Raoul Wallenberg: Saved More People During the Holocaust Than Any Other Individual

Raoul Wallenberg Passport Photo

Raoul Wallenberg was one of the heroes of the Holocaust. He was a brave defender of the lives of thousands. The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the person who "single-handedly saved more people from extinction than any other individual." Like many of the heroes who fought to save lives during this dismal period in world history, his good deeds did not go unpunished. Raoul Wallenberg disappeared near the end of World War II. The circumstances of his disappearance have yet to be satisfactorily established. This is a brief life story of a man who, whether he lived the remainder of his life in captivity or died soon after his disappearance, gave his life to defend the lives of the innocents who were threatened by one of the most monstrous rulers the world has ever known.

Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 4, 1912. He was born into a wealthy and famous family of bankers and politicians. However, he was born fatherless. His father was a naval officer who died at the age of 23-three months before his son was born. Raoul's mother made up for his loss by being a loving mother who doted on her son. He may have even inherited his caring nature from her. Raoul's grandfather-Gustav Wallenberg also took the young boy under his wing. He oversaw Raoul's education.

Raoul graduated in 1930. By the time of his graduation, he was fluent in Russian and a talented artist. He joined the Swedish army to serve the nine months of military service that was required of Swedish men. He finished his service by 1931, at which time he left for Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, he attended the University of Michigan. He studied architecture and was an excellent student. When Raoul Wallenberg graduated from the university in 1935, he received a medal for his academic achievements along with a degree in Science in Architecture.

Raoul Wallenberg returned home to Sweden for a time after his graduation. From there, he went to Cape Town, South Africa where he worked as a building supplies salesman. Six months later, he went to work for a bank in Haifa, Israel (which was then Palestine).  He returned to Sweden once again in 1936. He met a businessman named Koloman Lauers around this time. He soon became a partner in Koloman Lauers' Mid-European Trading Company.

Raoul Wallenberg's new business partner was a Hungarian Jew. Through his work with Kolomar, Raoul found out the sickening truth about Adolf Hitler. It was not long before the rest of the world knew too. It is presumably around this time that Raoul began to feel empathy for the Jews of the world.

In March of 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary. Roughly 700,000 Hungarians Jews became in danger of being taken, killed or both. The Nazis began taking Jews out of Hungary and bringing them to concentration camps almost immediately. The U.S.A.'s newly formed War Refugee Board met with officials in Sweden to discuss what might be done to save the Jews in Hungary. Raoul Wallenberg's business partner was among these men. When it was suggested that someone be sent into Hungary, Lauer mentioned Raoul. After some thought, it was decided that the intelligent, kind, resourceful young man who was fluent in Russian would be sent.

Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Hungary in July of 1944. By that time, more than half of the Hungarian Jews had been ripped from their homeland by the Nazis. Raoul immediately set to work building safe houses, acquiring barely official passes and pressuring officials. His efforts gave a large number of Jewish people save places to live, passes to protect them from the Nazis and he even managed to convince officials to allow him to exempt his Jewish staff members from wearing the Star of David.

All of the above was only the tip of the iceberg for Raoul Wallenberg. He chased down trains full of Jews to hand them passes in their cars. He provided essentials, such as medicine, clothing and food to the beleaguered Jews of Hungary. He was extraordinarily diligent in his efforts. He did not work alone, but it was his willingness to badger the Nazis that made the operation a success. In January of 1945, Raoul wrote a letter to a general who was meant to carry out the execution of tens of thousands of Jews. Raoul told the man, in no uncertain terms, that if he were to carry out his orders, he would be tried when the war was over and hanged as a war criminal. The man heeded Raoul's warning and thousands who were meant to die, lived because of him.

The Soviet army took Hungary from the Nazis in late 1944, early 1945. Raoul Wallenberg willingly went with a group of Soviet troops on January 17, 1945. Raoul said goodbye to his friends, who he told that he was not sure if he was a prisoner or a guest of the Russians. Either way, he was thought to be on his way to the Soviet headquarters in Budapest. His friends and family never saw him again. Click here to learn more about the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg.

Out of the roughly 700,000 Jews that lived in Hungary before the war, only 120,000 of them were accounted for when World War II ended. The large portion of them that were saved by Raoul Wallenberg never got the chance to thank their savior.

Sources

Metzler, David, Raoul Wallenberg, retrieved 5/28/10, jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/wallenberg.html

Bernheim, Rachel Oesteicher, A Hero For Our Time, retrieved 5/28/10, raoulwallenberg.org/raoulwallenberg_aheroforourtime.htm

Irena Sendler: Hero of the Holocaust

Newspaper story about Sendler's death.

Irena Sendler was a humble hero during one of the darkest times in the history of humanity. During the Holocaust, this woman saved more than two thousand children and infants from certain death in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. She did this at great personal risk, a risk that came very close to being made a reality. She is among the bravest and most selfless individuals in the pages of history, throughout the world. It took a rare person to boldly stand up to the Nazis. It took an exceptionally rare person to do so knowing that if they did not, they would have nothing to fear from them. Irena Sendler was the latter sort of person.

Irena Sendler was born into a Roman Catholic family just fifteen miles away from Warsaw, Poland in 1910. Her father was a physician who had poor Jewish people among his patients. Therefore, Irena Sendler was taught to be kind to the less fortunate from a very early age. Her father died when she was still young, but Irena never forgot the lessons he taught her.

Irena Sendler was about 29 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. At the time that the invasion occurred, Irena was employed as a social worker and was in charge of running some canteens in her area. Canteens were programs that delivered food, money and more to the needy. Irena arranged so that Jews could also get assistance from this public program. She would have them register with assumed Christian names. She would also ensure that the Jewish families who were obtaining these services were reported as having communicable diseases so that the Nazis would not inspect their homes and find them out.

The moving of nearly 500,000 Jews into what would become known as the Warsaw Ghetto began in 1942. Irena Sendler was a naturally sympathetic person and wanted to help as much as she could. She became a member of the Zegota, an underground resistance movement. Her focus was rescuing Jewish children from the ghetto and removing them to safe havens. She managed to obtain a pass to enter the ghetto from the Epidemic Control Department. She went every day, using the name Jolanta, with goods such as food and medicine to deliver to the ‘residents’ there.

With the help of like-minded people in the Social Welfare Department, Irena Sendler was able to begin smuggling children out of the ghetto. She was able to obtain forged documents, giving the freed children new Christian identities so that they could be kept elsewhere. As far as getting the children out of the ghetto, she did this in any way possible. Children were taken out in body bags, coffins, in trucks filled with goods, gunnysacks and more. She was even able to get others to help her, such as an ambulance driver and a mechanic.

Many of the children that were removed from the Warsaw Ghetto were taken into convents and orphanages.  Others were taken in by Christian families. Irena sometimes found it difficult to convince parents that their children would be safer without them, outside of the ghetto. She sympathized with these parents’ feeling of loss and so she kept meticulous records of each child she removed and was sure to include their real and assumed identities. She planned on reuniting the children with their families after World War II had ended.

On October 20, 1943, Irena Sendler’s deception was uncovered by the Gestapo. They arrested her and broke both of her legs and feet while torturing her for information. Though the wounds they inflicted were enough to cripple Irena for life, she never betrayed the name of a single one of her associates or any of the children that she had rescued. She was sentenced to die, but was rescued by the Zegota. One of their agents bribed a guard, who then released her. Unbelievably, Irena went right back to helping Jewish children, under a new identity, even though she was pursued by the Gestapo. 

When the war was finally over, Irena Sendler retrieved all of the records that she had kept of the children’s names. She had kept them hidden in jars that were buried beneath a tree in her neighbor’s yard. In all, there were roughly 2,500 names on her lists. She did the best she could to reunite each and every child with their family, but unfortunately many of their families had been wiped out during the Holocaust.

Irena Sendler died on May 12, 2008. She was ninety-eight years old. Before her death, she was given a number of distinctions and awards. In 1965 she was given the title “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem organization. In 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. In 2003, she was awarded the “Order of White Eagle” in Poland. Again in 2003, she won Jankarski’s award for Valor and Courage. In 2007, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Surprisingly, the award was given to Al Gore for his global warming message rather than Sendler.

Sources

Irena Sendler, retrieved 1/5/10, auschwitz.dk/Sendler.htm

In her safe arms, the innocents survived, retrieved 1/4/10, smh.com.au/news/world/in-her-safe-arms-the-innocents-survived/2008/05/13/121044435389.html

Dr. Eugene Lazowski: Hero of the Holocaust

Dr. Eugene Lazowski
Photo via Wikipedia

Dr. Eugene Lazowski was a Polish doctor and soldier during World War II. He was also a member of the Polish Underground Army and the Red Cross. He was one of the many heroes of the Holocaust whose humane deeds were conducted in secret and at great risk to themselves. He worked in a number of different ways to help the people in his neighborhood who were persecuted by the Nazis, all of which he could’ve been executed for.

Dr. Eugene Lazowski was born in Poland in 1913. He was in his twenties when he first came to Rozwadow, Poland. He was placed in a POW camp there. He bravely escaped the camp, narrowly avoiding a German guard.

Eugene had a home next to the ghetto in Rozwadow. In fact, his fence bordered the ghetto, which was filled with his fellow countrymen, many of them Jews. The ‘residents’ of the ghetto were sadly undernourished and some of them were very ill. Despite the fact that the Germans had declared it a crime to help these people, a crime that was punishable by death, Dr. Eugene Lazowski came up with a way to treat the sick in the Rozwadow ghetto. He would have them come to his fence, under cover of night, and tie a white cloth to it. When he saw the cloth, he would come out to the fence and treat whoever was there. He was able to supply his covert medical operation by cleverly falsifying his inventory.

Dr. Eugene Lazowski was given the opportunity to assist these people more, when his colleague, Dr. Stanislaw Matulewicz, made an amazing discovery. If he injected healthy patients with the same dead bacteria that was used to test for typhus, their tests would come back positive for the disease, with no harm done to them. The Germans were terrified of contracting the disease, so if a patient was found to have it, that would make them exempt from transfer to labor and concentration camps. There was one problem, however.

During the time of the Nazi occupation of Poland, Jews who were discovered to have deadly communicable diseases were killed and their homes burnt to the ground. If Dr. Eugene Lazowski and Dr. Matulewicz were going to help, they would only be able to use the bacteria on non-Jewish patients. They first tested it on a man who was home on leave from a labor camp. It worked. The test came back positive and the man did not have to return.

The doctors began slowly ‘spreading’ the disease throughout Rozwadow and the surrounding villages. They were very careful not to ‘infect’ Jews and they made sure that some of the ‘infected’ were referred to other doctors, who did not know of the deception, for testing. This way, all of the tests were not coming from them. That would have been too obvious.

Once there were enough cases of the disease, which is transmitted through the bite of infected lice, the Germans quarantined the area. No more people were taken out of the area and placed in camps. Dr. Eugene Lazowski was allowed to continue ‘treating’ the ‘epidemic’ and so, he was able to perpetuate it for nearly three years. During that time, the Germans only came to inspect the area once. Their fear of the disease prevented them from doing a thorough job of it and so the deception was not discovered.

Close to the end of World War II, a soldier whom he had secretly treated for a venereal disease warned Eugene Lazowski that the Gestapo was after him. The soldier told him that they were aware of him treating members of the resistance and had known for some time. Eugene later speculated that they had known about him, but had allowed him to live so that he may contain the ‘epidemic.’ So, in a way, Eugene had not only saved an estimated 8,000 people with the ‘epidemic,’ but he had also saved himself from execution.

When the doctor heard that the Gestapo was seeking him, he grabbed his wife and daughter and fled the city. He moved to the United States in 1958 and became a professor at the University of Illinois Medical Center. Dr. Eugene Lazowski passed away in Oregon in December of 2006.

Sources

Fake Epidemic Saves a Village from Nazis, retrieved 1/19/10, holocaustforgotten.com/eugene.htm

He Duped Nazis, saved thousands, retrieved 1/19/10, st.joen.net/lazowski/lazowski.html