Holocaust victim

His name was Anton. He lived on the edge of society in a small town called Zborow in Poland. He had no friends and no family, and he lived alone in a falling-apart shack. The people in town looked down on him and cruelly called him “the village idiot.”

When the Nazis arrived in July of 1941, they immediately murdered 1,000 Jewish men and forced the rest of the Jewish people into a ghetto. In the middle of this terror was the Zeiger family—a mother and father, their two young sons, and two orphaned children they were trying to protect. Desperate for help, they turned to their former neighbors, but not a single person was willing to help them. Until they found Anton.

Even though Anton was a small and weak-looking man, he did something incredibly brave. He dug a hidden pit under his shack, big enough to hide all six of them. The Zeiger family lived there for nine long months, with nothing but the dim light of a small kerosene lamp. Anton somehow found enough food to keep them alive without attracting attention. He cared for them and protected them, all while living under the constant fear of Nazi searches and punishment.

In 1944, Zborow was finally liberated, and the Zeiger family came out into the sunlight, alive and free. Thirty years later, in 1974, Anton Sukhinski was honored by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile. He was the only person from Zborow known to have helped the Jews.

I often ask myself if I would have been that brave, that courageous, like the man they called the “village idiot.”

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The Last Judicial Hanging in The United States

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