Andrzej Sitkowski was 15 years old when his mother told him that she had been asked by a neighbor to hide a little Jewish girl from the Nazis in their home.
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"It was a short conversation, and then, yes, we decided to take in Hadassah and she was brought over to our house in 1943," Sitkowski says, looking back at those difficult years during World War II when he lived with his widowed mother Helena and younger sister Magda on the outskirts of the Polish capital of Warsaw under German occupation.
"Of course, we were afraid, but fear was our daily dish during those years anyway," Sitkowski told The Associated Press at his home in the Bavarian village of Durach.
Almost eight decades after Hadassah Kosak's rescue, the 93-year-old Polish man is still regularly in touch with Kosak, now 84, who after the war immigrated via Israel to the United States where she became a history professor in New York.
For their efforts to help save the lives of Kosak, her sister Marion, and their mother Bronislawa, who later also came to stay with the Sitkowskis, Andrzej and his mother were given Israel's highest honor in 1995. They were named "Righteous Among the Nations" – a title bestowed by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum on non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Ahead of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp on Jan. 27, 1945, Yad Vashem and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany teamed up to highlight the stories of "righteous rescuers" like the Sitkowskis who risked everything, including their own lives, to save Jews.
As part of a social media campaign called #Don'tBeABystander, the Claims Conference and Yad Vashem are releasing several videos and launching a website on people who saved Jews during the Holocaust.
"One of the amazing things about the rescuers is that not only did they rescue the specific person who was hidden, but all of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – an entire family tree," said Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference.
"It says in the Jewish tradition that if you save one person, it is as if you save the whole world," Schneider explained.
Over the past 60 years, Yad Vashem has recognized around 28,000 people from some 50 countries as Righteous Among the Nations. The organization continues to receive hundreds of applications to honor individuals, mostly posthumously, each year.
"We believe about 200 of them are still alive and most of them are living in Europe," said Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem. "As antisemitism is growing again on all five continents, we need to stress again the moral stature of these persons and their actions."
In Poland, home to Europe's largest Jewish community before the Holocaust, the Nazi occupiers punished those who helped Jews by executing not only them but their entire families.
Still, when asked why he and his mother decided to help Jews despite the huge personal risks, Sitkowski shrugged and said it was simply their duty as human beings.
"When my mother told me about the request from the neighbor, there were no long deliberations. The approval was somehow obvious," Sitkowski remembers, tucking in his red scarf.
"It was just an impulsive decision of a mensch," he said, using the German word for a human being that in Yiddish also refers to a particularly good person.
Sitting in his living room overlooking the snowy foothills of the Alps, he smiles when he thinks of Hadassah.
"She was a beautiful little girl, very smart, with sort of darkish hair and black eyes — I grew very fond of her."
The two have maintained their strong bond. In the past, they would visit each other. Now, they talk on the phone and exchange letters.
In their conversations, their memories often wander back to those months of hiding when the Sitkowskis shared their meager food rations with Hadassah, and Andrzej taught five-year-old Hadassah how to read and write. At the time, they told their neighbors and acquaintances that Hadassah was a Christian whose mother had been taken against her will to work in Germany.
In reality, Hadassah's mother was hiding as a maid with another family, and her sister Marion was in hiding at a Catholic convent. When those hiding places were no longer safe, the two joined Hadassah at the Sitkowskis' home.
In September 1944, the Nazis burned down the Sitkowski home and many other houses on their street and later expelled all those who had lived there. The Sitkowskis and Kosaks were forced to split up. They survived the last months of the war in different locations across Poland until the Soviet Army liberated Poland in January 1945.
While Kosak first moved to Israel and later to the United States, her mother and sister ended up in Britain, where Marion married Ralph Miliband and where their two sons, Ed and David, two well-known politicians with the British Labour party, were born.
Kosak called the Sitkowski's decision to offer her and her family shelter "a true act of humanity. "Thanks to their bravery, and at a great risk to themselves, we survived the Nazi horrors."
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