Righteous Among the Nations

Most people did nothing. That is the first thing to say. The vast majority of Europeans, in every country the Reich occupied, watched their Jewish neighbours be marked, robbed, deported and murdered, and did not act. Some collaborated. Some informed for money. The largest group, by some way, looked away.

A small number did not. They hid Jews in attics and barns. They forged baptismal certificates and ration books. They moved children across borders in the night. They drove ambulances through checkpoints with people on the floor. They issued visas in defiance of their own governments. They led whole villages into a conspiracy of silence. They were caught and shot in some cases. In others they survived and never spoke of what they had done.

Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial authority, recognises those rescuers in a programme begun in 1953 and gives them the title Righteous Among the Nations. The criteria are strict. The rescuer must have risked their life. The rescue must have been to save a Jewish life. The act must not have been done for payment. The case must be documented. As of 2024 the programme had recognised around twenty eight thousand individuals from over fifty countries. Many more rescuers are not recognised because no survivor lived to testify or no documentation could be assembled. The number is therefore a floor, not a ceiling.

The pages in this section profile the rescuers most often named, and a few who deserve to be named more often. Frank Foley, a British passport officer in Berlin, who issued visas to thousands without authority. Nicholas Winton, who organised the Czech Kindertransport. Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews and disappeared into Soviet captivity. Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno who issued transit visas against Tokyo’s instructions. Witold Pilecki, the Polish officer who let himself be arrested into Auschwitz to organise resistance from inside. Oskar Schindler, whose factory list became the most famous rescue story of the postwar period. Joop Westerweel, who was caught and shot. Giovanni Palatucci, an Italian police official who is no longer regarded as a clean case but is included here because the case matters. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian who pretended to be the Spanish ambassador in Budapest. Irena Sendler, who saved around two and a half thousand Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. Jan Karski, who carried the news of what was happening to Roosevelt in 1943 and was not believed. Angel Sanz Briz and Carl Lutz, the Spanish and Swiss diplomats in Budapest. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the Protestant village in the Cévennes that hid around five thousand Jewish refugees. Marion Pritchard. Martin Niemöller. Corrie ten Boom. Hugh O’Flaherty. Pope John XXIII when he was Apostolic Delegate in Istanbul. Jimmy de Rothschild.

None of these people were superheroes. They were ordinary people who, in a moment that asked everything, said yes. Their existence does not prove that the catastrophe could have been prevented. Most of those they rescued were rescued one or two or ten at a time, and most of those they could not reach died. But the existence of the Righteous matters because it shows that the choice was real. The neighbours who did nothing had also had a choice. Some people, in that moment, chose differently.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards