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Yad Vashem "To Live with Honor and to Die with Honor"

Jews Who Saved Jews

Even under such terrible conditions, there were those who acted in ways that went beyond the necessities of human existence: they risked their lives in order to save the lives of others.

Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, head of the Nitra Yeshiva and one of the leaders of the “Working Group” in Slovakia, who was one of the main activists in the attempts at rescuing Slovakian Jewry and stopping the deportations to the death camps Gisi Fleischmann, one of the heads of WIZO in Slovakia and a leader of the “Working Group” in Slovakia, who was one of the main activists in the attempts at rescuing Slovakian Jewry and stopping the deportations to the death campsAlexander Bogen, an artist and partisan unit commander in the forests around Vilna, Lithuania. He smuggled Jews out of the ghetto into the forests, trained them how to fight and led them in attacks against the GermansPartisans guarding an airfield in the Naliboki forest, July 1944. Some of the partisans rescued Jews from the forests and protected them from the Germans In the summer of 1943, Myla Racine assumed command of an underground group affiliated with the Hanoar Hatzioni youth movement in St. Gervais, in the Italian occupation zone in France. She helped hundreds of families that had fled to the area, helping to smuggle children to Switzerland. She was caught on October 21, 1943 while smuggling children, imprisoned and tortured. She was later sent to Ravensbrück and then Mauthausen, where she was killed in an Allied air raid Marianne Cohen was a member of a Jewish resistance group who was caught in May 1944 while smuggling children to Switzerland. She was brutally tortured but did not give away the names of her superiors. In July 1944 Marianne was executed by the Germans. The children were saved Anemasse, France, 18/08/1944, a group of children who survived thanks to Marianne Cohen and Myla Racine On April 19, 1943, Youra Georges Livchitz, a young Jewish doctor, and two comrades in his Belgian resistance group, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau, set out for an operation of their very own: to halt a deportation train and attempt to release the Jews trapped within it. It was the twentieth transport from the Mechelen transit camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau, with 1,631 Jews aboard. Youra stopped the train and threatened the engineer with his handgun. Maistriau opened the doors of one of the cars, and seventeen Jews escaped, even as the German guards fired. It was the only attack on a deportation train during the war. In 1944, the three underground members were arrested. Jean and Robert survived the camps; Youra was tried and executed in February 1944, in Breendonk, BelgiumMay 1944, Members of the Bielski family camp in the Naliboki Forest