Jews Who Saved Jews During the Holocaust

The Germans bombed Staszów on 5 September 1939. Jews whose homes were damaged in the bombardment sought shelter in cellars or fled to the nearby forest.  The Germans occupied the town after two days, and one month later, started to boycott Jewish stores and workshops.

In the spring of 1942, the deportation of Slovakia’s Jews to Poland began. In view of the deportations, a group of activists – the Working Group - organized an effort to stop them. The Group was headed by Gisi Fleischmann, one of the heads of the Women’s International Zionist Organization there, and Michael Dov Weissmandel, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, along with public figures from various streams – Zionists, Orthodox and assimilated Jews.In its efforts to halt the deportations, the Working Group adopted a policy of bribing key officials...

The activity of the Eclaireurs Israélites - the French Jewish scouting organization founded by Robert Gamzon - was concentrated in the Vichy zone. The Scouts set up agricultural centers for teenagers, where they worked while studying about Judaism and Zionism. In late 1941, the Scouts were integrated into the UGIF (General Union of the Jews of France) and could thus also undertake clandestine activity without arousing suspicion. In November 1942, the organization went totally underground as La Sixième (“the Sixth Bureau”). Its members were involved in smuggling...

With the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Zionist youth movements in Budapest decided to go underground and to pursue every possible avenue to save Jews. The underground smuggled 7,000-15,000 Jews into Romania (“The Tiyul”) until the border became a front line in August 1944. It set up a workshop for forging documents, which were also used to release Jews from labor battalions and death marches to Austria.About 100,000 protective passes, “Schutzpasses”, were issued made by the underground and distributed to among Jews in Budapest. After the rise to power of...

Aviva Blum-Wachs was born in Warsaw in 1932 to Abraham (Abrasha) and Luba Blum. Aviva had a younger brother, Olek. When the Warsaw Ghetto was established in October 1940, Luba secured a building for the nursing school and moved there with her children. During the deportations in the summer of 1942, Luba managed to convince the Germans to let the nurses go, and smuggled Aviva and Olek out in a vehicle used to carry corpses. In the Aktion of January 1943, the Germans barged into the hospital at 33 Gęsia Street and shot hundreds of patients, physicians and nurses. Luba managed to hide several of...

On April 19, 1943, Youra Georges Livchitz, a young Jewish doctor, and two comrades in his Belgian resistance group, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau, set out for an operation of their very own: to halt a deportation train and attempt to release the Jews trapped within it. It was the twentieth transport from the Mechelen transit camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau, with 1,631 Jews aboard. Youra stopped the train and threatened the engineer with his handgun. Maistriau opened the doors of one of the cars, and seventeen Jews escaped, even as the German guards fired. It was the only attack on a deportation...

Ignac-Eliyahu (Ilia) Weiss, an active member of the Jewish community in Zagreb, Director of the Jewish retirement home, and an installation engineer by profession, lived in Zagreb with his Croatian wife Bariza and their daughter Mira.  Due to his field of expertise, Weiss was sometimes called on to repair the plumbing in the Levorgrad concentration camp near Zagreb.  The fact that his wife was Croatian also gave him comparative freedom of movement and action.  He would bring Levorgrad inmates clothes, food and medicines, and helped them as much as he could. In the...

Dr. Menachem Erich Klibansky was the headmaster of the "Yavne" Jewish gymnasium in Köln, Germany from 1929 until its closure in 1942. Klibansky saved dozens of his students, arranging for their passage to England as part of the Kindertransport. Klibansky himself, his wife and their three sons were deported to the East and murdered.

Yehuda Beilis was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1927, the youngest of Eliezer and Chana’s three sons. The Germans occupied Lithuania in 1941, while Yehuda was living in the resort town of Palanga. He was imprisoned in a synagogue with other Jewish teenagers, where they suffered abuse. In March 1944, Yehuda smuggled 22 children out of the Kovno ghetto.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, partisan units began to organize to fight the Nazi occupiers. The partisans, irregular fighters, operated in the forests and marshes and exploited their relative advantage in guerrilla warfare against the German forces.The partisans’ objective was to help free their country from the invader. Jewish partisans were also moved by their desire to save Jews and avenge those murdered by the Nazis. Fighting in the forests provided a chance for only a few some Jews - young people and those who had managed to acquire weapons - to survive. It is estimated...