Heroes that helped



Feng-Shan Ho and his wife

Feng-Shan Ho was one of these people, a Chinese diplomat who rescued around two thousand Jews during early WW2. Ho was acting against orders of his superior, when in accordance to his humanitarian beliefs; he started to issue visas to Shanghai. He continued to issue these visas until he was forced to return to China in May 1940. In 2001 he was made ‘Righteous among the Nations’ for his efforts to save thousands of Austrian Jews.




Hugh O'Flaherty

An Irish Catholic priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, was another person that tried to help. He saved approximately 4,000 Allied soldiers and Jews in Rome during WW2. O’Flaherty used his status as a priest and his protection by the Vatican to hide 4000 people – Allied soldiers and Jews – in flats, farms and convents. The Nazis desperately wanted to stop him, but his protection by the Vatican prevented them arresting him officially. He survived an assassination attempt and, along with the Catholic Church, saved the majority of the Jews in Rome. He died in 1963.
 



Giorgio Perlasca



Giorgio Perlasca was an Italian who helped to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. He issued them with fake passports that allowed them to travel to neutral countries. Although he fought alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Perlasca became disillusioned with Fascism and escaped from Italy in 1944 where he Spanish embassy in Budapest. He became a Spanish citizen on account of his past war experience. While he was there he worked with Spanish diplomat Angel Sanz Briz to create fake passports to smuggle Jews out of the country. When Sanz Briz was removed from his post, Perlasca pretended to be his substitute so that he could continue printing the false passports. He also personally sheltered the thousands of Hungarian Jews he was trying to help whilst they were waiting for their fake passports. It is estimated that he saved over 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust. After the war, he returned to Italy where he lived in obscurity until he was contacted in 1987 by a group of Hungarian Jews he had rescued, it was then that his remarkable story became public. He died in 1992.

 

Irena Sendler

During World War II, Irena Sendler was a member of the Polish Underground and the Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in children’s homes outside the ghetto. During visits to the Ghetto as an employee of the Social Welfare department, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jews there. She arranged the smuggling of Jewish children from the ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. Under the pretext of helping during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Though she was tortured and imprisoned by the Nazis, Sendler continued to help Jewish children in Warsaw. She was made ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in 1965, and later died in 2008.
 
 

Chiune Sugihara

Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat, served as Vice Consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. Soon after the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, he helped around 6,000 Jews leave the country by giving them transit visas so they could travel to Japan. Most of the Jews who escaped were from Poland or residents of Lithuania. From July 31 to August 28 1940, Sugihara began to grant visas himself. He ignored the requirements many times and arranged the Jews with ten-day visas transit through Japan, in direct violation of his orders. This was an extraordinary act of disobedience, given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian railway at five times the standard ticket price. He continued to write the visas himself (reportedly spending 18–20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month’s worth of visas each day) until September 4, when the consulate was closed and he had to leave his post. By that time he had given thousands of visas to Jews, many of them were the head of their household and take their families with them. Sugihara returned to Japan where he lived in obscurity until he was made ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Israel in 1985. He died the following year.

‘According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit in and after boarding the train, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out the train’s window even as the train pulled out.’

Frank Foley

Frank Foley was a British secret service agent is said to have saved 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust. In his job as passport control officer he helped thousands of Jews escape from Nazi Germany. At the 1961 trial of former ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, he was described as a “Scarlet Pimpernel” for the way he risked his own life to save Jews even when faced  with death by the Nazis. Despite having no diplomatic immunity and being liable to arrest at any time, Foley would bend the rules when stamping passports and issuing visas, to allow Jews to escape “legally” to Britain or Palestine, which was then controlled by the British. Sometimes he went further, going into internment camps to get Jews out, hiding them in his home, and helping them get forged passports. He died in 1958.

Source:
http://listverse.com/2008/11/06/10-people-who-saved-jews-during-world-war-two/