Yad Vashem - יָד וַשֵׁם:

"For this is what the LORD says: "To the eunuchs (those who cannot have children)who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant- to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial (יד=Yad) and a name (שם=Shem) better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.” Isaiah 56: 4, 5. Naming the Holocaust memorial ‘Yad Vashem’ conveys the idea of establishing a national depository for the names of Jewish victims who have no one to carry their name after death.

~History and architecture of the museum: The idea of establishing a memorial in the historical Jewish homeland for Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust was conceived during World War II, as a response to reports of the mass murder of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. Yad Vashem was first proposed in September 1942, at a board meeting of the Jewish National Fund, by Mordecai Shenhavi, a member of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek. In August 1945, the plan was discussed in greater detail at a Zionist meeting in London. In February 1946, Yad Vashem opened an office in Jerusalem and a branch office in Tel Aviv and in June that year, convened its first plenary session. In July 1947, the First Conference on Holocaust Research was held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, the outbreak in May 1948 of the War of Independence, brought operations to a standstill for two years. In 1953, the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, unanimously passed the Yad Vashem Law,* establishing the Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. Yad Vashem opened to the public in 1957. The exhibits focused on Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, the uprisings in Sobibor and Treblinka death camps, and the struggle of survivors to reach Israel. The location of Yad Vashem on the western side of Mount Herzl, an area devoid of weighty historical associations, was chosen to convey a symbolic message of ‘rebirth’ after destruction. At the end of the long corridor of the new museum is a balcony with the view over ‘Mevaseret Zion.’ This symbolises the The ‘approach to Jerusalem.’ The new Yad Vashem museum was designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, replacing the previous 30-year old exhibition. The new building, consists of a long corridor connected to 10 exhibition halls, each dedicated to a different chapter of the Holocaust. The museum is shaped like a triangular concrete ‘prism’ that cuts through the landscape, illuminated by a 200-meter long skylight. Visitors follow a preset route that takes them through underground galleries that branch off from the main hall. Visitors are guided into the galleries by a series of impassable gaps that of the Holocaust are highlighted. The museum combines the personal stories of 90 Holocaust victims and survivors and presents approximately 2500 personal items including artwork and letters donated by survivors and others. The old historical displays revolving around anti-Semitism and the rise of Nazism have been replaced by exhibits that focus on the personal stories of Jews killed in the Holocaust. According to Avner Shalev, the museum's curator and chairman, a visit to the new museum revolves around “looking into the eyes of the individuals. There weren't six million victims, there were six million individual murders." The new museum was dedicated on 15 March 2005 in the presence of leaders from 40 states and former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan.

~The Hall of Names:

The Hall of Names is a memorial to the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The main hall is composed of two cones: one ten meters high, with a reciprocal well-like cone excavated into the underground rock, its base filled with water. On the upper cone is a display featuring 600 photographs of Holocaust victims and fragments of Pages of Testimony. These are reflected in the water at the bottom of the lower cone, commemorating those victims whose names remain unknown. Surrounding the platform is the circular repository, housing the approximately 4.2 million names, so far collected, with empty spaces for those names yet to be submitted. Since the 1950s, Yad Vashem has collected approximately 110.000 audio, video and written testimonies by Holocaust survivors. As the survivors age, the program has expanded to visiting survivors in their homes to tape interviews. Adjoining the hall is a study area with a computerized data bank where visitors can do online searches for the names of Holocaust victims. ~Art Gallery: Yad Vashem houses the world's largest collection of artwork produced by Jews and other victims of Nazi occupation in 1933-1945. Yehudit Shendar, the senior art curator of Yad Vashem, supervises a 10.000-piece collection, adding 300 pieces a year, most of them donated by survivors' families or discovered in attics. Included in the collection are works by: Alice Lok Cahana, Samuel Bak, Felix Nussbaum. Above a painting named; ‘The Family,’ by Samuel Bak.

~Synagoge: The Synagogue at Yad Vashem Showcases Judaica from Destroyed Synagogues in Europe. Thirty-one distinct items are on display, including four Torah Arks, and various other Judaicia from throughout Europe. The four arks, all of which come from Romania, were brought to Yad Vashem with the support of the late Prof. Nicolae Cajal, then president of the Federation of the Jewish Communities in Romania and with the backing of the Romanian government. In 1998, Yehudit Inbar, Director of the Museums Division and Haviva Peled Carmeli, Senior Artifacts Curator, traveled throughout Romania to trace what was left of a once thriving Jewish community. Among the items discovered was an Ark that was found in a local Romanian’s home who was using it as a clothes closet, the Torah Ark of the Apple Merchants Association Synagogue in Iasi, and the unraveling Torah Ark Curtain from Cluj. The main, functioning Torah Ark’s façade is from Barlad, Romania. In addition, there are ritual articles from Poland, Greece, Transnistria, Germany and Slovakia. “The Yad Vashem synagogue will serve as a memorial to the destroyed places of worship of European Jewry. It will be a testimonial to the indestructible faith, the rich spiritual world of European Jewry and the extraordinary will of the Jewish people to survive, to remember and to rebuild,” said Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate. ~The Hall of Remembrance - אוהל יזכור: The principle memorial at Yad Vashem is the Hall of Remembrance (Ohel Yizkor). The severe concrete-walled structure with a low tent-like roof stands empty, save for an eternal flame. Engraved in the black basalt floor are the names of 21 Nazi extermination camps, concentration camps and killing sites in central and eastern Europe. A crypt in front of the memorial(eternal) flame contains ashes of victims. The approach to the Hall of Remembrance is lined with trees planted in honor of non-Jewish men and women – ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ - who, at the risk of their own lives, attempted to rescue Jews from the Holocaust.

~The Valley of the Communities - בקעת הקהילות: The Valley of the Communities in Yad Vashem is 10 dunam monument literally dug out of natural bedrock. Over 5000 names of communities are engraved on the stone walls in the Valley of the Communities. Each name recalls a Jewish community which existed for hundreds of years; for the inhabitants, each community constituted an entire world. Today, in most cases, nothing remains but the name. The Valley was excavated out of the earth- nothing was built above ground. It is as if what had been built up on the surface of the earth over the course of a millennium- a thousand years of Jewish communal life- was suddenly swallowed up. The names of the communities are engraved on the 107 walls which roughly corresponds to the geographic arrangement of the map of Europe and North Africa.

At the entrance to the Valley is the inscription: "This memorial commemorates the Jewish communities destroyed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and the few which suffered but survived in the shadow of the Holocaust. For more than one thousand years, Jews lived in Europe, organizing communities to preserve their distinct identity. In periods of relative tranquility, Jewish culture flourished, but in periods of unrest, Jews were forced to flee. Wherever they settled, they endowed the people amongst whom they lived with their talents. Here their stories will be told.." ~The Memorial to the Deportees - הזיכרון למגורשים: The Memorial to the Deportees was established at Yad Vashem as a monument to the millions of Jews herded onto cattle-cars and transported from all over Europe to the extermination camps. An original cattle-car, appropriated by the German Railway authorities and given to Yad Vashem by the Polish authorities, stands at the center of the memorial site. Although symbolizing the journey towards annihilation and oblivion, facing as it does the hills of Jerusalem, the memorial also conveys the hope and the gift of life of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, eternal capital of the Jewish people. The trees around the memorial were planted after a holocaust survivor, living in the Jerusalem neighbourhood facing the memorial, complained she saw the cattle – car from her kitchen window every morning. She could not bear this, so trees were planted to obscure the sight.

~The Children’s Memorial - הזיכרון של הילדים: In my opinion this is the most heartbreaking memorial in Yad Vashem. Approximately 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. They are specially remembered in the nearby Children’s Memorial, an underground cavern in which the flickering flames of memorial candles are reflected in an infinity of tiny lights within the prevailing darkness. Outside the entrance to the cavern a memorial of stones is placed. When you exit the Children’s memorial, another memorial is waiting. This is a statue of Janusz Korczak and the children of his orphanage. According to U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum full statistics for the tragic fate of children who died during the Holocaust will never be known. Some estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Romani children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children who were murdered under Nazi rule in Germany and occupied Europe.

~Nathan Rapoport - נתן רפופורט: Nathan Rapoport (1911-1987), was a Jewish sculptor who was born in Warsaw, Poland. In 1936, he won a scholarship to study in France and Italy. He fled to the Soviet Union when the Nazis invaded Poland. The Soviets initially provided him with a studio, but later compelled him to work as a manual laborer. After the end of the war, he returned to Poland to study at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In 1950, Rapoport immigrated to the United States, where he lived in New York until his death in 1987.

His sculptures in public places include:

-Monument to Mordechai Anielewicz at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai.

-The Last March, bronze sculpture in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

-The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, bronze sculpture in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

Righteous Among the Nations - חסידי אומות העולם‎: Righteous Among the Nations, in Hebrew, חסידי אומות העולם‎, is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis. The term originates with the concept of ‘righteous gentiles,’ a term used in rabbinical Judaism to refer to non-Jews, who abide by the Seven Laws of Noah: 1. The prohibition of idolatry. 2.The prohibition of murder. 3.The prohibition of theft. 4.The prohibition of sexual immorality. 5.The prohibition of blasphemy. 6.The prohibition of eating flesh taken from an animal while it is still alive. 7.The requirement of maintaining courts to provide legal recourse.

To be recognized as ‘Righteous,’ a person has to fulfill several criteria:

1.Only a Jewish party can put a nomination forward; 2.Helping a family member or Jew convert to Christianity is not a criterion for recognition; 3.Assistance has to be repeated and/or substantial; and 4.Assistance has to be given without any financial gain expected in return (although covering normal expenses such as rent or food is acceptable). 5.The person cannot have the blood of innocents on his hands. A person who is recognized as ‘Righteous among the Nations’ for having taken risks to help Jews during the Holocaust is awarded a medal in his/her name, a certificate of honor, and the privilege of having the name added to those on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (the last is instead of a tree planting, which was discontinued for lack of space). The awards are distributed to the rescuers or their next-of-kin during ceremonies in Israel, or in their countries of residence through the offices of Israel's diplomatic representatives. These ceremonies are attended by local government representatives and are given wide media coverage. At least 130 ‘Righteous Gentiles’ have settled in Israel. They were welcomed by Israeli authorities, and were granted citizenship. In the mid-1980s, they became entitled to special pensions. Some of them settled in British Mandatory Palestine before Israel's establishment shortly after World War II, or in the early years of the new state of Israel, while others came later. Those who came earlier often spoke fluent Hebrew and have now integrated into Israeli society. Below a graph with the names and numbers of Righteous Among the Nations - per Country & Ethnic Origin, as of January 1, 2014:

Albania - 69

Italy - 610

Armenia - 24

Japan - 1

Austria - 95

Latvia - 134

Belarus - 601

Lithuania - 871

Belgium - 1.665

Luxembourg - 1

Bosnia - 42

Macedonia - 10

Brazil - 2

Moldova - 79

Bulgaria - 20

Montenegro - 1

Chile - 1

Netherlands**- 5.351

China - 2

Norway - 52

Croatia - 109

Poland - 6.454

Cuba - 1

Portugal - 2

Czech Republic - 114

Romania - 60

Denmark*- 22

Russia - 189

Ecuador - 1

Serbia - 131

Egypt - 1

Slovakia - 539

El Salvador - 1

Slovenia - 7

Estonia - 3

Spain - 6

France - 3.760

Sweden - 10

Georgia - 1

Switzerland - 45

Germany - 553

Turkey - 1

Great Britain (Incl. Scotland) - 21

Ukraine - 2.472

Greece - 321

USA - 4

Hungary - 810

Vietnam - 1

Ireland - 1 Total: 25.271 * The Danish Underground requested that all its members who participated in the rescue of the Jewish community not be listed individually, but commemorated as one group.

** Includes two persons originally from Indonesia, but residing in the Netherlands. Below I will name and describe some of the famous ‘Righteous Among the Nations'. 1.Janusz Korczak(1878 - 1942):

Janusz Korczak was born Henryk Goldsmit in Warsaw on July 22, 1878. During his youth, he played with children who were poor and lived in bad neighborhoods; his passion for helping disadvantaged youth continued into his adulthood. He studied medicine and also had a promising career in literature. When he gave up his career in literature and medicine, he changed his name to Janusz Korczak, a pseudonym derived from a 19th century novel, Janasz Korczak and the pretty Swordsweeperlady. In 1912, Korczak established a Jewish orphanage, 'Dom Sierot,' in a building which he designed to advance his progressive educational theories. He envisioned a world in which children structured their own world and became experts in their own matters. Jewish children between the ages of seven and fourteen were allowed to live there while attending Polish public school and government-sponsored Jewish schools. The orphanage opened a summer camp in 1921, which remained in operation until the summer of 1940. Besides serving as principal of Don Sierot and another orphanage, 'Nasz Dom,' Korczak was also a doctor and author, worked at a Polish radio station, was a principal of an experimental school, published a children’s newspaper and was a docent at a Polish university. Korczak also served as an expert witness in a district court for minors. He became well-known in Polish society and received many awards. The rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930's restricted only his activities with Jews. In 1934 and 1936, Korczak visited Palestine and was influenced by the kibbutz movement. Following his trips, Korczak was convinced that all Jews should move to Palestine. The Germans occupied Poland in September 1939, and the Warsaw ghetto was established in November 1940. The orphanage was moved inside the ghetto. Korczak received many offers to be smuggled out of the ghetto, but he refused because he did not want to abandon the children. On August 5, 1942, Korczak joined nearly 200 children and orphanage staff members, some of them not Jewish, were rounded up for deportation to Treblinka, where they were all put to death. 2.Emilie Schindler(1907 - 2001): Emilie Schindler's husband Oscar Schindler became a household name as one of the great humanitarians of the century, saving 1300 Jews from certain death in the Nazi death camps during World War II. While Oscar Schindler's efforts to save hundreds of Jews are well known thanks to Keneally's book and the movie Schindler's List, the silver-screen version left Emilie on the sidelines. Now a new German-language book 'Ich, Emilie Schindler' by the Argentinian author Erika Rosenberg tries to show that Emilie was just as involved in shielding Jews from the Nazis. The biography highlights Emilie Schindler's bravery during the Holocaust and portrays her not only as a strong woman working alongside her husband but as a heroine in her own right.

Emilie Pelzl was born on October 22, 1907, in the city of Alt Moletein, a village in the German-populated border region of what was then The Republic of Czechoslovakia. Emilie later recalled the local pastor, an old family friend, who instructed young Emilie to end her friendship with a young Jew, Rita Reif. Emilie defied the pastor and retained her friendship with Rita, until Rita was murdered by the Nazis in front of her father's store in 1942.

Emilie Pelzl first saw the tall, handsome and outgoing Oscar Schindler when he came to the door of her father's farmhouse in Alt Moletein. It was 1928 and Oscar was selling electric motors. After a courtship of six weeks, they were married on March 6, 1928. Emilie's father had given Oscar a dowry of 100.000 Czech crowns, a considerable sum in those days, and he soon bought a luxury car and squandered the rest on outings. In her 'A Memoir Where Light And Shadow Meet,' Emilie recalls how she struggled trying to understand him:

"In spite of his flaws, Oscar had a big heart and was always ready to help whoever was in need. He was affable, kind, extremely generous and charitable, but at the same time, not mature at all. He constantly lied and deceived me, and later returned feeling sorry, like a boy caught in mischief, asking to be forgiven one more time - and then we would start all over again.”

In the thirties, now without employment, Oscar Schindler joined the Nazi party, as did many others at that time. He had seen the possibilities which the war brought in its wake, and he followed on the heels of the SS when the Germans invaded Poland.

Oscar moved to Crakow on his own, where he took over a Jewish family`s apartment. Bribes in the shape of money and illegal black market goods flowed copiously from Schindler and gave him control of a Jewish-owned enameled-goods factory,’ Deutsch Emailwaren Fabrik,’ close to the Jewish ghetto. Schindler principally employed Jewish workers. At this time, they were the cheapest labour.

But slowly as the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the Jews dawned on Schindler in all its horror - he came to see the Jews not only as cheap labour, but also as mothers, fathers, and children, exposed to ruthless slaughter.

Schindler promised the Jews who worked for him that they would never starve, that he would protect them as best he could. And he did, building his own workers barracks on the factory grounds to help alleviate the sufferings of life in the nearby Plaszow labor camp. He gave safe haven to as many Jewish workers as possible, insisting to the occupying Nazis that they were ‘essential workers,’ a status that kept them away from harassment and killings.

At Schindler`s factory, nobody was hit, nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps. But conditions at the factory were far from comfortable. Freezing, lice-ridden inmates still suffered typhus and dysentery.

Until the liberation of spring, 1945, the Schindler's used all means at their disposal to ensure the safety of the Schindler-Jews. They spent every pfennig they had, and Emilie's jewels were sold, to buy food, clothes, and medicine. They set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie looked after the sick. Those who did not survive were given a fitting Jewish burial in a hidden graveyard - established and paid for by the Schindlers.

Later accounts have revealed that the Schindlers spent something like 4 million German marks keeping their Jews out of the death camps - an enormous sum of money for those times.

The factory continued to produce shells for the German Wehrmacht for 7 months. In all that time not one usable shell was produced; none passed the military quality tests.

One night in the last weeks of the war, Emilie, acting alone while Oscar was in Crakow, was confronted by Nazis transporting 250 Jews in four wagons from Golechau to a death camp. She succeeded in persuading the Gestapo to send these Jews to the factory camp "with regard to the continuing war industry production." In her A Memoir she recalls:

"We found the railroad car bolts frozen solid .. the spectacle I saw was a nightmare almost beyond imagination. It was impossible to distinguish the men from the women: they were all so emaciated - weighing under seventy pounds most of them, they looked like skeletons. Their eyes were shining like glowing coals in the dark ..”

Of the 250 in the wagons, thirteen were dead. Throughout that night and for many nights following, Emilie worked tirelessly to rehabilitate these Jews. One large room in the factory was emptied for the purpose. Three more men died, but with care, the others gradually rallied.

Today, surviving Schindler-Jews remember how Emilie worked indefatigably to secure food and somehow managed to provide the sick with extra nourishment and apples. A Jewish boy, Lew Feigenbaum, broke his eyeglasses and stopped Emilie in the factory and told her: "I broke my glasses and can't see .." When the Schindler-Jews were transferred to Brunnlitz, Emilie arranged for a prescription for the eyeglasses to be picked up in Crakow and delivered to her in Brunnlitz.

Feiwel (today Franciso) Wichter, 75, was No. 371 on Schindler's List, the only one of the Schindler Jews living in Argentina:

“As long as I live, I will always have a sincere and eternal gratitude for dear Emilie. I think she triumphed over danger because of her courage, intelligence and determination to do the right and humane thing. She had immense energy and she was like a mother. “

Another survivor, Maurice Markheim, No.142 on the list, later recalled:

“She got a whole truck of bread from somewhere on the black market. They called me to unload it. She was talking to the SS and because of the way she turned around and talked, I could slip a loaf under my shirt. I saw she did this on purpose. A loaf of bread at that point was gold .. There is an old expression: Behind the man, there is the woman, and I believe she was the great human being.”

In May, 1945, it was all over. The Russians moved into Brunnlitz. The previous evening, Schindler gathered everyone together in the factory, where he and Emilie took a deeply emotional leave of them. The Schindlers - and the 1300 Schindler-Jews - had survived.

Oscar Schindler`s life after the war was a long series of failures. He tried without success to be a film producer and was deprived of his nationality immediately after the war. Threats from former Nazis meant that he felt insecure in post-war Germany, and he applied for an entry permit to the United States. He was refused as he had been a member of the Nazi party.

After this he fled to Buenos Aires in Argentina with Emilie, his mistress, and a dozen Schindler Jews. The Schindlers settled down in 1949 as farmers, first raising chickens and then nutrias. They were supported financially by the Jewish organization, Joint, and other thankful Jews. But Oscar Schindler met with no success, and in 1957 he became bankrupt and travelled back alone to Germany, where he remained estranged from his wife for 17 years before he died in poverty in 1974, at the age of 66. He never saw Emilie again.

Emilie stayed in Argentina, where she scraped by on a small pension from Israel and a $650 a month pension from Germany. Her only relative, a niece, lived in Bavaria, Germany.

In May, 1994, Emilie Schindler received The Righteous Amongst the Nations Award. In 1995, Argentina decorated her with the Order of May, the highest honor given to foreigners who are not heads of state. In 1998, the Argentine government decided to give her a pension of $1000 a month until her financial situation improved. She was named an Illustrious Citizen by Argentina.

In July, 2001, during a visit to Berlin, Germany, a frail Emilie handed over documents related to her husband to a museum. Emilie Schindler died Friday night October 5, 2001, in a Berlin hospital.

Emilie was bitter and disillusioned: “He gave his Jews everything - and me, nothing.” But she was capable of expressing both her love and bitterness towards him in one sentence, calling him a drunk and womanisor, but also saying: “If he'd stayed, I'd have looked after him.”

In A Memoir Emilie tells about her inner thoughts, when she visited his tomb, over thirty-seven years after he left:

"At last we meet again .. I have received no answer, my dear, I do not know why you abandoned me .. But what not even your death or my old age can change is that we are still married, this is how we are before God. I have forgiven you everything, everything .. "

3.Oskar Schindler(1908 - 1974):

An ethnic German, Schindler was born April 28, 1908, in Zwittau, Austria-Hungary, what is now Moravia in the Czech Republic. Schindler grew up with all the privileges money could buy. He was born Catholic.

Never one to miss a chance to make money, he marched into Poland on the heels of the SS. He dived headfirst into the black-market and the underworld and soon made friends with the local Gestapo bigwigs, softening them up with women, money and illicit booze. His newfound connections helped him acquire a factory which he ran with the cheapest labor around: Jewish. At first he seemed like every other usurping German industrialist, driven by profit and unmoved by the means of his profiteering. But somewhere along the line, something changed.

In December 1939, as occupied Poland was being torn apart by the savagery of the Holocaust, Schindler took his first faltering steps from the darkness of Nazism towards the light of heroism. "If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car,” he said later of his wartime actions, “wouldn't you help him?”

Before the outbreak of war, Poland had been a relative haven for European Jews - Krakow's Jewish population numbered over 50.000. But when Germany invaded, destruction began immediately and it was merciless. Jews were herded into crowded ghettos, randomly beaten and humiliated, capriciously killed. Jewish property and businesses were summarily destroyed, or appropriated by the SS and 'sold' to Nazi 'investors', one of whom was the fast talking, womanizing, money hungry Schindler.

Not long after acquiring his ‘Emalia’ factory - which produced enamel goods and munitions to supply the German front - the removal of Jews to death camps began in earnest. Schindler's Jewish accountant put him in touch with the few Jews with any remaining wealth. They invested in his factory, and in return they would be able to work there and perhaps be spared. He was persuaded to hire more Jewish workers, designating their skills as ‘essential,’ paying off the Nazis so they would allow them to stay in Krakow. Schindler was making money, but everyone in his factory was fed, no-one was beaten, no-one was killed. It became an oasis of humanity in a desert of moral torpor. As the brutality of the Holocaust escalated, Schindler's protection of his Jewish workers became increasingly active. In the summer of 1942, he witnessed a German raid on the Jewish ghetto. Watching innocent people being packed onto trains bound for certain death, something awakened in him.

“Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen,” he said later. “I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”

By the autumn of 1944, Germany's hold on Poland had weakened. As the Russian army approached, the Nazi's tried desperately to complete their program of liquidation and sent all remaining Jews to die. But Schindler remained true to the “Schindlerjuden,” the workers he referred to as “my children.” After the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto and the transfer of many Jews to the Plaszow concentration camp, Schindler used his influence to set up a branch of the camp for 900 Jewish workers in his factory compound in Zablocie and made his now famous list of the workers he would need for its operation. The factory operated in its new location a year, making defective bullets for German guns. Conditions were grim, for the Schindlers as well as the workers. But Schindler saved most of these workers when he transferred his factory to Brunnlitz (Sudetenland) in October 1944. 4.Raoul Wallenberg(1912- ?): Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat in Nazi-occupied Hungary who led an extensive and successful mission to save the lives of nearly 100.000 Hungarian Jews. Though his efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust is one of the most treasured aspects of that time, his fate and ultimate death is unknown still to this day. Raoul Wallenberg was born August 4, 1912, three months after his father's death.

Raoul belonged to one of the most famous families in Sweden, the large Wallenberg family. It was a family that contributed to Sweden bankers, diplomats and politicians during several generations in the country. Raoul's father, Raoul Oscar Wallenberg, was an officer in the navy, and his cousins Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg were two of Sweden's most famous bankers and industrialists.

In 1935, he received his bachelor degree of Science in Architecture. But the market for architects was small in Sweden, so his grandfather sent him to Cape Town, South Africa, where he practiced at a Swedish firm selling building materials. After six months, his grandfather arranged a

new job for him at a Dutch bank office in Haifa, Palestine.

Wallenberg, first to the right with some friends in Israel in 1936

It was in Palestine he first met Jews that had escaped Hitler's Germany. Their stories of the Nazi persecutions affected him deeply. Perhaps because he had a very humane attitude to life and because he owned a drop of Jewish blood (Raoul's grandmother's grandfather was a Jew by the name of Benedicks whom arrived to Sweden by the end of the 18th century). Wallenberg returned to Sweden from Haifa in 1936 and resumed his old interest for business.Within eight months, Wallenberg was a joint owner and international director of the Mid-European Trading Company. Through his trips in Nazi-occupied France and in Germany itself, Raoul quickly learned how the German bureaucracy functioned. He also made several trips to Hungary and Budapest. At that time, Hungary was still a relatively safe place in a hostile surrounding.

During the spring of 1944 the world had mostly awoken to realize what Hitler's "final solution to the Jewish problem" actually meant. In May 1944, the first authentic eye witness report of what was happening in the Auschwitz extermination camp finally reached the western world . It came from two Jews who had managed to escape the gas chambers and Nazi Germany all together.

Hitler's plans for the extermination of European Jewry were now known. At the beginning of 1944, there still lived an estimated 700.000 Jews in Hungary, a country which had joined Germany in the war against the Soviet Union already in 1941.

When the Germans lost the battle of Stalingrad in 1943, Hungary wanted to follow Italy's example and demand a separate peace. Hitler called the Hungarian head of state, Miklós Horthy, and demanded that he display continued solidarity with Germany. When Horthy refused to meet these demands, an angered Hitler had the German army invade Hungary in March 1944. Following soon thereafter, the deportations of Hungarian Jews to the concentration camps began. For the vast majority of these Jews, the lone destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland - a ride that brought with it certain death. Though the Germans began by deporting Jews from the Hungarian country side, the Jewish citizens of Budapest knew that their hour of fate was also soon to come. In desperation they sought help from embassies of the neutral countries where provisional identity passes were issued for Jews with special connections to these countries.

The Swedish legation in Budapest succeeded in negotiating with the Germans that the bearers of these protective passes would be treated as Swedish citizens and exempt from wearing the yellow Star of David on their chest.

It was Per Anger (photo above), a young diplomat at the legation in Budapest, who initiated the first of these Swedish protective passes. (In 1982, Per Anger was awarded the honor of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem for his heroic actions to save Jews during the war.)

In a short period of time the Swedish legation issued 700 passes, though this represented a mere drop in the ocean compared to the enormous number of Jews being threatened by Hitler. To deal with the great number of Jews looking for help, the legation requested immediate staff reinforcements from the foreign department in Stockholm.

In 1944, the United States established The War Refugee Board (WRB), an organization created with the mission of saving Jews from Nazi persecution.

(photo above; Budapest, Autumn 1944. Wallenberg to the right with Hungarian collegues).

The WRB soon realized that serious attempts were being made from the Swedish side to rescue the Jewish population in Hungary. The WRB's representative in Stockholm called a committee with prominent Swedish Jews to discuss suitable persons to lead a mission in Budapest for an extensive rescue operation. Among the participants was Raoul Wallenberg's business partner Koloman Lauer, chosen as an expert on Hungary.The committee's first choice was Folke Bernadotte, chairman of the Swedish Red Cross and a relative of the Swedish king. After Bernadotte was disapproved by the Hungarian government, Koloman Lauer suggested that his business partner - Raoul Wallenberg - be asked to lead the mission, emphasizing Wallenberg's familiarity with Hungary from the many trips he had made there while working for their joint company. Raoul was considered too young and inexperienced, but Lauer was persistent in his belief that Wallenberg was the right man — a quick thinker, energetic, brave and compassionate. And he had a famous name.

Soon the committee approved Wallenberg and by the end of June 1944, he was appointed first secretary at the Swedish legation in Budapest with the mission to start a rescue operation for the Jews.

Raoul wrote a memo to the Swedish foreign department. He was determined not to get caught in the protocol and paperwork bureaucracy of diplomacy. He demanded full authorization to deal with whom he wanted without having to contact the ambassador first. He also wanted to have the right to send diplomatic couriers beyond the usual channels. The memo was so unusual that it was sent all the way to Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, who consulted the king before he announced that the demands had been approved.

By the time Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944, the Germans, under the leadership of SS officer Adolf Eichmann, had already deported more than 400.000 Jewish men, women and children from Hungary. They had been deported on 148 freight trains between May 14 and July 8. Only about 230.000 Jews, out of a population that once numbered close to three-quarters of a million, were now left.

That same July, Eichmann was preparing a plan that in one day would exterminate the enitre Jewish population in Budapest, the only Hungarian region remaining with large pockets of Jews intact. In a report to Berlin, though, he wrote that "the technical details will take a few days." If this plan had been but into action, Raoul Wallenberg's mission would have been completely meaningless as the "Jewish issue" would have been ‘permanently solved’ for the Jews of Budapest.

Horthy, the head of state, meanwhile received a letter from the Swedish King, Gustav V, with an appeal to halt all the deportations. Horthy sent a note back to the Swedish king saying he would do "everything in his power to ensure that the principals of humanity and justice would be respected." Soon after, the Nazi's deportations in Hungary were canceled and one train with 1600 Jews was even stopped at the border and sent back to Budapest. Oddly enough, the German authorities approved the cancellation of the deportations. Eichmann could do nothing but wait and sit on his plan.

During this time, minister Carl Ivar Danielsson was head of the Swedish legation. His closest aide was secretary Per Anger. Raoul Wallenberg now headed the department responsible for helping the Jews. Before Wallenberg even started, the head of the Red Cross in Hungary, Valdemar Langlet, was already helping the Swedish legation by renting buildings for the Red Cross and putting signs like ‘The Swedish Library’ or ‘The Swedish Research Institute’ on their doors. The buildings were then used as hiding places for Jews. Raoul Wallenberg did not use traditional diplomacy. He more or less shocked the diplomats at the Swedish legation with his unconventional methods. Everything from bribes to extortion threats were used with success. But when the rest of the staff of the legation saw how Wallenberg's tactics got results, he quickly got their unreserved support.

Wallenberg's first task was to design a Swedish protective pass to help the Jews against the Germans and their Hungarian allies. In previous experience, Wallenberg had noted that both the German and Hungarian authorities were weak for flashy symbols and he therefore had the passes printed in yellow and blue with the coat of arms of the Three Crowns of Sweden in the middle and the appropriate stamps and signatures throughout. Of course, Wallenberg's protective passes had no actual value whatsoever according to international laws, but they provoked respect. At the start, Wallenberg was only given permission to issue 1500 of his passes. Quickly, though, he managed to negotiate another 1000, and through promises and empty threats to the Hungarian foreign ministry he eventually managed to raise the quota to 4500 protective passes.

In reality, Wallenberg managed to issue more than three times as many protective passes as he was officially allowed. For instance, he controlled a staff of several hundred co-workers - all Jews - and due to their work with Wallenberg, they didn't have to wear the degrading yellow star.

On October 15, the Horthy declared that he wanted peace with the Soviets. But his radio speech had barely been broadcast when the German troops took command. Horthy was immediately overthrown and replaced by the leader of the Hungarian Nazis, Ferenc Szálasi. Szálasi was the leader of the Arrow Cross organization, who was just as feared as the German Nazis for their cruel methods against the Jewish population. Adolf Eichmann returned to Hungary and received a free hand to continue the terror against the Jews.

It was at this point that Wallenberg started to build ‘Swedish houses’ - some 30 houses where Jews could seek refuge. A Swedish flag hung in front of each door and Wallenberg declared the houses Swedish territory. The population of the ‘Swedish houses’ soon rose to 15.000.

Other neutral legations in Budapest started to follow Wallenberg's example, issuing their own protective passes, and a number of diplomats from other countries were even inspired to open their own ‘protective houses’ for Jewish refugees.

Toward the end of the war, when the situation became increasingly desperate, Wallenberg issued a simplified form of his protective pass, one copied page with his signature alone. In the existing chaos even that worked.

The newly instated Hungarian Nazi government immediately let it be known that with the change of power the protective passes were no longer valid. Wallenberg, though, was undeterred, and soon befriended the Baroness Elizabeth ‘Liesel’ Kemény, wife of the foreign minister, and with her cooperation the passes were made valid again.

During this time Eichmann started his brutal ‘death marches.’ He went through with his promised deportation plan by forcing increasingly large numbers of Jews to leave Hungary by foot. The first march started November 20, 1944, and the conditions along the 200 kilometer road between Budapest and the Austrian border were so horrendous that even the Nazi soldiers accompanying the Jews complained themselves.

The marching Jews could be counted in the thousands of never-ending rows of starving and tortured people. Raoul Wallenberg was in place all the time to hand out protective passes, food and medicine. He threatened and he bribed until he managed to free those with Swedish passes.

When Eichmann's killers transported the Jews in full trains, Wallenberg intensified his rescue efforts. He even climbed the train wagons, stood on the tracks, ran along the wagon roofs, and stuck bunches of protective passes down to the people inside. At times, German soldiers were ordered to open fire but were so impressed by Wallenberg's courage that they deliberately aimed too high. Wallenberg could jump down unharmed and demand that the Jews with passes leave the train together with him.

Toward the end of 1944, Wallenberg moved over the Danube river from Buda to Pest where the two Jewish ghettos were situated. Even the once minimal level of law that existed on this side was now gone. Simultaneously, Wallenberg's department at the Swedish legation grew constantly and finally kept 340 persons ’employed.’ Another 700 people also lived in their building.

Wallenberg searched desperately for suitable people to bribe, and found a very powerful ally in Pa'l Szalay, a high-ranking officer in the police force and an Arrow Cross member. (After the war, Szalay was the only Arrow Cross(a national socialist Hungarian party) member that wasn't executed. He was set free in recognition for his cooperation with Wallenberg).

Pa'l Szalay

In the second week of January 1945, Wallenberg discovered that Eichmann planned a total massacre in Budapest's largest ghetto. The only one who could stop it was general August Schmidthuber, commander-in-chief for the German troops in Hungary.

August Schmidthuber

Wallenberg's ally Szalay was sent to deliver a note to Schmidthuber explaining how Wallenberg would en sure that the general be held personally responsible for the massacre if it proceeded and that he would be hanged as a war criminal after the war. The massacre was stopped at the last minute thanks to Wallenberg's action.

Two days later, the Russians arrived and found 97.000 Jews alive in Budapest's two Jewish ghettos. In total 120.000 Jews survived the Nazi extermination in Hungary. According to Per Anger, Wallenberg's friend and colleague, Wallenberg must be honored with saving at least 100.000 Jews. On January 13, 1945, an advancing Soviet army unit saw a man standing and waiting for them in front of a house with a large Swedish flag above the door. In fluent Russian, this man, Raoul Wallenberg, explained to a surprised Russian sergeant that he was Swedish chargé d'affaires for the Russian-liberated parts of Hungary. Wallenberg requested, and was given permission to visit the Soviet military headquarters in the city of Debrecen east of Budapest.

On January 17, 1945, on his way out of the capital with Russian escort, Wallenberg and his driver stopped at the ‘Swedish houses’ to say good-bye to his friends. To one of his colleagues, Wallenberg said that he wasn't sure if he was going to be the Russian's guest or their prisoner, though he expressed hope that he'd be back within eight days. Raoul Wallenberg was never seen again. The Russians claim that he died in Russian captivity on July 17, 1947. A number of testimonies , however, indicate that he was alive after that date and that he could have still been alive into and through the 1980's. But, why did Wallenberg want contact with the Russians in Debrecen? And why did the Russians arrest him?

In November 1944, Wallenberg had established a section in his department that under his supervision would make a detailed financial support plan for the surviving Jews. The Russians did not have the same views of Jews and, presumably, couldn't understand that a person had devoted his soul to save them. Therefore it was important to Wallenberg to explain his rescue operation.

The Russians, on the other hand, probably believed that Wallenberg had other reasons for his rescue efforts. They probably suspected him of being an American spy and were almost certainly skeptical of Wallenberg's contact with the Germans. Wallenberg and his driver, Vilmos Langfelder, never returned from Debrecen. According to reliable testimonies they were arrested and sent to Moscow. They were arrested by the NKVD, the organization later known as the KGB, who placed Wallenberg and Langfelder in separate cells in the Lubjanka prison, according to eye witnesses. On March 8, 1945, the Soviet-controlled Hungarian radio announced that Raoul Wallenberg had been murdered on his way to Debrecen, probably by Hungarian Nazis or Gestapo agents. This created a certain passiveness within the Swedish government. Foreign Minister Östen Undén and Sweden's ambassador in the Soviet Union presumed that Wallenberg was dead. In most places, however, the radio message wasn't taken seriously.

On February 6, 1957, the Russians announced that they had made extensive investigations and found a document most likely regarding Wallenberg. In the hand-written document it was stated that "the for you familiar prisoner Wallenberg passed away this night in his cell." The document was dated July 17, 1947, and signed Smoltsov, head of the Lubjanka prison infirmary. The document was addressed to Viktor Abakumov, the minister for state security in the Soviet Union. The Russians expressed regret in their letter to the Swedes that Smoltsov died in May 1953 and that Abakumov had been executed in connection with cleansing within the security police.

The last known photo of Wallenberg.

The Swedes were very distrustful toward this declaration, but the Russians have to this day stuck to the same statement. Testimonies from different prisoners who had been in Russian jails after January 1945 tell, in contradiction to the Russian information, that Raoul Wallenberg was imprisoned throughout the 1950's.

During the 1980's, interest in Wallenberg grew around the world. In 1981, he became an honorary citizen of the United States, in 1985 he received the same honor in Canada, and likewise in Israel in 1986. In Sweden and other countries, Raoul Wallenberg associations worked endlessly to find answers to what happened.

In November 2000, Alexander Yakovlev, the head of a presidential commission investigating Wallenberg's fate, announced that the diplomat had been executed in 1947 in the KGB's Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. He said Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former Soviet secret police chief, told him of the shooting in a private conversation. The Russians released another statement in December admitting that Wallenberg was wrongfully arrested on espionage charges in 1945 and held in a Soviet prison for 2½ years until he died. The statement did not explain why Wallenberg was killed or why the government lied about his death for 55 years, claiming from 1957 to 1991 that he died of a heart attack while under Soviet protection. On January 12, 2001, a joint Russian-Swedish panel released a report that did not reach any conclusion as to Wallenberg's fate. The Russians reverted to the claim that he died of a heart attack in prison in 1947, while the Swede's said they were not sure if Wallenberg was dead or alive. The report did unearth evidence that the reason the Soviets arrested Wallenberg was the suspicion that he was a spy for the United States.

5.Sir Nicolas Winton:

Nicholas Winton was born on the 19th May 1909 in London into a Jewish family. He travelled extensively through Europe and lived in Germany for a while, where he worked in a bank. However, when the threat of the Nazis began to increase, Winton decided to move back to Britain. In 1938 Winton had decided to holiday in the Alps. However, after his friend phoned him and described the situation in Czechoslovakia and asked for help, Winton changed his plans. Although Winton had other responsibilities, he immediately went to Prague with only one goal – to help the endangered people. In Prague, he created an office and contacted international embassies to secure asylum for as many at risk Czechoslovak citizens as possible. The only positive response came from Great Britain. All other countries had closed their borders. However, British ambassadors were given strict conditions concerning the transport of Jewish Czechoslovak citizens to great Britain. British borders would only allow children through, and 50 Pounds per child had to be paid. Winton’s office, situated in a typical Prague house, began to fill with parents who wanted to save their children from the Nazi danger. Archives with photos of all the registered children were made. These photographs were later printed in British newspapers for British families wanting to adopt Czechoslovak children. Time was against the Winton team and thus everything had to be done very quickly. When all the children were registered and British families had chosen the children for whom they would provide asylum, Nicholas Winton faced the final and most difficult task – to ensure all passengers visas and safe transport. Winton´s team realised the situation was so desperate, they decided to falsify the visas, thus increasing the danger. In spite of all this, eight trains successfully managed to get to Great Britain via Germany and France where the children came to safety and were given a new home. The final, ninth train with 250 children, did not reach Britain, because of the breakout of the war on the 1st September 1939. Despite the unsuccessful dispatch of the last train, Nicholas Winton saved 669 Czechoslovak children. Winton then returned to his home country, where he devoted himself to clerical work. He kept his noble deed a secret for many decades. Had it not been for his wife Greta, who accidentally found the scrapbook with photos of the rescued children in the attic of their house, we would probably have never found out about the unbelievable things Nicholas Winton managed to achieve. In 1998, president Václav Havel invited Winton for a private visit to Prague and awarded him with the order of T.G. Masaryk. In his home country, Winton was awarded the OBE. Thus his full name now goes by the title Sir Nicholas Winton. Winton died in his sleep from cardiac arrest on the morning of

1 July 2015 at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, having been admitted a week earlier following a deterioration in his health. He was 106 years old.

6.Pastor Andre Trocme:

Pastor Trocme (together with his wife Magda Trocme) was the religious leader of the Huguenot village of LeChambon-sur-Lignon, France, which hid and saved 5000 Jews. The south-central France plateau is home to 12 mostly Protestant villages. Pastor André Trocmé, and his wife Magda, were among the leaders of the rescue operations. The plateau was an ideal hiding place for a number of reasons, Hewett said. It is geographically isolated, with many woods, remote farms, no industry and poor transportation. His brother, teacher Daniel Trocme was deported with his students in the only successful Gestapo raid of the village; Daniel later died at the Majdanek concentration camp. The refugees were welcomed without hesitation. They were housed in private homes, on farms as well as in public institutions and were hidden in the countryside whenever the Nazis came through. One of the villagers later recalled: 'As soon as the soldiers left, we would go into the forest and sing a song. When they heard that song, the Jews knew it was safe to come home.'

7.Dr. Jan Karski(1914- 2000):

Jan Karski, Polish resistance hero and the man who first told Western Europe and the United States about the Holocaust, was born June 1914 in the central Polish city of Lodz. After having passed his secondary school final examination here Jan Karski went to Lvov in 1931 to study there. He was awarded with Doctor of Law and Diplomacy title at the Jan Kazimierz University, and after supplementary studies in Western Europe he became a diplomat in Polish diplomatic corps in pre- war Poland. After the war broke out in 1939, he joined the underground Home Army. Thanks to his courage, his photographic memory and his talent with languages, he became a legendary courier, sneaking through enemy lines and occupied Europe to bring news from the Resistance to Poland's government in exile. As an officer in the Polish resistance, Jan Karski made four runs to the West with reports from underground leaders to the exiled Polish government. He was captured in Slovakia in 1940 and tortured by the Nazi Gestapo, but he escaped with the help of Polish partisans who attacked the prison. In 1942, he risked his life to sneak two times into the Warsaw Ghetto. Also in 1942, disguised as a Nazi guard, Karski sneaked into the Izbica death camp in eastern Poland, where he witnessed mass killing and torture of Jews. After a very dangerous journey he brought his story to the West, briefing political and religious leaders in London and then in July 1943 met personally with President Franklin Roosevelt. However, Karski was unable to convince them to take military action against death camp targets. Anthony Eden in Britain, President Roosevelt in the US, and even prominent American Jewish leaders, all listened politely, but all were disinclined to believe Karski's gruesome narrative of mass murder in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the extermination camps. Their first priority remained the defeat of the Third Reich, rather than the rescue of European Jewry. The slaughter went on. "Maybe they did not believe, maybe they thought I was exaggerating," Karski told The Associated Press in 1995.

Karski's 1944 book, Story of a Secret State, which detailed the Polish resistance fight, recounted his exploits, and also described the realities of the Holocaust, became a best-seller in the United States. Jan Karski settled in the USA after the war. Since 1952 he was professor at Georgetown University in Washington. He also lectured in the Pentagon. Professor Jan Karski was an honorary citizen of Israel, an honorary doctor of University of Lódz, and he was given the White Eagle Order, the highest Polish distinction. He was honoured as a ‘righteous Gentile’ by the State of Israel and many would rank him alongside the better- known Oscar Schindler as one of the most courageous heroes of those dark years. He became recognized around the world as a moral authority and his actions have been held up as a model of human solidarity. Jan Karski died on July 13, 2000, aged 86 at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. 8.Mustafa and Zejneba Hardaga: In April 1941 when the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, Sarajevo was bombed from the air. The home of the Kavilio family was destroyed. They had fled to the hills when the bombing began, and were now without a home. As they were walking to the family factory, they met Mustafa Hardaga, a Muslim friend who was the owner of the factory building. He immediately offered them to stay at his house. The Hardagas were observant Muslims. The household included Mustafa and his wife Zejneba, and his brother Izet and wife Bachriya.

The Kavillo’s with their rescuers.

According to their Muslim tradition, the women were supposed to wear a veil and cover their faces in front of strangers. Having a strange man sleep at their home was a most unusual step. However, as Zejneba described many years later, their husbands welcomed the Kavilios and told them that they would now be part of the family. “Our home is your home”, they said, and to demonstrate this point, the women were not obliged to cover their faces in the precense of Josef Kavilio, since he was now a member of the family. The Kavilio family stayed with the Hardagas for a short while until Josef Kavilio was able to move his wife and children to Mostar, in an area under Italian control, where Jews were relatively safe. Kavilio himself stayed behind to liquidate his business. Eventually he was arrested and imprisoned. Because of the heavy snow, the prisoners could not be transferred from Sarajevo to the infamous Jasenovac camp near Zagreb, where the Croatians systematically killed Serbs, Jews and Roma. Instead the prisoners were taken, with their legs chained, to clear the roads from snow. This is where Zejneba saw Kvilio. Kavilio later testified that he saw her standing at the street corner, her face traditionally veiled. Undisturbed by the danger, she began to bring food to the prisoners. Josef Kavilio eventually managed to escape and returned to the Hardaga home. The family welcomed him warmly and nursed him back to health. The Gestapo headquarters were nearby, and the danger was immense. In his testimony Josef described the notices on the walls threatening those who would hide Serbs and Jews with the death penalty. Not wanting to endanger the Hardagas life, Josef decided to flee to Mostar and join his family. After September 1943, when the Italian areas came under German occupation, the Kavilio family had to move yet again. They fled to the mountains and joined the partisans. After the war they returned to Sarajevo. Again they stayed with the Hardagas until they could find a place of their own. The Hardagas also returned the jewelry that the Kavilio family had left with them for safekeeping. It was then that they learned that Zejneba’s father, Ahmed Sadik, had been hiding a Jewish by the name of Papo in his home. He did not survive the war. He was caught, arrested and killed in Jasenovac. The Kavilio family immigrated to Israel. In 1984 they asked Yad Vashem to recognize the Hardaga family and Ahmed Sadik as Righteous Among the Nations. A year later, Zejneba Hardaga came to Israel to plant a tree in her family’s name. Fifty years after the Holocaust, when in 1994 Sarajevo was under the attack of Serb forces, Zejneba and her family were in great distress. With the help of the Joint Distribution Committee, Yad Vashem appealed to the President of Bosnia to permit Zejneba to come to Israel. In February 1994 Zejneba, her daughter her husband and child arrived in Israel and were welcomed by government officials, representatives of Yad Vashem and the Kavilios. The Hardagas had sheltered a Jewish family during the darkest period in Jewish history. It was now the State of Israel that paid back the debt and helped the Hardagas in their time of distress. It was probably this deep bond that prompted Zejneba’s daughter – Sarah Pecanac – and her family to convert to Judaism. “It is only natural that I should want to become Jewish. It is an honor for me to belong to these people”, she explained. She closed yet another circle, when she began working for Yad Vashem, where the story of her family is exhibited in the museum, where the file about the family is kept in the archive of the Righteous Among the Nations, and where a tree was planted by her mother in honor of her family’s courage and humanity.

Zejneba (fourth from the right) at the tree planting ceremony in honor of her family, Yad Vashem.

9.Wilm Hosenfeld:

Hosenfeld was made famous by Roman Polanski's 2002 film ‘The Pianist’ based on a true story of Jewish-Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman. The film, which won top prizes at the Oscars, the French Cesars and the Cannes Film Festival, is based on Szpilman's diaries as well as letters the pianist wrote to Yad Vashem. The film depicts how Hosenfeld helped hide Szpilman in the ruins of Warsaw in November 1944 and provided the musician with blankets, food and moral support.

In addition to Szpilman, another Jewish survivor, Leon Wurm, had also testified that Hosenfeld helped him after his escape from a concentration camp.

Yad Vashem waited to honor Hosenfeld until it had been established that the German officer was not involved in war crimes during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. In his writing, Hosenfeld stressed his growing disgust with the regime's oppression of Poles, the persecution of Polish clergy, abuse of the Jews and, with the beginning of the 'Final Solution,' his horror at the extermination of the Jewish people.

Wladyslaw Szpilman

Hosenfeld was drafted into the Wehrmacht shortly before the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. He was deployed in Warsaw beginning in July 1940 where he served as a sports and cultural officer. He was involved in interrogating prisoners during the Warsaw Uprising. After the war Hosenfeld was arrested, tried by the Soviets and sentenced to life imprisonment which was later commuted to 25 years. He died in a Soviet prison in 1952.

10.Joop en Willy Westerweel:

Joop Westerweel (January 25, 1899, Zutphen - August 11, 1944, Vught) was a schoolteacher and a Christian anarchist who became a Dutch World War II resistance leader, the head of the Westerweel Group.

Westerweel was the son of a printer. He was a pacifist and when he was a schoolteacher in the Dutch East Indies(Indonesia of today), he became the first conscientious objector, he was sentenced to serve in prison and sent out of The Dutch East Indies. In the Netherlands he organised housing for German- and Polish Jewish refugees and education for their children. Early 1940 Westerweel started his underground activities. He gathered friends and family, Jewish and non- Jewish alike, that would be named the ‘Westerweel group’ after the war. The Jewish members of the group were mostly teenagers and young adults and also members of the Zionist youth organisation the ‘Halutzim - חָלוּצים.’ They managed to smuggle 50 Jewish children out of Germany, and escape routes to Switserland or through Belgium to France and on to Spain, and eventually ending up in Palestina, were set up. Probably around 300 to 400 people were saved by Westerweel and his group. Joop’s wife Willy was also a member of the Westerweel group, as were Joachim Simon*, Letty Rudelsheim, Giel Salome, Frans Gerritsen, Henny Gerritsen- Kouffeld, Jan Smit, Paula Welt Kaufman, Menachem Pinkhof and Mirjam Pinkhof.

*Joachim (Shushu) Simon(1919-1943):

Simon was born in Berlijn geboren in 1919. In november 1938 at the ‘Reichskristallnacht’he was arrested and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was released by the mediation of Dutch- Jewish organisations, after which he came to the Netherlands. When the war broke out he joined the ‘Palestina-pioneers.’ Simon went several times to France. In 1943 he fell into German hands and was put in the prison of Breda where he commited suicide so he would not reveal any names. He was only 24 years old. Willy, Joop’s wife, had organised, together with member Letty Rudelsheim(who was Jewish), a safe house in a flat in Rotterdam, along one of the escape routes. From this flat people were transferred to the south of Europe. Willy en Letty took care of the people in the flat by supplying money and food from stolen ration cards. On the 10th of october 1943 someone betrayed them to the Germans and they stormed the flat and arrested everyone in it. At the time there were 8 Jews in the appartment, they were put into the prison of Rotterdam, then to Westerbork and in the end were murdered in Auschwitz. Willy en Letty were arrested as well and Letty ended also in Auschwitz through Westerbork, but she survived and died in 2009. Willy was transported to the concentration camp in Vught** and from there went to Ravensbruck(a women's concentration camp during World War II, located in northern Germany, 90 km north of Berlin). Also she survived and died in 1999 in Amsterdam at the age of 91. Joop was arrested on March 10, 1944, after leading a group of Jewish children to safety in Spain, whilst on his way back to the Netherlands at the Dutch/ Belgian border. He was executed at Vught concentration camp in August 1944.

** Vught was the only official SS concentration camp in occupied Northwest Europe, established in occupied Netherlands in the province of north Brabant. Like any other Nazi concentration camp, Vught had its own gallows and crematorium.

11.Gijsbertje Duizer & Hilde van Straten-Duizer:

In Nazi-occupied Holland in 1943, 18-year-old Hilde van Straten-Duizer stood facing a group of German soldiers who were searching her mother's rural farm in Asperen (prov. Gelderland) for any Jews who were in hiding.

Gijsbertje Duizer-Verhoef with survivor Joseph van Straten.

Hilde was afraid that after searching the house, the Germans would check the storage loft above the family barn where a 22-year-old Jewish friend of the family was hiding in the hay. The young man's parents had already been deported — they were murdered at Auschwitz — and he had escaped, but would undoubtedly be sent away if he was discovered.

In an effort to avoid certain death for giving refuge to a Jew, Hilde and her sister sought to distract the Germans by flirting and engaging them in conversation.

They succeeded, and the soldiers left the house without ever checking the storage area.

Despite the risk to their own lives, Hilde and her mother Gijsbertje Duizer sheltered the young Jewish man until the end of the war. Meanwhile, Hilde had fallen in love with her family's hidden guest, and, after the liberation of Holland, converted to Judaism and married him.

Joop and Hilde Van Straten immigrated to Israel in 1951, and had four children.

Hilde Van Straten's mother passed away in 1968. Now nearing 80, van-Straten-Duizer and her late mother were recognized on March 31, 2005, at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

12.Miep Gies(1909 - 2010):

Hermine Santruschitz, better known as Miep Gies, was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family and four other Jews from the Nazis in an annex above Anne's father's business premises during World War II.

She was Austrian by birth, but in 1920, at the age of only eleven, Miep was taken in as a foster child by a Dutch family to whom she became very attached. Although she was initially only to stay for six months, this stay was extended to one year because of frail health, after which she chose to remain with them, living the rest of her life in the Netherlands. In 1933 she began working for Otto Frank, a businessman who had moved with his family from Germany to the Netherlands in hopes of sparing his family Nazi persecution because they were Jewish.

Miep became a close, trusted friend of the family and was a great support to them during the two years they spent in hiding.

She retrieved Anne Frank's diary after the family was arrested and kept the papers safe until Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz in 1945, and learned of his younger daughter's death.

Together with Alison Leslie Gold Miep authored the book Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family, first published in 1987.

1945: Miep Gies, front row left, with Otto Frank, front row center, and other 'helpers' Bep Voskuijl, front row right, Johannes Kleiman, back row left, and Victor Kugler, back row right.

After the Nazi invasion of 1940, Frank prepared a secret annex behind a swinging bookcase in a room above the firm's offices at 263 Prinsengracht; and in July 1942 the family of four – Otto, his wife Edith and their daughters Margot and Anne – went into hiding, leaving a false trail indicating that they had fled to Switzerland. Soon afterwards they were joined by other Jews, the van Pels family and Miep Gies's family dentist, Fritz Pfeffer – eight people in all.

For two years Miep Gies and her husband Jan, a municipal employee whom she had married in 1941, risked their lives to smuggle in food and provisions and news from outside, begging, buying and bartering what they needed from farmers and shopkeepers. They were helped throughout by her colleagues Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl. Miep acted as a confidante for the adolescent Anne, bringing her paper for her diary and, on one occasion, a pair of second-hand high-heeled shoes. The Gies's heroic feat of humanitarianism ended on August 4 1944, when the Frank family were betrayed (by a person whose identity remains unknown), arrested and sent to concentration camps. When the Gestapo arrived, Miep Gies was at her desk in the office below. She recognised from the voice of one of the arresting officers that he was Viennese, and she managed to charm him, perhaps saving her own life. After the Franks were betrayed and arrested, Miep’s task continued. She climbed the attic stairs one more time to retrieve Anne’s writings, finding them scattered on the floor. Miep quickly gathered up the notebooks and kept them for Anne’s expected return after the war. When she learned of Anne’s death in Bergen-Belsen, Miep gave Otto Frank his daughter’s notebooks. Ever since, Miep has mourned the cruel fate of her friends in the attic. “Every year on the fourth of August, I close the curtains of my home and do not answer the doorbell or the telephone,” she said. “It is the day that my Jewish friends were taken away to the death camps. I have never overcome that shock.”

Miep Gies has been honored around the world for her moral courage. In Israel the Yad Vashem Memorial pays tribute to her as a Righteous Gentile. She died at age 100 in the Netherlands on January 11, 2010.

13.Henk, Jan & Hein Sietsma:

Jacob and Rosetta Nihom lived with their parents behind their store in Nijkerk, Gelderland. In 1941, they were contacted by Mr. Henk Sietsma who offered to find for the children a hiding place. At this point the strictures on Jews were not threatening enough for their parents to agree to this.

Jan Sietsma 14 August 1923-29 March 1945

Henk Sietsma 18 October 1921- 10 May 2002

Hein Sietsma 15 October 1919-21 Januari 1945

In January 1942, a Jewish high school was established in Utrecht, and the two teenagers used to travel 45 kilometers every day to attend, but when Jacob received an order to report to a work camp in the Netherlands, the family decided that the time had come to go into hiding.

The Sietsma brothers, who had formed the ‘Group Hein,’ an underground resistance group which assisted Jews in going into hiding, were instrumental in providing places for the family to hide, obtaining food stamps and issuing false ID papers. Other members of this group were Mr. Harry Aldenzee, Jan and Dinie van Meerveld as well as Ab and Hendrika van Meerveld-van 't Hof, Aalt and Ali Lozeman and Piet Hartog.

Hein Sietsma (1919-1945) was arrested in Friesland on April 28, 1944, by the train controllers and deported to Dachau, where he died. Also Jan was arrested and transported to Dachau. He also did not survive the camp. Henk survived the war, after incarceration in a concentration camp in Germany. Henk estimates that nine families and eleven individuals at least were saved by the Group Hein. The group also saved the lives of many British and American air force men.

In April 1977, Yad Vashem recognized Hein and Henk Sietsma as Righteous among the Nations.

14.Dirk van Schaik:

Dirk van Schaik lived in the city of Gouda, South Holland, next to the Catharinehoeve, the hachshara farm which housed a group of Zionist youths, both German- born and Dutch, during the late thirties and early forties. Dirk was a laborer in the candle-making factory in Gouda and, as a Roman Catholic, had a large family. The family lived next door to the farm and Dirk's first contact with the residents of the home was when, for some extra income, he performed various tasks for the residents of the Catharinehoeve on the Sabbath. Through this weekly visit to the hachshara home, Dirk became friends with the group, and, after a while, became one of the agricultural assistants at the farm. In 1943, the situation in Gouda grew ever more threatening and the directors of the home, Manfred and Shoshana Litten(see photographs), decided to have all the youngsters under their direction go underground. Dirk helped them in their efforts to find places and after, when the youngsters were all taken care of, he provided them for two years with food coupons and false documents, serving as an escort when they needed to move from place to place. As the Littens were themselves in hiding, and were later deported, Dirk felt responsible for the youngsters in hiding and his whole life became centered around the effort to save their lives. In this he was assisted by his wife, his children, and his superiors at the factory, who inevitably noticed his numerous absences from work but never investigated into the cause. Dirk never received any recompense for his work during these years and did not expect any. Shoshana Litten- Serlui perished on May 25, 1945, in Czechoslovakia, details are unknown. Manfred Litten arrived in Auschwitz at the first of October 1944 and perished there on the 28th of February 1945. Their son Gideon, born in 1936, emigrated to Mandate Palestine at age 10 with the Youth Aliyah. On November 1, 1979, Yad Vashem recognized Dirk van Schaik as Righteous among the Nations. On the photo the tree planting ceremony in Yad Vashem.

15.Hendrikus and Martha Snapper: Hendrikus (Hein) Snapper worked in the municipal labor exchange in the Dutch village of Naaldwijk(Zuid- Holland). Early on, he became aware of the persecution of Dutch Jews and he and his wife Martha decided to help Jews avoid deportation. In 1942, he joined the Dutch underground and was put in contact with the de Hartog family, who had been among the last Dutch Jews to receive a deportation order and were desperately searching for a hiding place. The Snappers, with five small children of their own, took in Rosa de Hartog and arranged hiding places for her husband, Levy (Leen), and their five children with friends and neighbours. The Snapper family had previously taken in two Jews, an elderly woman and a 17-year-old, but neither could pass as their housekeeper so they had moved them on to other families.

The Snapper family. 16.Jan Zwartendijk(1896- 1976): Jan Zwartendijk was a Dutch businessman and diplomat who helped Jews escape Lithuania during World War II. In September 1939, Hitler conquered the western part of Poland, while Stalin, his ally, occupied the eastern part. As a result, over 10.000 Polish refugees fled to Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania — which was neutral at the time. The refugees were overwhelmingly young men of draft age. They represented the cream of Poland's Jewish intellectual elite. There were leaders of various labor (Bund and Zionist) parties; writers; actors; and some of the world's outstanding rabbis, talmudic scholars and almost 3000 Talmudic graduate students. When the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in late July 1940, fear seized the Orthodox Jewish community-which realized they would not be permitted to observe their religion and would be actively persecuted for it under Communism. During this transition period, they sought whatever means they could to escape to the free world. Sweden, the only accessible neutral in country in region, refused to accept refugees.

Zwartendijk with his daughter Edith and son Jan, Jr., Kovno, 1939-1940.

From his experience in Hamburg in the 1930s, Zwartendijk understood how grim the situation was for the Jews. He contacted L.P.J. Decker, the Dutch Ambassador in Riga, for advice and received a note saying that: "No visas were necessary for Curacao. The governor has exclusive authority to issue landing permits to foreigners, a power he rarely exercises."

The two students asked Zwartendijk to write only the first sentence in their passports. Zwartendijk agreed and entered the shortened statement in them. These now became ‘Curacao End-Visas.’ Gutwirth and Nussbaum then took their ‘visa'ed’ passports to Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas, who issued them transit visas valid for ten days in Japan. With the Dutch and Japanese ‘visas,’ the students- being foreign nationals- were able to obtain Soviet exit visas. This allowed them to travel to Vladivostock via the Trans- Siberian Railroad, and from there, by boat to Japan. The young men realized that they were on to something that might work for other Orthodox refugees caught in Lithuania. They went back to Zwartendijk, who had a rubber stamp made that said ‘No Visa to Curacao Necessary.’ Word spread among the refugees in Vilna and hundreds rushed the Dutch consulate in Kaunas. Zwartendijk stamped the by-now invalid Polish and Lithuanian passports at breakneck speed, all day, every day. Other people created forgeries of the already ‘questionable’ visas. From there they went to see Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul, who knew the visas weren't ‘real,’ but issued transit visas to the Jews anyway. People who arrived in Japan sent their visas back to relatives still in Vilnius. Zwartendijk churned out at least 2345 visas and Sugihara issued close to 2000 (because of accepted forgeries). Fully aware of the spuriousness of the documents, Japan allowed every Jew who used them to land. All of them were sponsored by the Jewish community in Kobe, Japan. Neither Zwartendijk or Sugihara were professional diplomats. Zwartendijk was businessman who was asked by Decker to replace a Nazi sympathizer. Sugihara was an intelligence officer. The combined efforts of these two quasi-diplomats lasted less than three weeks.

The importance of this rescue was highlighted in October 1940, when Himmler issued an order prohibiting emigration of Jews from the Nazi-occupied part of Poland. He did so on the grounds that Jewish immigration to neutral countries such as the USA was already restricted, and that if Polish Jews (‘Ostjuden’) were to obtain immigration visas, there would be fewer visas available to German Jews.

Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kaunas

In addition, Eastern European Jews, because of their Orthodoxy, were a source of Talmud teachers and rabbis sought by American Jewish religious institutions who were ‘eager’ to sponsor them.

The religious institutions in America, Himmler wrote, saw in the ‘Ostjuden’ a valuable element in their struggle for a spiritual Renaissance of Judaism — which would also lead to American Jewish efforts against Germany. (The USA was neutral until Germany declared war against the USA on December 11, 1941). When the Soviets closed the consulates in Kaunas on August 3, Zwartendijk went back with his family to Nazi- occupied Holland, where he continued as a Phillips executive. There is a possibility that he became a British contact for the Dutch underground. Decker, as a professional diplomat, was admitted to Sweden.

Sugihara was able to stay a few more weeks, and continued to hand out transit visas even after he was forbidden to do so by his superiors. From Kaunas, where he was sent to see if the Germans would invade Russia, he was sent to Prague, then Koeningsberg and was finally recalled to Berlin.

By the end of winter 1940-1941, between 2100 and 2200 Jewish refugees entered Japan, where they remained for three to eight months. Before December 7, 1941, more than half of them were able to travel on to free countries in the western hemisphere. The remaining 1000 were transferred to Hong Kew, in the Japanese section of Shanghai, where they survived the war. They included the entire Yeshiva of Mir, the only yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact, and a number of pre- eminent Talmudic scholars from Telshe Yeshiva, two legendary institutions of Jewish learning. This entire group eventually had a profound effect on the rejuvenation of Judaism in the post- war world.

17.Casper, Corrie ten Boom:

Casper ten Boom. In 1837, Willem ten Boom opened a clock shop. Dedicated Christians, the family home above the shop was always an ‘open house’ for anyone in need. After an inspiring Dutch Reformed worship service in 1844, Willem started a weekly prayer service to pray for the Jewish people and the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122: 6). His son Casper continued the tradition of prayer with his own family. These prayer meetings continued for 100 years- until February 28, 1944, when Nazi soldiers arrested Casper and his entire family for harbouring Jews. During World War II, the ten Booms lived out their Christian faith by making their home a refuge- a hiding place- for Jews and members of the Dutch underground who were being hunted by the Nazis. During 1943 and into 1944, there were usually as many as seven people illegally living in the ten Boom home- Jews and members of the Dutch underground. Additional refugees would stay with the ten Booms for a few hours or a few days until another ‘safe house’ could be located for them. Casper’ s daughter Corrie (15 April 1892- April 15, 1983) became a ringleader within the network of the Haarlem underground. Corrie and ‘the Beje group’ would search for courageous Dutch families who would take in refugees, and much of Corrie's time was spent caring for these people once they were in hiding. Through these activities, the ten Boom family and their many friends saved the lives of an estimated 800 Jews, and protected many Dutch underground workers.

The ten Boom extended family, posing with some of their ‘house guests.’ In 1968, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem asked Corrie to plant a tree in the Garden of Righteousness, in honor of the many Jewish lives her family saved. Corrie's tree stands there today. In the early 1970's, Corrie's book The Hiding Place became a best seller, and World Wide Pictures (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) released the major motion picture ‘The Hiding Place.’ Corrie went on to write many other inspiring books. There are five evangelical videos about Corrie. She died on her 91st birthday, April 15, 1983. The ten Boom family home has been turned into a museum.