • Giovanni Palatucci - Italian police official who saved several thousand.
  • Giorgio Perlasca - Italian. When Ángel Sanz Briz was ordered to leave Hungary, he falsely claimed to be his substitute and saved some thousands more Jews.
  • Dimitar Peshev - Deputy Speaker of the Bulgarian Parliament.
  • Frits Philips - Dutch industrialist who saved 382 Jews by insisting to the Nazis that they were indispensable employees of Philips.
  • Witold Pilecki - the only person who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, organised a resistance inside the camp and as a member of Armia Krajowa sent the first reports on the camp atrocities to the Polish Government in Exile, from where they were passed to the rest of the Western Allies.
  • Karl Plagge - a major in the Wehrmacht who issued work permits in order to save almost 1,000 Jews (see The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, by Michael Good)
  • Eduardo Propper de Callejón - First Secretary in the Spanish embassy in Paris who stamped and signed passports almost non-stop for four days in 1940 to let Jewish refugees escape to Spain and Portugal.
  • Traian Popovici - Romanian mayor of Cernăuţi (Chernivtsi) who saved 20,000 Jews of Bukovina.
  • Manuel L. Quezon - President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, 1935–1941, assisted in resettling Jewish refugees on the island of Mindanao.[35]
  • Florencio Rivas - Consul General of Uruguay in Germany, who allegedly hid one hundred and fifty Jews during Kristallnacht and later provided them with passports.[37]
  • Gilberto Bosques Saldívar - General Consul of Mexico in Marseilles, France. For two years, he issued Mexican visas to around 40,000 Jews and political refugees, allowing them to escape to Mexico and other countries. He was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1943 and released to Mexico in 1944.[38]
  • Ángel Sanz Briz - Spanish consul in Hungary. Together with Giorgio Perlasca, he saved more than 5,000 Jews in Budapest by issuing Spanish passports to them.
  • Abdol-Hossein Sardari - Head of Consular affairs at the Iranian Embassy in Paris. He saved many Iranian Jews and gave 500 blank Iranian passports to an acquaintance of his to be used by non-Iranian Jews in France.
  • Oskar Schindler - German businessman whose efforts to save his 1,200 Jewish workers were recounted in the book Schindler's Ark and the film Schindler's List.
  • Eduard Schulte - German industrialist, the first to inform the Allies about the mass extermination of Jews.
  • Irena Sendler - Polish head of Zegota children's department who saved 2,500 Jewish children.
  • Ho Feng Shan - Chinese Consul in Vienna who freely issued visas to Jews.
  • Henryk Slawik - Polish diplomat who saved 5,000-10,000 people in Budapest, Hungary.
  • Aristides de Sousa Mendes - Portuguese diplomat in Bordeaux, who signed about 30,000 visas to help Jews and persecuted minorities to escape the Nazis and The Holocaust.
  • Chiune Sugihara - Japanese consul to Lithuania, 2,140 (mostly Polish) Jews and an unknown number of additional family members were saved by passports, many unauthorized, provided by him in 1940.
  • Selâhattin Ülkümen - Turkish diplomat who saved the lives of some 42 Jewish Turkish families, more than 200 persons, among a Jewish community of some 2000 after the Germans occupied the island of Rhodes in 1944.
  • Raoul Wallenberg - Swedish diplomat. Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews condemned to certain death by the Nazis during World War II. He disappeared in January 1945 after being imprisoned by the Soviet troops who took control of Budapest.
  • Sir Nicholas Winton - British stockbroker who organized the Czech Kindertransport which sent 669 children (most of them Jewish) to foster parents ln England and Sweden from Czechoslovakia and Austria after Kristallnacht. Sir Nicholas has been nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.[39][40]
  • Namik Kemal Yolga -A Vice-Consul at the Turkish Embassy in Paris who saved numerous Turkish Jews from deportation.
  • Guelfo Zamboni - Consul General at Thessaloniki who gave false papers to save the lives of over 300 Jews residing there.
  • Fumimaro Konoe - Japanese Prime Minister who adopted a Japanese national policy to receive Jew refugees.[41]
  • Seishirō Itagaki - Japanese Army Minister who proposed and adopted a Japanese national policy to receive Jew refugees.[41]
  • Hideki Tōjō - General and Prime Minister of Japan who received Jewish refugees in Manchuria and rejected German protest.[27]
Religious figures Prominent individuals
  • Khaled Abdul-Wahab administrator of Mahdia, Tunisia, under German occupation; first Arab nominated for "Righteous Among the Nations" [44]
  • Maria Leenderts and Petrus Johannes Jacobus Kleiss, Dutch merchants in her "Selecta Schoenenwinkel" (located at 248 Dierenselaan in Den Haag) with the cooperation of personnel of the "Quick Steps" soccer club (located on the corner of the Hardewijkstraat and the Nijkerklaan in Den Haag) and the pastor of the "Sint Thersia Van Het Kind Jesus Kerk" (located across the street from the Selecta shoe store and on the corner of the Apeldoornselaan and the Dierenselaan) accommodated many Jewish families throughout the war.
  • Gustav Schröder - German Captain of the Ocean liner SS St. Louis who, in 1939 attempted to find asylum for over 900 Jewish passengers rather than return them to Germany.
  • Albert Battel - a German Wehrmacht officer.
  • Albert Bedane - of Jersey, provided shelter to a Jewish woman, as well as others sought by the German occupiers of the Channel Islands.
  • Victor Bodson helped Jews escape from Germany through an underground escape route in Luxembourg.
  • Corrie ten Boom, rescued many Jews in the Netherlands by sheltering them at her home. - was sent to Ravensbrück
  • Stefania Podgorska Burzminski and Helena Podgorska at age 16 and 7 (Helena was her sister), they smuggled out of the ghettos and saved thirteen Jews from the liquidation of the ghettos.
  • Sgt.-Major Charles Coward was an English POW who smuggled over 400 Jews out of Monowitz labour camp.
  • Miep Gies, Jan Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Victor Kugler, and Johannes Kleiman hid Anne Frank and seven others in Amsterdam, Netherlands for two years.
  • Alexandre Glasberg, Ukrainian-French priest who helped hundreds of French Jews escape deportation.
  • Friedrich Kellner, justice inspector, who helped Julius and Lucie Abt, and their infant son, John Peter, escape from Laubach.
  • Stanislaw Kielar – two girls from Reisenbach family
  • Janis Lipke from Latvia, protected and hid around 40 Jews from the Nazis in Riga.
  • Heralda Luxin, young woman who sheltered Jewish children in her cellar.
  • Józef and Stefania Macugowscy, hid six members of the Radza family, and several others, in Nowy Korczyn, Poland.
  • Shyqyri Myrto, Albanian rescuer of Jozef Jakoel and his sister Keti.
  • Dorothea Neff, Austrian stage actress, who hid her Jewish friend Lilli Schiff.
  • Algoth Niska Finnish gentleman rogue and alcohol smuggler; smuggled Jews via the Baltic.
  • Irene Gut Opdyke, Polish hid twelve Jews in a German Major's basement.
  • Jaap Penraat - Dutch architect who forged identity cards for Jews and helped many escape to Spain.
  • Nicolaus Rossini, helped many Jewish orphans - was executed in Kraków-Płaszów.
  • Irena Sendler, Polish social worker who saved about 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.
  • Suzanne Spaak, wealthy socialite who saved Jewish children in France.
  • Marie Taquet-Martens and Major Emile Taquet hid some seventy-five Jewish children in a home for disabled children they were running in Jamoigne-sur-Semois, Belgium.
  • Ilse (Davidsohn Intrator) Stanley, herself a German Jew living in Germany until 1939, made many trips to German concentration camps and secured the release of 412 people. After Kristallnacht when she could no longer make those trips, she continued helping German Jews leave the country legally, until her own departure in 1939.
  • Hetty Voute, part of the Utrechtse Kindercomite in the Netherlands that rescued hundreds of Jews. Her oral history is found in the book The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage by Mark Klempner
  • Gabrielle Weidner and Johan Hendrik Weidner, escape network rescued 800 Jews.
  • Bertha Marx and Eugen Marx assisted in saving Jews through the Resistance forces.
  • JUDr Rudolf Štursa, a lawyer, and Jan Martin Vochoč, an Old Catholic priest, in Prague baptized Jews on demand and issued over 1,500 baptism certificates.[45]

Villages helping Jews

  • Yaruga, Ukraine[46]
  • Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire département in France, which saved up to 5,000 Jews.
  • Markowa, Poland, where 17 Jews survived the war. Many families hid their Jewish neighbours there and some paid the ultimate price.
    • Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, their 6 children and unborn baby were shot dead by the Germans for hiding the Szall and Goldman families.
    • Dorota and Antoni Szylar - hid seven members of Weltz family.
    • Julia and Józef Bar - hid five members of Reisenbach family.
    • Michal Bar - hid Jakub Lorbenfeld.
    • Jan and Weronika Przybylak - hid Jakub Einhorn.
For more details on Polish villages helping Jews, see Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust.
  • Tršice, Czech Republic, many people from this village helped hide a Jewish family, six of them were given the honorific of Righteous among the Nations.
  • Nieuwlande, The Netherlands - during the war this small village contained 117 inhabitants. They unanimously decided in 1942 and 1943 that every household would give shelter to one Jewish household or individual during the war, thus making it impossible that anyone in the small village would betray their neighbours. Dozens of Jews were thus saved. All inhabitants have been honored by Yad Vashem.
  • Moissac, France There was a Jewish boarding home and orphanage in this town. When the mayor was told that the Nazis were coming the older students would go camping for several days, the younger students were boarded with families in the area and told to treat as members of their immediate family and the oldest students hid in the house. When it became too dangerous for the students to stay there any longer they made sure that every student had a safe place to go to. If the students again had to move the counsellors from the boarding house arranged for a new place and even escorted them to the new housing.
Their acts of selfless bravery and heroic devotion to life and humankind, reminders of what it is to be human.

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posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, January 17, 2012

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