The B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (JRJ Committee) decided last week to present their joint Jewish Rescuers Citation to seven additional Jewish heroes who endangered their lives to rescue fellow Jews during and immediately following the Holocaust. They join more than 650 Jewish rescuers who operated in Germany and throughout Nazi-occupied and allied countries in Europe and North Africa who have been honored with the citation since its founding in 2011.

Members of the citation committee are Aryeh Barnea, JRJ Committee chairman and educator; Holocaust historian Prof. Gideon Greif; historian and political scientist Dr. Tsilla Hershco; Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, former director of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations Department; doctoral candidate Ido Gilad; Prof. Yoel Yaari, professor emeritus of neurosciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Holocaust researcher; and B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem director Alan Schneider.

The honorees are:

Leya (Liza) Gutkovich:

A 25-year-old native of Minsk, Byelorussia—was one of 200 members of a Jewish women’s brigade of slave laborers from the Minsk ghetto who carried wood and coal to heat the German Air Force Command in Minsk, under the command of German Lt. Willi Schultz. Schultz appointed Gutkovich and Ilsa Stein—an 18-year-old Jewish slave laborer from Frankfurt, Germany—as his assistants in order to be in close proximity to Stein who he had fallen in love with. When Schultz sought her help to defect with Ilsa to the partisans, Gutkovich—who had connections to the Polish underground—conditioned her assistance on Schultz arranging a truck, driver and work orders that would provide cover for the escape of 25 Jews from the ghetto. The dangerous plan worked and the group reached Rusakovichi—one of the first villages in the partisan zone. Gutkovich fought with distinction with the partisans while Schultz and Stein were sent to Moscow where their son died shortly after birth and Schultz was taken for interrogation, never to return.

Zvi Spiegel:

A 29-year-old native of Munkács in Sub-Carpathian Rus’—was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 after serving in the forced labor units of the Hungarian army. Upon his arrival, Spiegel, a twin himself, was put in charge of the twin boys who were subjected to medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele. Until liberation on Jan. 27, 1945, Spiegel emerged as the boys’ leader and guardian, endangering his life to ease the children’s suffering and add brothers who were not twins to the group. Following liberation, rather than abandoning the young twins, he led them on a dangerous journey home to Hungary, traveling over hundreds of kilometers in the midst of chaos and hardship.

Aldo Pacifici:

Born in Florence, Italy in 1894—was a decorated Jewish Royal Italian Army special forces soldier during World War I, wounded in action twice. Following the war, Pacifici became a customs official and was promoted in 1936 to head the customs office at the strategic town of Ponte Chiasso on the Swiss-Italian border.  Under the 1938 racial laws, Pacifici was stripped of his position and dismissed from civil service. His two children were also barred from attending public school.

Endangering his life, Pacifici turned his home into a staging area for Jewish refugees attempting dangerous, clandestine crossings over the northern border into neutral Switzerland after the Nazi occupation of northern Italy in September 1943. Pacifici arranged the necessary financial cover and possessed unmatched, expert knowledge of the border’s topography, patrol schedules, and security gaps. Along with his brother Goffredo (recognized as a Jewish rescuer in 2014), Pacifici was instrumental in the famous rescue of the Jewish orphans housed in Villa Emma in Nonantola by (DELASEM). After 70 children were successfully smuggled across the Tresa River into Switzerland in October 1943, both brothers decided to remain in Italy to continue their rescue activities, further endangering their lives. Their operations came to a tragic end on Dec. 7, 1943, when they were arrested together following a local tip-off to the authorities. They were detained, transferred to the Fossoli transit camp, and ultimately deported on a convoy to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where both brothers were murdered.

Avraham Friedman:

Born in Dołhinów, Poland in 1918—volunteered to build the wall surrounding the ghetto following the Nazi occupation of Dołhinów in June 1941. Friedman engineered a section to allow him to clandestinely take Jews in and out of the ghetto  as well as bring in supplies, together with his friend Yaakov Segalchik (a recipient of the Jewish Rescuers Citation in 2019). Following the March 28, 1942, mass massacre (Aktion) that devastated Dołhinów’s  Jewish community, Friedman and another survivor, Shimon Shapiro, managed to escape the ghetto and joined a Soviet partisan unit led by Vasily Voronyansky (“Uncle Vasya”) and Ivan Timchuk, a local official who had known and employed many Dołhinów Jews before the war. From the nearby forests, Friedman led units that broke into ghettos and freed their inhabitants, among them the Dołhinów Ghetto (110 to150 saved), the Postawy Ghetto (at least 15 saved) and the Miadzioł Ghetto (approximately50 to60 saved). Friedman and Segalchik would go on to serve as  deputy commanders of the unit and were central to the establishment of a family camp for non-combatant Jews they rescued.

László Szamosi:

Born in Budapest on Oct. 28, 1913—was a wealthy young Budapest real estate dealer. Before the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, he had taken the precaution of selling a valuable downtown building plot for a substantial sum and saved the cash in case of sudden need. When restrictions were imposed on the Jews by the Sztójay Government, Szamosi bought Christian identification papers for himself, his wife, and their two small children, and the family went into hiding.

After the fascist Iron Cross Party took control of the government, the Szamosi family moved to one of the homes on Dob Street established by Ottó Komoly—president of the Zionist movement, co-founder of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee and head of Section A of the International Red Cross in Hungary, appointed by Friedrich Born, Chief Delegate of ICRC in Hungary–along with Zionist youth movements and under the nominal patronage of the International Red Cross, for abandoned or orphaned Jewish children. Thanks to his Christian identification papers, Aryan appearance and composure under pressure, Szamosi was able to purchase and deliver supplies for the children at his own expense.

Szamosi joined Section A as a volunteer and, with his wife Bözsi, forged Swiss Schutzpasses in large numbers using their typewriter, which had the same typeface as the machine used toprint the Swiss passes. They would learn from the children who were brought to the home the names of their parents who had been deported and herded temporarily into a large brickyard on the outskirts of the city.  Szamosi then would extract them with the help of the false papers—an operation that put him in contact with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

With the beginning of the death marches in early November 1944, Szamosi convinced Spanish Embassy chargé d’affaires Angel Sans-Briz to extend its diplomatic protection beyond the few Spanish-descended Jews.  Whenever Wallenberg sent a group of rescued Jews back from the frontier by train, Szamosi would meet them and help bring them safely into Swedish and other protected houses. Szamosi bribed policemen to help him escort those under his protection through the streets, displaying his Red Cross credentials to anyone who made inquiries.

At the urging of Born, Komoly and Szamosi received official diplomatic status at the Spanish embassy—the sole foreign mission that recognized the Szálasi regime as legitimate. When the diplomatic staff fled from Budapest rather than risk capture by the Soviets, Szamosi and Komoly used the embassy’s stamps, seals, printed forms and a car with diplomatic plates to claim extraterritorial status for the Dob Street children’s home and Section A headquarters. Szamosi fictitiously appointed Giorgio Perlasca—an Italian who had been living for some years in an apartment in the embassy building—as consul-general. Together they went on dangerous rescue missions to recover Spanish-protected Jews who had been taken by the Arrow Cross, at times marching into party houses where the Arrow Cross would torture their captives before killing them.

Lászlo Szamosi survived the war and Soviet occupation, eventually making his way with his wife and children to pre-state Israel, where he founded a real estate business in Haifa.

Siegfried Viteslav Lederer:

A Czech Jewish prisoner from the BIIb family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau—managed to escape the camp on April 5, 1944, dressed in an SS uniform, with the help of SS member Victor Pestek. This was one of the first documented escapes from Auschwitz. Lederer’s mission was to enter Theresienstadt, expose the prisoners to the truth about the extermination in the gas chambers in Auschwitz, warn them of the annihilation that awaits them, and call upon public opinion in the free world to take reprisals.

Lederer (1904-1972) was born to a Jewish family in Albersdorf (now Písařova Vesces), in the Tachov district of the Sudetenland. Influenced by communism, he joined a Czech resistance group opposing the German occupation. In November 1939 and again in November 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo for anti-regime activities but was released due to lack of evidence.  However, when he was arrested for the third time, he was imprisoned in the “Little Fortress” of Theresienstadt, a Gestapo prison, where he was interrogated and released to Pilsen. On Jan. 18, 1942, he was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto and on Dec. 18, 1943, was sent to the BIIb family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.  

Lederer and Pestek managed to get to the train station in Auschwitz and board the direct train to Prague. There they found refuge with Lederer’s acquaintances in the resistance movement.  With the help of the Czech barber Wöcław Veseli, Lederer secretly entered the ghetto and conveyed the horrors of mass murder to the Jewish leadership. Aware of the danger to the ghetto if news of his arrival would reach the 35,000 inmates, Lederer was smuggled out that same night, and hid in several places with the help of members of the underground.

In May 1944, Lederer risked his life and returned to the ghetto four times, smuggling guns, ammunition, hand grenades, medicine and a small radio transmitter. In June 1944, Lederer tried to smuggle a report on Auschwitz to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Switzerland, which did not reach his destination. Lederer joined partisan groups and was wounded during one of the operations and survived the war. He married a woman and lived in Prague until his death in 1972.

Yeshayahu Drucker:

Born in 1914 in Jordanów, Poland, and raised in Kraków—lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Following the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, he fled eastward from Warsaw and was arrested by the Red Army on Dec. 31, 1939, imprisoned and deported to the Komi forced labor camp near the North Pole. He was released in 1943 following a cooperation pact between the Soviet Union and the Polish Government-in-exile and immediately enlisted in the newly formed Polish Kosciuszko Division, participating in the advance on Berlin.

After the war, Chief Jewish Chaplain of the Polish Army Rabbi David Kahana, appointed Drucker as his aide and assigned him to retrieve Jewish children hidden by non-Jewish Poles. Appearing in Polish Army uniform with the rank of captain, Drucker worked ceaselessly for the release of Jewish children, often providing substantial payments to the host families with funds made available by the Joint Distribution Committee and the Orthodox Vaad Hatzalah in the United States. In some cases, forceful removal was needed when host families refused to release the child, and in some cases the children resisted repatriation.

Operating in a hostile anti-Jewish environment in which 1,000-2,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms in Poland after the War, Drucker located 600-700 Jewish children (out of an estimated total of 2,000-3,000 found by collective Jewish efforts after the war) who were quickly moved out of Poland to pre-state Israel and other countries, including 500 of them who were rescued by Chief Rabbi Issac Herzog in 1946. On some rescue missions, Drucker encountered armed men and villagers who tried to prevent repatriation of the children. He and his colleagues also fought for custody of the children in Polish courts. After the Communist regime took full control of Poland and closed all Zionist-affiliated institutions, Drucker left for Israel in 1950 where he continued to check on the well-being of the liberated children.