Chapter 3: Who were holocaust rescuers
After the War
A collective post-war amnesia set in at the end of World War II. Holocaust survivors and the millions who survived the war closed off their memories and rarely, if ever, spoke of what happened. They rebuilt their lives and moved forward. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg 1945-46 brought Nazi leaders to court for their war crimes six months after Germany’s surrender. The prosecution amounted thousands of documents collected by the Allies, films produced by the U.S. and Russia of concentration camp atrocities, and witness testimony from those within the Nazi Party, military, or German government. The defendants did not deny the evidence or that the crimes against humanity did happen. They did, however, try to plead innocence because they were only following orders, which the IMT would not accept. Of 21 defendants, 19 were convicted and 12 sentenced to death. In the five years after, hundreds of thousands of other Nazis and associates, such as doctors, camp guards, soldiers, and civilians, were tried and convicted (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2021).
In the late 1950s, the commitment to continuing down this path of justice faded. The world was still weary from the war. Also, the former-Axis countries and many of their citizens continued to deny they had done anything wrong. They had forged and supported the Nazi agenda, but still held that they were victims. A bystander interviewed for a research study in the 1980s claims:
“In 1933 we had no notion where that would lead. I followed orders, I had no choice. We lack national holidays to celebrate, and German national feelings are still repressed. Other countries that have done evil things are not talked about.”
Seemingly impossible in hindsight, Germany passed amnesty laws pardoning war criminals (Schwartz, 2021). Most of the Nazis who had been convicted the past ten years were set free, and a generation of denial closed the door.
In the 1960s, however, the children of this generation kicked down the door of silence. Adolf Eichmann, the chief logistician for the Nazi Final Solution who directed the killing of 1.5 million Jews, had escaped U.S. capture, and fled to Argentina in 1946. Not content to allow one of Hitler’s biggest henchmen to live free and without accountability, the Israeli Security Service captured him in 1960 and returned him to Jerusalem for trial. The timing was such that the trial gained international interest and exposure. It was one of the first major trials to be broadcast on television around the world and brought the term “Holocaust” to the public living rooms. It was also the first time that Holocaust survivors were able to speak as eyewitnesses about the brutal truth of the Nazi agenda, fully exposing the atrocities towards the Jews (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2021). The door of denial was not able to be closed any more as the discussion led to more probing questions. Finally, in 1978, the American-made television miniseries, “Holocaust,” was watched by 20 million Germans and is considered the tipping point in German attitudes towards their accountability. West Germany’s parliament abolished the statute of limitations on war crimes, and young people pressed their parents for answers for why they stood by as accomplices. Text books were updated and new pedagogy was incorporated into classrooms. “Within a few years, tens of thousands of German youth were looking into what had happened in their own hometowns and their own families under the Nazis as part of a nationwide grassroots history movement” (Axelrod, 2019).
The Eichmann trial launched initiatives to collect Holocaust survivor testimonies. These survivors had been quietly holding their stories to their chest, and the brave witnesses at the high-profile trail inspired them to finally tell them (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2021). At the same time, the Israeli World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem, reignited its mission to preserve the stories of rescuers and recognize them with the title, Righteous Among the Nations. Yad Vashem was established in 1953 in Jerusalem as a memorial to Jews who died in the Holocaust. Although their original mandate was to preserve these stories for historic integrity, for the previous ten years that commitment had waned because “no one wanted to dwell on those dark times” (Fogelman, 1994). After the Eichmann trial and as survivors opened up, Yad Vashem became invigorated to continue its mission and redirect the existing memory from a painful era to one of rescuers and hope.
Who Were the Rescuers
Yad Vashem describes rescuers as the Righteous Gentiles; non-Jewish people throughout Europe, also living through the horrors of the war, but who summoned their moral courage to take “great risks,” sacrificing their own safety to save Jews (Yad Vashem). They were not cast from the archetypical hero who pursues and trains for a life of death-defying action, such as a soldier or fireman, or who by chance finds themself with an opportunity to save a drowning victim. Nor were the rescuers’ actions finite, socially approved, or only endangering themselves [Oliner 1990].
They were a different breed of heroes, compelled by a deep sense of moral responsibility that engaged an exceedingly rare altruistic behavior during a wartime setting, defined as “helping another voluntarily, at considerable cost and without expectation of external reward” (Oliner & Oliner, 1990). They were the exception to the normative behavior of bystanders, the “mitlaufer” who followed the current. An estimated 300 million Europeans did not go to trial for war crimes or acts against humanity, or even to be described as “monsters.” Nevertheless, they stood by and were complicit in enabling the Nazi environment to flourish by staying silent, choosing to be indifferent to the propaganda, not hearing the fear in the voices of their neighbors, and even by taking over Jewish businesses and homes (Schwarz, 2021). As Auschwitz survivor, Elie Wiesel, said, it “is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.”
“In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care. These few men and women were vulnerable, afraid, helpless - what made them different from their fellow citizens?… Why were there so few?… Let us remember: What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander…. Let us not forget, after all, there is always a moment when a moral choice is made…. And so we must know these good people who helped Jews during the Holocaust. We must learn from them, and in gratitude and hope, we must remember them.”
Rescuers were never comfortable being called heroes, but from the outside they met the same challenges as the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Rescuers were of all ages and strata of society: university professors, illiterate peasants, urban cosmopolitan, teachers, religious clergy, servants, policemen, and doctors. Their views of religion, politics, and even antisemitism varied widely. They were a typical cross-cut of European life in the 1930s and 40s where no one stood out from anyone else. Lest one think that rescuers were naturally good natured and prim, researcher Eva Fogelman’s experience from interviewing them also found: “Sneaks, thieves, smugglers, hijackers, blackmailers, and killers. A womanizer, manipulator, seasoned briber, habitual liar, shameless forger, anti-Semite, tramp, and murderer” (Fogelman, 1994).
Holocaust rescuers found themselves helping Jews for days, months, and years never knowing when the end would come. They hid strangers in their attics, cellars, or monasteries; printed false identification documents; provided transport to safe territory; smuggled food and medicine; took babies from their mothers who were destined for crowded train cattle cars and a gas chamber. They lied. They lived in secrecy. They were triggered to act now and find a solution later. Their rescue activities varied from country to country and situation to situation. Secrecy was paramount. In a special category of rescuer was Jan Karski, the spy for the Polish Underground and government-in-exile. His actions were unlike other rescuers who worked to save individuals or small groups of Jews. Karski took extreme risks sneaking into the Warsaw ghetto and the Izbica concentration camp, and traveling internationally with hidden documents to alert world leaders of the truth of what the Nazis were doing to all Jews of Europe.
Gino Bartali and his friend, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa of Florence
As Germany was occupying Italy and sending it into turmoil, Bartali received a note from his friend, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, of Florence. The cardinal was working with DELASEM to hide and provide fake identification documents to thousands of Jews who were hiding within his region’s religious buildings and trying to flee to neutral countries or the Allies in southern Italy. Bartali’s years of training while working for the Army provided him a consistent story to work clandestinely as a courier for the Assisi Network between Florence and Assisi, and as far as Rome and Genoa. Hidden within the frame of his bicycle were false identification papers that he would deliver to others in his network or directly to Jews fleeing occupied Italy. If stopped by the Nazis along his route, his notoriety gave him the excuse that he was training to win great races after the war (McConnon & McConnon, 2012). At other times, his mission was to ride to Genoa to pick up money provided by a lawyer to aid the network’s efforts (MacMichael, 2010). From 1943 to 1944, it is estimated that he rode at least 40 missions for the Assisi Network (MacMichael, 2010). His friend, Ivo Faltoni (2011), remembers:
“By accepting this assignment, he showed that he loved his neighbor more than himself, regardless of the risk he ran for himself and his family. Unaware of all his long training sessions in a period without competitions, to those who asked him, ‘Why?’ he replied, ‘I have to keep training. One day this hell will end.”
A brief recreation of Bartali delivering hidden identification documents for the Assisi Network
His successful bike racing career afforded him the money to own a few properties in Florence. During the German occupation, he hid Jewish family friends in one of his buildings and also supplied the family’s mother with false identification so she could leave their hiding place for water and food (Yad Vashem, 2021). A humble and deeply religious Catholic with the nickname Il Pio (the Pious), Bartali frequently prayed for guidance and protection for his family as he was gripped with fear when he left on his missions and saw what was happening to others (McConnon & McConnon, 2012).
Tina Strobos of The Netherlands was a 19-year-old medical student at a university in Amsterdam. After the German occupation, her sorority became active in the Dutch Underground. They were a well-organized group of like-minded intellectuals who never bought in to Hitler’s propaganda. They read Mein Kampf in school and understood where he wanted his agenda to fall, although they never had information and could not conceive the extent of gas chambers extermination. They were well trained in all aspects of resistance and saving Jews. Strobos knew how to be interrogated, what papers to obtain, how to arrange a hiding space in her house, how to plan an escape route.
Tina Strobos, her fiancée Abraham Pais and her mother Marie Schotte in 1941 Amsterdam (photo Wikimedia)
“You couldn’t just go on the roof because they would put barbed wire on each side of the road, and machine guns, and they would even have somebody on the rooftops watching. It’s impossible to believe the effort and time and manpower these Gestapos employed to catch Jews.”
The Dutch underground often communicated in code on the phone when contacting each other for assignments. Strobos’ underground work included picking up Jewish children, hiding contraband like radio senders and gun, transporting Jews to the Belgian border with fake passports so they could take the underground railroad through France to neutral Spain. Along with her mother and grandmother, like many Dutch non-Jews in the crowded urban centers, they hid Jews in their house with specially designed spaces built by a carpenter from the underground. They also coordinated and rehearsed escape routes into neighboring buildings. Rescuers were living in a world of self-preservation, antisemitism, and desperation. There was no telling how long the war would last or whether a neighbor would report them to the Gestapo.
“[Strobos] In 1942 we had to sign a loyalty oath, and none of us did at the university, and that drove us underground. We had an underground medical school and classes in my house and other people’s and hospitals. And I continued studying as much as possible that way. So the schools closed and I had purposely joined a sorority, even though I’m not that kind of person. You know they can be a little bit snobby, you know those upper class snobs. Wasn’t my circle really. But the sorority I joined was wonderful. There were a couple of Jewish girls in my sorority. And that whole sorority was a network for hiding Jews and finding placements, getting money, passports, food cards, whatever was needed. So I had a fantastic network.
[Interviewer] So was that the beginning of your own personal involvement?
[Strobos] No, as I said we were involved from day one in all kinds of activity. Getting false passports for people, hiding people in the underground, I was involved right from the start. And I was also in a group of students. We studied Mein Kampf, we studied Marx, and they became very active, and they scared me to death, frankly, because they all had guns. I’m a very non-violent person and I separated myself from them. They were all killed, all ten of them. Sort of a cell. There were three underground groups and that was the militant group. I separated myself from that group and became very involved with the women’s students who were involved with the LO geared to hiding people and non-violent action. But occasionally I did things for the others. I hid weapons, I transported radio senders and weapons occasionally. And if these people needed a hiding place we hid them too.”
The rescuers worked unnoticed, often in clandestine community groups or religious networks in pockets spread across Europe, but sometimes alone. They were not affiliated in an organized, European-wide network, and they seldom knew of other rescue efforts outside their trusted circle. Across the board, they were modest and downplayed their role, brushing aside the label of “hero.” When asked about the danger of helping Jews in Poland in particular, a common theme to rationalize their action was presented as follows:
“(They) minimized the heroism of their actions…by emphasizing that the dangers emanating from Jewish rescue were only a part of an overall threatening environment. They pointed out that people could and did die for nothing at all. They argued that, since life was full of constant and unexpected perils, helping Jews was just one additional reason for dying. Compared to the ever-present threats, aid to Jews was not as dangerous and hence not as extraordinary as some tend to see it.”
Their collective impulse towards altruistic behavior, however, amounted to an inspiring troupe of humanitarians who risked everything to save terrified Jewish friends and strangers from death, yet asked for nothing in return. When a door opened to find a Jew pleading for safety or their underground network made the call for help, they acted upon their moral impulse to help another person first and to make a plan later (Baron, 2019). Irene Gut Opdyke was a Christian Pole nursing student whose life was forever disrupted by the German invasion. Because she was young and healthy, she was taken by Germans to work as a kitchen and laundry manager at their headquarters in Tarnopol. She found herself in charge of Jews who were selected from the nearby labor camp to work under her supervision.
Irene Opdyke, 1939
“See, when the Germans took over really distant cities they took all the Jewish people and segregate them. Like machines they did take out heart and soul. Those that could work and those that could not work. Those that could work they put them separate in work barracks, it was slave labor. And those that could not work, the old, the children, the this, they took them and forced them to be in ghetto for later disposal.”
Her upbringing in a caring family created a willingness to help the Jews who also became her friends. It began with providing them with extra food from the kitchen and evolved into warning them about raids, hiding them behind blankets in the laundry room, stuffing them into the air duct of a Nazi commander’s bathroom, hiding them in a Nazi villa, and driving them to a forest to hide in a newly built bunker, and regularly visiting hundreds of Jews in the woods with food and clothing.
“[Opdyke]: I was so scared. I was so scared because at that time I was already helping the Jewish people in the laundry room. In the laundry room we had 12 Jewish people.
[Interviewer]: And how were you helping them?
[Opdyke]: Well many times I borrowed extra food you know. I brought the clothes to be washed. Food was no problem because there were you know in the diner there were butter and bread and whatever cookies and fruit and whatever. Another thing, too, when I met them you know at first they didn’t trust me. You know that is understandable. But when we start speaking and I told them that I am alone and I don’t know where my parents are and this, they trusted me and they start telling me story of their broken lives, about their families and everything.
And at that time there was a winter, it was cold, I asked Shultz for some blankets. The blankets I give to the Jewish people, they made cover for themselves. We made a hiding place in little in the washroom. There were one wall full of shelves. The shelves were nice and deep. We made the shelves very narrow in some places put the blankets folded so it looks like its full. And then I overheard that Gestapo, Rakita say, ‘There will be raids on Wednesday or Friday, don’t look for the Jews to come to work you know. We have some cleaning to do.’ Well I did have to tell that to my friends. And I noticed that many people did not come, you know. So we created our own little hiding place there. So when I knew they did not go to the barracks.
[Interviewer]: And where was the hiding place?
[Opdyke]: In the laundry room at that time. That was before I hide them. See when you speak you cannot tell that. You know if you half an hour. But, I told them what happened so a few of them did not want to go, so they slept there behind the shelves. And I lock the laundry room. I was responsible and that’s it.”
Rescuers faced their own dangers not only from the Nazis, but from well-intentioned friends and family or bitter neighbors. Having their rescue efforts exposed by someone in their home or neighborhood could lead to everyone they loved and protected being killed in retribution. Unfortunately, exposure or betrayal happened often, and they knew it, yet their moral compass continued to point them to do what they believed was right. Knud Dyby was working as a Danish police officer and also for the underground to get thousands of Jews into fishing boats and safely to Sweden. His identity, essentially as a spy, had to be kept secret and he had several of his own fake identification cards with different names. Still, he could be tipped off:
“A bookshop owner had reported me for anti-German activities to the German general so I knew I had to be underground, and I lived probably about 16 or 20 different places in Copenhagen. I remember many times I actually had a steel plate inside my door, but even that wasn’t enough so I would crawl out of a window and crawl over on the other side of the hallway and sleep in a storage room where I had made a cut so that even if the Germans had come into my apartment I would still be away from it. The most difficult part of it probably was that I had to urinate out of the window, which wasn’t easy.”
Rescuers were some of the last to disclose their stories after the war for a number of reasons. They still feared retribution from neighbors and countrymen who believed that aiding Jews had put everyone at risk (M. Baird, personal communication, March 15, 2021). Antisemitism was not resolved; it remained evident through Europe (Koepp, 2019). Both rescuers and bystanders felt betrayed by the other, which led to an exodus of rescuers leaving their native towns or countries for good. Many came out of the war with survivor’s guilt, unable to reconcile why they lived while so many others did not (M. Baird, personal communication, March 15, 2021). Finally, most rescuers believed that what they did was nothing special and not worth telling anyone.
Gino Bartali was trained to work in secrecy so not to compromise his associates. Through it all, and especially as his actions were revealed decades later, he never saw himself as more worthy of praise than those who gave their lives, or as anyone else called to perform the same mission. As his granddaughter, Lisa Bartali, said (Zago, 2020):
“For 50 years he never wanted to say anything. He had a strong moral sense and to tell of the good done would go against his nature. This is why he repeated that good is done but not said. To be good Christians you don’t need to tell what you do… Gino felt part of this rescue network, the DELSAM, he took part in 1943. In this network there were many operators who did good exactly as grandfather did. What was the point? His name would have caused a sensation. Probably only his name would end up in the papers and he could not allow it. And the parish priests, the friars, the nuns, those who modified and printed the documents? And all the others? They would have ended up in oblivion.”
However, even in Denmark where so many came together to help, bitterness still grew between those that helped and those that stood by:
“[Interviewer]: After the war did you talk with your family about all the things you had done?
[Dyby]: No, it wasn’t very popular to talk much about it. No, I never talked about it. I mean, it wasn’t a secret. They would know that from my new associates that I had made that there was something going on, but after everybody was so happy and they wanted to forget about it. Forget about the whole thing, yeah. About 40 years until we talked about rescues and resistance. We would talk about it among themselves, but not with anybody else. It wasn’t popular to talk about. The people who did something, we all did something. The people who didn’t do anything they certainly didn’t want to hear about it either.
[Interviewer]: Was that hard for you?
[Dyby] There was hard feelings with some people that would demonstrate that they didn’t like what was done and it shouldn’t have been done, and see what happened now we have to build up our ___________ again, we have to do this because you made sabotage, but most of the people knew that we had to help the Allies. But there’s always some who said, ‘Was that necessary?’”
Different Countries, Different Dangers
The rescue of Jews was inconsistent in its execution and success across Europe. Researcher Nechama Tec (1995) proposes three reasons why rescue could have been more difficult in some countries more than others. A primary reason was how thoroughly the Germans had inserted themselves into each occupied country’s government. A German military-led government was considered to have less enforcement of racial laws and deportations than a Nazi-led civil government. With complete internal control of a country, such as in Eastern Europe or the Netherlands, the Nazi leaders had no restraints on how to execute their Final Solution. A second factor was the level of antisemitism. In countries such as Poland, with a long history of anti-Jewish propaganda and ideology, it was more acceptable to overlook the treatment for a group of people they already saw as “others.” Even Poles with sympathetic tendencies were more influenced by their communities and gave second thoughts to helping. A third factor was the number of Jews in a country, how well they were adapted into its society, and whether they physically appeared more like the non-Jewish citizenry. Amsterdam had a thriving Jewish population of over 70,000 in a very dense area, which made it difficult to keep them hidden. Some areas of Poland, such as Warsaw, had Jews with more blond and light skinned appearances so they could blend in and even carry out resistance actions spying on the Nazis. However, the country also had Jews who had never assimilated into the Catholic society. They continued to dress traditionally and speak Yiddish, which made them all too recognizable when the Nazis arrived in droves (Paldiel, 1993).
Poland's Situation
Poland had 3.3 million Jews before the German invasion, which was the largest Jewish population in Europe. The pervasive sense of antisemitism coupled with a native population dealing with its own struggle to survive did little to breathe sympathy for what they were enduring even as Jews were rounded up from ghettos and shot in mass graves. Rescuer Irene Opdyke recalls in her 1993 video testimony:
“To this day I can remember. Did see man with white beard white head looks like rabbi. They were beating him. He was going. see beautiful young woman blond with little girl. You know the girl was holding to her and she was wounded in the leg because she was pulling her leg. The child was screaming. And we were standing there and crying. Then did see you know woman with baby in her arms and did see one of the Gestapo pull the baby and threw the head to the ground. nightmare. Unbelieve horror. And cry my sister cry. We were we could not believe our eyes our soul. What is happening What is happening Then when the procession left when they moved them we were coming down and we could hear shooting from far away. We were moving behind far away. We did want to know where they go to take them. They took them behind the town. It was shallow grave already dug. They were putting them all around and shooting with machine gun. Some of them were buried alive. They were hardly wounded. the Germans posted soldiers all around so nobody see the crime. We were from far away to see that. There is no way can even today tell you how it was. Unbelievable.”
Even if a Jew were to escape from a ghetto, they would need to know where to find pockets of safety and how to avoid informants who were fueled by the Nazi propaganda. These “szmalcowniks” even prevented would-be rescuers from helping (Yad Vashem). Survivor Sam Oliner (1994) recalls that it was difficult to trust anyone knowing that some were out to receive a bounty from the Gestapo for revealing a Jew’s location:
“And so came and knocked on the door and she already heard what had happened because the forest is very close by on clear day down the hill you can see-see its location the approximate location of it. And she knew what had happened and so she took me in and she sort of calmed me down she said don’t worry you must survive you will survive but she couldn’t keep me in the house for number of reasons. don’t know maybe she was not 1000 percent altruistic. Maybe she was afraid. But she was kind and compassionate. But then she had—-and the main reason why she was frightened is because in Poland—again this is not an attack on Poles. As matter of fact feel fondly towards Poland. But the facts must come out and the truth must be told.
During the war there was group of people—and you must have heard in your other interviews—a group of people called schmaltz which means—comes from the Yiddish word schmaltz and schmaltz is guy, mostly males, Poles, during the war made their living off catching, betraying, informing on Jews. They would bring them to the Gestapo, the information, and get a reward or even capture some old man or woman and bring them to the Gestapo and get a reward. Poles were hungry and deprived, too. So if you got an overcoat or some shoes or food or some money or whatever from the Gestapo, it supplemented your income. So some – some, I must repeat myself – over and over, only some Poles did that. And let’s not condemn all of Poles, because Poles were also heroic rescuers.” “And so there was this man, a traitor, and he was literally within a matter of…a half a mile away, and she was afraid because what he used to do is he suspected somehow, so he’d sneak up at night and listen to the window and see whether there is anybody, and then go to the police for a reward, and the next day the Gestapo would be right there. ”
Regardless of the conditions that set Poland up for the most devastating impacts of the Holocaust, it also had the highest number of rescuers recognized by Yad Vashem: 7,177 as of January 2021. Out of 3.3 million Jews, only 380,000 survived and it is estimated that 30,000 to 35,000, or 1% of all Polish Jews, were saved by rescuers. (Yad Vashem)
Denmark's Situation
Denmark had control of its government and civil services for most of the war, and Jews’ lives remained mostly unobstructed. They were never gathered into ghettos or camps that would allow the Germans to easily round them up onto trains east. The hands-off attitude of the Germans convinced them that throughout the occupation they would still remain safe. Knud Dyby recalls this sense of complacency among the Danish Jews:
“[Interviewer]: Did they begin by harassing the Jews at all?
[Dyby]: No. Until 1943…October 1943…they never asked the Jews neither to get a Star of David or they didn’t stop the Jews from their normal activities or their shops or homes or anything. There were several rumors that something would happen, but they never happened. So by the time October 1943 came, the Germans decided that the Jews in Denmark had to be arrested, many, many Jewish families would not believe it because they said, “Why would they do it now? They haven’t done anything so far and we’re living peacefully here. We don’t believe it.” So many people actually had to convince them that this time it was the _____, that they were in danger.”
By the time the Germans decided to make a plan to deport the Jews in the fall of 1943, the Danes already had a coordinated underground network in place with plans to hide resistance members and Jews, or transport them to nearby Sweden. A sympathetic Nazi, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, tipped off the Danish government that deportations would begin, and the underground went to work. Over the period of a few weeks in October 1943, almost 8,000 Jews were ferried to Sweden using the Danish fishing fleet. One hundred twenty Danish Jews died in the whole Holocaust.
The Netherland's Situation
At the beginning of the war, The Netherlands had approximately 140,000 Jews, which was a very high population per capita given its small region and the dense urban areas like Amsterdam where most of them lived. This made it extremely difficult and challenging to shuffle Jews from place to place as the Gestapo “crawled” through the streets constantly searching buildings (Tina 1988). Throughout the war, a Jew might stay in 40 different places with one of the estimated 20,000 Dutch people that helped the Jews in some form. The Dutch were second to Poland in number of rescuers, but the circumstances that filled their country with such difficulty allowed less than 25%, or 33,000, of Jews in The Netherlands to survive (Rabben, 2016).
“[Interviewer]: Over all those years of rescuing, about how many people went in and out of your house?
[Strobos]: Hundreds, close to a hundred. My mother and I made a list after the war. I lost the list with all the names of the people.
Now in Hausen, for instance, a little fishing village on the Zauderzei, they were raided. There was a village of about 8000 souls, and they were raided by 7000 Gestapo, house to house, so when I’m talking about what they put into it, as effort to find hidden Jews, it was enormous. I don’t know any other country they did that….I’ve heard people ask me, “How come 95% of the Danish Jews were saved and only 20% of the Dutch?” Well, that was the reason. The Danish Jews could, in one night, roll over to Sweden, and apparently there wasn’t too much patrolling there, because 95% could get to Sweden. But we had Germany on one side, the North Sea on the other. People tried to escape, some of my friends tried to escape over the North Sea in a boat, but if your boat wasn’t seaworthy...besides, they had a lot of patrols on the North Sea, the Germans, with big lamps, boats with big lamps, and if you weren’t caught, these boats weren’t seaworthy.”
Rescuers who were well trained by the underground created escape routes from apartments to rooftops and nearby buildings. Strobos notes that the building where Anne Frank hid did not have an escape route out of the attic, which left her and her family trapped. Carpenters with the underground used their talents to create creating hidden walls and spaces within shelves, under floors, and between attic rafters for Jews to hide when the Nazis came to raid.
Tina Strobos’ house in Amsterdam
“[Interviewer]: What did you and your family and other rescuers risk? What were the risks?
[Strobos]: Life and death. There were big placards hung up all through the city that helping Jews uh, was punishable by death. And, uh, this was no idle boast… If you were caught, you were going to be punished by death. And whenever they arrested us, just for, you know, being accused, helping Jews, uh, they would say, “You’re under arrest, you’re going to jail.” And my uncle who was accused of helping Jews was a year in a concentration camp. Now, this was not a gas chamber camp, this was a Dutch camp, but, people died like flies there from undernourishment, illness, and uh, he escaped sort of miraculously. They emptied out the camp, and he was left behind with a couple of other people hiding in the latrines. And he walked to the next village, it was in Fuft, and uh, he came home emaciated a year later.
[Interviewer]: Were you afraid of the Gestapo?
[Strobos]: Was I afraid of them?! I was terrified of them. My mother would tremble from head to toe when they would come, and I would sort of hold her arm or say, ‘Don’t show them you’re scared. Don’t show them you’re scared. There’s nothing here in the house. Don’t worry. They can’t pin anything down on us.’ You know, whenever they weren’t paying attention, uh, I’d bolster her spirits.”
Italy's Situation
Once Germany began the occupation of Italy in September 1943, the terror that had been a reality for Jews in other countries finally came to native and foreign Jews as they were hunted by Nazis and fascists in the newly named Italian Social Republic, north of the Allied line in Salerno. Networks such as DELASEM and the smaller religious networks that had already been helping them went into a world of secrecy and recruited others to help in their campaign to hide Jews or quickly send them to Allied or neutral territories. It was perilous work. German pilots dropped fliers from the sky that warned Italians they would be killed for hiding Jews (Jacoby, 2014). The Nazis showed no mercy even when they burst their way into the sanctuary of monasteries and convents looking for Jews. At an abbey in Certosa di Farneta near Lucca, dozens of Nazis tricked their way beyond the doors into the peaceful courtyard. After searching the chapel and rooms, they tortured and killed 12 monks and 32 partisans and Jews (Wikipedia).
Word spread quickly through occupied Italy about what would happen if Jews were captured and put on trains to Nazi-occupied Poland. Leo Diamantstein’s family was originally from Poland, but fled to Italy as antisemitism grew worse. When the Germans arrived in the family’s adopted town of Vicenza, Leo’s father made him and his brother run into the mountains:
“You know, I mean, it was a precarious life. We had nightmares, you can imagine. At one point a train arrived with 200 Germans. This was so, so sudden. It was in the middle of the day and we didn’t know what to do. We had a quick reunion, so father said, “No matter what happens we don’t have time to go anywhere, you kids go up in the mountains somewhere.”
So Maurice, Adolf and I….I still remember, Adolf took his mandolin and Maurice’s guitar and we put rucksacks on and we went across about five miles away. We went up a mountain that somebody told us there’s a small community. If anything there needs to be told was this experience, because whenever I feel that there is little hope for humanity I remember this episode because I was so touched by it.
We got up to this plateau and it was only maybe 50 yards space, not that much, maybe 30, and there was a small square up in the mountains, Monte Sormano. It was a steep hill up. And there were six families living there. Totally self-sufficient. They had one cow and they had a fellow that had a huge workbench. Made all their own tools. They cultivated this whole side of the mountain, made steps with cultivations in it, and they lived there.
So we told these people what our predicament was. They just couldn’t understand it. He said, “What do they have against you, what did they do to them?” And we said we didn’t do anything to them. He says, “Then why do they want to kill you?” We said, “Because we are Jewish.” He said, “What’s that?” Well so we explained it to them and they said, “Well why would they want to kill you, that doesn’t make sense.” I said, “I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way it is.” And they said, “Well you can stay here.”
And we told them that before you let us stay here you need to know one thing: There has been an edict published that if they find us here they will not only kill us, they will kill you. “So please,” I said, “don’t take us in unless you know what you’re doing, because you are endangering your lives.” And believe it or not for an hour they argued about with whom we are going to stay. They said, “No let them stay with us, no let them stay with us.” So finally, we decided we would stay in a hay loft because we didn’t know yet what these 200 Germans were going to do. What would they do? It didn’t make sense. And we said, “Let’s wait it out.” I still remember that night Maurice and Adolf were strumming their instruments. They fed us. They were just incredibly nice.
One of them told us he was in Greece, he fought in Greece. And he said, “I was next to a guy that was manning a machine gun and he was going to machine gun for hours and I don’t know how many Greeks he killed.” And he says, “I couldn’t understand it.” He said, “Why was he killing those Greeks? They didn’t do anything to us.” He says, “I can understand if you take my daughter away, if you do anything to any of my family I will kill you,” he says, “but these people didn’t do anything to us.” There was a strong way of reasoning, a humanitarian reasoning, within all Italians in that sense. Well not all, but most.”
Gino Bartali was under no illusion of the danger he faced helping Cardinal Dalla Costa and the Assisi Network. Although he had a permit to ride through Tuscany and Umbria on his bike, he was still under constant surveillance by the Germans. He was finally brought in for questioning at the Gestapo headquarters in Florence by a suspicious Nazi commander and being prepared to be tortured for information. Miraculously, he was recognized by one of the Nazis who made a case that the famous cyclist couldn’t possibly be hiding Jews while still training so much (McConnon & McConnon, 2012).
For nine months, Italians worked under the strain of Nazi occupation to save over 40,000 Jews in their country. Mordecai Paldiel (1993) of Yad Vashem wrote that,
“In no other occupied Catholic country were monasteries, convents, shrines, and religious houses opened to fleeing Jews, and their needs attended to, without any overt intention to steer them away from their ancient faith, but solely to abide by the preeminent religious command of the sanctity of life. They epitomized the best and most elevated form of religious faith and human fidelity.”
Nearly 85% of the Jews in Italy were saved because of their efforts. 8,564 Jews were deported to Auschwitz and only 1,009 survived (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2021). Paldiel credits this high success rate to several factors unique to Italy’s situation during the war:
The late occupation of Italy. Germany did not take over the Italian Social Republic until September 1943, and then the Allies reached Rome and Assisi the following June, and Florence in August. Italy was not fully liberated until May 1945, but by then the Nazi resources for deportations was drastically reduced.
The sweeping effort by the Catholic clergy and small monasteries and convents throughout the country who moved into action without waiting for direction or approval by their superiors. Pope Pius XII has come under severe criticism for his apparent lack of action or disapproval of Germany’s actions throughout the war and especially as Roman Jews were deported block from the Vatican.
Italians in all ranks of professions and government and police positions even inside the Fascist government who refused to abide by the German requests or who helped the Jews with hiding and using fake documents.
Righteous Among the Nations
“We should also emphasize…after the war over half a million Jews survived in Europe. Now, some of them don’t owe anything to anybody. They survived in camps, the Nazis had no time to finish them. There are others who don’t owe anything to anybody. They survived in the mountains, in the forests fighting as partisans, but most of them were helped by individuals: priests, nuns, peasants, some intelligencia…wherever they were…in France, in Belgium, in Poland, in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece.
Now, to help a Jew during the war was very dangerous. In France…in Belgium… you might go to jail if they caught you. Some cases you would be punished…penalty, pay some money…but in eastern Europe, particularly Poland - instantaneous death, execution. Sometimes if the family was involved, entire families shot. There were a few cases, not many, but a few cases, where Gestapo found out that peasants in the village knew that there was some Jewish family in hiding…they burned the entire village. But still there were people who were helping the Jews.”
By 1963 Yad Vashem’s historians were researching and verifying rescuers from direct testimony and documented evidence. Yad Vashem’s purpose in documenting these rescuers is to manage an important archive of Holocaust research as well as to recognize these heroic activities and to “provide a blueprint to empower future generations” (Koepp, 2019). Mordecai Paldiel (1993), former director of the Department for the Righteous at Yad Vashem, elaborated on their purpose in recognizing these citizens:
It proves that helping was possible in every occupied country during WWII and refuses the excuse of a “moral paralysis.”
It shows that totalitarian regimes can and should be opposed, not only by organized groups, but by individuals.
It reminds us of the sanctity of life and that the death of one innocent person is a “moral challenge to the rest of mankind.”
It shows that the Righteous Gentiles were ordinary citizens with no special training or intangible level of generosity.
Yad Vashem’s historians painstakingly review survivor testimonies and other documentation when considering whether the candidate meets the criteria for the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” which includes (Koepp, 2019):
Willingness to risk one’s own life to save Jews from deportation and extermination
Personal involvement in the rescue of Jews, regardless of outcome
Performing actions that sprang from humanitarian concerns and not a desire for compensation
Absence of physical harm to Jews or others
Documentation of these activities from survivors either through oral testimony or incontrovertible documentary evidence of their actions.
Identification of qualified types of rescue aid: Sheltering, hiding Jews, helping them to assume new identities, helping to transport to safer locales, hiding children who were separated from parents.
Once awarded, the title takes on great ceremony worthy of recognizing those whose achievements decades ago deserve the most cherished observance. At the Yad Vashem campus in Jerusalem, the rescuer and survivor families are all encouraged to participate. Most have not seen each other since the war and the reunion always brings great emotion. The families represent generations of Jews that the Nazis could never destroy. The rescuer is awarded with a certificate, a plaque on Yad Vashem’s wall of names, a carob tree sapling planted in the institute’s expansive garden, and a large medal bearing the inscription, “Whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he had saved the whole world.”
Since the emergence of rescuer stories, there has been steady debate by Holocaust survivors and researchers about focusing on the heroic aspect of a few rescuers for the sake of a feel-good story. Some believe it diminishes the reality that Jews lived in terror and six million were killed (Koepp, 2019) or it implies that Jews were passive victims waiting for rescue (Yelich-Biniecki et al., 2016). While sensitivity to their experience and opinion is noteworthy, other researchers and current Holocaust remembrance organizations and educators have a different view. They insist that it is in learning these rare stories of moral courage that students can realize the scale of how many bystanders allowed the Holocaust to occur, and what happens when so few have the courage to step forward and protect their friends, neighbors, or strangers (Feldstern & Ryan, 2019). Even more importantly, it gives students hope.
As of January 2021, Yad Vashem has recognized 27,921 people as Righteous Among the Nations. They estimate that the world will never know the exact number of rescuers for several reasons: many never came forward with their story; thousands died during or after the war; and the rescue of one Jew could take as many as ten to help and those collective helpers cannot be identified (Yad Vashem, 2021). They were the exception rather than the rule. Exact numbers will never be known. Some estimates say that only 5-10% of the 500,000 Jews who lived through the Holocaust received assistance from rescuers (Baron). Yad Vashem estimates 100,000 non-Jews could have helped (Gushee). Holocaust researchers, Sam and Pearl Oliner, suggest that the number of rescuers during World War II could have been from 50,000 to as many as 500,000 (Oliner & Oliner, 1990). They further estimate that the number of rescuers could have been one million if the two million Jews who survived received any assistance.
Jan Karski also raises the point of how many rescuers must have helped for over half a million Jews to have survived the Holocaust:
“In Jerusalem you have approximately 5,800 those trees of diplomacy [as of 1988]. This is a fraction, a small fraction. There must have been many, many, many more. They should be sought after even if they are dead already. Their names should be known. For the Jewish post-war generation, again, not to lose faith in humanity. For the non-Jewish post-war generation, make them realize first where a lack of tolerance…antisemitism, racism, hatred…where do they lead to? Yesterday Jews, tomorrow perhaps Catholics, or whites or yellows or blacks… And secondly, what obedience to our Lord’s commandment, “Love your neighbor” can do, it can save people even in such circumstances as the Second World War.”
Whatever the actual number of rescuers, there still is a striking disparity given that the population of Europe at that time was over 300 million. Whether this estimated range was high or low, it was a fraction compared to the bystanders and collaborators who chose to look the other way.
Gino Bartali and the Assisi Network Righteous Among the Nations
Not until the early 2010s did Yad Vashem historians verify what others had suggested about Bartali’s contributions during the war. From 1943 to 1944, it is estimated that Bartali rode at least 40 missions for the Assisi Network and saved approximately 800 Jews. He was recognized in 2013 as Righteous Among the Nations. His associates in the Assisi Network were also recognized by Yad Vashem over the years and awarded Righteous Among the Nations:
Father Rufino Niccacci, 1974
Bishop Giuseppe Nicolini, 1977
Father Aldo Brunacci, 1977
Luigi and Trento Brizi, 1997
Cardinal Elia Angelo Dalla Costa, 2012
Mother Superior Giuseppina Biviglia, 2013
Mother Superior Ermella Brandi, 2013
Tina Strobos and the Dutch Righteous Among the Nations
The Dutch were second to Poland in number of rescuers, but the circumstances that filled their country with such difficulty allowed less than 25%, or 33,000, of Jews in The Netherlands to survive. The number of people actually rescued was only 11% of the Jewish population.
Tina Strobos and her mother, Marie, were recognized by Yad Vashem for their perilous actions working for the Dutch underground and saving nearly 100 Jews in their home. They were awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations in 1989.
Knud Dyby and the Danish Underground Righteous Among the Nations
The title of Righteous Among the Nations is given to individuals, not groups. However, the Danish Underground considered their massive rescue effort a group undertaking and a matter of national pride to refute the Germans and uphold moral values. They elected to have their group recognized by Yad Vashem, rather than by individual names. At the Yad Vashem campus there is a carob tree, plaque, and fishing vessel dedicated to their efforts.
Several Danes were still recognized by Yad Vashem with the title Righteous Among the Nations due to their extraordinary risk taking and contributions to the rescue of Danish Jews. Knud Dyby was recognized for using his position as a policeman to supply the resistance with intelligence information, false identification documents, coordinating Jews meeting with fishing boats, and transporting sensitive documents to and from Sweden. He spent many of his later years sharing his stories with audiences, especially to young people, to encourage goodness to all of their neighbors.
Jan Karski, Irene Opdyke, and the Polish Righteous Among the Nations
There is a distortion in trying to compare the number of Righteous titles in each country given the great differences in their situations during the war and incalculable number of rescuers who will never be known. It also diminishes the efforts of the equally courageous few. Still, it is inspiring to see that in the occupied Polish region targeted by the Nazis as the center of extermination has by far the largest number of Righteous Gentiles: 7,177. On the other hand, Poland also had the largest Jewish population in Europe, over 3 million, and only 10% survived. Of that, Yad Vashem estimates that only 1% were saved by rescuers (Yad Vashem). Irene Opdyke’s extraordinary example of moral courage while living with and working for the Nazis was recognized by Yad Vashem in 1982. Jan Karski did not save Jewish individuals like other rescuers. His unique contribution was in risking his life to witness the atrocities firsthand and then travel to Allied countries and report to their leaders pleading for action. Even after the war, he dedicated his life to continuing the memory of Holocaust victims. He was awarded as Righteous Among the Nations in 1982.