| The Holocaust |
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Part of: Jewish history
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Camps
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Remembrance
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In three cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population during the Holocaust. In other countries, notable individuals or communities created resistance during the Holocaust which helped the jews escape some concentration camps.
Since 1963, a commission organized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, and headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, has been charged with the duty of awarding people who rescued Jews from the Holocaust the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations. As of January 2007, 21,758 people have received the honor.[1]
There was also Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
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In a few cases, individual diplomats and people of influence, such as Oskar Schindler or Nicholas Winton, protected large numbers of Jews. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese consul-general to Austria Ho Feng Shan, and others saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes.
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.
Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued 30,000 visas to Jews and other persecuted minorities, though it cost him his career in 1941, when Portuguese dictator Salazar forced him out of his job. He died in poverty in 1954.
Brazilian diplomat Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas illegally issued Brazilian diplomatic visas to hundreds of Jews in France during the Vichy Government, saving them from certain death.
Chiune Sempo Sugihara, Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1939–1940, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Poland in defiance of explicit orders from the Japanese foreign ministry. The last foreign diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train. After the war, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese foreign service, ostensibly due to downsizing. In 1985, Sugihara’s wife and son received the Righteous Among the Nations honor in Jerusalem, on behalf of the ailing Sugihara, who died in 1986.
Although Pope Pius XII did not publicly speak out against the murder of the Jews during the Holocaust, the Vatican did take action to save many Jews in Italy from deportation, including sheltering several hundred Jews in the catacombs of St. Peter's Basilica. In his Christmas addresses of 1941 and 1942, the pontiff was forceful on the topic but did not mention the Nazis by name. The Pope encouraged the bishops to speak out against the Nazi regime and to open the religious houses in their dioceses to hide Jews. In recent years, the Vatican has expressed its remorse for not speaking out with more authority against the genocide.[2]
In April 1943, members of the Belgian resistance held up the twentieth convoy train to Auschwitz, and freed 231 people (115 of whom escaped the Holocaust).
There were also groups, such as the Polish Żegota organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue victims. 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 word of the Holocaust.
In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. Once a Vatican ambassador to Egypt, O'Flaherty used his political connections to help secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.
Some towns and churches also helped hide Jews and protect others from the Holocaust, such as the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon which sheltered several thousand Jews. Similar individual and family acts of rescue were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated in the famous cases of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers.
Between 1933 and 1941, the Chinese city of Shanghai accepted unconditionally over 30,000 Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust in Europe, a number greater than those taken in by Shanghai into an area known as the Shanghai ghetto. Some of the Jewish refugees there aided the Chinese resistance against the Japanese. Many of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai migrated to the United States and Israel after 1948 due to the Chinese Civil War.