In Europe

Walraven and Gijs van Hall carried out the biggest banking fraud in Dutch history: with the proceeds, theirorganisation was able to keep alive for years tens of thousands of resistance people and those in hiding.
    In Marseille, the American Varian Fry helped in the escape of hundreds of prominent European intellectuals. The 3,000 inhabitants of the isolated French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (Haute-Loire), led by Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, provided shelter throughout the war years for more than 5,000 Jews. In Vilnius, Anton Schmidt, a sergeant major in the
Wehrmacht
, saved thousands of Jews from the firing squad. At Kaunas, Japanese consul Sempo Sugihara allowed at least 1,600 Jewish refugees to escape by giving them transit visas for Japan. In Krakow, the industrialist Oskar Schindler was able to save most of his Jewish workers. Something similar was achieved at the Skoda plant in the Czech town of Plzeń by Albert Göring, the brother of Hitler's right-hand man.
    In October 1943, most of Denmark's Jews were able to escape to Sweden on a few fishing boats, aided by the police, the churches, the Danish coastguard and countless unsung Danes. Almost all 50,000 of Bulgaria's Jews were left in peace until the end of the war, thanks to the outspoken public opinion against deportations expressed in the newspapers, the pulpits and at public meetings, a popular will which the Nazis did not dare to defy. Jews generally received protection in the areas under Italian control as well; the Italian officers considered the anti-Semitic politics of the Germans ‘incompatible with the honour of the Italian Army’.
    In Hungary, the Red Cross representative Friedrich Born, along with the diplomats Carl Lutz (of Switzerland) and Raoul Wallenberg (of Sweden), was able to save the lives of many tens of thousands of Jews by means of a highly dangerous ruse involving Swedish passports and British immigration permits for Palestine. Wallenberg came from a rich and famous family of Swedish bankers and industrialists. During his activities in Hungary he was in constant contact with Nazis and Western leaders. For the perpetually paranoid agents of the NKVD, that was enough to label him a spy. Immediately after the Russians occupied the country in January 1945, he and his chauffeur were arrested. Within the Soviet Gulag camp system he was registered as a ‘prisoner of war’; in the years that followed, there were regular rumours of his having been seen here or there by recently released prisoners. Those rumours were neverconfirmed. In 1957, the Soviets came up with a document dated 17 July, 1947 in which it was stated that ‘the prisoner Wallenberg, well known to you, died last night in his cell’. It was signed by Smoltsov, former director of the infirmary at Moscow's Lubyanka prison. Wallenberg, it was claimed, had died of ‘coronary failure’. In November 2000, the chairman of a new Russian investigation committee admitted in a footnote to his report that the diplomat had probably been executed in 1947. The motive for his abduction was purely commercial: the Soviet government had hoped in this way to force the Wallenbergs to provide them with some politically sensitive supplies.
    Tens of thousands of European families took Jews into hiding, hundreds of thousands of families were involved in channelling rations, countless larger and smaller resistance groups fought for and alongside runaway Jews. The risks were enormous, the sanctions were grave, yet still it went on.
    In Belgium, some 35,000 of the country's 60,000 Jews were saved in this fashion: 60 per cent. In France, 270,000 of the 350,000 Jews survived: more than 75 per cent. In Norway, 1,000 of the 1,800 Jews survived: approximately 60 per cent. Of the 7,500 Danish Jews, more than 100 died: 98 per cent were saved. In other parts of the continent, the percentage of survivors was much lower: in the Netherlands, only 40,000 of the country's 140,000 Jews made it through the war: less than 30 per cent. Of the 2.7 million Polish Jews, barely 75,000 survived: 2 per cent. At the same time, for their singular courage in the war, it has been helpers from these latter two countries who have most often received the honorary title of ‘Righteous among Nations’ from the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum: 5,373 and 4,289, respectively.
    It would be simple enough to equate such figures, as is sometimes done, with values like ‘courage’ or ‘humanity’, or