A Holocaust survivor has accidentally discovered, after 75 years, who hid her relatives from the Nazis – and she wants him posthumously recognised as a righteous gentile.
The man, Wladamir Riszko, is believed to have hidden 16 people in a cellar in the Polish city of Przemysl between 1942 and 1944, including the woman who later became his wife.
Rosalie Hart’s uncle and cousin, Meyer and Regina Dornbusch, were among those hidden by Mr Riszko.
Ms Hart, a 91 year-old Krakow ghetto survivor in Maida Vale, had heard snippets of her relatives’ time in hiding over the years. But she never had enough to piece together a full picture.
Then this year, just days before Holocaust Memorial Day, the identity of the man who saved her relatives emerged on Facebook.
Various family members were tagged in a Facebook post left by someone seeking to trace Mr Dornbusch’s descendants.
“With the power of Facebook, two of the different families hidden by this man and his descendants have now all reconnected,” Ms Hart’s granddaughter Emma Russell, 21, said.
Sara Bank-Wolf, 49, who lives in Israel, was the author of the post. Her father, Dov Feingold, and grandparents, Chaim and Sara, were among those hidden by Mr Riszko, she said.
She previously knew they had escaped the Przemsyl ghetto and been hidden by a righteous gentile, but his identity remained a mystery for decades. “It was haunting me over the years,” she said.
Then, unexpectedly, new information came to light. “Last Sunday night, I pulled my mum and said to her ‘are you sure we don’t know anything else?’
“She said, ‘all I remember is that Zaydee used to say the man who saved them married one of the Jewish people he saved and moved to New Zealand’.”
Ms Bank-Wolf contacted a Holocaust museum in New Zealand, which introduced her to Mr Riszko’s daughter who had a list of the 16 her father had saved.
Mr Riszko, who died in 1978, emigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s where he worked as a dockworker.
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