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during the Holocaust, individuals in every European country and from all religious backgrounds
risked their lives to help Jews. Rescue efforts ranged from the isolated actions of individuals to
organized networks both small and large.
Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust presented a host of difficulties. The Allied prioritization of
"winning the war" and the lack of access to those who needed rescue hampered major rescue
operations. Individuals willing to help Jews in danger faced severe consequences if they were
caught, and formidable logistics of supporting people in hiding. Finally, hostility towards Jews
among non-Jewish populations, especially in eastern Europe, was a daunting obstacle to rescue.
Rescue took many forms.
German-occupied Denmark was the site of the most famous and complete rescue operation
in Axis-controlled Europe. In late summer 1943, German occupation authorities imposed martial
law on Denmark in response to increasing acts of resistance and sabotage. German Security
Police officials planned to deport the Danish Jews while martial law was in place. On September
28, 1943, a German businessman warned Danish authorities of the impending operation,
scheduled for the night of October 12, 1943. With the help of their non-Jewish neighbors and
friends, virtually all the Danish Jews went into hiding. During the following days, the Danish
resistance organized a rescue operation, in which Danish fishermen clandestinely ferried some
7,200 Jews (of the country's total Jewish population of 7,800) in small fishing boats, to safety in
neutral Sweden.
agent of theUS War Refugee Board), Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, and Italian citizen Giorgio
Perlasca (posing as a Spanish diplomat), provided tens of thousands of Jews in 1944 with
certification that they were under the "protection" of neutral powers. These certifications
exempted the bearers from most anti-Jewish measures decreed by the Hungarian government,
including deportation to the Greater German Reich. Each of these rescuers worked closely with
members of the Budapest Jewish communities. For example, Perlasca, whose credentials were
the most vulnerable to challenge, worked closely with Otto Komoly and the SzamosisLaszlo
and Eugeniato obtain protective papers and shelter for scores of Jews in Budapest.
The Sudeten German industrialist Oskar Schindler took over an enamelware factory located
outside the Krakow ghetto in German-occupied Poland. He later protected over a thousand
Jewish workers employed there from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The
deportation of more than 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace, Macedonia, and Pirot to
Treblinka in March 1943 by the Bulgarian military and police authorities shocked and shamed
key political, intellectual, and religious figures in Bulgaria into an open protest against any
deportations from Bulgaria proper. The protest action, which included members of the
government's own ruling party, induced the Bulgarian King, Boris III, to reverse the decision of
his government to comply with the German request to deport the Jews of Bulgaria. As a result of
Boris' decision, the Bulgarian authorities did not deport any Jews from Bulgaria proper.
Other non-Jews, such as Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government-in-exile, based in
London, to the non-communist underground movements, sought to expose Nazi plans to murder
the Jews. Karski met with Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto and in the Izbica transit ghetto in
late summer of 1942. He transmitted their reports of mass killings in the Belzec killing center to
Allied leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he met in July 1943.
Some US-based groups engaged in rescue efforts. The Quakers' American Friends Service
Committee, the Unitarians, and other groups coordinated relief activities for Jewish refugees in
France, Portugal, and Spain throughout the war. A variety of US-based organizations (both
religious and secular, Jewish and non-Jewish) cooperated in securing entry visas into the United
States and arranging placement and, in some cases, eventual repatriation for around 1,000
unaccompanied Jewish refugee children between 1934 and 1942.
Whether they saved a thousand people or a single life, those who rescued Jews during the
Holocaust demonstrated the possibility of individual choice even in extreme circumstances.
These and other acts of conscience and courage, however, saved only a tiny percentage of those
targeted for destruction.