Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust

[8][9][10] Rescuers' motivations varied on a spectrum from altruism to expecting sex or material gain; it was not uncommon for helpers to betray or murder Jews if their money ran out.

Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, organized a resistance movement in Auschwitz from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread the word of the Holocaust.

When AK Home Army Intelligence discovered the true fate of transports leaving the Jewish Ghetto, the council to Aid Jews – Rada Pomocy Żydom (codename Żegota) – was established in late 1942 in co-operation with church groups.

When the island was almost levelled by the great earthquake of 1953, the first relief came from the state of Israel, with a message that read "The Jews of Zakynthos have never forgotten their Mayor or their beloved Bishop and what they did for us.

82-year-old Simon Danieli traveled from Israel to his birthplace in Veria to thank the descendants of the people who helped him and his family escape Nazi persecution during World War II.

Danieli was 13 in 1942 when his family—father Joseph, a grain merchant, mother Buena, and nine siblings—fled Veria to escape the increasingly frequent atrocities committed by Nazi forces against the city's Jews.

They ended up in a small nearby village in Sykies, where the family was taken in by Giorgos and Panayiota Lanara, who offered them shelter, food and a hiding place in the woods, helped also by a priest, Nestoras Karamitsopoulos.

[30] Père Marie-Benoît was a French Capuchin priest who helped smuggle approximately 4,000 Jews into safety from Nazi-occupied Southern France and subsequently was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous among the Nations in 1966.

Pere Bruno risked his life for his values and to save the lives of an estimated 400 Jewish children and is honored as a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem.

L'abbé Joseph André is another Catholic priest who secured safe hiding places with Belgian families, orphanages and other institutions for Jewish children and adults.

In August 1943, this situation was about to collapse as the Danish government refused to introduce the death penalty as demanded by the Germans following a series of strikes and popular protests.

Based on its 1940 population of 9 million the 5,516 Jews rescued in the Netherlands represents the largest per capita number: 1 in 1,700 Dutch was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations medal.

Miriam Steiner-Aviezer, a researcher into Yugoslavian Jewry and a member of Yad Vashem's Righteous Gentiles committee states: "The Serbs saved many Jews.

The active participation of Bulgaria in the Holocaust however did not extend to its pre-war territory and after various protests by Archbishop Stefan of Sofia and the interference of Dimitar Peshev, the planned deportation of the Bulgarian Jews (about 50,000) was stopped.

[60] In June 1940, when Germany invaded France, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued visas, indiscriminately, to a population in panic,[61] without asking previous authorizations from Lisbon, as he was supposed to.

[note 1] During the war, some parts of Kosovo and Macedonia which were occupied by the Axis powers were annexed to Albania, and an estimated 600 Jews were captured in these territories, and consequently killed.

[97] In Italian-occupied Croatia, the Nazi envoy Siegfried Kasche advised Berlin that Italian forces had "apparently been influenced" by Vatican opposition to German anti-Semitism.

Giorgio Perlasca, who posed as the consul-general of Spain under the Spanish ambassador in Budapest, was able to put under his protection thousands of Jews and non-Jews destined to concentration camps.

[101][102] Bartali cycled from Florence through Tuscany, Umbria and Marche, many times traveling as far afield as Assisi, all the while wearing the racing jersey emblazoned with his name.

Calogero Marrone was the chief of the Civil Registry office in the municipality of Varese and issued hundreds of fake identity cards in order to save Jews and anti-fascists.

[104] She and two British women, Mother Riccarda Beauchamp Hambrough and Sister Katherine Flanagan have been beatified for reviving the Swedish Bridgettine Order of nuns and hiding scores of Jewish families in their convent.

Gilbert credits the network established by Bishop Giuseppe Placido Nicolini and Abbott Rufino Niccaci of the Franciscan Monastery, with saving 300 people.

[106] Other Italian clerics honored by Yad Vashem include the theology professor Fr Giuseppe Girotti of Dominican Seminary of Turin, who saved many Jews before being arrested and sent to Dachau where he died in 1945; Fr Arrigo Beccari who protected around 100 Jewish children in his seminary and among local farmers in the village of Nonantola in Central Italy; and Don Gaetano Tantalo, a parish priest who sheltered a large Jewish family.

[124] Upon receiving news of the roundups on the morning of 16 October, the Pope immediately instructed Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione, to make a protest to the German ambassador.

When Archbishop Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI) was offered an award for his rescue work by Israel, he said he had only been acting on the orders of Pius XII.

[125] Pius' diplomatic representatives lobbied on behalf of Jews across Europe, including in Vichy France, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovakia, Germany itself and elsewhere.

The neutral powers led a major rescue effort and Pius' representative, Angelo Rotta, took the lead in establishing an "international Ghetto", marked by the emblems of the Swiss, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish and Vatican legations, and providing shelter for some 25,000 Jews.

[135] In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and escaped prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by the Irish-born priest and Vatican official Hugh O'Flaherty.

[139] Ho Feng Shan – Chinese Consul in Vienna started to issue visas to Jews for Shanghai, part of which during this time was still under the control of the Republic of China, for humanitarian reasons.

Between 1933 and 1941, the Chinese city of Shanghai under Japanese occupation, accepted unconditionally over 18,000 Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust in Europe, a number greater than those taken in by Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and British India combined during World War II.