Hero, Villain, Coward, Victim or Survivor?

Krystyna Moskalik, a schoolteacher in the village of Sieciechowice in southern Poland kept Roza Kwar alive, disguised under a Christian identity and living with her family. Of all her aunts, uncles, cousins and family - only three survived the massacre of "undesirables" by Hilter's regime.

Théophile Larue, a Paris policeman, warned his Jewish neighbors of an impending mass raid on the Jewish community. With the assistance of his wife, a railroad worker and his brother, he helped them escape and prevented their deportation to the death camps.

Aladár Bajos - midwife

Pecs, Hungary, spring 1944

Many Jewish women in this community were subjected to invasive body searches prior to their deportation to the Auschwitz killing center in summer 1944. Aladár Bajos was one of ten midwives who conducted the searches. In a postwar deposition, Bajos stated that she participated because she feared losing her job. She also testified that because there were only two pairs of rubber gloves, she “did not perform any internal, vaginal examinations of the women, only assist[ed] them in undressing.” The painful, humiliating, and unhygienic searches for hidden jewelry and other valuables remained among the most painful memories of women survivors. Picture - Members of a Pecs Hungarian Jewish family, most of whom were later killed in Auschwitz.

BREMEN, GERMANY, CIRCA 1929


“It was the summer of 1997 when I received an unexpected letter and a picture from a former non-Jewish playmate. The picture…was of a group of neighborhood youngsters near where we lived in Bremen, my hometown [in Germany]….It was taken [in 1929] before Hitler came to power, when Jewish and non-Jewish children still played together.

[That summer] I had visited Bremen at the invitation of the city. This playmate of mine, Gunther, wrote me that he had missed meeting me during my stay, but had wanted to show me that in our early lives we had been good friends….He wanted to assure me that he had never ‘touched a Jew.’ His parents had owned a cleaning store right next to my father’s business and we frequently met as children. He knew my family and knew that my mother had been murdered by Nazis during Kristallnacht. He might have felt bad about that.

After more than half a century, you can say many things. I answered him that I remembered well our encounters before the war. We were a happy-go-lucky group, never thinking of harming each other. But I was interested in his life after Hitler came to power…. The answer was shocking. He wrote that he had been a guard in Bergen-Belsen [concentration camp]. Again, though, he assured me that he ‘never touched a Jew.’ What I wanted to hear from Gunther was how he felt about his job. Did he think that killing Jews was the proper thing to do?...He never wrote to me again.” —Rabbi Jacob Wiener (born Gerd Zwienicki)

The execution of Piotr Sosnowski, a Roman Catholic priest.

Near Tuchola, Poland, October 27, 1939

Father Sosnowski was a priest from the town of Bysław. German SS and police forced a group of approximately 45 Poles to dig a mass grave in the forest. Before shooting them all, they permitted Father Sosnowski to administer last rites to the doomed men. The shooters were local ethnic Germans organized by the SS into ‘self-defense” militias whose declared purpose was to help secure areas behind the military front, but who actually engaged in implementing Nazi policy to eliminate Polish elites.

LEEUWARDEN, THE NETHERLANDS, CIRCA 1940


Eva (b.1932) and Abraham (b.1934) lived with their parents in the Dutch town of Leeuwarden. After the Germans occupied the Netherlands, Eva and Bram went into hiding at a farm in the Veluwe area of central Holland. Both children assumed false names to disguise themselves as non-Jews. They wrote letters to their parents, who had remained in hiding in Leeuwarden.

In February 1944, a Dutch civilian betrayed the children to the Germans. Eva and Bram were deported to Auschwitz where they were murdered on March 6, 1944. Their letters to their parents were discovered in the 1970s during a renovation of the building where their mother survived the Holocaust.

A man pretended to be Gestapo and a neighbor terrified Rosa's mother and drove her away long enough to steal all of her possessions, still they found a way to survive.

Rosa (Binder) Sirota was born in 1933 in Lvov, Poland (today: L’viv, Ukraine). Her parents owned a grocery store; the family lived in an apartment behind the store. Rosa had a Catholic nanny and sometimes accompanied her to church. Rosa did not notice many changes after the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Shortly after the Germans invaded in 1941, her father was arrested, never to return. Betrayed by a neighbor, Rosa and her mother had to live in the Lvov ghetto. Eventually Rosa’s mother obtained false papers for them and arranged for a hiding place in the Ukrainian village of Ottyn’ovitse, approximately 30 miles from Lvov. Under these assumed Christian identities, mother and daughter survived the war.

Ona Simaite, a librarian at the university in Vilna, Lithuania (today: Vilnius), used her position to aid and rescue Jews in the local ghetto.

Entering the ghetto under the pretext of recovering library books from Jewish university students, she smuggled in food and other provisions and smuggled out literary and historical documents. In 1944, the Germans arrested and tortured Simaite. She was later deported to Dachau. Following her liberation, Simaite lived in France. She refused all honors for her wartime actions.