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Background

Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 4, 1912, in Stockholm, Sweden.

After studying in the United States in the 1930s and establishing himself in a business career in Sweden, Wallenberg was recruited by the US War Refugee Board (WRB) in June 1944 to travel to Hungary. Given status as a diplomat by the Swedish legation, Wallenberg's task was to do what he could to assist and save Hungarian Jews.

Wallenberg Arrives in Budapest

Assigned as first secretary to the Swedish legation in Hungary, Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944. Despite a complete lack of experience in diplomacy and clandestine operations, he led one of the most extensive and successful rescue efforts during the Holocaust. His work with the WRB prevented the deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Hungary had been an ally of Germany, but German defeats and mounting Hungarian losses led Hungary to seek an armistice with the western Allies. To forestall these peace feelers, German forces occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, and forced the Hungarian head of state, Miklos Horthy, to appoint a pro-German government under Dome Sztojay. The Sztojay government was prepared not only to continue the war but also to deport Hungarian Jews to German-occupied Poland. Shortly after the occupation, Hungarian officials began to round up Hungarian Jews and to transfer them into German custody.

By July 1944, the Hungarians and the Germans had deported nearly 440,000 Jews from Hungary, almost all of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the SS killed approximately 320,000 of them upon arrival and deployed the rest at forced labor in Auschwitz and other camps. Nearly 200,000 Jews remained in Budapest; the Hungarian authorities intended to deport them as well, in compliance with German requests.

Rescue Activities

With authorization from the Swedish government, Wallenberg began distributing certificates of protection issued by the Swedish legation to Jews in Budapest shortly after his arrival in the Hungarian capital. He used WRB and Swedish funds to establish hospitals, nurseries and a soup kitchen, and to designate more than 30 "safe" houses that together formed the core of the "international ghetto" in Budapest. The international ghetto was reserved for Jews and their families holding certificates of protection from a neutral country.

After the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement seized power with the help of the Germans on October 15, 1944, the Arrow Cross government resumed the deportation of Hungarian Jews, which Horthy had halted in July before the Budapest Jews could be deported. As Soviet troops had already cut off rail transport routes to Auschwitz, Hungarian authorities forced tens of thousands of Budapest Jews to march west to the Hungarian border with Austria. During the autumn of 1944, Wallenberg repeatedly-and often personally-intervened to secure the release of those with certificates of protection or forged papers, saving as many people as he could from the marching columns.

Wallenberg's colleagues in the Swedish legation and diplomats from other neutral countries also participated in rescue operations. Carl Lutz, the consul general in the Swiss legation, issued certificates of emigration, placing nearly 50,000 Jews in Budapest under Swiss protection as potential emigrants to Palestine. Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca posed as a Spanish diplomat. Closely assisted by Laszlo and Eugenia Szamosi, Perlasca issued to many Jews in Budapest certificates of protection for nations whose interests neutral Spain represented and established safe houses, including one for Jewish children.

After the Liberation of Budapest

When Soviet forces liberated Budapest in February 1945, more than 100,000 Jews remained, mostly because of the efforts of Wallenberg and his colleagues.

Wallenberg was last seen in the company of Soviet officials on January 17, 1945, as the Red Army besieged Budapest. He was presumably detained on suspicion of espionage and subsequently disappeared. A Soviet government report in 1956 suggested that Wallenberg had died on July 17, 1947, while imprisoned by Soviet authorities at the infamous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Subsequent eyewitness sightings of Wallenberg in the Soviet penal system after 1947 have called this statement into question, and 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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Raoul Wallenberg and the Rescue of Jews in Budapest

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Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 4, 1912, in Stockholm, Sweden. After studying in the United States in the 1930s and establishing himself in a business career in Sweden, Wallenberg was recruited by the US War Refugee Board (WRB) in June 1944 to travel to Hungary.

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Varian Fry was an American journalist who helped anti-Nazi refugees escape from France.

After Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, sent Fry to France to aid anti-Nazi refugees who were in danger of being arrested by the Gestapo (German secret state police). In Marseille, Fry's network of accomplices forged documents and created clandestine escape routes. He offered aid to antifascist refugees, both Jews and non-Jews, threatened with extradition to Nazi Germany under Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice (the "Surrender on Demand" clause).

Fry stayed in France for 13 months. He was under constant surveillance and was, more than once, questioned and detained by authorities. He established a legal French relief organization, The American Relief Center, and worked behind its cover using illegal means--black-market funds, forged documents, secret mountain passages, and sea routes--to spirit endangered refugees from France.

Fry's efforts resulted in the rescue of some 2,000 persons, including such distinguished artists and intellectuals as Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann. His covert activities angered officials of both the U.S. State Department and Vichy France and in September 1941, he was expelled from France.

Shortly before Fry's death, the French government awarded him the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. It was the only official recognition he received in his lifetime. Fry died unexpectedly in 1967 while revising his memoirs. He left behind a wealth of written and photographic materials that document his experiences in France. Assignment Rescue, the version of his memoirs Fry rewrote for young readers, was published shortly after his death.

In 1991, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council awarded the Eisenhower Liberation Medal to Varian Fry. In 1994 he was also honored by Yad Vashem as a "Righteous Among the Nations" for his rescue activities [the only American so honored].

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Varian Fry was an American journalist who helped anti-Nazi refugees escape from France. After Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, sent Fry to France to aid anti-Nazi refugees who were in danger of being arrested by the Gestapo (German secret state police).

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After Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany in March 1938, the 185,000 Jews there were subjected to a severe reign of terror, which resulted in intense pressure to leave the country. In order to do so, the Nazis required that Jews have entry visas or boat tickets to another country. However, the majority of the world's nations refused to budge from their restrictive immigration policies, a stance reaffirmed at the Evian Conference, in April 1938.

Unlike his fellow-diplomats, Ho Feng-Shan, who served as the Chinese consul-general in Vienna during 1938-1940, issued visas to Shanghai to all requesting them, even to those wishing to travel elsewhere but needing a visa to leave Nazi Germany.

Many of those helped by Ho did indeed reach Shanghai, either by boat from Italy or overland via the Soviet Union. Many others made use of their visas to reach alternate destinations, including Palestine, the Philippines, and elsewhere....

The rush for visas assumed panic proportions during and immediately after Kristallnacht, in November 1938, when thousands of Jews were thrown into concentration camps, only gaining release if their relatives produced visas or tickets for travel to other destinations. Gerda Gottfried Kraus, based in Canada, relates that after Kristallnacht, her husband waited in a long line for admittance into the Chinese consulate. Seeing a car approaching the consulate's gates, he thrust his application form through its window. "Apparently, the consul-general received it, because [my husband] then got a call and received the visas."

Ho refused to abide by the instructions of his superior, the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, Chen Jie. Chen Jie, hoping to cement closer ties between China and Germany, had forbidden Ho to issue visas on such a large scale, estimated to run into the hundreds, perhaps even thousands. Although visas were not required for entrance to Shanghai, such a document was, as noted, a prerequisite for Jews wishing to leave Nazi Germany. It is believed that the "demerit" which was entered in Ho's personal file, in 1939, at the Chinese Foreign Ministry was linked to his insubordinate behavior towards his immediate superior, the ambassador in Berlin, on the issue of the visas. After a long diplomatic career, Ho retired in 1973, and died in 1997, at the age of 96.

It was only after his passing that evidence by survivors who benefited from Ho's aid began to reach Yad Vashem. After carefully evaluating the case, the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous decided to award Feng-Shan Ho the title of Righteous Among the Nations for his humanitarian courage in issuing Chinese visas to Jews in Vienna in spite of orders from his superior to the contrary.

Ho was posthumously awarded the President's Citation Award from Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, on September 12, 2015. Ho's daughter, Manli, accepted the award on his behalf. President Ma Ying-jeou stated that this honor was "long-delayed," and spoke of Ho's bravery at a dedication ceremony.

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After Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany in March 1938, the 185,000 Jews there were subjected to a severe reign of terror, which resulted in intense pressure to leave the country. In order to do so, the Nazis required that Jews have entry visas or boat tickets to another country.

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Chiune Sugihara

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Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara (January 1, 1900-1986) was the first Japanese diplomat posted to Lithuania. He was born to a middle-class family in Japan's Gifu Prefecture on the main Japanese Island of Honshu. Sugihara is sometimes also referred to as "Chiune," an earlier rendition of the Japanese character for "Sempo," part of his formal name.

Sugihara graduated from the exclusive Harbin Gakuin, Japan's training center for experts on the Soviet Union. As the director of the foreign ministry in Manchukuo, a puppet state Japan had established in Manchuria under Japanese supervision, Sugihara negotiated the purchase of the North Manchurian railroad from the Soviet Union in 1932.

Because Sugihara was fluent in Russian, the Japanese sent him to the Lithuanian capital, Kovno, in November 1939. He had learned the language from Russian emigres during 16 years in Harbin, Manchuria. He was ordered to provide Japan with intelligence on Soviet and German troop movements in the Baltic region.

Sugihara also exchanged information with members of the Polish underground in Lithuania and issued them visas for transit through Japan in 1940. He recognized the urgency of the situation in Lithuania following the occupation by Soviet forces in June 1940 and the accompanying wave of arrests by Soviet secret police. Sugihara may also have realized that, with western Europe engulfed in war, the most likely avenue for escape for refugees in Lithuania was an eastern route through the Soviet Union to Japan.

In the summer of 1940, when refugees came to him with bogus visas for Curacao and other Dutch possessions in America, Sugihara decided to facilitate their escape from war-torn Europe. In the absence of clear instructions from Tokyo, he granted 10-day visas for transit through Japan to hundreds of refugees who held Curacao destination visas. Before closing his consulate in the fall of 1940, Sugihara even gave visas to refugees who lacked all travel papers.

After Sugihara had issued some 1,800 visas, he received a cable from Tokyo reminding him: "You must make sure that they [refugees] have finished their procedure for their entry visas and also they must possess the travel money or the money that they need during their stay in Japan. Otherwise, you should not give them the transit visa."

In his response to the cable, Sugihara admitted issuing visas to people who had not completed all arrangements for destination visas. He explained the extenuating circumstances: Japan was the only transit country available for those going in the direction of the United States, and his visas were needed for departure from the Soviet Union. Sugihara suggested that travelers who arrived in the Soviet port of Vladivostok with incomplete paperwork should not be allowed to board ship for Japan. Tokyo wrote back that the Soviet Union insisted that Japan honor all visas already issued by its consulates.

By the time Sugihara left Lithuania he had issued visas to 2,140 persons. These visas also covered some 300 others, mostly children. Not everyone who held visas were able to leave Lithuania, however, before the Soviet Union stopped granting exit visas.

Sugihara left Lithuania in early September 1940. The Japanese transferred him to Prague in Bohemia and then to Bucharest, Romania, Germany's ally, where he remained until after the end of the war. During the victorious Soviet army's march though the Balkans in 1944, the Soviets arrested Sugihara together with other diplomats from enemy nations. Soviet authorities held him and his family, under fairly benign conditions, for the next three years. When Sugihara returned to Japan in 1947, the Foreign Ministry retired him with a small pension as part of a large staff reduction enacted under the American occupation.

Sugihara held a variety of jobs after the war including one for a Japanese trading company in Moscow from 1960 to 1975. Shortly before his death, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, declared Sugihara "Righteous Among the Nations" for his aid to the refugees in Lithuania during World War II. Yad Vashem conferred the title in 1984, honoring the former Japanese consul with a ceremony in Jerusalem in January 1985.

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

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Japanese diplomat Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara was recognized as a "Righteous Among the Nations" for his aid to refugees in Lithuania during World War II.

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Oskar Schindler was born in 1908 in Moravia, Austria-Hungary. After school he helped his dad sell farm equipment. He got married in 1928. He worked many and various jobs. Oskar was a man of the...

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Maria Andzelm lived in Janowiec, Poland and lived and worked on a farm. The Germans occupied their town and took their stuff. They were already very poor, but they still helped people on the street. When Maria’s best friend was deported she wanted to do something to help, but what could a kid do? One day their father asked them to come to the back room. He had an important secret, they were going to hide two Jews, one of them being Moses. If they were found hiding Jews they would be killed. So to hide the Jews their father and Moses dug a little box underground to hide them. They had to do it very secretively. For the next two years they hid in the box. Maria fed them three times a day, and brought them books to read. Right before the war ended there was an attack. Maria and her friend rushed to a cellar. They stayed in there for two days. When someone came to the cellar Maria asked what happened to her family. The man said that her father was shot saving the two Jews. The rest of the family moved to help a widow with her farm. Then the family moved into a house that was being paid for by Moses. Later Maria married Moses. They moved to the United States and opened up a cigar store. Moses and Maria had two kids. Later Moses died of heart disease.

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Maria Andzelm lived in Janowiec, Poland and lived and worked on a farm. The Germans occupied their town and took their stuff. They were already very poor, but they still helped people on the street....

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Christian Wirth's constant problem at Belzec and the other Aktion Reinhard camps was the wild, undisciplined and often drunken behaviour of the Russian volunteers sent to him from the SS- Trawniki camp as guards.

In the early days at Belzec they habitually fraternised with the local villagers, bargained with them on the black market for food, alcohol and even women and on occasions indulged in orgies.

Even when on duty at the camps these renegades were mostly drunk which made their behaviour - usually violently anti-Semitic, anyway - even more sadistic towards their victims, and insubordinate to the SS - all of which greatly hindered the smooth running of the extermination operation.

For lesser offences, Wirth had them incarcerated in small underground bunkers without food or water for several days and more serious offences - shot out of hand. They were constantly beaten and maltreated by Wirth and certain members of the SS garrison at every possible opportunity.

Wirth had two recalcitrant Ukrainian guards dressed in traditional garb and then gassed together with a transport of Jews. Josef Oberhauser was told by Ukrainian guards that Wirth had also shot some of their comrades at the SS- Trawniki training camp.

In the early summer of 1943 a group of Ukrainian guards did attempt to turn against their masters at the Belzec death camp. The incident was recounted by Belzec villagers after the war.

The Ukrainian guards had wanted to attack the Kommandantur on Tomaszowska Street but had been betrayed to the SS by one of their own comrades. Fifty Ukrainian guards were shot.

This story of an attempted revolt at Belzec was confirmed in part in 1963 by one of the former SS-NCO's of the camp garrison, Robert Juhrs:

"Because of a serious offence, such as a planned mutiny - and such was the case, as I recall - the Ukrainian guards were dismissed, thrown out of their unit and immediately transported away. Where they went and what happened to them, I have no knowledge."

This indiscipline within the Ukrainian guard force had fatal consequences for the SS-men who served at Belzec, as Heinrich Gley, one of the SS men on the staff at Belzec testified in 1963:

"One evening, the company commander Jirmann ordered me to go with him to a copse near the Kommandantur where a bunker was located. I did not know what he intended doing there, but on the way I learned from him that two Ukrainians were locked up there who, during their guard duty had broken into the valuables room.

As Jirrmann opened the bunker door, both Ukrainians leapt on him and knocked him to the ground. As he dropped his torch during the incident, I could not see how he - Jirrmann had fallen to the ground as the first Ukrainian came out of the bunker.

I assumed it was one of the Ukrainians and fired at him. As a matter of fact it was Jirrmann I had fatally wounded."

Jirrmann died on the 1 March 1943 and was buried in the German military cemetery at nearby Tomaszow Lubelski, his remains were moved by the Germans to the military cemetery in Przemysl.

In terms of Jewish resistance in Belzec, a spontaneous act of resistance was staged in Belzec by a group of prisoners who worked in the removal of corpses from the gas chambers on the 13 June 1942, the Polish underground ( Polish United Workers Party) reported:

"The revolt in the camp, probably the first one, took place on June 13 th when Jews were summoned to remove the corpses of murdered women and children, at the horrible sight - they were standing in the gas chambers holding each others waists and necks, presumably in the pre-natal reflexes - they attacked the Wachmannschaft (the guards) which resulted in a struggle in which 4-6 Germans and nearly all the Jews died, several Jews managed to escape."

This event isn't mentioned in any other source.

An escape took place in Belzec at the end of March 1942, just after the mass extermination programme commenced:

"Within a few days of gassing operations starting at Belzec, Mina Astman and Malka Talenfeld, two women from the Zolkiev ghetto in the District of Galicia escaped from the camp.

In locked wagons the deportees were taken to Belzec. There they were ordered to undress. The deportees became agitated. One Jacob Segal, more courageous than others, asked an SS man present, "For what reason have we been ordered to undress?"

With sadistic pleasure the SS-man answered that they were going to their deaths. On hearing this, Segal threw himself into the arms of his wife crying, "Let us say our farewells as these are our last moments." When the other Jews saw this, they too began to embrace each other, crying.

At that moment the SS man ordered the men to stand on one side, and women with children on the other, near a barrack. Next the women were ordered to enter the barrack. Knowing what awaited them, the women were reluctant to enter.

First went the wife of Markus Gutman, with their daughter Sophie, and then all the other women. Taking advantage of the wailing, chaos and lack of experience on the part of the Germans, Mina Astman and Malka Talenfeld jumped into a rubbish pit.

They stayed there until nightfall, under cover of darkness they sneaked out of the camp and returned back to the Zolkiev ghetto a few days later.

The subsequent fate of the two women is not known, but they almost certainly died during a later round-up. Their story was published after the war in a booklet about the fate of the Jews of Zolkiev."

Another escape from Belzec was the dentist Bachner from Krakow. He arrived in the camp with the last transports from Krakow at the beginning of October 1942. When the transport reached the camp, he succeeded somehow in entering a latrine and found a hiding place in the excrement pit.

He stayed there a few days, one night he was able to leave the pit and escape back to Krakow. His eventual fate is unknown.

The most famous escape from the Belzec death camp was carried out by Rudolf Reder:

"At the end of November, the thug Jirrmann told me one morning that the camp needed sheet metal. Jirrmann told me with a venomous smile that I would be going under escort to Lwow to get the sheet metal - "Sollst nicht durchgehen" (Just don't make a run for it).

I went there loaded into a truck with four Gestapo men and a sentry. In Lwow after a whole day loading sheet metal I was left alone with one hoodlum guarding me. The rest went off to have a little fun. I sat there for a few hours without thinking or moving.

Then I chanced to notice that my guard had dozed off and was snoring. By reflex, without a moments thought, I slipped out of the truck, the thug was still asleep. I stood on the sidewalk for a while longer. I pretended to be fussing with something near the sheet metal and then I moved slowly away.

Legionow Street was very busy. I pulled my cap down. The street was dark and no one saw me. I remembered where my landlady lived, a Polish woman, and made my way there. She hid me."

The last escape from among the prisoners in Belzec was Chaim Hirszman. He escaped from the last train out of Belzec after the camp was dismantled. The remaining Jews were being taken to the Sobibor death camp for liquidation in July 1943.

Hirszman and two other prisoners decided to escape from the train by removing a plank from the box cars floor. He jumped first, the other two were to jump after him. Hirszman succeeded in escaping and later joined the partisans. The fate of the other two prisoners remains unknown.

Chaim Hirszman survived the war but was killed in 1946 by Polish anti-Semites.
Sources:
Christian Wirth: Inspekteur Der SS Kommandos Aktion Reinhard by Mike Tregenza.

Belzec by Rudolf Reder, published by the Auschwitz -Birkenau Museum 1999.

Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, by Yitzhak Arad, published by Indiana University Press 1987.

Holocaust Historical Society

Copyright Chris Webb H.E.A.R.T 2008

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Belzec Death Camp, Escape & Resistance - Revolt & Resistance www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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Christian Wirth's constant problem at Belzec and the other Aktion Reinhard camps was the wild, undisciplined and often drunken behaviour of the Russian volunteers sent to him from the SS- Trawniki camp as guards. In the early days at Belzec they habitually fraternised with the local villagers, bargained with them on the black market for food, alcohol and even women and on occasions indulged in orgies.

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The German Teens Who Rebelled Against Hitler

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The German Teens Who Rebelled Against Hitler

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These adolescents, aged between 12 and 17, hang around late in the evening with musical instruments and young females. Since this riff raff is in large part outside the Hitler Youth and adopts a hostile attitude towards the organization, they represent a danger to other young people. -Nazi Party Report, Dusseldorf, Germany, July 1943

From the time Adolf Hitler rose to power and prominence in Germany, his mission had been to indoctrinate the next generation of citizens to be fearless, cruel, and unwavering-all the qualities he needed to combat democracy. The Hitler Youth organization was developed to satisfy his goals. Enrollment was mandatory; members played sports and contributed to Nazi-approved artistic endeavors. Military training followed.

But not all of Germany's adolescents were willing to be subordinates to Hitler's cause. A small but subversive number of teenagers severed ties with state-approved groups and rebelled both culturally and politically, listening to American music, growing their hair long, and eventually graduating to sabotage. They were known as the Edelweiss Pirates, and their delinquency would grow to become a very sharp thorn in the side of the Reich.

Regardless of social class, boys and girls under the age of 14 were expected to affiliate themselves with the German Youth Group. From 14 to 18-the age in which they became eligible for military service-teens were corralled into the Hitler Youth movement. Disinterest wasn't tolerated. If a child refused, Gestapo would threaten families with relocation to an orphanage.

Owing to either fear or loyalty, it's estimated that more than 90 percent of German children were enrolled in the groups. But by the end of the 1930s, a growing number of members began to feel the tug of teenage rebellion. With fathers off to war, parents killed for Communist activity, and bombing raids loosening adult supervision, kids began to resist the conformist status quo. They disliked being told how to think, what to wear, and where to go.

The Edelweiss Pirates, which named themselves after the edelweiss flower covertly pinned to their lapels as a sign of their affiliation, began as a loosely organized resistance in the working-class areas of towns like Cologne and Essen. Checkered shirts, white socks, and scarves distanced the boys (there were very few female members) from the sterile attire of Hitler Youth squads; they let their hair grow long and loose. Guitars and other instruments accompanied parodies of Hitler Youth songs that they sang while camping or hiking, away from the Gestapo constantly on the lookout.

Initially, the Pirates were meddlesome simply for leading by bad example: The SS was concerned their activities could influence youths that were already in line. Depending on the region, police waved them away as a nuisance. In other areas where officials were more concerned, the Pirates would be detained and beaten, their heads shaved to send a message.

The group met the increasingly violent response to their presence with an escalation of misbehavior. Hitler Youths spotted on the street were challenged to fights; anti-Nazi graffiti dotted buildings; leaflets air-dropped by Allied forces were gathered and stuffed into mailboxes. Word spread that army deserters or camp escapees could find safe harbor in their homes. Eventually, the Pirates began organized raids on munitions factories. If a Nazi car was in sight, it was a likely target for sugar in the gas tank.

While the Pirates grew to express open hostility, another faction-the Swing Youth, or Jazz Youth-rebelled by embracing the banned music and culture of the American enemy. Big band sounds would echo through dance halls that attracted up to 6000 attendees performing the jitterbug or other salacious moves. In contrast to the Pirates, the swing cliques were generally made up of upper-middle class teens who could afford contraband records, clothing styles, and audio equipment. When the Gestapo cracked down on public gatherings and violated curfews, they moved to private dances in their own homes. According to a report filed with the Hitler Youth about a February 1940 dance in Hamburg:

The dance music was all English and American. Only swing dancing and jitterbugging took place...The dancers made an appalling sight. None of the couples danced normally ... sometimes two boys danced with one girl...When the band played a rumba, the dancers went into a wild ecstasy ...They all 'jitterbugged' on the stage like wild animals.

Notorious SS official Heinrich Himmler told officers that anyone caught listening to jazz should be "beaten." But after a long stretch of dealing with both the Pirates and the swing members, Himmler decided to send a more serious message to anyone thinking of joining their movement.
ExecutedToday
While captured Pirates being tortured and sent to "re-education camps" may have proved individually discouraging, Himmler felt the need to broadcast the Reich's distaste for free thinkers. In October 1944, he captured 13 agitators, including seven Pirates, and marched them to the gallows in the middle of Cologne. All prisoners were hung in full view of the public.

Other Pirates had been sent to forced labor camps, where they maintained a ritual of singing songs in protest of the Nazi regime. Before the war ended in 1945, at least one rebel, Herbert Schemmel, was able to retrieve his stash of confiscated records.

The Pirates and the groups affiliated with them were labeled criminals by the courts of the era. In 2005, German officials officially relabeled them as resistance fighters and honored the surviving five members still in Cologne. The Edelweiss Pirates had fulfilled Hitler's desire for German youths to be fearless and unwavering in the face of adversity. He just hadn't anticipated it would be pointed in his direction.

Additional Sources: "Opposition and Resistance in Nazi Germany" [ PDF]

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The German Teens Who Rebelled Against Hitler

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Allied forces had a secret ally: German teen gangs that resisted Hitler's messages, sabotaged their military, and embraced American culture.

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The story of Frumke Plotnicka and Chajke Grossman Revolt & Resistance www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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At the beginning of World War II, the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway declared their neutrality. That means they would not take sides in the conflict. With memories of the devastation of World War I still fresh in the memories of many Danes, the governments thought that by being neutral their citizens would be spared the horrors of this new crisis.

This however was not to be the case.

The morning of 9 April 1940, German forces crossed the border into neutral Denmark, in direct violation of a German-Danish treaty of non-aggression signed the previous year. In a coordinated operation, German ships began disembarking troops at the docks in Copenhagen. Although outnumbered and poorly equipped, soldiers in several parts of the country offered resistance; most notably the Royal Guard in Copenhagen and units in South Jutland.

At the same time as the border crossing, German planes dropped the notorious Oprop leaflets over Copenhagen calling for Danes to accept the German occupation peacefully, and claiming that Germany had occupied Denmark in order to protect it against Great Britain and France. Colonel Lunding from the Danish army's intelligence office later confirmed that Danish intelligence knew the attack would be coming on either April 8th or 9th and had warned the government accordingly. The Danish ambassador to Germany, Herluf Zahle, issued a similar warning which was also ignored.

As a result of the rapid turn of events, the Danish government did not have enough time to officially declare war on Germany. Sixteen Danish soldiers died in the invasion, but after two hours the Danish government surrendered, believing that resistance was useless and hoping to work out an advantageous agreement with Germany

Within the first years of the German occupation, the Germans had often raised the question of the status of the Danish Jews. However the Danish government had consistently refused to engage in any debate on the "Jewish question" as they insisted there existed no "Jewish question" in Denmark.

It became increasingly clear to Berlin that if they wished to maintain a peaceful occupation and secure the collaboration of the Danish government, it would be opportune not to put pressure on the government. It was abundantly clear that a compromise was out of the question, and as long as the Danish government adhered to collaboration the "problem" was put aside.

During the first years of the occupation, active resistance activities were few in number and consisted mostly of the production of underground newspapers. This lack of active fighting prompted Winston Churchill to refer to Denmark as "Hitler's Pet Canary". Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, many Danish Communists formed resistance cells.
Resistance Groups

BOPA (Borgelige Partisaner, Bourgeois Partisans) was a group of the Danish resistance movement operating at the time of the occupation of Denmark by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

In 1942, the illegal Communist Party of Denmark had begun organizing small sabotage cells across the country, mainly formed by veterans who had been part of the volunteer anti-Franco brigades of the Spanish Civil War. However, as arms were scarce, the weapon of choice was often petrol and matches, and only small scale operations were carried out.

On January 25, 1943 a group of students - who had previously been refused membership of the communist resistance group due to the mistrust held by its members toward any elitism - set fire to a stock of German listening devices at Dansk Industrisyndikat in Hellerup using a bottle of spirit. The students were hereafter accepted into the group, and this caused a change of name from the original KOPA (Kommunistiske Partisaner, Communist Partisans) to BOPA. The new name was at first used jokingly by old members, but it soon became the most widely used name.

Operations grew in magnitude as individuals with inside knowledge of possible targets joined the group. Especially young apprentices from large factories proved useful in identifying targets which were supplying the German military, and this resulted in attacks on factories such as Burmeister & Wain and Riffelsyndikatet in 1943, Riffelsyndikatet (again) and Global in 1944 and Always in 1945.

Holger Danske (Resistance group)

The group was formed in Copenhagen in 1942 by five men who had all fought on the Finnish side during the Winter War. By this time of the occupation resistance work carried a great deal of risk because the general public was still largely opposed to sabotage and the government was following its "co-operation" policy with the Nazis to avoid as much German intervention in Danish affairs as possible.

Holger Danske, as well as the rest of the Danish resistance, was very opposed to this collaboration and continued to believe that the Danish should have resisted the invasion much more fiercely. Gunnar Dyrberg recalls in his book how he had seen Danes engage in friendly conversation with the Germans immediately after the invasion and cites this as one of the reasons he later decided to enter Holger Danske.

The group was infiltrated by the Gestapo twice but because of its loose structure (unlike BOPA the organization was very loose) they were unable to identify all the members. A total of 64 members were excecuted by the Gestapo during the occupation.

Among their largest sabotage actions were the blowing up of the Forum Arena in 1943 and the attack on Burmeister & Wain in 1944.

In 1942-43, resistance operations gradually shifted to more violent action, most notably acts of sabotage. Various groups succeeded in making contacts with the SOE which began making airdrops of supplies. The number of drops were slow until August 1944, but increased in the last part of the war.

As the war dragged on, the Danish population became increasingly hostile to the Germans. Soldiers stationed in Denmark had found most of the population cold and distant from the beginning of the occupation, but their willingness to cooperate had made the relationship workable.

The government had attempted to discourage sabotage and violent resistance to the occupation, but by the autumn of 1942 the numbers of violent acts of resistance were increasing steadily to the point that Germany declared Denmark "enemy territory" for the first time. After the battles of Stalingrad and El-Alamein the incidents of resistance, violent and symbolic, increased rapidly.

On August 29, 1943, SS-General Werner Best declared martial law and demanded the introduction of capital punishment. The Danish government, after cooperating for three years, defiantly stopped functioning but refused to resign formally to prevent Germans from taking over, without violating the Danish constitution. The Danish administration however continued to function.

In a move to save face, Best decided to crack down and launched plans to arrest Jews. On September 8, he sent a telegram to Berlin: "The time has come to turn our attention to the solution of the Jewish question." When final orders for the raid arrived from Berlin on September 28, Best informed his confidant, Georg Duckwitz, that Jews would be rounded up within two days, on the night between October 1 and 2.

German maritime attaché Georg F. Duckwitz leaked the information to Danish politicians and the news spread like wildfire through friends, business acquaintances, and strangers wanting to help. Ordinary citizens all over the country offered refuge in churches, attics, and country homes, and residences. Complete strangers walked up to Jews on the street to offer keys to their apartment. Medical staff hid more than 1, 000 Jews in Copenhagen hospitals.

On the night of the raid, Germans only found 284 Jews out of almost 8,000 in the population.

Read more about the fate of the Danish Jews HERE

The Jews were smuggled out of Denmark by transporting them by sea over the Øresund from Zealand to Sweden, a passage of approximately 10 miles. Some were transported in large fishing boats of up to 20 tons, but others were carried to freedom in rowboats or kayaks. Some refugees were smuggled inside freight cars on the regular ferries between Denmark and Sweden, this route being suited for the very young or old who were too weak to endure a rough sea passage. The underground had broken into empty freight cars sealed by the Germans after inspection, helped refugees onto the cars, and then resealed the cars with forged or stolen German seals to forestall further inspection.

Some of the fishermen assisting in the rescue charged money to transport Jews to Sweden, while others took payments only from those who could afford passage. Some profiteers took advantage of the confusion and fear during the early days of the escape, but as time passed, the Danish underground movement ousted them and took an active role in organizing the rescue and providing financing, mostly from wealthy Danes who donated large sums of money for the rescue.

During the first days of the rescue action, Jews swarmed into the many fishing harbors on the Danish coast for rescue, but the Gestapo became suspicious of activity around harbors (and on the night of October 1-2, eighty Jews were caught hiding in the loft of the church at Gilleleje, their hiding place betrayed by a Danish girl in love with a German soldier). Subsequent rescues had to take place from isolated points along the coast. While waiting their turn, the Jews took refuge in the woods and in cottages away from the coast, out of sight of the Gestapo.

In September 1943, the 'Danish Freedom Council' was created. This attempted to unify the many different groups that made up the Danish resistance movement. The council was made up of seven resistance representatives and one member of SOE. The resistance movement grew to over 20,000 and in the lead-up to D-Day acts of sabotage markedly increased. Though the D-Day landings were to be in Normandy, SOE believed that the more German soldiers tied up elsewhere in Europe, the less that could be present in northern France. Therefore, the more acts of sabotage in Denmark, the more German troops would be tied down there.

In 1944, the 'Danish Freedom Council' stepped up its efforts and more than 11 million copies of underground newspapers are published. That June, following a declared state of emergency, the entire city of Copenhagen goes on strike. Infuriated, Germany floods the city with troops, cuts off water and electricity, and establishes a blockade. By July 2, 23 Danes have been killed and more than 203 are wounded. But the dauntless Danes persevere. Exasperated, the Germans abandon these punitive measures by July.

Later that fall, when the Germans try to deport Danish police officials whom they believe are turning a blind eye to sabotage and disorder, Copenhagen goes on strike again, joined this time by 58 other cities and towns. Unafraid of Gestapo arrests, civilians flock to the resistance movement; enrollment exceeds 45,000 at its highest point. In May 1945, war-ravaged Berlin succumbs to advancing Allied forces, prompting Germany to abandon Denmark altogether.

After the war, 40,000 people were arrested on suspicion of collaboration. Of these, 13,500 were punished in some way. 78 received death sentences, although only 46 were carried out. Most received prison sentences of under four years.

Many people criticized the process for victimizing "small" people disproportionately, while many politicians and businesses were left untouched. Another difficult issues was what to do with collaborators who were essentially "following orders" that their own government had given them, such as business executives who had been encouraged to work with the Germans.

Sources:
The Museum of Danish Resistance

Holocaust Historical Society

Danish Peace History

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Resistance In The Holocaust
by Clinton and James Patterson

Partisans from the Kovno Ghetto in the Rudniki Forest of Lithuania.

It all started because of Germanys defeat in World War I. The allies forced the Germans to pay unfair war damages. Inflation made money almost worthless. People became desperate. Adolf Hitler gained favor with the German people by telling them of a glorified image of Germany and he gave them an excuse for loosing the war. He told them that the Jews stabbed Germany in the back. He said they were genetically inferior, and that they were the all-time enemy of the German people. Not everyone agreed with Hitlers outrageous ideas, but many hoped he would solve Germanys financial problems, and return them to their former glory.
The Holocaust took place in World War II. It was an effort by Adolph Hitler to utterly destroy the Jewish people. Six million Jews were killed in World War II, half of that six million were children and teenagers. If you had a distantly related Jewish family member, you were considered a Jew, and therefore you must be killed. This report is about resistance in the Holocaust. Its about who resisted, and how some made it out alive.

Members of the Bielski Atriad at the family camp
in Naliboki Forest in Byelorussia

The Holocaust is not very pleasant to talk about. The Nazis put the Jews in concentration camps and ghettos, and killed them in cruel ways. They led them to believe that they would be all right; they gave false hope to them right up to their deaths, which was either in the gas chamber or by the firing squad. The gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms, so that people would think all they were getting a shower. Even though the Nazis and their calibrators killed millions, nonetheless, some people did resist. They resisted in three different ways, armed, unarmed, and spiritual. Armed resistance was fighting the Nazis with weapons. Spiritual resistance was not letting the Nazis break you and your religious beliefs.
Resistance occurred wherever Nazis imposed their rule. In cities, ghettoes, and camps, people risked all they had to resist. Not all the people who resisted were Jewish, some were French, Polish, British, American, Soviet, and even a handful of Germans. Resistors sabotaged supply trains, planned escapes for Jews, and gave other resistors supplies. Resistance fighters were called Partisans. They fought together against Nazi oppression.

A train that was sabotaged by French resistance fighters.

Some of the resisters were teenagers. One group, called the White Rose, was from the University of Munich, they secretly published, and distributed leaflets denouncing the Nazis, and recommended that Germans sabotage Nazi plans. They were the only organized group of Germans who resisted the Nazis.
Many Jews were put into ghettos. Ghettos were sections of a city that was walled and sealed up. Jews could not escape and usually died of disease, starvation, and shootings by the Germans. Most resistance in the ghettos was unarmed resistance because weapons were hard to come by.

Resistance fighters in ghetto revolt

For example, in September of 1942, by the time the first wave of deportations and deaths in the Warsaw Ghetto had stopped, hundreds and thousands of Jews were already dead, and only 60,000 remained in ghetto. Underground groups such as ZOB thought the end was near. They collected as many weapons as they could. Weapons were expensive and were often bought from members of the Polish underground. Sometimes weapons were stolen. When a second wave of deportation came and the Nazis rounded up some 5,000 Jews, the remaining Jewish resisters started throwing homemade bombs. The Germans made a strong response and many Jews were killed because they hadnt enough weapons to fight with.

Vladka Meed

One person in the resistance was Vladka Meed, she convinced non-Jews that she was not Jewish. Using false identification papers she smuggled weapons across the Warsaw Ghetto walls. She also smuggled people out of the ghetto and found places for them to hide.

Vladka Meeds false identification papers

Another example of Jewish resistance was a teenager named Rosa Robota. She arrived at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 1944. She helped plan a revolt in the camp. Rosa had the woman who worked in the munitions factory carry explosive powder out of the factory by scraping it under their fingernails. They gave the powder to a Russian prisoner named Borodin to construct a bomb. The Germans found out about their plans. The people got scared and set off the bombs that were hidden in the crematoriums. One of the crematoriums was blown up, during the commotion six hundred people escaped, but all were recaptured or killed. Rosa and three other young women were publicly hanged.

Roza Roberta.

Frank Blakhmen was sixteen years old during World War II. He came from Kamlanka, Poland. He escaped before the Germans took the Jews into camps. He and twelve Jewish men dressed as Polish officers and got weapons from a farmer named Lemenchek. They got a total of six guns . They captured calibrators and used the information they got to blow up railroads and bridges to disrupt the German lines of communication.

Frank Blakhmen

After the war, for most Jews who had been liberated from the death camps, it was difficult for them to talk about their experiences. In fact, most Jews would not speak out until years later. Most could not understand how there could be a God, when he allowed so many to be killed. When asked if she thought the Holocaust could happen again, Leah Harmerstein responded, "Yes, its possible. You see, Nazism killed not only people, it killed moral principles. Before you can kill people, you first have to kill moral principles. Then its possible."

This whole report was based upon this book
SOURCES:
Anflick, Charles. Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny . New York: Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 1999.
PICTURE CREDIT:
Picture #1 - "Partisans from the Kovno Ghetto in the Rudniki Forest of Lithuania" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #2 - "Members of the Bielski Atriad at the family camp in Naliboki Forest in Byelorussia" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #3 - "A train that was sabotaged by French resistance fighters" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #4 - "Resistance fighters in ghetto revolt" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #5 - "Vladka Meed" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #6 - "Vladka Meeds false identification papers" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #7 - "Roza Roberta" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #8 - "Frank Blakhmen" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

Picture #9 - "Book Cover" from: Resistance: Teen Partisans and Resistors Who Fought Nazi Tyranny

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Resistance In The Holocaustby Clinton and James Patterson Partisans from the Kovno Ghetto in the Rudniki Forest of Lithuania. It all started because of Germanys defeat in World War I. The allies forced the Germans to pay unfair war damages. Inflation made money almost worthless. People became desperate.

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Example of teenagers resisting during the Holocaust

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Example of teenagers resisting during the Holocaust

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When World War II enveloped Europe, children throughout the continent were impacted. Many children were sent to concentration camps while others became part of their country's Resistance Movements, opposing Nazi orders and policies.

Sometimes authors use the story of real children to write historical novels. Sometimes the real stories are as compelling as the fictional ones.

Take Shadow on the Mountain, for example. Espen, the main character, is based on Erling Storrusten. Who was he? What role did he play during the war?

When Germany invaded Norway, Erling's country, he decided to fight back. Sixteen at the time of the invasion, in 1940, Erling became a courier for distributing forbidden and illegal underground newspapers.

As time went by, and Erling grew older during the war, he took-on more resistance responsibilities. During one key event, he pretended to be who he was not in order to gain entrance into Germany's headquarters in Lillehammer, Erling's home town. He was able to draw the layout of the headquarters, then turn that important document over to Resistance leaders.

When the German secret police, the Gestapo, learned Erling's identity, he had to flee Norway. Traveling hundreds of miles over five days, mostly on skis, he reached safety in Sweden. Margi Preus has retold Erling's story in Shadow on the Mountain.

Joan Wolf takes a similar approach in her story Someone Named Eva. Although she doesn't have a specific character on which to model her heroine, Wolf uses the events of a town called Lidice as the backdrop of her tale.

Hitler believed that people in the Czech town of Lidice were providing shelter for the assassins of one of the Fuhrer's top men. Women and children were rounded-up, and seven children were initially selected for Germany's "Lebensborn" program.

The Lebensborn program, devised by SS head Heinrich Himmler, focused on children who had Nordic features like blue eyes and blond hair. Nazi policy allowed those children to be kidnapped from their parents, then sent to centers where they would be "Germanized" (before being sent to live with German families who supported Hitler and his Third-Reich ideas).

Once those children were examined and measured, to be sure they fit the "Aryan" profile, they had to learn German customs and the German language. In the case of Milada, the heroine of Someone Named Eva, that process took two years.

During that entire two years, the twelve-year-old Czech girl was forbidden to speak her own language and was not allowed to see her real family.

In truth, the men of her family would have no-longer been alive since the Nazis killed all of the men of Lidice in retaliation for the death of Hitler's protégé. Whether the townspeople were actually hiding the partisans who shot Reinhard Heydrich seemed not to matter. The Nazis' perception of responsibility was enough for them to destroy the town and kill the men.

When she is sent to live with a German family, Milada is now known as Eva. With her Nordic features, she fits into her new life, but (as her Grandmother had insisted before they were parted), she must also remember who she really is.

At the end of the war, Eva/Milada struggles with leaving her foster family whom she has grown to like.

In real life, there were people who returned to a rebuilt Lidice after the war. Only 153 women and 17 children survived, however. In her story, Joan Wolf makes two of those people Milada ( Someone Named Eva) and her mother (who'd spent the war, like other Lidice women, at the Ravensbruck concentration camp).

In both of these cases, the hero and the heroine of fictional novels have their roots in real-life events. Their lives were profoundly disrupted by the war, in major ways, but neither of these individuals was Jewish. That fact helps us to realize the impact of Hitler's policies was widespread throughout the European continent, negatively effecting the lives of many different nationalities.

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When World War II enveloped Europe, children throughout the continent were impacted. Many children were sent to concentration camps while others became part of their country's Resistance Movements, opposing Nazi orders and policies. Sometimes authors use the story of real children to write historical novels.

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Citation: C N Trueman "Youth Opposition in Nazi Germany"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, . .

Youth protest movements did exist in Nazi Germany. The Nazi propagandists of the time would have had the world believe that the youth population of Nazi Germany was fully behind Hitler. It is true that many did join the Hitler Youth movement but in 1936 membership was made compulsory and all other youth movements were banned so there was no alternative. However, there were some youths who were ideologically against the regime and who were brave enough to make a stand.

In 1937 one such protest movement was started - the Edelweiss Pirates (Eidelweisspiraten). The movement started in the Rhineland and then spread out. Members were mainly working class male youths. They would gather together and act in a manner that they would know would anger the local Nazi leaders. Whereas the Nazi Party required Hitler Youth members to wear a uniform that was semi-military, Edelweiss members wore more bohemian clothing, knowing that it would anger the powers-that-be. They also sang songs that the Nazis had banned and played music that was also banned, such as jazz and blues tunes. They created areas within a town or city where members of the Hitler Youth were not tolerated. At no stage were they ever a danger to the Nazi regime and for years they were seen as nothing more than a youthful irritant - youths going through that phase in their lives where rebellion (as they perceived it) was the order of the day.

Whereas the Edelwiess Pirates were mainly seen as coming from working class backgrounds, youths from more upper class backgrounds formed 'swing groups'. They too engaged in what would have been perceived as non-Germanic activities, which once again involved the ways they dressed and the music they listened to.

However, the regime's stance changed during World War Two where it required explicit obedience to the state. This change from irritant to threat is best seen in a series of letters found after the war had ended.

In a letter from Heinrich Himmler to Reinhard Heydrich (January 1942) the head of the SS wrote that a half-measured approach to the 'swing groups' was unacceptable and that members of any such groups had to be dealt with accordingly. Himmler told Heydrich that for members of the 'swing groups' labour and work camps were inappropriate. They had to be sent to concentration camps for between "2 to 3 years". Himmler did not differentiate between male youths and "worthless girls".

"There the youth should first be given thrashings and then put through the severest drill and set to work. It must be made clear that they will never be allowed to go back to their studies. We must investigate how much encouragement they have had from their parents. If they have encouraged them, then they should also be put into a concentration camp and (have) their property confiscated." ('Hitler's Germany' by Jane Jenkins)

Himmler also advised Heydrich that he should intervene "brutally" to stop any further spread of the 'swing groups'.

In July 1943, Nazi Party leaders in Dusseldorf contacted the Gestapo with their views on a local Edelweiss group. The letter stated that the "gang" was "throwing its weight around" and that the "riff-raff" represented a "danger to other young people". It claimed that this particular city group had an age range from 12 to 17 and that members of the army associated with them when they were on leave. The Dusseldorf city leaders also believed that the local Edelweiss group was responsible for anti-Hitler and anti-war graffiti in the city's pedestrian subways. However, it is clearly stated that these were only suspicions.

One of the most famous youth movements that campaigned against Hitler was the White Rose movement founded by Hans and Sophie Scholl. Members of this movement openly campaigned against Hitler and the continuation of World War Two, which they believed was lost as early as 1942.

"Why do the German people behave so apathetically in face of all these dreadful and inhuman crimes? It is high time we uprooted the 'Brown Horde'. We shall only do this by cooperation between many convinced and bold men who are agreed on how to achieve their aims." Leaflet written by Hans Scholl.

Scholl encouraged members of the White Rose movement to engage in sabotage.

In January 1942, Hans Scholl produced a leaflet entitled "A call to all Germans". It stated:

"The war is approaching its inevitable end. With mathematical certainty, Hitler is leading the German nation to disaster. Now is the time for those Germans to act who want to avoid being lumped with the Nazis barbarians by the outside world."

It was extremely dangerous to air such views in public but the Scholl's ensured that their beliefs were put into print and made public. Such was the all-embracing nature of a police state that it was only a matter of time before they were caught. Tried before the 'People's Court', they were put on trial for treason, inevitably found guilty and executed.

December 2011

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Youth Opposition in Nazi Germany - History Learning Site

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Youth protest movements did exist in Nazi Germany. The Nazi propagandists of the time would have had the world believe that the youth population of Nazi Germany was fully behind Hitler. It is true that many did join the Hitler Youth movement but in 1936 membership was made compulsory and all other youth movements were ...

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This month marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Warsaw Uprising. By the summer of 1944 the tide of the Second World War had turned. The Soviets, now Allies, had reversed the German advance, and France was fighting towards liberation. Sensing change, the Polish government-in-exile authorized their highly organised resistance 'Home Army' to rise up against the extremely brutal Nazi forces occupying their capital.

On the 1st August thousands of Polish men, women and children launched a coordinated attack. The Poles had faced invasion on two fronts at the start of the war, and were well aware of the dual threat to their independence. Their aim now was to liberate Warsaw from the Nazis so that they could welcome the advancing Soviet Army as free, or at least fighting, citizens. Moscow radio had appealed to the Poles to take action, but the Red Army then deliberately waited within hearing distance for the ensuing conflict to decimate the Polish resistance before making their own entry. The Warsaw Uprising is remembered as one of the most courageous resistance actions of the Second World War, but also one of the most tragic.

A couple of years ago I travelled to Warsaw to research my last book,The Spy Who Loved, a biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the Polish-born Countess who became Britain's first female special agent of the war. While there I visited the famous Powąski cemetery where many of Krystyna's family are buried, along with (parts of) Chopin and other famous Poles. Walking around I was very struck by several memorials like the one above, which shows how a Polish woman who died in 1999 chose to be remembered - fighting for the freedom of her country fifty-five years earlier.

To her despair, Krystyna Skarbek, then stationed in Italy, was not able to join her compatriots during the Warsaw Uprising. However I was honoured to meet one of the female veterans of the conflict at an event at the Polish Embassy earlier this year. A few months later I had the pleasure of meeting her again at her north London home, where she generously shared her memories of the uprising with me over a cup of strong coffee and some delicious Polish pastries.

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Women of the Warsaw Uprising, by Clare Mulley

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This month marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Warsaw Uprising. By the summer of 1944 the tide of the Second World War had turned. The Soviets, now Allies, had reversed the German advance, and France was fighting towards liberation.

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Citation: C N Trueman "The French Resistance"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, . .

The French Resistance played a vital part in aiding the Allies to success in Western Europe - especially leading up to D-Day in June 1944. The French Resistance supplied the Allies with vital intelligence reports as well as doing a huge amount of work to disrupt the German supply and communication lines within France.

The surrender of France in June 1940, was a major blow to many French people in terms of their pride. Many believed that the government had let the people down. The creation of a Nazi-approved Vichy government, primarily in the centreand south of the country, was, in the minds of many, further proof that politicians had let down France. The resistance movement developed to provide the Allies with intelligence, attack the Germans when possible and to assist the escape of Allied airmen.

In the immediate aftermath of the June 1940 surrender, France went into a period of shock. The public had been assured that the French army, along with the Maginot Line, was more than strong enough to resist a German attack. The speed and severity of Blitzkrieg had shocked the French people. The non-occupied region of France, known as Vichy France, was set up by the Germans and governed by Marshall Pétain. His reputation was still high and in the early days of Vichy, his leadership gave it some stability and kudos. Also in the days after the British attack on Mers el Kébir, there was a degree of anti-British sentiment in France. Therefore, there was no immediate drive to create a resistance movement en masse in central and southern France.

On June 18th, 1940, Charles de Gaulle addressed the people of France from London. He called on the French people to continue the fight against the Germans. This message hit hard in occupied France but initially it was less well received in Vichy France. Regardless of what many thought of the Vichy government, the area they controlled was run by French people. However, when the Vichy government began to openly collaborate with the Germans, attitudes hardened.

The French Resistance movement is an umbrella term which covered numerous anti-German resistance movements that were based within France. There were resistance movements that took direct orders from the Special Operations Executive, there was the communist resistance, groups loyal to de Gaulle, regional resistance movements that wanted independence etc. In the north, the target was simply the Germans while in the south, the Vichy government was a target as well as the Germans. The first resistance movements were in the north, such as the OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire) and by the end of 1940, six underground newspapers were being regularly printed in the north. In May 1941, the first SOE agent was dropped into northern France to assist the work of the resistance.

Because of the peculiar political complexities of France, the resistance movement got off to a difficult start. However, by June 1941, the resistance movement had become more organised and its work against the Germans increased accordingly. Two dates are important in explaining the work of the resistance movement in France.

On June 22nd 1941, all the communist groups within France joined forces to create one group. This simple act greatly increased its potency. On November 11th 1942, German forces occupied the whole of France. This meant that the whole country was occupied and the attitude of the north quickly transferred itself to the south.

The German attack on Russia - Operation Barbarossa - led to many French communists joining the resistance movement. Politics took a back step and the French communists gained a reputation for being aggressive and successful resistance fighters. Many French people joined as the support for Vichy quickly waned. Many in the south were angered by the compulsory labour service that had been brought in. But the treatment of the Jews was a major cause of resentment towards the Vichy government and many joined the resistance as a means of fighting against a policy that the vast majority found abhorrent.

The relationship between Britain and the French Resistance movement was vital. Britain, via the SOE, supplied the French with equipment and trained agents. The French Resistance, in turn, supplied vital intelligence reports. As an example, the British attack on the radio base at Bruneval in 1942 could have been a lot more costly in terms of lives lost, if the British had not received intelligence reports from the resistance with regards to the building of new blockhouses there. With such information, the British paratroopers could plan accordingly.

Though the British government and de Gaulle could have a difficult relationship at times, in October 1941, both reached a compromise with regards to resistance operations in France. de Gaulle set up a Central Intelligence and Operations Agency with the support of the British. This acted independently but planning was carried out in co-operation with the SOE which supplied equipment. Agents sent into France started a general re-grouping of all resistance movements and a Conseil National de la Résistance movement was established which was subordinated to de Gaulle. By the end of 1942, de Gaulle became head of the Comité Français de Libération Nationale which headed all resistance movements in France. As a result of this greater organisational security, the resistance became more effective in 1943. Attacks on the French rail system increased greatly. Between January and June 1943, there were 130 acts of sabotage against rail lines each month. By September 1943, this had increased to 530. The disruption to the Germans ability to move equipment was massive.

By 1944, it is estimated that there were 100,000 members of the various resistance movements that existed in France. Just one year earlier, there were just 40,000 members.. By the spring of 1944, there were 60 intelligence cells whose task was solely to collect intelligence as opposed to carrying out acts of sabotage. In the build up to D-Day, the intelligence they gathered was vital. In May 1944 alone, they sent 3,000 written reports to the Allies and 700 wireless reports. Between April and May, the resistance destroyed 1,800 railway engines. When this figure is added to the 2,400 destroyed by Allied bombers, it is easy to understand why the Germans had such difficulty transporting equipment across France.

Post-war analysis of the success of the resistance shows that the 150 most successful acts of sabotage against factories in France between 1943 and 1944, used just 3,000 lbs of explosives - the equivalent of the bomb load of one single Mosquito plane.

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The French Resistance - History Learning Site

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The French Resistance played a vital part in aiding the Allies to success in Western Europe - especially leading up to D-Day in June 1944. The French Resistance supplied the Allies with vital intelligence reports as well as doing a huge amount of work to disrupt the German supply and communication lines within France.

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JEWISH YOUTH MOVEMENTS IN WARTIME POLAND

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JEWISH YOUTH MOVEMENTS IN WARTIME POLAND

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Jewish Youth Movements in Wartime Poland: From Minority to Leadership

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The Gelpernus DiaryResistance in the Kovno Ghetto

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The Gelpernus DiaryResistance in the Kovno Ghetto

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Resistance in the Kovno Ghetto
Chaim Yelin & Dimitri-Ghelpernus

- Dimitri-Ghelpernus Author

Part 1 "In the Ghetto Grip"

I. AMONG THE RUINS

When at the beginning of August 1944 Kovno was liberated from the fascist invaders, partisan groups entered the city together with Soviet Army detachments. Among them was the group "Pirmin" ("Forward") and parts of the groups "Mirtis Ocupantams" ("Death to the Invaders"), "Vladas Baronas", "Laisvoi Lietuva" ("Free Lithuania") and others. Many Jews, former members of Kovno underground anti-fascist ghetto organisation fought among them.

Having returned to their home town, without washing off road dust, with their sub-machine guns over their shoulders, Kovno ghetto partisans crossed the river Neris (Villia) and entered Kovno suburb of Villiampole (Village).

The partisans were going there with a heavy heart, where their fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends and relatives suffered in the grips of the ghetto - all those who failed to make their escape via barbed wire fence and police cordons of the Jewish prison.

They faced a terrible picture: the whole ghetto was blown up and burned down. The remains of the burned and charred bodies could be seen everywhere. Smoke was still coming from the ruins of the houses. The bodies of people who resisted the Gestapo, who did not follow the orders of their oppressors, were lying under those ruins. These people resisted German orders and did not let the Germans to transport them to the west. They were prepared to meet death rather than to leave like slaves.

And so the partisans walked among the ruins. Could it be true that everything had perished and all life had been turned into ashes? A cowering figure of a man emerged from the ruins of a big block C (Varniu street 32; * now P.Zibertas street). His clothes were torn and soiled in clay and sand, his hands were bleeding.

Having seen the Red Army soldiers and the partisans, having heard his mother tongue, this exhausted man came to the manhole which he had recently dug out with his bare hands and shouted, "Jews, you are free!" Thirty four people, one by one, crawled out of the manhole. All were emaciated and painfully pale, even their skin was translucent.

They had sunken cheeks, they were screwing up their cheeks because of pain - they had not seen day light for three weeks! When the order to gather for transportation was issued, these people hid in a dug out, six-meter deep shelter. The house above them was blown up. The exit was buried under the ruble.

These documents were hidden at a critical time, at the beginning of 1944, when they were expecting the ghetto liquidation. The yellowed pages, which were handed from person to person in the ghetto, finally saw the daylight. These pages gave hope, lifted spirits, they helped to organize and to mobilize the fighting ghetto vanguard, who came out armed in order to take vengeance on fascists.

Among the found documents, which are now kept in the State archives of the Lithuanian SSR, was the charter of the ghetto antifascist organisation. The first article of it states that the main aim of the organisation is the fight against fascism until the bitter end. A "combat programme" of the movement was also found. Aims, methods and tactics of the fight were also formulated in it.

Introduction of the "combat programme", written in the occupied territory, contains information on the origins of the resistance movement in Kovno ghetto. It says, "We were the first ones to experience the German invasion and occupation as we lived in the boarder region.

Having attacked the Soviet Union, Germans occupied Lithuania as early as the first week. Storm which is sweeping a country has a terrifying power. Many town and country people, having been accused of sympathizing with the Soviet power, were killed.

Tens of thousands of Jews, who tried to escape further into the country, were caught and executed. Hundreds and thousands of Jews were incarcerated in Kovno forts, prisons and synagogues in other Lithuanian towns and villages. From there they were led to an execution point. The dead and wounded were thrown together into prepared pits.

A small number of surviving Lithuanian Jews were incarcerated in Kovno ghetto..." A number of other documents used by the author to write this book were found at the same time.

II. IN THE TURMOIL

Kovno - a former temporary capital of Lithuania - is one of the most important industrial and significant cultural centres of the republic. The city, which is situated in the very spot where the river Neris leads into Neman, was not far from the then border with Germany (80 km).

On the 22nd of June 1941 Molotov said in his speech," Today, at 4 a.m. without making their demands to the Soviet Union, without declaring war, German military forces attacked our country, breached the state border in many places and bombed the cities of Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol', Kovno and a number of others."

And so Kovno became one of the first cities to suffer from German fascists, who treacherously attacked the Soviet Union. The fascist hordes forced their way into Kovno suburbs as early as the night of the 23rd of June.

A small group of city residents, having used transport means which were at their disposal, managed to evacuate; but many of those making their way eastward on foot were captured by the attacking fascists. Such a fate befell those Jews who were trying to evacuate further east into the Soviet Union, having left behind their houses and other property.

1) Jewish population is forbidden to walk along city pavements. Jews must walk on the right edge of a pavement one behind the other.

2) Jews are forbidden to be in places for rest, to use public benches.

3) Jewish population is forbidden to use public transport. Every- where in public transport one should place notices which say: "Jews are not allowed!"

4)Those who break this law will face capital punishment!"

Order No.2 compels all Jews, irrespective of their gender or age, wear a star of David, 8-10 centimetre in diameter, on their chests and backs. Jews are allowed to be outdoors only at certain times of the day. They are forbidden to sell, exchange or dispose of in any other manner any of their property. Jews are forbidden to live with non-Jews.

The orders were getting tougher and tougher with time going by. Each new order tightened its grip on the Jewish population further... It was forbidden to buy food. Jews were condemned to hunger. On the basis of this order, at the beginning of August, in one day twenty six Jews were shot dead for trying to buy food from farmers.

Armed gangs of Lithuanian nationalists, former members of fascist organisations in bourgeois Lithuania - "Shauliu saiunga" (Riflemen), "Yaunoi Lietuva" (Young Lithuania), "Neolietuva" - various scum and criminals got the freedom of action. They began persecution of Soviet activists and families of Soviet Army servicemen, best sons and daughters of Lithuanian people were killed.

There were endless arrests of Soviet activists in the city. A great number of people died at the hands of Gestapo: Budjinskiene, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Pranas Zibertas, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of Lithuania, Girsh Sesitskii, Sender Aigulskii and Jeruchim Natanzon, trade union activists, Vitautas Montvila,famous Lithuanian poet, Joseph Witz, Shcherbakov, well-known worker, with his wife and a newborn baby son, and very many others.

Over 1000 Jews were killed in a most terrible manner on the night of 26th of June in Kovno suburb of Villiampole. Ruthless executioners crashed children's heads with the butts of their guns. A six-year old girl was lying with a broken leg; she was grabbed and her body was hit against a telephone pole, this leg came off the body... Some bandits came across rabbi Salman Ossovskii while he was sitting clad in tallis with his prayer book. Those executioners cut his head off with a saw. They cut off the tongue and put out the eyes of the leader of Villiampole yeshiva Abraham Grodzenskii.

The executioners slaughtered whole families living in the streets Paneriu, Vidurine, Jurbako, Arëgalos and others. But even then there were already people who did not give their lives without a struggle. Sarah Soifer saw worker Benzl Fain breaking the skull of the fascist who entered his home first.The executioners attacked the owner of the flat, his wife and his child. Benzl was torn to pieces. The child's head was torn off and thrown out of a window into the street. This severed head was left there for several days.

A young Jew by the name of Strazh, an accountant in a Kovno bank, threw himself at one of the marauding bandits and put out his eyes. Blacksmith Shmuel Katz fought against fascists like a lion. But what could one do in the face of all rifles and machine-guns! And yet he fought for his human dignity till his last breath.

Blacksmith Jitzik Fridman, a Jewish strongman, came out with an axe to meet thugs from the "New Order". Such cases were numerous. Dead bodies of men and women were found at entrances into houses, in cellars, at entrances to those cellars and sheds, where they defended with axes and truncheons approaches to where their families were hiding.

A whole family was massacred in a flat at 10 Arëgalos street. Seriously wounded head of this family, Akiva Pukhert, metal craftsman in Kovno factory "Drobe", managed to write before his death in his own blood on a wall, "Revenge!" his body was found next to this inscription.

The hunt for Soviet people continued in the streets of the city. Captured people were delivered to Kovno prison under a strict guard, and later, when the prison became full - to the Seventh Fort ( one of the forts belonging to the former Kovno fortress). At the end of June about eight thousand men, women and children were gathered here. Women and children were kept under lock in underground cells. People were deprived of food and water; they were not allowed out even to relieve themselves. Both dead and living were lying together.

But people managed to resist even in those conditions. Aaron Vilenchuk and Gilel Mariner, who miraculously survived the terrible massacre in the Seventh Fort, remember several cases of people attacking armed guards with their bare hands.Famous Kovno doctor Boris Hodos ignored the order to stay down without moving and got up. He openly told the bloodthirsty animals in human disguise what they really were. "Your day of reckoning will come!"- he shouted at them. Boris Hodor called on his Jewish fellow- prisoners to resist the fascists. A guardsman opened fire and wounded the brave man. He was "allowed" to die in terrible agony.

Worker Haim Hendle, teacher Moishe Goldman and many others acted in a similar manner. On the first of July, those men who were still alive were shot dead. The fascists' main aim of killing Jewish old and young men during the first days - to weaken the force of possible resistance - was achieved to some extend.

All those events showed the true face of fascism and deeply angered the whole city. Lithuanian doctors Kutorgene, Staugaitis, Alekna, Kairiukshtis, woman-writer Bortkiavichene and others tried to persuade the invaders to stop Jewish pogroms. German leaders warned them against interference in this matter; if they showed compassion for Jews they would finish up sharing their fate.

Many Lithuanians took Jews into their flats thus saving them from executioners. Ionaitis, who lived in 16,Iurates street, hid in his house the persecuted during the worst days of massacre in Villiampole. He kept them there for a week and saved them from all dangers.

Father and son Boruchovich were near their place of execution by fire at a "shaulist house". Woman-worker Brone Lipskiene, wife of a communist, attacked the fascist who was taking them there. She shouted, "Murderers! Bloody dogs!" Risking her life, Brone Lipskiene, gave the two Jews an opportunity to escape.

Worker Stasis Iovaisha of Benedictine Nuns street ( now it is Pakalnes street) warned all passing Jews not to go to Villiampole when pogroms took place there. Iovaisha hid many people at his place and kept them hidden all the time while the massacre went on in the town. Lithuanian writer Kasis Binkis' house was turned into a real Jewish refuge. During the days of the gravest danger the persecuted found a shelter here. The Binkis family shared with them their remaining bread and clothing.

One can cite many more examples of help given to Jews by Russians, Lithuanians and Poles. This help is a living proof that friendship among various Soviet nationalities found its roots during the first year of the Soviet power in Lithuania.

III. IN THE GHETTO

On 10 July a new decree appeared in the streets of Kovno making it compulsory for all Jews to leave the city by 15 July 1941 and to resettle in designated for them quarters of suburb Villiampole.

In order to lure Jews to the designated quarters ( Hitler's officers did not use the word "ghetto" ) they stopped temporarily anti-Jewish acts. Nevertheless, the majority of the Jewish population was not in a hurry to move in there. They hoped that in a little while the old order would come back... And when they started fencing off the Jewish quarters with barbed wire and turning them into a ghetto, people were still convinced: before the fencing would be completed one would have a chance to dismantle it...

On the 26th of September Germans took over 1,000 people - men, women, children - from the ghetto and shot them in the 9th fort. They were accused of attacking a ghetto warden. From that day the 9th fort had become a mass grave for the Jewish population of Kovno. Pits 120-150 metres in length, three metres in width and two metres in depth lay ready to accept thousand of innocent victims. And not only Jews from Kovno ghetto - Lithuanians, Russians, Poles and also whole wagonfuls of people from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France and other European countries (mainly of Jewish origin) were killed in the 9th fort.

As by that time selection of people for forced labour had become a norm, that demand did not cause either concern or suspicion. Yet,only few turned up at the gathering point. Hitler bandits set out to gather the required number of people. 534 people were captured. They were led out of the ghetto under heavy guard. No one from that group returned later home... (* It has become known now that they were shot in the 4th fort).

Among those "five hundred thirty four" killed people were the leader of the Lithuanian State Opera, violinist Robert Stender, famous film director Marek Martens, who had made a number of Jewish films in Poland, engineers Mordhai Klein and Daniel Goldberg, economists Lion Beliatskin and Shmuel Bloch, artist A.Kaplan, journalist Max Volfovich, sportsman Nojahc Blat, director of Kovno furniture factory Shimon Zimmerman and other representatives of Kovno Jewish intelligentsia.

IV. BEHIND BARBED WIRE.

The ghetto was finally fenced off from the rest of the world with the help of high lattice barbed wire and heavy guard. Germans declared territory of two metres on both sides of the barbed wire as a "dead zone". Guards were given an order to shoot without a warning anybody seen in that zone. All chances of meeting non-Jews, buying food from them, receiving medical and other help as well as getting information about the course of war became virtually nil.

Aleksas Miksha technica| shop foreman at rubber factory "Inkaras" - could not forget his former colleagues from work, who lived in dire need. He and his wife frequently came to the fence to pass on necessary things.

Like hungry animals they searched through the narrow winding streets of the old Villiampole and made people open doors and shutters of small bent wooden houses. Feeling still sleepy and tired, dressed in old rags,Jews dragged their aching bodies in the morning dusk. They went to the collection point at the ghetto gates in Arëgalos street. Here they formed groups which were sent to various places. Counted and formed into ranks of four (later also five), these groups under armed guard were taken to their place of work.

The biggest number of Jews were taken to do heavy manual work at Kovno airfield. Hungry and poorly dressed they dug ground, pushed trolleys, carried stones, bricks, iron in strong winds, severe frosts and heavy rain. Guards armed with rifles and supervisors armed with whips oversaw the work. Nevertheless, the work proceeded slowly and as soon as supervisors left their posts even for a short while, the Jews stopped working altogether.

The ghetto gates were always the most dangerous place there. Often brutal Germans killed people for little reason. They killed if numbers of those sent to work were insufficient or because a guard did not like the way Jews were passing through the gates. They even killed for no reason at all - by shooting into a crowd of people who simply happened to be there.

On the evening of 22nd of September one of the guards at the ghetto gates "greeted" with shots a group of people returning from work on the construction of a garage in Kiastutis street. The "occasion" was "Rosh Gashan" (Jewish New Year). Seven Jews were shot dead, one - Klugman, escapee from Warsaw - was buried alive.

Germans called their extermination of Jews from the ghetto "action". Actions in Kovno ghetto followed one after another. On 4th of October 1941 around 3 thousand people without work permits were arrested in the "little ghetto" ( a separate part of Kovno ghetto). They were sent in large groups to the 9th fort. Residents from an old people's home and orphans from a children's home were sent there by lorries too. During this action ghetto hospital with all the patients and medical staff still in it was burnt down.

Kovno ghetto residents remember the events of 28th of October as "the big action". On that day on gestapo orders all Jewish population were lead into Democrat Square for an "inspection of ghetto workforce". After a process of selection, which was accompanied by terrifying scenes, 11 thousand people were sent to the infamous 9th fort. Remaining people went to the empty ghetto streets not knowing what to do...

But in the very depths of the ghetto forces were growing which could see a way out.

V. RESISTANCE

The following text was taken from the above mentioned "struggle programme":

"...Jewish people together with all Soviet people are burning with desire to fight fascist murderers. There is already a basis for organising Jewish masses in their fight with the invaders in the ghetto. They simply need an organisation which is capable of preparing and leading people in an open fight with the enemy..."

The formation of the organisation began during the first days of the ghetto. It was done on the initiative of a number of communists and non-party bolsheviks who acted independently.

Communist Haim Yelin, young writer and former public activist in bourgeois Lithuania, lived in the ghetto in a flat at 18,Baioru street under the name of Haim Kadisson.

As a student at Kovno university Haim Yelin established links with underground activists. Haim Yelin performed various tasks on the orders of the banned Lithuanian Communist party: he gave speeches at various meetings, open debates, literary evenings, does underground work. In 1937 he was a delegate at the First World Jewish Congress of Culture in Paris.

Haim Yelin could not openly appear in the ghetto. Hitlerites sought him everywhere in Kovno. In order to avoid recognition Yelin grew beard and frequently wore a bandage across his cheek to give appearance of toothache. Outside his home he kept contacts only with his closest and most reliable friends.

Tireless Alta Boruchovich became group's secretary. She became also group's messenger. She would not be intimidated by the terror in the ghetto. From early morning till late at night she visited her friends in their houses; she knew all their needs. Alta Boruchovich used to find a way to help people before organized help could be arranged. She would get a pair of boots, mend clothing, help to get medicine or food.

The group organized a komsomol cell with Monia Golzberg as its secretary. An important point in the cell's existence was the appearance of a rather primitive radio, which was assembled by its members. This radio could receive only a local station but even from it it was obvious that Hitler's army was already experiencing difficulties in its war with the Soviet Union.

One more cell emerged in the ghetto around communists Mary Lan and Elia Shmuilova, secretary of Kovno city MOPR committee. Mary Lan, a long standing party member, introduced bolshevik principals to their work and passed on her underground work experience. Pesach Shater, Haia Shmuilova, Meilach-Leib Goldschmidt and others were active members of this group. They also supported friends and helped those pioneers who were without their parents, they also incited against carrying out German orders.

Haim Yelin established a link with Komsomol members, former Shalom Aleihem grammar school students. The first meeting between Yelin and Moishe Rubinson, secretary of the group took place in one of the ghetto streets.

It was arranged for Rubinson to approach a man dressed in a winter coat and a hat with its earflaps down and ask him the time. The answer had to be "a quarter to three". Rubinson met a passer-by who had an appearance of a peasant at the agreed spot.

The man was pacing the street to and fro. Rubinson hesitated whether to approach him. Then the passer-by - Haim Yelin - approached the young man and pretending to be mentally handicapped asked, "Is it not a quarter to three now?" The contact was made. Rubinson met Yelin, whom he had known since before the war, a few more times. However, Yelin so masterfully disguised himself that Rubinson was not sure who his contact was. Komsomol members received a plan of action and instructions on how to set up a circle.

Isolated in the ghetto members of separate resistance groups could not know yet that there were headquarters of Lithuanian partisan movement headed by Antanas Snechkus, first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party. This body organized resistance of the population against fascist occupiers. The appeal of October 10, 1941 by the headquarters to the Lithuanian population stated,

"Resist the occupation authorities any way you can, harm them, make it more difficult for them to carry out military operations against the Soviet Union! Set up committees to fight the invaders, attack German military bases and headquarters, damage their transport, hinder its movement, damage telephone and telegraph poles, burn bridges, derail their trains. Destroy, blow up and burn depots and food storehouses of the German army, join the partisans. Give every help to the partisans!

Communists of Lithuania! Be in the forefront of the struggle against the invaders! Give leadership to the masses in their fight against the enemy! May Lithuanian soil burn under the feet of the German occupiers! The victory will be ours!" The leadership of the ghetto resistance movement understood that their main task was establishing contacts and links with the city party organization. A number of courages attempts were made to achieve the aim...

Every minute outside ghetto compound represented a deadly danger to a Jew. But this did not frighten those whose goal was to devote his life to struggle and if needed to sacrifice his life.

Later such links between those groups and separate individuals were established. A basis for a broad military organization headed by communists was set up.

IV.WE ARE PARTISANS

December 31, 1941. It was nearly 8 o'clock. Biting frost. Darkness reigned in the ghetto streets. Only high snow hills looked white in the narrow, interlaced streets of the old town.

Ghetto streets seemed to be deserted. People were allowed to walk in the streets until 8 pm but as soon as darkness fell people did not dare to leave homes. The ghetto plunged into blackness. At times the silence was broken by the sound of shooting. In that darkness lonely figures minced along the streets. They moved in various directions and at certain intervals, but their paths lead them to one place - a small house at the back of a large snow covered courtyard. Two people guarded it by the entrance in the shadow of the fence. Those guys had to meet their guests and to guard illegal gathering which took place in their small flat.

All arrived on time. People sat or stood up in a very small space. Even seriously ill Moishe Sherman could not stay at home that evening; he overcame his illness and got there. All participants arrived but the meeting did not start. Some kind of worried look could be seen on people's faces. It was the third day since Haim Yelin had arrived in the town.He promised to come in order to participate in the first general meeting of the leaders of antifascist ghetto groups. Had any harm come to him? The clock indicated eight o'clock and no walking in the streets was permitted... All were waiting for Haim Yelin to bring latest news from the town and no one was inclined to start the discussion of the agenda without him. The meeting was to set up a united antifascist ghetto organization and draw out an action plan.

Suddenly the door opened and a young tidily dressed peasant of average height squeezed through the door. He took off his fur hat, lowered the high collar of his short fur coat and the gathered recognized Haim Yelin, who had died his hair white and grown long moustache which was pointing up. Yelin had just managed to get through the ghetto fence. The gathered drew a sigh of relief. Smiles appeared on their pale faces.

The meeting started. A unanimous decision was reached - all resistance units joined into one organization. It was necessary to work out an action plan and the rules of the organization, to establish the direction for further action.

A decision was made to continue searching for links with Kovno city Communist party organization and to begin the fight against fascist occupiers under its leadership. They discussed the aims of the movement. Haim Yelin formulated those aims briefly but sufficiently clearly:

- We lived only a year under the Soviet rule. But we remain Soviet citizens! We will not leave the ghetto to its fate, but our main aim is armed struggle among partisans. A member of our organization is a partisan!

The gathered listened to those words with inspiration. "We are partisans!" - This sounds great!

"We are partisans!" - members of the meeting joined in saying those words and took them to all antifascist movement cells.

[Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8]
Sources:
Chaim Bargman: translator Yiddish-Russian (L) with Robin O'Neil: translator Russian - English. Kaunas, Lithuania 2007

ChaimBargman-translator-Yiddish-Russian
Robin O`Neil, MA (1996)--translator Russian-English

OGhIS State Publishing House "Der Emes", Moscow 1948

(photos: GFH, USHMM, & Private Collections)

Copyright H.E.A.R.T 2008 [Page design by Carmelo Lisciotto]

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The Gelpernus Diary - Resistance in the Kovno Ghetto -Revolt & Resistance www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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Resistance in the Kovno Ghetto Chaim Yelin & Dimitri-Ghelpernus - Dimitri-Ghelpernus Author Part 1 "In the Ghetto Grip" I. AMONG THE RUINS When at the beginning of August 1944 Kovno was liberated from the fascist invaders, partisan groups entered the city together with Soviet Army detachments.

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The ghettos buzzed with rumors about the murder of Jews. Most inhabitants, however, found the vague information difficult to absorb, especially in view of the unprecedented nature of the events described. However, resistance groups obtained reliable information about the murders by means of couriers and liaisons outside the ghettos. As the information accumulated, they finally realized that a terrifying campaign of systematic murder, previously unheard of in human history, was being perpetrated. However, they only grasped this awareness after the execution of the deportations from the ghettos, and then they began to prepare for armed resistance.

The war of self-defense was carried out on three levels: armed uprisings in ghettos and camps; escape and smuggling of Jews from towns and ghettos to the forests for partisan warfare; and hiding by individuals in various hiding places, collective rescue efforts, and rescue of children.

Jews were active in the Belgian and French resistance and played a considerable role in the Slovakian uprising that broke out in the summer of 1944. Most Jews who fled to the mountains of Yugoslavia joined Tito's partisan army. Tens of thousands of Jews reached the forests of Belarus and the Ukraine; they helped to establish partisan companies and fought admirably in special Jewish units or in mixed battalions. In Belarus and the Ukraine, family camps were established in the heart of dense forests; the fugitive noncombatant Jews who lived there were fed and protected by Jewish fighters.

Rebellions also took place in the death camps. In August 1943, the uprising in Treblinka broke out. Three groups of prisoners who had been put to work burning bodies and sorting the many victims' belongings killed some of the camp commanders and guards, took over the armory, and set the gas chambers and the camp barracks ablaze. In Sobibor, prisoners rose up and several managed to escape. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, a group of prisoners blew up one of the crematoria.

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The ghettos buzzed with rumors about the murder of Jews. Most inhabitants, however, found the vague information difficult to absorb, especially in view of the unprecedented nature of the events described. However, resistance groups obtained reliable information about the murders by means of couriers and liaisons outside the ghettos.

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Sofka Skipwith was born in 1907 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was the daughter of Prince Peter Alexandrovitch Dolgorouky. Long name right :). Sofka married Leo Zinoveiff. They had two sons Peter...

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Miep Gies was born in 1909 in Vienna. She had a severe case of tuberculosis and poor nutrition. She was then sent to Amsterdam. She had a really positive experience with her foster family. They...

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Hannah Senesh (originally Szenes) was a paratrooper trained to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Captured and killed by the Nazis, she is still a national heroine in Israel.

Senesh dresses up in costume as a Hungarian soldier

Through her brief but noteworthy life, Senesh became a symbol of idealism and self-sacrifice. Her poems, made famous in part because of her unfortunate death, reveal a woman imbued with hope, even in the face of adverse circumstances.

Senesh was born on July 17, 1921, in Budapest, Hungary as the daughter of an author and journalist. She demonstrated her own literary talent from an early age, and she kept a diary from age 13 until shortly before her death. Although her family was assimilated, anti-Semitic sentiment in Budapest led her to involvement in Zionist activities, and she left Hungary for Eretz Yisrael in 1939. She studied first at an agricultural school and then settled at Kibbutz Sdot Yam. While there she wrote poetry, as well as a play about kibbutz life.

In 1943, Senesh joined the British Army and volunteered to be parachuted into Europe. The purpose of this operation was to help the Allied efforts in Europe and establish contact with partisan resistance fighters in an attempt to aid beleaguered Jewish communities. Senesh trained in Egypt and was one of the thirty-three people chosen to parachute behind enemy lines. With the goal of reaching her native Budapest, Senesh parachuted into Yugoslavia in March 1944 and spent three months with Tito's partisans. Her idealism and commitment to her cause are memorialized in her poem "Blessed is the Match," which she wrote at this time.

On June 7, 1944, at the height of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, Senesh crossed the border into Hungary.

She was caught almost immediately by the Hungarian police and tortured cruelly and repeatedly over the next several months. Despite these conditions, Senesh refused to divulge any information about her mission. Even the knowledge that her mother was at risk and that she too might be harmed did not compel Senesh to cooperate with the police. At her trial in October 1944, Senesh staunchly defended her activities, and she refused to request clemency. Throughout her ordeal, she remained steadfast in her courage, and when she was executed by a firing squad on November 7, she refused the blindfold, staring squarely at her executors and her fate. Senesh was only 23 years old.

The following poem was found in Hannah's death cell after her execution:

Senesh's grave stone in Israel

One - two - three... eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark...
Life is a fleeting question mark
One - two - three... maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

In 1950, Senesh's remains were brought to Israel and re-interred at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

Her diary and literary works were later published, and many of her more popular poems have been set to music. The best known of these is "Towards Caesarea," more popularly known today as "My God, My God" with a melody created by David Zahavi and sung by artists including Ofra Haza, Regina Spektor, and Sophie Milman.

Senesh has also been the subject of several artistic works, including a play by Aharon Megged.

Sources: The Pedagogic Center, The Department for Jewish Zionist Education, The Jewish Agency for Israel, (c) 1997-2007, Director: Dr. Motti Friedman, Webmaster: Esther Carciente.

Photo: Gravestone courtesy of Valley2city.

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust-Rescuers

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Rescuers of those whose lives were in danger during the Holocaust are considered in this section of A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust.

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Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social work student who was credited with saving dozens of Jews during the Holocaust, spiriting some to safe houses, hiding others under floorboards, and, in one case, executing a Nazi before he could arrest a family of four, died Dec. 11 in Washington. She was 96.

The cause was cerebral arteriosclerosis, according to her family.

Mrs. Pritchard was recognized in 1981 by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as one of the " righteous among the nations " - those gentiles who, seeking no reward, risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazi dragnet that claimed 6 million lives during World War II.

She was said to have fed, clothed, hidden or otherwise aided as many as 150 people, many of them children. She insisted that she could not have done her work without the assistance, overt or implied, of neighbors, friends and other members of the resistance. She observed, her son Arnold Pritchard recalled, that only rarely if ever during the Holocaust could one person single-handedly save the life of another.

Mrs. Pritchard - then Miss van Binsbergen - was 19 when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She credited her father, a Dutch judge who abhorred the Nazi ideology, and her mother, an Englishwoman who raised her daughter in the Anglican faith, with instilling in her a sense of justice and moral resolve.

The "crucial moment" for her came in 1942, she said, when she was riding her bicycle to her university in Amsterdam and witnessed the liquidation of a home for Jewish children. Deportation of Jews from the Netherlands began that year and would continue into 1944. Of 107,000 Jews taken away, all but 5,200 would perish. Less than 25 percent of Dutch Jewry survived the Holocaust, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"It was a beautiful spring morning, and it was a street I had known since I had been born, and all of a sudden you see little kids picked up by their pigtails or by a leg and thrown over the side of a truck," Mrs. Pritchard said in an interview published in the volume "Voices From the Holocaust" by Harry James Cargas. "You stop but you can't believe it."

She watched two women attempt to stop the soldiers, only to be put in the truck with the children. At that moment, she said, she committed herself to fighting Nazi persecution in whatever way possible.

Along with about 10 friends, she helped obtain false identity documents and hiding places to help Jews evade arrest. Despite severe food shortages, they scrounged up extra ration cards and provisions. She put her social work training to use by finding host families to take in Jewish children and prepare the families for the perils they faced.

At times, she performed what was known as the "mission of disgrace," falsely declaring herself to be the unwed mother of a baby to conceal the child's Jewish identity. A toddler spent several months with her before she found a safer home outside Amsterdam.

For nearly three years, Mrs. Pritchard cared for a Jewish man, Fred Polak, and his two young sons and infant daughter, taking up residence in the country home of an acquaintance where they were hidden. In case of a Nazi roundup, they perfected a routine by which the father and his children could slip beneath the floorboards within 17 seconds. They gave the baby sleeping pills to prevent her from crying.

One day, three Germans and a Dutch policeman came to search the house and left, having failed to detect the hideaway. Shortly thereafter, the Dutchman, who nonetheless suspected that something was awry, returned and discovered the hideout. Before he could make an arrest, Mrs. Pritchard grabbed a small revolver that she had kept for such an emergency and fatally shot him.

"I would do it again, under the same circumstances," she told an interviewer years later, "but it still bothers me."

She credited a local undertaker with helping dispose of the corpse by burying it with another body in a coffin. "I just hope that the family would have approved," she said.

Marion Philippina van Binsbergen was born in Amsterdam on Nov. 7, 1920. She grew up mainly in the Netherlands but traveled frequently to England, where she attended boarding school.

When the war broke out, she was studying social work at the University of Amsterdam. She was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned for seven months after being caught at a meeting where students were transcribing Allied radio broadcasts for dissemination. Until then, "I always thought I had my mother's ability to ignore fear," she remarked, according to the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

She said it was perhaps easier for her than for others to face the dangers of rescue work, her son recalled, because she was not married at the time and did not have children of her own: She was risking no life but her own.

Among the most famous Jews who sought refuge in the Netherlands were the German-born diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot. Mrs. Pritchard told the Los Angeles Times that she met them by chance at a birthday party before they went into hiding and were ultimately discovered, deported and murdered.

After the war, Mrs. Pritchard became a United Nations social worker in displaced-persons camps. Through those assignments, she met her husband, Anton Pritchard, a former U.S. Army officer. In 1947, they were married in one of the camps.

The Pritchards settled in Waccabuc, N.Y., and later in Vershire, Vt. Mrs. Pritchard continued her social service work in the United States, helping refugee families. She graduated from what is now the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and ran a psychoanalysis practice for several decades. In 2006, she moved to Washington.

Her husband died in 1991. Survivors include three sons, Arnold Pritchard of New Haven, Conn., Brian Pritchard of Los Angeles and Ivor Pritchard of Washington; eight grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

Mrs. Pritchard's wartime story was chronicled in books including " Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust " by Eva Fogelman and the documentary "The Courage to Care" (1985).

"Most of us were brought up to tell [the] truth, to obey the secular law and the Ten Commandments," she said in a 1996 lecture. "By 1945, I had stolen, cheated, deceived, and even killed."

She attributed her morals to her parents, who she said had treated her with "respect and consideration from the time" she was born. "As a result," she observed, "I grew up treating other people the same way."

Erica Polak, a Dutch psychologist, was the infant girl who survived the war in the countryside shelter with her father and brothers, thanks to Mrs. Pritchard's efforts.

"My whole family is so grateful to her," she wrote in an email after her rescuer died, "no words will ever be enough to describe that deep gratitude we feel."

Read more Washington Post obituaries

Nicholas Winton, rescuer of children during the Holocaust, dies at 106

Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and memory keeper of the Holocaust, dies at 87

Was Anne Frank's family betrayed? After 72 years, historians have a new theory.

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Marion Pritchard, Dutch rescuer of Jewish children during the Holocaust, dies at 96

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Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social work student who was credited with saving dozens of Jews during the Holocaust, spiriting some to safe houses, hiding others under floorboards, and, in one case, executing a Nazi before he could arrest a family of four, died Dec. 11 in Washington. She was 96.

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It was a seemingly simple document-a brief 1944 letter with text in German and Hungarian that declared that a Jewish woman from Budapest, was under the protection of the Swiss Legation. But for Maria Magdalena Grausz, it meant freedom.

Grausz and over 60,000 other Hungarian Jews were saved from deportation to concentration camps by similar letters, all issued by a diplomat named Carl Lutz. Credited with saving half of Budapest's Jewish population from t he Holocaust, Lutz used paper, not weapons, to fight the Nazis.

Born in Switzerland, Lutz immigrated to the United States as a young man. Then, he became a diplomat, eventually serving at the Swiss Consulate in Mandatory Palestine. Lutz, a strict Methodist, was then transferred to Budapest.

At the time, Hungary was one of the Axis powers aligned with Nazi Germany. Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy had passed laws restricting the activities and movements of Hungarian Jews. During the early parts of the war, the Hungarian Army committed anti-Jewish pogroms and more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews were forced to work on the battle front in hellish conditions. However, Horthy refused to let Hungarian Jews be deported to extermination camps by the Nazis.

Lutz represented countries that had cut off their diplomatic relations with Hungary because of its German alliance. Troubled by Jews' precarious situation in Hungary, Lutz began to work with the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a group that helped European Jews get entry to British Palestine. Thousands of of Jews, including 10,000 children, left Hungary with Swiss documents issued by Lutz.

Then, in 1944, things got even worse. When Hitler learned that Horthy had been trying to find a way out of his Axis alliance, he toppled Horthy and put the Arrow Cross Party-a political party that consisted of Hungarian Nazis-in charge. The party began a reign of terror throughout Hungary, forcing Jews into ghettos, deporting them to death camps, and murdering them outright.

Lutz was horrified and tried to negotiate a way to stop the deportations. Against all odds, he got permission to issue protective documents for 8,000 Jews-a tiny fraction of Hungary's 800,000 Jews-to flee to Palestine under Swiss protection.

He'd only been given permission to issue 8,000 letters, but in an attempt to save as many Jews as possible, Lutz interpreted that mandate as applying to families, not individual people. He issued more and more protective letters, all numbered one to 8000, and members of the Zionist youth underground forged thousands more.

As the Arrow Cross rampaged throughout Budapest, people with Lutz-issued documents crowded into safe houses he helped organize. To prevent them from being raided, Lutz extended Swiss protection to 76 buildings. One of them, a department store called the Glass House, served as a refuge for up to 3,000 Jews and a headquarters for the Zionist underground.

Chaos swirled throughout Hungary as 440,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a two-month period. Others were shot point-blank and thrown into the Danube by the Arrow Cross-and at one point, Lutz even jumped into the river to save a bleeding woman by invoking his Swiss diplomatic powers. But miraculously, Jews with Lutz-issued papers weren't targeted.

"The Germans are very correct people," said Eric Saul, founder and executive director of Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project. "They admire discipline and order. So when Nazi commandants saw these letters, they accepted them." Despite pushback from Nazi and Hungarian officials, he kept working to save more and more Jews.

Then, in November 1944, the Arrow Cross assembled 70,000 Jews and forced them on a death march to various concentration camps in Austria and Germany. Carl Luz and his wife followed along. As the grueling marches continued, they'd pull people out of line whenever an opportunity presented itself, issuing protective documents and taking them under their wing.

"For these people it was the last glimmer of hope, for us, this...was the worst form of spiritual torture," Lutz later recalled. "We saw the people being lashed with dog-whips and lying in the slime and mud with bloody faces....Whenever possible I would drive alongside these people on their way to the concentration camps to try and show them that there was still hope."

By the end of World War II, 565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered. But though the efforts of Lutz and his co-conspirators, which included diplomats from other countries and Zionist underground members, 62,000 Jews-half of the Jewish population of Budapest-were saved. It's still unclear how many Jews made it to Budapest safe houses or how many passes were issued or forged.

After the war, Lutz divorced his first wife and married Maria Magdalena Grausz, the woman he helped save in July 1944. He returned to Switzerland-but not to accolades or acclaim.

Today, Lutz's heroism is clear. But after World War II ended, his actions weren't celebrated. Switzerland criticized him for overstepping his diplomatic authority, investigated his wartime activities, and blocked his career advancement.

Eventually, his reputation was rehabilitated. But though Lutz has been compared to Oskar Schindler and other Gentiles who used their connections to save Jews, he's still relatively unknown. Lutz didn't do it for fame, though: As his stepdaughter Agnes Hirschi says, "The laws of life are stronger than man-made laws....My father always considered his time in Budapest and the rescue of innocent Jews as the most important part of his life."

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The Diplomat Who Saved Thousands of Jews During the Holocaust | HISTORY

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Carl Lutz managed to save half of Budapest's Jewish population by exploiting the Nazi's respect for paperwork.

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During the Holocaust, countless Jewish organizations and individuals worldwide did what they could to save their brethren. While these rescue efforts were initiated by Jews, most would have had little success without the assistance of numerous sympathetic non-Jews.

Rescue of Children

Organized actions to rescue children began even before the onset of World War II. The Youth Aliyah (a movement founded for the transfer of Jewish children from Germany to Palestine), under the auspices of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, managed to bring more than 14,000 unaccompanied children to Palestine and Britain between 1933 and 1945. In Great Britain, an umbrella group known as the Movement for the Care of Children organized the travel and shelter of over 10,000 central European Jewish refugee children between December 1938 and September 1939. Since these children traveled without their parents, the operation became known as the Kindertransport.

In France, three Jewish organizations made organized attempts to rescue children. The best known was Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Children's Aid Society; OSE). Others active in this area were the Eclaireurs Israelites de France (a Jewish scouting movement) and the Mouvement des Jeunesses Sionistes (a Zionist youth movement). Operating nationwide, members of these groups used their institutions to provide hiding places for Jewish children, especially for more vulnerable foreign refugees. They also arranged the release of children from internment camps, and then smuggled them to safety in Switzerland or Spain. On a local level in France, similar activities were carried out by the Comite rue Amelot, the Jewish Communist "Solidarite" organization in Paris, the Service Andres group in Marseille, and the Groupe Maurice Cachoud in Nice, which specialized in secretly transporting children to refuge in Switzerland. Thanks to these efforts, as many as 12,000-15,000 Jewish children were saved from deportation and almost certain death.

Escape via the Far East

Escape via East Asia was an option that saved the lives of thousands of Polish Jewish refugees in Lithuania. Organized by Zionist leader Zorah Warhaftig, many refugees were able to obtain transit visas from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, as well as from sympathetic Dutch diplomats. They then had to negotiate with Soviet authorities to obtain exit visas. Armed with this documentation, some 2,178 Polish Jewish refugees entered Japan between October 1940 and August 1941. Most of them were subsequently sent to Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China, where they remained for the duration of the war.

Efforts by the Yishuv

The Yishuv (Jewish settlement in Palestine) sent 37 parachutists into Europe to aid Jews under Nazi oppression. The Nazis caught and shot seven of the parachutists, including Hannah Szenes (in Hungary), Haviva Reik (in Slovakia), and Enzo Sereni (in Germany).

The Yishuv also organized "illegal" immigration to Palestine, in an ongoing operation known as Aliyah Bet. Zionist groups, especially their youth components, facilitated the migration of both individuals and small groups from Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw, among other places. Initially, the Aliyah Bet ships left from Greek ports. Later, the main route was by boat down the Danube River, via the Black Sea, to the Mediterranean. These voyages, which became more difficult once the war began, were carried out under the auspices of two rival political organizations in Palestine: the Labor Zionists and the right-wing Revisionists.

Despite the dangers, 62 such voyages were carried out from 1937 to 1944. From January 1939 to December 1944, 18,879 Jews reached Palestine by sea. Some 1,393 documented travelers are not known to have reached Palestine and may have drowned en route.

After World War II, the Jewish Brigade Group and former partisans organized the Brihah, the mass exodus of 250,000 refugees to Palestine. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency of Palestine provided substantial aid to Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps.

Ransom of Jews

There were several attempts to rescue Jews by offers of money to the authorities.

In Slovakia, the "Working Group," a secret Jewish rescue organization headed by Zionist women's leader Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, offered a bribe to SS Captain Dieter Wisliceny, Adolf Eichmann's deputy in the SS Jewish section and the official supervising the deportation of Slovak Jews in 1942. There is no definitive evidence that the deportations from Slovakia were halted because of the bribe, although it may have influenced the decision. More certain is that the Working Group's bribes of Slovak officials helped lead to the opening in 1942 of Novaky, Sered, and Vyhne-three forced-labor camps to which Jews could be deported and remain in comparative safety, rather than to extermination camps. In this way as many as 4,000 Slovak Jews were saved from certain death. In a strategy known as the "Europa Plan," members of the Working Group also attempted to raise $2-3 million from Jews of the free world to pay the Nazis to cease deportations to the killing centers.

In Hungary, the Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest was founded in 1941 and was involved in various efforts to save Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian Jews. In 1943, the group became a recognized arm of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. In May 1944, following the German occupation of Hungary, they approached SS officers Adolf Eichmann (one of the central figures in the "Final Solution") and Kurt Becher. It is believed that Eichmann offered to " exchange" one million Jews for certain unspecified goods. While the deal was never finalized, due to Allied objections, the Committee's negotiators eventually persuaded the Nazis to allow a transport of 1,684 Hungarian Jews to leave Budapest on June 30, 1944. After a short stay in Bergen-Belsen, these Jews reached Switzerland.

Rescue of Rabbis

In November 1939, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States established the "Va'ad ha-Hatsala" (Rescue Committee), a relief and rescue agency whose express purpose was to save European rabbis, yeshiva (rabbinical academy) students, and other orthodox Jews. In 1940-1941, the Va'ad assisted in the emigration of approximately 650 rabbis and students from Lithuania to the United States, Palestine, central Asia, and Shanghai.

In 1942, after the revelation of the mass murder of European Jewry, the Va'ad engaged in political activity designed to rescue Jews under Nazi occupation. Some 400 American rabbis staged a protest march in Washington, DC, on October 6, 1943. During 1944-1945, the Va'ad, through its branches in Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, and Tangier, launched efforts to rescue Jews. One of the most successful of these was the rescue of 1,220 Jews from Theresienstadt. As a result of negotiations between Swiss politician Jean Marie Musy (sponsored by the Va'ad) and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, these prisoners were released to Switzerland in February 1945.

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During the Holocaust, countless Jewish organizations and individuals worldwide did what they could to save their brethren. While these rescue efforts were initiated by Jews, most would have had little success without the assistance of numerous sympathetic non-Jews. Organized actions to rescue children began even before the onset of World War II.

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Through Yad Vashem's fine "Righteous Among the Nations" project, Israel and the Jewish People have, since 1963, aptly recognized non-Jews who saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust while imperiling themselves.

But while the deeds of these 19,000 well-deserving non-Jews, who placed the lives of other human beings before their own well-being during those dark years in Europe, have been intensely researching, acknowledged and commemorated over, the Jewish People have largely ignored individual Jews and Jewish organizations who, during the same period, went beyond the call of duty to save the lives of fellow Jews. Like the many non-Jews who have been recognized over the years for their heroism, these Jews knowingly put themselves in danger to help save their brethren - in many cases doing so even when they themselves had the opportunity to flee the Nazi persecutions and thus be saved. These people operated in the same countries and localities as many of the Righteous Among the Nations, participating and sometimes leading the rescue operations and putting themselves in the greatest of dangers as Jews. Many paid for their efforts with their lives.
The stories of three of these outstanding individuals can exemplify the phenomenon:

Zerah Wahrhaftig, working under adverse conditions in Lithuania, exploited false "visas" to Dutch protectorates in the Caribbean to extract thousands of Jews via Russia to Japan with the help of the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara and his Dutch colleague Zwartendijk.

Tuvya Beilski built a viable settlement - including public kitchen, medical clinic, hospital, bakery, flourmill, bathhouse, stables, schools and more - hidden in the harsh Belarus forest. By the end of the war, 1200 Jews who escaped from ghettos in the vicinity found refuge in what became know as "Beilski's Shtetl."

Mussa Abadi and Odette Abadi-Rosenstock picked up Jewish children in Nice and Cannes, France, whose parents had already been deported or were in hiding. With the assistance of the Bishop of Nice Paul Raymond they found hiding places for the children and provided them with forged ID and baptismal certificates. 527 children were saved by the Abadis.

A small number of these rescuers are still alive in Israel and around the world. Some of them remain reluctant till today to recount their stories. Their satisfaction remains in the knowledge that through subterfuge, cunning and bravery they were able to overcome the Germans and their collaborators and save Jews - in the tens, hundreds and sometimes even in the thousands. Today, their heroism goes largely unknown and unrecognized. Ironically, 57 years after these events, no framework has yet been established to pay tribute to these unsung heroes, nor has the subject of Jewish rescuers been studied in a comprehensive manner by the academic world. Indeed, as concluded by the eminent Holocaust historian Nechama Tec "While there were Jews who selflessly rescued others, as a subject of systematic study they have remained unnoticed." ("Reflections on Rescuers", in The Holocaust and History, ed. M. Berenbaum and A. Peck, Indiana University Press and US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998, paperback 2002. p. 657). Tec herself asks accusingly, "Why had I overlooked the rescue of Jews by Jews? Did I think that self-preservation, as a basic drive, would take precedence over everything else? Historically, Jews have been viewed as victims, and not as rescuers, not as heroes. Had I unconsciously assimilated these perceptions? Had I assumed that victim and rescuer were incompatible roles?" (Ibid.)

In recognition of the need to break with years of virtual silence on this issue, a group of Holocaust survivors from Holland, France, Germany and other countries who were themselves saved by the efforts of Jews, together with a number of Jewish rescuers and representatives of international Jewish organizations, established in 2000 in Jerusalem the "Action Committee for the Recognition of Jewish Rescuers." Since its founding, the Committee has been engaged since then in numerous initiatives aimed at bringing this little-known chapter in Holocaust history to the attention of the general public These activities include the ongoing compilation of their stories, contacts with Holocaust commemoration and research institutions, outreach to the media, meetings with appropriate government and elected representatives etc. The Committee, an all-volunteer body, has also been the catalyst of activities at Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Memorial and other institutions on the issue of Jewish rescue. Making the lessons of Jewish resistance - armed and unarmed - relevant for Jewish youth today is a major motivation behind the activities of the Action Committee.

As time progresses, fewer and fewer of these rescuers remain alive and all efforts must be made to unearth their stories before it is too late. The Action Committee seeks to promote in various ways the commemoration and awareness of the courageous activities undertaken by Jewish rescuers. This includes the incorporation of Jewish rescue in school Holocaust studies curricula - a project which is of particular relevance because many of the rescuers were themselves school-age youths at the time - along with greater academic research into this area. It is imperative that these events become part of the Jewish ethos of courageous resistance to oppression and persecution.

In honor of those who risked their lives to save others, the Action Committee is working to ensure that the heroism shown by Jews who helped their fellow Jews to survive through a time of unspeakable horror, will find its rightful place in the vast compendium of tragic events that took place during the Holocaust. As the surviving rescuers age and pass along, we owe it to them to act without delay.

The working Committee,

Haim Roet (Chair)
P.O. Box 8257
91082 Jerusalem, ISRAEL
Tel. 02-563 1199
Fax 02-566 2283
roetbgs@netvision.net.il

Ilana Drukker
P.O. Box 8504
91084 Jerusalem, ISRAEL
Tel. 02-563 9570
Fax 02-561 1177
leentje@netvision.net.il

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Through Yad Vashem's fine "Righteous Among the Nations" project, Israel and the Jewish People have, since 1963, aptly recognized non-Jews who saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust while imperiling themselves.

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Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust presented a host of difficulties. The Allied prioritization of "winning the war" and the lack of access to those who needed rescue hampered major rescue operations. Individuals willing to help Jews in danger faced severe consequences if they were caught, and formidable logistics of supporting people in hiding. Finally, hostility towards Jews among non-Jewish populations, especially in eastern Europe, was a daunting obstacle to rescue.

Rescue took many forms.

Denmark

German-occupied Denmark was the site of the most famous and complete rescue operation in Axis-controlled Europe. In late summer 1943, German occupation authorities imposed martial law on Denmark in response to increasing acts of resistance and sabotage. German Security Police officials planned to deport the Danish Jews while martial law was in place. On September 28, 1943, a German businessman warned Danish authorities of the impending operation, scheduled for the night of October 1-2, 1943. With the help of their non-Jewish neighbors and friends, virtually all the Danish Jews went into hiding. During the following days, the Danish resistance organized a rescue operation, in which Danish fishermen clandestinely ferried some 7,200 Jews (of the country's total Jewish population of 7,800) in small fishing boats, to safety in neutral Sweden.

German-Occupied Poland

In the so-called Generalgouvernement (German-occupied Poland), some Poles provided assistance to Jews. For instance, Zegota (code name for Rada Pomocy Zydom, the Council for Aid to Jews), a Polish underground organization that provided for the social welfare needs of Jews, began operations in September 1942. Although members of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa-AK) and the communist Polish People's Army (Armia Ludowa-AL) assisted Jewish fighters by attacking German positions during the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943, the Polish underground provided few weapons and only a small amount of ammunition to Jewish fighters. From the beginning of the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center in late July 1942 until the German occupiers leveled Warsaw in the autumn of 1944 after suppressing the Home Army uprising, as many as 20,000 Jews were living in hiding in Warsaw and its environs with the help of Polish civilians.

Religious Backgrounds

Rescuers came from every religious background: Protestant and Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim. Some European churches, orphanages, and families provided hiding places for Jews, and in some cases, individuals aided Jews already in hiding (such as Anne Frank and her family in the Netherlands). In France, the Protestant population of the small village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered between 3,000 and 5,000 refugees, most of them Jews. In France, Belgium, and Italy, underground networks run by Catholic clergy and lay Catholics saved thousands of Jews. Such networks were especially active both in southern France, where Jews were hidden and smuggled to safety to Switzerland and Spain, and in northern Italy, where many Jews went into hiding after Germans occupied Italy in September 1943.

Individuals

A number of individuals also used their personal influence to rescue Jews. In Budapest, the capital of German-occupied Hungary, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (who was also an agent of the US War Refugee Board), Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, and Italian citizen Giorgio Perlasca (posing as a Spanish diplomat), provided tens of thousands of Jews in 1944 with certification that they were under the "protection" of neutral powers. These certifications exempted the bearers from most anti-Jewish measures decreed by the Hungarian government, including deportation to the Greater German Reich. Each of these rescuers worked closely with members of the Budapest Jewish communities. For example, Perlasca, whose credentials were the most vulnerable to challenge, worked closely with Otto Komoly and the Szamosis-Laszlo and Eugenia-to obtain protective papers and shelter for scores of Jews in Budapest.

The Sudeten German industrialist Oskar Schindler took over an enamelware factory located outside the Krakow ghetto in German-occupied Poland. He later protected over a thousand Jewish workers employed there from deportation to Auschwitz.

The deportation of more than 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace, Macedonia, and Pirot to Treblinka in March 1943 by the Bulgarian military and police authorities shocked and shamed key political, intellectual, and religious figures in Bulgaria into an open protest against any deportations from Bulgaria proper. The protest action, which included members of the government's own ruling party, induced the Bulgarian King, Boris III, to reverse the decision of his government to comply with the German request to deport the Jews of Bulgaria. As a result of Boris' decision, the Bulgarian authorities did not deport any Jews from Bulgaria proper.

Other non-Jews sought to expose Nazi plans to murder the Jews. Among them was Jan Karski, a courier for the London-based Polish government-in-exile to the non-communist underground movements. Karski met with Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto and in the Izbica transit ghetto in late summer of 1942. He transmitted their reports of mass killings in the Belzec killing center to Allied leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he met in July 1943.

Groups

Some US-based groups engaged in rescue efforts. The Quakers' American Friends Service Committee, the Unitarians, and other groups coordinated relief activities for Jewish refugees in France, Portugal, and Spain throughout the war. A variety of US-based organizations (both religious and secular, Jewish and non-Jewish) cooperated in securing entry visas into the United States and arranging placement and, in some cases, eventual repatriation for around 1,000 unaccompanied Jewish refugee children between 1934 and 1942.

Choices in Extreme Circumstances

Whether they saved a thousand people or a single life, those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust demonstrated the possibility of individual choice even in extreme circumstances. These and other acts of conscience and courage, however, saved only a tiny percentage of those targeted for destruction.

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

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Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust presented a host of difficulties. The Allied prioritization of "winning the war" and the lack of access to those who needed rescue hampered major rescue operations. Individuals willing to help Jews in danger faced severe consequences if they were caught, and formidable logistics of supporting people in hiding.

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Aharon Liebeskind was born in Zabierzow, a village near Krakow in 1912, and he studied law at Krakow University. In 1938 he became secretary of the Akiva movement, which he had joined at the age of fourteen. In early 1939 he was appointed national secretary of Akiva and went to live in Warsaw, although he kept his home in Krakow as well, and continued to lead the movement there.

As well as the above commitments he also managed to complete his doctoral dissertation. His job kept him in Warsaw until the outbreak of the war. From the outset of the German occupation of Poland, Liebeskind was convinced that the Jews would not be able to live under the Nazis, and he did all he could to get the members of his movement out of Poland.

Liebeskind was a charismatic figure, much admired by his fellow members and followers. He did not accept an immigration certificate to Palestine for himself, so as not to abandon his family and followers during these dark times.

In December 1940 Liebeskind was put in charge of an agricultural and vocational training programme in the Krakow area, sponsored by the Jewish Self-Help Society, which had it's headquarters in Krakow.

He utilised his position to promote the activities of the Jewish underground in the city, which he had founded and led. Using the society's official stationery, he distributed leaflets and arranged money transfers to the members of the underground.

Liebeskind also arranged for the financing of the Kopaliny training farm, headed by Shimshon Draenger, which served as a cover for underground operations. His post enabled him to move around and thereby to maintain and strengthen contact with fellow members in various locations.

Having learned about the mass murder of Jews in the Chelmno killing center and the deportations from Cracow to the Belzec death camp in June 1942, the Jewish fighters decided to respond with armed resistance against the Nazis.

Using couriers like Hela Schüpper, the leaders of this group established contact with other Jewish resistance groups in Warsaw, Tarnow, and Rzeszow, obtained valuable information, and smuggled weapons back into the ghetto. They sent commando groups out into the nearby forests to link up with the partisans and set up a forgery workshop, under Shimson Draenger, to create false papers and documents.

He is credited with saying that, "the Jewish fighters are fighting for three lines in history." He initiated the established of a broadly based fighting organisation in Krakow, forging ties with the other leaders of the He- Haluts (pioneer) youth organisations in the city.

An especially close tie existed between Liebeskind and Avraham Leibovich (Laban) of the Dror movement, and the two became the commanders of the resistance organisation, the Fighting Organisation of the Pioneering Jewish Youth (He-Haluts ha-Lohem).

In October 1942, the two resistance groups joined together to form the Jewish Fighting Organization (JFO). In the months that followed, the JFO operated outside the ghetto, sabotaging rail lines, raiding German warehouses, and attacking German soldiers and security police.

On December 22, the Jewish fighters carried out their boldest plan-a series of attacks on German forces throughout the city. Members of the JFO were to throw grenades into three cafés where German officers congregated, sabotage army and police vehicles, distribute anti-Nazi leaflets, raise Polish flags on the bridges over the Vistula, and assassinate German soldiers throughout the city.

At the Cyganeria café, the fighters killed at least seven German officers and wounded many more.

In the wake of these attacks, German authorities launched a massive manhunt to find the resistance fighters and Leibovich was captured by the Germans in December 1942, was taken with other Jewish resistance fighters on the 29 April 1943 by trucks to the Plaszow Labour Camp.

During the short drive from the prison to the Labour Camp they were able to escape from the truck. Most of them were murdered by machined-gun fire.

Among the few who escaped being shot was Avraham Leibovich, but he was recaptured and taken to Plaszow and killed.

Since the Gestapo began its major endeavor to pursue him, Liebeskind and the organisation's headquarters moved to the "Aryan" part of the city in November of 1942.

From there he renewed contact with the Polish Communist Workers Party (PPR) - which had been broken off in the wake of an abortive attempt made in September 1942 to leave the Krakow ghetto and take refuge in the forests - and with its Jewish unit, commanded by Heshek (Zvi) Bauminger.

Liebeskind aim was to launch a large-scale attack on the Germans inside Krakow. On the 22 December 1942, He-Haluts ha-Lohem and the Jewish unit of the PPR attacked German targets in Krakow.

They inflicted many casualties on the Germans, but following the attack, the headquarters and most of the members of He-Haluts ha- Lohem fell into German hands.

On the 24 December 1942 Liebeskind was caught in the headquarters bunker and killed in a hand-to-hand fight.
Sources:
Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust

The Holocaust, by Sir Martin Gilbert, published by Collins London 1986

Hilberg, Raul. " The Destruction of the European Jews " Yale University Press, 2003 edition.
US National Archives

Copyright: Anthony Skelton & Victor Smart H.E.A.R.T 2008

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Aharon Liebeskind, Jewish Underground Leader - Revolt & Resistance www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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The story of Pinkus Kartin - Revolt & Resistance www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Jannetje Johanna (Jo) Schaft (1920 -1945) was a Dutch resistance fighter during World War 11. Her secret name in the resistance movement was Hannie and she became known as The Girl with Red Hair.

As a law student she became friends with a number of Jewish students and opposed Nazi persecution. She refused to sign the declaration supporting the Nazi occupation of Holland and instead became a member of the Dutch resistance movement, helping people escape the Nazis. Initially nvolved in the distribution of illegal resistance newsletters and the theft of ID cards, which she'd turn over to her Jewish friends, she later also carried out attacks on Germans, collaborators and traitors.

On 17 April, 1945, seven weeks before the liberation of Holland, she was captured at a military checkpoint in possession of underground pamphlets and a pistol. Realising that they now had in custody the resistance member who had been on their hit list, the Nazis ignored the agreement that had been reached with the Dutch authorities to stop executions.

Three weeks before the end of the war she was taken to the sand dunes of Bloemendaal by a Dutch driver, three German soldiers and the Dutch detective, Maarten Kuijper. The 24 year old Hannie, Kuijper and German Mattheus Schmitz led their prisoner into the dunes, a man with the shovel bringing up the rear. Schmitz, walking a few paces Hannie, drew his pistol and fired, causing her to cry out in pain from a wound to the head but not fall. She said to the men in front of her "I could shoot better". Kuijper then levelled a machine gun at her and shot her dead. Kuijper then helped the others bury the body in a shallow grave.

After the war, in these dunes the remains of 422 resistance people were found, 421 men and one woman, Hannie Schaft.

Hannie Schaft was reburied at the honorary cemetery at the dunes in Overeen in the presence of Princess Juliana and her husband Prince Bernard. Later, as queen, Juliana unveiled a bronze commemorative statue in the Kenau Park in nearby Haarlem, her birthplace. Hannie Schaft also received the 'Wilhelmina resistance cross' and a US decoration.

Because Hannie had been a member of a Communist resistance movement cell, the one she thought was doing the most to oppose the Nazis, she is generally identified as having been a communist. With the increased involvement of the US in Europe post WW2 and the escalating opposition to communism, her popularity decreased for a period to the point that the commemoration at Hannie's grave was forbidden in 1951. Today there are schools and streets named after her and she is remembered each year in November during a national event in Haarlem, Holland, where she was born and raised.

Kuiper was one of the major betrayers of Jews in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Holland and arrested Anne Frank and her family. It is now believed by some authors and historians that Kuiper was both the arresting officer and the betrayer of the Franks, that it was he who made the anonymous phone call in 1944 which led the Gestapo and Dutch security police to the concealed annexe in a canalside house where Anne Frank and her family had hidden for almost two years. It is believed that Kuiper learned of the Frank family being in hiding from a Dutch Nazi by the name of Ahler, a former business associate of Otto Frank, who was also a paid informant.

Maarten Kuiper was sentenced to death by a Dutch court and executed on 30 August 1948.

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Jannetje Johanna (Jo) Schaft (1920 -1945) was a Dutch resistance fighter during World War 11. Her secret name in the resistance movement was Hannie and she became known as The Girl with Red Hair. As a law student she became friends with a number of Jewish students and opposed Nazi persecution.

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The Story of Abba Kovner - Revolt & Resistance www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Nachum Remba was born in Kolna, Poland in 1910, into a prominent Zionist family, Remba spent most of his adult life as a communal worker. Prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Remba was the secretary of the education department of the Warsaw Kehililla, the official administrative body of the Warsaw Jewish community.

Although himself an employee of the Warsaw Judenrat, he did not hesitate to join a committee to combat corrupt Judenrat practices and he secretly organised some of the Judenrat employees into an association of which he was chairman.

He then pointed out to the German officers Jews he claimed were too ill to make the journey east, and demanded that he be permitted to take them into the "hospital."

Jonas Turkow, the well-known Jewish actor whom Remba had rescued in this manner, described what the Umschlagplatz looked like during the height of the deportation

"Huge throngs of people are being pushed toward the barbed wires that divide the place in two. On the ground lie wounded men, women and children, valises, all kinds of possessions, bedding, prayer shawls, phylacteries, food packages and single shoes lost by some who were caught in the round-up.

Police officers are running back and forth with orders from the little "Napoleon" (chief of the ghetto police - Lejkin), and the convert Schmerling, who is " Platz - Kommandant."

On the roof are machine guns manned by SS-men and gendarmes, bullets swish by your nose. Near me a woman falls, wounded, no one pays any attention to her.

And in the midst of this nightmarish scene, Remba dressed in his doctor's coat, went from one place to the next, from one German to the other, rescuing Jews, pulling them o

In the "hospital" the rescued were ordered to lie on the beds. Some were "bandaged." As soon as the path was clear, they were taken by "ambulance" back to the ghetto.

The nurses wore especially wide coats under which they were able to hide the rescued children. Frequently, it was necessary to chloroform the little ones and put them to sleep to make their rescue possible.

Stanislaw Adler remembered Nachum Remba in his memoirs:

"Horenstein was replaced by Remba. Tall and robust, he was brown-haired and of a gay disposition, but an idler - no one knew what he was doing. One could meet him in all the offices, gossiping and joking - and here again that vexing pronunciation.

His composure and endurance, his great kindness and thoughtfulness, and above all his crystalline honesty and selfless devotion began to shine in all their grandeur. " Remba was betrayed and the Germans ended the "hospital" rescue mission, but many owed their lives to his bravery. "

Remba was present at the march of the Warsaw orphans to the Umschlagplatz led by Janusz Korczak. He was one of the last to speak with Korczak prior to the the final deportation, proposing that they go to the Judenrat to seek a postponement. Korczak refused, because he did not want to leave the children alone even for a moment.

Remba burst into tears as he watched the children silently board the trains headed for Treblinka.
Sources:
They Fought Back by Yuri Suhl published by Schocken Books New York 1975

In the Warsaw Ghetto - The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler published by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1982.

Majdanek by Josef Marszalek, published by Interpress 1986

E. Ringelblum, Kronika getta warszawskiego (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983), pp. 606-607. Holocaust Historical Society

Copyright: Chris Webb H.E.A.R.T 2008

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The story of Nachum Remba - Revolt & Resistance www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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List of other resisters- click on names on left side UNDER Abe Asner

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List of other resisters- click on names on left side UNDER Abe Asner

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Abe Asner in Polish army uniform, 1938.

Video still from interview, November 2001

Abe Asner was born in the district of Lida, Poland on October 19, 1916. In 1938, Abe followed in the footsteps of his brothers and joined the Polish army. On June 22nd, 1941, Abe was visiting a cousin in Lithuania when he awoke to the sight of German planes littering the sky with bombs. When German tanks surrounded the ghetto where Abe and his brothers were staying, they had to make a choice: stay among the 3,000 Jews who were facing imminent death or flee to the forests. Abe disappeared into the trees with nothing but the clothes on his back.

The forest proved to be a breeding ground for resistance fighters. Soon Abe was among the 60-some Jews and Russian POWs running missions. His military training gave him the skills to kill German soldiers who attempted to search the dense forest. In the beginning, Abe thought the resistance would only last a few weeks. It continued for over four years and their partisan unit grew to several thousand people, including the woman who became Abe's wife.

Abe and his brothers were successful in many missions, ranging from sabotaging enemy supplies to halting German food convoys to rescuing Jews from ghettos. They frustrated the Germans with their efficiency under the cover of darkness. "The night was our mother," Abe remembers. Eventually the Germans placed a bounty on their heads. "So much money to catch us, dead or alive," Abe recalls.

The ongoing violence of the Partisan missions wore away at Abe's psyche. When the war finally ended, he worked hard to adjust to normal life. Despite the physical and emotional scars he carries, Abe knows his deeds helped to shape the lives of countless people.

Abe's passion still burns brightly when he recalls his partisan days. "We don't go like sheep. We did as much as we could. We did a lot," he says. "People should know somebody did (fight back). People should know."

After the war Abe moved to Canada with his wife, where they had two daughters and four grandchildren. Abe Asner passed away on May 26, 2015 at the age of 98.

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Abe Asner in Polish army uniform, 1938. Video still from interview, November 2001 Abe Asner was born in the district of Lida, Poland on October 19, 1916. In 1938, Abe followed in the footsteps of his brothers and joined the Polish army.

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Abe Asner

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Abe Asner in Polish army uniform, 1938.

Video still from interview, November 2001

Abe Asner was born in the district of Lida, Poland on October 19, 1916. In 1938, Abe followed in the footsteps of his brothers and joined the Polish army. On June 22nd, 1941, Abe was visiting a cousin in Lithuania when he awoke to the sight of German planes littering the sky with bombs. When German tanks surrounded the ghetto where Abe and his brothers were staying, they had to make a choice: stay among the 3,000 Jews who were facing imminent death or flee to the forests. Abe disappeared into the trees with nothing but the clothes on his back.

The forest proved to be a breeding ground for resistance fighters. Soon Abe was among the 60-some Jews and Russian POWs running missions. His military training gave him the skills to kill German soldiers who attempted to search the dense forest. In the beginning, Abe thought the resistance would only last a few weeks. It continued for over four years and their partisan unit grew to several thousand people, including the woman who became Abe's wife.

Abe and his brothers were successful in many missions, ranging from sabotaging enemy supplies to halting German food convoys to rescuing Jews from ghettos. They frustrated the Germans with their efficiency under the cover of darkness. "The night was our mother," Abe remembers. Eventually the Germans placed a bounty on their heads. "So much money to catch us, dead or alive," Abe recalls.

The ongoing violence of the Partisan missions wore away at Abe's psyche. When the war finally ended, he worked hard to adjust to normal life. Despite the physical and emotional scars he carries, Abe knows his deeds helped to shape the lives of countless people.

Abe's passion still burns brightly when he recalls his partisan days. "We don't go like sheep. We did as much as we could. We did a lot," he says. "People should know somebody did (fight back). People should know."

After the war Abe moved to Canada with his wife, where they had two daughters and four grandchildren. Abe Asner passed away on May 26, 2015 at the age of 98.

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Abe Asner in Polish army uniform, 1938. Video still from interview, November 2001 Abe Asner was born in the district of Lida, Poland on October 19, 1916. In 1938, Abe followed in the footsteps of his brothers and joined the Polish army.

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Sara Fortis in partisan uniform. Date unknown.

Video still from interview, August 2004

Sara Fortis (born Sarika Yehoshua in 1927 in Chalkis, a small town near Athens, Greece) never knew her father, who passed away when she was only two months old. Raised by her mother, Sara and her sister enjoyed a happy childhood. Though they identified as 100% Greek, they also celebrated being Jewish by lighting candles every Friday and attending temple on holidays.

Sara knew it was time to leave her hometown when the Germans arrived in 1941. She had heard about Jews in other small Greek towns being deported by the Nazis and never returning. Sara and her mother escaped to the small village of Kuturla and hid there for a short while. When it was no longer safe for Jews, Sara was told to go, although the villagers agreed to hide her mother. Leaving her mother, Sara decided to become an andarte ( resistance fighter). Wanting to play a significant role in the group, she decided to go from village to village to recruit other females who wanted to fight.

Sara formed a band of female partisans that became indispensable to the male fighters, transforming young village girls into women. On their first mission, they were ordered to throw Molotov cocktails to distract the enemy and allow the partisans to attack. Impressed by their skills, the male partisans invited the all-female group to join in many missions. They burned down houses, executed Nazi collaborators, and aided the men in a way no group of females had before. The male andartes were given credit for many missions the women completed, as it was unfathomable that women could accomplish such acts. Often the women were forced to sleep next to the men and Sara constantly worried about the women's safety.

Sara became a prominent and well-respected figure in the andartes movement in Greece. By age 18, she was known as 'Kapetenissa [Captain] Sarika'. The Nazis sent an informer to try to capture her, but mistakenly arrested -- then brutally raped and murdered -- her cousin, Medi. Vowing revenge, she tracked down and executed the informer.

After the war, the andartes fell out of favor with the new Greek government. Sara was arrested, but owing to her great reputation, she was released shortly after. She then emigrated to Israel, where she met her husband and settled down.

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Born Sarika Yehoshua in 1927 in Chalkis, Greece, Sara Fortis went from village to village recruiting women who wanted to fight. She organized a band of all-female partisans, training young women to become bold fighters. They burned down houses, executed Nazi collaborators, and aided the Greek partisan movement in a way no group of females had before.

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Vitka Kempner

Video still from interview with Great Projects Film Company

Vitka Kempner was born in Kalish, Poland on the Polish-German border, in 1922. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Kalish fell and Vitka escaped to Vilna, Lithuania. In 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, attacking the Soviet Union and neighboring countries. Vilna was soon occupied, with the Jews forced into a ghetto. Hearing the rumors about the death camps, Vitka decided to take her destiny into her own hands.

Vitka joined the Vilna chapter of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir, a Zionist youth group. The group decided to transform itself into a resistance cell, led by Abba Kovner. The group, was instrumental in organizing the larger Vilna resistance movement, known as the United Partisans Organization, (FPO). Vitka later helped found the 'Avengers', which would go on to become one of the most famous and most successful all-Jewish partisan units during the war.

Vitka was responsible for the FPO's first act of sabotage, smuggling a homemade bomb out of the ghetto and blowing up a Nazi train line. The group began to arm themselves, smuggling weapons through the sewer system. Eventually, Vitka became one of Abba's chief lieutenants; they would marry after the war.

After a failed uprising, Vitka helped the FPO to evacuate much of the population through the sewer system to the surrounding forests. Several of the escapees became soldiers in their unit.
The Avengers continued their sabotage operations, destroying both the power plant and the waterworks of Vilna, the city they once loved.

As the Soviets advanced westward, the Avengers emerged from the forest and joined the struggle openly, helping to liberate Vilna. But the liberation of their country and the German defeat were not enough. Vitka and Abba wanted revenge. In 1945, Vitka planned an infiltration of the bakery at a Nuremberg POW camp and poisoned 3,000 loaves of bread with arsenic. The operation failed, but it is said that she continued to help hunt down Nazis after the war.

Besides avenging the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, Vitka and Abba also reached out to the survivors. They helped smuggle hundreds of European Jews in to British-occupied Palestine. Vitka and Abba followed in 1946, settling at Kibbutz Ein Horesh and raising two children.

Their story is chronicled in Rich Cohn's book The Avengers, which was also made into an audio book, narrated by Larry King.

Vitka Kempner passed away in February 2012 in her home in Israel, two and a half decades after Abba's death. She and Abba Kovner are survived by two children and several grandchildren.

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In the Vilna ghetto, Vitka along with Abba Kovner and several members of her Jewish youth group, helped organize the United Partisans Organization (FPO). As a partisan she smuggled weapons in and out of the ghetto through the sewer system, and helped destroy the local power plant and waterworks.

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Born in the small town of Kamionka, Poland, on December 11, 1922, Frank Blaichman was 16 years old when the German army invaded the western and central parts of Poland in September 1939. The Blaichman family were among several hundred Jews living in the town. They were merchants; his grandmother owned a grocery store, and his father made a living buying grain from farmers in the area, selling it in nearby towns and in the city of Lublin. That was about to change.

Within months of the invasion, German officials issued a host of administrative decrees and regulations that were intended to isolate the Jews, deprive them of their livelihoods, and dispossess them of their property and force them to emigrate from the area, which was annexed to Germany. Jews were now required to wear armbands bearing the Star of David. They couldn't travel outside Kamionka without special permits. They were ordered to turn over any valuables, such as gold and jewelry. Their businesses were confiscated. And they were subject to being captured at random for forced labor.

Young Frank immediately began taking daring risks in an effort to help his parents and his six brothers and sisters survive. The family needed some way to make money, so Blaichman took to the road illegally. Blaichman, who had learned Polish from customers at his grandmother's store, rode his bicycle from neighboring farms and villages to Lubartow (six miles to the east) and Lublin (12 miles to the south) and began to buy and sell whatever goods he was able to obtain. Passing as a Pole, Frank bought honey, chickens, butter, grains, and meat from the farmers and sold these products in the cities, where he would buy tobacco, yarn, and saccharin to sell back to the farmers. The risks of traveling without papers or the required Star of David armband were enormous, but life for Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland was already precarious.

Month by month, life became harder. Jewish men were conscripted for forced labor, and Frank was assigned to work two days a week in the fields of a nearby estate where potatoes, sugar beets, and other crops were grown. Once again he took an incredible risk: he found someone he could pay to take his place in the field. By 1942, the situation was becoming dire. The community suffered from hunger and disease, was terrorized by harassment, raids, and random shootings, and heard more and more frequent rumors of mass killings and deportations to death camps. One of Frank's uncles was shot on the spot when the Germans made a surprise search and discovered fresh meat in his house; a cousin met a similar fate when fresh bread was found in her house.

In October 1942, when the Judenrat (Jewish councils forced to carry out Nazi orders) informed the Jews of Kamionka that they were going to be "resettled" in a ghetto in Lubartow, Frank escaped and hid in a bushy area outside of town. He was determined not to be imprisoned in the ghetto, even if it meant never seeing his family again. Frank knew many friendly non-Jewish farmers in the area. One of them invited him into his home, where the family greeted Frank warmly and fed him despite the German policy to shoot any Poles who gave assistance to Jews in any way.

Frank soon learned that Kamionka's Jews had not been relocated to the ghetto in Lubartow. The farmer told him that the Germans had put them on trains to some other, unknown destination. Frank realized that his family and many relatives, together with the rest of Kamionka's Jewish community, were on their way to die. Like thousands of other Jews throughout Eastern Europe, Frank fled to the forest.

In the woods, he discovered an encampment of more than 100 Jews sheltered in small bunkers dug into the sandy ground and padded with straw. At first the forest seemed like a haven, but Frank soon realized the encampment was in constant danger and began to organize a defense unit. Early one morning, German soldiers, acting on information given to them by Polish spies, attacked the encampment in the forest. Over 80 Jews were murdered. Frank was one of a lucky 22 who survived. Realizing that the small forest didn't offer enough protection, Frank's group began to seek shelter in the more secluded villages, splitting up into smaller groups, keeping on the move, and hiding in local farmers' homes and on their property. This turned out to be more effective than staying in the forest, especially during the harsh winter, as local farmers provided them with assistance, shelter, and cooked meals.

Early in 1943, Frank's unit grew to 60 members when they joined forces with refugees from the town of Markuszow. That spring the unit grew again when Frank met Samuel "Mietek" Gruber, who had escaped with 28 other men from a prisoner-of-war camp in Lublin. Gruber's group had fought in the Polish army before being captured by the Germans; they had experience fighting and knew how to handle explosives. Known as the Markuszow group under the leadership of Iser Eisenberg, they were becoming a disciplined fighting force. The expanded unit hunted spies and collaborators in the area, disrupted communication by destroying telephone lines, damaged dairy factories that produced food for the Germans, and ambushed German patrols. By September 1943, the expanded unit began working with Armia Ludowa, a communist-led Polish partisan group. Armia Ludowa provided Frank's unit with much-needed food and ammunition from their Soviet allies. Previously armed with old rifles and handguns, the group was able to obtain explosives, hand grenades, land mines, machine guns, submachine guns, mortars, anti-tank guns, and all the ammunition they needed. Just 21, Frank was the youngest platoon commander in the expanded unit and even was selected to escort the future prime minister of Poland to a secret meeting with Soviet high command.

"I'm very proud of what I did all those years," he says. "The reality was we had nothing to lose, and our way to survive was to fight."

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Born in the small town of Kamionka, Poland, on December 11, 1922, Frank Blaichman was 16 years old when the German army invaded the western and central parts of Poland in September 1939. The Blaichman family were among several hundred Jews living in the town.

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'May 10, 1940, was a day I'll never forget,' recalled Tiny Mulder. 'When I awoke, I wondered what that noise was up in the air. The radio confirmed that the Germans were invading. There was no declaration of war. They just came. Just like that. We were a small country then, of eight million, overrun by a large army.'

Overrun, but not defeated. Like many Dutch citizens, Mulder, 19 years old and living in Drachten, decided to work in the underground. Organized resistance, however, came slowly. 'The Germans treated the Dutch very well at first, to gain our trust,' she remembered, 'then we began to see what was coming.' She worked in a local government office, regulating the distribution of clothing, food and oil. 'We never had a military government in the Netherlands. Dutch collaborators were appointed to higher offices in The Hague by Reichscommissar Artur von Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who had been appointed by Adolf Hitler to govern Holland. My boss, Pieter Wybenga, never had any Nazi sympathizers working for him.'

Wybenga was one of the earliest members of the underground, and he recruited Mulder. Her first job was to work as a courier, traveling by train to Rotterdam or Amsterdam to deliver maps with information for the Allies. During her missions Mulder wore a green hat to identify herself. 'You never gave your name to anyone. What you don't know, you can't reveal,' she said.

In 1943, Mulder gained additional duties with the Resistance, taking on the job of rescuing Allied airmen shot down in the northern Netherlands. The planes, on their way to bombing missions over Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin, were downed either by German fighters or anti-aircraft fire.

Mulder was particularly happy to be helping the airmen. Not only were they destroying German war industries, but they also lifted the morale of the Dutch. 'The British and Canadians flew at night and Americans during the day,' she said. 'When we saw these airplanes in the beautiful formations, B-17s, B-24s with vapor trails, we felt that we were not alone, that someone was helping us.'

Hurrying downed airmen to safety was a big job for a young girl. Mulder thinks she was chosen for the difficult assignment because of her command of English, but surely her candor, caution, quick wit and courage must have played a role. 'It was dangerous work,' she admitted. Two of her girlfriends had been captured doing the same job and were moved from one prison camp to another until they were finally liberated by the Russians at the end of the war.

When a plane was shot down, as many as 10 airmen could be captured by the German police or army. If they came down in a field, there was a better chance for rescue. Some farmers or villagers would hide them inside their homes and give them civilian clothes, but not everyone would take such a chance. Mulder understood their hesitation. 'Here is the farmer living in an occupied country, and a couple Americans show up at your door,' she said. 'What is he to do?' In every village there was someone who was part of the underground, sometimes the minister or schoolteacher.

In the best of scenarios, the farmers would contact the Resistance. 'He would say: 'Come over here, we have something. Do you know what to do?' Or someone might send a message: 'We have four young rabbits. Would you like to have some?' Then the chain got working. In the end they came to me, as I was in charge of helping them on their way out of enemy territory.'

There was danger at every step of the way. During the initial contact with the fliers, Mulder was at her most cautious. 'I had to find out if they were real Americans or fake Americans,' she recalled. 'The Germans had enough American uniforms by that time, and they had Germans who had been educated in Albuquerque before the war to create impostors.

'When we saw them coming out of an American plane, that was all right, but if they just turned up early one morning, then I became suspicious. So we asked the farmer, 'Did they come from the sky, yes or no?' We had some questions, which the soldiers had to be able to answer properly. Then we could be sure they were not Germans.'

Once their nationality had been determined, the next step was to find clothing for the men and a place to stay. Her own parents took in some of the airmen. Ed Pollock, a Boeing B-17 pilot, later remembered the Mulder family very well. 'Our plane, hit by German flak near the German border on December 11, 1943, was on fire, and two of my men were killed,' he recalled. 'Of the remaining eight, five were wounded. Tiny came along and took me to her house, where I stayed for three months. I played chess with Mr. Mulder every night. They were wonderful people, and they risked their lives for us.'

After placing the airmen in a safe house, the next thing to do was to advise the national resistance organization of the new arrivals and send a message to London over the wireless, giving their name, rank and serial number. When it was time for the soldiers to make their escape, Mulder and her fellow workers provided them with false Dutch identity cards, kept under lock and key in the town hall. Members of the underground had various ways of getting the papers from helpful officials. A photographer who could be trusted took the airmen's photos for the cards. The whole process had to be repeated for Belgium and France, the countries through which the men would pass on their route to Spain and on to London by plane.

'Many did not make it,' Mulder admitted. 'The chain of guides between the Netherlands and Spain broke all the time.' The weak link was in Antwerp, where a Canadian of German origin offered to help the Nazis by infiltrating the underground. 'He didn't disturb the underground movement, but picked off the Allied soldiers and sent them to prison,' Mulder recalled. 'He was executed in Belgium after the war as a traitor, but that was too late.'

Communication with London did not always work well, either. 'The London office was sloppy about letting us know if the men made it,' Mulder said, 'but they always sent us messages, urging us to return the men. They said they could build airplanes faster than they could replace crews.' Tiny shrugged. 'This was war. They didn't count lives.'

Frank McGlinchey, the bombardier of a plane shot down on October 8, 1943, explained what happened after he bailed out: 'I fell about a 1,000 feet before yanking the handle. The parachute opened immediately, and I had one of the softest landings on record.' The area where McGlinchey came down was near the village of Beetsterzwaag. A group of Dutch farmers, who spoke no English, found him. They understood immediately what had happened and took away McGlichey's parachute and hid it. The farmers pointed out a route for the young bombardier to follow, and he soon came upon his navigator, Carl Spicer, walking in a field. The two men walked throughout the night and found a barn, where they hid when daylight came.

'Just as we had hoped, an old farmer came out to begin his day's work,' McGlinchey said. 'We told him our story through sign language. He understood and took us into his house, fed us and took us upstairs to sleep.'

The men were passed from home to home and then hidden in a loft in the Dutch Reformed Church in Wolvega, where Mulder came to get them. 'The janitor of the church took me upstairs where the two men greeted me with friendly smiles,' said Mulder. 'They had no doubt about my good intentions, maybe because they had met only people who were kind and willing to help.' She told them that their pilot, Bill McDonald, had come down near Lippenhuizen, and had been taken in by the local postmaster.

Mulder took the soldiers back with her to Drachten, using a taxi with a driver friendly to the underground. Spicer stayed with a farm family, the Van Veldens, and Mulder took McGlinchey to her own home. She then bicycled to Lippenhuizen and brought McDonald on a borrowed bicycle to a safe house in Drachten. 'I remember that he could not ride a bicycle well, and the wheels went every which way,' she said. 'I had to grasp hold of his handlebar.'

Spicer said later: 'I owe Tiny Mulder a lot. I was staying at another farm, but in the evenings, she would take me to her house and we would pop corn or have apples. I remember that her father would catch fish in the canal every Friday for a Catholic flier.'

When the arrangements were in place, the men set out for Spain. 'I took McGlinchey and McDonald by train to Ermelo,' Mulder said, 'and delivered them to a safe house called 'Red Riding Hood.' That is the last I ever saw of them. I learned after the war that they had gone as far as the Pyrenees and ran into a German border patrol. They were sent all the way back north to a German POW camp.'

The young agent also accompanied Spicer and a Canadian flier, Fred Boulter, to Ermelo. 'After the war, I heard that Carl arrived in London on Christmas Eve 1943,' Mulder said. 'He and Fred had parted company, and Fred was arrested in Paris and sent to a German POW camp.'

For another downed airman, Merlin Verburg, the crash landing turned into an unplanned homecoming. Verburg's grandmother was from the northern Dutch province of Friesland, and he recognized the language when he met up with the farmer who rescued him.

Mulder had a sparkle in her eye as she recounted Verburg's adventure: 'A policeman told us there was an American shot down, but there were already Germans looking for the downed plane, and there were more airmen on the loose. When I arrived, the farmer had given Merlin some clothing, and there just happened to be a visitor there who gave him his bicycle.'

Mulder decided that it was a time for ingenuity and improvisation: 'I said, 'Well, Merlin, we are very much in love!' So we went off on the bicycles arm in arm! No airman who had come down two hours ago would have a girlfriend already! We rode right past the Germans.'

The most dangerous rescue came with a crew of 10 whose plane was hit and collapsed against a windmill. 'Everyone was involved in this case,' said Mulder. The co-pilot was killed, and the rest of the crew roamed the fields during the night. In the early morning, local farmers hid them. The Germans knew about the crash because the pilot had lost a leg and needed professional care. Someone contacted police officials, and the pilot was taken to a German hospital, where he was well cared for.

'At a farm across the road was a farmer with four sons, who put all of those men in rowboats and rowed them across the river to safety,' Mulder remembered. From there, she and her helpers rowed the men across a lake to a houseboat where they could hide.

The underground knew the farmers would be questioned and tried to prepare them. They told them what the Germans would ask and how they must reply. 'We told them to say that they know nothing about it, and that a car came here with Germans in it and took them away,' Mulder recalled. 'We told them to say nothing else, only repeat what we told them.' The lessons worked. Germans searching for the airmen could not get at the truth and released the farmers.

Nevertheless, the situation was tenuous after the 10 Americans had been helped. Villagers expected the Germans to retaliate by conducting a 'razzia,' a house-to-house search to find Jews, to take people to work in Germany or to ferret out those who worked in the underground. Mulder was running out of hiding places in the village and asked the monks at the local monastery to take some Americans. There was no time for diplomacy. When the monks hedged a bit, Mulder told them it was 'only for one night.' The monks then found room to hide some soldiers. It was almost a week before safe houses were found.

Along with rescuing the airmen, hiding Jews remained a high priority. 'People in other areas would send word, asking if there was room for a girl of 7 or a couple in their 60s,' said Mulder. 'When we asked people to take someone in, they would ask, 'What if we are found out?' I told them, 'Well then, you go to a concentration camp, and the Germans take everything you have.' Sometimes they would say no, and that was absolutely all right. People who are afraid do the most dangerous things when they panic!'

Looking back on the war, Mulder wishes they had saved more Dutch Jews. 'No country lost more Jews than the Netherlands, according to their population,' she recalled. 'There were about 126,000 Jews and more than 100,000 did not return.' Her parents took one 7-year-old as a member of their own family. 'She stayed two years with us until the war was over,' Mulder recalled. 'She looked very much like me and like my mother. She could even go to school. My parents took their documents to city hall, and someone I knew entered her as a daughter of my parents. She is still my sister.'

The Jewish girl's parents, who were also in hiding, were frantic because they feared their dark-haired daughter would stand out among the blond and blue-eyed Frieslanders. Mulder, who is dark-haired herself, knew what to do. 'I went to visit them. I told them, 'I'm Tiny, and your daughter is living with me.' That's all I said. I didn't tell them where I lived.'

Mulder next served as a translator for Allied forces when they arrived in 1945. After V-E Day she went to work as a journalist for a Frisian newspaper. She also began traveling to England, Canada and the United States, where she renewed her friendship with many of the 70 American, Canadian and British soldiers she had helped rescue.

In recognition for her service, Mulder received the Medal of Freedom with the Silver Palm from the United States. Despite her courageous work with the wartime Resistance, she apparently approached that ceremony with some trepidation. 'That was more nerve-wracking than helping the fliers during the war,' said Mulder. A short time later, the British government awarded her the King's Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom.

This article was written by Bette McDevitt and originally appeared in the November 2003 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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Tiny Mulder: Teenage World War II Resistance Heroine

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'May 10, 1940, was a day I'll never forget,' recalled Tiny Mulder. 'When I awoke, I wondered what that noise was up in the air. The radio confirmed that the Germans were invading. There was no declaration of war. They just came. Just like that.

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Vladka Meed, whose given name was Feigele Peltel, served the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto by passing as a Christian outside its walls. Fluent in Polish and possessing a typical "Aryan" appearance, Meed became a successful underground courier, smuggling weapons across the wall to the Jewish Fighting Organization. Meed came to New York immediately following the war and in 1948 she published a memoir about her experiences, On Both Sides of the Wall, in Yiddish. She lectured widely about the Holocaust and was extremely active in Holocaust education and memorialization. As vice president of the Jewish Labor Committee, she ran the Yiddish Cultural and Welfare Department for many years. She received numerous awards, including the 1993 Hadassah Henrietta Szold Award and the 1995 Elie Wiesel Remembrance Award.

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Vladka Meed was an underground courier who smuggled weapons to the Jewish Fighting Organization inside the Warsaw Ghetto while passing as a Christian outside its walls. In 1948 she published a memoir about her experiences, On Both Sides of the Wall. Meed received many awards for her work in Holocaust education and memorialization.

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On an Auschwitz station platform in 1944, Helga Weiss and her mother fooled one of the most reviled men in modern history, Josef Mengele, and managed to save their lives. Not long into her teens, Weiss lied about her age, claiming she was old enough to work for her keep. Her mother persuaded the Nazis under Mengele's command that Helga was in fact her daughter's older sister, and she was sent to the forced labour barracks and not the gas chamber.

The story is one of many recorded in a concentration camp diary that was sold to publishers around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. The private journals of Helga Weiss are to be published in the UK for the first time next year by Viking Press, while foreign rights have been snapped up by publishing houses across the world.

Weiss, an artist in her early 80s who lives in Prague and is also known by her married name of Weissova-Hoskova, mentioned her journal during occasional public appearances, but until now public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. The British publisher Venetia Butterfield heard of the diary's existence last summer when Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezín camp in former Czechoslovakia.

"I heard about the event and called someone in north London who knew Helga. They told me she was just about to get on a plane back to Prague, but that she was coming round for a coffee first," said Butterfield. "I raced up to see her and we talked for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. She is an amazing woman with a great, feisty attitude."

Butterfield, who also publishes Anne Frank's diary, asked to see a sample of the writing in one of Weiss's surviving exercise books. "We had an academic report done, and once it was clear what the diaries were I went to Prague to see her. Accounts of the past are often shaped by the knowledge of what was to happen next. What is so important about the diary is that it is Helga's reality. You are there with her. It is a very different thing from a memoir."

Before Weiss was sent to the Nazi-controlled ghetto of Terezín as a child, she witnessed the insidious progress of the Holocaust in Prague. "One thing after another was forbidden: employees lost their jobs, we were banned from the parks, swimming pools, sports clubs. I was banned from going to school when I was 10," Weiss told the Observer at the time of the London concert. "I was always asking my parents, 'What's happening?', and became angry at them if I thought they were trying to hide something, to protect me."

The Weiss apartment was handed over to Germans and the family were transported to Terezín by rail. Known as Theresienstadt in German, the city on the north-west perimeter of Prague had become a transit hub where Czech Jews were put to work before being sent on to extermination camps. Her diary, which begins in 1939, records noises that still haunt her; the "thunderous steps, the roar of the ghetto guards, the banging of doors and hysterical weeping always sound - and foretell - the same".

"She was obviously very clever and quite mature," said Butterfield. "She was obsessed with school at first, like any child of that age. Then there are terrible goodbyes as her friends begin to be taken off to Terezín. At each point Helga thinks the worst thing has happened to her so you see how people become used to bad things. Eventually, when the family are sent to the camp they take some cake and eat a little every day."

Butterfield points out that memories of Terezín are not all painful. Weiss grew up there, fell in love for the first time, and spent time with both her parents, before her father was killed at Auschwitz. "My father told me that, whatever happens, we must remain human, so that we do not die like cattle," Weiss has said. "And I think that the will to create was an expression of the will to live, and survive, as human beings."

On 4 October 1944, Weiss and her mother were also transported to Auschwitz, where they faced Mengele, who was directing children and older women towards the gas chambers and fit adults towards the forced labour camp. Thanks to her subterfuge, she was one of only 150 to 1,500 children believed to have survived of the 15,000 sent to Terezín.

She was then transferred from Auschwitz to a labour camp at Flossenbürg where she escaped death a second time when she was forced to join a 16-day "death march" to the camp at Mauthausen. She remained there until the end of the war. "I asked Helga whether it had felt wonderful to be liberated," said Butterfield. "She said, no, it was not that special because by that point she was so ill and had seen so many terrible things it was hard to feel anything."
Helga's Diary will be published by Viking on 7 June next year

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The schoolgirl who survived the Holocaust by fooling the Nazis

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Helga Weiss, now an artist in Prague, escaped death at Auschwitz by lying to Josef Mengele about her age and saying she was fit to work

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Helmuth Hübener on the Day of His Execution

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Helmuth Hübener, a 16-year-old Mormon youth living in Hitler’s Germany, exhibited unprecedented moral courage in opposing the propaganda machine of the Nazi regime in the summer of 1941. For …

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Helmuth Huebener and his friends, Karl Heinz Schnibbe, Rudolf Wobbe and Gerhardt Duewer, were known as the Huebener group. They defied the Nazi regime by distributing leaflets to expose the lies and deceit of Nazi propaganda. This was viewed as a crime by Nazi authorities and was severely punished. Helmuth Huebener was seventeen years old when he was sentenced to death. Karl, Rudolf and Gerhardt were imprisoned and sent to forced labor camps in Russian and Poland.

From 1941 to 1943 they distributed their leaflets to working class sections of Hamburg, a busy industrial city, situated in northern Germany on the Elbe and Alster Rivers. Hamburg was Germany's second largest city and its biggest port.

Sons of working class families, Helmuth and Gerhardt were administrative apprentices in social administration. Karl-Heinz was apprenticed to a house painter and Rudi (Rudolf), the youngest member of the group, was a mechanic's apprentice. Full of youthful idealism and exuberance, the Huebener group may not have been fully aware of where their activities would take them.

"Come and visit me. I have something to show you", Helmuth told Karl at a meeting of young people at St. Georg's. Karl had no idea of what he would find when he arrived at the apartment later that night. It was dark and quiet in the apartment; Helmuth's grandparents were already asleep. Helmuth showed Karl a small radio. "The radio has short wave and we can listen to foreign broadcasts."

"Man are you nuts?" Karl said. "Don't you know that's illegal?" He was feeling nervous, knowing that listening to foreign broadcasts was strictly forbidden and severely punished.

"Hitler is making a lot of good things illegal. But we are not sheep, we don't have to obey all the crazy laws." Helmuth said, turning on the radio.

A feeble light illuminated the numbers on the short wave dial and they listened to the German language broadcast from the Britain. The broadcast contradicted all the boasts of German victories they were hearing every day.

"Do you realize that we are being told lies. They tell us that hundreds of Russian soldiers are being killed, but they don't mention how many German soldiers are also losing their lives".

"Think about it, Germany has no raw materials and is dependent on other countries. When the Allies will start to win, Germany will have nothing. Hitler is leading us to destruction. Don't you think people have the right to hear the truth".

The British had already begun to bomb Hamburg. After the broadcast, Helmuth showed Karl a leaflet he had written.

"I know you'll want to help me distribute these", he said handing the leaflet to Karl. Karl picked up the red paper and felt it burn his hand, He could not believe what he was reading.

Who is Lying ??????????????????
The official report of the German
High Command of the Armed Forces

Quite a while ago they claimed
The roads to Moscow, Kiev
and Leningrad were opened

And today-six weeks after
Germany's invasion of the USSR,
Severe battles are still occurring
Far from these places.
This is how they are lying to us!

"This is crazy", Karl said. "Don't you know how dangerous this is?"

"It's only dangerous if we are not careful and we will be careful. People need to be told the truth".

"But how is this going to help anybody?" Karl asked.

"What we can do is warn people and wake them up. When enough people hear the truth, who knows what can happen".

Karl was reluctant but he agreed to take seven leaflets. The streets were very dark because of the blackout. Britain had begun their bombing raids on Hamburg. Karl felt sick to his stomach with fear, and looked around him. When he was sure there was no one to see, he placed a leaflet in the telephone box at the entranceway of an apartment house. When he had gotten rid of all the leaflets, he let out a sigh of relief and dashed home as fast as he could.

Two policemen were on the street where Karl lived. Passing them he mumbled "Heil Hitler" and wished them a good evening.

"Where are you going so late?" one of the policeman asked.

"Oh, I was just visiting a friend", Karl answered in as strong a voice as he could muster.

"Well, good night then. Let's hope there will be no more air raids."

Opening the door to his apartment, he felt a wave of relief. He did not want to distribute any more leaflets. If Helmuth asked him at that moment to distribute more leaflets, he would turn him down. But the next morning he felt differently and told himself that he would be willing to do it now and again. If he were careful, nothing could go wrong. HE did not tell his mother what he had done.

Karl was to learn later that Rudi was involved. He did not know about Gerhardt until later. Helmuth tried to protect his friends by not telling them everything. At that time Karl did not know that Helmuth had already written and distributed short leaflets.

The President of the church knew about Helmuth's good stenographic and typing skills and asked him to type letters to soldiers on the front lines. He gave Helmuth a typewriter and access to paper. Helmuth typed his first leaflet on red paper so it would be noticed and made ten copies.

Down with Hitler.
People's Seducer
People's Corrupter
People's Traitor
Down with Hitler.
He put them in the telephone boxes of apartment buildings with the notice, "This is a chain letter, so pass it on." The first leaflets were very short and contained brief messages, but listening to the radio broadcasts gave him the idea of writing news reports. With carbon paper he typed seven or eight copies at a time. Realizing that if the information campaign was to be successful, he would need the help of his friends.
Helmuth, Karl and Rudi saw one another often at the church. Karl and Rudi looked up to Helmuth who often had answers to difficult questions. They knew he read a lot of books and knew a great deal about religion as well as history. Karl began to call Helmuth the "professor" because he seemed to know so much. On his part, Helmut trusted Karl and Rudi. They met regularly in the church and often went to a small restaurant afterwards. That is where they told one another about their experiences with the Nazi Youth.

The three boys were forced to join the Hitler Youth against their will. Strong individualists, they shared an intense dislike of Nazi Youth activities, the pressures to conform, the persecution of Jewish people, and the ugliness and sheer brutality of what they saw around them. Helmuth, Karl and Rudi came from religious families and much of what they saw around them contradicted their beliefs. Hamburg was a working class city with a strong tradition of Social Democracy and many Mormons were Social Democrats who had opposed Hitler. Helmuth thought that the Mormons who supported Hitler were mislead and misinformed like the President of St. Georg's who was a member of the Nazi party. Helmuth still had respect for the President and knew he was a good and caring man. He could not understand what made him have so much faith in Hitler.

Living in Hamburg, where there was still a strong belief in democracy, Helmuth, Karl and Rudi were skeptical and aware of the cruelties imposed by Hitler. Hamburg never went completely over to the Nazis like other German cities; the city had too many Social Democrats. Hamburg was a sprawling city with many bridges that cross the rivers and canals. Nazi patrols were everywhere. Whenever a flag patrol came along, everyone was expected to stop and raise his or her hands in salute. Helmuth avoided the patrols and when he saw them coming, he would turn and walk the other way. From the corner of his eye, he could see that there were other people managed to avoid saluting too.

As teen aged boys, Helmuth, Karl and Rudi lived with their families. Helmuth's mother worked as a nurse and when she married for the second time, Helmuth moved in with his grandparents. He was not happy with his new stepfather who was avid Nazi. Rudi lived with his widowed mother, who had strong religious beliefs and encouraged Rudi to be respectful of other people. Their family doctor was Jewish and she refused to find another doctor, even after people were warned not to go to Jewish physicians. Karl's parents were social democrats.

One evening when Helmuth, Karl and Rudi were walking home from church they defiantly began to sing American songs. They heard the loud voice of a Nazi Youth Patrol ordering them to stop.

"How dare you sing English songs?" the Nazi Youth demanded to see their identification papers and warned them never to sing English songs again.

Helmuth remarked, "Have you noticed that that our country is being run by threats and brutal force".

"Everywhere you go you see signs that say "Forbidden", Forbidden on pain of death" "Not permitted" "What kind of country is this, anyway?" Karl added.

"This country is headed for destruction," Helmuth said in a soft voice.

As young men, the four boys were forced to become members of the Hitler Youth. Helmuth detested the boring meetings, the constant saluting to Hitler, and he avoided going to the meetings. Karl also did not want to go but his father cautioned him that it was dangerous not to attend the meetings and he went against his will, but he refused to wear the uniform and was expelled. Rudi stopped going to meetings after Nazi Youth patrol tried to stop him, because he did not salute. Angrily, Rudi drove his bicycle into one of the members of the patrol, knocking him down. He rode quickly away. That was the last time he had anything to do with the Nazi Youth.

The persecution of Jewish people was deeply disturbing to the boys. It was senseless, cruel and tragic. They saw first hand the increasing brutality and the beatings.

They had Jewish friends who were disappearing. As a painter's apprentice, Karl-

Heinz worked in the neighborhood where many Jewish people lived. He had just become a painter's apprentice, when he saw the shattered windows of shops owned by Jewish people. Clothing and other goods were lying in the gutter. Until that night in 1938, that became known as Crystal Night (Krystallnacht), no one thought the Nazis would do go to such violent extremes. The day he saw an old man being brutally beaten by a policeman, he knew he hated everything the Nazis stood for. Rudi remembered the horrified look on his mother's face when she told him that their family physician had been arrested and sent away.

Helmuth brought a packet of letters he had typed for the president of St. Georg's and saw the sign on the door forbidding Jews to enter. He wanted to tear the sign down. Soon after, the President asked that a radio be brought into the church so everyone could listen to Hitler's speeches. Karl's father who told the President "This is a church of God not a political meeting" and the President relented.

Helmuth discovered that Nazi spies monitored the meetings at the church. One evening Helmuth saw a few Nazi youth enter the church and recognized them. Afraid they had come to make a disturbance, he confronted them. "What are you doing here, You boys are not interested in our church services". He was surprised that the Nazi Youth left quietly. But it was becoming obvious that people were becoming increasingly fearful, there were very few outspoken objections to Nazi policies.

After he distributed his first seven leaflets, Karl saw Helmuth at church on Sunday." Well how's it going? Helmuth asked laughing. If I know you, I know you did everything perfectly". Both of them were laughing so hard, that Rudi came up and asked what was so funny. Rudi was two years younger than Karl. He had no idea that Helmuth had already spoken to Rudi. Helmuth invited them both to come to his apartment. The best nights for listening to the broadcasts together were Friday or Saturday nights. Karl's' mother allowed him to stay out later those nights; during the week he went to church with his parents. The boys met again on the following Saturday and Helmuth told described his plan. He wanted to conduct a full fledged informational resistance.

"What do you mean?" Karl asked.

"I mean that the leaflets should report the news we hear from the British. People

have a right to know the truth".

"You don't think that the three of us can overthrow the government do you?" Karl took a deep breath. Helmuth was surely going to get them all in trouble.

"No, but we can keep people informed and show them that there is opposition. They will begin to talk to one another and who knows what will happen"

"I'll have to think about it," Karl said.

Rudi was also hesitant.

"Most people do not have short wave radios, unless we tell them what is happening, how else will they know?" Helmuth insisted.

Everyone was quiet, then Rudi said, "OK I'll help you." Helmuth went into the next room and returned with a pile of papers. He showed them his shorthand notes of the broadcasts and explained how he would prepare the leaflets. Both Karl and Rudi had already seen the shorter handbills. This was the first letter sized leaflet that described the brutal treatment given to Russian prisoners of war.

"Who else knows about these leaflets?" Karl asked.

"No one, only us" but Helmuth told them he planned to ask Gerhardt, his friend at work. The boys agreed not to mention the leaflets to anyone and if one of them was caught, they agreed he should take the blame.

When there was a new leaflet to distribute, Helmuth announced to Karl and Rudi, "Isn't it time for us to get together to do something?" That was the signal that more leaflets were ready for distribution. At first there was a new leaflet every other week and then every week. Sometimes there were two in a week. Helmuth even got hold of a stamp with an eagle and a swastika and made the leaflets look like the Nazis made them. Gerhardt joined the group and the boys were assigned different neighborhoods. They were distributing about sixty leaflets at a time.

Wandering about the darkened city, they were careful not to be seen as they tacked the leaflets to the bulletin boards in the entranceways of the apartment buildings.

Crossing over the bridges, they went all around Hamburg and got to know which times were the safest to put up the leaflets. When there were air raids, they went to the air raid shelters, but they resumed their work as soon as the all clear sounded. It was tense work, because they never knew when they would be seen or reported. Rudi was less careful than Helmuth or Karl and kept his leaflets in a secret hiding place behind a strip of wallpaper that had become loose. This was like a pocket and when he was ready to leave work, he took leaflets out and distributed them on his way home. He did not always until dark.

Karl almost got into trouble when he was chatting with friends in a nearby café and showed them a leaflet. They were shocked and scolded him. Grinning, Karl told them it was a joke and put the leaflet away. From then on, he did not take any more chances.

For almost two years, Helmuth, Karl, Rudi and Gerhardt distributed the leaflets to apartment buildings all over the city. People were getting desperate as the bombings intensified. There was rubble and bombed out buildings everywhere. And the Nazi patrols were always on guard. But no one was caught.

There were many French prisoners of war working in the factories of Hamburg decided to have one of the leaflets translated into French. Helmuth knew an apprentice who spoke French and before he had a chance to discuss the idea with his friends, he showed the leaflet to the apprentice and asked him to translate it. The apprentice read the leaflet and threw it back at Helmuth. He reported him to the Gestapo that very afternoon in February 1943.

A notice was posted at the church announcing Helmuth's arrest.

Karl felt sick, he knew he and Rudi would soon be arrested too. The boys had agreed that if one was arrested, he would take the blame and not involve the others. But the following Monday a green paddy wagon, the "Green Minna" came for Karl. There were 20 or 30 other prisoners in the wagon. They were taken to the prison.

The prison guards were sadistic individuals and never missed an opportunity to humiliate a prisoner. The Gestapo wanted the prisoners to feel less than human and they let the prisoners know they could do whatever they wanted. Karl steeled himself to become callous and ignore the cruel comments. He knew that if he let himself care too much, he would go to pieces. He tried to concentrate on something else to be able to stand the long waits and the intense fear; he tried thinking about visits to his aunt in the country.

The prisoners had to wake up at 5 in the morning. They had to make their beds perfectly or they would be punished. A Dutch prisoner showed Karl how to make his bed. Breakfast was a thin crust of bread and ersatz coffee. After breakfast the prisoners were manacled together and taken back to the Green Minna to Gestapo headquarters. The prisoners included physicians, scientists, teachers as well as workers, it didn't matter, everyone was treated the same.

When Karl saw Helmuth a few days later, he was shocked at the black and blue marks on his face. But Helmuth managed to wink at him and even grin. During the long waits before they were questioned by the Gestapo and wondered where Helmuth was. "A member of our branch Helmuth Huebener has been arrested by the Gestapo. I cannot give you any details to the Frenchmen who were working in Germany.

Helmuth Huebener was seventeen years old when he was executed. He was the youngest resistance fighter to lose his life in Ploetzensee, the infamous Nazi center of death. The other members of the group were imprisoned and sent to forced labor camps in Poland and Russia.

When Truth was Treason: German Youth Against Hitler, The Story of the Helmuth Huebener Group based on the narrative of Karl Heinz Schnibbe with documents and notes, compiled by Blair R. Holmes & Alan F. Keele U. of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1995

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Faces of Courage, The Helmuth Huebener Group

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Helmuth Huebener and his friends, Karl Heinz Schnibbe, Rudolf Wobbe and Gerhardt Duewer, were known as the Huebener group. They defied the Nazi regime by distributing leaflets to expose the lies and deceit of Nazi propaganda. This was viewed as a crime by Nazi authorities and was severely punished.

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Scroll down the page!! You DO NOT have to sign up!!!

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Some non-Jews stood up to the Nazis, and helped their Jewish neighbors, despite grave dangers.

Many ordinary men and women in every country of occupied Europe showed great courage and compassion in helping the Jewish victims of Nazi terror.

For the most part, these individuals did not plan to become heroes; the names of the rescuers are largely unrecorded, and their good deeds remain anonymous and unrewarded, except in the emotions of those they saved. They helped by providing hiding places, false papers, food, clothing, money, contact with the outside world, underground escape routes and sometimes even weapons.

Their decency exposed them to the dangers of discovery and denunciation. If caught, they faced torture, deportation to concentration camps, or execution. Their behavior was atypical even in their own communities, where the attitude of the majority was characterized by inertia, indifference, and open complicity in the persecution and mass murder of Europe's Jews.

Why They Did It

It is impossible to analyze the multiple reasons for individual heroism and ethical behavior under Nazi occupation. Explanations for heroism and creativity rest in the individual psyche and character; however, it is clear that compassion and simple decency played as large a role as bravery.

Impartial and reliable information about the number of rescuers and the number of Jews aided or saved is not available. Very rough statistics indicate that about 2,000 non-Jews participated in the rescue of Jews and that they saved between 20,000 and 60,000 children and adults.

There is no postwar institution specializing in either World War II or the Holocaust that has collected systematic data about the righteous or about Christian-Jewish relations during the war years. Postwar historiography has given scant attention to this subject, except for biographies of heroes like Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest. Individual episodes are recorded in numerous published memoirs or hidden within the histories of the Jewish communities under German occupation. Others are found in some survivor testimonies, oral histories, and depositions.

Individuals & Groups

The rescuers can be broadly divided into two categories: 1) individuals acting autonomously in haphazard isolation, and 2) individuals acting as part of organized groups-for example, Christian clergy, Socialists, and Communists, among others. Both groups of rescuers faced certain common problems.

They were dependent on the general political and military situation. Helping Jews was thus more successful as liberation approached than in the early days of the war. Later in the war, the time required in hiding was shorter, support from local resistance movements was better organized, and the degree of popular hostility to rescue was muted by imminent military defeat.

The geographical patterns of local hostility to Jews influenced receptivity to their rescue. Thus, western Europe (France, Belgium, and the Netherlands), Scandinavia (Denmark and Finland), and southern Europe (Italy and Greece) adapted rapidly to the problems of hiding and rescuing Jews, whereas eastern and central Europe (Poland, the Ukraine, and Austria) remained a more hostile environment to rescue efforts.

As the war continued, the rescuers learned to adapt and work around the Nazi network of informers and collaborators. However, they were never able to develop effective strategies to combat the Nazis' rapid organization of mass deportations and population transfers. As the war progressed, rescuers were able to identify sympathetic local groups, individuals, and organizations in every country of occupied Europe; for example, low-level clergymen, Socialists, Communists, and nationalist anti-Nazis. At all times, however, the success of Jewish rescue depended upon fate and chance.

Individuals faced greater pressures than did groups. Many Christian professionals (writers, artists, doctors) saved their Jewish colleagues; Christian employees aided Jewish employers; Jewish employees were helped by Christian bosses; and Gentile wives helped save their Jewish husbands and children.

Despite the overwhelming odds, individual rescues sometimes succeeded, especially if the Jewish fugitives could pass as natives in language, manner, and appearance; if the hideout was skillfully camouflouged; if the local population was sympathetic; if geography and distance from neighboring homes aided concealment; and if organized groups or sympathetic friends provided additional safe houses and forged ration papers for essentials like food and clothing.

Notwithstanding the mortal risks, many individuals became "their brothers' keepers," were able to overcome their realistic fears, and forged an ethical and practical identification with the persecuted.

Religious Responses

Despite the Vatican failure to act, many priests, nuns, and laymen hid Jews in monasteries, convents, schools, and hospitals and protected them with false baptismal certificates. However, as Saul Friedlander's memoirs show, many Catholic priests proselytized and converted their "guests." Moreover, after the war, many Jewish children were never returned to Jewish families, even after lengthy court battles.

Nevertheless, some clergymen went to great lengths to protect the Jewish education and observance of their wards. Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, and Unitarian relief organizations cooperated with the Catholic church in France to rescue 12,000 Jewish children; they arranged safehouses and smuggled small numbers into Switzerland and Spain.

In Lvov, the Metropolitan Andreas Sheptitsky defended the Jews against the Nazis, and he and his Ukrainian compatriots hid about 150 Jews in monasteries in eastern Galicia. Furthermore, the French Huguenot Pastor Andre Trocme converted the small French Protestant village of Le Chambon into a mountain hideout for 1,000 Jewish persecutees. Le Chambon was as unique as the mass rescue of Danish Jews, because the entire town supported the rescue and accepted arrest and torture rather than betray the Jews they hid.

Lay Catholics, such as the German Dr. Gertrude Luckner, who headed the Caritas Catholica, also extended help to Jews and non-Aryan Christians in Germany. She was deported to Ravensbruck for her aid to the persecuted. After the war, Dr. Luckner was honored for her courage by the Israeli government. It must be noted that much of this Christian help was actually rendered to fellow Christians (converted Jews), who were classified as Jews due to their descent under Nazi racial laws.

In addition to active help, many clergymen also protested the mistreatment and deportations of Jews as violations of divine and human laws. The Catholic pastor of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, Bernard Lichtenburg, prayed publicly for the Jews until his arrest and death on the way to Dachau. The rescue work of priests of all Christian denominations is well-documented in postwar literature.

Mass Rescues

Spectacular rescues by mass resistance also occurred, as for example, the rescue of 7,000 Danish Jews in October 1943. The combination of a mass resistance, the proximity of receptive neutral Sweden, advance warnings of Nazi deportations, and identification with the persecutees by a whole nation made this episode almost unique.

Similar smaller rescue operations occurred in Greece, where Jews were hidden in the mountains or on islands. Later, Greek Jews were smuggled into Turkey. Similar popular aid to the Jews was rendered in Finland and in Holland there was a protest strike in February 1941, against the deportation of Dutch Jews. The Italian army also helped Jews in their occupation zones in France and Yugoslavia, and they played an important role in rescuing Italian Jews before the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943.

Resistance movements also helped Jews. Sometimes, this aid was intended to help the Jews; often it was rendered in the context of the general anti-Nazi resistance. In Yugoslavia, Serbian partisans attacked a concentration camp near Nish in 1941, freeing a small number of Jews. On April 19, 1943, the Committee for Jewish Defense, aided by Christian railroad workers, attacked a Belgian transport leaving Malines for Auschwitz. Several hundred Jewish deportees escaped with the help of the Belgian resistance.

A unique example of anti-Nazi resistance occurred in the Bialystok ghetto, where several anti-Nazi German and Austrian soldiers were sentenced to death for smuggling weapons and wireless sets to the Jewish resistance. One of these men, Otto Busse, survived and settled in the Kibbutz Nes Amin in 1969, devoting his life to Israel as a concrete example of "Christian atonement."

In Hiding

Many Jews were saved by hiding and also by illegal frontier crossings. Anne Frank's family hid in the concealed annex of an Amsterdam office building with the help of a Christian friend, and the family of Emmanuel Ringelblum (the Warsaw ghetto historian) hid in Warsaw in a specially prepared underground bunker camouflaged by a Polish gardener's greenhouse. Both the Franks and the Ringelblums were caught and perished. About 20,000 Polish Jews, however, did survive hidden in Aryan Warsaw. Likewise, 5,000 Dutch Jews and several thousand German Jews were hidden in the heart of the Nazi empire, in Berlin and Hamburg.

Gentiles, like the teacher Joop Westerweel, smuggled about 100 Jewish children (Palestine Pioneers) across the Dutch border through the French Pyrenees to safety in Spain. He worked alongside Yehoyahim Simon ("Shushu") in the Zionist Halutzim (pioneer) movement. Both Shushu and Westerweel were eventually caught by the Germans and executed.

Spontaneous gestures by supportive Christian neighbors and friends led to aid for Jews in hiding and on the run. Although the Jewish underground railway to Palestine continued with difficulty throughout World War II, some Jews did escape the European arena and made it to safety in Palestine, Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain.

Although Yad Vashem (Israel's Memorial to the Six Million) has honored over 1,200 Righteous Among the Nations since 1953, it is impossible to generalize about the motives, deeds, and actual numbers of these rescuers. Some rescuers acted within the planned context of guerrilla units and resistance movements, others used the buildings and funds of the Roman Catholic church to aid Jews.

The rescuers were able to use the national humiliation caused by the German occupation to build limited popular support and help the Jews. They were few in number but ethically and morally strong. Although the number of Jews they saved was small, they provide a beacon of victory for posterity, a victory over the capitulation and collaboration of the majority of their compatriots.

Reprinted with permission from Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust (Rossel Books & Behrman House).

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Righteous Gentiles and Holocaust Rescuers | My Jewish Learning

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Some non-Jews stood up to the Nazis, and helped their Jewish neighbors, despite grave dangers. Many ordinary men and women in every country of occupied Europe showed great courage and compassion in helping the Jewish victims of Nazi terror.

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Sonderkommando Revolt – Auschwitz – Birkenau

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Sonderkommando Revolt – Auschwitz – Birkenau

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Chiune Saigihara, Carl Lutz, Feng-Shan Ho, Varian Fry, Raoul Wallenberg

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Chiune Saigihara, Carl Lutz, Feng-Shan Ho, Varian Fry, Raoul Wallenberg

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As persecution of Jews in Europe mounted in the years prior to and during World War II, many people desperately sought visas to escape the Nazi regime. Diplomats, consuls and foreign officials were in a unique position to extend significant help to Jews and other refugees seeking asylum in other countries. But too often the stated policy of foreign governments to stay neutral or restrict immigration left many to perish in Holocaust. As official representatives of their governments, diplomats were obliged to uphold the policies of their countries. Those who acted contrary put themselves at peril. Yet scores of diplomats and others disobeyed their governments by issuing visas, protective papers and other documentation that allowed refugees to escape during the period 1933-1945. Some rescuers established safe houses or hid Jews in their embassies or private residences. When found to be violating their governments' policies, some diplomats were transferred, fired or stripped of their ranks and pensions. When caught by Nazi authorities, they faced imprisonment, deportation to a concentration camp and sometimes murder. But because of their heroic deeds, tens of thousands of lives were saved.

Research assistance and photographs of the featured rescuers has been provided by Eric Saul, author of the upcoming book, Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats. Saul's many exhibitions on the subject of diplomatic rescues have travelled worldwide.

Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986) was posted to Lithuania, in November 1939 as the Japanese consul general. After the Soviets occupied Lithuania in June 1940 and began their massive arrests, Sugihara realized the urgency of the situation and issued an estimated 6,000 transit visas in July and August mainly to Polish Jews stranded in Lithuania. He granted visas for transit through Kobe, Japan, providing an eastern escape route. From Japan, refugees could go to the United States, Canada, South America, or Australia. About 1,000 Sugihara visa recipients from Lithuania survived the war in Shanghai. Even after his government cabled him to restrict his issuance of visas, he continued to do so at a rapid pace. "There was no place else for them to go," he said later. "If I had waited any longer, even if permission came, it might have been too late." He was transferred to Prague in September 1940 and in 1944 arrested by the Soviets and held 18 months. When he returned to Japan in 1947, he was asked to retire, which he said he believed was for his actions in Lithuania. In 1985, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, honored Sugihara with the title "Righteous Among the Nations" for his aid to refugees in Lithuania.

Charles "Carl " Lutz (1895-1975) was appointed the Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, Hungary, in 1942. After the Nazis occupied Hungary in March 1944 and began sending Jews to death camps, Lutz negotiated with the Nazis and the Hungarian government to allow him to issue protective letters to 8,000 Hungarian Jews for emigration to Palestine. Deliberately misinterpreting the agreement to mean 8,000 families, not individuals, he issued tens of thousands of protective letters. A year earlier, he had helped 10,000 Jewish children emigrate to Palestine from Hungary. He also established 76 safe houses in the Budapest area by calling them Swiss annexes. Working with his wife Gertrud, he was able to liberate Jews from deportation centers and death marches. He is credited with saving 62,000 Jews from the Holocaust. After the war, Lutz was admonished for exceeding his authority in helping Jews, but in 1958 he was rehabilitated by the Swiss government. The Yad Vashem honored him and his wife with the title "Righteous Among the Nations" in 1964 and he has been declared an honorary citizen of the state of Israel.

Feng-Shan Ho (1901-1997) became the Chinese consul general in Vienna soon after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. After Kristallnacht -a night in November 1938 when synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany were ransacked and burned and scores of Jews killed or deported to concentration camps- requests for visas skyrocketed. In order to be released from detention, Jews needed emigration documents. Despite orders from his superior to desist, Ho issued those lifesaving visas, sometimes as many as 900 in one month. One survivor, Hans Kraus, who had waited hours outside the Chinese embassy, thrust his requests into the window of Ho's car; a few days later he received his visa. Eric Goldstaub recalls being granted 20 visas, enough for his entire family to flee Austria. Ho was reassigned in 1940 and went on to serve 40 years as a diplomat. He retired to San Francisco in 1973. It was only upon his death that evidence of his humanitarian assistance to Jews came to light. He was posthumously awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 2001 and is known as "China's Schindler."

Varian Fry (1907-1967) was an American journalist when he volunteered in 1940 to head up the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization supported by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The purpose of the agency was to aid refugees in Nazi-occupied France and ship them out before they could be arrested and sent to concentration camps. Operating from a list that included distinguished artists, writers, scholars, politicians, and labor leaders, Fry set out to provide financial support for the refugees and to secure the necessary papers for their escape. He enlisted the aid of sympathetic diplomats such as Harry Bingham IV and Myles Standish, the U.S. vice consuls in Marseilles. Fry established a French relief organization to use as a cover his operation. For 13 months, from August 1940 to 1941, he and his band of volunteers used bribery, back market funds, forged documents, clandestine mountain routes and any means possible to help rescue more than 2,000 people from France. In 1994, Israel awarded him Righteous Among the Nations status.

Raoul Wallenberg (1912-?), trained as an architect, was appointed first secretary at the Swedish legation in Budapest in July 1944 with the mission to save as many Budapest Jews as possible. The Germans were deporting thousands of Jews each day to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Recruited specifically to organize a mission that would rescue Jews from deportations, Wallenberg circumvented many of the usual diplomatic channels. Bribes, extortion and fake documents were commonplace and produced quick results. He redesigned Swedish protective papers, which identified Hungarian Jews as Swedish subjects. The yellow and blue passes with the Swedish coat of arms usually passed muster with the German and Hungarian authorities, who were sometimes bribed as well. Wallenberg established some 30 "Swedish" houses where Jews could take refuge. Increasingly bold, he intercepted a train bound for Auschwitz, distributed his protective passes, and removed Jews from the cattle cars. On numerous occasions, he saved Jews from death marches. When the Soviet army arrived in Budapest in January 1945, he was arrested and eventually disappeared into the Soviet prison system. Though there were rumors of sightings of him and of his execution, there is still nothing conclusive about what happened to him. In just six months, Wallenberg had saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives. He is honored throughout the world as well as a recipient of Israel's Righteous Among the Nations award.

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Five Rescuers of Those Threatened by the Holocaust

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As persecution of Jews in Europe mounted in the years prior to and during World War II, many people desperately sought visas to escape the Nazi regime. Diplomats, consuls and foreign officials were in a unique position to extend significant help to Jews and other refugees seeking asylum in other countries.

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Kazimierz Piechowski- Escape from Auschwicz

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Kazimierz Piechowski- Escape from Auschwicz

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Most of those who escaped the infamous extermination camp at Auschwitz did so while they were out on a work detail.

But escaping from inside the camp's barbed wire was something altogether more difficult.

The countryside around Auschwitz was fervently pro-Polish and anti-Nazi. The local population was willing to do whatever it took to aid an escapee.

So the underground partisan movement in the local area and the camp resistance formed a partnership to help people escape.

Auschwitz was part of a series of labor and extermination camps created by the Nazis in occupied Poland. Its first prisoners arrived in May 1940. In June, a Polish boy scout named Kazimierz Piechowski would be imprisoned in Auschwitz I.

In a 2011 interview with The Guardian's Homa Khaleeli, Piechowski talked about his duties moving the corpses of executed prisoners. He got the work detail because he learned German as a boy scout.

"The death wall was between blocks 10 and 11. They would line prisoners up and shoot them in the back of the head," he told Khaleeli. "Sometimes it was 20 a day, sometimes it was 100, sometimes it was more. Men, women and children."

Only 19 when the Nazis occupied his hometown, Piechowski saw his young friends rounded up by German soldiers because of their scouting background. During a run for the Hungarian border he was captured and sent to Auschwitz.

The concentration camp was so new, Piechowski was among those who helped build it.

When Piechowski saw his friend's name on the death list, he joined the resistance movement in the camp and hatched a plan to get his friend out before he could be executed.

To escape from Auschwitz, the inmates had to cross electric fences with barbed wire, covered by guards with machine guns. They then had to get out of the outer perimeter and make it to a nearby Polish town.

By the time he started planning his escape, Piechowski had access to the German's military uniforms and ammunition. His doomed friend was a mechanic in the camp motor pool and had access to the camp Commandant's car.

Piechowski and two fellow prisoners formed a fake working party to remove trash. They walked out of the main camp, dressed in stolen German officers' uniforms and hopped in the Commandant's car - with Piechowski dressed as an SS officer.

As they drove to the main gate, the car received salutes from all the Nazi guards on duty. At the main gate, however, the gate arm remained down. The escapees feared the entire plan was up in smoke.

That's when Piechowski started shouting.

"Wake up, you buggers!" Piechowski screamed in German. "Open up or I'll open you up!"

The guard did.

The men drove to the town of Wadowice. All went their separate ways. Piechowski joined the nationalist partisan resistance movement and spent the rest of the war fighting Nazis.

In all, 196 prisoners made an escape from Auschwitz, out of 928 attempts. An estimated 1.1 million Jews, homosexuals, Slavs, Gypsies, and Polish political prisoners were killed in the Auschwitz camp complex.

Kazimierz Piechowski survived the war, spent seven years in a Soviet gulag for joining the Polish Home Army, and is now 97 years old.

He still tours to recount stories of his time in a Nazi death camp.

"I am a scout, so I have to do my duty - and be cheerful and merry. And I will be a scout to the end of my life," he told The Guardian.

Read the full interview at The Guardian's site.

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This Holocaust survivor recounts his daring escape from Auschwitz

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Most of those who escaped the infamous extermination camp at Auschwitz did so while they were out on a work detail. But escaping from inside the camp's barbed wire was something altogether more difficult. The countryside around Auschwitz was fervently pro-Polish and anti-Nazi. The local population w...

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Malka & Edek Galinski- Escape from Auschwicz

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Malka & Edek Galinski- Escape from Auschwicz

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Malka Zimetbaum was the youngest of five children born to Pinkas Zimetbaum and his wife Chaya, in Brzesko, Poland on the 26 January 1918.

The family moved to Belgium and Malka was registered as living in the city of Antwerp on the 21 March 1928. Malka was a model pupil and she excelled in mathematics and languages. She had a command of Flemish, French, German, Polish and English.

As an adolescent Malka joined Hanoar Hatzioni, a Jewish youth organisation in Antwerp and from this time she now preferred to be called Mala. To support her father who had become blind, Mala took a job as a seamstress for Maison Lilian, a major Antwerp fashion house.

Subsequently she worked as a linguist-secretary in a small company in the diamond trade based in Antwerp. Two years after the German occupation of Belgium Mala was arrested on the 22 July 1942, at Antwerp Central Station, on her way back from Brussels, where she had been looking for a hiding place for her family and herself.

The Germans took Mala first to the notorious Fort Breendonk, then five days later she was transferred to Mechelen, where German authorities had turned the Dossin Barracks into a collection and deportation point for Jews. Mala worked in the registry.

On the 15 September 1942, the tenth deportation train left the Dossin Barracks destined for the East, on board were 1048 deportees, including Malka.

After a nightmare journey lasting two days Mala was subjected to the normal selection at the Juden Rampe outside Birkenau. Mala was one of the 101 females considered fit for labour, whilst 717 were gassed immediately.

She was placed in the women's camp at Birkenau and after undergoing the normal humiliations for new arrivals at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was tattooed on her forearm with the number 19880.

Housed in a wooden barrack, originally designed as a horse stable and because of her skill with languages, she was employed in the camp administration as a Lauferin, whose duties were as a messenger and interpreter.

According to a fellow prisoner, "These girls had to stand next to the guardhouse waiting for orders. Whenever Camp supervisor Mandel or overseer Margot Drechsler needed them they yelled " Lauferin, and the girl had to do as ordered on the double."

A prisoner called Raya Kagan who knew Mala in Birkenau, described her as such:

"I had known Malka since the summer of 1942. At that time she became a Lauferin - a messenger between blocks and a liaison between the Blockfuerherstube, the Kapo and the prisoners.

She was a young girl, of Polish origin, but she had been living in Belgium and arrived with the Belgian transport. She was very decent, she was known throughout the camp, since she helped everybody.

And her opportunities and the power, as it were, that she possessed were never wrongfully exploited by her, as was often done by the Kapo's. She suffered like everybody else. However, she had better conditions - she was able to take a shower in Birkenau."

Another Birkenau survivor Anna Palarczyk recalled after the war that:

"In my opinion, resistance in Birkenau was to help each other survive and Mala was eager to help, that was deeply rooted in her ethics. Mala fed starving prisoners.

Now and then Mala brought me some bread, a little honey, a carrot. Without that I would have died. She used to encourage desperate persons. Having recovered from typhoid fever, I had no shoes, I was really skinny. It was Mala who scolded me, "Take care of yourself! Get decent clothing. You've got to wash somehow."

Mala even managed to send cryptic warnings to her family back in Belgium. The Camp authorities wanted to dispel rumours of extermination of the deportees and also arrest Jews who had so far avoided capture and allowed prisoners to write home.

Mala sent a postcard dated 25 August 1943 to one of her elder sisters, it read:

"Don't worry. I am in good health, working as an interpreter. All the others are together with Etush."

*It should be noted this was a clever warning as Etush, Mala's sister-in-law had died before the war.

Another postcard written by Mala, dated the 25 October 1943 read:

"My dear sister, why don't you write me? You know that every couple of lines from you will renew my courage to face life. Where are our dear parents, why don't they correspond? What about the dear children? Thinking of it will drive me mad"

Mala's fears were justified- her parents and her three nephews, aged 3,5 and 6 had been murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Mala formed a relationship with a Polish prisoner Edek Galinski, who was a veteran of Auschwitz, bearing the low tattoo number 531, who had arrived in Auschwitz in June 1940 from the prison in Tarnow.

Another prisoner who arrived at Auschwitz with Edek Galinski was Wieslaw Kielar who was a close friend of Edek recalled in the spring of 1944 :

"Edek began to talk about his relationship with Mala, which had been developing for some time. I was surprised because up to now he had been so discreet and he usually avoided the subject.

At any rate, he had never before opened his heart to the extent which he did now. He had known her a long time, he said, he was very attached to her. They were living together and linked very closely, he found it difficult to part with her, particularly since she suffered from malaria.

He could not bear the mere thought that sooner or later she would have to share the fate of all the Jews. Now everything is fine, she's even a favourite of Drechsler, everybody likes her. But when the moment comes, she will be the first to be sent to the gas chamber by Drechsler."

Edek, Wieslar planned to escape, and Edek wanted the escape to include Mala, but although Wieslar at first agreed to it, he had serious reservations that Mala, who had not been well, and was Jewish could jeopardise their chances of a successful escape.

Edek brought Wieslar a portrait of Mala drawn in chalk to dispel his fears, over any pronounced Semitic features; Wieslar described her as having "a sweet and pretty face." The portrait had been drawn by female prisoner Zofja Stepien.

Edek managed to obtain from his former Kommandofuhrer Lubusch an SS uniform, which he had left in a hut and had even found an SS guards identity card on the ramp, the date for the escape of all three of them were fixed.

On the eve of the planned escape Wieslar Kielar proposed a new plan whereby Edek and Mala escaped on the Saturday as planned, and that Wieslar would escape with another prisoner called Jozek on the Monday.

The uniform would have to be smuggled back to Birkenau in order for the escape to be repeated in the same manner, from the village of Kozy, objections and doubts remained, but this was agreed between Edek and Wieslar.

The escape took place on Saturday the 24 June 1944 around noon, with Edek dressed as an SS guard and Mala dressed as a male prisoner carrying a heavy lavatory pan.

Wieslar Kielar described the escape attempt:

"At last they were coming. Stocky Jurek side by side with a short figure in overalls, carrying a heavy lavatory pan, Mala was already bending down under this load. I gave a sign to Edek. He had been waiting for it because moments later he emerged from the bunker.

Brushing some invisible dust from his Rottenfuhrer's uniform, he approached the side of the road and waited for the others to reach him. Jurek stopped in front of the SS man at regulation distance, executed a regulation about face and marched back.

Mala stayed behind with Edek. He let Mala walk ahead, while he moved a few steps behind her, casual, normal, as one would often see an SS man escorting a prisoner. Slowly they left the camp. I followed them with my eyes for a good three hundred yards until I lost sight of them because the road turned slightly to the right and disappeared behind the building of the potato bunker."

At night at the Roll Calls in the men's and women's camp the sirens wailed, first in the men's camp then in the women's camp, as the SS discovered that two prisoners were missing.

Shortly afterwards the news spread through the camp like wildfire, that Edek and Mala had escaped. First Protective Custody Commander for the Men's Camp Schwarzhuber was reported to have said, "that if such an old prisoner had got away, it wasn't worth the trouble looking for him."

Freedom however, was not to last. Both Edek and Mala are captured on the 6 July 1944 by the Bielitz Gestapo, and are returned to Auschwitz the next day, and are locked in Bunker II and subjected to brutal interrogations by the Political Department, after initially being treated kindly, which was unexpected.

Within the camp rumours were fife about how they were captured, Wieslar Kielar received a letter, better known as stiffs, in camp parlance, from Edek himself, which explained exactly what had happened.

The letter read:

"They were arrested in the Zywiek Mountains where they had run into a border patrol. They were taken to Bielsko and put in jail without being recognised because Edek continued to wear the SS uniform."

The interrogations became more brutal they beat Edek's bare feet with a metal rod, Mala too, was no longer handled with kid gloves. Wilhem Boger was in charge of the interrogations.

But despite the brutal treatment neither Edek nor Mala betrayed anyone, and the case was referred to Breslau for a ruling. The sentence was handed down, both were to be hung. Edek made another attempt at communication and stated that "Mala or himself would go to the executioner alive."

Wieslar describes Edek's execution, which took place on the 15 September 1944, Mala was also executed on the same day:

"Roll call was coming to an end. Now, as was customary on these occasions all of us went to where the gallows stood and formed a large square around the gallows.

I stood as near as possible to the small room from which Edek would be led to his doom. After a while the door opened and Edek appeared. There was complete silence. All that could be heard was the crunching of gravel under the boots of Edek, the condemned man, walking towards the gallows, and Jupp the executioner.

Near the spot where I stood people made way to let the two men pass. I squeezed myself into the front row, hoping that Edek would see me. He walked very tall, pale, his face slightly bloated. His eyes scanned the crowd for faces he knew.

I was sure he wanted to see me. I stood there, he almost touched me as he went past. A whisper would have been enough, "Edek" - but at that moment I was not capable of even that. I stood as if paralysed. Edek went past me without noticing me.

Now I saw his straight back and his hands drawn behind his back and bound with wire. Bravely Edek mounted the scaffold and immediately climbed onto the stool that had been placed beneath the gallows. The noose touched his head.

The command "Attention" was given. After a while an SS man silently stepped forward and read out the sentence in German. At this moment Edek standing on the stool sought the opening of the noose with his head - then he vigorously kicked away the stool and hung. He kept his word - he would not deliver himself alive to the hangman.

But the SS men would not permit such a demonstration. They began to shout and the Camp Kapo understood them at once. Grasping Edek round the middle, he placed him back on the stool and loosened the noose.

The German finished reading the sentence in German and begun muddling it in Polish. He read fast and unintelligently. He was in a hurry. Edek waited until he finished. In a moment of utter silence he suddenly cried in a choking voice, "Long live Poland -"he broke off in the middle of a word. Quickly Jupp drew away the stool, and this time the noose was pulled tight.

Edek's body tightened, twitched and then remained hanging limply, his head dropped to one side. He was no longer alive."

There are various versions as to how Mala's died in Birkenau, the complete truth may never be known, but various eyewitness testimonies have stated the following.

"After evening roll call, the female prisoners were ordered to form a circle near Block 4 in the women's camp Blb. The Lagerfuhrein Maria Mandel and overseer Margot Dreshel and several SS guards were also present when Mala was brought forward by SS Unterscharfuhrer Ruiters, towards the gallows.

While Lagerfuhrein Maria Mandel read out the sentence, Mala slashed her wrist with a razor blade. As blood poured from the wound Ruiters tried to grab the blade, but Mala hit him, which was the trigger that made the SS beat her severely, breaking her hand in an attempt to seize the razor blade."

Mala was then put onto a handcart and taken to the Crematorium, where some sources say she died on the way. Other sources claim she was shot by the SS or was thrown into the crematoria alive. Mala though like Edek had kept her promise, she had not been taken alive by the executioner.

Mala Zimetbaums story was made available to the public in the official testimony of Mrs. Raya Kagan, delivered on June 8, 1961, during Session 70 in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Mala is still remembered even to this day, and many Auschwitz survivors regularly gather to pay their respect to this brave woman, and a plaque has been placed on the house where her family lived in in Antwerp, scholarships and even a B'nai B'rith lodge have been named in her honor.

Anus Mundi - Five Years in Auschwitz by Wieslar Kielar published by Penguin Books 1982.

Kulka, Erich, "Five Escapes from Auschwitz," in They Fought Back, op.

The Auschwitz Chronicle - Danuta Czech published by Henry Holt New York 1990.

Mala - A Fragment of a Life by Lorenz Sichelschmidt.

Adolf Eichmann Trial Transcripts - Nizkor

Copyright Victor Smart & Ryan Harrison H.E.A.R.T 2009

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Miriam Schmetterling remembers the day in 1944 when Mikolaj Tracz appeared at the top of the ladder to the attic where she had been hiding for 10 months with her husband, his parents and another Jewish family.

"You can come out now," she recalls Tracz saying. "The Germans are gone."

"I can live," was her first thought. "I can live now."

More than 60 years later, Schmetterling wept as she hugged Tracz's daughter, Jozefa Tracz-Czekaj, who as a teenager helped her parents hide the two Jewish families. It was their first reunion since the war, at a ceremony honoring Poles who saved their Jewish neighbors and friends from the Holocaust.

"I find no words to describe what I'm feeling now," said Schmetterling, now 82. "I did not even dare dream of this meeting."

Tracz-Czekaj was 15 in 1943, when her parents, Mikolaj and Maria Tracz, took the seven members of the Schmetterling and Teig families into hiding in the attic of their house -- right across from the Nazi police station in the town of Kopyczynce, then in eastern Poland, now Ukraine.

She said her family members were friends with the two Jewish families and decided they had to do something to help.

"The Germans were killing the Jews, and we could not stand and watch it," said Tracz-Czekaj, now 79.

She remembers helping bring food to the families and playing piano loudly so that the noise from the people living in the attic would not attract attention from strangers.

"Jozefa, her father and the whole family were the heroes of the war," an emotional Schmetterling told the gathering of some 140 elderly people at the Lauder-Morasha School, a Jewish institution in Warsaw.

Some 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland in 1939, when the Nazis invaded at the start of World War II. Most were killed in the Holocaust, but some were saved by their non-Jewish neighbors, despite a Nazi order to kill anyone helping the Jews.

Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved almost 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis, is believed to have been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany organized the meeting on the sidelines of its annual executive board meeting, held this year in Warsaw, to honor Tracz-Czekaj and dozens of others. They hold the title of Righteous Among the Nations; trees are planted in their honor at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.

"You in this room rescued hundreds of people during terrible times," Gideon Taylor, the Claims Conference executive vice president, told the gathering.

"You showed courage in a time of hatred. You showed morality in a time of killing."

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Holocaust survivor, rescuer reunite in Poland

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Miriam Schmetterling remembers the day in 1944 when Mikolaj Tracz appeared at the top of the ladder to the attic where she had been hiding for 10 months with her husband, his parents and another Jewish family. "You can come out now," she recalls Tracz saying. "The Germans are gone."