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Fashion, Rebellion, Resistance - Some Were Neighbors: Choice, Human Behavior, and the Holocaust - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Fifteen-year-old Maurice Lombart was arrested by French police for wearing a handmade Jewish Star in protest of anti-Jewish laws in June 1942.

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Holocaust Survivors of South Jersey: Biographical Profiles

These brief biographies document some of the hundreds of Holocaust survivors who have lived in Atlantic, Cape May, and Cumberland counties as well as some adjacent communities. Their life stories remind us not only of one of the darkest chapters of human history, but they are also testaments to resilience, perseverance, and the contributions of refugees and immigrants to our region, to the United States, and indeed to the world. Holocaust survivors were often married to other Survivors; where practical, both Survivor spouses are presented in a single profile.

This website is part of the South Jersey Holocaust Survivors Project of the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University. For more about the project, which includes an extensive digital archive and digital exhibition currently being developed, visit the project homepage.

Featured Survivors

Augusta and Arthur Goldmeier

Bertha Borowick

Bina and Chaim Brettler

David Hoch

David and Esther Berkowitz

Donald Berkman

Eda and Herman Holzer

Eve and Jacob Ackerman

Helen and Joseph Finkelstein

Helen, Joseph, and Ted Dolotta

Henry and Regina Berger

Ida Belchatowski

Ida and Morris Shkolnik

Irma and Robert Berger

Julia and Max Blum

Lusia and Stanley Igel

Mary and Al Cinger

Maude Dahme

Molly and Pinchus Kiejdan

Nella and Myer Glick

Nettie and Morris Adelsberg

Perl and Emanuel Anhalt

Renate Berger

Rose and Sidney Jacoby

Ruth and Justin Aufseeser

Sally Charsinsky

Sara and Sam Schoffer

Sonia and Harry Golubcow

Stephen Anhalt

Sylvia Genoy

Tonia and Morris Altman

Ursula and Herber Bernstein

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Biographical Profiles aimed to document the lives of Holocaust Survivors who settled in Atlantic, Cape May, and Cumberland Counties

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Jews responded to the ghetto restrictions with a variety of resistance efforts. Ghetto residents frequently engaged in so-called illegal activities, such as smuggling food, medicine, weapons or intelligence across the ghetto walls, often without the knowledge or approval of the Jewish councils. Spiritual resistance took place through cultural activities such as secret schools and clandestine religious observance, which asserted people's humanity and individuality.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The most well-known attempt by Jews to resist the Nazi regime took place in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943 and lasted for almost a month. It was organised by the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa - ŻOB (Jewish Fighting Organisation), and headed by 23-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz.

In 1942, 300,000 Jews had been deported from the Warsaw Ghetto, and rumours had made it back to the ghetto about the mass murders. Anielewicz encouraged people to resist being rounded up into trains which would take them to the concentration camps. In January 1943 the ŻOB fired shots during a deportation using a small number of weapons that had been smuggled into the Ghetto. After a few days of the attack, Nazi troops retreated. This success inspired further revolt.

On 19 April 1943 the Nazis entered the Warsaw Ghetto to carry out its liquidation, anticipating success within a few days. Around 750 ŻOB resistance fighters fought the well-armed and trained soldiers. The revolt lasted for just over a month until they were finally defeated on 16 May. More than 56,000 Jews were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto during the liquidation with 7,000 being shot upon capture and the remaining 49,000 deported to concentration camps.

There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos.

The Oneg Shabbat Archive

Also in the Warsaw Ghetto, a historian called Emanuel Ringelblum organised a secret group to create an archive documenting life in the ghetto. They gathered testimonies, diaries, posters, reports, photographs and anything else they could find. The documents were placed in three large milk urns which were buried in separate locations around the ghetto, so future societies would know what had happened.

Only three people who had contributed to the Oneg Shabbat archives survived the war and in 1946 they were able to unearth one of the milk churns. A second churn was discovered four years later. The third milk churn has still not been found.

Read more about Emanuel Ringelblum here.

The Kashariyot

The kashariyot (couriers) were a group of young women who disguised themselves as non-Jews and travelled between Jewish communities and ghettos in Poland smuggling messages, documents, money and weapons to incarcerated Jews. Their efforts were documented by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Oneg Shabbat archives, where he praised their bravery and ingenuity:

'Boldly they travel back and forth through the cities and towns of Poland. [...] They are in mortal danger every day. They rely entirely on their 'Aryan' faces and on the peasant kerchiefs that cover their heads.'

The word kashariyot comes from the Hebrew kesher, meaning connection, acknowledging that these women provided hope and a link to the outside world, as well as the information they brought with them.

The Auschwitz Revolt

In 1944, the Soviet Army had entered German-occupied Poland, and the liberation of Auschwitz seemed like a possibility at last. A resistance movement, including Jews and non-Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz, began planning an uprising. Three young Jewish women working in the munitions factory at Auschwitz III worked for months smuggling small amounts of gunpowder out of the factory, wrapped in cloth or paper and hidden in their clothes. This was then smuggled to Jewish prisoners working for the Sonderkommando - the group of prisoners forced to work at the crematoria. In an attempt to hide evidence of their crimes, the Nazis would frequently kill the Sonderkommando members so that they would not be able to testify to the horrors they had witnessed.

The leaders of the Sonderkommando planned to use the gunpowder to blow up the gas chambers and crematoria, and begin the uprising. On 7 October 1944, hearing that the SS were planning to liquidate the Sonderkommando, the revolt began. Crematorium IV was blown up and set on fire. Members of the SS were attacked with hammers and rocks. Prisoners cut through the barbed wire fence and began to escape.

The majority of those who escaped were caught and executed, along with 200 other prisoners involved in the revolt. The four women who smuggled the gunpowder were publicly hanged.

Rescuers

Since 1963, Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem has been honouring non-Jewish individuals around the world who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. They are known as 'Righteous among the Nations', and so far there are more than 26,500 people on the list.

During the Nazi period everyone had to make moral choices. Some people became perpetrators, others were bystanders. A small and brave minority chose to help the persecuted - these are the rescuers and helpers. This was an extraordinary selfless choice. It meant risking not only their own lives but the lives of their own family and children. Many paid with their lives. None succeeded in halting the Holocaust, but many people survived as a result of their efforts.

Those regarded as rescuers may have hidden someone for a few hours, overnight, or for two or three years. Some may have saved one life, others saved thousands. Whatever the scale each deed was as significant as each other. Both the Talmud and the Koran remind us: 'whoever saves a life, it is as if he saved the world entire.'

Stories of rescuers are found in every Nazi-occupied country and from all walks of life. Their actions demonstrate that true heroes are often just ordinary people acting on their convictions. Many were surprised that what they had done was deemed to be exceptional.

The Nazis were brutal in their reprisals against anyone caught trying to assist Jews. Bystanders therefore had good reason to be concerned for their personal safety. This in turn makes the actions of those who did resist the more remarkable. Their actions were selfless, but no less calculated. They knew the potential risk, but acted anyway.

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Resistance and rescuers

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Jews resisted ghetto restrictions in a variety of ways; smuggling food, medicine, weapons or intelligence across ghetto walls. Schooling children and attending religious gatherings also continued in secret. There were also people throughout Nazi occupied Europe who risked their lives to help and rescue Jews.

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Irena Sendlerowa was a social worker in Warsaw, who directed a children's rescue group to smuggle Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false papers and placing them with substitute Polish families. Records that Irena kept showed that she was able to save nearly 2,500 children from certain death under the Nazis.
You can download the PDF of Irena Sendlerowa's life story here
Irena Sendlerowa (Irena Sendler) was born in 1910 to a Polish family living in the suburbs of the city of Warsaw. Her father was a physician, many of whose patients were Jews. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, she was a social worker with the city's Social Welfare Department and, as an employee of this Department, she had a special permit to enter the ghetto where she wore a yellow star. In secret, Irena directed a children's rescue group to smuggle Jewish children from the Ghetto. This group was part of an organised 'underground' council called Zegota, set up to help Jews. When Irena managed to rescue children, she provided them with false papers and placed them with the substitute Polish families, who pretended to their neighbours that the children were relatives. When she could not find a suitable family willing to take such a tremendous risk, she placed them in Catholic institutions like the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, or in convents. Everyone hoped that relatives of the children might survive the Nazis and so Irena kept careful records of all the children so that they could be found easily after the war. She hid her records, which she wrote on small pieces of paper, in jars in a friend's garden. These records showed that Irena was able to save nearly 2,500 children from certain death under the Nazis.

Inevitably, Irena was found out and arrested by the Gestapo. In October 1943, she was arrested and taken to the infamous Pawiak prison, where she was brutally tortured to make her reveal information. However, despite this treatment, Irena gave nothing away and she was condemned to death. However, on the day set for her execution, other members of Zegota were able to bribe one of the Gestapo agents and, in the nick of time, Irena was rescued. Officially, however, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. Irena assumed a false identity, and continued to help the underground rescue operations, although she was forced to stay out of sight for the remainder of the war.

For many years, her amazing story remained untold, but eventually, it became known. Some pupils at a school in America, researching for a history project, made it into a play called 'Life in a Jar' after the method Irena had used to keep track of the children. In 2003, Irena received the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish civil decoration. Recipient of the 'Jan Karski Award For Valour and Compassion', her age prevented her from attending the ceremony in the USA; the message she sent included the words : 'But we and future generations must also remember the human cruelty and hate which led those who handed over their neighbours to the enemy, the hate which told them to commit murder. There was also indifference towards the tragedy of those who perished.

'It is my dream that this memory become a warning to the world and that Humanity never experiences such tragedy ever again.'

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Irena Sendlerowa

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Irena Sendlerowa was a social worker in Warsaw, who directed a children's rescue group to smuggle Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false papers and placing them with substitute Polish families. Records that Irena kept showed that she was able to save nearly 2,500 children from certain death under the Nazis.

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Rudolf Vrba

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Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau so he could warn Hungarian Jews about their imminent extermination.

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Among the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust were Armenians - some of them motivated by the memory of the atrocities committed against them at the beginning of the 20th century. These acts of rescue took place where the Armenians fled subsequent to the genocide - Ukraine, Crimea, France, Hungary, and Austria.

Christian conduct during the Holocaust continues to challenge the Christian world well into the 21st century. Many factors played a role in influencing the behavior of church leaders and clergy when confronted with the murder of the Jews. Some spoke out against the persecution, others remained silent, many acquiesced, and some even collaborated. A few - from all Christian denominations - risked their lives to save Jews.

As Nazi Germany intensified its anti-Jewish policy, increasing numbers of Jews were driven to flee and to seek ways to emigrate. Long lines of desperate people seeking visas formed in front of foreign consulates, but the free world was reluctant to permit entry of the many refugees. Most diplomats continued to employ ordinary procedures in extraordinary times; only very few proved to be an exception and faced with the refugees' plight, were willing to act against their government's policy and instructions and suffer the consequences.

While indifference and hostility towards the Jews were the general rule in Nazi occupied Europe, there were always a few who risked their lives to help the persecuted. Among the Righteous Among the Nations there are also Muslims from Albania, Bosnia, Turkey, countries of the former Soviet Union. and an Egyptian doctor residing in Berlin.

They were young girls of very modest or poor background, who had to leave their parents' home at an early age and go to work taking care of other people's households and children. When the war broke out the situation often changed overnight and a reversal of fortunes took place: the Jewish employers were stripped of their status, assets and rights and became helpless victims to persecution and murder, and it was the nursemaids who, despite the danger, their young age and lack of education, took charge and assumed full responsibility for the Jewish families' survival.

Rescue acts were by their very nature performed in secret. The danger of denunciation was great, and Jews had to be hidden not only from the perpetrators, but also from neighbors. Yet, in several places organized rescue was put in place, with rescuers joining together and pooling their resources and efforts. Sometimes these groups were part of organized resistance movements; in other cases they were spontaneous.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the last such camp still functioning. They found 7,000 survivors. Another 50,000 inmates had been marched out several days earlier by the camp's staff in order to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. Most of them perished before the war ended. Auschwitz, where over one million people - most of them Jews - were killed, has become a symbol for the Holocaust and for evil as such, and rightly so. For the Jewish people, it is the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, a cemetery without graves.

And yet, even within the horror that was Auschwitz, there were flickers of light. Despite the total dehumanization that was part of the camp system, there were remarkable acts of solidarity and humanity by camp inmates. Among them were non-Jews, who at risk to their own lives, sought to ease the pain, to give aid and to rescue Jews. They proved that even within the brutality and the murder, people could choose not to remain indifferent. These non-Jews are among the more than 21,000 who by 2006 have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Since 1963, as mandated by the Israeli Parliament, Yad Vashem has honored those non-Jews who, during the Holocaust, saved Jewish lives in circumstances that posed a risk to his or her life, without intending to receive a reward, monetary or otherwise.

We bring you here six of their stories.

During the Holocaust most people abandoned their Jewish neighbors, turned a blind eye or even participated in the persecution of the Jews. Among them were teachers, who watched as their students were marked, harassed, discriminated against and finally murdered. Only some felt that it was their duty not only to educate and instill values in the classroom, but to live by those ideals, even at the risk of their lives. Yad Vashem has recognized those teachers as Righteous Among the Nations.

These Righteous Among the Nations, who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, and are featured in this unique exhibition, embodied the Olympic spirit by dedicating their lives to "social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles". (taken from the Olympic Charter).

In order to perpetrate the murder of six million Jews it was necessary to enlist the cooperation of different state institutions. Many of those involved were, so they claimed, professionals merely doing their job. Only a small minority mustered the necessary courage and honesty to recognize the real significance of what they were doing or what they were required to do and decided to defy their superiors and their orders and instructions.

About One and a half million Jewish children perished in the Holocaust. Every child, every baby was targeted - only because they were born Jewish - in the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. A whole generation was killed; only a few survived. In trying to save their children, parents often had to take the painful decision to part from them; other children were hidden after their parents were deported or killed.

In a Europe where Jews were ostracized and targeted for murder, most people abandoned their former neighbors, and only a few stood by their side. The price that rescuers had to pay for their actions differed from one country to another. In Eastern Europe, notices were put up threatening those who helped Jews and their families with death. In Germany and Western Europe punishment was generally less severe. However, witnessing the brutal treatment of the population and the perpetrators' determination to hunt down every single Jew, people must have feared that they would suffer greatly if they attempted to help the persecuted. Moreover, in many places rescuers had to beware not only of the authorities, but there was a great risk of denunciation on the part of their neighbors.

Some of the rescuers had to pay the ultimate price. Here are some of their stories:

A little over half of the Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem are women. While many of them acted in cooperation with other family members, some of these courageous women were the initiators of the rescue and acted independently to save Jews. Here are some of their stories.

Featured here are several dozen stories of Righteous Among the Nations arranged by topics and by countries. All the Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem are included in the Database of the Righteous.

The "Pianist"'s Rescuer: Wilhelm (Wilm) Hosenfeld

Rescue in the Sewers: Leopold & Magdalena Socha

The Nanny That Kept Her Promise: Gertruda Bablinska

The Port Worker Who Turned Rescuer: Jan and Johana Lipke

"Our Helpers" in the Secret Annex: Hermine (Miep) and Jan Augustus Gies

A Mother's Deathbed Confession: Ida Brunelli-Lenti

Chinese Visas in Vienna: Feng-Shan Ho

Here Is the List of Jews You Required: Metropolitan Chrysostomos and Mayor Lucas Carrer

The Life Saving Stay in the Hospital: Roger and Jeanette Voinot

Murdered by Their Neighbors: Vasiuta Wegrzynowska and her children

Rescued by an Egyptian in Berlin: Dr. Mohamed Helmy and Frieda Szturmann

Murder in Markowa: Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma

Shelter During the Massacres: Ignat and Sofya Yermolovich

The Policeman who Lifted the Border Barrier: Paul Grueninger

The Rescue of the Future Chief Justice: Jaroslavas Rakevičius and his sons

Teaching the Rescuer's Daughters Math and Reading: Antonina Kulakovskaya and daughter Vera Gribanova (Kulakovskaya)

"We are all Jews": Roddie Edmonds

"Saint Feodosiya": Filip & Teklya Konyukh and their sons Aleksander and Andrey

In Search of Esther: Stanislaw and Tasilia Pozniak and daughter Janina

Three Boys in the Studite Monastery: Hieromonk Daniil Tymchyna

Rescue in a Circus: Adolf and Maria Althoff

An American in Marseille: Varian Fry

The Assisi Network: Monsignor Giuseppe Placido Nicolini, Father Aldo Brunacci, Father Rufino Nicacci, Luigi Brizi and his son Trento

British POWs: Stan Wells, George Hammond, Tommy Noble, Alan Edwards, Roger Letchford, Bill Keeble, Bert Hambling, Bill Scruton, Jack Buckley and Willy Fisher

Priests, Farmers and Noblemen: Joseph Celis and his children; Marie Louise Tabruyn, Father Louis Celis' housekeeper; Alfons and Clementina Maris; and Baron Raymond and Baroness Marcelle de Tornaco

18 Months in a Haystack: Pavel and Lyubov Gerasimchik and their children

Mykola and Maria Dyuk

The Insubordinate Consul: Aristides De Sousa Mendes

The Priest's Request: Father Bronius Paukstys

A Tale of Two French Butchers: Jules and Jeanne Roger and mother Louise Roger, Esther and Roger Perret

Schindler's List: Oskar and Emilie Schindler

Visas to Japan: Chiune Sempo Sugihara

Geulen's List: Andree Geulen-Herscovici

With Fishing Boats to Sweden: Henry Christen and Ellen Margrethe Thomsen

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon: André and Magda Trocmé, Daniel Trocmé

Muslim rescuers in Albania: Vesel and Fatima Veseli and their children: Refik, Hamid and Xhemal

Swedish Rescuer in Budapest: Raoul Wallenberg

The Witness to Murder Who Decided to Act: Hermann Friedrich Graebe

Hiding in Cages in the Zoo: Jan and Antonina Zabinski

Paul Grüninger

Robert and Johanna Sedul, Otilija Schimelpfening

Nikolaou Kostas

Petrus (Pieter) and Adriane Kleibroek and their daughter Nelie

Russian Orthodox Father Aleksey Glagolev

Florence Network

Mikas and Elena Lukauskas

Anna Krezo and her daughter Nadezhda Soloviova

Theodor and Jaroslawa Florczak

Hermanna van Corbach

Józef & Natalia Roztropowicz, and their daughters, Janina and Stanislawa

Theodorus and Maria Schouten, and their daughter Cornelia Anna

Jonas and Felicija Radlinskas

Jan and Anna Puchalski, and their children, Irena, Krystyna and Sabina

Paul and Suzanne Gibaud, Louis and Georgette Barthelemy, Albert and Renee Sarro

Jan and Antonina Zabinski

Raoul Wallenberg

Vesel and Fatima Veseli and their children: Refik, Hamid and Xhemal

Henry Christen and Ellen Margrethe Thomsen

Andree Geulen-Herscovici

Chiune Sempo Sugihara

Oskar and Emilie Schindler

Mykola and Maria Dyuk

Jules and Jeanne Roger and mother Louise Roger, Esther and Roger Perret

Father Bronius Paukstys and his brother Juozas

Aristides De Sousa Mendes

Pavel and Lyubov Gerasimchik and their children Klavdiya Kucheruk, Galina Gavrishchuk and Nikolay

The Celis Family

British POWs

Hieromonk Daniil Tymchyna

Feng-Shan Ho

Jan and Johana Lipke

Monsignor Giuseppe Placido Nicolini, Father Aldo Brunacci, Father Rufino Niccacci, Luigi Brizi and his son Trento

Adolf and Maria Althoff

The Konyukh, the Kalutas and the Kuyavas

Jaroslavas Rakevičius and his sons Česlovas, Juozas, Zenonas and AlgimantasJonas and Ona Mozūraitis, and their children

Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma

Roger and Jeanette Voinot

Leopold and Magdalena Socha

Wilhelm (Wilm) Hosenfeld

Władysław & Stanisław Swierczewski

Euzebia Bartkowiak

Ignat and Sofya Yermolovich

Jerzy Pozimski

Dr. Ella Lingens

Jerzy Bielecki

Lorenzo Perrone

Dr. Adelaide Hautval

Ludwig Wörl

Andrée Geulen

Amato Billour

Jelena Glavaški

Sister Gertruda Stanisława Marciniak

Vladimir Chernovol

Gerda Valentiner

Benjamin Blankenstein

Aleksander Kramarovskiy

Elisabeth Abegg

Ali Sheqer Pashkaj

Destan and Lime Balla

Besim and Aishe Kadiu

Danielius Žilevičius, Ona and Adolfina Žilevičienė

Anthonie Pieter Wetemans and Judith Wetemans (de Graaff)

Martin Uher

Béla Stollár

Margit Eugénie Mallász

Jan Kasper Klein

Tadeusz Gebethner

Maria Helena Friedlander (Bruhn)

Boris and Žarko Dolinar

Gino Bartali

Karolina Juszczykowska

Sofia Kritikou (Kritikoy)

Bronislava Krištopavičienė

Caecilia Antonia Maria Loots

Antonina Gordey

Lois Gunden

Ludviga Pukas

Elisabeta Strul (Nicopoi)

Maria Agnese Tribbioli

Anna Igumnova

Johanna Eck

Jeanne Daman-Scaglione

Suzanne Spaak

Sofka Skipwith

Grigori and Pran Tashchiyan, and their children Asmik and Tigran Tashchiyan

Ashkhen Agopyan

Arut and Natalya Zagoruyko-Kisheshyan and their daughter Almaza Kisheshyan

Harutyun Khachatryan

Albert and Makrouhi Hougassian and their daughter Berthe

Aram and Felicia Taschdjian

Vartan Mkrtchyan and his mother Arakel, Knarik Shakhbazyan

Georges Dilsizian and his son André-Gustave

Ara Jeretzian

Yervante and Elbis Beurkdjian

Peruza Bagdasarian and her son Sarkis

Jozef Marchwinski

Heinrich and Maria List

Andrey and Anastasiya Cheremukha, and their son - Valentin

Johan Gerard and Wilhelmina Dora Westerweel

René Dumonteil

René and Hélène Bindel, their son Jean, and Clotilde Pava

Julien Henri Marius and Pauriol Heniette Augustine

Monsignor Pierre-Marie Théas

Pastor Jean Séverin Lemaire

Raoul Laporterie

Marie-Louise Carven

Marie-Rose Gineste

Monseigneur Jules-Gérard Saliège

Germaine Ribière

Gilbert Lesage

Father Jean Fleury

Anne-Marie Mingat and her mother, Marthe Lerme

Malgorzata Wolska and her children Mieczyslaw, Halina (Michalecka-Wolska), Wanda (Szandurska- Wolska) and nephew Janusz Wysocki

Anna Borkowska

Jan Zwartendijk

Leokadia Jaromirska

Yefim Buldov

Wladyslawa Wierzbicka-Kostanska and her son, Jan Kostanski

Waitstill and Martha Sharp

Vladimir and Galina Imshennik

Traian Popovici

Tatiana Zelenskaya and Pavel Chariuta

Tadeusz and Wladyslawa Korsak, Jan and Maria Michalowski

Tadeusz Czezowski, his wife Antonina Czezowska and their daughter Teresa Czezowska

Stojan-Bogoja Siljanovski

Stanisław and Regina Świda

Stanislawa Rotman-Kaczmarczyk

Stanislaw and Tasilia Pozniak and daughter Janina

Selahattin Ülkümen

Prokofiy and Lidiya Ivanov, Yelizaveta Kondratyeva

Princess Alice

Pierre Nicolini

Per Faye Hansen

Olena Hryhoryshyn

Mykolas and Jadvyga Šimelis

Mustafa and Zejneba Hardaga, Izet and Bachriya Hardaga, Ahmed Sadik

Milena Jesenská

Milena Herbenova

Metropolitan Chrysostomos, Mayor Lucas Carrer

Maria Walewska

Maria Chomova and her daughter, Olga Sramkova

Maria Burdowa

Luis Martins de Souza Dantas

Lucien Bunel (Father Jacques)

Klaas and Hendrika van der Knoop

Karl Plagge

Joseph Migneret

Johan Benders and Gerritdina Benders-Letterboer

Jean Phillipe

Jean Deffaugt

Jan and Yekaterina Karijev

Jacob and Wijntje de Vries

Ivan (Ivica) Vranetic

Irena Sendler

Iosif and Anna Nazaruk

Ida Brunelli-Lenti

Hermine (Miep) and Jan Augustus Gies

Hermann Friedrich Graebe

Hendrikus (Hein) and Martha Snapper

Gijsbertje Duizer-Verhoef and Hilde Van Straten-Duizer

Gertruda Babilińska

François and Berthe Bousson

Frans and Rie Pakker (De Wit)

Feodor Mikhailichenko

Father Pierre-Marie Benoit

Father Arrigo Beccari and Dr. Giuseppe Moreali

Erzsebet Fajo

Elisabeth Hedwig Leja Gessler

Dr. Mohamed Helmy and Frieda Szturmann

Dorothea Neff

Domicele Pagojute

Djina-Gertruda Beritic and her son - Tihomil

Dimitar Peshev

The Cooymanses, the Numanses, the Kohlys and the Roelofsens

Camille Ernst

Bertha and Klaas Crum

Bernhard Lichtenberg

Armin T. Wegner

Anton Sukhinski

Anton Schmid

Angela and Frantiszek Melo and their son - Frantiszek

André and Magda Trocmé, Daniel Trocmé

Boris M. and Vaska Altiparmak

Aleksander and Antonina Wyrzykowski

Elisabeth and Karel Eckhart and mother Gertrude Eckhart

Victor Bodson

Henriette (Hetty) Voute and Gisela Wieberdink-Soehnlein

Julija Vitkauskienė and her son Arėjas-Stasyss Vitkauskas

Kipras Petrauskas and Elena Žalinkevičaite-Petrauskienė

Johannes and Anna Syrier

Hein and Henk Sietsma

Pieter Adriaan Meerburg

Don Gaetano Tantalo

József and Margit Strausz

Jozsef Vamos

Imre Irsay, his wife and son György

Ferenc and Teresa Bankuti, Cecilia Schindele

Clara Ambrus

Yiorgos and Magdalini Mitzeliotis, Stefanos and Magdalini Korfiatis

Jane Haining

Francis Foley

Ilse Sonja Totzke

Gustav Schroeder

Alfred Rossner

Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim

Gertrud and Reverend Otto Mörike

Hermann Maas

Gertrud Luckner

Loni and Albert Harder

Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz

Dr. Hans Georg Calmeyer

Berthold and Elsa Beitz

Dr. Albert Battel

Wiktoria and Stanislaw Szumielewicz

Manko and Maryna Swierszczak, Michal and Genowefa Dukiewicz

Helena Sitkowska and her son Andrzej Sitkowski

Karolina Sapeta

Maria Kotarba

Stanislaw Jasinski and his daughter Emilia Slodkowska (née Jasinska)

Stefan Jagodzinski

Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska

Antoni Gawrylkiewicz

Jun Shun Pan

Jadwiga Dudziec

Krystyna Danko

Roza Sober-Dragoje and Zekira Besrević

Aracy Carvalho de Guimarães Rosa

Mariya Yevdokimova

Yevgeniya Yemelyanova

Aleksander Novosad

Fatima Kanapatskaiya and her daughter Aysha (Anna) Trofimova-Kanapatskaiya

Olga Chirun

Varvara Tsvileneva

Marcel and Celestine Arnoldy

Bishop Pavel Gojdic

Jozef and Augusta De Winne

Eduardo Propper de Callejon

Angel Sanz Briz

Vasiuta Wegrzynowska and her children Jan, Mikhal and Docia

Fedora Vagun (Kontush)

Maria Tykva

Mariya Podolyan and her mother Sofya Shapovalova

Raisa Makarevich and her mother Feokla Levitkaya

Antonina Kulakovskaya and her daughter Vera Gribanova (Kulakovskaya)

Mefodiy and Kseniya Logatzky and daughter Darya

Roddie Edmonds

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Featured here are several dozen stories of Righteous Among the Nations arranged by topics and by countries.

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Killing Center Revolts The Warsaw ghetto uprising inspired revolts in other ghettos and in killing centers. Although many resisters knew they were bound to lose against overwhelmingly superior German forces, they chose to die fighting.

After the last Jews deported to Treblinka were gassed in May 1943, about 1,000 Jewish prisoners remained in the camp. Aware that they were soon to be killed, the prisoners decided to revolt. On August 2, armed with shovels, picks, and a few weapons stolen from the arms warehouse, they set fire to part of the camp and broke through its barbed-wire fence. About 300 prisoners managed to escape, and about a third of them survived German efforts to recapture them.

Two inmates of Sobibor, Aleksander Pechersky and Leon Feldhendler, planned a similar revolt in 1943. On October 14, prisoners killed eleven camp guards and set the camp on fire. About 300 prisoners escaped, but many were killed during the manhunt that followed. Fifty were alive at the war's end.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoners of the Sonderkommando -the special squad whose job it was to burn the corpses of the murdered victims-learned of the plans to kill them. On October 7, 1944, a group of them rebelled, killing three guards and extensively damaging the crematorium. Several hundred prisoners escaped, but most were later recaptured and killed. Four young women accused of supplying the dynamite were hanged in front of the remaining inmates. One of them, 23-year-old Roza Robota, shouted "Be strong, have courage," as the trap door opened.

Key Dates

August 2, 1943
Treblinka uprising
Early in 1943, deportations to the Treblinka killing center come to an end. In March the Germans commence Aktion 1005 in Treblinka. Aktion 1005 is the code name for the German plan to erase all evidence of mass murder. Prisoners are forced to open mass graves and burn the corpses. As this Aktion nears completion, prisoners fear that they will be killed and the camp dismantled. Resistance leaders in the camp decide to revolt. On August 2, 1943, prisoners quietly seize weapons from the camp armory, but are discovered before they can take over the camp. Hundreds of prisoners storm the main gate in an attempt to escape. Many are killed by machine-gun fire. More than 300 do escape; most are recaptured and killed by German police and troops. Most of the camp is burned by prisoners during the uprising. The surviving prisoners are forced to remove all remaining traces of the camp's existence. They too are then shot. Treblinka is finally dismantled in the fall of 1943. Between 870,000 and 925,000 people had been killed there.

October 14, 1943
Sobibor uprising
Aktion 1005 is implemented in the Sobibor killing center in the autumn of 1942, at the height of killing operations in the camp. In early 1943, deportations to Sobibor slowed and prisoners suspected that they would soon be killed and the camp dismantled. Prisoners form a resistance network in early 1943. They plan a revolt and mass escape from the camp. On October 14, 1943, the prisoners revolt, quietly killing German and Ukrainian guards. The guards open fire and prevent prisoners from reaching the main exit, forcing them to attempt escape through the minefield. About 300 escape; about 100 are recaptured and later shot. After the revolt, Sobibor is closed and dismantled. In all, at least 167,000 people were killed in Sobibor.

October 7, 1944
Auschwitz Sonderkommando uprising
During the summer of 1944, gassing operations in Auschwitz increase with the arrival of over 440,000 Hungarian Jews. The special prisoner detachments working in the killing area (the Sonderkommando) are increased to cope with the large number of gassings. By the fall of 1944, however, the detachments are again reduced in number. Members of the Sonderkommando, fearing that they will be killed, plan a revolt and escape. The plan for revolt is supported by women prisoners who smuggle gunpowder out of nearby factories to members of the Sonderkommando. On October 7, 1944, Sonderkommando prisoners revolt. During the revolt, crematoria IV is extensively damaged. It becomes inoperable and is never used again. Several SS guards are killed by prisoners during the revolt. The revolt is quickly suppressed by the camp guards. All members of the Sonderkommando are killed. Four of the women who smuggled gunpowder out of the factories are hanged on January 6, 1945, weeks before the camp is liberated.

January 17, 1945
Chelmno
Chelmno originally closed in March 1943, but reopened in June 1944 to facilitate the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. Killing operations take place until mid-July 1944. Beginning in September 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners is forced to exhume and burn bodies from the mass graves at Chelmno as part of Aktion 1005, the German plan to erase all evidence of mass murder. On the night of The Soviet army approaches the Chelmno killing center. The Germans decide to abandon the camp. Before they leave, the Germans begin killing the remaining Jewish prisoners. Some of the prisoners resist and escape. Three prisoners survive. At least 172,000 people were killed in Chelmno.

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Killing Center Revolts The Warsaw ghetto uprising inspired revolts in other ghettos and in killing centers. Although many resisters knew they were bound to lose against overwhelmingly superior German forces, they chose to die fighting. After the last Jews deported to Treblinka were gassed in May 1943, about 1,000 Jewish prisoners remained in the camp.

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Rescue in Denmark Most individuals in occupied Europe did not actively collaborate in the Nazi genocide. Nor did they do anything to help Jews and other victims of Nazi policies. Throughout the Holocaust, millions of people silently stood by while they saw Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and other "enemies of the Reich" being rounded up and deported. Many of these bystanders told themselves that what they saw happening was none of their business. Others were too frightened to help. In many places, providing shelter to Jews was a crime punishable by death.

In spite of the risks, a small number of individuals refused to stand by and watch.These people had the courage to help by providing hiding places, underground escape routes, false papers, food, clothing, money, and sometimes even weapons.

Denmark was the only occupied country that actively resisted the Nazi regime's attempts to deport its Jewish citizens. On September 28, 1943, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a German diplomat, secretly informed the Danish resistance that the Nazis were planning to deport the Danish Jews. The Danes responded quickly, organizing a nationwide effort to smuggle the Jews by sea to neutral Sweden. Warned of the German plans, Jews began to leave Copenhagen, where most of the almost 8,000 Jews in Denmark lived, and other cities, by train, car, and on foot. With the help of the Danish people, they found hiding places in homes, hospitals, and churches. Within a few weeks, fishermen helped ferry some 7,200 Danish Jews and 680 non-Jewish family members to safety across the narrow body of water separating Denmark from Sweden.

The Danish rescue effort was unique because it was nationwide. It was not completely successful, however. Almost 500 Danish Jews were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Yet even of these Jews, all but 51 survived the Holocaust, largely because Danish officials pressured the Germans with their concerns for the well-being of those who had been deported.

Compared to other nations that came under Nazi Germany's control, Denmark enjoyed several advantages that helped make the rescue of its Jewish population possible. It was only lightly occupied and, until August 29, 1943, had a largely independent government that had not adopted antisemitic measures, such as marking Jews. Copenhagen, where Denmark's small Jewish population was concentrated, is less than twenty miles from Sweden, which, as the roundups began, announced it would admit them. In addition, the German military and even most Nazi officials in Denmark made little effort to prevent Jews from escaping. The situation was very different in countries like the Netherlands and Poland that had much larger Jewish populations and that came under total occupation and direct rule by Germany. There, the possibilities for rescue were far smaller and the risks far greater. Nevertheless, without the Danes' widespread support for Jews and active resistance to Nazi policies, few if any Jews would have survived the Holocaust in Denmark.

There are numerous stories of brave people in other countries who also tried to save the Jews from perishing at the hands of the Nazis. Nearly 12,000 Jewish children were rescued by clergymen in France who found housing for them and even smuggled some into Switzerland and Spain. About 20,000 Polish Jews were able to survive in hiding outside the ghetto in Warsaw with the assistance of non-Jewish Poles. Some Jews were even hidden in the Warsaw Zoo by the zoo's director, Jan Zabinski.

Key Dates

August 29, 1943
Danish government resigns
The Germans occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940. The Danes and the Germans reached an agreement in which the Danish government and army remained in existence. Despite the occupation, the Germans did not initiate deportations from Denmark. In the summer of 1943, with Allied military advances, resistance activity in Denmark increases in the form of sabotage and strikes. These actions cause tension between the occupying German forces and the Danish government. In August 1943, the Germans present the Danish government with new demands to end resistance activities. The Danish government refuses to meet the new demands and resigns. The Germans take over the administration of Denmark and attempt to implement the "Final Solution" by arresting and deporting Jews. The Danes respond with a nationwide rescue operation.

October 1, 1943
German deportation action begins in Denmark
German police authorities seek to round up Jews in Denmark at the close of Rosh Hashanah , when Jews are expected to be in their homes. The German plans were leaked three days earlier, however, and most Jews are in hiding. The next day, Sweden announces it will admit Jewish refugees from Denmark. The Danish underground and general population spontaneously organize a nationwide effort to smuggle Jews to the coast, where Danish fisherman ferry them to Sweden. In little more than three weeks, the Danes ferry more than 7,000 Jews and close to 700 of their non-Jewish relatives to Sweden. Despite the Danish efforts, some 500 Jews are arrested by the Germans and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto.

June 23, 1944
Danish delegation visits Theresienstadt
A Danish delegation joins representatives of the International Red Cross on a visit to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Bohemia. To deceive both these visitors and world opinion about Nazi treatment of the Jews, the SS beautifies the ghetto and creates the impression that Theresienstadt is a self-governing Jewish settlement. Unlike most of the other prisoners in Theresienstadt, the 500 Danish prisoners there are not deported to concentration camps and are permitted to receive parcels from the Red Cross. On April 15, 1945, the Danish prisoners are released from the ghetto into the hands of the Swedish Red Cross. This is a result of negotiations between Swedish government representatives and Nazi officials in which Scandinavian prisoners in camps, including Jews, are transferred to a holding camp in northern Germany. These prisoners are eventually sent to Sweden, where they stay until the end of the war. Out of the some 500 Danish Jews deported, about 450 survive.

Last Edited: Sep 23, 2019

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The Danish resistance movement, assisted by many ordinary citizens, coordinated the flight of some 7,200 Jews to safety in nearby neutral Sweden. Learn more about rescue in Denmark.

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Alina Dabrowska was 20 years old when she first heard about Auschwitz. She was an inmate at a prison in Nazi-occupied Poland - incarcerated for helping Allied forces - and one day in 1943, while walking the grounds, a new arrival warned her about it.

"She said, 'You're all going to Auschwitz! Do you know what kind of camp that is?' " Dabrowska recalls. "She told us that if someone is out of strength, they were immediately killed. She told us many horrible things. None of us believed her."

Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, some 1.1 million died at the camp, including 960,000 Jews. It was the largest extermination camp run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. The Soviet army liberated Auschwitz 75 years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945.

Now 96, Dabrowska is among a handful of Auschwitz survivors still alive. For her, the importance of sharing her stories has only grown with time. She raised a family and had a fulfilling career with Poland's foreign ministry, but only in recent years decided to speak publicly about the memories of Auschwitz that still haunt her. She and other survivors fear the world will forget the Holocaust's horrors if their stories are not made public.

When German soldiers first imprisoned Dabrowska, they executed her accomplices, including her brother. She spent a year in prison, and then the Nazis transferred her in June 1943 to Auschwitz.

"When we got off the train, we were taken to a large hall, where we stripped down completely," she remembers. "Our hair was shaved and they tattooed numbers on our arms."

She rolls up her sleeve to show hers: a small, faded black "44165" etched into her forearm. Dabrowska remembers the next morning, taking stock of the camp, beginning to realize what she'd heard about it was true.

"I noticed an electric fence around the camp," she recalls. "Whenever we came back from working in the mornings, there was usually someone glued to it. If someone couldn't take it anymore, they jumped over the ditch and threw themselves onto the electric fence and their lives were over."

A year later, she says, she had had enough of the cold, the hunger and the death surrounding her. She too found herself in front of the fence. She was about to jump when a guard yelled at her. She instinctively turned around and never tried it again.

"I focused on doing whatever I could to survive," Dabrowska says. "I had hope, but sometimes an officer with a cane selected some of us to go to the gas chamber. What left the deepest impression on me was watching those marches to the chambers where so many were murdered."

Some 865,000 Jews were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers upon arrival at the camp. Dabrowska remembers the horror of noticing a friend's body among a pile of bodies of the executed. "I saw her lying in that pile of naked bodies," she says, "and I approached. There she was, just lying there. I grasped her cold hand, and that's how I said goodbye to my friend."

Another Auschwitz survivor, Janina Iwanska, now 89 and living in Warsaw, was deported to the camp at the height of the killing in 1944. In an eight-week period between May and July, guards killed 330,000 people.

She was 14 years old. She had been separated from her parents during the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi forces and arrived at Auschwitz alone, packed among hundreds of strangers in a train car.

"We were taken off the train at night, and the air was thick with smoke that smelled like burning hair," remembers Iwanska. "We walked through a forest and I asked a prisoner, 'What are those bonfires?' and she said, 'You'll find out, child.' It was only later that I learned they were burning bodies because they couldn't keep up with the crematoriums alone."

Iwanska, who is Roman Catholic, slept in the children's dorm, and she quickly made herself useful by taking care of the younger children at the camp. This and the fact that she isn't Jewish are why she believes she survived.

Today, Auschwitz is a museum recalling the evil that humans are capable of inflicting on each other. Tour groups quietly shuffle from an exhibit holding 2 tons of hair shaved from the victims of the gas chambers to the gallows where the former commandant of Auschwitz was hanged after he was tried by a military tribunal in 1947.

Pawel Sawicki, a guide at the museum, has seen thousands of tourists come from all over the world. "Sometimes I think that when they leave a candle or a stone or they put the flower or they say a prayer and they leave the memorial, and they go back to their lives, they think: 'Our job is done. We remembered,' " he says. "But I think there should be a next step. People should look at this place and think about our moral responsibility. This is not an anthropological discovery of 'Oh, people 75 years ago were able to do something like this,' and we are surprised. They [still] are able to do it. They did it before. And people still hate each other."

Each December, Piotr M.A. Cywinski, the Polish director of the Auschwitz museum, sends a holiday card with a similar reminder. This year, the card with a message wishing a peaceful holiday season included a photograph of Chinese soldiers marching past Uighur children in Xinjiang, where China's government has sent an estimated 1 million ethnic Muslims to internment camps.

But talking about the lessons of Auschwitz can be painful, especially for those who lived through it.

Berlin Rabbi Daniel Fabian's grandmother survived Auschwitz but never talked about her time there.

"We did not talk about it at home," Fabian says. "The Holocaust was never a topic, as I remember it."

It was only when he was required to sign up for German military service that he says he began to realize what his grandmother had been through. Fabian's mother gave him an envelope to hand-deliver to the German officers in charge of registering him. Inside were his grandmother's liberation papers from Auschwitz.

After the German officers saw the documents, they exempted Fabian from service. From then on, he says, he began to think in earnest about what Germany had done to Jews during the war.

"When I lived in the United States, I realized that the Holocaust is a very big part of Jewish identity in America," says Fabian. "And that seemed strange to me, because in Germany, it is not."

Fabian says that doesn't mean German Jews ignore it - on the contrary, he says, there are reminders everywhere. It's just that not much is said about it, he says.

"The Holocaust is something that's part of them, but they don't base their Jewish identity on the Holocaust, or not exclusively on the Holocaust," he explains. "But there are many other things also that, you know, remind them of being Jewish. And they identify with being Jewish. And so this is just, this is one important aspect of it, but it's just one aspect of many."

Fabian thinks more personal stories should be shared while the few remaining survivors are still alive.

Many of those survivors agree, though it has taken decades for them to want to speak publicly about their experiences. Iwanska now does so during regular visits to Germany.

She tells stories like this one from the end of the war - when she and four friends kept each other from freezing to death while Nazi soldiers transferred them to other camps on a death march.

"We were put into open train cars and we huddled together - standing because there was no room to sit or lie down - to keep warm," says Iwanska. "When it snowed, we collected it to drink, because they didn't give us water. We were in such complete solidarity that when one of us fell asleep standing, none of the others would steal the snow that accumulated on her. That snow belonged to her. Thanks to our solidarity, we lived."

It's also taken decades for Dabrowska to share her stories of Auschwitz.

"I was seeing my camp friends, but I didn't want to talk about it," she says. "I was always hiding the number on my arm, so that I wouldn't have to talk about it. One time, a Jewish woman recognized me and said, 'You were there!' and I answered, 'No, you have mistaken me for someone else.' It took 50 years before I made the conscious decision to go to Auschwitz."

It was only when she returned to the camp for the first time in 2001 that she felt strong enough to share her memories of it.

Like Iwanska, she travels to Germany twice a year to speak to young people about her memories of the camp.

"Those children will grow up one day and they will be the ones deciding about how to rule the world," she says. "It is important [to talk about it] in order to develop the conviction that war is not a good thing, in order to seek peace and try to talk about it, in order to think that it is us who are responsible for this Earth and for passing it on, undamaged, to the next generations."
Grzegorz Sokol contributed to this report from Warsaw and Austin Davis contributed from Berlin.

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75 Years After Auschwitz Liberation, Survivors Urge World To Remember

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Alina Dabrowska was 20 years old when she first heard about Auschwitz. She was an inmate at a prison in Nazi-occupied Poland - incarcerated for helping Allied forces - and one day in 1943, while walking the grounds, a new arrival warned her about it. "She said, 'You're all going to Auschwitz!

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April 19 - May 16, 1943
Two events made April 19, 1943, an especially tragic day in the history of the Holocaust: In an exclusive resort on the island of Bermuda, British and American delegates began a 12-day conference supposedly to consider what their countries could do to help the Jews of Europe. Very little, they concluded. At the very same time, on the other side of the world in Poland, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless month-long battle against the Nazis. It was the first time during the war that resistance fighters in an area under German control had staged an uprising. It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto.

The Nazis had established the ghetto two and a half years earlier. In mid-November of 1940, after ordering all Jews in Warsaw to collect in a designated part of the city, they sealed it off from the rest of the city with a medieval-like 10-foot high wall. Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly experience; it was like moving to prison. One inhabitant wrote, "we are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race." Jews weren't allowed out. In November 1941 the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found beyond the ghetto walls. And very little information was allowed in. Earlier in the occupation, the Nazis had already taken away radios. Now they also removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming packages.

Conditions in the ghetto were appalling. At one point, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded inside its walls. Typically several families lived in one apartment. Unable to buy food on the open market, they had to rely on the Nazis to supply the ghetto, and the Germans made it their policy to keep the inhabitants on the verge of starvation. The Nazi occupation authorities had instructions to provide Jews with half the weekly maximum food allowance needed by a "population which does no work worth mentioning." Within months, the hunger, overcrowding, lack of medical supplies and fuel shortages had a devastating effect. In 1941, typhus epidemics, which started in the synagogues and institutional buildings housing the homeless, decimated the ghetto. Matters were made worse when the sewage pipes froze and human excrement was dumped onto the street. By the end of the year, disease had killed more than 43,000 people or ten percent of the ghetto population.

In the spring of 1941, German industries set up workshops in the ghetto, which operated with the use of forced Jewish labor. For the most part, these small factory operations were created to support the German war effort. For that reason, Jews employed in them were saved from the first deportations to the death centers. The Nazis began transporting Jews in the summer of 1942. On July 20th, they issued an order for "non-productive" elements to prepare for a "resettlement" program that would begin two days later. The order provoked widespread panic throughout the ghetto. Jews who didn't have work cards frantically tried to get them. Ordered to organize the deportations, the head of the Jewish council committed suicide. The very same day, a group of Jewish leaders met to discuss whether or not to resist the orders. The majority decided not to. It was thought the Germans would take no more than 60,000 people and it was agreed that resistance would simply hasten the end of the ghetto.

Between that meeting and mid-September, the Nazis actually deported more than 300,000 Jews from the ghetto. Most of them were taken to the Treblinka death camp. In the fall of 1942, almost all the factions in the ghetto decided to resist future deportations. Each political group formed its own "battle group" which came under the central command of a 24-year-old named Mordecai Anielewicz. The armed resistance prepared for the conflict by building bunkers and shelters. In January 1943 the Nazis surprised the Jewish fighters, by suddenly deporting 6500 Jews. A struggle ensued in which a German police officer was badly injured and the planned mass deportation came to a halt. Enraged by the incident, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghetto. The emptied district was then to be razed to the ground.

At 3am on the morning of April 19, the Nazis surrounded the ghetto and the battle began. Between 2000 Germans armed with a tank, two armored cars, three light-anti-aircraft guns, one medium howitzer, heavy and light machine guns, flame throwers, rifles, pistols and grenades faced off against 700-750 Jewish resistance fighters. The Jews had managed to stockpile a few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols. But they possessed only two or three light machine guns. The Germans planned to clear the ghetto of 60,000 Jews in three days. The Jews hoped to hold out as long as possible.

By April 22, fire was devouring several sections of the ghetto, forcing many Jews to leap from burning buildings. In the next few days, the Germans began capturing and killing more and more of the ghetto inhabitants some of whom reported that the resistance fighters in the bunkers had become "insane from the heat, the smoke, and the explosions." Some Jews tried to escape through the sewers. The Germans responded by blowing up the manholes and using poison gas. On May 8, Anielewicz was killed. By May 15th, the shooting had become so intermittent that it was clear the ghetto fighters had been defeated. As a sign of the German victory, the Nazi commander blew up the great Tlomacki Synagogue.

All in all, several thousand Jews had been buried in the debris, and more than 56,000 had been captured. About 30,000 of them were either immediately shot or transported to death camps. The remainder were sent to labor camps. Though the Nazis did raze the ghetto as Himmler had ordered, the resistance fighters had achieved at least one of their goals. Their commander Anielewicz articulated what this was in a letter to a friend shortly before his death. "My life's dream has been realized," he said. "I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto rally its greatness and glory." By the end of the year, with very little left of Jewish life in Poland, the task for the Jewish resistance had become, in the words of one member of the underground, to "keep alive the remnants who have survived...so there will be some reserve for the future and witnesses to this crime."

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The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising | American Experience | PBS

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In Poland, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants began a hopeless month-long battle against them.

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by Charles L. Chavis, Jr. Editor's note: The story of how Jewish refugee professors fleeing the Nazis were shunned by U.S. antisemitism but welcomed by America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) is a little-known yet important lesson in solidarity. The film "From Swastika to Jim Crow"-streaming here-documents the struggle and the embrace. Exploring Hate talked with George Mason University's Dr. Charles L. Chavis, Jr., historian of racial violence, civil rights activism, and Black-Jewish relations about how those historical insights continue to resonate today. The interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Exploring Hate: Why did Jewish refugee professors end up teaching at HBCUs?

Charles Chavis: In many cases, HBCUs were the only organizations willing to sponsor Jewish refugees' visa applications. Antisemitism was entrenched in historically white institutions from Harvard to the University of Maryland to Stanford, to name just a few, and many had previously implemented quotas on American Jewish faculty and students. These quotas became even stricter as a direct response to the influx of Jewish refugee professors. More often than not, American systems actively barred Jewish refugees, including Jewish scholars, from entering the United States. So HBCUs were among the only safe havens of higher education for Jewish refugee scholars.

EH: What made HBCUs open to hiring them?

CC: HBCUs-unlike historically white American universities-rarely had the privilege, or the depravity, to deny scholars of any race an opportunity to teach students. Nor did they wish for their students to be deprived of some of the best multiracial, interfaith scholars from the global community.

EH: How did Black students and Jewish professors see one another and react to one another?

CC: We have learned from oral histories and newspaper accounts that many Jewish refugee scholars had little exposure to Black people prior to their arrival at HBCUs. This isn't to say that Black people did not exist in Germany. Afro-Germans were similarly targeted by the Nazi regime with various forms of persecution, including sterilization and violence during the 1930s.

Black students, particularly at Maryland HBCUs, were aware of local Jewish congregations and recognized their support of the Black liberation struggle. There was a deep-rooted Black-Jewish alliance in Maryland, which was exemplified by the anti-slavery and anti-lynching advocacy of Rabbis David Einhorn and Edward Israel. Shortly after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Nazi Germany, Rabbi Israel-together with the Black press, Black intellectuals, and Black institutions such as the NAACP-began prophetically warning both Black and white interracial and interfaith congregations of the horrors that Hitler was capable of.

It was commonplace, then, for a mutual warmth, rapport, and empathy to develop between Black students and their Jewish professors. As a student instructed by Ernst Manasse (featured in the documentary) at North Carolina University wrote in the school newspaper: "these teachers cared for us, they demonstrated a recognition of the barriers we had to confront and committed themselves to arming us with what we needed to survive it all."

EH: How did Jewish professors respond to prejudice in the South having just fled from Nazi Germany?

CC: The ubiquity, severity, and seeming inescapability of anti-Blackness in America surprised and alarmed Jewish refugees. Even Jewish scholars with a background in history, global affairs, and similarly rigorous studies were taken aback.

"It was a great good luck of mine to find my first teaching job at a Black university where I felt I had so much in common with teachers and students."
John Herz, Howard University, quoted in PBS documentary "From Swastika to Jim Crow"

EH: What role did your alma mater, Morgan State University (formerly College), in Baltimore, Md., play?
CC: Morgan State became an epicenter for Jewish refugees in the Upper South. This is largely thanks to its first Black president, Dr. Dwight Oliver Wendell Holmes. During his tenure, Dr. Holmes reversed the traditions of Jim Crowism, antisemitism, and white supremacy that white presidents at Morgan had historically respected.

Dr. Gerd Ehrlich was a Jewish refugee scholar who joined Morgan's faculty in 1949. Professor Ehrlich's journey to Morgan began in 1938, after he was expelled from high school following the Kristallnacht pogrom. He escaped from a forced labor camp near Berlin and used false papers to apply for an American visa. An expert in German language and political science at Morgan, Dr. Ehrlich was remembered fondly by his students as a supportive, empathetic mentor who truly cared for his students. And he was one of many so remembered.

EH: What inspired you to study Black-Jewish relations?

CC: It was during my time at Morgan State that I learned of the radical roots of Black-Jewish relations in the United States-focusing specifically on Black and Jewish leaders of the anti-lynching struggle during the 1930s and 1940s. This Black-Jewish coalition laid the foundation for future advocacy during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and has more to teach us today as we seek to combat anti-Blackness and antisemitism.

EH: What do you find most significant about this chapter of Black-Jewish American history?

CC: The meaningful intersection between Black and Jewish histories forces us to sit with the fact that American institutions did not make every effort to aid Jewish refugees. This shatters the mythologies surrounding America and the Holocaust.

It also shows us that the friendship and camaraderie shared among Jewish refugee scholars and HBCU communities laid the foundation for a web of Black-Jewish alliances that climaxed during the Civil Rights Movement and that must be revived today. With the modern-day mass murders of Black and Jewish American citizens in their houses of worship (for example, in Charleston, S.C., and Pittsburgh, Pa., respectively), we are painfully reminded of how our struggles are linked in this country-and how urgently interfaith, interracial solidarity is needed once again.

Today in History features stories that probe the past and investigate the present to better understand the roots and rise of hate. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author.

Charles L. Chavis, Jr.

Dr. Charles L. Chavis, Jr. is Director of African & African American Studies, founding Director of the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, & Race, at The Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, and Assistant Professor of History and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State (Johns Hopkins University Press; January 2022) which investigates and reconstructs the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Dr. Chavis is National Co-Chair for the United States Truth Racial Healing and Transformation Movement and Vice Chair of the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He also serves on the Exploring Hate Advisory Committee. Follow him on X: @Chavis4Change

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Salvation and Alliance  | Exploring Hate | PBS

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A little-known lesson in solidarity: Jewish refugee professors fleeing the Nazis were shunned by U.S. antisemitism but welcomed by America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

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Jewish Partisans Some Jews who managed to escape from ghettos and camps formed their own fighting units. These fighters, or partisans, were concentrated in densely wooded areas. A large group of partisans in occupied Soviet territory hid in a forest near the Lithuanian capital of Vilna. They were able to derail hundreds of trains and kill over 3,000 German soldiers.

Life as a partisan in the forest was difficult. People had to move from place to place to avoid discovery, raid farmers' food supplies to eat, and try to survive the winter in flimsy shelters built from logs and branches. In some places, partisans received assistance from local villagers, but more often they could not count on help, partly because of widespread antisemitism, partly because of people's fears of being severely punished for helping. The partisans lived in constant danger of local informers revealing their whereabouts to the Germans.

Many Jews participated in the partisan units formed in France and Italy to help regular Allied forces defeat German forces. They forged documents and identity cards, printed anti-Nazi leaflets, and assassinated collaborators.

Twenty-three-year-old Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jew who emigrated to Palestine in 1939, was one of the thirty-two Palestinian parachutists the British dropped behind German lines to organize resistance and rescue efforts. Before crossing the border in Hungary on June 7, 1944, to warn Hungarian Jews about the extermination camps, Szenes, a poet, handed a poem to one of her companions. It ended with these lines: "Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake. Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame." Szenes was captured the next day and executed as a traitor to Hungary.

Key Dates

July 20, 1941
Ghetto ordered in Minsk, sparks resistance
On July 20, 1941, the Germans order the establishment of a ghetto in Minsk. Within days of the ghetto's establishment, thousands of Jews are killed. Jews in the ghetto form an underground resistance network in August 1941. Members of the underground set up a printing press and newspaper to distribute information to the ghetto population. The underground also contacts partisan units outside the ghetto to find hiding places for Jews in the ghetto. In March 1942, the Germans carry out an action in the Minsk ghetto in which thousands are killed. Shortly thereafter, members of the underground begin leaving the ghetto for the forests where they form partisan units and fight the Germans. The partisans in the forests work to rescue Jews from the ghetto and bring them to the forests, where they establish partisan bases. Approximately 10,000 Jews flee the Minsk ghetto for the forests by 1944. Many lose their lives in the attempt.

January 1942
Jewish Army in France
The Jewish Army (Armee Juive; AJ), is established by Zionist youth groups in Toulouse, France. The AJ operates throughout France, but is particularly active in the southern regions. Members are recruited from both Jewish and non-Jewish youth and resistance groups and are trained in military and sabotage activities. AJ members smuggle money out of Switzerland to France to distribute to Jewish relief agencies. This money helps thousands of Jews in hiding. The AJ assassinates some of those who cooperate with the Germans and smuggles about 500 Jews and non-Jews across the border into neutral Spain. In 1943 and 1944, the AJ establishes close ties with Allied forces-including General Charles de Gaulle's Free French of the Interior (FFI) forces. In 1944, during the liberation of France, the AJ participates in uprisings in Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse against the German occupation.

January 21, 1942
United Partisan Organization in Vilna
After reports of mass killings of Jews at Ponary, outside Vilna, members of Zionist youth movements establish the United Partisan Organization ( Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye, FPO) in the Vilna ghetto. The organization prepares to resist the Germans in the event that the ghetto is threatened with destruction and establishes contact with other ghettos to acquire weapons and encourage resistance. In early September 1943, the Germans deporting Jews from the ghetto and are confronted with resistance by FPO members. The FPO decides to abandon the ghetto and flee to the nearby forests to fight the Germans from the outside. The last group of resistance fighters escapes the final destruction of the ghetto on September 23, 1943. They leave the ghetto through the sewers and join partisans in the Rudninkai and Naroch forests.

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Some Jews who managed to escape from ghettos and camps formed their own fighting, or partisan, units during World War II. Learn about life as a partisan.

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Background

Kindertransport, 1938-40: Oral Histories Nazi authorities staged a violent pogrom upon Jews in Germany on November 9-10, 1938. This event is known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). After the pogrom, the British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees. British authorities agreed to allow an unspecified number of unaccompanied minors under the age of 17 to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-annexed territories (that is, Austria and the Czech lands). They were spurred by British public opinion and the persistent efforts of refugee aid committees. Notable among the refugee aid committees were the British Committee for the Jews of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany.

Private citizens or organizations had to guarantee payment for each child's care, education, and eventual emigration from Britain. In return, the British government agreed to allow unaccompanied refugee children to enter the country on temporary travel visas. It was understood at the time that when the "crisis was over," the children would return to their families. Parents or guardians could not accompany the children. The few infants included in the program were cared for by other children on their transport.

The Transports

The first Kindertransport arrived in Harwich, Great Britain, on December 2, 1938. It brought some 200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin which had been destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom. Most transports left by train from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and other major cities in central Europe. Children from smaller towns and villages traveled from their homes to these collection points in order to join the transports.

Jewish organizations within the Greater German Reich (which in 1938 included Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland) planned the transports. These organizations were the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany, headquartered in Berlin; after early 1939, its successor organization the Reich Association of Jews in Germany; and the Jewish Community Organization ( Kultusgemeinde) in Vienna. They generally favored children whose emigration was urgent because their parents were in concentration camps or were no longer able to support them. They also gave priority to homeless children and orphans.

Children chosen for a Kindertransport convoy traveled by train to ports in Belgium and the Netherlands. From these ports, they sailed to Harwich. At least one of the early transports left from the port of Hamburg in Germany. Some children from Czechoslovakia (which was dismantled by Germany between September 1938 and March 1939) were flown by plane directly to Britain. The last transport from Germany left on September 1, 1939, just as World War II began. The last transport from the Netherlands left for Britain on May 14, 1940, the same day that the Dutch army surrendered to German forces.

Arrival in Harwich

After the transports arrived in Harwich, children with sponsors went to London to meet their foster families. Children without sponsors were housed in a summer camp in Dovercourt Bay and in other facilities until individual families agreed to care for them or until hostels could be organized to care for larger groups of children.

Many organizations and individuals participated in the rescue operation. Inside Britain, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany coordinated many of the rescue efforts. Jews, Quakers, and Christians of many denominations worked together to bring refugee children to Britain. About half of the children lived with foster families. The others stayed in hostels, schools, or on farms throughout Great Britain.

In all, the rescue operation brought about 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to Great Britain. The vast majority of these children were Jewish.

Enemy Aliens

With the outbreak of World War II, refugees from Germany residing in Great Britain were increasingly seen as a security threat. Thus they were treated as "enemy aliens"-in this context meaning citizens of a country with whom England was at war and who were currently residing on English soil. This fact, in combination with a rise in unemployment and antisemitism, had a direct impact on some of the children brought from Germany to Great Britain as refugees. In particular, teenage children who held German citizenship were considered susceptible to foreign political influence.

In 1940, British authorities interned as enemy aliens about 1,000 older children from the Kindertransport. They were held in internment camps on the Isle of Man, Canada, and Australia. Despite their classification as enemy aliens, some of the boys from the children's transport program later joined the British army and fought in the war against Germany.

After the War

Many children from the children's transport program became citizens of Great Britain, or emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Most of them would never again see their parents, who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Last Edited: Sep 30, 2021

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Kindertransport, 1938-40: Oral Histories Nazi authorities staged a violent pogrom upon Jews in Germany on November 9-10, 1938. This event is known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). After the pogrom, the British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees.

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War Refugee Board During World War II, it became increasingly clear to American citizens that Nazi Germany and the other Axis powers were murdering European Jews. In January 1944, Treasury Department staff, led by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board.

Roosevelt tasked this organization, nominally headed by the Secretaries of State, War, and Treasury, with carrying out an official American policy of rescue and relief. The War Refugee Board staff worked with Jewish organizations, diplomats from neutral countries, and resistance groups in Europe to rescue Jews from occupied territories and provide relief to Jews in hiding and in concentration camps. They organized a psychological warfare campaign to deter potential perpetrators, opened a refugee camp in upstate New York, and released the first details of mass murder at Auschwitz to the American people.

The War Refugee Board, along with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also sponsored the work of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman sent to Budapest as a diplomat to assist Hungarian Jews. Wallenberg helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews by distributing protective Swedish documents. Because Sweden was a neutral country, Germany could not easily harm those under Swedish protection. Wallenberg also set up homes, hospitals, nurseries, and soup kitchens for the Jews of Budapest.

The War Refugee Board played a crucial role in the rescue of tens of thousands Jews. After the war, the War Refugee Board's first director, John Pehle, called their work "little and late" in comparison with the enormity of the Holocaust.

Key Dates

January 22, 1944
United States takes action
As more and more reports of mass killings of Europe's Jews are publicized in 1943 and early 1944, the US government comes under increasing pressure to heighten rescue efforts in Europe. On January 16, 1944, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and two members of his staff met with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to establish a government agency to coordinate the rescue of Europe's Jews. On January 22, 1944, Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9417, establishing the War Refugee Board. The Board is responsible for devising and carrying out programs for the rescue and relief of victims of Nazi persecution. American diplomats worldwide are instructed to enforce all policies set forth in the Executive Order.

June 9, 1944
Haven for refugees in United States
In a press conference, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces the opening of an Emergency Refugee Camp at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. Nearly 1,000 refugees, representing many countries, are transported from Allied-occupied Italy to Fort Ontario in August 1944. The establishment of this "free port" in the United States does not indicate a major change in the US immigration policy. The refugees are considered guests of the United States and sign documents agreeing to return to Europe after the war. They live in the camp under security restrictions and are not allowed to work outside the camp, though children attend local public schools. Despite considerable opposition, on December 22, 1945, President Harry Truman announces that the refugees held in Fort Ontario are eligible for immigration visas and permitted to enter the United States. Fort Ontario was the only attempt of the United States to provide a haven for refugees on US territory during World War II.

July 9, 1944
Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest
Raoul Wallenberg, a businessman from neutral Sweden, arrives in Budapest on diplomatic assignment from the Swedish legation and the War Refugee Board to aid in the rescue and relief of Jews in Budapest. By the time Wallenberg arrives, the Germans have already deported nearly 440,000 Jews from Hungary. Nearly 200,000 Jews remain in Budapest, and might soon face deportation. Wallenberg issues Swedish protective passes and moves Jews into houses under Swedish protection. In November 1944, when the Germans begin a death march of Jews from Budapest to labor camps in Austria, Wallenberg pursues the march and removes Jews with protective papers and returns them to safe houses in Budapest. Near the end of 1944, over 70,000 Jews are gathered in a ghetto in Budapest. Wallenberg and his staff successfully ward off threats from German and Hungarian authorities to destroy the ghetto and its inhabitants. Diplomats from other neutral countries join Wallenberg's rescue efforts. In January 1945, Raoul Wallenberg is arrested by Soviet officials. He is held in prison for at least two years. The exact date and circumstances of Wallenberg's death may never be clarified. In October 2016, 71 years after his disappearance, Swedish officials formally declared Wallenberg legally dead.

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The War Refugee Board was formed in 1944 by executive order under President Roosevelt. It was tasked with the rescue and relief of victims of Nazi oppression.

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Within the United States, Sophie Magdalena Scholl is not the best-known resistance fighter, but her story is a powerful one. She was a key member of the Weiße Rose (White Rose)-a resistance group run by students at the University of Munich who distributed leaflets and used graffiti to decry Nazi crimes and the political system, while calling for resistance to the Nazi state and the war. On February 22, 1943, she was beheaded for treason at just 21 years old.

Sophie was born in May 1921, the fourth of six children to an upper-middle class family in the south of Germany. Robert, her father, was mayor of Forchtenberg, an idyllic town in the northeast of the modern state of Baden-Württemberg. When Sophie was 10, the family moved to Ulm, a mid-size southern town dating back to the Middle Ages, where her father worked as state auditor and tax consultant.

After the Nazis came to power in January 1933, Sophie, along with most of her siblings, was an excited and happy follower of the National Socialist cult of youth. The teenager believed in the ideals propagated at the time. Similar to many of their contemporaries, Sophie was particularly intrigued by the focus on nature and communal experiences. She joined the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) and quickly rose in their ranks. The parents, especially her father, did not like their children's' involvement in the Nazi youth groups and made no secret about it. A critic of the party from the beginning, who had raised their children firmly grounded in the Christian tradition, Robert Scholl viewed the developments in Germany and their children's interest in Nazism with growing fear and horror. Lively discussions were a daily occurrence at the dinner table, teaching the children the value of open and honest conversation-a rarity at the time.

Sophie's siblings, especially her oldest brother Hans, later to become a founding member of the Weiße Rose, also were members of non-Nazi groups of young people. These associations shared and propagated a love for nature, outdoor adventures, as well as the music, art and literature of German Romanticism. Originally seen as compatible with Nazi ideology by many, these alternative groups were slowly dissolved and finally banned by 1936. Hans remained active in one such group, however, and was arrested in 1937 along with several of the Scholl siblings. This arrest left a mark on Sophie's conscience and began the process that eventually turned her from happy supporter of the Nazi system to active resistance fighter.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. The older Scholl brothers were sent off to fight on the front. Sophie's life in Ulm changed as well. She graduated high school in the spring of 1940 and started an apprenticeship to become a kindergarten teacher. She eventually wanted to study biology and philosophy. In order to be admitted, students had to spend a period of time working for the state in the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD; National Labor Service). Sophie's hopes that becoming a teacher would allow her to substitute for the RAD were quashed and she instead had to enter the service in the spring of 1941. She hated it. The military-like regimen and mind-numbing routine caused her to find solace in her own spirituality, guided by readings of theologian Augustine of Hippo. She wrote down her thoughts, noting that her "soul was hungry"-she longed for an autonomous life, an end to the war, and for happiness with her boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel, who was now fighting on the Eastern front. Her doubts about the regime grew.

When she finally moved to Munich to study biology and philosophy in May 1942, her brother Hans, a medical student at the same university, and some of his friends had already begun to actively question the system. Serving on the Eastern Front, they learned about the crimes committed in Poland and Russia first hand and saw the misery with their own eyes. They knew they couldn't remain quiet. Starting in June 1942, they began printing and distributing leaflets in and around Munich, calling their fellow students and the German public to action. Other members of their circle joined in the endeavor, writing four pamphlets until the fall of the same year. As a student, Sophie had seen the flyers and applauded their content as well as their authors' courage to speak truth to power. When she found out about her brother's involvement, she demanded to join the group. She did not want to stay passive anymore.

The White Rose was a small endeavor with large consequences. At its core were siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, their fellow students Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and a professor of philosophy and musicology at the University of Munich, Kurt Huber. Together they published and distributed six pamphlets, first typed on a typewriter, then multiplied via mimeograph. At first, they only distributed them via mail, sending them to professors, booksellers, authors, friends and others-going through phone books for addresses and hand-writing each envelope. In the end, they distributed thousands, reaching households all over Germany. Acquiring such large amounts of paper, envelopes, and stamps at a time of strict rationing without raising suspicion was problematic, but the students managed by engaging a wide-ranging network of supporters in cities and towns as far north as Hamburg, and as far south as Vienna. These networks were also activated to distribute the pamphlets, attempting to trick the Gestapo into believing the White Rose had locations all across the country.

In reading the group's leaflets today, one cannot help but think of how chillingly accurate they were in their accusations and calls to action, and the powerful insights they provide about Nazi Germany: The third pamphlet reads:

"Our current 'state' is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don't need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don't you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?"

In their attempt to gain traction for the resistance and to stop the war effort, they gave clear advice and advocated sabotage of Hitler's war machine. Their fifth pamphlet stated: "And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present 'state' in the most effective way....We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end: Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine....Try to convince all your acquaintances...of the senselessness of continuing, of the hopelessness of this war; of our spiritual and economic enslavement at the hands of the National Socialists; of the destruction of all moral and religious values; and urge them to passive resistance!"

In January 1943, the group felt empowered and hopeful. Their activism seemed to be working, rattling the authorities and sparking discussions amongst their peers. Their group was well-organized and they were about to set up even more connections to other underground resistance groups. Observing the political situation in Germany in January of 1943, Sophie and the White Rose members believed a change in the country was imminent. The German army's disastrous defeat at Stalingrad was a turning point on the Eastern Front, and voices of dissent grew louder at the University of Munich after students were publicly called out as leeches and war resisters. This encouraged them to work more boldly, distributing the flyers directly in person and writing slogans like "Down with Hitler" and "Freedom" on the walls around Munich. Their sixth-and last-pamphlet reads: "Even the most dull-witted German has had his eyes opened by the terrible bloodbath, which, in the name of the freedom and honour of the German nation, they have unleashed upon Europe, and unleash anew each day. The German name will remain forever tarnished unless finally the German youth stands up, pursues both revenge and atonement, smites our tormentors, and founds a new intellectual Europe. Students! The German people look to us! The responsibility is ours: just as the power of the spirit broke the Napoleonic terror in 1813, so too will it break the terror of the National Socialists in 1943."

Hans and Sophie distributed them at their university on February 18, for their fellow students to find walking between classes. At some point, in what we can assume was an attempt to make even more people see the flyers, Sophie pushed a stack off a railing unto the central hall. What is now an iconic scene in every movie and documentary about the group, was the moment that changed everything. The pamphlet drop was seen by a janitor, a staunch supporter of the Nazis, who had Hans and Sophie immediately arrested by the Gestapo. The draft for the seventh pamphlet was still in Hans' bag, which led to Christoph Probst's arrest the same day.

Mug shots of Sophie and Hans Scholl after their arrest by the Gestapo on February 18, 1943.

The three endured a mock trial after long and arduous interrogations. They took all blame for the White Rose's actions. This attempt to save their friends from persecution failed in the end, and Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell, and Kurt Huber were arrested later in February and put to death shortly after.

After a half-day trial led by the infamous Roland Freisler, president of the People's Court, Hans, Sophie, and Christoph were sentenced to death for treason. Despite this horrific prospect, Sophie did not waver. Freisler asked her as the closing question whether she hadn't "indeed come to the conclusion that [her] conduct and the actions along with [her] brother and other persons in the present phase of the war should be seen as a crime against the community?" Sophie answered:

"I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct."

Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst were executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943.

While their deaths were only barely mentioned in German newspapers, they received attention abroad. In April, The New York Times wrote about student opposition in Munich. In June 1943, Thomas Mann, in a BBC broadcast aimed at Germans, spoke of the White Rose's actions. The text of the sixth leaflet was smuggled into the United Kingdom where they were reprinted and dropped over Germany by Allied planes in July of the same year.

The memorial for the White Rose in front of the main building of the Ludwig Maximilians University depicts the group's flyers.

In post-war Germany, the White Rose was and is revered. A myriad of schools, streets, and a prestigious award are named after individual members, the group or the siblings Scholl. Sophie's story looms especially large in the history of Ulm, my hometown. She personifies the importance of acting according to one's beliefs and of following your conscience, even in the face of great sacrifice. In our collective memory, her story reminds us to not be silent, and fight for what Sophie wrote on the back of her indictment a day before she was killed: Freiheit-Freedom.

English texts of the pamphlets are from White Rose Translation Project and The Holocaust Research Project.

Image of the indictment courtesy of Institute fuer Zeitgeschichte.

Tanja B. Spitzer, a native of Germany who came to New Orleans a little over a decade ago to study at Tulane University, is an expert on transatlantic history and cultural diplomacy.

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Modern mechanized armies need a robust logistics chain to provide fuel, ammunition, and other sinews of war to sustain combat operations. Fighting the Allies during the North African campaign of 1942-1943, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps (DAK)was resupplied by a concerted air and sea lift effort.

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Sophie Scholl and the White Rose | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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Within the United States, Sophie Magdalena Scholl is not the best-known resistance fighter, but her story is a powerful one. She was a key member of the Weiße Rose (White Rose)-a resistance group run by students at the University of Munich who distributed leaflets and used graffiti to decry Nazi crimes and the political system, while calling for resistance to the Nazi state and the war.

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Visas to JapanShortly before the outbreak of World War II Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. Accordingly, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, the Soviet Union occupied the country’s eastern parts. Following the Germans attack on Poland and the beginn…

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Meet Holocaust Survivors - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Holocaust survivors have volunteered at the Museum on a regular basis across the institution—engaging with visitors, sharing their personal histories, serving as tour guides, translating historic materials, and more, since the Museum opened. Their presence has been an invaluable asset, and their con…

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Resistance inside Germany Despite the high risk of being caught by police with the help of their many informers, some individuals and groups attempted to resist Nazism even in Germany. Socialists, Communists, trade unionists, and others clandestinely wrote, printed, and distributed anti-Nazi literature. Many of these rebels were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.

There were many plots to assassinate Hitler during the war. After the important Soviet victory at Stalingrad in early 1943, when it looked as though the tide was turning against the German army, a serious assassination attempt was planned by a group of German military officers and carried out in 1944. Hitler escaped the bomb blast with minor injuries. The four leaders of the conspiracy were immediately shot. Later, 200 other individuals convicted of involvement in the plot were executed.

Of the Germans who opposed Hitler's dictatorship, very few groups openly protested the Nazi genocide against Jews. The "White Rose" movement was founded in June 1942 by Hans Scholl, a 24-year-old medical student at the University of Munich, his 22-year-old sister Sophie, and 24-year-old Christoph Probst. Although the exact origin of the name "White Rose" is unknown, it clearly stands for purity and innocence in the face of evil. Hans, Sophie, and Christoph were outraged that educated Germans went along with Nazi policies. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and painted slogans like "Freedom!" and "Down With Hitler!" on walls of the university. In February 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught distributing leaflets and arrested. Together with their friend Christoph, they were executed four days later. Hans's last words were "Long live freedom!"

Key Dates

December 22, 1942
"Red Orchestra" spy executed in Berlin
Arvid Harnack is executed for treason in Berlin. Harnack is a leading figure in the wide-ranging Soviet spy network, dubbed the "Red Orchestra" by the Gestapo (secret state police). The "Red Orchestra" is active in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and inside Nazi Germany. Harnack, a leading figure in the group active inside Germany, was involved in German economic planning. He sought to end Adolf Hitler's dictatorship by helping the Soviet Union defeat Germany. As early as 1936, Harnack began to pass on secret information about German armament production to the Soviet Union. During the war, Harnack combines espionage for the Soviet Union with sabotage and other acts of opposition to Hitler. In 1942, the Gestapo begins watching Harnack. He is then arrested, tortured, and condemned to death. Harnack is strangled and hung from a meat hook. Most of the remaining leaders of the spy network are also arrested and brutally killed.

February 22, 1943
Hans and Sophie Scholl executed in Munich
Hans and Sophie Scholl (brother and sister) are executed in Munich. They had founded the White Rose opposition group in 1942. Both are students at the University of Munich. They write and distribute leaflets opposing the Third Reich. The last White Rose leaflet, which the Scholls scattered in the entrance hall of the University of Munich on February 18, 1943, arouses a particular stir. The leaflet declares that "The day of reckoning has come, the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyranny that our people have ever suffered." They are reported by the building janitor to the Gestapo (secret state police) and arrested, along with four others. They are brought before the People's Court. Sophie and Hans are convicted of treason and beheaded.

July 20, 1944
Bomb explodes in Hitler's eastern headquarters
Military reverses following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943 cause increasing discontent, in the German military, with Adolf Hitler. A small group of high-ranking military officers plans a coup against Hitler. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, an aide on the general staff of the German armed forces, places a briefcase containing a bomb next to Hitler at his headquarters in Rastenburg, in eastern Germany. During a briefing on the military situation on the eastern front, the powerful bomb explodes, shattering the building. Stauffenberg, who made an excuse to leave after placing the bomb, sees the explosion and returns to Berlin to report Hitler's death. However, the weighty conference table used for military briefings shields Hitler from the full force of the explosion. He survives with minor burns, damaged ear drums, and partial paralysis in his right arm. Stauffenberg is arrested and shot. The other participants of the conspiracy are arrested, tortured, tried for treason, and then brutally executed. They are strangled and hung from meat hooks.

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Some individuals and groups in Germany attempted to resist Nazism, despite the risk of being caught and facing punishment. Learn more about their efforts.

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Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names

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This database brings together information from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collections, as well as from other organizations, about individual survivors and victims into one search tool.

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War Refugee Board / Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

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War Refugee Board / Jewish Joint Distribution Committee