

Jan hid “sometimes in a suitcase on top of a closet, while his parents hid in a coal cellar in the Palasthys’ basement,” explains the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

She became close to the family of one of her 10-year-old students Jan Braun - so close that when the Nazis invaded the Slovakian city, the Palasthys hid Jan and his family in their apartment.

Nora and Karl Palasthy: Nora was a teacher in Bratislava and Karl was her husband. In January 1945, Anita’s parents were deported to the Westerbork transit camp, but they and Anita’s sister survived the war, and Anita reunited with them all in May 1945. Soehnlein was eventually caught and sent to an internment camp for having helped Jews. “Because her father worked for the Dutch railways, she was able to travel relatively freely while taking children to their hiding places,” explains the collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. Those she helped included 14-year-old Anita Meyer, whom she smuggled to southern Holland in May 1943. The family continued to send her food and money until she died.Īnna Soehnlein: A non-Jewish camp counselor and law student who helped many young Jews escape Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. and moved there in 1950 when he was 10 years old. But Foxman’s parents won out, and the family was smuggled into Austria’s “American Zone,” where they lived in a Displaced Persons camp until they were granted visas to the U.S. “Most hidden children that were saved were female because it was safer, when you’re taken to the bathroom.” After his parents returned for him, Kurpi fought them for custody, believing, he says, that she was saving him. “I couldn’t play with children because I was circumcised,” he tells TIME.
#Story of the zookeepers wife how to
She had him baptized Henryk Stanislas Kurpi, and raised him as a Catholic and taught him how to pray with a rosary, on the fast-track to the priesthood. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.īronislawa Kurpi: A Polish-Catholic nanny to former Anti-Defamation League President Abe Foxman, who hid him for four years in the German-occupied Lithuanian city of Vilnius, where his family had fled from his birthplace in Poland. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters.
#Story of the zookeepers wife professional
Refik Veseli followed them there to finish his professional photography training with Mosa.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. While hiding out at Veseli’s parents’ house, Moshe and his wife stayed in a barn while his children “lived openly as Muslim villagers.” After the liberation of Albania in October 1944, the Mandils left Kruja and re-opened their photo studio in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. Mosa found a job at a local photography studio, where Veseli was his apprentice, but Germany occupied Albania in 1943.

Pleased with the images, the guards helped them escape to Italian-occupied Albania, where they settled in Kavajë and then Tirana, which they hoped would be safe. 1941 to May 1942, before Mandil won over the Italian prison guards by taking photos. According to the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, Mandil’s family had been on the run for a while, and had even been imprisoned in the city of Pristina from Oct. Refik Veseli: A 16-year-old Albanian photography student who, in the fall of 1943, hid professional photographer Mosa or Mosche Mandil and his family, Jewish refugees from Yugoslavia, at his family home in the mountain village of Kruja. A green sweater that Keren’s grandma knitted for her before the war is on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Socha fed and clothed the group, even bringing first-grade school books for the children, helping them remain hidden underground for 14 months. Her father, facing deportation, had broken ground through an apartment into the sewage system, where their family and some dozen other friends were hiding out. Leopold Socha: A non-Jewish sewage worker who discovered a 7-year-old Kristine Keren and her family living in a sewer underneath the Lwów ghetto. Below are five such stories, compiled with the help of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. Not all stories of non-Jews who actively helped to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust were so dramatic, or have been made into bestsellers, but of course that doesn’t make the stories any less important to share.
