The Rescue of Children

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

Only when she was 57 years old, did Sabina Heller discover her true identity. Until that time she believed she was born in Lodz in 1941, the daughter of Zofia and Zygmund Goszczewski. Unbeknown to her, all the information about her birth and her fate during the Holocaust, together with letters of her rescuers who had tried to find her afterwards, had been kept in a file in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Emunah Rachmany Gafny, an Israeli researcher, eventually found the file and... Continue reading

Andree Geulen-Herscovici

Geulen's List The first time Andrée Geulen, a 20-year-old teacher in a Brussels school, was confronted with the persecution of the Jews was when one day some of her students arrived at school with the compulsory yellow star on their clothes. Like many other Belgians, until that time Geulen hadn't paid attention to the anti-Jewish measures and the persecution of the Jews. But once she was faced with the discrimination of her students, she decided to act. She ordered all her students to wear... Continue reading

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

A Tale of Two French Butchers Dr. Ehud Loeb was born in 1934 as Herbert Odenheimer in Buehl, Germany. During the Holocaust his family was deported to France; from there his parents were sent to Auschwitz where they perished. Dr. Loeb survived as a child in hiding. Ehud Loeb today lives in Jerusalem and is a member of the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous Among the Nations. He feels that as someone who was saved, it is his duty to contribute in some way to rewarding those who... Continue reading

The Celis Family

Joseph Celis; his daughters Bona and Lucy Celis; his two sons, the priests Hubert and Louis CelisMarie Louise Tabruyn, Father Louis Celis’ housekeeperAlfons and Clementina MarisBaron Raymond and Baroness Marcelle de Tornaco   Priests, Farmers and Noblemen   This is the story of the rescue of four children of one family whose parents were deported to Auschwitz. Ten people were recognized as Righteous for their rescue. They came from different backgrounds – priests, nobility, farmers and a... Continue reading

Germaine Ribière

Germaine Ribière was a young student who lived with her parents in Limoges (Haute-Vienne). During the German occupation, she abandoned her studies, left home, and devoted herself to saving Jewish children. Ribière, a devout Catholic, joined the rescue networks in which clergymen such as Father Roger Braun, Father Pierre Chaillet and Bishop Jules Saliège were involved. Ribière made contact with Jewish families living in France and, after getting their permission, arranged hiding places for... Continue reading

Leokadia Jaromirska

Leokadia Jaromirska lived in the Warsaw suburb of Bialoleka. One morning in October 1942, while on her way to work with another woman, they heard the cries of children and saw a little girl and an eight-month-old baby abandoned near the fence of a convent. Years later she described how they picked the children up. Leokadia convinced the other woman to take the girls home with her. After work she hurried back to the other woman's home, where she found out that the woman had panicked and... Continue reading

Vladimir and Galina Imshennik

The Orthodox priest Vladimir Imshennik and his wife Galina were residing in the village of Nosilowo, Molodeczno District, Wilno County, Poland (nowadays the region is a part of Belarus). From 1940 to 1950 Vladimir served as rector at the village Church of Transfiguration.  At the end of June 1941 the area was occupied by the Germans, and in October the same year a ghetto was established in the nearby town of Lebiedziew. Among its inmates was one of Vladimir’s acquaintances, a Jewish doctor... Continue reading

Tatiana Zelenskaya and Pavel Chariuta

In December 1941, in the city of Simferopol in the former Soviet Union, Tatiana Zelenskaya, a singer, and her husband, Pavel Chariuta, the musician who accompanied her, were young actors performing together on stage. The city was already under Nazi rule when one of the theater employees approached Tatiana with a request that would save a life and forever change the lives of the young couple. The employee, whom Tatiana would later realize, had heard of the German plans via his connection with... Continue reading

Milena Herbenova

Shelter for a Little Girl Eva Novotna was born in December 1938 in Prague. When she was three months old, the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia. Since her father was Jewish, the little baby was also registered as Jewish. Eva's parents, Vlasta and Kurt Beer, were staunch communists, and after the occupation became active in the underground. In March 1941 both parents were arrested. The father committed suicide, and the mother was released, but only for a short while. In the summer of 1942 she... Continue reading

Maria Chomova and her daughter, Olga Sramkova

The SS Officer's Gift of Candy   By the end of 1944 some remnants of Slovak Jewry were hiding in the snowy Tatra mountains. Intensive German searches forced them to move from one place to another. Among these hunted Jews was the Berger family with their three children. The youngest - Ferdinand, today Mordechai – was only three year old, and suffered immensely under the harsh conditions. Among the peasants from the area that were bringing food to the Jews and partisans, was a 17-year-old girl... Continue reading

Joseph Migneret

The Devoted Teacher The elementary school of Hospitaliers St. Gervais is situated in a small street by the same name in the heart of the Marais quarter in Paris. What is today a very chic part of town was known as "the Pletzl"— the Jewish quarter, where many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled. The school itself was originally a Jewish school, established in 1846. The remains of the old inscriptions are still visible on the building. Although it became a public school in 1880, most... Continue reading

Irena Sendler

Smuggling Children out of the Ghetto When World War II broke out, Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker, employed by the Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipality. After the German occupation, the department continued to take care of the great number of poor and dispossessed people in the city. Irena Sendler took advantage of her job in order to help the Jews, however this became practically impossible once the ghetto was sealed off in November 1940. Close to 400,000 people had been... Continue reading

Father Pierre-Marie Benoit

Father Pierre-Marie Benoit was a French national who until 1940 lived in the Capuchin monastery in Rome. When war between France and Italy was clearly inevitable, he returned to his homeland and moved into the Capuchin monastery in Marseilles. The Jewish laws enacted by the Vichy government set in motion a tumultuous and active chapter in Father Benoit's life. Out of a profound commitment to humanitarian values, Father Benoit pledged himself to protecting Jewish refugees. Utilizing his ties... Continue reading

Erzsebet Fajo

The Maid Who Became A Rescuer This is the story of Erzsebet Fajo who worked as a nursemaid for a Jewish family – a young woman of very modest circumstances, who, when the tides changed and the Jews became victims of brutal persecution, decided to fight for the survival of her employers, and demonstrated enormous courage and resourcefulness. Erzsebet Fajo from Bekescsaba was only 13 years old when she had to leave school and go to work for the Abonyi family as a live-in nursemaid. Laszlo... Continue reading

Elisabeth Hedwig Leja Gessler

Edward and Dora Gessler, a Jewish couple, lived with their children, a cook and a housekeeper in the city of Beilsko Biala in Southern Poland. In 1938, Elisabeth Hedwig Leja, a Polish Catholic woman of ethnic German origin (Volksdeutsche) joined the family as a nanny and caretaker of the family’s three young children, Elek, 11, Lili, 4, and Roman, 1. At the outbreak of the war, rather than join her family in safety, Elisabeth chose to remain with the Gesslers and help them as they fled from... Continue reading

Djina-Gertruda Beritic and her son – Tihomil

A Baby in a Parcel   Sometime in the winter of 1941-2, an unusual package was delivered to the offices of the Jewish Community in Zagreb, that operated under close surveillance of the Ustaša regime. It was delivered by a man who deposited the cardboard box and left without explanation. When the box was opened, the astonished community officials found a young baby and a note: 'Please take this baby to my cousin Blanka Fuerst'. The incident was described by Abraham Joshko: "One day in the... Continue reading

The Cooymanses, the Numanses, the Kohlys and the Roelofsens

Henry Jacques Marie Cooymans and his wife, Alice Hedwig Franciska Cooymans-SchöllerSiebe Riksterus Numans and his wife, Gerry Numans-RutgerDr. Hein Kohly and his wife, Marguerita Yvonne Kohly-KnusAart Roelofsen and his wife, Wilhelmina Roelofsen   A Father’s Birthday Gift   Like many Jewish families in the Netherlands, the van der Hoeden family had to take the painful decision to split up in order to survive. Parents and children went into hiding in different places, more often than not... Continue reading

Elisabeth and Karel Eckhart and mother Gertrude Eckhart

Unknown Children On 13 September 1944, the last transport of Jews from the Netherlands left Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. France had already been liberated and German troops were on the retreat on all fronts. But until the very end, Nazi Germany garnered its last remaining resources in order to complete the most important task of murdering the Jews. Driven by an uncompromising antisemitic ideology, they continued to hunt down every last Jew, every Jewish child they could put... Continue reading

Henriette (Hetty) Voute and Gisela Wieberdink-Soehnlein

Infants in Milk Cans When the deportations from Amsterdam began, a collection point for Jewish children was established in the so-called the Crèche – what had been a day care center for the children of mostly Jewish working mothers. Once caught, children were separated from their parents. The parents were brought to the Jewish Theatre – Amsterdam’s main assembly point for Jews – and all the captured children were put across the street, in the Crèche. From there they were taken to the... Continue reading

Julija Vitkauskienė and her son Arėjas-Stasyss Vitkauskas

Before the war, Julija Vitkauskienė lived in Kaunas, Lithuania with her only son Arėjas-Stasys. Vitkauskienė worked for many years for a printing company and her son was in the graduating class of the local gymnasium. A doctor Max Gilde and his wife, singer Eida Gilde, were neighbors and friends of the Vitkauskienė family. When the Germans entered Kaunas, the Gildes were confined to the local ghetto and for about a year Julija Vitkauskienė did not see them. In 1942, Vitkauskienė met Dr.... Continue reading

Kipras Petrauskas and Elena Žalinkevičaite-Petrauskienė

Kipras Petrauskas, the tenor singer and one of the founders of the National Lithuanian Opera, lived, during the years of the German occupation, in Kaunas, with his wife Elena Žalinkevičaite - Petrauskienė, a well-known actress and poet. In the spring of 1942, Petrauskas was asked to provide shelter for a six-month-old Dana Pomeranz, the daughter of a violinist Daniel Pomeranz, a famous musician in a pre-war Lithuania. Petrauskas and his wife gave their agreement, and one day a baby girl was... Continue reading

Wiktoria and Stanislaw Szumielewicz

When World War II broke out, the Nisencwaig family from Staszow, Poland, numbered 18 members. Only two of them survived the Holocaust. This is the story of the survival of one of them. Continue reading

Stefan Jagodzinski

During the war, Dr. Bronislaw Tenenwurzel, his wife Betty, and their two children, Emanuel and Ruth, was interned in the Miechow ghetto, near Krakow. In late 1942, when the ghetto was about to be liquidated, Tenenwurzel, with the help of a Polish acquaintance, sent his 14-year-old son, Emanuel, to a monastery in Mogila. However, after rumor spread in the monastery that Tenenwurzel was Jewish, he decided to escape. The Polish acquaintance that had helped him in the past once again came to his... Continue reading

Yevgeniya Yemelyanova

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, ten-year-old Grigoriy Elper, of Minsk, was at a summer camp near the city. Although his parents managed to get out of the city, the attempt to evacuate the summer camp failed, and Grigoriy was interned in the Minsk ghetto together with his grandparents.  In the fall of 1941, Grigoriy met Yevgeniya Yemelyanova, a Belorusian doctor who often furtively entered the ghetto to bring food to her Jewish friend, an acquaintance of Grigoriy’s grandmother.... Continue reading

Varvara Tsvileneva

On the eve of the German invasion into the Soviet Union, Varvara Tsvileneva was employed as a researcher in the medical institute in Leningrad, and lived on the grounds of the institute with her mother. Isaak and Vera Skoblo were her colleagues at the institute, but she only became real friends of theirs in the spring of 1942, when all the institute’s employees were evacuated to the east in the same train. About two months later, they all arrived at the city of Kislovodsk in the northern... Continue reading