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Standing here, at Yad Vashem on the day the Righteous Among the Nations medal is being awarded to my rescuers, Regina and Stanislaw Swida, I would like to share my reflections and inner questions pertaining to some particular and more general aspects of my rescue. These questions have been challenging me ever since I was mature enough to grasp the strength of mind of my rescuers and other Righteous Among the Nations, who risked their lives to extract from the clutches of the forces of evil persons whose being Jewish was a sin punishable with death.
If I were in their place, would I act like them? This is the question that I have been asking myself from the days of my youth, and until this very day I have not come up with an answer. I believe that even if I were to give a positive answer to this question, it is most doubtful if I would act accordingly, were I to find myself in a similar situation as the Righteous Among the Nations. Beyond the banality of evil, apathy and indifference, the closing of one’s eyes in the face of terror and fear of denunciation, the Righteous showed that in the individual's small realm, in the depth of human nature, one can always find other feelings – one can find solidarity with the other, human warmth and a sense of justice that made them act nobly. I do not pretend to know much about the profile of the Righteous Among the Nations and the dynamics and circumstances that motivated them to rise at a time of overall moral collapse. However my instincts tell me that had one put this very same question to them prior to the events, most of them would have given the same answer as I just did. Their greatness was the very fact that they did not ask too many questions, and that their answered were given in the form of exemplary deeds.