Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust

Righteous Among the Nations
The Holocaust Rescuers of Jews Righteousness Seven Laws of Noah Yad Vashem
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During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.

The support, or at least absence of active opposition, of the local population was essential to Jews attempting to hide but often lacking in Eastern Europe.^[1] Those in hiding depended on the assistance of non-Jews.^[2] Having money,^[3] social connections with non-Jews, a non-Jewish appearance, perfect command of the local language, determination, and luck played a major role in determining survival.^[4] Jews in hiding were hunted down with the assistance of local collaborators and rewards offered for their denunciation.^[5][6][7] The death penalty was sometimes enforced on people hiding them, especially in eastern Europe, including Poland.^[8][9][10] Rescuers' motivations varied on a spectrum from altruism to expecting sex or material gain; it was not uncommon for helpers to betray or murder Jews if their money ran out.^[11][9][12]

Jews were hidden or saved by non-Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The Catholic Church and Vatican opposed the systemic murder of Jews, and in Italy the Mussolini government refused to deport Jews or participate in their mass murder. Many diplomats were involved in efforts to help Jews escape, such as by providing documents that allowed safe transit.

Since 1953,

Poland had a very large Jewish population, and, according to

In the 1948–49 Zegota Case, the Stalin-backed regime established in Poland after the war secretly tried and imprisoned the leading survivors of Zegota as part of a campaign to eliminate and besmirch resistance heroes who might threaten the new regime.[21]

Jews were aided also by diplomats outside Poland. The

82-year-old Simon Danieli traveled from Israel to his birthplace in Veria to thank the descendants of the people who helped him and his family escape Nazi persecution during World War II. Danieli was 13 in 1942 when his family—father Joseph, a grain merchant, mother Buena, and nine siblings—fled Veria to escape the increasingly frequent atrocities committed by Nazi forces against the city's Jews. They ended up in a small nearby village in Sykies, where the family was taken in by Giorgos and Panayiota Lanara, who offered them shelter, food and a hiding place in the woods, helped also by a priest, Nestoras Karamitsopoulos. The Nazis, however, soon stormed Sykies, where around 50 more Jews from Veria had also taken refuge. They questioned the priest about the whereabouts of the Jews, but when Karamitsopoulos refused to answer, they began raiding people's homes. They found Jews hidden in eight homes, and promptly set fire the houses. They also turned their wrath on the priest, torturing him and pulling out his beard, according to Danieli.^[30]

France

The Jewish community in Denmark remained relatively unaffected by Germany's

Based on its 1940 population of 9 million the 5,516 Jews rescued in the Netherlands represents the largest per capita number: 1 in 1,700 Dutch was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations medal.^[35] Notable rescuers include:

• Willem Arondeus, Dutch artist and resistance fighter who helped forge documents allowing Jewish families to flee the country
• Gertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, who helped save about 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Austria just before the outbreak of the war (Kindertransport
  ) and on the last transport ship leaving the Netherlands to the UK in May 1940.
• Jan Zwartendijk, who as a Dutch consular representative in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued exit visas used by between 6,000 and to 10,000 Jewish refugees.
• Those who hid and helped Anne Frank and her family, like Miep Gies.
• Caecilia Loots, a teacher and antifascist resistance member, who saved Jewish children during the war.^[36]
• Dutch Jews, most of them children, throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands.^[37][38]
• Tina Strobos, rescued over 100 Jews by hiding them in her house and providing them with forged paperwork to escape the country.^[39]
• Jan van Hulst (18 December 1903 – 1 August 1975), instrumental in preventing Jews from being deported and murdered during the Holocaust.
• The participants of the so-called "Amsterdam dock strike" (better known as the February strike, about 300,000 to 500,000 people who on 25 and 26 February 1941 took part in the first strike against persecution of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe).
• The village of Nieuwlande (117 inhabitants) that set up a quota for residents to rescue Jews.

Serbia

After the

Serbian civilians were involved in saving thousands of Yugoslavian Jews during this period. Miriam Steiner-Aviezer, a researcher into Yugoslavian Jewry and a member of Yad Vashem's Righteous Gentiles committee states: "The Serbs saved many Jews. Contrary to their present image in the world, the Serbs are a friendly, loyal people who will not abandon their neighbors."[42] As of 2017 Yad Vashem recognizes 135 Serbians as Righteous Among Nations, the highest of any Balkan country.^[43][44]

Bulgaria

The active participation of Bulgaria in the Holocaust however did not extend to its pre-war territory and after various protests by Archbishop Stefan of Sofia and the interference of Dimitar Peshev, the planned deportation of the Bulgarian Jews (about 50,000) was stopped. Deportation to the concentration camps was denied. Bulgaria was officially thanked by the government of Israel despite being an ally of Nazi Germany.^[54]

Dimitar Peshev was the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and Minister of Justice during World War II. He rebelled against the pro-Nazi cabinet and prevented the deportation of Bulgaria's 48 000 Jews. He was aided by the strong opposition of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Although Peshev had been involved in various anti-Semitic legislation that was passed in Bulgaria during the early years of the War, the government's decision to deport Bulgaria's 48 000 Jews on 8 March 1943 was too much for Peshev. After being informed of the deportation, Peshev tried several times to see Prime Minister Bogdan Filov but the prime minister refused. Next, he went to see Interior Minister Petar Gabrovski insisting that he cancel the deportations. After much persuasion, Gabrovski finally called the governor of Kyustendil and instructed him to stop preparations for the Jewish deportations. By 5:30 p.m. on 9 March, the order was cancelled. After the war, Peshev was charged with anti-Semitism and anti-Communism by the Soviet courts, and sentenced to death. However, after an outcry from the Jewish community, his sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment, though released after just one year. His deeds went unrecognized after the war, as he lived in poverty in Bulgaria. It was not until 1973 that he was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations. He died the same year.

Portugal

Historians have estimated that up to one million refugees fled from the Nazis through Portugal during World War II, an impressive number considering the size of the country's population at that time (circa 6 million).^[55] Portugal remained neutral within the overall objectives of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance; and that astute policy under precarious conditions, made it possible for Portugal to contribute to the rescue of a large number of refugees.^[56] Portuguese Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar allowed all international Jewish organizations—HIAS, HICEM, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, World Jewish Congress, and Portuguese Jewish relief committees—to establish themselves in Lisbon.^[57] In 1944, in Hungary, risking their lives, the diplomats Carlos Sampaio Garrido and Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquinho, coordinating with Salazar, also helped many Jews escape Nazis and their Hungarian allies.^[58] In June 1940, when Germany invaded France, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued visas, indiscriminately, to a population in panic,^[59] without asking previous authorizations from Lisbon, as he was supposed to. On 20 June, the British Embassy in Lisbon accused the Consul in Bordeaux of improperly charging money for issuing visas and Sousa Mendes was called to Lisbon. The number of visas issued by Sousa Mendes cannot be determined; a 1999 study by the Yad Vashem historian Dr. Avraham Milgram published by the Shoah Resource Center, International School for Holocaust Studies,^[60] asserts that there is a great difference between reality and the myth created by the generally cited numbers. Sousa Mendes never lost his title as he kept on being listed in the Portuguese Diplomatic Yearbook until 1954 and kept on receiving his full Consul salary, $1,593 Portuguese Escudos,^[61][62] until the day he died.^[63] Other Portuguese credited for saving Jews during the war are Professor Francisco Paula Leite Pinto and Moisés Bensabat Amzalak. A devoted Jew, and a Salazar supporter, Amzalak headed the Lisbon Jewish community for more than fifty years (from 1926 until 1978). Leite Pinto, General Manager of the Portuguese railways, together with Amzalak, organized several trains, coming from Berlin and other cities, loaded with refugees.^[64][65][66]

Spain

In

According to the data available at Yad Vashem, by 1 January 2019, 904 rescuers of Jews in Lithuania were identified, whereas in the catalogue compiled by the

Chiune Sempo Sugihara, Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1939–1940, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Kaunas after occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union in defiance of explicit orders from the Japanese foreign ministry. The last foreign diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train. After the war, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese foreign service, ostensibly due to downsizing.

As well as in other countries rescuers from Lithuania came from different layers of society. The most iconic figures are librarian Ona Šimaitė, doctor Petras Baublys, writer Kazys Binkis and his wife journalist Sofija Binkienė, musician Vladas Varčikas, writer and translator Danutė Zubovienė (Čiurlionytė) and her husband Vladimiras Zubovas, doctor Elena Kutorgienė, aviator Vladas Drupas, doctor Pranas Mažylis, Catholic priest Juozapas Stakauskas, teacher Vladas Žemaitis, Catholic nun Maria Mikulska and others. In Šarnelė village (Plungė district) Straupiai family (Jonas and Bronislava Straupiai together with their neighbours Adolfina and Juozas Karpauskai) saved 26 people (9 families).^[75]

Citizens of Lithuania and foreign countries who rescue people on the territory of Lithuania and citizens of Lithuania abroad are awarded Life Saving Crosses. The President of Lithuania honors Jewish rescuers every year on the occasion of the National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews, which is marked on September 23 to commemorate the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto on that day in 1943.

Albania

Unlike many other Eastern European countries under Nazi occupation, Albania—which has a mixed Muslim and Christian population and a tradition of tolerance—became a safe haven for Jews.^[76] At the end of 1938, Albania was the only remaining country in Europe that still issued visas to Jews through its embassy in Berlin.^[77] Following the Nazi occupation of Albania, the country refused to hand over its small Jewish population to the Germans,^[78] sometimes even providing Jewish families with forged documents.^[76] During the war, about 2,000 Jews sought refuge in Albania, and many of them took shelter in rural parts of the country where they were protected by the local population.^[76] At the end of the war, Albania's Jewish population was greater than it was prior to the war, making it the only country in Europe where the Jewish population increased during World War II.^[79][80] Out of two thousand Jews in total,^[81] only five Albanian Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.^[78][82] They were discovered by the Germans and subsequently deported to Pristina.^[83]

Between February and March in 1939,

Refik Veseli was the first Albanian to be awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations,^[85] having declared afterwards that betraying the Jews "would have disgraced his village and his family. At minimum his home would be destroyed and his family banished".^[86] On 21 July 1992, Mihal Lekatari, an Albanian partisan from Kavajë, was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Lekatari is noted for stealing blank identity papers from the municipality of Harizaj and distributing identity papers with Muslim names on them to Jewish refugees.^[87] In 1997, Albanian Shyqyri Myrto was honored for rescuing Jews, with the Anti-Defamation League's Courage to Care Award presented to his son, Arian Myrto.^[88] In 2006, a plaque honoring the compassion and courage of Albania during the Holocaust was dedicated in The Holocaust Memorial Park in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, with the Albanian ambassador to the United Nations in attendance.^{[note 1]}

During the war, some parts of

The most notable Finnish individual involved in aiding the Jews was Algoth Niska (1888–1954). Niska was a smuggler during the Finnish prohibition but had run into financial troubles after its end in 1932, so when Albert Amtmann, an Austrian-Jewish acquaintance, expressed his concerns over his people's position in Europe, Niska quickly saw a business opportunity in smuggling Jews out of Germany. The modus operandi was quickly established. Niska would forge Finnish passports and Amtmann would acquire the customers, who with their new passports would be able to cross the border out of Germany. All in all, Niska falsified passports for 48 Jews during 1938 and earned 2,5 million Finnish marks ($890,000 or £600,000 in today's money) selling them. Only three of the Jews are known to have survived the Holocaust while twenty were certainly caught. The fates of the other twenty-five are not known. Involved in the operation with Niska and Amtmann were Major Rafael Johannes Kajander, Axel Belewicz and Belewicz's girlfriend Kerttu Ollikainen whose job was to steal the forms on which the passports were forged.^[91][92]

Italy

Despite Benito Mussolini's close alliance with Hitler, Italy did not adopt Nazism's genocidal ideology towards the Jews. The Nazis were frustrated by the Italian forces' refusal to co-operate in the roundups of Jews, and no Jews were deported from Italy prior to the Nazi occupation of the country following the Italian capitulation in September 1943.^[93] In Italian-occupied Croatia, the Nazi envoy Siegfried Kasche advised Berlin that Italian forces had "apparently been influenced" by Vatican opposition to German anti-Semitism.^[94] As anti-Axis feeling grew in Italy, the use of Vatican Radio to broadcast papal disapproval of race murder and anti-Semitism angered the Nazis.^[95] Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943, and the Nazis moved to occupy Italy, commencing a round-up of Jews. Although thousands were caught, the great majority of Italy's Jews were saved. As in other nations, Catholic networks were heavily engaged in rescue efforts.^{[note 2]}

In

On 19 July 1944, the Gestapo rounded up the nearly 2000 Jewish inhabitants of the island of Rhodes, which had been governed by Italy since 1912. Of the approximately 2,000 Rhodesli Jews who were deported to Auschwitz and elsewhere, only 104 survived.

Giorgio Perlasca, who posed as the consul-general of Spain under the Spanish ambassador in Budapest, was able to put under his protection thousands of Jews and non-Jews destined to concentration camps.

The cycling champion

Calogero Marrone was the chief of the Civil Registry office in the municipality of Varese and issued hundreds of fake identity cards in order to save Jews and anti-fascists. He was arrested after an anonymous tip-off and died in the Dachau concentration camp.

Martin Gilbert wrote that, in October 1943, with the SS occupying Rome and determined to deport the city's 5000 Jews, the Vatican clergy had opened the sanctuaries of the Vatican to all "non-Aryans" in need of rescue in an attempt to forestall the deportation. "Catholic clergy in the city acted with alacrity", wrote Gilbert. "At the Capuchin convent on the Via Siciliano, Father Benoit saved a large number of Jews by providing them with false identification papers [...] by the morning of October 16, a total of 4,238 Jews had been given sanctuary in the many monasteries and convents of Rome. A further 477 Jews had been given shelter in the Vatican and its enclaves." Gilbert credited the rapid rescue efforts of the Church with saving over four-fifths of Roman Jews.^[99]

Other Righteous Catholic rescuers in Italy included

In the 1930s, Pope Pius XI urged Mussolini to ask Hitler to restrain the anti-Semitic actions taking place in Germany.^[107] In 1937, the Pope issued the Mit brennender Sorge (German: "With burning concern") encyclical, in which he asserted the inviolability of human rights.^{[108][note 3]}

Pius XII

Following the capitulation of Italy, Nazi deportations of Jews to death camps began. Pius XII protested at diplomatic levels, while several thousand Jews found refuge in Catholic networks. On 27 June 1943, Vatican Radio broadcast a papal injunction: "He who makes a distinction between Jews and other men is being unfaithful to God and is in conflict with God's commands".^[119]

When the Nazis came to Rome in search of Jews, the Pope had already days earlier ordered the sanctuaries of the Vatican City be opened to all "non-Aryans" in need of refuge and according to Martin Gilbert, by the morning of 16 October, "a total of 477 Jews had been given shelter in the Vatican and its enclaves, while another 4,238 had been given sanctuary in the many monasteries and convents of in Rome. Only 1,015 of Rome's 6,730 Jews were seized that morning".^[120] Upon receiving news of the roundups on the morning of 16 October, the Pope immediately instructed Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione, to make a protest to the German ambassador. After the meeting, the ambassador gave orders for a halt to the arrests. Earlier, the Pope had helped the Jews of Rome by offering gold towards the 50 kg ransom demanded by the Nazis.^[121]

Other noted rescuers assisted by Pius were

In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and escaped prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by the Irish-born priest and Vatican official Hugh O'Flaherty. Msgr. O'Flaherty used his political connections to help secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.^[132] The wife of the Irish ambassador, Delia Murphy, assisted him.

Norway

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China

The Philippines

In a notable humanitarian act,

• 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.
• The Most Illustrious duke Roberto de Castro Brandão – Brazilian diplomat and nobleman 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, Brazilian Ambassador
  , current duke 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
  Swedish
  diplomat, who negotiated the release of 27,000 people (a significant number of whom 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.^[140]
• Marseilles
  , France, 1940–1941.
• Geneva from 1942 to 1945, 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 Salvadorean 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.
• Harald Edelstam – Swedish diplomat in Norway who helped to protect and smuggle hundreds of Jews and Norwegian resistance fighters to Sweden.
• Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl. They successfully negotiated with the Nazis in early 1942 to stop the transports from Slovakia and a few months later, via the Europa plan, to try to stop transports from other parts of Europe. They demanded bombing of the rail lines to Auschwitz and authored/distributed the Auschwitz Report
  in 1944.
• 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 – the Dominican dictator promised to receive 100,000 Jewish refugees into the Dominican Republic in 1938 when Franklin D. Roosevelt organized an international conference in Evian to discuss the persecution of the Jews. Dominican Republic was the only nation accepting Jews immigrants after the conference.^[141] 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.^[141] 5000 dollars in gold from Jewish International in New York were paid for each person taken by the Trujillo.^[141] Other refugees settled in the capital Santo Domingo.^[142][143]
• Albert Göring – German businessman (and younger brother of leading Nazi Hermann Göring) who helped Jews and dissidents survive in Germany.
• 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.^[146]
• Wladyslaw Szpilman
  , a Polish Jew, among many others.
• Japanese Army Minister who proposed and adopted a Japanese national policy to receive Jewish refugees.^[133]
• Lyndon B. Johnson – Future President of the United States who, as a member of the United States House of Representatives in 1938, helped Austrian conductor Erich Leinsdorf gain permanent residency in the United States. Johnson later helped Jews enter the U.S. through Latin America and become workers on National Youth Administration projects in Texas.^[147]
• Prince Constantin Karadja – Romanian diplomat, who saved over 51,000 Jews from deportation and extermination, as credited by Yad Vashem in 2005.^[148]
• 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 from deportation 70 Jews, to whom he had granted Turkish citizenship.
• Fumimaro Konoe – Japanese Prime Minister who adopted a Japanese national policy to receive Jewish refugees.^[133]
• Zofia Kossak-Szczucka – Polish founder of Zegota.
• Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson) established a US-based rescue group, which had considerable support in the Congress and Senate. The group's activism was the major factor forcing President Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board in January 1944. One of the WRB's important actions was initiation and sponsoring of the Wallenberg mission to Budapest.
• Swiss consul in Budapest
  , protected tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary.
• 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.^[149]
• George Mantello (b. Mandl Gyorgy) – El Salvador's honorary consul for Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia – provided Salvadoran protection papers for thousands of Jews. He spearheaded an unprecedented Swiss grassroots protests and press campaign. It led to Roosevelt, Churchill and other world leaders threatening Hungary's ruler, regent Miklos Horthy, with post-war retribution if the transports did not stop. That ended the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.^[150][151]
• Boris III of Bulgaria – King of Bulgaria from 1918 to 1943 Resisted demands from Hitler to deport the Jews resulting in all 50,000 being spared, Boris died in 1943 after meeting with Hitler.
• High Commissioner of the Philippines, 1937–1939, who facilitated the entry of Jewish refugees into the Philippines.^[152]
• Helmuth James Graf von Moltke – adviser to Nazi Germany 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.^[153]
• Jean-Marie Musy toward end of the war negotiated with Himmler on behalf of Recha Sternbuch – to rescue large numbers of Jews in the concentration camps
• Italian
  police official who saved several thousand.
• 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, played a major role in rescuing Bulgaria's 48 000 Jews, the entire Jewish population in Bulgaria at the time.
• Frits Philips – Dutch industrialist who saved 382 Jews by insisting to the Nazis that they were indispensable employees of Philips.
• Polish Government in Exile, from where they were passed to the rest of the Western Allies
  .
• Wehrmacht Heer
  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)
• Enver Hoxha – Led the Resistance against the German and Italians in Albania. Hoxha refused that the Germans or collaborationists deport a single Jew, therefore Albania was the only country in Europe to have an increased Jewish population after the war.
• Mehmet Shehu – a resistance fighter in Albania who allowed Jews to enter Albania, and refused to hand the Jews over to The Germans, during the occupation
• 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.^[152]
• Florencio Rivas – Consul General of Uruguay in Germany, who allegedly hid one hundred and fifty Jews during Kristallnacht and later provided them with passports.^[154]
• Marseilles, France. For two years, he issued Mexican visas to around 40,000 Jews, Spaniards 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.^[155]
• 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.^[156]

• 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.
• Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld set up a Uk-based rescue committee and rescued many thousands of Jews.
• Eduard Schulte – German industrialist, the first to inform the Allies about the mass extermination of Jews.
• 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.
• Recha Sternbuch rescued large numbers of Jews with the help of her husband Yitzchak by smuggling them into Switzerland from Austria, by distributing protection papers, by negotiating with Himmler with help of Jean-Marie Musy to save Jews in the concentration camps as the Germans were retreating, and by rescuing the Jews who arrived to Bergen-Belsen by train from Hungary.
• 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.
• Jewish refugees in Manchuria and rejected German protest.^[134]
• 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.
• Swedish diplomat. Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews condemned to certain death by the Nazis during World War II. In January 1945, Wallenberg was imprisoned at the headquarters of Rodion Malinovsky in Debrecen and disappeared. He is believed to have been poisoned in the Lubyanka Building by the NKVD torturer Grigory Mairanovsky.^[157]

• 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 was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.^[158][159]
• Namik Kemal Yolga – A Vice-Consul at the Turkish
  Embassy in Paris who saved numerous Turkish Jews from deportation.
• Consul General at Thessaloniki
  who gave false papers to save the lives of over 300 Jews residing there.
• Raymond Geist –
  German Federal Republic in 1954.^[160]

Catholic officials

• Pope Pius XII, preached against racism in encyclicals like Summi Pontificatus. Used Vatican Radio to denounce race murders and anti-Semitism.^[119] Directly lobbied Axis officials to stop Jewish deportations.^[130] Opened the sanctuaries of the Vatican to Rome's Jews during the Nazi roundup.^[120]
• Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican". Retold in the film The Scarlet and the Black
  .
• Filippo Bernardini, papal nuncio to Switzerland.^[128]
• Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican Chargé d'Affaires in Slovakia.^[128] Protested the anti-Semitism and totalitarianism of the Tiso regime.^[129] Burzio advised Rome of the deteriorating situation for Jews in the Nazi puppet state, sparking Vatican protests on behalf of Jews.^[162]
• Angelo Roncalli, the nuncio to Turkey saved a number of Croatian, Bulgarian and Hungarian Jews by assisting their migration to Palestine. Roncalli succeeded Pius XII as Pope John XXIII, and always said that he had been acting on the orders of Pius XII in his actions to rescue Jews.^[163]
• Andrea Cassulo, papal nuncio in Romania.^[164] Appealed directly to Marshall Antonescu to limit the deportations of Jews to Nazi concentration camps planned for the summer of 1942.^[165]
• Cardinal Gerlier of France refused to hand over Jewish children being sheltered in Catholic homes. In September 1942, Eight Jesuits were arrested for sheltering hundreds of children on Jesuit properties, and Pius XII's Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione protested to the Vichy Ambassador.^[166]
• Giuseppe Marcone, apostolic visitor to Croatia, lobbied Croat regime, saved 1000 Jewish partners in mixed marriages.^[167]
• Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb, condemned Croat atrocities against both Serbs and Jews, and himself saved a group of Jews.^[167] He declared publicly in the spring of 1942 that it was "forbidden to exterminate Gypsies and Jews because they are said to belong to an inferior race".^[127]
• Bishop
  Pavel Gojdič protested the persecution of Slovak Jews. Gojdic was beatified by the Church and recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.^[168]
• Admiral Horthy to stop their deportation.^[169] He issued protective passports for Jews and 15,000 safe conduct passes – the nunciature sheltered some 3000 Jews in safe houses.^[169] An "International Ghetto" was established, including more than 40 safe houses marked by the Vatican and other national emblems. 25,000 Jews found refuge in these safe houses. Elsewhere in the city, Catholic institutions hid several thousand more Jewish people.^[170]
• Utrecht, Netherlands, who drew up together with Titus Brandsma O.Carm. († Dachau, 1942) a letter in which he called for all Catholics to assist persecuted Jews, and in which he openly condemned the Nazi German "deportation of our Jewish fellow citizens" (From: Herderlijk Schrijven, read from all pulpits
  on Sunday 26 January 1942).
• Archbishop
  Archbishop of Albi – in denouncing roundups and mistreatment of Jews in France, spurring greater resistance.^[171]
• Père Marie-Benoît, Capuchin priest who saved many Jews in Marseille and later in Rome where he became known among the Jewish community as "father of the Jews".^[103]
• Mother Matylda Getter's Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary sheltered Jewish children escaping the Warsaw Ghetto.^[172] Getter's convent rescued more than 750.^[173]
• Alfred Delp S.J., a Jesuit priest who helped Jews escape to Switzerland while rector of St. Georg Church in suburban Munich; also involved with the Kreisau Circle. Executed 2 February 1945 in Berlin.
• Franciscan friar and priest who sheltered Jewish refugees in Assisi
  , Italy, from September 1943 through June 1944.
• Conventual Franciscan friar. During the Second World War, in the friary, Kolbe provided shelter to people from Greater Poland
  , including 2,000 Jews. He was also active as a radio amateur, vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.
• Bernhard Lichtenberg – German Catholic priest at Berlin's Cathedral. Sent to Dachau because he prayed for Jews at Evening Prayer.
• Sára Salkaházi – a Hungarian Roman Catholic nun who sheltered approximately 100 Jews in Budapest.
• beatified
  .

Others

• Greek Jews
  in and around Athens were thus able to claim that they were Christian and were thus saved.
• Sofia and Exarch of Bulgaria, actively supported Dimitar Peshev
  's pressure against the Bulgarian government to cancel the deportation of the 48,000 Bulgarian Jews.
• Bishop George Bell - Bishop of Chichester, England and friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  . In 1936 Bell received the chair of the International Christian Committee for German Refugees, and in that role he especially supported Jewish Christians, who at that time were supported by neither Jewish nor Christian organizations. He provided a temporary home for exiled Jewish children in his own official residence.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a German Lutheran pastor who joined the Abwehr (a German military intelligence organization) which was also the center of the anti-Hitler resistance, and was involved in operations to help German Jews escape to Switzerland. Arrested by the Nazis, he was hanged on 5 April 1945, not long before the war ended.
• Metropolitan
  Axis occupying forces to submit a list of all Jews on the island, submitted a document bearing just two names: his own and the mayor's. Consequently, all 275 Zante Jews were saved
  .
• canonized by Pope John Paul II^[176]
• Dimitar Peshev was the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and Minister of Justice (1935–1936), before World War II. He rebelled against the pro-Nazi cabinet and prevented the deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews, and was bestowed the title of "Righteous Among the Nations".
• Leopold Socha was a Polish sewage inspector in the city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). During the Holocaust, Socha used his knowledge of the city's sewage system to shelter a group of Jews from Nazi Germans and their supporters of different nationalities. In 1978, he was recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.
• Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
  , harbored hundreds of Jews in his residence and in Greek Catholic monasteries. He also issued the pastoral letter, "Thou Shalt Not Kill", to protest Nazi atrocities.
• André and Magda Trocmé – A French Reformed pastor and his wife who led the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon village movement that saved 3,000–5,000 Jews.
• Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem

• Bertha Bracey – As secretary of the Germany Emergency Commission, set up 7 April 1933, in Britain, she raised awareness for the dangers of the Nazi philosophy. With voluntary workers, she handled appeals for assistance from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia and contributed substantially to the Kindertransport which brought 10,000 children to England.
• Elisabeth Abegg – On 23 May 1967, Yad Vashem recognized German Quaker Elisabeth Abegg as Righteous Among the Nations. She helped many Jewish people by offering them accommodation in her home or directing them to hiding places elsewhere.
• Kees Boeke and Betty Boeke-Cadbury – On 4 July 1991, Yad Vashem recognized Cornelis Boeke and his wife Beatrice Boeke-Cadbury as Righteous Among the Nations for hiding Jewish children in Bilthoven.
• Laura van den Hoek Ostende – On 29 September 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Dutch Quaker Laura van den Hoek Ostende-van Honk as Righteous Among the Nations for hiding Jews in Putten, Hilversum and Amsterdam.
• Mary Elmes – On 23 January 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Irish Quaker Mary Elisabeth Elmes as Righteous Among the Nations for rescuing Jewish children in France.
• Auguste Fuchs-Bucholz and Fritz Fuchs – On 11 August 2009, Yad Vashem recognized German Quakers Auguste Fuchs-Bucholz and Fritz Fuchs as Righteous Among the Nations.
• Carl Hermann and Eva Hermann-Lueddecke – On 19 January 1976, Yad Vashem recognized German Quakers Carl Hermann and Eva Hermann-Lueddecke as Righteous Among the Nations
  .
• Gilbert Lesage – On 14 January 1985, Yad Vashem recognized French Quaker Gilbert Lesage as Righteous Among the Nations.
• Gertrud Luckner – On 15 February 1966, Yad Vashem recognized German Quaker Gertrud Luckner as Righteous Among the Nations.
• Ernst Lusebrink and Elfriede Lusebrink-Bokenkruger – On 11 August 2009, Yad Vashem recognized German Quakers Ernst Lusebrink and Elfriede Lusebrink-Bokenkruger as Righteous Among the Nations.
• Geertruida Pel and Trijntje Pfann – On 15 August 2012, Yad Vashem recognized Dutch Quaker Geertruida Pel and her daughter Trijntje Pfann as Righteous Among the Nations.
• ISBN 97890-79700-67-7
  ;
• Wijnberg, I., Hollaender, A., 'Er wacht nog een kind ..., De quakers Lili en Manfred Pollatz, huIlse Schwersensky-Zimmermann and n school en kinderte men, 2014,
  ISBN 97890-79700-67-7
• Ilse Schwersensky-Zimmermann and Gerhard Schwersensky – On 2 May 1985, Yad Vashem recognized German Quakers Gerhard Schwersensky and Ilse Schwersensky-Zimmermann as Righteous Among the Nations for hiding Jews in Berlin.

Villages helping Jews

• Yaruga, Ukraine^[177]
• Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire département in France, which saved up to 5,000 Jews.
• In
  Józef and Wiktoria Ulma
  including 6 children and prenatal child 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; while Jan and Weronika Przybylak hid Jakub Einhorn.

• 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, Netherlands – during the war, this small village contained 117 inhabitants. Most households in the village and surrounding area cooperated to shelter Jews, thus making it difficult for anyone in the small village to betray their neighbors. Dozens of Jews were thus saved. Over 200 inhabitants have been honored by Yad Vashem.^[185]
• 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 be treated as members of their immediate family; the oldest students hid in the house. When it became too dangerous for the students to stay there any longer, the residents made sure that every student had a safe place to go to. If the students had to move again, the counsellors from the boarding house arranged for a new place and even escorted them to the new housing.
• The Portuguese cities of Figueira da Foz, Porto, Coimbra, Curia, Ericeira and Caldas da Rainha were assigned to house refugees. They were pleasant resorts with many available hotels.^[186] The refugees led totally ordinary lives.^[57] They were allowed to circulate freely within town limits, practice their religions, and enroll their children in local schools. "Here we were given freedom of movement; we were allowed to go on outing and live as we wished", said Ben-Zwi Kalischer.^[187] Those times were captured on films that can be found at the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.^[188]
• Oľšavica, Slovakia^[189][190]

Others

• The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
• The Jewish Labor Committee^[191]

See also

• Arab rescue efforts during the Holocaust
• British Hero of the Holocaust
• Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire
• Rescue of Roma during the Porajmos
• Rescuer (genocide)

Footnotes

Citations