How a life-risking act by a Christian family during the Holocaust saved a family

Jewish World Review ^ | 2/13/2012 | Binyamin Rose

[Former Fetus]

Crammed uncomfortably in the front seat of a van, forced to sit at a 45-degree angle to avoid a head-on collision between my knees and the gear box, I'm surprised and relieved when my seatmate notices my pained grimace and graciously offers to share his legroom.

"Stretch your legs out, there's room here," says Rabbi Yitzchok Meyer Landau, the spiritual leader of the famed Khal Veretzky (fondly known as "Rav Landau's") at the corner of Avenue L and East 9th Street in Midwod, Brooklyn.

Sharing tight quarters is part of the Landau heritage, as I would soon see for myself.

"It might be cramped here," I say, "but it's nothing compared to what your grandparents must have gone through." Rabbi Landau merely replies by exhaling and raising his eyebrows.

We are on the road to Nitra, a city of 85,000 at the base of the Zobor Mountain, for a reunion with the surviving member of the Slovakian family that kept the Landau grandparents alive for seven critical months during World War II. We were also preparing to step — maybe for one last time — into the bunker the size of a walk-in closet in which Rabbi Yitzchok Meyer's grandparents and eight other Jews hid for those seven months, some of them with Nazi soldiers literally sleeping on top of their heads.

[Former Fetus]

Full title is Back to the Bunker: How a life-risking act by a Christian family during the Holocaust saved a family and built a thriving community a world away

An interesting, heart-warming story for this Monday morning. I found this sentence particularly encouraging: ""But the Almighy listens to every prayer of a tzaddik [truly righteous person], and about 20 years later it was fulfilled."

[Manic_Episode]

Bump for later.

[khelus]

Thanks for posting.

I found this quote interesting:
"Today, 68 years later, Mr. Truska finds it easy to articulate why his family risked their own lives to save Jews, even if the answer is difficult for the listener to comprehend.

"We really didn't think we were doing anything so special," Mr. Truska explained last week, as his granddaughter interpreted. "Our family had an appreciation for life and we wanted to save lives. We liked people and we didn't differentiate between one person and another. We felt if we didn't save these people, then even more people could die. We also realized that if these people could be deported to die, the same thing could happen to people like us, under different circumstances."

This mirrors what so many of the righteous gentiles said, in essence it was the right thing to do.