American Jews honor Polish Holocaust rescuers

By Rob Strybel

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poles who risked their lives a half century ago by taking in fugitive Jews during the Nazi Holocaust were honored in Warsaw on Sunday, in what may be one of their final gatherings.

They recalled how they tucked Jews into odd hiding places when German soldiers were on the prowl, risking the death penalty for themselves and their family.

"At various times we had up to nine people living in our flat. They had free run of the house, but when they heard a knock at the door, they would all run down to a special hiding place next to the coal bin," said Waclaw Nowinski, 83.

He was one of about 60 ageing Poles invited to the event by the U.S.-based Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR), all of them medal-holders of the Yad Vashem Institute's Righteous among the Nations decoration.

Since its inception in 1986, the JFR has spent millions of dollars supporting needy Gentile rescuers like Nowinska and Irena Senderska-Rzonca, who was only 13 in 1943 when her family provided a safe haven for a Jewish doctor's family in the eastern Polish town of Boryslaw, now in Ukraine.

She recounted how a Jew named Dr Bander asked her father if he could help his wife and five-year-old son, she said.

"We hid them in the dovecote, and I would take food and water up to them. They were later joined by the father."

On one occasion Nazi officers were billeted in the house and German soldiers bedded down in the attic, separated from their quarry by only the thinnest of slats.

STAYING IN TOUCH

Like many Yad Vashem medal-holders, Senderska-Rzonca has stayed in touch with her beneficiaries. "Miron Bander was just a little boy back then. He is now a successful physics professor in California," she said.

Nowinski said he had been in contact with a rescued Jew named Bronowski until his death in Israel last year at 103.

"We're still in touch with Janina Panski of Tel Aviv. My dad arranged forged Aryan (racial-purity) documents for her, and because she didn't look Jewish she could freely walk the streets," he explained.

During World War Two, Poland was the only country in German-occupied Europe where anyone aiding Jews risked death. In was also the only occupied country whose government-in-exile set up an underground organization for the express purpose of aiding and saving Jews.

According to estimates, up to 120,000 Jews who could not have survived the Holocaust without help were rescued, and over 6,000 Poles were subsequently awarded the Righteous Among Nations medal, more than any other country.

There was a bittersweet note to the Warsaw ceremony.