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Yad Vashem Photo Archives, 4613/938
Yad Vashem Photo Archives, 4613/404
He smuggled Jews out of the ghetto into the forests, trained them how to fight and led them in attacks against the Germans.
Yad Vashem Photo Archives 3271/71
Yad Vashem Photo Archives 3271/72
She helped hundreds of families that had fled to the area, helping to smuggle children to Switzerland. She was caught on October 21, 1943 while smuggling children, imprisoned and tortured. She was later sent to Ravensbrück and then Mauthausen, where she was killed in an Allied air raid.
Yad Vashem Photo Archives 119DO7
She was brutally tortured but did not give away the names of her superiors. In July 1944 Marianne was executed by the Germans. The
Yad Vashem Photo Archives 2921/104
Yad Vashem Photo Archives 7646/19
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 train during the war. In 1944, the three underground members were arrested. Jean and Robert survived the camps; Youra was tried and executed in February 1944, in Breendonk, Belgium
Yad Vashem Photo Archives 7222/32
The toy was used by Judith Geller in the course of her activities in the French Resistance, in her guise as a social worker visiting children.
Baby eating utensils sent by the parents of Henri Hamerslag, when he and his sister Mirjam were entrusted to the care of Mirjam Waterman, a member of the Dutch resistance. Waterman would bring children, whose parents had received a deportation order, to the "Amstel" railway station in Amsterdam. From there, the children would be taken to hiding places. In May 1943, Waterman arrived at the railway station with the two Hamerslag babies: one-and-a-half year-old Mirjam, and her brother Henri, who had been born just a few days earlier. Mirjam and Henri were brought the children's home in Hilversum run by Katy Mulder, later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations for her rescue activities. In 1944, Mirjam Waterman was caught and deported to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Despite the appalling conditions, she survived.
Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection
Courtesy of Tzvi (Henri Hamerslag) Araten, Israel
In 1943, an operation took place to move youngsters and members of the "Hechalutz" youth movement from different hiding places around Holland to Spain, via Belgium and France. Max Windmuller acted as the liaison between Holland and France. In France, Windmuller worked with members of the Resistance, who produced forged documents. He himself used the ID of a Gestapo official, which enabled him to travel freely from place to place by train. Max Windmuller was caught in 1944 and sent to the camps. He was murdered on a death march one day before the liberation.
Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection
Donated by Shulamit Roethler, Israel
At first glance, rescues of Jews carried out by Jews should not receive a special emphasis, because they appear to be only natural, routine acts. However, the cases of rescue by Jews – of which there were many instances – were not self-evident. The Holocaust challenged established social norms, values and relationships. It led to a weakening of the bonds of solidarity within Jewish society. In a reality in which each individual Jew was subject to persecution and the threat of destruction, the instinctual drive for physical survival became dominant. However, even in such conditions, many Jews risked their lives to save other Jews – both family members and complete strangers. More than once they forfeited a chance to escape in order to help other Jews.
Jewish organizations attempted to rescue Jews by getting them out of the camps, by ransoming them for money, by placing them in children’s institutions or private homes, and by organizing their emigration from countries under the rule of the Nazis and their collaborators. Jews living under false identities managed to rescue other Jews by helping them go into hiding, by passing information to them, by smuggling them into areas outside the Nazi sphere of influence, and by obtaining falsified documents for them which stated that they were Christian workers or laborers essential for the German war economy.
Jews attempted to stall and prevent the deportation of Jews to the death camps by negotiating with senior Nazi officials or with regimes supportive of the Nazis. Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps established welfare societies that provided assistance to Jewish orphans and other needy individuals. Thus many Jews were saved from death.
