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Salute Those Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

(Observer-UK) Martin Gilbert - The idea that "One Person Can Make a Difference" is the theme of this year's Holocaust Day, which falls each year on 27 January, coinciding with the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Berlin, in the years leading up to the outbreak of war, Captain Foley, the British passport control officer, handed out far more emigration certificates and visas than he was entitled to do. He used his imagination to circumvent the rules he was meant to follow. As a result, several thousand German Jews were able to make their way to safety. In Frankfurt, British Consul General Robert Smallbones likewise bent the rules. Following the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when more than 1,000 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of shops and homes wrecked, the British government welcomed almost 10,000 German-Jewish children. To find homes for so many refugees, many Christian families opened their homes. Randolph Churchill, who had volunteered to parachute behind German lines in Yugoslavia, suggested to his father that aircraft flying military supplies into areas controlled by Marshal Tito's anti-German partisans should, when they flew back to their bases in southern Italy, take with them Jews who had fled into Yugoslavia in search of a safe haven. Winston Churchill put his son's suggestion to Tito, who agreed. As a result, several hundred Jews were saved.
2006-01-27 00:00:00
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