Remembering the women rescuers
Dear Friends,
Every March 8th, the world marks this day in a show of appreciation and admiration towards women for their achievements.
The IRWF joins in this worldwide celebration and emphasizes the awe-inspiring role played by the women rescuers during the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and many other tragic chapters of human history.
For many years now we have been researching and unearthing unknown cases of rescue and we learned to appreciate the crucial contribution made by women in this field.
During the Shoah, for example, thousands of women risked their lives and that of their loved ones in order to reach-out to the persecuted. The Polish Irena Sendler is probably the most prominent of the women rescuers but there are many others. We had the privilege to shed light on many women who went out of their way to save innocent lives, such as Stanislawa Slawinska, from Poland, Karolina Reszeli and her late mother Zsuzsanna, among many others.
Our flag project, Houses of Life, which is aimed to identify and mark physical sites in Europe that gave shelter to victims of the Holocaust, mainly children, has already discovered more than 300 such sites in various countries, such as Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary and Greece. Most of the Houses of Life were churches, monasteries, convents and boarding schools and we were astonished by the large number of nuns and women in general that played a key role in the life saving process, such as Mother Maddalena Cei.
Also during the Armenian Genocide, many women made their exemplary contribution to saving of Armenians, such as the the Estonian Missionary Hedwig Büll, who saved some 2,000 Armenian children.
We owe our gratitude to women around the world in general, and very especially to the brave women rescuers who showed us how each one of them stood up against evil and made a difference.
Eduardo Eurnekian – Chairman
Baruch Tenembaum – Founder
