Poland

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... Read More Here

Gertruda Babilińska

The Nanny That Kept Her Promise   Gertruda Babilińska was born in 1902 in Starograd, near Gdansk. Her father worked at the post office and she was the eldest of eight children. When she was 19 years old, she went to Warsaw to seek work. She found a position with a Jewish family, taking care of their two children. When the family decided to leave for Palestine, they offered to take the nanny along, but Babilińska wanted to stay in Poland.  She was then engaged as nanny by the Stolowickis, a... Read More Here

Aleksander and Antonina Wyrzykowski

Jedwabne – A Noble Family in the Midst of Murder and Betrayal The Jedwabne massacre has become a symbol for Poles turning on their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust and participating in the murder. As various investigations of the pogrom showed, on 10 July 1941, less than a month after the German occupation of the area, the town's Poles, without any assistance or guidance by the Germans, rounded up their Jewish neighbors and brutally killed them. However despite the deep hostility against... Read More Here

Wiktoria and Stanislaw Szumielewicz

Into Wiktoria's Arms Eva Nisencwaig was 3 years old when Germany occupied Poland in 1939. Her family tried to endure the difficult situation of Jews as best as they could, but in the summer of 1941, Moshe and Hena Nisencwaig became aware of the imminent danger to their lives. They took the painful decision to part from their five-year-old daughter and to put her in the care of Polish friends, Wiktoria and Stanislaw Szumielewicz, who had a farm in Ritviana. The couple took the child in,... Read More Here

Manko and Maryna Swierszczak, Michal and Genowefa Dukiewicz

Hiding in Graves in a Cemetery   As youngsters before the war, Yechiel Rozen and his brothers, Shmuel and Henry, used to play football in a playing field adjoining a Polish cemetery, in the town of Buczacz, in the Tarnopol district. In the course of time, a friendship developed between the Rozen boys and Manko Swierszczak, a gravedigger and custodian of the cemetery, whose friendly nature soon endeared him to the boys. In June 1943, when the last of the Jews were deported from Buczacz, the... Read More Here

Helena Sitkowska and her son Andrzej Sitkowski

Fufilling their "Humanitarian Duty"   When the war broke out David and Bronislawa Kozak lived in Czestochowa with their two daughters Dobra Jenta (later Marion Miliband) and Hadassah. Shortly after the German occupation the family business was confiscated, and when the ghetto was established in April 1941, the Kozaks had to leave their home and move into the ghetto. In the fall of 1942 Bronislawa and the two girls were smuggled out of the ghetto by a former employee of the family business.... Read More Here

Karolina Sapeta

Karolina Sapeta worked as a live-in domestic for the Hochhauser family in Kraków and served as nanny for their children, whom she gave warm and devoted care. When the Germans occupied Poland and the Jews of Krakow were put in a ghetto, Sapeta came to the family’s aid and illegally provided them with food and clothing. In March 1943, when the Kraków ghetto experienced its final Aktion, Sapeta decided to at least rescue the Hochheisers’ children. She removed ten-year-old Samuel... Read More Here

Maria Kotarba

Born near Nowy Sacz, Maria Kotarba had worked as a courier with the Polish resistance before being caught and transported to Auschwitz on 6 January 1943. As a political prisoner, Maria was put to work in the camp in the Rajsko gardening Kommando. One day, Maria met Lena Lakomy, a “nurse” escorting sick prisoners to the camp infirmary. Lena had been registered in the camp as a non-Jewish Pole, on account of her non-Jewish looks. One day, Maria clandestinely joined the group of sick prisoners... Read More Here

Stanislaw Jasinski and his daughter Emilia Slodkowska (née Jasinska)

In September 1942, German and Ukrainian police appeared at dawn in the village of Siedliszcze Male, near the townlet of Kostopol in the Wolyn district. They assembled the local Jews and murdered them, together with the rest of the Jews from the surrounding area. Two brothers, Szmuel and Josef Liderman, succeeded in escaping the slaughter, however, and slipped away across the fields to the village of Antonowka, near the town of Rowne, where there were still Jews living. Shortly thereafter, the... Read More Here

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... Read More Here

Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska

Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska (née Rusinek) was 15 years old when she joined the Polish Underground against the Germans. In 1943, she met Jadwiga Piotrowska, later recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, and joined her in rescuing Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Magdalena collected the children, cared for them and escorted them to their places of refuge with Polish families or in convents. She displayed enormous dedication and love, although she was placing her own life... Read More Here

Antoni Gawrylkiewicz

Antoni Gawrylkiewicz, a youthful 18-year-old village shepherd, saved a group of Jews almost equal to his age, 16 people, belonging to three Jewish families – Kabacznik, Solominansky and Sonenson – over a period of two years, from May 1942 to July 1944. As told by Haifa resident Yitzhak Sonenson and his New York-based sister, Prof. Yaffa Eliach (a noted Holocaust scholar), the-then respectively 10 and 6 year-old brother and sister witnessed a harrowing German liquidation raid in Eishyshok... Read More Here

Jadwiga Dudziec

Jadwiga Dudziec, a teacher from a small village in the Vilna region, was active in the Polish Scout Movement. In 1934 Dudziec moved to Vilna where she established contact with the Zionist Movement of the Jewish Scouts. During the German Occupation Dudziec insisted on employing Jews in the timber factory that she managed. Her apartment was above the workshop and it served as a meeting point for members of the Jewish underground. Due to her connections with the Polish underground, Dudziec found... Read More Here

Krystyna Danko

During the years preceeding WWII, Krystyna Danko, a Polish orphan from the town of Otwock, formed a close friendship with the oldest daughter of a Jewish family. As a result of the bond between the two girls, Krystyna spent a great deal of time in the Kokoszko family's home where she found warmth and emotional support. After the war began, Krystyna, at great personal risk, went to incredible lengths to help the Kokoszko family escape the Nazis. She hid the father, mother and oldest daughter in... Read More Here