Edith Wolff had a Jewish father; her mother’s family was Christian. According to the Nuremberg race laws of 1935, she was deemed a “first-degree Mischling” (person of mixed race). In protest against the persecution of the Jews, Edith Wolff converted to Judaism and wrote anonymous protest letters. Although she herself was at risk, she was active in a Jewish aid organization. When, in the fall of 1941, she learned of the deportations, she arranged for hiding places, food, and ID cards for Jews. Together with her friend Jizchak Schwersenz, a teacher, she founded the secret youth group Chug Chaluzi (Circle of Pioneers). The core group consisted of roughly ten Jews in hiding. During their time underground they shared their ideas about religion and Zionism. The members of the group were united by their will to survive and to emigrate together to Palestine. Most of those in the group who went into hiding survived. Jizchak Schwersenz managed to escape to Switzerland. Edith Wolff was interrogated by the Gestapo in the summer of 1943 and was later sentenced to two years of penal servitude. She survived incarceration in a number of concentration camps and prisons.

Walter Süskind was director of the Expositur, a department of the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, an institution founded and controlled by the occupiers. He had to run the assembly camp in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater, where Jews were held until their deportation to the extermination camps. Walter Süskind and other Jews helped roughly one thousand prisoners escape from the camp. They worked together with a number of resistance groups that usually found rural hiding places for individuals who fled the camp. Also, many infants were smuggled out of the camp day nursery in shopping bags or laundry baskets. Süskind had to close the assembly camp after the last deportation in the fall of 1943. In eighteen months he had saved the lives of hundreds of people. Walter Süskind was himself subsequently deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where he, his wife, and his daughter were murdered.

Shmuel Oswald Rufeisen fled Poland after the Germans invaded in 1939. By way of Ukraine and Lithuania, in 1941 he reached the city of Mir in Belorussia, which meanwhile was also occupied by Germany. Because he spoke German without an accent, he passed himself off as an ethnic German from Poland. He found work as an interpreter for the German regular uniformed police and was deployed in the ghetto. At the same time, he made contact with groups of Jewish partisans in the area. By chance Rufeisen discovered that everyone in the Mir ghetto was going to be shot on August 13, 1942. He warned the ghetto inhabitants, and more than two hundred of them fled into the forests. The ghetto was not guarded because the guards were looking for Russian partisan units, thanks to false information provided by Rufeisen. Most of those who escaped were later found and murdered. Rufeisen was arrested, but managed to flee. He found shelter in a convent in Mir. While there, he turned to Christianity and was baptized. In 1943 he joined a Jewish partisan unit, where he survived the rest of the war.