: A Lesson of the Holocaust: One Person Can Make All the Difference #WorldNEWS “We saw a child in mortal danger. We knew that we had the possibility to take her and to protect , and it was beyond

A Lesson of the Holocaust: One Person Can Make All the Difference #WorldNEWS
“We saw a child in mortal danger. We knew that we had the possibility to take her and to protect [her], and it was beyond our feeling or thinking that we would reject it,” Andrzej Sitkowski thought back to when he was 15 and his entire family mobilized to save two Jewish girls and later their mother. It was the height of World War II in Germany, and the Jewish family certainly would be caught if Andrzej’s family did not intervene. But taking them in meant certain death if the Nazi’s found them out. “I thought that what we did was normal…we did not say we wanted to save Jews. It came by coincidence. But in this coincidence, we found ourselves to be ‘menschlich’ [human]. ”
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Their example and those of many others should be a lesson to the world. This week, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), in partnership with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is launching #DontBeABystander : Those who Risked Everything to Save a Life. ” Our goal is to highlight people like Andrzej—a group of people we must learn from while we still have their first-hand accounts—those who were recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem for their heroic wartime actions.
The title Righteous Among the Nations, has, over the past sixty years, become one of the most esteemed titles of modern history. At the core of the word “Righteous” is the basic human value, the right to live. These rescuers recognized this and stood up in the face of immense danger to protect the right to live of their Jewish neighbors. They refused to be a bystander and risked everything, including their own lives and the lives of their families, to save Jews during the Holocaust. Like so many of the “ordinary people” who did nothing to stop the Nazis, and in many instances willingly—even eagerly—joined the Nazis in their cruel and murderous campaigns, the Righteous Among the Nations were also “ordinary people”—yet they chose to undertake extraordinary actions. Yad Vashem describes them: “Some acted out of political, ideological or religious convictions; others were not idealists, but merely human beings who cared about the people around them. In many cases they never planned to become rescuers, and were totally unprepared for the moment in which they had to make such a far-reaching and fatalistic decision. They were ordinary human beings, and it is precisely their humanity that touches us and should serve as a model. ”
Throughout the past 77 years, since the end of World War II Holocaust survivors have not only have sought a measure of justice for the horrors they and their loved ones endured, but they have also dedicated their lives to telling the world what happened.