1. Helena Merenholc (1907-1997, Poland)

Merenholc was a psychologist who aided Jewish children and orphans in the Warsaw ghetto. In March 1943, she managed to escape from the ghetto with her mother and sister. Under a false identity, Merenholc helped Jews hidden by Żegota (Polish Council for Aid to Jews) by providing them with false documents and finding hiding places for them. After the war, Merenholc stayed in Poland and worked for the Central Committee of Jews as well as the Polish Radio. In 1976, she began hosting meetings of activists from the Workers’ Defense Committee and was involved in the struggle for human rights. Merenholc died in 1997 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw.

2. Janina Rechtleben -Wojciechowska (1900, Poland-1980, England)

Rechtleben-Wojciechowska remained on the Aryan side of Warsaw and was active in the Jewish underground there. Her apartment served as a hiding place for Jews who escaped from the ghetto after the Great Action in the Summer of 1942 and as a meeting place for the Underground.  She provided the escapees with clothing, food and documents. After the war she settled in London with her life partner, playwright Fryderyk Járosy. She died in 1980 and is buried in Warsaw.

3. Maurycy Herling-Grudziński (1903-1966, Poland)

A lawyer who, under the cover of his Polish identity, smuggled Jews out of the Warsaw Ghetto beneath piles of animal skins. From the fall of 1942, his home became a hiding place for Jews he smuggled out of the ghetto. His private initiative eventually became an organized activity under the supervision of Żegota (Polish Council for Aid to Jews). He also established a financial assistance program for Jewish refugees hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw. After the war he joined the Polish United Workers’ Party and became a Supreme Court judge.

4. Madeleine Dreyfus (1909-1987, France)

As a member of the Garel Network, Dreyfus found hiding places among Christian families in the villages of the South of France for Jewish children. Several times a month she led groups of Jewish children by train to hiding places. She was arrested and deported to Bergen-Belsen, where she was imprisoned for eleven months. She was liberated in May 1945 and continued to practice as a Adlerian psychologist in France.

5. Lore Durlacher/Ora Goren (1920, Germany-1992, Israel)

Durlacher worked in a mental hospital in Apeldoorn, Holland. After all the patients were deported, she escaped to a hiding place arranged by the Westerweel group. Using a forged identity card provided by the underground she moved to Amsterdam where she became an active member of the group. Durlacher provided food stamps and forged papers to Jews in hiding and assisted in smuggling Jews out of the Westerbork detention camp. After the war, she married Aharon Greenbaum Goren in Amsterdam—a Jewish Brigade soldier she met at the first convention of the “Halutz”. She immigrated to Israel In August 1946 and settled in Hefer Valley.

6. Naomi Mayer (1924, Hungary-1945, Switzerland)

Mayer smuggled two young Jewish brothers, aged three and four, onto the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee train to Bergen-Belsen and cared for them throughout months of detention in the camp. Fearing the children could be mistreated if discovered, Mayer took great risks to hide and care for them in the camp. After 180 days, she and the boys were released and transported —along with 1,600 others on the train—to Switzerland. There, upon learning that she could not adopt the boys and that her fiancé had been murdered in Hungary, Mayer took her own life.

7. Peter Jablonski (1921, Poland-2011, Canada)

At the age of 23, Jablonski rescued a 13-year-old boy who was injured in a bombing of the house in which he was hiding. Jablonski hid the boy and two other Jews in a bunker he had dug in Warsaw. He saved the boy’s injured leg and provided everyone with food. He made aliya with his wife Sabina in 1950 and immigrated to Canada in 1956.

8. Oscar Schoenfeld (Hungary 1923–Israel 2004)

Schoenfeld was a member of the Betar youth movement and later of the Le’Ezrat Ha’am organization. In November 1938, following the Hungarian invasion of the Carpathians, the organization went underground. During this period, Schoenfeld assisted Jewish refugees who had infiltrated Hungary from Poland and Czechoslovakia by finding them hiding places and providing food, water, and suitable clothing. He was sought by the Hungarian police, who arrested and tortured his father in an attempt to force him to turn his son in. He was later captured and tortured but managed to escape. Schoenfeld immigrated to the U.S. in 1949 and took residence in Los Angeles, where he opened his own business manufacturing aluminum doors. He married his wife Alise in 1952. Schoenfeld was one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Beverly Hills. He passed away in 2004 and is buried in Israel.

9. Witold Góra (1923, Hungary-2004, Israel)

Under a false identity, Góra worked as a maintenance man at the Polish laundry “Opus”. He stole documents from the Gestapo station that was located in the same building and used them to forge identity cards, saving dozens of Jews from deportation and extermination in Treblinka. He also rented safe houses for escapees from the Warsaw ghetto. Góra was honored with citations and government medals for his activity during the war. He remained in Poland and worked as director of an office for projects and technical planning that undertook government electrical and construction contracts.

10. Pinchas Ostrowski (1922, Poland-1983, Israel)

In mid-1945, following the war, Ostrowski—then serving as director general of the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture in Mecholenka, Poland—rescued a Jewish boy from the home of a Polish farmer who falsely claimed the child was his son. The boy’s entire family had been murdered. Ostrowski employed subterfuge to reach the boy who had nearly lost all memory of his Jewish heritage: he issued an order to confiscate quotas of agricultural produce from the village, setting out with a Red Army escort to traverse an area inhabited by hostile Ukrainians. Ostrowski also used his authority to enable 70 Jews to leave Soviet territory and immigrate to Israel. He made aliya in 1948 with a group of Jewish soldiers who fought the Nazis. Joined the Israeli Army and was released in 1968 as a lieutenant colonel.

11. Rabbi Josef Gean (1882, Libya-1960, Israel)

Rabbi Gean established an illegal hospitality enterprise for hundreds of Jewish refugees who arrived in Libya from Europe during the anti-Semitic Italian occupation regime that deported Jews to extermination camps in Europe and established six concentration camps in Libya. In doing so, Gean risked his life. He made aliya with his family and most of the Libyan Jewish community in around 1948 to 1949.

12. Lolek Lehrer (1916-1943, Poland)

Lehrer managed to live under a false identity on the Aryan side of Krakow. He obtained work as a railway employee that allowed him to move between Krakow, Bochnia, Warsaw and Lublin. In the winter of 1942, he began helping Jews escape from Poland to Slovakia. Lehrer continued this until he was arrested and murdered on Sept. 27, 1943.

13. Jean-Charle Leon Lachtchiver (1931, France-2019, Israel)

Lachtchiver assisted his mother, Jewish rescuer Jeanne Lachtchiver, to distribute false identity cards to Jews. In her home in Grenoble, France, the mother ran an extensive rescue operation for the HaNoar HaTzioni Zionist youth movement underground, which included large-scale printing of false identity cards and lodging convoys for children overnight before they were smuggled to Switzerland by the Jewish Resistance. Jean hid documents and false identity cards in his schoolbooks and passed them to members of the Underground for Jews in danger of deportation. He also reported on events he witnessed that indicated the tragedies befalling the Jews of the city, such as Germans loading Jews onto trucks on their way to deportation and gathered intel on the location of German Army and Gestapo soldiers in the city.

14. Zvi Henryk Zimmerman (1913, Poland-2006, Israel)

Orphaned at a young age, Zimmerman studied law in Krakow and became a Zionist activist. He was appointed director of the Relief Department in the Krakow Ghetto Jewish Council (“Judenrat”) and was a leader of the Zionist underground “Ha’sne”, which engaged in rescue activities—issuing false Aryan documents and smuggling Jews across the border to Romania and Hungary. He also carried out dangerous operations for the Hahalutz Halochem, an armed group in the ghetto. As part of his role in the Jewish Council, Zimmerman went on a mission in March 1942; the report he prepared with others became the first reliable and official document to reach the West, documenting the extermination of the Jews, in May 1942. After the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in 1943, Zimmerman was transferred to a forced labor camp in Bieżanow. He escaped to the Carpathian Mountains on the Polish-Slovak border, where he joined the partisans and participated in fighting against German forces. When he learned of the fate of Polish Jews fleeing to Hungary being caught and handed over to the Nazis or Slovaks who murdered them, and with the intension of finding an escape route for many, Zimmerman infiltrated through Slovakia to Hungary—an ally of Germany. He received a semi-official appointment at the “Polish Civil Committee for Aid to Refugees” in Budapest which served as the representative of the Polish government in exile and in this capacity approved thousands of false affidavits held by Jewish refugees claiming to be Christian Poles, thus endangering his life. According to estimates, about 5,000 Jews were rescued through these efforts. Zimmerman also initiated the establishment of an orphanage in the town of Vác, near Budapest, for 100 Polish-Jewish children who had arrived in Hungary on their own under false Christian identities. After the occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Zimmermann went underground and worked with the Rescue Committee to devise a plan to save Jews while the Gestapo was after him. With the agreement of the Rescue Committee, he set out for Romania with four other representatives of Jewish organizations to pave the way for an escape route. He was appointed chairman of the committee of Polish Jews in Romania, planned smuggling routes from Hungary, and advised community leaders to organize large-scale hiding places. In cooperation with the Jewish Rescue Committee, Zimmerman organized voyages of Jewish refugees from Romania to Israel via Turkey, and left for Israel from Constance via Istanbul on July 6, 1944, aboard an old Turkish cruise ship called “Kazbek”, onto which he also smuggled a two-and-a-half-year-old girl. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Zimmerman served as a member of Knesset, deputy speaker of the Knesset, deputy mayor of Haifa, and as Israel’s ambassador to New Zealand and the islands of Oceania. Most of his family perished in the Holocaust.