In December of 1942, a secret committee to aid Jews—Żegota—formed in Warsaw. People with different political orientations came together in this aid organization, including many Jews. The headquarters were in Warsaw, but there were also offices in Kraków, Lviv, Zamość, and Lublin. The Polish government in exile and foreign Jewish aid organizations financed the group’s work. Members of Żegota supported ghetto inhabitants, helped them flee, and arranged hiding places for them. The organization set up a number of departments, which were responsible for arranging secret quarters, work, food, clothing, and medicine. Żegota forged thousands of ID documents and supported those in hiding financially. The council circulated flyers, appealing to the population to help Jews. The Kraków section of Żegota helped Jews escape to Hungary. In Warsaw alone, Żegota supported up to four thousand people.

Johann (Joop) Westerweel, a teacher, met numerous young chaluzim (Zionist pioneers) from Loosdrecht near Amsterdam in 1941. Together with the leaders of their youth group, he founded a network to rescue the young people. When deportations became imminent in August of 1943, Westerweel and his wife Wilhelmina, with the help of friends, found hiding places for all fifty chaluzim. Soon the group established escape routes. Westerweel and his circle of helpers smuggled refugees through Belgium and France to Spain and Switzerland. They created false identities for others, enabling them to survive.

Wilhelmina Westerweel was arrested in December of 1943. Consequently, Joop Westerweel went underground, and yet a short time later he again smuggled a group out of the country. During the operation he and other helpers were arrested and imprisoned in Herzogenbusch concentration camp, where they were maltreated. Joop Westerweel was murdered on August 11, 1944. The group nevertheless continued its work and smuggled another two hundred Jews into France. In all, they saved roughly three hundred Jews.

Under the code name Carl Fredriksen Transport, a handful of people saved 350 Norwegian Jews and hundreds of resistance fighters. It was the most comprehensive rescue operation in Norway. Two trucks drove across the border to Sweden five days a week in November and December of 1942, carrying up to forty refugees on each journey.

Alf Pettersen worked for a large haulage company. He came from the border region and was familiar with safe escape routes. When his friend Rolf Syversen asked him to help a Jewish family, he drove them to the border. Subsequently, Pettersen and Syversen continued to provide aid. Reidar Larsen led the group. As the haulage company’s vehicle fleet manager, he made the trucks and drivers available. The group was supported by Norwegian resistance organizations. They procured the money to pay for the drivers and the fuel.

In early January of 1943, the Gestapo discovered the group. Some of them were able to escape with their families to Sweden. Others were sentenced to penal servitude. Syversen was taken to the Grini detention camp and shot.

The prison chaplain Harald Poelchau and his wife Dorothee of Berlin were staunch opponents of the Nazi dictatorship from the very beginning. Poelchau was determined to help persecuted Jews. When the deportations began in October of 1942, he helped Jews go underground. He was supported in his efforts by his wife Dorothee as well as by friends and acquaintances. Harald Poelchau arranged lodgings, food, and ID papers, as well as opportunities for work. In helping those in hiding, he also worked with a network that called itself “Uncle Emil.”

Harald Poelchau also met with Jews seeking help in his office in the Berlin-Tegel prison. There they could talk freely about the situation and concrete offers of assistance. Those who called him in his prison office were supposed to speak only if Poelchau answered the phone mentioning the code word “Tegel.”