In Denmark, “lust murderer’s canary,” was not as harsh conditions in Norway. The occupying forces cooperated with the Danish authorities, which, at least on the surface, partly remained in his power. Everything was of course Hitler’s gracious approval, no independence, no mention of this.

The Danish refugees, who came mainly after the crisis in September 1943 and at the break with Germany in 1944, found refuge in Sweden. A successful chapter in the joint history was when all Danish Jews were rescued over to Sweden in autumn 1943rd

Both the Danish and Norwegian resistance movements had a well developed, informal cooperation with the Swedish intelligence service, who did not have to be very neutral. In Sweden, was trained almost 20 000 well-armed insurgents to “police” who could be deployed in Denmark and Norway, when Germany fell. These troops were able to quickly establish peace and order in the liberated states, and the foundation for the new armed forces. The training of military forces – in conjunction with other projects – was that above all Norwegians are not lost faith in Sweden, despite the odious transits. Although the relationship with the Danes was strengthened and immediately after the war wrote the head of the Danish Freedom Forces, General Gortz, the following lines to the Supreme Commander

“With all our hearts we thank the Supreme Commander of the Swedish defense command, the Army and Navy and Air Force, each one, all together, for the invaluable assistance given to the Danish army and navy at the completion of their forces in Sweden. We have known about the handshake, which ties together, and we have received the support without which it would have been doubly difficult to hold out and bring the fight to end here at home. “

The Swedes also provided resistance movements of the arms at different times, and constantly exchanged information. Other parts of Swedish society participated in the relief that was not compatible with neutrality. The organization was formed as with police Sri Lankan government a “contraband shipping” that continuously transported weapons and supplies to the resistance movement in Denmark, and took the refugees on their way home.

Planning for the Swedish relief actions abroad at the end of the war was started early. SIH (Swedish Committee for the international aid activities) was established in 1944th Its main task was to lead the state through the activities and to coordinate with the private. Before the end of the war and began preparing well and hoarded. Large amounts of food stored in anticipation of further relief and drug manufacture was ordered to be accelerated.

When the war finally came, the operations envisaged could be successfully done. Children’s Hospital was built in Norway’s larger cities and the supply of medical materials and medicines was up and running quickly to a large number of affected countries. During the winter of 1945/1946 started barnbespisningar. It was a mammoth undertaking with several canteens in Central Europe that saved the lives of several hundred thousand children. Total cost all Swedish help about two billion dollars to implement.

Raoul Wallenberg – A SWEDISH HERO

Raoul Wallenberg was born 1912, son of a sailor, Oscar Wallenberg, whose cousins were the two principals of the known financial Wallenberg family. After graduating in 1930 Raoul trained as an architect, but soon abandoned the profession and became a businessman instead. He first worked in South Africa and the beginning of the war, among other things. AI Palestine, where he met the fleeing Jews who spoke about the Nazi terror. The stories had a profound impact on the already Humane Raoul and came to influence his future conduct.
Since 1942 worked the Swedish Foreign Ministry, in principle, all alone, active in helping Jews and others who were deported to death camps. In spring 1944, however, had the whole world woke up and realized what Hitler’s “final solution” really meant. In May 1944, reached the first eyewitness report, the Western world about what happened prior to the Auschwitz extermination camp. It came from two Jews who escaped the German thugs. Now there was no longer any doubt, just painful facts.

In the Swedish legation in Budapest negotiated rapidly developing rules for the protection of Swedish passports along with the Germans. That meant that holders of security passes would be treated as a Swedish citizen, and – if they were Jews – get special permission to wear the yellow Star of David that would otherwise be mandatory. Legation issued at a brisk pace 700 security pass, but it was just a drop in the ocean compared to how many people were in need. You asked for immediate help from the Foreign Ministry in the form of more staff.

Simultaneously World Jewish Congress’ meeting in Stockholm. The main issue was organized to help the Hungarian Jews, whose situation now began serious attention. The U.S. organization WRB (War Refugee Board) realized early on that serious attempts were made from the Swedish side to save the Jewish population in Hungary. Therefore, met at their initiative WRB’s representative in Stockholm and a number of prominent Jews to discuss the appropriate people for a major rescue operation in Budapest. WRB and Jewish representatives agreed on Raoul Wallenberg, and the Swedish authorities took the bait. After the WRB consulted with the Swedish king also granted Wallenberg some special requirements. Wallenberg wanted to send diplomatic couriers outside the usual channels, and to avoid bureaucracy and paperwork. He also did not have to consult the ambassador if he wanted to negotiate with anyone.

KING JOIN UP

When Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest it was too late. Of the original 750 000 Jews in town, there were only 230 000 Jews left. The trains had passed without interruption between Auschwitz and Budapest with a load that did not live long. Adolf Eichmann, head of the main Jewish issues, had just under a month had time to deport 400 000 men, women and children. He is now preparing a plan to annihilate all Jews all over Budapest in just one day. In a report to Berlin, he wrote that “the technical details would take a few days”. If he had succeeded, the Swedish legation work could not be done, but now seized the king. He said on June 30, 1944 to the Hungarian head of state Miklós Horthy:

In light of that I’ve found out that your Government is extraordinarily hard and tough measures against the Jewish population in Hungary, may I personally turn to you to ask them in the name of humanity take action for those who still have to be afraid of this unfortunate people. This appeal to your generous hearts before spelling of my old friendship for your country and of my sincere concern for Hungary’s good reputation in the nations. “

The King replied on July 12:
“I have received the telegraphic appeal sent to me by your Majesty. With feelings of deep understanding, I ask your Majesty convinced by that I do all that, the current situation, in my power to ensure that humanity and justice principles. I respect the feelings of friendship, your Majesty put on our country and I ask Your Majesty to preserve those feelings for the Hungarian people in these times of severe trials. “

BUSY DAYS FOR THE SWEDISH MISSION

Deportation was suspended immediately. A train with Jews on their way to extermination camps had to go back to Budapest. The man who made this possible was Heinrich Himmler, who have always rejected such prayers. The reason for the shift may have been the peace game that he brought a high level with various rulers. Himmler hoped to negotiate a separate peace with the West and realized that stopped the Jewish deportations could help him. He had never been a real idealist in the race issue, but only worked with Jewish issues just because it was an important element of Nazism. Adolf Eichmann sat in Budapest without any power, and could not do anything but wait.

When Germany moved into Hungary and made the Nazi Arrow Cross leader Ferenc organization Szálasi the head of state, Adolf Eichmann, however, be given full play, and protective passports were declared invalid. Wallenberg continued assiduously his work although he had no passport to his aid. But after he familiarized himself with the Hungarian Foreign Minister’s wife, he managed to get passports valid again.

Raoul Wallenberg was bought immediately now about 30 houses on the west side of Budapest. He announced that they were Swedish territory, which of course was not true, and overlaid veneers – well aware of German weakness for pomp and circumstance – with major Swedish flags and festoons. There he hid nearly 20 000 Jews, who otherwise would have been sent to extermination camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Wallenberg worked very quickly, efficiently and intensively in the changed situation. He went around to prisons, concentration camps and rail yards where trains were loaded with people who were sent to extermination camps, and used all possible methods – including bribery, scams and threats – to rescue as many people as possible. All Jews who might have the slightest connection to Sweden were supplied with protective passports and were beyond the reach of the Germans. Protective Passports, which under international law had no value, was also designed with the view of Germans as well as Hungarians sense of grandeur. Few suspected that the book of the three golden crowns against a beautiful blue background really was not worth anything. Wallenberg managed to get tens of thousands more workouts than the actual quotas was, again using less conventional methods.
PANIC, LAWLESSNESS AND DEATH IN HUNGARY
While Eichmann started the terrible “death marches”, where tens of thousands of prisoners would leave Hungary on foot. Many were tortured and starved and did just not go. The protesters were told that they do not need to march – and was shot down over the stain. During the 200 km long march into Austria were the conditions so miserable that even the Nazis themselves started complaining to his superiors. Raoul Wallenberg was there all the time to hand out protective passes, food and medicine. He threatened and bribed, until he managed to free those with Swedish passports.

When the last trains with Jews departed from Budapest, he threw up on the trailer roof and threw bunches of protective passes for människohoparna. The German soldiers who were ordered to shoot him deliberately took aim too high when they saw his courage. Wallenberg was then able to quietly walk up to the Nazis and require all occupants with Swedish protective passports to come with him.

In January 1945 the Germans knew the end was near. The minimal level of law and order that prevailed in Budapest was now gone – panic prevailed. Before the retreat gave Adolf Eichmann ordered to blow up the largest ghetto – including humans. The only man who could revoke the decision was General

August Schmidt Huber who was Supreme Commander of the German troops in Hungary. Wallenberg was sent by an agent a message to him in which he asserted that Schmidt Huber himself would be responsible for the war, and be hanged, if he undertook he did not stop the plans. The German stopped the massacre at the last minute and 70 000 people had been rescued.

Two days later arrived in the Russian army, and found that 97 000 Jews survived in Budapest. A total of 120 000 Jews lived throughout Hungary. Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues at the Swedish Legation rescued over 100 000 people.

WHAT HAPPENED with Raoul Wallenberg?

According to Russian authorities, he died in 1947 in a Soviet prison, accused of being “American spy”. Since then, however, several independent sources confirmed that he is now living, or at least lived long after the official date of death. The story of Wallenberg is punctuated by strange events and has always been a problem in the Swedish-Soviet, now the Swedish-Russian relations. 1992 greeted the Wallenberg family in Moscow, but including Raoul’s “suddenly found” passport along with an apology. The new leadership in the Kremlin hoped, with the regime change to avoid the classic, unpleasant questions about submarines, DC 3rd and Raoul Wallenberg – but later said the substance was still too hot. Although also generally accepted historians, such as His Villius, supports the official version, there are those who argue that he is still alive, in a forgotten Russian prison.

My personal view – of course, completely unscientific – is that he lived long after 1947, but now is deceased. The reasons for my opinion are two:
1st There is – as me – credible witnesses who claim to have seen Wallenberg well into the sixties.
2nd After the turmoil that shook Russia in the last decade can be something like this possibly have been concealed.

Of course, one can say that the Russians should not have been able to hide illegitimate endorsements from 1947 either. My opinion is that a lie is not necessarily run the same risk of being exposed as the fact that a Swedish world celebrity is alive against all odds. Not in the chaos, and to some extent still exists. It is incredible the idea that Wallenberg would be alive, borne out by the not-too-high average age in the Soviet prisons. If Wallenberg was still alive he turns 87 years this year.

The White Buses

The Jewish writer Zenia Larsen describes his experiences from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen:

“The Germans exterminated millions of lives as we exterminate vermin. They had judged her and her friends to a life among the thousands of corpses, the living corpse, among people ester in which only the mouth was moving at times. In the end, she herself unmoved walked among dead human bodies, unmoved walked past the dying wheezing, indifferently understood that she would soon turn into one. She had learned how little a human life means, how some one million lives mattered. “

She would not, as she had expected, turned into one of these thousands of corpses. To her rescue was reached in time:

“These cells, which she herself just a few weeks ago sleep-walker-like dragged past was now borne so gently and softly to the strange people that it seemed as if the world’s fate hung on to this very human remnant survived. And not only that they were borne, not only are they that no one wanted to know of and went inside in a foreign country – but they were collected on the location of the establishment of a foreign people that they did not know. From Bergen-Belsen and here, from människovärdets greatest humiliation to this incredible care. “

The strange people who came and picked malnourished and tortured, but still surviving, out of concentration camp victims were Swedes.

Folke Bernadotte NEGOTIATES

At the end of 1944, Niels Christian Dietleff at the Norwegian Embassy in Stockholm reports from Berlin on the unjustified mass movements of the German concentration camp. The report also said that more and more people in the camps just “disappeared” in the camps. The more informal “grapevine” was forwarded information about where the Danish and Norwegian camp prisoners were, and this meant that Niels could establish lists of names. They were sent to the Swedish legation in Berlin and came on to Stockholm. Dietleff bath together with a Danish-General, Charles Hammerich, the Swedish authorities to devise a rescue for the Scandinavian camp prisoners. They both realized that the potential reduction for each day to save lives, and that the great opportunity to help was if we could get Sweden caught on and let the neutral country to act against the Germans. Sweden agreed and transferred the responsibility for the operation, and thus the important negotiations with Hitler and Himmler, the Folke Bernadotte.

In mid-February 1945 Bernadotte flew to Berlin. He had taken about Himmler’s private interests and took particular with a book of runes, which welcomed Gestapo chief much. After the negotiations proceeded relatively quickly, there was a rush, saw conditions like this:

Scandinavian freed prisoners would not be shipped to Sweden, but instead transferred to Neuengamme in northern Germany.
Swedish delegates would have come into the camp and ensure that inmates received medication, food and clothing. Swedish women with German nationality would get an exit visa to Sweden. Not more than 250 men would be part of the expedition was to be implemented in the Red Cross sign. Not one line was written in Swedish newspapers, it could compromise the entire expedition. Bernadotte had ten days to put it all on their feet.

EXPEDITION BECOMES REALITY

On March 11, 1945 drove the first white bus out of Malmo to Copenhagen. Just before his departure had changed orders come from the allied air force, all vehicles had to be completely painted white with large red crosses and Swedish flags on the sides. In principle, all that Malmö was dialed in the form of flash painter was summoned, and the final brush strokes were drawn on the ferry to Copenhagen.

The so-called Swedish Tysklandsdetachementet, which is now rapidly moving towards the crumbling Third Reich, was extensive. The expedition consisted of 308 persons, 36 buses, 19 trucks, seven motorcycles, 7 passenger cars, a tow truck, workshop Truss and boiled ross. Despite the need for further transportation to Germany, where absolutely nothing was on offer. While the newly painted bus went over the Sound, the ship sailed Lille Mathiesen over to Lübeck with supplies and fuel. The distance to and from the Neuengamme and Dachau was 225 mil. It is estimated that the trip total of all buses would require 40 000 gallons of gasoline. A wrong turns could was disastrous – not a drop of fuel was available in Germany.

The column was well ahead in Dachau, it turned out that the SS commandant of the camp was anything but cooperative. Things got so bad that the head of the entire Tysklandsdetachementet, Gottfried Birch, had to threaten to go to Himmler before the prisoners freed. Only then gave up the camp commandant and delivery could begin. The Swedes did not care once in the agreement with Himmler, and took more prisoners than Scandinavians. This allowed people of 24 different nationalities come to gather on the white bus. From that moment on camp inmates during the Red Cross auspices, they were safe and beyond the reach of the Nazis. This was obviously hard to swallow for many SS officers, who felt his power curtailed.

When we returned to Neuengamme it turned out that the Swedish delegation, which would improve the sanitary conditions, not allowed into the commandant Pauli. After negotiations, the Swedes were, however, come in, and got a shock of misery. Neuengamme was like so many other camps at this time grossly overcrowded. A new tragic task was therefore to the Swedes, to move 2000 people dying to another camp.

The white buses TOTAL STAKE

In a second agreement with Himmler Bernadotte permission to bring the freed prisoners to Sweden. Most were spread out in a hospital or improvised hospitals in southern Sweden. Many were so abused, sick and weak that despite all the help just faded away. Although the problems were great, could total 27 000 people returned to life thanks to the rescue of War II.

In the late 1930’s he worked in Sweden with  Hungarian Jew, in 1938 Hungary passed a series of anti-Jewish measures and Wallenberg found himself travelling to and from Hungary conducting the business affairs for his friend unable to return there. By April 1944 the Germans and Hungarians together began the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, unlike the Holocaust victims elsewhere this was well publicized and Wallenberg was chosen to enter Budapest to organize a rescue package for the Jews.

Working with the Swedish legation in Budapest he was able to issue passports stating the holder was a Swedish citizen awaiting repatriation to Sweden and avoid being sent off to the concentration camps. With money raised he was able to rent buildings he claimed to be Swedish, these buildings housed 10,000 people. At the height of the rescue program more than 350 people were working to rescue the Jews from Budapest.

To avoid his own capture Wallenberg slept in a different house each night, as the Germans prepared to leave Budapest with the Russians on the verge of a takeover he persuaded the German commanders to cancel a final death march of those Jews remaining again saving many lives.

Once the Soviet Red Army arrived in Budapest Wallenberg was taken into custody on the suspicion of being a US spy. His time in custody is pure speculation as many witnesses claim to have met him. The Swedish authorities were informed on the 21st January 1945 that he was under the protection of the Soviets. On the 6th of February 1957 the Soviets released a statement saying Wallenberg had died of a heart attack on July 17th 1947 and that his body had been cremated shortly afterwards. In 1989 his personal belongings were returned to his family after being found while upgrading a store room. The last reported claimed sightings of Wallenberg were from witnesses who said they have evidence that he was still being held prisoner in November 1987.

Raoul Wallenberg’s half-brother, Professor Guy von Dardel has traveled to the Soviet Union on around fifty occasions in search of more information, together with his two daughters they refuse to accept the versions of his death and request that archives be opened to reveal the truth if what they contain is the truth.

STOCKHOLM — New Evidence straight from the highly secret archives of the Russian Security Services indicates Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, was indeed alive, perhaps for years after the Soviets stated that he had died in a Moscow prison.

It is a known fact that Wallenberg was arrested in Budapest in January 1945 by the Soviet army, but his fate has long been a mystery which the Soviets have shown little interest in clearing up.

In fact, what bits of information they have released have been nothing short of deliberately misleading.  The Soviets claimed he was executed July 17, 1947 but  never produced a verifiable death certificate or his remains.  Witnesses have come forward to claim he was seen in Soviet prisons or labor camps many years later, but those accounts were never proven to be either fact or fiction.

Finally, the Russian Security Services have admitted that a man identified only as Prisoner No. 7, who was interrogated six days after Wallenberg’s reported death, was “with great likelihood” Raoul Wallenberg. 

The startling find was revealed last November to Susanne Berger and Vadim Birstein, two members of a research team that carried on a 10-year investigation into Wallenberg’s mysterious vanishing in the 1990s.

The information, while welcome, still must undergo in-depth verification, Berger wrote in a letter, “but if indeed confirmed, the news is the most interesting to come out of Russian archives in over 50 years.”

She said her team has gathered strong circumstantial evidence which supported the archivists’ conclusion of the identity of Prisoner No. 7.

Wallenberg became Sweden’s envoy in Budapest in July 1944, and immediately began doing what he could to protect the Hungarian Jews.  He was remarkably successful.  His intervention is credited with halting the deportation of 20,000 Jews destined for the infamous Nazi concentration camps or death factories.  His efforts also convinced German officers occupying the Hungarian capital not to follow through on a plan to destroy the city’s Jewish ghetto, thus averting the annihilation of its 70,000 residents.

Although he engaged in no anti-Soviet activities, he was arrested without explanation the day after the Soviet Red Army captured the city, along with his Hungarian driver Vilmos Langfelder.  

The Swedish Foreign Ministry has said only that they have to examine the information and then decide what is to be done.

Wallenberg’s heroic stand against the Nazi occupation forces, knowing full well he was risking his own life, his disappearance and probable tragic end, and the many “sightings” in Soviet prison have made him a folk hero and the subject of dozens of fascinating books and documentaries.

The already fermenting mystery only deepened after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged in the 1990s that he wasn’t acting alone, but that he had been recruited for his rescue mission by an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which later became the CIA. 

As follows are but some extraordinary men and women, who, at great personal risks, have done all they could to save lives. Most of their deeds may have gone unnoticed during their lifetimes but many have been honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial with the title “Righteous among the Nations” or “Righteous Gentiles” recognizing those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.

Raoul Wallenberg (1912 – 1947?)

Swedish Diplomat

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Immediately following his arrival as First Secretary to the Swedish embassy in Budapest in July 1944, Wallenberg used his diplomatic status to issue “protective passports” to thousands of Jews, identifying them as Swedish citizens, thereby preventing their deportation to death camps. He would often personally intervene to obtain the release of these passport bearers, including those with forged documents, from the Jews who were forced to march toward the Austrian-Hungarian border for deportation, saving as many lives as possible. He even rented more than 30 buildings to house about 10,000 Jewish refugees, putting up fake signs as “The Swedish Research Institute” and hanging the Swedish flag to avoid detection. All in all, this soft-spoken Swede is credited to have rescued more Jews than any single rescuer or country, around 100,000 of them; but he was unable to save his own. In January 1945, he was taken by the Soviet Red Army troops to a Soviet prison, where he was reported to have died in 1947, although the exact circumstances of his death are still very much in dispute.

Irena Sendler (1910 – 2008)

Polish Catholic Social Worker

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People and their households caught hiding Jews risked death sentences in German-occupied Poland. As a Jewish sympathizer since childhood, Sendler (Sendlerowa) and her friends produced thousands of false documents to help Jewish families prior to joining the resistance group Zegota (Council for Aid to Jews). Upon her appointment as head of Zegota’s newly formed children’s department, she organized the smuggling of some 2,500 children out of Warsaw ghetto and had them placed in Polish families, orphanages and convents. She gave each child a new identity and carefully recorded their names and placements so that they could be returned to surviving relatives after the war. Her work was interrupted when she was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by the Gestapo in 1943. However, she was successfully rescued by Zegota before her scheduled execution. She then went into hiding and resumed her work for Jewish children for the remainder of the war. In 2003, she received Poland’s highest civilian decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.

“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth and not a title to glory.” – Sendler’s letter to Polish Parliament

Giovanni Palatucci (1909 – 1945)

Italian Police Official and Lawyer

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Palatucci entered the police service in 1936 and was assigned to be in charge the Adriatic seaport of Fiume (present day Rijeka, Croatia). When anti-Jewish laws were enacted in 1938, he used his authority as chief of the Foreigners’ Office to forge travel papers that permitted hundreds of Jews flee persecution in Eastern Europe and settle in Fiume, sometimes even providing them with funds. However, his effort became riskier in 1943, when Mussolini’s government fell and the Nazis occupied the place. In defiance against orders to arrest and deport the Jews in the area, he made sure that they were sent instead to a prison-turned refugee camp managed by his uncle, Bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, in Campania southern Italy, by destroying documented records of some 5,000 Jewish refugees, thus saving them from certain death in concentration camps. When his activities were discovered in 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to Dachau, where he died just a few months shy of his 36th birthday.

Andre Trocmé (1901 – 1971)

French Protestant Pastor

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Andre Trocmé, as the spiritual leader of the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and as a man clearly driven by ethical and religious convictions, spoke against discrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in bordering Germany and repeatedly asked his congregation to help protect “the people of the Bible.” When the Nazi occupied France, he and his wife Magda (1901 – 1996) arranged for the rescue of between 3,000 to 5,000 Jews fleeing the Nazi persecution. Under their leadership, many private families willing to take in Jewish refugees and children were located, and town schools got ready for a sudden increase in the number of students. Their courageous efforts made Le Chambon and nearby villages a unique refuge in Nazi-occupied France. When forced to produce a list of Jews in the town, he responded, “We do not know what a Jew is; we know only men.” Despite rumors of his imminent arrest, he encouraged his congregation to “do the will of God and not of men.” In January 1971, Yad Vashem recognized André and Magda Trocmé as “Righteous among the Nations.”

Oskar Schindler (1908 – 1974)

German Industrialist

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Schindler was an unlikely rescuer of the Jews, as he was all too flawed. He was a Nazi, a womanizer, and an opportunistic businessman motivated by greed; and yet he heeded the call of his conscience. He initially sought to profit from the 1939 German invasion of Poland by hiding wealthy Jews and employing around 1,000 cheap Jewish slave laborers for his ammunition factory in Poland. However, appalled by the immense brutality of Nazism, he began shielding his workers without any regard for cost. He smuggled children out of ghettos and used his connections in high places to request for hundreds of Jews to be moved to an adjoining factory. He would call on his legendary charm and persuasive eloquence to help his “Schindlerjuden” (”Schindler Jews” as they came to be known) get out of difficult situations, claiming that women, children, handicapped and unskilled workers were vital to his business. While he died penniless at age 66 having spent all his wealth by the end of the war and having failed in his post-war business efforts, he gained the perpetual gratitude of his Jews, whom he affectionately referred to as “my children.” He is the only Nazi to be buried in a cemetery in Jerusalem.

Nicholas Winton (1909 – )

British Stockbroker

(Winton holding a boy)

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In 1939, Winton visited Prague at the invitation of a friend from the British Embassy and was alarmed by the influx of refugees, endangered by the impending Nazi invasion. He noticed that the refugee camps set up by the British team were dealing mostly with the elderly and other vulnerable adults, but nothing was being done for the children. So he took it upon himself to organize the Czech Kindertransport, managing to save 669 children out eight trains prior to the outbreak of World War II and finding them foster parents in England and Sweden. He was not troubled by the fact that his humanitarian efforts went unrecognized for he did not view his acts as something extraordinary. His exploits became known only in 1988 when his late wife discovered lists of children and letters from their parents in the attic. He is very much revered as the father who rescued his many “children” from certain death in Nazi camps. Known as “Schindler of Britain,” Winton currently lives in Maindenhead, Great Britain; he was knighted in 2002 and was nominated by the Czech government for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

Chiune Sugihara (1900 – 1986)

Japanese Diplomat

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Though Sugihara was named vice-consul of the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939, his main duty was to keep the Japanese forces informed of the Soviet and German troop movements. Following the 1940 Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Polish Jews as well as Lithuanian Jews had difficulty acquiring exit visa, making it unsafe to travel and difficult to find countries that will issue them. With no discernible motivation other than to do the right thing, he started issuing visas to all who applied including those who did not meet immigration requirements, allowing them to enter Japan for up to 15 days, in direct violation of his orders. He was subsequently reassigned to Berlin when the Soviet took over Lithuania. While en route to the train station, he continued to give out visas for a mob of desperate refugees surrounding his car. However, many passports remained unstamped when he boarded the train, so he threw the official stamp to the crowd. His altruistic acts saved anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 Jews based on some estimates. Sugihara, the “Japanese Schindler,” was honored as “Righteous among the Nations” by the Israeli government in 1985.

“I cannot allow these people to die, people who have come to me for help with death staring them in the eyes. Whatever punishment may be imposed on me, I know I should follow my conscience.” – Sugihara

Varian Fry (1907 – 1967)

American Journalist

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Distressed by what he personally saw of Nazi barbarities against Jews during his 1935 Berlin visit as a foreign correspondent for an American journal, the Harvard-educated Fry started to help raise funds for European anti-Nazi movements. Following the 1940 invasion of France, he went to Marseille and ran an elaborate rescue network in direct opposition to French and even some American authorities. Despite being under constant surveillance by the puppet Vichy regime, he was able to secure visas with the aid of American Vice-Consul in Marseille Hiram Bingham IV for around 3,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees (among whom were many prominent artists and intellectuals including Marc Chagall and Wilhelm Herzog among others) escape to neutral Portugal before making their way to the United States. A few months prior to his death, France presented him with the Legion of Honor for his heroic work in Marseille from 1940 to1941. Fry, also known as the “American Schindler,” was posthumously honored by Yad Vashem in 1996, the very first American to be listed as “Righteous among the Nations.”

More Holocaust-themed articles:

·        Heroes of the Holocaust & Their Stories of Courage 2

·        Famous Holocaust Survivors

·        Six Classic Holocaust Literatures