The 21-year-old Elisabeta Nicopoi of Jassy (Iaşi) helped many of her Jewish coworkers in the textile factory, as well as Jews in her neighborhood. On June 28, 1941, and in the days following, Romanian military and police units as well as civilians carried out a massacre of Jews in Jassy, together with soldiers of the German army. A total of roughly eight thousand people were murdered.

Elisabeta Nicopoi warned Jews of the violent riots, thereby saving many lives. She hid twenty people in a storeroom, including her coworker Marcus Ştrul and his parents and siblings. When Jews were taken from the city to perform forced labor, she brought them food and clothing. Such action was deemed to be aiding enemies of the state. Gendarmes arrested her, held her for several days, and mistreated her. She suffered from the repercussions for the rest of her life.

Sergeant Anton Schmid of Vienna ran a Wehrmacht office in Vilnius (Vilna) as of September 1941. At this time the mass shootings of Jews in Lithuania by members of the SS and Lithuanian auxiliary troops had already begun. By chance, Schmid ran into two Jews and helped them. He provided them with a new identity and jobs. He also hid some Jews in his work residence and met with members of a resistance group from the Vilna ghetto. Schmid took advantage of his position at the Wehrmacht office and used Jews from the ghetto as forced laborers, thus saving them from being murdered. He even created additional jobs and hired about another 150 people. He procured ID papers and smuggled roughly 300 Jews out of the ghetto and the city with an official truck. In 1942, Anton Schmid was sentenced to death by a war court for the aid he had given and was executed by shooting.

Oskar Schindler was a businessman who took over an enamel works in German-occupied Kraków in 1939. In 1941, Jewish forced laborers from the Kraków ghetto began working there. Schindler—at first an advocate of Nazism—was an eyewitness to the violent persecution in the ghetto. He tried to protect his workers. After the ghetto was liquidated in March of 1943, the surviving inhabitants were moved to the forced workers’ camp in Plaszow, on the outskirts of Kraków. Schindler convinced Amon Göth, the camp commander, to give him permission to house his workers on the grounds of the enamel works factory. By doing so, he protected them from the terror in the camp and saved them from deportation. When the Plaszow camp was cleared in 1944, Schindler had to move his operations to Brünnlitz (Brněnec). He again successfully negotiated to take his Jewish forced workers with him. His wife Emilie attended to feeding the workers. The couple was thus able to save at least 1,100 people.

Carl Lutz organized one of the largest rescue operations of World War II in Hungary. In 1942 he became vice-consul at the Swiss embassy in Budapest. German troops invaded Hungary in March 1944. With Hungarian support, 400,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz extermination camp within only a few weeks. Although a Swiss diplomat, Lutz also represented the interests of Great Britain in Hungary and kept lists for emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine. He obtained emigration certificates for 7,800 people. To save them from deportation, he issued letters of protection without the authorization of the Swiss authorities. By reusing the number on each certificate many times, he was able to issue thousands of additional letters of protection. There were also numerous forgeries in circulation. Carl Lutz placed 76 buildings in the Budapest ghetto under diplomatic protection. The more than 30,000 Jews housed there were given food and support. Up to 62,000 Jews survived thanks to Carl Lutz’s efforts.

Maria von Maltzan lived in Berlin and met Hans Hirschel, a Jewish author, in 1939; they became a couple. As of 1942, Hans Hirschel lived in hiding in her apartment. Maltzan was denounced in mid-1943. The Gestapo spent hours searching her apartment. At the last minute, Hirschel had hidden in a foldout couch they had prepared for such an occasion. Thanks to her quick-wittedness, Maria von Maltzan was able to prevent the Gestapo men from opening the couch, and Hirschel was not discovered. Maltzan later also took in others at risk. She ran an animal shelter and worked in slaughterhouses, so she was able to obtain food for those in hiding and medicine for the sick. Together with helpers in the Swedish Victoria congregation in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district, Maltzan helped Jews escape to Sweden. Maria von Maltzan and Hans Hirschel were together in Berlin when the war ended.