Jewish Aid and Rescue During the Holocaust

Last edited Fri Apr 29, 2022, 03:10 AM - Edit history (1)

- Austrian Jewish refugee children, members of one of the Children's Transports (Kindertransport), arrive at a London train station. Great Britain, February 2, 1939.
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- JEWISH AID AND RESCUE - US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Despite the varied and courageous efforts of Jewish groups leading to the rescue of thousands of their co-religionists, they could do little to save millions of European Jews from the Nazi genocide. During the Holocaust, countless Jewish organizations and individuals worldwide did what they could to save their brethren. While these rescue efforts were initiated by Jews, most would have had little success without the assistance of numerous sympathetic non-Jews.

- RESCUE OF CHILDREN: Organized actions to rescue children began even before the onset of World War II. The Youth Aliyah View This Term in the Glossary (a movement founded for the transfer of Jewish children from Germany to Palestine), under the auspices of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, managed to bring more than 14,000 unaccompanied children to Palestine and Britain between 1933 and 1945. In Great Britain, an umbrella group known as the Movement for the Care of Children organized the travel and shelter of over 10,000 central European Jewish refugee children between December 1938 and September 1939. Since these children traveled without their parents, the operation became known as the Kindertransport.

In France, three Jewish organizations made organized attempts to rescue children. The best known was Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Children's Aid Society; OSE). Others active in this area were the Eclaireurs Israelites de France (a Jewish scouting movement) and the Mouvement des Jeunesses Sionistes (a Zionist youth movement). Operating nationwide, members of these groups used their institutions to provide hiding places for Jewish children, especially for more vulnerable foreign refugees. They also arranged the release of children from internment camps, and then smuggled them to safety in Switzerland or Spain. On a local level in France, similar activities were carried out by the Comite rue Amelot, the Jewish Communist "Solidarite" organization in Paris, the Service Andres group in Marseille, and the Groupe Maurice Cachoud in Nice, which specialized in secretly transporting children to refuge in Switzerland. Thanks to these efforts, as many as 12,000–15,000 Jewish children were saved from deportation and almost certain death.

- Escape via the Far East was an option that saved the lives of thousands of Polish Jewish refugees in Lithuania. Organized by Zionist leader Zorah Warhaftig, many refugees were able to obtain transit visas from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, as well as from sympathetic Dutch diplomats. They then had to negotiate with Soviet authorities to obtain exit visas. Armed with this documentation, some 2,178 Polish Jewish refugees entered Japan between Oct. 1940 and Aug. 1941. Most of them were subsequently sent to Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China, where they remained for the duration of the war. - Efforts by the Yishuv - The Yishuv (Jewish settlement in Palestine) sent 37 parachutists into Europe to aid Jews under Nazi oppression. The Nazis caught and shot 7 of the parachutists.. The Yishuv also organized "illegal" immigration to Palestine, in an ongoing operation known as Aliyah. Zionist groups, especially their youth components, facilitated the migration of both individuals and small groups from Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw, among other places... https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-aid-and-rescue



- Jewish refugee youth, on an escape route from France to Switzerland, at a Children's Aid Society (OSE) girls' home. Couret, France, c. 1942.
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- Bulgaria: Dimitar Peshev of the National Assembly prevented the deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews.
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- RESCUE OF JEWS DURING THE HOLOCAUST - Wikipedia -Edited.

During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany. Since 1953, Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, has recognized 26,973 persons as Righteous among the Nations. Yad Vashem's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, recognizes rescuers of Jews as Righteous among the Nations to honor non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazi Germany.

- BY COUNTRY: Poland, Greece, France, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Serbia, Bulgaria, Portugal, Spain, Lithuania, Albania, Finland, Italy, Vatican City State, Norway, China, The Philippines. *More at the Link...



- Greece: Princess Alice of Battenberg and Greece, who was the wife of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, stayed in occupied Athens during the Second World War, sheltering Jewish refugees, for which she is recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" at Yad Vashem. Although the Germans and Bulgarians deported a great number of Greek Jews, others were successfully hidden by their Greek neighbors... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Alice_of_Battenberg
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- Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.

- LEADERS AND DIPLOMATS, (Selected):

- Duke Roberto de Castro Brandão – Brazilian diplomat and nobleman who issued diplomatic visas and passports to Jews in Marseilles, France. He was later deported, along with his daughter...
- Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg – Swedish diplomat, who negotiated the release of 27,000 people (a significant no. of whom were Jews) to hospitals in Sweden.
- Frank Foley – British MI6 agent undercover as a passport officer in Berlin, saved around 10,000 people by issuing forged passports to Britain and the British Mandate of Palestine.
- Albert Göring – German businessman (and younger brother of leading Nazi Hermann Göring) who helped Jews and dissidents survive in Germany.
- Paul Grüninger – Swiss commander of police who provided falsely dated papers to over 3,000 refugees so they could escape Austria following the Anschluss.
- Kiichiro Higuchi – Japanese lieutenant general who saved 20,000 Jewish refugees.
- Lyndon B. Johnson – Future President of the U.S. who, as a member of the US House of Representatives in 1938, helped Austrian conductor Erich Leinsdorf gain permanent U.S. residency. Johnson later helped Jews enter the U.S. through Latin America and become workers on National Youth Admin. projects in Texas.
- Prince Constantin Karadja – Romanian diplomat, who saved over 51,000 Jews from deportation and extermination..
- Necdet Kent – Turkish Consul General at Marseille, who granted Turkish citizenship to hundreds of Jews. At one point, he entered an Auschwitz-bound train at enormous personal risk to save from deportation 70 Jews, to whom he had granted Turkish citizenship.
- Carl Lutz – Swiss consul in Budapest, protected tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary.
- Oskar Schindler – German businessman whose efforts to save his 1,200 Jewish workers were recounted in the book Schindler's Ark and the film Schindler's List.



- Oskar Schindler saved 1200 Jews by employing them in his factories.

- Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld set up a UK-based rescue committee and rescued many thousands of Jews.
- Eduard Schulte – German industrialist, the first to inform the Allies about the mass extermination of Jews.
- Irena Sendler – Polish head of Zegota children's department who saved 2,500 Jewish children.
- Ho Feng Shan – Chinese Consul in Vienna who freely issued visas to Jews.
- Henryk Slawik – Polish diplomat who saved 5,000–10,000 people in Budapest, Hungary.
- Recha Sternbuch rescued large numbers of Jews with the help of her husband Yitzchak by smuggling them into Switzerland from Austria.. rescuing the Jews who arrived to Bergen-Belsen by train from Hungary...
- Chiune Sugihara – Japanese consul to Lithuania, 2,140 (mostly Polish) Jews...
- Raoul Wallenberg – Swedish diplomat. Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews condemned to certain death by the Nazis during World War II. In January 1945, Wallenberg was imprisoned...
- Sir Nicholas Winton – British stockbroker who organized the Czech Kindertransport which sent 669 children (most of them Jewish) to foster parents ln England and Sweden from Czechoslovakia and Austria after Kristallnacht. Sir Nicholas was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.
- Raymond Geist – Consul General at the American embassy in Berlin. While in Berlin from 1929 to 1939 he personally intervened to save those who were under the threat of being imprisoned in concentration camps and issued more than 50,000 visas to them. According to the TV series Genius, he issued visas to Albert Einstein and his family...



- Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE (b. Wertheim; 19 May 1909 – 1 July 2015) was a British humanitarian who helped to rescue children who were at risk from oppression by Nazi Germany. Born to German-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th c., Winton assisted in the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of WWII. On a brief visit to Czechoslovakia he helped compile a list of children needing rescue and, returning to Britain, he worked to fulfill the legal requirements of bringing them to Britain and finding homes and sponsors for them. This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for 'children's transport').

His humanitarian accomplishments went unnoticed by the world for nearly 50 years until 1988 when he was invited to the BBC television programme That's Life!, where he was reunited with dozens of the children he had helped come to Britain and was introduced to many of their children and grandchildren. The British press celebrated him and dubbed him the "British Schindler". In 2003, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia". On 28 Oct. 2014, he was awarded the highest honour of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion (1st class), by Czech President Miloš Zeman. He died in his sleep, in 2015, at the age of 106... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Winton
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- RELIGIOUS FIGURES. See also: Rescue of Jews by Catholics during the Holocaust

- Catholic officials: Pope Pius XII, preached against racism in encyclicals like Summi Pontificatus. Used Vatican Radio to denounce race murders and anti-Semitism. Directly lobbied Axis officials to stop Jewish deportations. Opened the sanctuaries of the Vatican to Rome's Jews during the Nazi roundup. - Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty CBE – Irish Catholic priest who saved more than 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews; known as the "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican". Retold in the film The Scarlet and the Black. - Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican Chargé d'Affaires in Slovakia. Protested the anti-Semitism and totalitarianism of the Tiso regime... - Cardinal Gerlier of France refused to hand over Jewish children being sheltered in Catholic homes. ..

- OTHERS, QUAKERS, PROMINENT INDIVIDUALS, VILLAGES HELPING JEWS...

- READ MORE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_Jews_during_the_Holocaust