RESCUERS: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust

(For more information about this book, the exhibit and the videotape click here.)

This interview with Zofia Baniecka takes place on a perfect October day on Staten Island at the home of Ruth Curtin, one of the people Zofia saved. She does not speak a word of English, so Ruth translates from Polish, with her own memories as a filter. Despite the barrier of language, we feel immediate connection with Zofia because of her warmth. Her physical presence conveys the spirit of an intellectually rigorous mind clear in its path to action. She smokes throughout the interview, but this is not a nervous gesture, more a mark of her passionate, independent character. Zofia and Ruth were schoolmates in Warsaw, and although Zofia still lives in that city, the women have maintained a close friendship. This is not Zofia's first visit to Ruth's home.

I was born in Warsaw in 1917, the only child of a father who was a sculptor and a mother who was a teacher. I came along after they had been married fifteen years, so I was a bit spoiled. I had a beautiful childhood. I went to the finest Catholic school even though we weren't religious. There were many Jewish students in my school, but only during the war did I find out which students were Jewish. They were children from assimilated homes and many of them had converted. My parents had high ideals and our house was always full of their friends talking about politics or music and art.

My father was my greatest love. When I went to the university and openly anti-Semitic behavior became even worse than before, we spoke about it often and, of course, he was against it. He had a very close friend who was a sculptor and a Jew. My father often went into the ghetto to take food and books to friends. But during the Russian strike on Warsaw in 1941, my father was killed. We were in our home when he was hit, and Mother was hit also, in the head, but she recovered.

The house I had lived in all my life was in the area in Warsaw that became the ghetto, so we were required to move when they enclosed the ghetto. Friends took us into their large apartment, and mother and I lived in the living room. Then the underground got us a large apartment, four rooms plus a kitchen, and mother and I began working constantly. She was in a shopping network of guns and vegetables. Nobody would ever suspect that a small gray-haired woman would be carrying a gun in her shopping bag.

At first I was a liaison for the underground, relaying orders from one group to another, delivering underground newspapers throughout the provinces. I got involved through social contacts: a friend asked me to join the underground press, and I agreed. I was itching to do something. I was afraid, but I had to do it. I saw the whole Jewish population wearing yellow armbands. I saw beatings on the street of old Jews, of children, shootings, the most horrible sights.

I had always been independent and patriotic and this was certainly my attitude during the war. It was unthinkable to be anything else. We hid guns and ammunition in our apartment, as well as people. The apartment was divided by curtains, and behind each one there was a different Jewish family. When our house was full, I found hiding places for the Jews with other families because it was too dangerous for them to be where the guns were. Ruth was a friend from school, so of course I didn't turn her away. She stayed only a few weeks, however, until I could help her find a safe place.

Mother and I were in constant danger because to find a gun in a private house meant a death sentence. It was proof that you were in the underground. We were in danger of being raided at any minute, so I had to take the Jews to our houses as fast as I could, even though this hurt me. I didn't like turning them away, even if I was sending them to another house. But I was in touch with the Jewish Committee so that when I had children to hide, they could help me find places.

From the window of our house I could see the ghetto. When the houses were burning during the ghetto uprising in April 1943, I saw people jumping from windows. One family of ten came and stayed for a few weeks until I found other shelter for them. No one was refused in my home. We had at least fifty Jews during the war-- friends, strangers, acquaintances, or someone who heard about me from someone else. Anyone was taken in.

I was never interrogated or nearly caught, though I don't know why. Many fellow resistance leaders perished in prison. I was just lucky. Luck, it's only luck, because I kept people and guns in my house from the winter of 1941 until the Polish uprising in August 1944.

At the end of the war Roosevelt sold out Poland. I was arrested by the Russians because I was and still am a Polish patriot. I didn't have to ask for help because my underground friends were there to help me. Until this day I am in touch with my friends from the underground.

My husband and I struggled constantly for a free Poland. We belonged to Solidarity from the beginning, and our home is a meeting place for people to study, kind of like a free university. I am not at all religious today-- not since I was eighteen have I been to church regularly-- but I do still believe in human beings. There are many people who have saved my belief in humanity, and that is why it is important for people to know about this time, of Poland during the war, and that there were those of us who did try to save Jews. It is necessary for the children to know that there were such people.

I was born in the North of Poland, near Danzig, in 1902. I had five sisters and two brothers, and I was the oldest. My father worked in the post office. We were a good religious family. The proverb in our home was "Love our neighbor as yourself." My mother was always concerned about everyone else. For instance, when I went into the ghetto to see Mickey I was gone for several days. When I returned home my mother opened the door, and instead of saying, "How are you?," she asked me, "How is the child?"

For fifteen years I worked for a very rich Jewish family named Stolowitzky, taking care of the children, a daughter and a son. [Gertruda is crying as she talks of the family.] First the father was taken to Auschwitz. When the daughter died Mrs. Stolowitzky thought it would be safer in Warsaw, so I left Danzig and went with them. Then she heard it was better in Vilna, so we went there. We got an apartment, but things were very bad. Mickey's mother asked me to promise her that I would take care of Mickey if anything happened to her. In Vilna, I rented an apartment which I kept for the four years I was there. The Lithuanians in Vilna were very anti-Semitic and mean. One day one of them hit me. We were having a very difficult time there. The Nazis would give poison candy to the children. I had to teach Mickey never to take anything to eat from anyone.

Then Mickey's mother became sick and died. Mickey came to me and said, "I have no mother. Will you be my mother?" I could not tell him right away. I asked him to wait, and in three days I would give him an answer. I was a single, forty-year-old Catholic woman. How was I going to raise a Jewish child? But I finally told him I would be his mother and he could move into my apartment with me, and he was so happy that he threw his arms around me.

Once Mickey got sick and the only doctor I knew was in the ghetto, so I had to take him to a German doctor. I lied and said that I was his older sister, but I don't think he believed me. After several visits, Mickey was well. When I asked the doctor what I owed him, he wouldn't allow me to pay him. He said to me, "No, you have helped me feel like a man." So he did know Mickey was a Jewish boy.

As soon as the war ended I knew I had to get Mickey to Israel. There was no other way that I could raise a boy to be a Jew. All during the war he had gone to church with me. He learned all the prayers and he even became an altar boy, but I knew I would tell him as soon as I could that he was not Catholic, that he must always be Jewish.

We were on the first ship to Israel, the Exodus. The British were so terrible. The ship was crowded and we were not allowed to dock in Palestine. A chef on the ship gave me cookies for Mickey. But we finally arrived, and I tell you, a miracle happened. From the moment Mickey stepped onto the land of Israel he became a Jewish patriot. It was a miracle.

Mickey's mother had told me that her relatives in Israel would help us, so I went to them right away. I will never forgive them for what they did to me. They gave me a little room upstairs, with no water and no toilet. They paid for one-half year for Mickey to go to school. Mickey cried when he came home. They wanted to adopt Mickey and send me back to Poland. They said they would not pay for school for Mickey if I stayed in Israel. Mickey cried and said to me, "You are my mother. I don't want them for parents." And he said to them, "I don't want to be a son of your family. I want to stay with my mother forever. Where she will go, I will go."

So I went to work as a maid to pay for Mickey's schooling. He went to Be'er Shemin to school, to a program especially for children from Europe like him. And for eighteen years I lived in this same room with no water and worked as a maid so I would have money to pay for the room and for things for Mickey. And Mickey grew up to be such a good Jew. I am so proud of him. He is the most wonderful son in the world.

Mickey worked for Copel Tours in Israel, arranging tours, and then they moved him to Miami in 1975. I miss him very much. Now he lives in New York, and brings tours to Israel for another company. He visits Israel often, and he always uses his Israeli passport. It would be easier and cheaper for him to use an American passport, but he believes in being a Jew and an Israeli. And every time he comes to Israel, he comes here to visit me.

If I had known, forty years ago, that after bringing a Jewish boy to Israel I would be living my last years in this old-age home, I would never have done it. There's no one to talk to here. I still speak only Polish, but I would love to discuss things with people. But the intellectual level is very low. To go to church is very important to me, and yet my priest is a converted Jew. Father Daniel will never be a real priest. A Jew who becomes a priest is never a priest. Just as Mickey became Jewish as soon as he stepped onto Israeli soil, so also, for me, the priest is not a real priest.

Mickey doesn't want me to move to the United States because he returns to Israel often and he wants to remain an Israeli, so he wants me here in his homeland. And I don't think I would want to move anyway. I visit him in the United States. He is the best son in the whole world.

Living in Warsaw, Alex and Mela Roslan were the parents of two young children when the ghetto was created. We interviewed them on the patio outside their comfortable garden apartment in Clearwater, Florida. The sunshine and emerald lawn do not soften Alex's emotional, dramatic story of how he and Mela took the three wealthy Gutgelt brothers, ranging in age from three to eight, into their small Warsaw apartment and kept them hidden for four years. The story is not entirely a happy one; the Roslans' son dies in the Warsaw uprising and the middle Gutgelt boy dies of scarlet fever. Although Mela was full partner with Alex in the rescue, she says little, listening to his every detail, speaking only when he cannot remember something. After two hours he makes us sandwiches, shows us photographs, and continues to share with us what seems to be the most important time of his life.

Today sometimes I don't sleep. I think about how it was and why it happened like that. My story was not possible. My friends said it wasn't possible. "There's not enough food for your own children and certainly not enough for three boys, too." But I thought the war would be finished in two or three months. I wasn't a religious fanatic but I believed all the time that somebody watched over me.

Mela and I were both born in a small village twelve kilometers from Bialystok, in Poland. Mela was born in 1907, and I was born two years later, in a house just two blocks from hers. There were maybe 100 people in the village, but Bialystok had about 200,000 people. Mela's father was a shoemaker in Bialystok, and he made a study of Jewish people. He spoke Yiddish like he was a Jew.

My grandmother was very religious, but not my grandfather. My father went to the army when I was six years old and never came back, but he had taught me to fight for what I thought was right, and that those who follow like sheep are led to slaughter. My mother was thirty-six years old then, and she married a man twenty-four years old. He married her because she had a good farm, but he was not a farmer. I was twelve years old and they thought I was a troublemaker because I was always angry that he was letting our farm run down. So they sent me away to Bialystok to become a shoemaker, but I left there and didn't come home. I went to another village and got a job, and three years later I went back home. But I still argued with my mother that her husband isn't a good farmer, so I sold my part of the farm and left for good. I cried when I had to leave home. [Alex cries here, remembering the pain of leaving his mother.]

Mela and I were married in 1928, and we moved to Bialystok. Our son, Yurek, was born in 1931, and our daughter, Mary, in 1934. I was working as a textile merchant and I made a lot of money. Most of my customers were Jews, but overnight, when they put the Jews in the ghetto, I lost everything. I wanted to know what happened to my friends and customers because I heard terrible stories. I got a Jewish friend to bring me into the ghetto through a tunnel. It was dangerous for a non-Jew to be inside the ghetto so I wore a Jewish star. I saw so many children, hungry and starving. They were so skinny. The parents had been taken to "farms", but we knew what they meant. The children came around and begged for a penny to buy some bread. My Jewish friend stopped me. He said it wouldn't make any difference, that they would die anyway. I came home and told Mela we had to do something. We decided to go to Warsaw.

You know, I think I cry a lot. I cried when I had to leave my mother's house; I cried when I went into the ghetto and the little children clamored after me and kissed my coat and cried for help. I'm very sensitive to the poor. My grandmother was like that.

We got a nice one-room apartment in Warsaw, and one day I met my friend Stanley, from the next village from mine. Stanley told me he had been working for the Gutgelt family before the war; he was the chauffeur for the grandfather. He said they were wonderful people, and very rich, but now they are in the ghetto. He told me that the grandfather had taken the three sons and the son-in-law, and almost all the money, and they had left Warsaw, hoping to get to Palestine. They believed the Germans were only interested in killing men, and thought they would leave the women and children alone. So in the ghetto were the grandmother, two aunts named Janke and Devora, and three children, Jacob, Sholom, and David. The boys' mother had died when David was born. I told Stanley he should help them, that he should take the children, but he says it's too hard. I say maybe they can come to my house. I have two children, no one will notice one more. Stanley made a connection with Janke and told her that he was considering taking the children, but before anything could happen, Stanley had to go one day to the next town to buy some tobacco to sell. He asked me to go with him, but something told me not to go. The next day I found out that Stanley and all the people he was with were killed.

A couple of days later a man dressed like a German civilian knocked on my door. He was looking for Stanley, and I told him what had happened. He cried out, "oh, now everything is finished." I asked him what he meant, and he said, "Do you know Janke?" This man was Dr. Kowalski, the brother-in-law of Janke's husband. His real name was Avraham Galer, but Kowalski was the name on his fake I.D. I told him I knew Stanley was making plans, and he asks me if I will take one boy. I tell him I will try.

I met with Janke at my house. She explained that she doesn't have any money, and that she would like to give some of the family's real-estate holdings. I tell her, "This is still war. If after the war you can pay me, maybe, okay." She asks me, "How do I know I can trust you? I don't know you." I say, "Trust me." She cries and kisses me. I want to take her and the rest of the family, but they want to stay in the ghetto until after Passover. So two days later I meet her and take Jacob.

Jacob told Janke goodbye and right away I told him, "Jacob, from now on you're not Jacob anymore. You look just like my brother's son. Your name is now Genek. I will make you two promises right now. No matter how bad things get, we will live through it. And you will remain Jewish." I don't know how I could promise him that, but I did.

Jacob was about nine or ten years old, and so smart and clever. I told him he had to stay in his room and not look out the window. We had to be careful that the neighbors shouldn't see him. Our children liked him so much. We always divided everything fairly between all four children. I tried to make sure that the children didn't understand they were strange because Janke had told me, "Try to make sure Jacob doesn't know he's different. Try to make sure he doesn't know what danger is. If there is danger, don't talk about it."

We built a false floor in the kitchen cupboard; Jacob was skinny so he couldn't fit in. But about two weeks later the Gestapo came because a neighbor thought she had seen Jacob. They looked everywhere, but they didn't find him. Then one day that same SS man came again, but that time my brother-in-law was visiting and he knew this man. Jacob was hiding under the sink, and we started giving the Nazi whiskey. They drank and they ate so much, and my brother-in-law convinced him his sister would never hide a Jew, so we escaped that time. But I knew I had to go looking for another apartment.

I found a nice big apartment in a quiet neighborhood. I put Jacob inside the couch, and that's how we moved across town, right under the noses of the Germans. A couple of days later Dr. Kowalski came to see me and he says, "Mr. Roslan, I want to bring you another boy. He's in place now where he has to stay in the attic laying down all the time. He's so skinny and sickly."

So I asked my wife what she thinks. We talked. But I said, "Mela, if they catch us for one, it's the same if we have two." So Sholom came, and we changed his name to Orish. He was so hungry, but so sweet. I think he was here only two months when my Mary and Yurek, and Jacob got scarlet fever. The doctor said it is very bad. Yurek was in the hospital and he gave Mela half his medicine every night for Jacob. Then Sholom got sick, and he was too weak. Mary, Yurek, and Jacob got well, but Sholom was too sick. Dr. Kowalski came every day, but then he didn't come for a few days. One night in the middle of the night I went to Sholom and he says he feels so bad. He says, "I would feel better if you would hold me." I picked him up, and he died in my arms. We buried him in the basement, sitting up, because someone told me that was the way to bury a Jew.

Then Jacob got sick again and he had to have an operation. My brother-in-law knew a doctor who had a clinic and would do the surgery, but I had to find 10,000 zlotys. This wasn't so much money but if you had none it was too much money. I decided to go out and sell our nice big apartment and get a smaller one, and I did it. Somebody watched over me. I got 60,000 zlotys, but when I told Mela I sold the apartment she cried and cried. She said, "Orish died, Genek will die, and now we don't even have an apartment." I said, "Mela, don't worry, I bought a one-room apartment and I'll make more money so we can get a bigger one soon. Don't worry."

The next day I bandaged Jacob's head and took him to the hospital on a horse. His operation was a success, and everyone cried. Then David came to us. He was about four or five, and so cute, so cute. He had been at my brother-in-law's but it didn't work out, so we took him.

I had to keep doing everything I could of to make money. I did a lot of tricks, but Mela, she had her tricks, too. When we moved she knew the Gestapo was looking for me so she took all my clothes to a friend's house so she could say I was gone for good. I was arrested near the end of the war, and Mela came every day to a different gate with money for me to use to buy my way out. We never would have survived without Mela. I was in jail for six weeks and Mela took care of everything, of the children and of getting me out. Until that time I was worried because she was always weak. But from that time when she had to do it on her own, she was strong. I know I couldn't have done it myself.

Then came the Warsaw Uprising, when everyone thought the Soviet troops were just outside the city and about to liberate us. Our son, Yurek, was killed on the street by a Nazi sniper. He told Jacob that he was helping the Partisans, but he never told us that. It was a terrible time.

As I said, I thought the war would be finished in two or three months. We got the underground paper and it seemed good. But '43, '44, beginning of '45 were very though years. You know it was terrible that the boys' aunts and grandmother wouldn't come with us , too. Three weeks after we took Jacob, the ghetto was liquidated and they went to Auschwitz.

So after the war we went to Berlin looking for Jacob and David's father. We found out they made it to Palestine, so we all wanted to go. But the British wouldn't let us go, only the boys. It was so hard to say goodbye to them. They had been with us for four and a half years, and two and a half of these had been so hard. So, in 1947, I had fine suits made for them, and they left.

Mela and I and our daughter, Mary, came to the United States. We wrote letters, so many letters, to David and Jacob, but we didn't get answers. I couldn't believe it! I said, "They were like our own sons, and they forget us!" But I think their father threw all our letters away. Then one day in about 1963, we were living in Queens and got a phone call from someone in Forest Hills, New York. He asked me, "Do you have a relative in Israel?" I was so excited I said, "Yes, Gutgelt, but they changed their names to Gilat." He said, "Maybe we'll see you tomorrow." And the next day Jacob came. He was in California, studying for his Ph.D. at Berkeley. We talked and talked; he remembers everything.

He told us some old secrets: "You know, Uncle, when I went to you, Grandma said, 'Don't become a goy. Die with us together, because you will eat pork with the goys and die. Do not speak like a goy; they're different. Don't try to speak perfect'". You know, the Jews spoke Polish with a Yiddish accent. "But then my Aunt Janke said, 'Jacob, don't listen to your Grandma. She's old-fashioned.' And that was that."

A few years later David came to study for his doctorate, and we saw him. At first I didn't recognize him. I hadn't seen him in so long, and he had a beard. But then he threw his arms around me. That was in 1980. David is a mathematician and Jacob is a nuclear scientist. We didn't all get together again until 1981. Jacob and David asked us to come to Israel for Passover, and to get our medal from Yad Vashem, and plant a tree there. I was so happy that I had been able to keep my promise to Jacob.

It was a wonderful reunion. We all had Passover together, even the boys' father. We were there for twenty-one days. David took us to the north and Jacob took us to the south. I know Israel better than Poland. Israel is like a magnet. I like Israel ten times better than the United States.

You know, Rabbi Schulweis has been wonderful to me. People like him in the world maybe you can count on one hand. He invited us to California, he sent us a ticket to go to Israel, he got us $2,000 from Buffalo, and now we get $250 every month from the foundation in New York.

The man who owns this building where we live gives our apartment for less rent. So I told my wife - this is no joke- "Schulweis is like mother and this man is like father. I have two support people." I play the lottery, and if I win I will split it with Schulweis. Sometimes he calls me and I cry when I hear his voice on the phone.

When I look back on those times I think that maybe there were so many anti-Semites in Poland because there were so many Jews who did well in business and the Poles were jealous. In this country, if something happens, nobody helps you. In my building everybody has a car, but many people are very old and can't drive anymore, but no one gives them a ride to go shopping. I never go shopping without taking someone with me.

The best years of my life were when I first came to Warsaw and become successful in business. And then I was so happy when I brought Jacob home. No one was paying me, but I felt I was doing something great. I thought, If I survive this, I've done something great.

Irene Opdyke was once an interior decorator, and her stylish townhouse in Lomita, California, reflects her attention to her surroundings. Her attractive appearance, Zsa Zsa Gabor accent, and sense of drama make her a popular and compelling speaker about the Holocaust. Furthermore, her story of rescue in Warsaw would make a riveting film, and the ending, where she saved all eighteen Jews, is one of success. Unlike some rescuers, she is not shy about talking about her deeds, feeling it is her responsibility to tell children about the price of hate and the courage of a few.

I never talked about what I did during the war, and I still wouldn't be talking about it if I hadn't read that article in the newspaper in the early seventies that said the Holocaust didn't happen. That started my Polish blood cooking and I said, "Well, I have to speak out." And that's the reason I put my time, my heart, and my feelings into speaking about the war, to so many groups, all over the country.

If someone would say I had to go back to do the same things to be able to help people, I'd do it without question. I was born in Poland in 1921. My family was Catholic, and my mother was such a strong influence. She didn't have much schooling but she was smart, and she never turned away anyone from her doorstep. We five girls were always bringing in animals which needed help!

I always wanted to be a nurse, to help people. In 1939, when I was eighteen years old, I was 200 miles from home in central Poland in nursing school. I joined the Polish army with other nurses. One night we were captured by Russian soldiers who had invaded Poland. Three soldiers beat me and the next thing I knew I was on a truck to a Russian hospital. Later I was able to return to Poland on an exchange between Russia and Poland, and I began working in a munitions factory that supplied the German front. One day , because of the fumes, I fainted at the feet of a German major. I looked German because I was blond and blue-eyed, but when he asked me if I was German, I said I wasn't. He liked that I was honest, so he gave me a job working in the kitchen and serving meals to German soldiers.

One day I was running an errand and I found myself in the ghetto. There were all kinds of people, pregnant women, children screaming "Mama, Mama!" Then I saw a woman with an infant in her arms. With one movement of his hand, the SS man pulled the baby away and threw it to the ground. I could not understand. But later on I realized that God gave us free will to be good or bad. So I asked God for forgiveness and said if the opportunity arrived I would help these people.

Soon the German major was transferred to another Polish town, Ternapol, and he took me with him. There I met twelve Jewish people who worked in the Gestapo laundry room. We became friends. They had been people of means, businessmen and women, a medical student, a lawyer, a nurse. I thought we were all the same: we were all in trouble and the Germans were our enemy. One night when I was serving dinner I heard the German officers making plans to raid the ghetto. The Gestapo man said, "Herr Major, Thursday or Friday don't count on the Jews to come to work." I realized that was the day they would make the raid on the barracks. I started getting the message to the laundry room and they got the word around. Many people were able to escape.

Then one day I heard them making plans to wipe out the while ghetto in Ternapol, and I knew this meant my friends in the laundry room would be killed. I didn't know what to do. Then a miracle happened. About three days later the major called me and said, "I have a villa and I want you to be my housekeeper." I knew then that could be the place I would hide the Jews.

They stayed in the attic when the major was downstairs and in the cellar when he was upstairs. Then we had a real problem to deal with. One couple was expecting a baby and we knew the child would cry and make too much noise. They said they'd give up the child, but I said, "Ida, please, wait, don't do anything. We'll see - you'll be free." Then one day in the middle of the marketplace they hanged a Polish couple with their two children and a Jewish couple with their little child. They forced us to stay and watch to see what happened because there were signs on every street corner saying they would do that if you helped Jews. I ran home to my friends. Three of my friends were in the kitchen and I was so shaken that I forgot to leave my key in the lock after I locked the door. This was the way I would protect us from the major coming in unexpectantly. We were talking and all of a sudden the major was standing in the kitchen. He was looking from one to another, trembling, and he didn't say one word. He went to his library.

I ran out after him and he was screaming at me, "I trusted you. How could you do this behind my back, in my own house? How? Why?" I cried. I said, "They are my friends." I was kissing his hands, holding his knees. He said, "No! I am an old man. I have to go now. I'll give you my decision when I return." After a few hours he returned and said he'd help me for a price. He would keep my secret but I had to be his - and willingly, too. There was no other way. I won't tell you it was easy. Not only because he was an old man, but I still remembered the Russians raping me. But I knew there were twelve lives depending on me. This went on for several months until the Germans started losing.

Everyone left the villa and we fled into the forest. We had a radio and we knew the front was coming. Then the Russians came and we were free. And on May 4, 1944, a little boy was born in freedom! That was my payment for whatever hell I went through - seeing that little boy. His name was Roman Heller.

After the war I joined the Polish Partisans hoping to find my family, but instead I was arrested by some Russians. Some Jewish friends helped me escape to Germany. I went to a Jewish displaced-persons camp with all the Jews who were homeless after the war. From that camp they helped people settle in Allied countries. A group of men came from the United Nations to the camp. One was American and he interviewed me and said America would be proud to have me. So I came here in 1949, to the United States, alone. I didn't know a word of English. I worked in a union shop, sewing, and then I met a Polish-Jewish woman who gave me a job, and we've been friends ever since. One day in New York, a man came up to me on the street and he said, "Irene, you don't remember me, but you brought me shoes in the forest." There were so many of these people that I didn't really know.

So for five years I lived alone, working. Then one day I went to the U.N. to have lunch in the cafeteria and I started talking with a man and all of a sudden I realized he was the man who interviewed me. At the same time he was a widower. He asked me to go out to a dinner, six weeks later we were married, and two years later, in 1957, we had a daughter.

I was busy working as an interior designer, and raising my daughter, and traveling a lot with my husband, but still I missed my family in Poland. One night my husband brought a woman home for dinner and she stayed for fourteen years. Her name was Vivian Bennett. She was a wonderful lady and she was going blind. She had no one to help her through eye surgery so I told her she could stay with me. She spent her last $1,500 on the surgery, and from then on I took care of her. She was so intelligent; there wasn't a subject she didn't know about. She was like my mother. I learned so much from her. Yes, she needed me, but I needed her, too. She helped me start my book. I never told her anything about what I did until I returned from Israel in 1982, and then she helped me write speeches. But she didn't finish the book. I could see at the end she was clinging to life so she could finish it. She was in such agony. Finally I told her, "Vivian, you don't owe me anything. Please, rest in peace." And she died that day. I still miss her.

But I always thought of my family in Poland. What happened to them? In 1982 I was honored by Yad Vashem. I went to Israel and planted my tree on the Avenue of the Righteous. There was a lot of publicity, and my family in Poland found out I was still alive. In 1985 I went back to Poland to see my sisters. We went to Auschwitz, and even after so many years there is still a smell of death. I never saw the ovens at Auschwitz. I was like a mother hen sitting on her eggs all during the war. But I was so ashamed for the human nation that genocide of this proportion could happen.

In 1975 I heard a neo-Nazi say that the Holocaust was a hoax, and I decided I had to start talking. I think another Holocaust could happen if we don't mingle together to try to understand one another and not be ignorant. It's my duty to tell the truth about what I saw. So for the last ten years I've been telling my experiences to many groups all over the country, and now I do it so much that I'm only at home about five days each month. My favorite groups are the children. They give me standing ovations, and then the big, macho boys come and give me a big hug and kiss. This is the most important thing for me now, to reach the young people. I tell them, "You can do what I did! Right now! Stand up when you hear name-calling, when you see skinheads. You are the future of the nation." I don't tell them what to do; I tell them I believe in them, that they can do it. They're the last generation that will hear firsthand accounts of the Holocaust. They are the future. We all have to reach out to know we're not alone in the world. You have to give not just money, but you must give yourself.

When we arrive at the dilapidated, two-room house of Stefan and Shoshana Raczynski, in Be'er Ya'akov near Tel Aviv, they introduce us to Danny Ragovsky, a young bus driver who isn't just paying the couple a social call. He has something to tell us. A year and a half before, he had seen a television program describing how the Christian rescuers had been ignored and mistreated in Israel. Danny explained their situation: "Because they weren't Jewish, they had never been entitled to the same rights as citizens, and now they were being denied their pensions. And really, these people are the 'flowers' of our society. We must remember them because a nation which doesn't honor its past will never have a future. These rescuers saved the people who helped build Israel. Here they are called 'The Righteous Among the Nations' and yet we have neglected them all these years. These people are not looking for publicity. They're modest. They're not talking about money either. It's only about attention, you know, tenderness, not more than that."

Danny became connected with Shoshana, who had begun a lobbying network of the forty rescuers in Israel. To get them to meet one another, Danny took them on his bus to Herzlia for a picnic at the seashore; he has continued these outings as regular social occasions. "A lot of them are very old and sick," says Danny. "Now, since this was made public, they're finally getting an extra pension, an honor pension. But it's been a year and it's a little late. They've been living in very, very terrible conditions."

Stefan: I was born in a 1921 on a farm near Vilna. I had a brother and two sisters, and my parents were farmers. Our family was Catholic, and deeply religious. You know, when six people live together they always help one another, and that's what it was like in my family. It was considered natural. In a nearby town lived 800 Jews. My father loved his fellow man; he would take me to meet the merchants, and he taught me to respect Jews.

Shoshana: I was in the Vilna ghetto, and when I was twenty years old my parents were killed and I escaped. I got to a nearby village and started caring for an old woman who had tuberculosis, and Stefan found me there. When the woman died, Stefan found me there. When the woman died, Stefan found me there. When the woman died, Stefan's mother invited me, through Stefan, to come to their home, to stay there, and she even offered to be my mother. And once I was there I met a lot of Jews there.

Stefan: Our farm was even seven kilometers from a forest where Nazis took all the Jews from the nearby town and shot them. They dumped their bodies into a ditch and covered it with sand. I remember seeing them falling like matches. Now some of the people at different stages managed to escape, and they knew about his farm and that the owners were good people who would take them in. Some who were shot but not killed to get out of the forest and make their way to the farm.

It was a natural thing to do, like when you see a cat on the street, hungry, you give it food. When the Jews started coming from the forests and they were hungry, we gave them food and we didn't think anything of it.

The first man to come was a friend of mine from that town who had escaped before they were taken to the forest. After that others came that I didn't know. We had one Jew who used to pray so loud that you could hear him two kilometers away. All the neighbors knew he was there. We had three religious Jews who would eat only dairy, and we had to bring in special plates for them. Altogether we took in about forty people, but we would have only between four and ten at one time. The neighbor kept four people, and that neighbor was also giving the Jews a place to work besides a place to stay.

Shoshana: When I was there you had twenty people in your house, all at the same time. I think you're trying to be modest. I remember the time when Stefan's mother prepared for us a ceremonial dinner for Chanukah. She put colored carpets on the floor, and we all sat together, twenty Jews, and ate, drank, and sang in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. And Stefan guarded in the yard so no stranger would approach the house.Stefan's father would say to each Jew, "Everything that we own belongs to you as well." And Stefan himself slept in the barn with a few of the Jews hiding there.

Stefan: We all felt terrible anxiety that cannot be described. We were scared that the Nazis would come and kill us and burn us. In fact, it was hard for us to believe that it would not happen. Everybody was scared the same way that today Israelis are frightened of terrorists in certain areas.

Every month about twenty or thirty soldiers came looking for Jews. They broke down doors, tore things apart, did everything to find Jews. I stood guard when the Nazi soldiers approached and hid the Jews in the forest. Each of the Jews had a special place to hide; some dug bunkers, or holes which they covered with trees and leaves. They spent a lot of time in these hiding places during the day.

People ask me why I didn't join the Polish Partisan Army, but everyone was fighting everyone else. I didn't want to take part in that. I only wanted to clean the land of the murderers. I was ready to do everything to remove from the neighborhood people who were denouncing the Jews to Lithuanians and Germans. Then a Lithuanian officer told my father they knew we were hiding Jews and we'd be killed if we were found. My father and the officer made a deal: he let the officer live in my uncle's house for free, gave him all the vodka he wanted, in exchange for becoming our informer. He began telling us whenever the Germans were coming so we could make sure the Jews went to their hiding places. After that we all felt a little freer, and because we weren't so scared, the Germans didn't really search the house so much. They would just come sit and drink. One day Germans came to the house and got drunk, but one who was sober found one of the Jews hiding in the barn. He shot him and arrested my father. My mother went to the Lithuanian officer and asked what we should do; this was a jail from which no one ever returned. We had to pay his way out of jail. When he came home he told us about how they had began to torture him when the call came from the officer telling them to release him. After that they left us mostly alone. The police acted as if they were scared or ashamed, or maybe they thought we had only the one Jew here.

The world was crazy; it was like a comedy. Really, there was a lot of humor involved. It was like a game - we wouldn't let ourselves think that....

Shoshana: We wouldn't agree with the world being run that way. And the harder the Germans worked, the harder we worked, because we couldn't accept that way of living.

Stefan: It was like gambling for us. That's how we felt about it. Risking our lives. We only lived until tomorrow.

Shoshana: We ended up being addicted to it.

Stefan: And we were all together.

Shoshana: After the war, Stefan and I married and lived in Vilna, which was then part of Russia. He was almost sent to Siberia, so we returned to Poland under the repatriation laws which said that and Pole than living in Russia may return to Poland. In 1958, we began trying to get a visa to come to Israel, which was refused us because Stefan wasn't Jewish. It was only through my brother that we got permission to come.

Stefan: Jews lived in Poland for one thousand years, but Poles were not allowed in Israel even for a peek. In my passport it said that I am a Jew, but later I hired a lawyer to rewrite it, because I didn't want to lie.

Shoshana: I was a Zionist so I had always wanted to come to Israel, and my only brother had already come here.

Stefan: We finally came to Israel in 1960. AL the rest of my family stayed in Poland. My father is now dead, and my mother is very old. Just before we left for Israel, my father told me, "In Israel, Jews will dote upon you for what you did for them during the war." I was convinced this would be so.

Shoshana: Stefan had changed a great deal since we came to Israel. They injured him; he felt humiliated and he became cynical. When our son went to the army he wanted to be a pilot. They told him, "Your father is a Polish Catholic; you won't be a pilot." Stefan went there and told them, "My son wants to be a pilot, and he will be one." Of course, today our son is already an ex-pilot, and we're very proud of him.

Stefan: He's a great pilot. He gave a lot for Israel. Our daughter got married and lives here.

Shoshana: One day a few religious Jews were throwing stones at our house, screaming, "Go away, goy."

Stefan: I was a Catholic and I will stay a Catholic. Things have been very hard for me here in Israel, but I don't regret what I did during the war. I was honored by Yad Vashem as one of the "Righteous," and in 1985 I was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "I will yet one day hang myself from the tree in the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations. Maybe this will move something." But I've become a little less angry now. I'm sure none of us who are living in Israel regret what we did. Now the country is trying to make amends for the way they wronged me.