Czech who rescued Jew honored in Israel

The story was one of several moving accounts given at a recent Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awards ceremony here when the Israeli ambassador to the Czech Republic, Erelly Hadar, presented Righteous Among the Nations certificates, most of them posthumously, to 15 citizens of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Hadar told the audience that those who had put themselves in great danger to save Jewish lives during the war had acted out of "human kindness."

She said Israel continued to keep and cherish the names and lives of the millions who perished during the war.

"That is why we cherish and respect so much those very noble people who took upon themselves the responsibility to save somebody, even one person, from certain death," Hadar said.

Jaroslav Homolka was one of the few rescuers able to attend the ceremony. In 1942, when he was 20 years old, his parents hid a Jewish couple, Ruzena and Frantisek Ehrmann, at their farm near Pilsen, even though they barely knew them.

The Ehrmanns spent the rest of the war in a tiny shelter hidden behind a wardrobe. The Homolka family brought them food and took them to the nearby woods at night for fresh air. They narrowly escaped detection when the police raided their home after the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the highest Nazi official in wartime Czechoslovakia.

Others who received awards included a Slovak couple who gave sanctuary in Bratislava, Slovakia, to three Jews, including a member of the Jewish underground, and three friends who hid a young Jewish man in their apartment in Prague.