The Holocaust
Stories of those who saved lives, the Righteous Among the Nations, and witnesses to history.
8 articles
The Holocaust
The Mason Who Smuggled 200 Jews Out of Germany Through Switzerland
A German Freemason drove his furniture truck across the border 47 times to rescue Jewish families
Friedrich Muller was a 52-year-old furniture dealer and Freemason from Freiburg, a German city on the Swiss border. When the Nazi regime began rounding up Jewis…
The Holocaust
The Vatican Courier Who Smuggled Letters from Auschwitz
A priest carrying diplomatic papers secretly carried messages from Auschwitz prisoners to their families
In the autumn of 1942, a young priest named Father Luigi Rava was assigned to deliver diplomatic mail between the Vatican nunciature in Berlin and the Holy See …
The Holocaust
The Pope Who Saved the Jews of Rome: The Secret of Castel Gandolfo
Pius XII ordered the doors of every Catholic institution in Rome opened to shelter Jewish refugees
On October 16, 1943, the Nazis conducted the largest roundup of Jews in the history of Rome. Over 1,000 men, women, and children were seized from their homes an…
The Holocaust
The Freemason Who Hid 32 Jews in a Warsaw Lodge
A Polish Master Mason sheltered 87 people beneath his lodge floor for 742 days using Masonic symbols as a shield
When the Gestapo raided the Masonic Hall at 56 Aleje Jerozolimskie in Warsaw in November 1941, they found nothing. The lodge had been sealed by the Nazis months…
The Holocaust
The Grand Master Who Saved 10,000 Jews
A French Freemason used his lodge network across France to build an escape pipeline for Jewish families
When the Vichy regime implemented the anti-Jewish statutes in October 1940, Paul Borel was the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France. He had been elected i…
The Holocaust
The Letters He Wrote to the Wrong Address for Fifty Years
A Holocaust survivor wrote annual letters to the family who saved his sister — never knowing they were gone
In 1946, Jakob Rosenfeld stood before the ruins of a house in Tarnow, Poland, and wept. The house had belonged to the Nowak family, who had hidden his 16-year-o…
The Holocaust
Irena Sendler: She Smuggled 2,500 Children Out of the Warsaw Ghetto
A Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish children — and buried their names in jars in her garden
Irena Sendler (Irena Sendlerowa) was a Catholic social worker in Warsaw who, beginning in October 1940, entered the Warsaw Ghetto under the pretext of inspectin…
The Holocaust
Chiune Sugihara: The Japanese Scholar Who Issued 6,000 Visas Against Orders
A Japanese consul in Lithuania defied his own government to save 6,000 Jewish refugees
In the summer of 1940, as the Soviet Union was absorbing the Baltic states and Nazi Germany was advancing across Europe, Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara in Kaun…