Miep Gies
Born • 15th February 1909 in Vienna, Austria What did she do?
Miep moved to the Netherlands in 1920 after suffering from illness in Austria. She was cared for by a Dutch family and decided to stay. In
1933 she began working for Otto Frank, a German Jewish businessman who had fled to Amsterdam after the Nazis came to power. Miep became a friend of the Frank family.
By 1942 the situation of Jews in the Netherlands was so dangerous that the Frank family went into hiding in a secret annex at the back of Otto’s business.
Miep immediately offered to help and support them.
Miep supplied the Frank family with food, friendship, support, and news of the outside world. Finding food was hard during the war and there was a risk of being seen carrying large bags into the office. To avoid this, Miep bought food on the black market, carried only one bag at a time and hid things under her coat.
The Frank family and the other Jews hiding with them were discovered by the Nazis in August 1944. Miep was not arrested but she took a great risk in going to the police headquarters to try to bribe the Germans to let the Franks go.
After the Franks were arrested, Miep found the diary of Otto’s daughter Anne and looked after it. After the war, Miep gave the diary to Otto, who was the only member of the family to survive. Without Miep we would know nothing about Anne Frank today. Miep later said that “We simply did our duty as human beings, helping others who were in need.”
Derviš Korkut
Born • 24th November 1888 in Travnik, Bosnia What did he do?
Derviš was an ethnic Albanian Muslim who was the chief librarian at the National Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Derviš worked closely with
the city’s Jewish community, preserving and translating old documents. In the 1920s, he spoke out against anti-Jewish laws in Yugoslavia.
The most important exhibit in the museum was the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illustrated Jewish religious text which was created in Spain in the 14th century. After the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Nazis tried to take the Haggadah. Derviš smuggled it out of the museum and left it with a Muslim imam in the countryside. The Haggadah survived the war.
In 1942 Derviš and his wife Servet hid a young Jewish woman called Mira Papo. Derviš and Servet had recently had a baby so they told people Mira was their nanny. They dressed her in traditional Muslim clothes and pretended that she was Albanian.
Mira remained with the Korkuts for five months even though a German officer was living in the same house. She was then able to escape to an Italian- controlled area of Yugoslavia where she survived the rest of the war.
After the war, Derviš and Servet had a daughter called Lamija who married an Albanian from Kosovo. During the war in Kosovo in the 1990s, Lamija and her family where given refuge in Israel as a sign of gratitude for the actions of her father.
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka
Born • 10th August 1889 in Kosmiń, Poland What did she do?
Zofia was a famous Polish writer. She was a strong supporter of Catholic nationalist move- ments and was regarded as an antisemite. In
1936, she wrote that “Jews are so terribly alien to us, alien and unpleasant, that they are a race apart.”
After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Zofia became involved in the resistance movement and edited an illegal newspaper. When the Nazis began deporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, she published a leaflet entitled Protest.
Zofia wrote that “our feeling toward the Jews has not changed. We continue to deem them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland.” However, she called on Poles to save Jews: “In the face of murder it is wrong to remain passive. Whoever is silent ... becomes a partner to the murder.”
In September 1942, Zofia co-founded the Provisional Committee to Aid Jews which developed into Żegota, the largest rescue organisation in Europe.
Żegota was funded by the Polish government-in-exile and provided money and hiding places for thousands of Jews who had escaped from ghettos.
Zofia was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1943. The Nazis did not realise who she really was – if they had, she would have been executed. The Polish underground was able to secure her release in 1944 and she took part in the Warsaw Uprising of that year.
Giorgio Perlasca
Born • 31st January 1910 in Como, Italy What did he do?
Giorgio was an Italian businessman who had been a supporter of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government. He served as a soldier during
Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and then as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War where he fought on the same side as General Franco’s Spanish Fascists.
However, Giorgio became disillusioned with Fascism because of Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany and because of the anti-Jewish laws which Mussolini introduced in 1938.
During the war, Giorgio worked in business, buying meat for the Italian army.
His work took him to Budapest but he was arrested there in 1943 after Italy surrendered to the Allies. Giorgio escaped and took refuge in the Spanish Embassy where he was accepted because of his earlier service in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1944 Giorgio began to help Angel Sanz Briz, the head of the Spanish Embassy, in protecting Jews in Budapest. When Sanz Briz had to leave Hungary in November 1944, Giorgio pretended to be his replacement, using a forged letter. Although he was not even Spanish, Giorgio was able to convince the Hungarians and the Nazis. He issued protective passes to thousands of Jews and even rescued some from deportation trains.
After the war, Giorgio did not even tell his family what he had done. His story only came out in the 1980s when a group of survivors who he had saved tracked him down.
Oskar Schindler
Born • 28th April 1908 in Zwittau, Czechoslovakia What did he do?
Oskar was a German from the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. He tried to go into business before the war but his money-making
schemes failed. Although he was a Czech citizen, he worked as a spy for Germany. He joined the Nazi Party in 1939, a few months after Germany had occupied the Sudetenland.
Oskar saw the German invasion of Poland in 1939 as a chance to finally make money. He took over a factory in Kraków which had been owned by Jews before the war. The Nazis made Polish Jews undertake forced labour so Oskar used them as cheap workers. He used bribery and charm to get contracts from the German army which helped him to make large profits.
When deportations from the Kraków Ghetto began in 1942, Oskar was worried. This was partly because he feared losing cheap labour. However, he started to protect his workforce regardless of what it cost him. When the ghetto was liquidated in March 1943, he had his workers moved to his factory so that they would not be sent to the nearby Płaszów labour camp.
In 1944, he arranged to have 1,200 workers transferred to a factory in Czechoslovakia, saving them from deportation to Auschwitz. Over 6,000 of their descendants are alive today.
After the war, Oskar explained that he felt moved to act by the cruelty of the Nazis: “a thinking man, who had overcome his inner cowardice, simply had to help. There was no other choice.”
Leopold Socha
Born • 28th August 1909 in Lwów, Poland What did he do?
Leopold was a sewer worker in the Polish city of Lwów. He had been a thief when he was younger and had served three prison sentences by his mid-twenties.
In 1943 he met a group of Jews who were hiding in the sewers after escaping from the ghetto. Leopold and his colleague Stefan Wróblewski offered to use their knowledge of the sewers to find them a safe hiding place and supply them with food in return for money.
However, after the money ran out, Leopold and Stefan decided to continue protecting the Jews and used their own money to pay for supplies. Krystyna Chiger, who was seven years old when she began hiding, remembered that Leopold would bring “whatever we requested”. He even brought candles every Friday for the Sabbath meal, arguing that the Jews should keep their religious traditions even in the sewers.
Krystyna Chiger believed that Leopold was trying to make up for the crimes he had committed when he was younger. She wrote that “I did not get the sense that Socha would ever abandon us. From the very beginning, I could see that this was not his nature.”
Leopold’s actions saved the lives of ten people, including Krystyna. Leopold died in a motor accident in 1946.
Corrie Ten Boom
Born • 15th April 1892, Amsterdam, Netherlands What did she do?
The Ten Boom family were devoted Christians who had been very involved in charity work before the Second World War. During the war,
they used their home in Haarlem to hide people hunted by the Nazis. These included resistance fighters and Jews.
The family built a small hiding place behind a wardrobe in Corrie’s bedroom where 6 people could hide as long as they stood up and didn’t move or make a noise. When danger came, a small bell would ring, and the refugees had to run into the space with all their belongings until it was safe.
On 28th February 1944 the Nazi secret police raided their home looking for Jews. They could not find any, even though 6 were in the hiding place.
Nevertheless, the Ten Boom family were arrested and taken to Nazi concentration camps. Many of the family died there, but Corrie managed to survive.
Through their actions, Corrie and her family saved about 800 Jews and protected many others who were working against the Nazis.
After the war, Corrie set up refuges for Jewish survivors as well as for Dutch people who had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis.
Raoul Wallenberg
Born • 4th August 1912 in Lidingö, Sweden What did he do?
Raoul came from a wealthy Swedish family. As a young man, he had travelled widely, hitchhiking across the USA and visiting Palestine, before
becoming a businessman. The Swedish government sent him to Budapest as a diplomat in July 1944.
By the time Raoul arrived in Budapest, the Germans had deported more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in just two months. The Hungarian leader, Miklós Horthy, had then ordered a stop to the deportations. However, there was a risk that they would begin again. Raoul used his diplomatic status to give many Hungarian Jews ‘protective passports’ which said the holders were Swedish citizens even though this wasn’t true.
Raoul used embassy money to rent houses for Jews with the protective passes and put up fake signs outside such as ‘The Swedish Library’. This gave the houses protected status because they were treated as Swedish property. He also set up soup kitchens, hospitals and nurseries.
In October 1944, the Hungarian Fascist Arrow Cross party seized power with German support. They restarted the deportations. Raoul repeatedly intervened to try to protect the Jews who had the Swedish passes. On some occasions, he personally rescued Jews from trains or from columns of people being marched out of the city.
Raoul was arrested by the Soviet secret police during the liberation of Budapest in January 1945. He died in Soviet captivity although mystery surrounds when, where, and how he died.
