There is a moment that happens on almost every Poland journey I lead, usually after several heavy days. A group member, worn down by Auschwitz and the ghetto sites and the cemeteries, asks the question quietly, almost reluctantly: “Did anyone help?” They are afraid of the answer. They have spent days inside the machinery of murder, and they need to know whether anyone stood against it. The answer is yes. In the very country where the death camps were built, ordinary Poles hid Jews in their attics and barns and cellars, fed them, forged papers for them, and walked them to safety, knowing that in occupied Poland the penalty for doing so was death, not only for themselves but for their entire family.
This is the story of the Righteous Among the Nations, and for a heritage group it is not a comfort that erases the horror. It is something more honest. It is proof that even under the most extreme evil, human beings retained the freedom to choose. If you are a rabbi or a pastor bringing your community to Poland, you need this part of the story. It does not lighten the journey. It deepens it.
What “Righteous Among the Nations” Means
The title Righteous Among the Nations, Chasidei Umot HaOlam in Hebrew, is the highest honor the State of Israel bestows on non-Jews. It is awarded by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust remembrance authority, to people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, without seeking payment or reward.
The criteria are strict. The rescuer must have been a non-Jew. The act must have involved real personal risk, to life, liberty, or safety. There must have been no significant financial motive. And the rescue must be documented, usually through the testimony of the survivors themselves. A commission at Yad Vashem, including survivors and historians, reviews each case. When the title is granted, the rescuer’s name is inscribed on the Wall of Honor at the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem, and they receive a medal engraved with a line from the Talmud: “Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world.”
As of recent years, more than twenty-eight thousand people have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. The largest single national group, by a wide margin, is Polish. More Poles have been honored than the citizens of any other country.
Why Poland Holds So Many of These Stories
I want to be careful and honest here, because this history is often flattened in both directions.
Poland under Nazi occupation was the most dangerous place in Europe to help a Jew. In Western European countries, sheltering a Jew might bring imprisonment. In occupied Poland, the Germans imposed the death penalty, and they applied it to the rescuer’s whole household. There are documented cases of entire Polish families, including small children, executed for hiding Jews. The Ulma family of Markowa, a husband, a pregnant wife, and their six children, were murdered together in 1944 for sheltering their Jewish neighbors. They have since been recognized among the Righteous and beatified by the Catholic Church.
So when a Pole chose to help, the stakes were absolute. That is one reason Poland produced so many acts of extraordinary courage, and why so many of the Righteous come from this soil.
I also tell groups the harder truth, because honesty is owed to the dead. Not every Pole was a rescuer. There was indifference, and there was betrayal, including Poles who informed on hidden Jews. The same occupation that produced the Ulmas also produced denunciation. Holding both of these facts at once is not a contradiction. It is what it means to look at human beings clearly. The Righteous shine the way they do precisely because they were not the majority. They chose differently when choosing differently could cost everything.
The People Behind the Title
The honor lists names, but the stories are what a group remembers.
Irena Sendler
A Polish social worker in Warsaw, Irena Sendler used her access to the ghetto to smuggle children out, hidden in ambulances, in toolboxes, in sacks, through the courthouse and the church on the ghetto’s edge. She and her network saved an estimated two thousand five hundred children. She recorded their real names on slips of paper sealed in jars and buried in a garden, so that one day the children might be reunited with whatever remained of their families. She was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and sentenced to death, then saved at the last moment when her network bribed a guard. She lived the rest of her life insisting she had done nothing remarkable, only what was necessary.
The Ulma Family
In the village of Markowa in southeastern Poland, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma hid eight Jews on their small farm. In March 1944, betrayed by an informer, the German police came at dawn. They shot the Jews they found, then shot Józef and the heavily pregnant Wiktoria, and then, on the order of the commanding officer, murdered all six Ulma children, the eldest eight years old. The Markowa Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews now stands in the village, telling not only their story but the stories of rescue across the region.
The Networks and the Unnamed
Many of the Righteous acted alone, a farmer, a nun, a railway worker. Others worked through organized networks. Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was a Polish underground organization created specifically to rescue Jews, the only such government-backed body in occupied Europe. It forged documents, found hiding places, and channeled money to families in hiding. Behind every recognized name there are others who were never honored because the people they saved did not survive to testify, or because they themselves did not survive. The full number of rescuers will never be known.
Where Groups Encounter These Stories in Poland
Markowa
The Ulma Family Museum in Markowa is, for many groups, the single most moving site on this theme. It is set in a quiet village, and it does not flinch. It honors the rescuers while naming the betrayal that exposed them. Groups leave it changed.
Warsaw
The Warsaw of Irena Sendler and Żegota is woven into the wider ghetto story. As we walk the streets of the former ghetto with our guides, we trace the routes children were smuggled out and the institutions on the ghetto’s edge that became escape points. The POLIN Museum addresses the Righteous within the full arc of Polish Jewish history.
The Small Towns
In the towns of Galicia and across rural Poland, rescue often happened on isolated farms, in root cellars and haylofts. When our route passes through these regions, our guides carry the local stories, the names of families honored at Yad Vashem for hiding their neighbors. These are not famous sites. They are the ordinary places where extraordinary things were done.
How to Hold This Story in Your Itinerary
After more than forty years of leading these journeys, here is what I have learned about placing the Righteous in a trip.
Do not use them to soften the truth. If a group spends six days witnessing destruction and then hears a few uplifting rescue stories at the end, it can feel like a tidy resolution to something that has no resolution. That does a disservice to the murdered and to the rescuers both.
Instead, I let the Righteous stand as a question put to every person in the group. These rescuers were not superhuman. They were farmers, social workers, nuns, neighbors. The honest weight of their example is the question it leaves with you: what would I have done, and what am I doing now? That is a question worth carrying home. For Christian groups in particular, the moral and spiritual challenge of the Righteous often becomes the heart of the trip. For Jewish groups, these names are a debt of gratitude that gets spoken aloud, often at the very sites where the rescues happened.
FAQ: The Righteous Among the Nations in Poland
What does “Righteous Among the Nations” mean?
It is the highest honor the State of Israel gives to non-Jews, awarded by Yad Vashem to people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust without seeking reward. Recognized rescuers have their names inscribed at the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem and receive a medal bearing the words, “Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world.”
Why does Poland have the most Righteous Among the Nations?
More Poles have been recognized than the citizens of any other country. Poland under Nazi occupation was also the most dangerous place to help a Jew, since the Germans imposed the death penalty on rescuers and their entire families. The extreme risk makes each act of rescue all the more remarkable, and it is part of why so many of the Righteous come from Poland.
Who was Irena Sendler?
Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who smuggled roughly two thousand five hundred Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and placed them in hiding. She recorded their real names and buried the records in jars so the children might one day be reunited with their families. Arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, she survived the war and was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
What happened to the Ulma family?
Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, a farming couple in the village of Markowa, hid eight Jews on their property. In 1944, after being betrayed, they were murdered by German police along with the Jews they sheltered and all six of their young children. They were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, and a museum in Markowa now honors them and other Polish rescuers.
Does telling the rescue stories minimize the Holocaust?
No, and a careful guide makes sure of that. The stories of the Righteous are told alongside the full truth, including the indifference and betrayal that also existed. The rescuers stand out precisely because they were not the majority. Their example is not a comfort that erases the horror but a moral question for everyone who hears it: what would I have done?
Carrying These Names Home
The Righteous Among the Nations do not undo the catastrophe. Nothing can. But they testify to something the death camps tried to deny, that even in the heart of the killing, a human being could still choose to act with courage and mercy. To bring your community to the places where these choices were made, and to speak these names aloud, is to honor both the murdered and those who tried to save them.
If you are planning a heritage journey through Poland and you want the story of the Righteous woven into it with the care it deserves, I would be glad to help. You can read more about the wider journey in our guide to Jewish heritage in Poland and learn how the group leader experience works through our group heritage tours. For group leaders bringing fifteen or more participants, you travel free.
When you are ready to begin, reach out to us. I have been helping group leaders plan journeys like this for over forty years, and I would be honored to help you plan yours.