January 27th is the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. A new initiative now offers a different perspective on remembrance. It focuses on people who risked their lives to save Jews.
Seventy-seven years after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, in cooperation with the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC), is releasing a series of short videos commemorating the "Righteous Among the Nations." Yad Vashem has thus far honored more than 28,000 non-Jews from 50 countries with this title for rescuing Jews during the Nazi era.
In the two-minute videos, “righteous individuals” tell their stories, like the Polish man Andrzej Sitkowski, whose mother took in a little girl during the war. He himself was 15 years old at the time: “In those difficult circumstances, we didn’t primarily say, ‘We want to save Jews.’ We saw above all a person in need. And we acted humanely.”
According to press reports, Sitkowski, who now lives in Bavaria, said: "To young people I say: 'Never forget that you are human beings. And human beings can do so much more than one might expect.'"
In another video, former Supreme Court President Aharon Barakhow he and his mother were rescued and taken in by Lithuanian farmers: “These ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ risked their lives, and we owe them ours. May we learn from them.”
Education against antisemitism
The website “ Don’t be a bystander” is among the social media posts . There, the stories of individual rescuers can be read in English
“We believe that around 200 of these ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ are still alive, most of them in Europe,” says Yad Vashem Director Dani Dayan. “While antisemitism is on the rise on every continent, we want to commemorate these people and their actions.”
The “Jewish Claims Conference” is an association of Jewish organizations that has represented compensation claims of Jewish victims of National Socialism and Holocaust survivors since 1951.
Yad Vashem commemorates and documents the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis. In addition to a museum and memorials, it includes an educational and research center and publishes numerous works.
According to the memorial site, the data of 4.8 million victims have been made digitally accessible in recent years. Their names and life stories can be found in the "Central Database of Names of Holocaust Victims".
