by Dr. Mordecai Paldiel

Every year, Yad Vashem honors hundreds of people as Righteous Among the Nations. With few exceptions, all the rescuers hail from outside Israel. However, two of these people—both originally from Ukraine—actually ended up moving to Israel with those they saved, where they settled and eventually passed away. Their stories came to light only last year:

In 1939, Antonia Gruber was a student of German Philology in Lwow, Poland. She also took piano lessons at a nearby conservatory, where she met another student, (Jozef) Nestor Sniadanko. Soon after the German invasion in June 1941, Antonia, her widowed mother and two sisters were forced out of their home into a Jewish-designated house. Nestor visited Antonia’s family in their overcrowded dwelling and later in the ghetto, bringing them hard-to-obtain food and provisions, and protecting them from attacks. In 1942, Antonia escaped from the ghetto and was sheltered by Nestor in his home until liberation in July 1944. Antonia’s mother and her two sisters perished. In 1945, Antonia and Nestor married, and decided to leave the area and move westward. For security reasons they destroyed all their personal documents, and Nestor altered his family name to that of his wife—Gruber. In 1947, Antonia gave birth to their son, Freddy, in the Rosenheim Displacement Camp in Germany. The Grubers then moved to Palestine, settling in Haifa.

In Israel, Antonia resumed her interest in music, and eventually taught piano at the Rubin Conservatory. Her husband, Nestor, found employment at the Paz Oil Company, where he remained until his retirement. Freddy Gruber became a well-known television journalist.
Nestor Gruber died in 1979 and was buried in the local Christian cemetery. For many years, Antonia kept the story of her rescue to herself, but finally decided last year, at the age of 88, to ask Yad Vashem to have her late husband honored as a Righteous Among the Nations.

Soon after the German occupation of Nadworne, Poland in 1941, the Jewish population was confined to a ghetto. Dov Blitzer, a wealthy owner of a leather-making firm, was murdered during a Nazi action later that year. His wife had died before the war. In December 1941, Dov’s mother sent an urgent message to Frania Dedek, a former domestic help of the Blitzer family to save her grandson Benjamin, then two and a half years old; his sister Sonia wished to remain with her grandmother. Frania took the child with her and fled into the nearby woods, where she spent seven months hiding in holes and bushes.

Benjamin Blitzer in a DP camp, c. 1946
Posing as a Ukrainian field worker, Frania moved with Benjamin from place to place, concealing him in the fields where she worked. After the liberation by the Russian army in the summer of 1944, she took another orphaned child, Eliezer Art, under her wings. Following a tortuous journey, Frania and her two boys, Benjamin and Eliezer, reached Israel in February 1948. There she married Avraham Bielski, a Holocaust survivor who had lost his wife and children. She converted to Judaism and brought up the children in a religious environment.

In submitting her name for the title of Righteous Among the Nations, Frania Bielski-Dedek’s daughter-in-law Esther said, “This is the ‘least’ that we can do to reward her and her memory.”

The author is Director of the Department of the Righteous Among the Nations.

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