The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) published "Stronger Than Fear," which profiles Righteous Rescuers from nine countries along with stories of the Jewish people they saved. The initiative joins Israel's longstanding efforts to honor those who protected Jews during the Shoah.

At an event launching the collection in Limoges, France, Holocaust survivors will meet the children and grandchildren of the Righteous Rescuers who saved them. In other instances, living Righteous Rescuers will meet descendants of Holocaust survivors they helped save.

"During the Shoah, thousands of individuals across Europe risked their own lives to save Jews from the Nazis," President of the Claims Conference Gideon Taylor said. "Today, only about 150 of those Righteous Rescuers are still with us. The Claims Conference has been a long-time supporter and funder of many Righteous Rescuer programs around the world, and we are proud to continue honoring their sacrifice with this publication."

The gathering will include Jewish siblings Dr. Sophia Joachims, 89, and Mark (Manek) Schonwetter, 91, who were born in Poland and survived the Holocaust thanks to a Righteous Rescuer family that hid them. Survivor Colette Zeif from Paris will also attend. After her mother was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, Colette and her elder sister Jacqueline were taken in by the couple Marguerite and Charles Bayrand in Limoges, who presented them as their own children.

Rüdiger Mahlo, Representative of the Claims Conference in Europe, emphasized the educational importance of these stories: "The history of the Righteous Rescuers extends beyond the lives they saved. They demonstrate the courage needed to speak out, to act, and to choose empathy over apathy. The transmission of these stories is at the core of educating every generation on the Holocaust."

Bronislawa Bakun, a Righteous Rescuer from Janów/Sokólka in Poland who rescued more than 12 Jews from persecution and death, offered a powerful yet humble perspective: "We simply did what one does when one is human."

Greg Schneider, Executive Vice President of the Claims Conference, noted that the publication provides 36 portraits of Righteous Rescuers who together saved more than 220 Jews. "Each portrait is a living example of humanity and courage," he said. "The Claims Conference is committed to passing their legacy of strength and active compassion on to future generations."

While more than 28,400 Righteous Rescuers have been vetted and registered by Yad Vashem, only about 150 remain alive today. Their testimonies are considered critical to Holocaust history and deeply personal to the global Jewish community, including Israel.

Pierre-Michel Kahn, the only survivor of the Montbéliard roundup of February 1944, saved by Righteous Rescuer Louise Blazer, shared his perspective: "Saving Jews at the risk of one's own life means preferring the lives of others to one's own. I'm thinking of Lou Blazer, a member of the Resistance and suspected as such by the German police, who didn't hesitate to ask the Kommandantur for a safe-conduct, allowing her to get a Jewish child out of prison, as he was about to leave for Auschwitz."

The book features rescuers from Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Currently available in English and French, further editions are planned in Polish, German, Hebrew, and Lithuanian throughout 2025.

Jaroslawa Lewicki, a Righteous Rescuer originally from Złoczów in Poland who, together with her mother and grandfather, hid two Jewish boys in their house for more than a year, shared her family's approach: "To give the hidden Jews hope for survival, we had to conceal our own fear. My mother would remind us every day that we must be stronger than our fear, or nothing will succeed."

Witold Lisowski, a Righteous Rescuer from Warsaw who along with his mother and brother smuggled food and medicine into the Ludwisin ghetto and hid Dudek Inwentarz in their home for several years, reflected on the lasting impact: "Today, when I see the family of 30 that Dudek founded after we helped him survive the Second World War, I know that it was worth taking every risk."

Regina Suchowolski Sluszny, a Holocaust survivor from Belgium saved by the Flemish couple Anna and Charel Jacobs-Van Dijck, explained her mission to share these stories: "The aim of my testimonies in various schools and organizations in Belgium is to help people understand the heroism of the Righteous through my own story and that of my husband, Georges Suchowolski. We are two Jewish children who were hidden for many years by non-Jews."

She added, "These Righteous risked their lives to protect children they didn't even know the day before. It is to honor all the Righteous Among the Nations that I recount what happened to us. These Righteous must never be forgotten, for it was they who enabled us, at the risk of their own lives and of being sent to forced labor themselves, to start a family after the war. Thanks to the Righteous, 50% of the Jewish people living in Belgium before the war survived. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!"

The Claims Conference has upheld a commitment to honor Righteous Rescuers since 1963, when Yad Vashem began officially recognizing individuals as Righteous Among the Nations. The program takes its name from the literature of the Sages (Chasidei Umot HaOlam), which describes non-Jews who came to the aid of Jewish people in times of need.

A digital version of the book "Stronger Than Fear" is available on the Claims Conference website.

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The Spanish government released the names of Hungarian Jews who evaded Nazi persecution with the help of a Spanish diplomat in an effort to find their descendants and share their stories with the world.

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Yad Vashem recognized Angel Sanz-Briz as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1966 for saving approximately 5,200 Jews from the Nazis.

As a diplomat stationed in Hungary in 1944, he created Spanish passports for Jews of Spanish origin and granted Spanish citizenship to Hungarian Jews. He also rented apartment buildings in Budapest to hide Jews and placed the Spanish flag outside the buildings to label them official properties of the Spanish Legation.

Additionally, he urged the International Red Cross representative to put Spanish signs on hospital buildings, orphanages and maternity clinics in Budapest to help protect the Jews inside.

With support from the Spanish government, the Centro Sefarad-Israel – a Sephardic cultural institution that is part of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs – published the names of the people Sanz-Briz saved and details about them in the hopes of locating their relatives. The Centro Sefarad-Israel set up an email address so people who had any information at all could contact them.

Sanz-Briz continued his diplomatic career well after World War II. He was appointed ambassador to Guatemala, followed by consul general in New York in 1962, and later, Spain's ambassador to the Holy See. He died on June 11, 1980, while serving in Rome.

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The Spanish diplomat was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 1994, and a street in Budapest was named after him in 2015.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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In the BBC series "My Grandparents' War," now airing on PBS in the US, World War II history comes to life as modern-day celebrities, including Helena Bonham Carter, learn about their grandparents' experiences in that turbulent era.

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American author Elizabeth Vrato has a similar story.

Vrato, a Chicago attorney and author of The Counselors: Conversations with 18 Courageous Women Who Have Changed the World (foreword by Bill Clinton), discovered just last year that her own grandfather, Kadri Cakrani, acted with incredible humanitarianism and bravery during the Holocaust in Europe. Commandant Cakrani sheltered approximately 600 Jews in Albania while serving as the military officer in charge of its Berat region while it was under Nazi occupation.

Cakrani rallied his soldiers and the local citizenry to shelter Jews from the Nazis, even though the penalty for doing so was death. Fluent in German after having gone to school in Vienna, Cakrani lied capably under repeated threats and questioning by Nazi officials, saying he had no information about any Jews in the Berat region. He never turned over a single name. Whenever he got word of Nazi sweeps to find Jews, the sheltered refugees – from Poland, Germany, France and Macedonia – were moved from one part of the city to another, keeping them safe. He also took the enormous personal risk of hiding Jews in his own home.

At the end of World War II, Cakrani himself became a refugee. He put his life on the line once again in opposing Communist dictator Enver Hoxha in his takeover of Albania. Chased by Hoxha's death warrant and aided by British officers Colonel David Smiley and Lieutenant Colonel Billy McLean, Cakrani narrowly escaped to a displaced persons camp in Italy. Cakrani was granted political asylum by President Harry Truman and worked with US Intelligence to try to restore democracy to Albania. Furious at Cakrani's escape and protection by the West, Hoxha seized all of Cakrani's property and assets.

Cakrani never spoke publicly against Hoxha or about his work to shelter Jews during the Holocaust, in order not to endanger the lives of his fellow soldiers and friends who remained behind the Iron Curtain under Hoxha's regime. His story remained untold for decades.

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Vrato says that during the four years she spent "researching, traveling, and interviewing leaders who changed the world, such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Attorney General Janet Reno," she was unaware of this "dramatic, heroic story within my own family."

Vrato first learned of her grandfather's wartime actions from a Facebook post about the new Solomon Museum of Jewish History in Berat in early 2020. Shortly after seeing the post, she visited the museum, just before borders closed due to the COVID pandemic.

Some of the testimony, correspondence, and photos about her grandfather's selfless acts she encountered there, collected by Professor Simon Vrusho, now are viewable on KadriCakrani.org. The site's content is available in English, Hebrew, and Albanian.

"I'm so proud this story can finally be told," Vrato says. "My grandfather shows us the best aspects of humanity and of Europe."

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The Adamczyk family was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations for saving the lives of Jewish brothers Chaim and Moshe Frimel. Today, the Jewish organization From the Depths provides food packages to the daughter of the family and other righteous gentiles in Poland who are unable or struggle to leave their homes due to the COVID pandemic.

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Jadwiga Szczeszak-Adamczyk and her family were awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations when she and her family saved Jewish brothers Chaim and Moshe Frimel in the Polish town of Denkow.

In 1939, one-sixth of the village of some 400 residents was Jewish. When the Nazis arrived in 1942, they established a ghetto. Jews were either forced into labor gangs or were sent to the Treblinka death camp.

When the local ghetto was emptied, the Frimel brothers were deported to a labor camp in nearby Bodzechow. When the camp was closed, the brothers escaped and returned to Denkow, where they appealed to the Adamczyk family, whom they kept in touch with while in the camp, for help.

The entire Adamczyk family – parents, three daughters, and one son – smuggled food to the brothers, putting their own lives in jeopardy, as the Nazi regime in Poland made it a capital offense to help Jews.

The brothers hid in a bunker that they dug underneath one of the rooms in the family's home until they were liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. Among the Adamczyks' neighbors were German officers, and to make sure that the brothers were not discovered, the family stopped inviting friends to their house and curtailed their social activities. The Adamczyk family did not ask anything in return for saving the brothers.

After the war, the two emigrated from Poland: Chaim to Israel and Moshe to Canada. They maintained contact with the Adamczyks for many years after. Moshe even visited the family after the war.

After Moshe's passing, Jadwiga thought she would never interact with Jews again. But in the last few months, she's been receiving help from Jonny Daniels' From the Depth organization, which provides food packages for righteous gentiles in Poland who are unable or struggle to leave their homes.

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The memorial museum in Lithuania's former capital recounts the story of Chiune Sugihara, who was a vice-consul diplomat based at the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas during 1939-1940. Its small collection is housed in the villa that once served as the consulate.

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The brake the coronavirus pandemic slammed on international travel has put the small museum, like other cultural institutions and tourist destinations around the world, under intense economic pressure.

"Tickets sales are our main income resource. Japanese used to make up 85% of the visitors. Now, the visitors from Japan are gone, so is our income," museum director Ramunas Janulaitis said.

However, people from Gifu Prefecture on the Japanese island of Honshu, where Sugihara was born, raised some 30,000 euros (about $35,600) to help the museum survive the pandemic.

"We expect to raise another 40,000 (euros) in the autumn" Japanese Ambassador Shiro Yamasaki said.

Both the Soviet Union and Germany occupied Lithuania during the war. The Soviets annexed the Baltic nation, which became independent in 1990.

During his time at the consulate in Kaunas, Sugihara issued transit visas to Japan to nearly 6,000 Jewish refugees, mainly from neighboring Poland. The 10-day visas which he supplied without the approval of Japan's Foreign Ministry, enabled the refugees to escape and survive the Holocaust.

Sugihara was reassigned elsewhere in Europe, and when he returned to Japan in 1947, he was fired. He died in 1986.

Created in 1999, the museum honoring his courageous actions exhibits the life and work of Sugihara, The villa was decorated to recreate what it looked like during his time serving there. The names of Jews to whom he is known to have granted visas also are displayed.

The government in Lithuania, the southernmost Baltic country that once was the home to a large Jewish community, has declared 2020 as "the year of Chiune Sugihara."

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On Sunday, the German news agency dpa on Sunday quoted the head of Nuremberg's Jewish community, Andre Freud, saying Steinl died Monday, on the eve of her 98th birthday.

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Steinl, a Sudeten German, was recognized in 1979 as Righteous Among the Nations, Israel's highest honor to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

According to an entry on the Yad Vashem website, Steinl was an overseer in the Polish town of Stryj during World War II when a worker confided in her that she was Jewish.

Steinl sent the woman, Sarah Shlomi (née Froehlich), to live with her parents – likely ensuring she wasn't deported to a Nazi concentration camp.

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Clutching the hands of those she hid, fed and protected as a teenager more than 75 years ago, 92-year-old Dina Melpomeni said she could now "die quietly."

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Sunday's emotional encounter was the first time Dina had met the offspring of the Mordechai family she helped save during the Holocaust. Once a regular ritual at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, such gatherings are rapidly dwindling due to the advanced ages of both survivors and rescuers and may not happen again. The soon-to-be-extinct reunion is the latest reminder for Holocaust commemorators preparing for a post-survivor world.

"The risk they took upon themselves to take in an entire family knowing that it put them and everyone around them in danger," said Sarah Yanai, today 86, who was the oldest of the five siblings Dina and others sheltered. "Look at all these around us. We are now a very large and happy family and it is all thanks to them saving us."

More than 27,000 individuals, including some 355 from Greece, have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, Israel's highest honor to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

The names of those honored for refusing to be indifferent to the genocide are engraved along an avenue of trees at the Jerusalem memorial. Only a few hundred are believed to still be alive.

"This is probably going to our last reunion, because of age and frailty," said Stanlee Stahl, the executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which sponsored the event and which provides $1 million a year in monthly stipends to those recognized.

She said her organization has been doing such reunions every year since 1992, but this one was likely the last of its kind and therefore particularly emotional. Similar reunions sponsored by Yad Vashem of long-lost siblings or other relatives also are coming to an end.

"Either the survivor has passed on, the righteous has passed on or in some instances either the survivor or the righteous gentile is unable to travel," she said, choking up.

"You see the survivors, their children, their grandchildren, you see the future. To me it is very, very, very special. In a way, a door closes, one opens. The door is closing ever so slowly on the reunions."

The Mordechai family lived in Veria, Greece, near Thessaloniki, where nearly the entire Jewish community was annihilated within a few months in one of the most brutal executions of the Nazis.

When the Nazis began rounding up the Jews for deportation in early 1943, the family's non-Jewish friends provided them with fake identity cards and hid them in the attic of the old abandoned Turkish mosque. They were there for almost a year, hearing the screams outside of other Jews being rounded up. But eventually they had to leave because their health was declining in the cramped, unventilated attic.

That's when Dina and her two older sisters took the family of seven into their own single-room home on the outskirts of the city, sharing with them their meager food rations. One of the children, a six-year-old boy named Shmuel, became gravely ill and had to be taken to a hospital, despite the risk of exposing his identity. He died there.

Shortly after, the family was informed upon and Dina's sisters and their relatives helped them flee in various directions.

Yanai, the oldest, headed for the woods, another went to the mountains, and the mother headed out on foot with her youngest two surviving children in search of another hiding spot. Dina and her orphaned and impoverished sisters provided them with clothing before their departure. The family reunited after liberation and made its way to Israel, where the children built families of their own.

Yossi Mor, today 77, was just an infant when his family was taken in, but he said he could still remember a few things, such as when his older brother died and the kindness they encountered from their rescuers – who gave them various forms of refuge for nearly two years.

"They fed us, they gave us medicine, they gave us the protection, everything, they washed our clothes," he said, before gesturing toward Dina. "She loved me very much."

Mor and Yanai had gotten together with Dina in Greece years ago. But the younger generation of their extended family, which included grade-school children in pigtails and soldiers in uniform, had never met her before Sunday's ceremony. The two soldiers proudly pushed Dina and Yanai throughout the complex in their wheelchairs.

A special committee, chaired by a retired Supreme Court justice, is responsible for vetting every case of "Righteous Among the Nations" before awarding the title. Following a lengthy process, between 400 and 500 are typically recognized a year and the process will continue and new stories come to light even for those awarded posthumously, said Joel Zisenwise, the director of the department at Yad Vashem.

"What we see here is moving in the sense that we have evidence of an ongoing relationship of the rescuers with the survivors and the descendants. It is an ongoing form of paying tribute," he said.

"It definitely is moving to see these families coming together knowing that they may indeed be one of the last meetings."

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Those still living today, 80 years after the start of World War II, were children or young adults during the war and in most cases helped their parents in the dangerous job of hiding and feeding Jews. During the German occupation, those caught aiding Jews were punished with the execution of entire families.

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Today, the rescuers are in their 80s and 90s, and they arrived at the event in Warsaw helped by their children, with some in wheelchairs.

"On behalf of the Jewish people, I thank you for your noble deeds so many years ago, for when most turned their backs on their Jewish neighbors, you did not," Stanlee Stahl, the foundation's executive vice president, told those gathered. "You will always be remembered in our prayers, for you didn't just save the Jewish person 75 years ago, you made it possible for generations to be born."

Giving one example, she singled out two brothers in attendance, Andrzej and Leszek Mikolajkow, who with their parents saved a Jewish mother, father and two sons. One of those sons ended up moving to Israel and having 12 sons of his own, and the family today numbers 300.

"You made it possible for hundreds if not thousands of people to be alive today," Stahl said. "You have helped repair the world."

All of the rescuers have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial.

According to Yad Vashem's website, 27,362 people have been recognized to date as "Righteous Among the Nations," even though there are certainly many more who helped Jews who haven't been recognized because they were killed or there were no survivors to alert Yad Vashem to their actions. The country with the largest number of acknowledged rescuers, with far over 6,000, is Poland, which was home to Europe's largest Jewish community before World War II.

The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous pays monthly stipends to elderly rescuers in Eastern Europe, many of whom live on pensions of only a few hundred dollars a month in Poland and far less in Ukraine and elsewhere. Last Christmas each rescuer got an additional $1,500, a gesture that goes far beyond just symbolic help, and the group has also helped them with medicines and hearing aids.

Warsaw is the only place in Europe where there are enough of them in one place to bring together. On Sunday, there were about 30 in attendance.

Anna Bando, who heads an organization of the Polish rescuers, thanked the Jewish group for remembering them so many years later, at a time when she says "we are leaving this world" and so many people no longer remember the war. Another rescuer wept at the beginning of the ceremony from the sorrow she felt of so many people of her generation being gone, including the Jewish family she helped save and remained close to for many years. The last member of that group passed away not long ago at age 101.

Due to sanctions on Russian-annexed Crimea, the organization can no longer send money, however, to a small group of rescuers there, a situation that Stahl described as distressing in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Before the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the group was helping five people there.

At one point, she received a letter from a Jewish woman in Israel who was rescued by a woman in Crimea, begging her to send money. But with US sanctions in place, it is illegal to do so.

During the Warsaw event, Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, asked God to bless them, and described them as a "model for the kind of people that God wants us to be."

Israeli Ambassador-designate, Alexandre Ben-Zvi, paid his respects, while the US deputy chief of mission, Bix Aliu, who is of Albanian heritage, paid tribute to their extraordinary courage. In personal remarks, Aliu described meeting an elderly rescuer in Albania, a Muslim majority country that was the only country in Europe where the number of Jews was larger at the end of the war than before due to a nationwide effort to save Jews.

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Jane Haining, who cared for hundreds of Jewish girls at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest during World War II, died at Auschwitz camp after the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. Author Mary Miller said Haining was "an ordinary person who became extraordinary" through her love and courage.

"She was an independent woman and kept an independent spirit throughout all the awful things that were later to happen," Miller told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Born into a humble farming family in Dumfries in 1987, Haining studied business and became "an early career girl."

In 1932, she moved to Hungary to work as a matron at the school, which educated Christian and Jewish children together to foster mutual respect.

"They were part of that whole movement to give girls a good education," Miller said.

Pressure on the school grew rapidly as Jewish refugees poured into Budapest, fleeing persecution elsewhere in Europe.

As anti-Semitism intensified, the Scottish Mission, which oversaw the school, organized courses in practical subjects to help Jews emigrate and get jobs abroad. Haining helped women secure work as domestic servants in Britain under the program.

Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Haining refused her employers' orders to return to Britain.

"She said that if these girls needed me in good times, they need me much more in bad times," Miller said.

By then, most of the school's 400 pupils were Jewish, and many of the boarders Haining cared for were orphans.

In one letter, Haining wrote: "What a ghastly feeling it must be to know that no one wants you. … We have been enabled … to provide an oasis in a troubled world."

She described how one Jewish mother of twins, who approached her for help, broke down in her office in desperation.

"[She] was at the stage when she was thinking of adding some poison to their food and ending it all," Haining wrote.

The school attracted attention for speaking out repeatedly against anti-Semitism, according to Miller's book "Jane Haining – A Life of Love and Courage."

From 1943, Miller said the Mission helped many people, including former pupils, to escape transportation to Nazi death camps, hiding them in cellars or getting them to safe houses.

Haining was arrested by the Nazis in April 1944.

A former pupil who saw her taken away said her last words to the sobbing children were: "Don't worry, I'll be back by lunch."

She died in Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland two months later, aged 47.

Yad Vashem honored Haining as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1997 and she was awarded a Hero of the Holocaust medal by the British government in 2010.

"She did not compromise, and in our own difficult times, there is a challenge there for all ordinary people tempted to look away from evil and find reasons to say, 'There is nothing we can do,'" Miller said.

"Jane Haining reminds us that there is always something we can do."

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