Heroes of the Day

Many of the individuals listed below received the medal "Righteous Among the Nations" from the government of Israel and Yad Vashem (The Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority) in Jerusalem.

• Elizabeth Abegg--Abegg's home in Berlin, the capital of Germany, was a place of rescue and help for the Jews right under the noses of the Gestapo. She fed Jews, sold her own possessions to get money, got ration cards and visas, and found safe places for them in and out of the country. Her help to a group in hiding helped save at least 24 Jewish children.

• Corrie ten Boom--a Dutch woman who saved the lives of many Jews in her native Holland during the Nazi occupation. Eventually caught, she was sent with her family to a concentration camp. Her father died in the prison hospital and her sister, Betsie ten Boom, died in Ravensbruck concentration camp. After 14 months, Corrie was discharged from Ravensbruck and spent most of her later years traveling throughout the world sharing her story with vast audiences.

• George Ferdinand Duckwitz--Duckwitz was a naval attaché in the German embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. From 1939 on, he passed secret information to the Danish resistance alerting the underground and the neutral Swedish government when boats coming into port were for the purpose of deporting Jews. This gave them time to mount a scheme that succeeded in saving all but a few of the Jews of Denmark.

• The White Rose Group--Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie, and their friend Christopher Probst wrote and distributed four leaflets in Munich, Germany, calling for Germans to resist in any form the "evil Nazi regime," including passive refusal to obey, and sabotage of the government. The three were caught, declared traitors, and were beheaded on February 22, 1943.

• Raoul Wallenberg--a Swedish aristocrat who was attached to the embassy in Budapest, Hungary. He designed and printed thousands of Swedish citizenship papers and gave them to Jews. He also furnished houses for them, got food and clothing to Jews on deportation trains and removed them from death marches. He saved at least 70,000 lives.

• Oskar Schindler--a German businessman in charge of a ceramics firm in Poland, arranged to keep 500 Jewish workers safe in his factory during roundups and deportations. He eventually moved back to Germany to open an armaments factory where he brought his workers with him. He also managed to get 300 of the workers family members out of Auschwitz, the only known example of such an accomplishment. He is responsible for saving at least 1,500 Jewish lives.

• Andrew Sheptitsky--The Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Lvov, who denounced the German invaders. He banned religious services for all who accepted Hitler's gospel of murder, hid Jewish children and adults in his church, stored the Torah scrolls there, and arranged for 150 Jews to be concealed in convents. Although hundreds of monks and nuns knew of the Jews' presence, not a single Jew was betrayed. His example influenced many Ukranian people to also save Jews.

• Doctor Adelaide Hautval--The daughter of a French Protestant pastor, she was imprisoned in France because she was traveling without a permit to help her sick mother. In January 1943, she was sent to Block 10 in Auschwitz where the Nazis, in the name of "medical science," conducted experiments upon Jewish women. As the only doctor assigned to their day-to-day care, she did what she could, hiding sick women on the upper level of the bunks and not reporting epidemics. She became known as the "angel in white" to the condemned women. She lived to testify at several trials after the war involving the German doctors at the camp.