February 2013: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has posthumously honored Varian Fry, an American journalist responsible for aiding thousands of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, with the ADL Jan Karski ‘Courage to Care’ Award. The award was presented posthumously to Fry on February 8, 2013 during the League’s National Executive Committee Meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, where it was accepted on behalf of the family by his son, James Fry. “This award does cause a mix of emotions for me,” his son, James, stated in accepting the award on his father’s behalf. “I regret that he couldn’t be here, and that he didn’t obtain much recognition in his lifetime. My father loved to fight battles. This was a very useful trait for his time in Marseilles, because he was facing an enormous evil, a black and white choice, a clear danger even to himself.”
Varian Fry organized mass rescue efforts together with a group of American expatriates, French nationals and other refugees by obtaining foreign visas and passports. Through the coordination of hired guides, smuggling routes were created, and over a 13-month period Fry was able to aid close to 4,000 refugees. He facilitated the escape of close to 2,000 individuals targeted by the German Gestapo, including such distinguished artists and intellectuals as Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Mann. Fry’s activities became difficult to keep secret and he was eventually expelled from France in 1941. In 1994, the State of Israel bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations for Fry’s remarkable rescue efforts.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor stated, “Varian Fry stood up to say ‘no’. Others did too, but too few.” “And we know that whenever and wherever good people stood up to say ‘no,’ Jews lived, Catholics lived, and others lived. Imagine what would have happened if there were more people like Varian Fry.” The ADL ‘Courage to Care’ Award is named in honor of one of its first recipients, Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat and righteous Gentile who provided the West with one of the first eyewitness accounts of Hitler’s Final Solution. It is made possible through a generous grant from Eileen Ludwig-Greenland. The award was presented in the form of a plaque with bas-reliefs that was designed by noted sculptor Arbit Blatas and depicts the horrifying context, the Nazis’ persecution, deportation and murder of millions of Jews that served as a backdrop for the rescuers’ exceptional deeds.

Dr.Tina Strobos, a Dutch woman who rescued more than 100 Jews during the Holocaust, passed away, on February 27 at the age of 91, at her home in Rye, N.Y.  Dr. Strobos, who died of cancer, was honored as “righteous among the nations” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem in 1989. The Talmudic saying, “Whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he had saved the entire world,” may best articulate the heroic life of Dr. Strobos and the memory she will leave behind.

Yad Vashem documented that about 80 percent of the 140,000 Jewish residents of Holland were murdered at the hands of the Nazis. Anne Frank, the teenage girl whose diary came to symbolize the story of countless Jews who were forced into hiding in an attempt to escape the Nazis, hid with her family in an Amsterdam attic just blocks away from Dr. Strobos’s home. Dr. Strobos stated, “If I knew they were there, I would have gotten them out of the country.”

Dr. Strobos and her mother turned their three-story home, which was behind the Royal Palace of Amsterdam into a Jewish shelter and provided their guests with food and medical care as well as false passports. In the beginning, she worked primarily on arming and equipping the resistance fighters. She ran guns, explosives and radios, sometimes hiding them in her bicycle basket during journeys of 50 miles. But as armed resistance became increasingly dangerous, she turned her efforts to helping her Jewish friends and later others seeking a way out of the country.

February 28, 2012: A nun and a deceased priest were honoured as “Righteous Gentiles” for saving three Jewish children in France during the Holocaust. Last year, the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad VaShem decided to award Father Joseph Caupert, Sister Marie-Emilienne and Mother Marie-Rose Brugeron the title of Righteous Among the Nations. The ceremony recognizing Mother Marie-Rose Brugeron will take place in France.

Sister Marie Emilienne received the medal and certificate of honor as did the nephew of the late Father Joseph Caupert at a ceremony at the French embassy and in the presence of Gabrielle Hochman, who survived the Holocaust in hiding at a Catholic orphanage.

Gabrielle Hochman’s family’s story began in 1923, when David and Hella-Zyssa Hochman emigrated from Poland to France and settled in the city of Metz. They bore two children, Annie and René, and after the German invasion in 1940, they moved to Nice, where Gabrielle was born.

Three years later, Italian forces ruled the region after the Nazi occupation, and the Hochmans turned over their three children to the French Jewish humanitarian organization, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE). The OSE saved approximately 5,000 children, including non-Jews, during the war.

The father, with the help of his Catholic brother-in-law, hid the children in a convent in Mende under the supervision of Father Joseph Caupert and Mother Superior Marie Rose Brugeron. They and Sister Marie-Emilienne kept the girls’ Jewish identity secret, and the nun took it upon herself to protect Gabrielle whenever there was danger from the Nazis. She did not even disclose the girl’s Jewish identity to the nun who was taking care of her.

The Hochman parents went into hiding elsewhere, but the mother was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis after the Gestapo caught her on her way to visit her children. She was murdered by the Nazis on November 2, 1942. After the war, the father and his two girls were reunited but never discussed their experiences of the Holocaust. The fate of her brother Rene remains unknown.

Gabrielle Hochman began inquiries in the 1990s with the Association of Jewish Children Hidden during the Holocaust. The OSE found her name on a list of children who were secretly hidden. She traveled to France in 1994 to meet Sister Marie-Emilienne, who was honored three years later in Mende.