Those Who Risked Their Lives

Another Jew of the Holocaust was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. He was born in 1877 as a Russian Jew. Rumkowski became an unsuccessful businessman and an orphanage director. Later he became the head of the Jewish Authorities in the Lodz ghetto and provided heat, work, food, housing, health, and welfare to the ghetto population. The Jews in the ghetto appreciated what Rumkowski did so much that their money was named after him as the “Rumkie” and his face was printed on the ghetto’s postage stamps. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Lisa Fittko was another Jew in the holocaust. She was born in a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1909. Fittko lived through the Nazi occupation of Europe. She worked in the Underground Resistance that helped refugees. Fittko led Jewish refugees to safety in Spain. At age 40, she received international recognition for two widely translated memoirs. Lisa Fittko died in Chicago, Illinois on March 12, 2005.

Anne Frank was a well-known Jew in the Holocaust. Anne’s full name was Annelies Marie Frank. She was a German Jew, born in June 1929. Her family moved to Amsterdam when her father, Otto Frank started a business. When the Germans started to take over Amsterdam, Anne Frank and her family hid in the secret annexe of the 3-story building on July 5, 1942 whose entrance was hidden by a bookcase on a hinge. Otto Frank’s brave employees were helping them.

Ann Frank wrote in her diary (which was an autograph book that she received for her 13th birthday) about how her family lived in hiding. On August 4, 1949 German troops stormed the hideout and take Frank and her family for interrogation in a concentration camp in Auschwitz. Her family had been betrayed. Anne Frank died of typhus on March of 1945 a few weeks before British troops freed the Jews in the concentration camp.

Her father was the only survivor of the family. He returned to their hideaway and found Anne Frank’s diary. Later it was published in different languages in many of the countries in the world.