Articles about the Righteous Among the Nations

One of the purposes of Yad Vashem, as defined by the law that established the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, is to commemorate  the non‐Jews who risked their  lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In the context of this endeavor – which soon will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary – the Righteous Among the Nations Department gathered a great deal of diverse documentation for the use of the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous . The testimonies, photographs and documents in the thousands of files tell the stories of survivors...

Since the inception of the Righteous Among the Nations program some 45 years ago, Yad Vashem recognized over 22,000 men and women from 44 countries as Righteous Among the Nations. The Department of the Righteous’ archive contains close to 15,000 files with hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation – it is a wealth of testimonies, photos, official and personal documents, newspaper clippings and other material with information about rescue efforts during the Holocaust.It is therefore only natural that this repository is of great interest to scholars, and that it is being used in...

When Yad Vashem was established to commemorate the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah, the Knesset added yet another task to the Holocaust Remembrance Authority's mission: to honor the Righteous Among the Nations - those non-Jews who had taken great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Righteous program is an unprecedented attempt by the victims of an unparalleled crime to search within the nations of perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders for persons who bucked the general trend of indifference, acquiescence and collaboration.The motivation for the establishment of this unique...

The deeds and behavior of those we term Righteous Among the Nations, that is of nonJewish Holocaust rescuers of Jews honored by Yad Vashem, have undergone certain scrutiny from sociological and psychological disciplines. Three of the most important studies in this field are of Nechama Tec, Samuel & Pearl Oliner and Eva Fogelman.1 While they each suggest different interpretations to explain the uniqueness of the behavior of the Righteous, they all concur in locating the formative nexus of the Righteous’ behavior during the childhood years. In this paper, I submit that the inordinate...

Rescue of Jews under the Nazis was, in psychological parlance, a "rare behavior." From a population of 700 million in Germany and the allied occupied countries, the thousands who risked their lives to save Jews and others from Nazi persecution constituted an aberration from the norm. The majority remained passive bystanders; many actively collaborated in the Final Solution.The diversity among the rescuers1 of Jews during the Holocaust would dissuade any social scientist from generalizations about motivation. However, systematic analysis of their family backgrounds, personalities,...

A number of years ago, I interviewed some French Catholics about what they had done during the Holocaust to help Jews. One woman I spoke to was an 87-year old nun who lived in a house for retired sisters near Paris. She was still formidable, despite her short stature and age. Fifty years ago she had been director of a large boarding school in Paris, where she must have been immensely impressive. Her position at the time made it relatively easy for her to take in and hide Jewish children until she could arrange to send them across the border into the unoccupied zone. Often she took them to the train...

The subject of this volume is a small group of German men and women who were recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority, as “Righteous Among the Nations.” Active solidarity with persecuted Jews was a strictly circumscribed phenomenon in German society under Hitler. The comparative figures of the Righteous in Yad Vashem are representative in this respect, though far from exhaustive. As of the time of writing, the title of “Righteous” has been conferred on some 17433 individuals, amongst them 5373 Poles, 4289 Dutchmen but only 336 Germans. It...

Much has been written on rescue activities in Poland during the German occupation in WWII. The articles on this topic comprise, for the most part, testimonies and chapters of memoirs produced by survivors, and sometimes rescuers. Despite this, only a few research studies dealing with this topic have been published, and it has yet to be researched in a systematic and extensive manner.The exact numbers of Jewish survivors in Poland by the time of liberation in May 1945 are unclear. Additionally, those who spent the terror of the war years in Poland and miraculously survived fall into different categories....

Some 75% of the Jewish population in France in June 1940, the beginning of the Nazi occupation, survived the destruction of the Holocaust. Compared to its neighbors (Holland and Belgium), also under German rule from 1940-1944, and even more so compared to countries in Central and Eastern Europe, this is a large number. This article examines to what degree the acts of those who rescued the Jews in France contributed to the fact that at the time of liberation some 260,000 French Jews (out of 300,000 in 1940) took part in the victory celebrations over Nazi Germany.

In his book After the Destruction (Na de Ondergang, 1997), the young Dutch researcher Ido de Haan noted that the number of Dutch Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem is relatively high when compared with other countries. In one particular sentence, the author reveals his lack of knowledge on the topic of the Righteous in general, and on the Netherlands in particular. He seems to assume that some kind of cap has been set for the number of people deserving of this honor in each country, and that Holland’s limit is unusually high.This kind of mistake in understanding the Righteous...

Slovak-Jewish relations, an important factor in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, were influenced in no small part by events that took place in the latter third of the 19th century. That century saw the national awakening of oppressed nations. The Slovak nation, ruled by the Hungarians for 1,000 years, was struggling at the time for its national existence. The creation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy led in 1867 to the granting of equal civil rights to the Jews in the empire in the assumption that they would assimilate nationally and culturally into the state. At the same time the Hungarian...

In the past, and now, I heard Jan Karski say, "Jews were abandoned by all world governments but not by all individuals." A Polish Catholic, a Righteous Among the Nations, a World War II hero, an emissary for the Polish underground and the Polish Government in Exile, a professor of political science, Karski's observation grew out of his personal experiences. (Jan Karski, Personal communication, 1999). Mixed in with Karski's wartime political and humanitarian preoccupations was a strong opposition to the Nazi policies of the biological annihilation of the Jewish people. He tried...

For more than thirty years we have been endeavoring to delve increasingly deeper in our research of the Holocaust in order to understand how it was possible for a nation, which professed to be civilized, to decree the destruction and annihilation of another nation – a decree whose execution was planned with characteristic precision, and carried out with a barbarism that staggered belief. The perspective gained in the course of the past thirty years does not provide an answer. The astronomical loss of lives certainly justifies extensive research, and indeed in recent years historians, sociologists,...

Shortly after its establishment in December 1942, the Council for Aid to Jews (known by its code-name “Żegota”) became one of the most active and dedicated organizations operating in the underground in occupied Poland. In spite of the grave dangers which its workers faced daily, and the frequent crises as a result of the discovery of the Council’s clandestine apartments, the arrest of its leaders and workers, and the constant fear of the Gestapo, the Council was able to extend aid to Jewish survivors, and the cooperation between the Polish and Jewish members of the Council was...

I must admit that the invitation to lecture on the rescue of Danish Jewry somewhat baffled me. I have already dealt with the subject many times, and thought that I had totally exhausted it, that there was nothing more to add. After additional thought on the matter, however, I decided that it would be a good idea to briefly summarize the events and note the key aspects of the rescue of Danish Jewry in an attempt to compare the circumstances of their rescue with similar attempts elsewhere in Europe.When dealing with the period of the Holocaust, it is very difficult to establish the criteria by which...

The term “rescue” refers to a very broad, complicated, and multi-faceted concept. In fact, the clarification of that term is one of the tasks of this conference. In my opinion, the term encompasses all activities carried out or attempted by individuals, groups, or organizations, whose objective was to ensure the physical survival of Jews. I specify “of Jews” rather than “of all the Jews” because to the best of my knowledge there was never a single attempt in France or Belgium to rescue all the Jews. There simply were no such practical possibilities.Whereas relief...

Since the inception of the Righteous Among the Nations program fifty years ago, Yad Vashem bestowed the title on close to 25,000 men and women from 48 nationalities. The Department of the Righteous’ archive contains thousands of files with hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation – it is a wealth of testimonies, photos, official and personal documents, newspaper clippings and other material with information about rescue efforts during the Holocaust. It is therefore only natural that this repository is of great interest to scholars, and that it is being used in attempts to statistically...

The rescue of Jewish children in convents during the Holocaust is a subject that evokes intense emotions and sensitivities among both Jews and Christians, as it is intertwined with the controversial issue of the attitude of the Church toward the Jews at that time. The Jewish collective consciousness associates the affair with the conversion of many of these children to Christianity—as if their rescuers effected their deliverance in order to stalk innocent souls and exploit their existential distress for missionary motives. Christians, in contrast, consider the very hint of such a suspicion...

Chapter from the report of the “Elie Wiesel Commission” – the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania – submitted to Romania’s President in 2004.IntroductionIn June 2000, by resolution of the Bucharest town hall, a street in the Romanian capital was named “Dr. Traian Popovici,” after the former mayor of Cernăuţi during the Second World War, who saved thousands of Jews from deportation to Transnistria. Popovici was the first Romanian awarded the title “Righteous among Nations” by Yad Vashem to be officially honored by the Romanian...