Other articles

  • Helena Orchon, Poland

    Helena Orchon was born in Poland in 1903. Her entire family was involved in the theatre. Similarly, she became an actress and director. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, Helena joined the Polish underground. In one example of Helena’s active resistance to the Nazi occupation of her homeland, she obtained forged identity papers for Jews. […]

  • Helena Zahaikiewicz Melnyczuk, Ukraine

    Helena Zahaikiewicz lived with her brother Orest and father Bohdan in the Ukrainian city of Peremysl. One day in September 1943, the two siblings witnessed a commotion on their street as they were returning home. Apparently, some Jews who had been hiding were detected. The authorities were called and the Jews as well as the […]

  • Olga Rajsek, Croatia

    Olga Rajsek, a Christian, was the fiancée of Zlatko Neumann, a Jew who was imprisoned, along with his brother, by the pro-fascist Ustasa organization, that was placed into power after the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941. Olga took in 12-year-old Dana Stochhamer, the son of his imprisoned brother. The Jewish boy had been recently released […]

  • Stefania (Fusia) Podgorska, Poland

    Stefania Podgorska, at the age of 14, worked in a grocery store in Przemyl owned by the Diamants, a Jewish family. Stefania grew very close to the Diamants, who eventually took her in after the Nazi invasion of September 1939. She continued to live with the Diamants and work at the store even after the […]

  • Zofia Baniecka, Poland

    Zofia Baniecka was born in 1917 to a Catholic family in Warsaw, Poland. She was the only child of a father who was a sculptor and a mother who was a teacher. Zofia was raised in a liberal and cultured home and she attended school with many Jews. In late 1940, the Baniecka family was […]

  • Marianna Imiolek-Gajowniczek, Poland

    Marianna Imiolek-Gajowniczek lived in Warsaw with her parents Antoni and Czeslawa. In August 1943, an acquaintance asked Czeslawa to hide two Jews, as that person was already hiding three other people. They were Leon Weinstein and his sister-in-law Bronislawa Szafran. Marianna’s parents took them in and instructed their ten-year-old daughter to tell friends, if asked, […]

  • Marianna Kopyt, Poland

    Marianna Kopyt was a resident of Radom, Poland, during the Nazi occupation of her country. In 1941, she took in her friend Baruch Silberszlak and his two-year-old daughter Ilana Szochat. Ilana and her father barely escaped the Radom ghetto that had earlier trapped her mother and her mother’s family. Marianna hid Baruch under the floorboards […]