Israel’s medallions for the “righteous” were presented today to seven non-Jews who rescued and sheltered European Jews during World War II at grave risk to their own lives. Three of the awards were posthumous. They were conferred by Israel Consul General Rehaveam Amir at ceremonies at the American-Israel Cultural Foundation here.
The medallions and accompanying certificates were awarded on behalf of the Yad Vashem, the Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, which documented each case on the basis of evidence supplied by surviving witnesses now scattered all over the world. The medallions are inscribed with the Talmudic dictum, “One who saves a human life saves, as it were, a whole world.”
The recipients were: Wladyslaw Wojcik, a Pole who became a fugitive from police for two years in order to provide shelter and care for a three year-old Jewish girl whose mother entrusted her to his care before she was deported to a death camp; Alexander Roslan, of Warsaw, who sheltered three children throughout the war at great risk and hardship to his own family; Barna Kiss, the overseer of a forced labor detachment whose humane treatment of Jewish prisoners was responsible for the survival of most of them on a thousand-mile march from Budapest to the Russian border; Also, the late Mme. Blanche Mollino, a French woman who raised funds in the United States to help Jewish scholars after the fall of France and who later risked her life sheltering Jews sought by the Gestapo and Vichy authorities; the late Anton Uszczanowski and his wife, Jadwiga, who sheltered several Jewish families in Poland during the Nazi occupation for which Mr. Uszczanowski was eventually executed; Mrs. Julia Markus Wolfinger who sheltered a family of eight Jewish survivors of the Storry ghetto in Poland in her home which was near a German military base; and the fate Ignazy Lubcczynski, a lieutenant colonel in the Armia Krajovia in Poland who saved Jews from death by recruiting them into his unit and by supplying them with false documents.
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