Category: The Good Guys

An honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis for altruistic reasons. As of 1 January 2021, the award has been made to 27,921 people. This Yad Vashem highlights that the table is not representative of the effort or proportion of Jews saved per country, and notes that these numbers “are not necessarily an indication of the actual number of rescuers in each country but reflect the cases that were made available to Yad Vashem.

Below is a partial list.

Country	Number of awards	Notable recipients
Poland	7,177	Jan Karski, Maria Kotarba, Irena Sendler, Irena Adamowicz
Netherlands	5,910	Frits Philips, Jan Zwartendijk
France	4,150	Anne Beaumanoir, Jeanne Brousse
Ukraine	2,673	Klymentiy Sheptytsky
Belgium	1,774	Queen Elisabeth of Belgium
Lithuania	918	Ona Šimaitė
Hungary	876	Endre Szervánszky, Sára Salkaházi
Italy	744	Giorgio Perlasca, Gino Bartali, Giuseppe Girotti, Odoardo Focherini
Belarus	676
Germany	641	Oskar Schindler, Wilm Hosenfeld, Hans von Dohnanyi, Bernhard Lichtenberg

A complete list can be found at this Wikipedia article.

A nurse, Irena Sendler, is credited with rescuing over 2,500 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.

Head of the children’s section of Zegota – a secret organization that was a ‘Council to Aid Jews’. Her actions aroused the attention of the Gestapo, and in 1943 she was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death. A bribe saved her life, but nonetheless she was left unconscious in a forest, with both her arms and legs broken.

Within the Kraków Ghetto there were four prewar pharmacies owned by non-Jews. Tadeusz Pankiewicz was the only proprietor to decline the German offer of relocation to the non-Jewish side of the city. He was given permission to continue operating his establishment as the only pharmacy in the Ghetto.

He supplied the often-scarce medications and pharmaceutical products to the ghetto’s residents, often free of charge, and substantially improved their quality of life. Apart from health care considerations, Praniewicz dispensed hair dyes to disguise the identities of Jews, and tranquilizers given to fretful children to keep them silent during Gestapo raids.

In Rozwadow, Drs. Lazowski and Matulewicz (left) are credited with saving approximately 8,000 Jews by putting their medical knowledge to use. Knowing that the Germans were terrified of Typhus, the crafted a plan. They injected the town’s Jews with a benign form of typhus, and then informed the Nazis that an epidemic was at large. errified that it would spread, the Nazis quarantined the town and left it to its own devices.

Known as “the Polish Schindlers”, the two of them saved 12 ghetto communities in this crafty manner.

“I was not able to fight with a gun or a sword,” Lazowski said. “But I was able to find a way to scare the Germans.”.

“I was not able to fight with a gun or a sword,” Lazowski said. “But I was able to find a way to scare the Germans.”.