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European Christians Who Helped Jews in WWII To Be Acclaimed as “Righteous Gentiles”

Dec. 26, 1962 - European Christians who secretly befriended Jews in Nazi-occupied countries will now be acclaimed. Jews in free-world nations have formed a World Council to Mark the Deeds of Righteous Gentiles. They have begun a campaign to obtain public recognition of heroism shown by men and women who defied the Nazis to help Jews. An initial list of 175 has been published. Among those listed are:

— Charles Coward, a British Sergeant Major (pictured at the Nuremberg Trials in 1947) who worked as a prisoner-of-war in the I.G. Farben Chemical plants at Auschwitz and was a Red Cross trustee there. He enabled some 400 Jews marked for death in the gas chamber to escape.

— Corry Ten Boon, the only survivor of a Dutch family whose home in Haarlam had served for three years as a hideout for dozens of Jews. Her father died in prison, and her sister Betsy succumbed to sickness and starvation in the Westerbork concentration camp, where Corry survived.

— Wladislaw Kowalski, a retired Polish Army officer who hid Warsaw ghetto families in his home and in the homes of others. He organized a toy workshop in his cellar to finance the project.

— The Rev. Gabor Sztehlo of Budapest, a Protestant clergyman who set up homes, including his own, to shelter Jewish children and who took food to others in hiding.

— Anna Schumeita, librarian at the University of Vilna in Lithuania, who moved in and out of the ghetto acting as courier and benefactor for the Jewish resistance organization. She was sent to Dachau.

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