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Last update - 17:37 18/11/2008
Dozens of Poles awarded medals for saving Jewish lives in Holocaust
By The Associated Press
Tags: yad vashem, poland 

Polish President Lech Kaczynski awarded some 70 state medals Monday - many posthumously - to people from across Poland who risked their lives during the Holocaust to help save Jews.

First lady Maria Kaczynska presented the medals to the people or their relatives in a gala ceremony at Warsaw's National Theater.

Among those awarded was Zofia Brusikiewicz, 81, whose parents hid 13 Jews in an apartment in Warsaw, and Irena Gut-Opdyke, whose dramatic story is narrated in a one-act play, Irena's Vow, that opened Off Broadway in September.
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Gut-Opdyke hid 12 Jews in the basement of an SS officer's house, where she served as a housekeeper. She died at aged 85 in 2003 in New York, where her family recently received her medal.

Poland was the only country under Nazi occupation where helping Jews was
punished with summary execution of the entire family.

Most of the medal recipients are already among the 6,000 Poles holding the title of the Righteous Among the Nations from Israel's Yad Vashem. They were largely found thanks to testimony deposited with the institute.

About 3.5 million Jews, or 10 percent of the country's population, lived in Poland before World War II. Most were killed in death camps, like
Auschwitz-Birkenau, that the Nazis built when they occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945. Around 200,000 survived, but many left for Israel or other countries amid anti-Semitic purges of the 1960s.
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