“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.

“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 recognized about 28,000 individuals from some 50 countries as “Righteous Rescuers.” The organization 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.

“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 neighbor 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.

In their conversations, their memories often wander back to those months of hiding when the Sitkowskis shared their meager food rations with Hadassah, when Andrzej taught five-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 laborer.

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.

https://ca.yahoo.com/news/77-years-auschwitz-jews-honor-074006991.html