Swiss, Hungarian awarded Yad Vashem medals
(AP) -- Four Swiss and a Hungarian were honoured Monday with an Israeli award recognising the sacrifice of non-Jews who risked their lives to help persecuted Jews.
(AP) — Four Swiss and a Hungarian were honoured Monday with an Israeli award recognising the sacrifice of non-Jews who risked their lives to help persecuted Jews.
Switzerland’s diplomatic envoy to Hungary in winter 1944, Harald Feller, was honoured for protecting groups of Jews in his own home.
Also recognised was Jean-Edouard Friedrich, who helped Jews flee to neutral Switzerland as the International Committee of the Red Cross envoy to Berlin from 1940-45.
Posthumous awards went to a Swiss man, Ernest Witwer, who helped two young Jewish brothers escape France, and another Swiss envoy to Hungary, Peter Zuercher, helped prevent thousands being sent to concentration camps.
Hungarian optician Imre Haynal hid Jews from the German Gestapo in his office.
The medals, conferred by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance authority, were handed over at a ceremony by Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Mayer.
Recipients of the Israeli award include Oskar Schindler, immortalized in the film “Schindler’s List.”
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