Berlin to honor gentiles who helped Jews in Shoah

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Sixty-two years after the end of World War II, gentiles who helped Jews escape the Holocaust will be honored with a museum in Berlin, sources said Monday afternoon. Israel recognized gentiles who helped Jews escape the Holocaust as early as 1963, and honored 443 Germans at the Yad Vashem Memorial as "Righteous among the Nations." But similar honors have been long delayed at home. The "Silent Heroes" museum is to open in 2008 in an old tenement building in the center of Berlin. It will be based in Otto Weidt's former workshop for the blind, where several Jews survived in a secret room, and include two more floors that are currently vacant and still under renovation. The new museum will focus on both rescuers and survivors with multimedia presentations and witnesses' documents that reveal the motivations and dangers faced by the protectors.