NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / World

77 years after Auschwitz, Jews honour those who rescued them

AP
25 Jan, 2022 11:19 PM5 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

The 93-year-old Polish citizen Andrzej Sitkowski, was named 'Righteous Among the Nations' by Yad Vashem in 1995. Photo / AP

The 93-year-old Polish citizen Andrzej Sitkowski, was named 'Righteous Among the Nations' by Yad Vashem in 1995. Photo / AP

Andrzej Sitkowski was 15 when his mother told him that she had been asked by a neighbour to hide a little Jewish girl from the Nazis at their home.

"It was a short conversation, and then, yes, we decided to take in Hadassah and she was brought over to our house in 1943," Sitkowski says, looking back at those difficult years during World War II when he lived with his widowed mother Helena and younger sister Magda on the outskirts of the Polish capital of Warsaw under German occupation.

"Of course, we were afraid, but fear was our daily dish during those years anyway," Sitkowski told the Associated Press at his home in the Bavarian village of Durach where he settled 10 years ago with his German wife.

Almost eight decades after Hadassah Kosak's rescue, the 93-year-old Polish man is still regularly in touch with Kosak, now 84, who after the war immigrated via Israel to the United States where she became a professor of history in New York.

For their efforts to help save the lives of Kosak, her sister Marion and their mother Bronislawa, who later also came to stay with the Sitkowskis, Andrzej and his mother were given Israel's highest honour in 1995. They were named "Righteous Among the Nations" — a title bestowed on non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust by Yad Vashem, the country's official Holocaust remembrance organisation.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

This year, as the world commemorates the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp on January 27, 1945, Yad Vashem and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany have teamed up to highlight the stories of "Righteous Rescuers" like the Sitkowskis who risked everything, even their own lives, to save Jews from getting slain by the Nazis and their henchmen.

As part of a social media campaign called #Don'tBeABystander, the Claims Conference and Yad Vashem are releasing several videos and launching a website about people who saved Jews during the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were murdered across Europe.

"One of the amazing thing about the rescuers is that not only did they rescue the specific person who was hidden, but all of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren — an entire family tree," said Greg Schneider, the executive vice-president of the Claims Conference.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"It says in the Jewish tradition that if you save one person it is as if you save the whole world," Schneider told the AP.

Over the past 60 years Yad Vashem has recognised about 28,000 individuals from some 50 countries as "Righteous Rescuers." The organisation still receives hundreds of applications each year to honor others, mostly posthumously. Of all the rescuers still alive today, most helped their parents as children or teenagers.

A group of Jewish people are escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers. Photo / AP
A group of Jewish people are escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers. Photo / AP

"We believe about 200 of them are still alive and most of them are living in Europe," said Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem. "As antisemitism is growing again on all five continents, we need to stress again the moral stature of these persons and their actions."

In Poland, home to Europe's largest Jewish community before the Holocaust, the Nazi occupiers punished those who helped Jews by executing not only the helpers, but their entire families.

Still, when you ask Sitkowski about why he and his mother decided to help Jews despite the huge personal risks, he shrugs and says it simply was their duty as human beings.

"When my mother told me about the request from the neighbour there were no long deliberations. The approval was somehow obvious," Sitkowski remembers, tucking in his red scarf.

"It was just an impulsive decision of a Mensch," he adds, using the German word for human being that in Yiddish also refers to a particularly good person.

Sitting in his living room overlooking the snowy foothills of the Alps, he smiles when he thinks of Hadassah.

"She was a beautiful little girl, very smart, with sort of darkish hair and black eyes — I grew very fond of her."

Even today, there's still a strong bond between them. In the past, they would visit each other and nowadays they talk on the phone and exchange letters.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

In their conversations, their memories often wander back to those months of hiding when the Sitkowskis shared their meagre food rations with Hadassah, when Andrzej taught 5-year-old Hadassah how to read and write, and when they made their neighbors and acquaintances believe a fabricated story in which Hadassah was not a Jew, but a Christian-Polish girl whose mother had been taken to Germany as a forced labourer.

A group of Polish Jews are led away for deportation by German SS soldiers during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Photo / AP
A group of Polish Jews are led away for deportation by German SS soldiers during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Photo / AP

In reality, Hadassah's mother was hiding as a maid with another family and her sister Marion was hiding at a Catholic convent. But when those hiding places were no longer safe, the two joined Hadassah at the Sitkowskis.

In September 1944, however, the Nazis first burned down the Sitkowski home and many other houses on their street and then later expelled all people who had lived there. So they needed to escape again and eventually the Sitkowskis and Kosaks had to split up and survived the last months of the war in different places across Poland until the Soviet Army liberated Poland in January 1945.

While Hadassah Kosak first moved to Israel and later to the United States, her mother and sister ended up in Britain, where Marion married Ralph Miliband and where their two sons Ed and David, two well-known politicians with the British Labour Party, were born.

The decision of Andrzej and his mother to offer a shelter "was a true act of humanity," Hadassah Kosak told the AP. "Thanks to their bravery, and at a great risk to themselves, we survived the Nazi horrors."

Save

    Share this article

Latest from World

World

Russia launches 400 drones, missile in latest Ukraine assault

World

US agents seize $16m in crypto tied to Sinaloa cartel in major busts

World

LA protests: Pentagon pulls back half of guard troops


Sponsored

Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from World

Russia launches 400 drones, missile in latest Ukraine assault
World

Russia launches 400 drones, missile in latest Ukraine assault

The attacks left one woman dead and more than two dozen people wounded.

16 Jul 09:28 AM
US agents seize $16m in crypto tied to Sinaloa cartel in major busts
World

US agents seize $16m in crypto tied to Sinaloa cartel in major busts

16 Jul 08:33 AM
LA protests: Pentagon pulls back half of guard troops
World

LA protests: Pentagon pulls back half of guard troops

16 Jul 08:24 AM


Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky
Sponsored

Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky

06 Jul 09:47 PM
NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP