These European Gentiles fought fascism one person at a time, risking their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust — Oskar Schindler, thanks to movie director Steven Spielberg, is one of the most famous. If their American cohorts are “The Greatest Generation,” what can we possibly call such heroes?

To Jews, they are simply The Righteous. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem has recognized more than 21,000 non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust: “The Righteous Among the Nations.” “The rescuers were the precious few, 50,000 to 250,000 among more than 700 million people in Europe,” says Stanlee Stahl, executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous in New York City. “They had the courage to care and the courage to act.”

Stahl ’67 has headed the foundation for 15 years, sending monthly financial support and medicines to more than 1,200 aged and needy rescuers in 26 countries. Yad Vashem evaluates both the rescuers’ wartime activities and current needs.

The annual budget ranges from $1.3 million to this year’s $2.5 million. Fundraising is the lifeline of the foundation, established in 1986 by Rabbi Harold Schulweis. Its motto comes from the Talmud, books of Jewish civil and religious law: “Whoever saves a single life is as if one saves the entire world.”

“I’m blessed,” Stahl says. “I meet the most amazing people. When I’m in Europe, I make four home visits a day to the rescuers. We who live in this beloved country don’t know what it’s like first to live under the Nazis, then under the Soviets — we have no idea.”

The majority of recipients are in Poland; more live in such former Soviet Bloc countries as Albania, Belarus, Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, and Russia itself. Others are in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, and across the Atlantic in Canada and the U.S. Monthly stipends range from $80 to $250.

“After the breakup of the Soviet Union, our money made the difference between eating and starving.”

Many rescuers have lived to see the generations that would never have existed without their courage.

“Mary Diaczok, who is 83 living in Ontario, saved Mania Birenberg, who now lives in Illinois. Mary went to Mania’s grandson’s wedding, and she said, ‘Everyone wanted to touch me. I felt like the Pope.’ ”

Danuta Renk of Fort Wayne, Ind., is still in contact with the fellow Poles she sheltered in her father’s barn.

“She would take them food in the dog bowl so no one suspected,” says her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Szubiak. “Her father was digging a hole in the barn to hide them, and Danuta would go out at night in the woods to scatter the dirt.”

“If you were caught hiding a Jew in Eastern Europe, you were hung on a meat hook, or everyone was shoved in the barn and burned alive,” Stahl says. “The person who turned you in got a kilo of sugar and a liter of vodka, and maybe some new boots.

“Hatred is horrible.”

We like to think we would be as selfless as the rescuers, but Stahl is uncertain. “We don’t know how we’d react. I am an adoptive parent. I don’t know if I’d risk his life for people I didn’t know.

“When we see someone hit a child, do we intervene? Most of us don’t. May we in America never be tested.

“That’s why we’ve got to vote. We take our liberty for granted. We don’t have ID documents — yet — but as recent as 2000, a Jew in the Ukraine had ‘Jew’ on his ID, not ‘Ukrainian.’ ”

Stahl was born into an activist, Orthodox household in “blue- and pink-collar” Passaic, N.J. In the ’30s, her mother, Pearl, went to New York’s Union Square to raise money to buy Jews’ passage out of Germany. After her brother, Stanley Goldblum, died in the battle for Rome in 1944, Pearl knew exactly what she’d name her daughter the following year: Stanlee.

“I got a letter from the draft board, and Miami originally wanted to put me in Dennison Hall,” Stahl says of the male dorm. “I ended up in Reid.”

Miami, where she majored in government and history, was “culture shock. I went from a fully integrated high school to a very homogenized campus.”

Soon, she was presiding over her sorority, Alpha Epsilon Phi, and serving on student senate and class cabinet. After graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C., and a job at the National Institutes of Health.

“I was influenced by John Kennedy: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’ ” She earned a master’s in public administration from George Washington, then took a gap year traveling around Europe and North Africa, working in Israel before returning stateside.

Stahl was poised to earn a doctorate from New York University when a thief stole her briefcase with her dissertation and notes. “I took a master’s in philosophy in 1987. It is what it is.”

She is philosophical about much of life, realizing the rolls of the Righteous will continue to dwindle. That’s why she jump-started the foundation’s educational component, instituting a summer teacher-training session on the Holocaust at Columbia University and a bar/bat mitzvah program for boys and girls of 12 and 13.

“Teachers don’t teach about what they do not know, and most of them don’t know about the Holocaust. I think the Holocaust is the seminal event of the last century, and it’s very complex. It’s important that teachers understand it.”

Young Jewish men and women entering adulthood are encouraged to choose and sponsor a rescuer as a role model. David, Stahl’s son with husband George Ackerman, chose a Danish rescuer who helped ferry 1,400 Jews from Denmark to Sweden, 12 at a time. The late Preben Munch-Nielsen’s boat is on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Many of the young people have extrapolated these lessons into action against modern genocides, as in Rwanda and Darfur.

“Rescuers are ‘upstanders,’ not bystanders, and they’re not just relics of World War II or Shoah. They’re about personal choice and responsibility,” says Stahl, who runs the social action program for her Conservative congregation in South Orange, N.J.

“We make it possible for these noble men and women to live out their lives in dignity. On behalf of the Jewish community, we’re repaying a debt of gratitude.”

Cincinnati freelancer Betsa Marsh is a frequent contributor to Miamian.

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