TORONTO — Gabriella Starker-Saxe and Marek Zakrzewski had never met before last week, but their stories are remarkably similar. Both are Canadian descendants of Holocaust-era heroes, and both remember hearing their forebears say that their exploits were nothing special.

From left,  Yaron Ashkenazi, executive director of Canadian Society for Yad Vashem; Fran Sonshine, national chair of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem; Marek Zakrzewski, accepting the award on behalf of his father, Zbigniew; Yacov Fliegmann; and Gabriella Starker-Saxe, accepting the award on behalf of her grandmother, Irma Uranyi Palne. [Ron Csillag photo]

“She never talked about it,” said Starker-Saxe of her grandmother, Irma Uranyi, as she wiped away a tear. “My mother did, though, and the attitude was, ‘You did the things you had to do. You did what was normal.’”

Zakrzewski nodded in agreement. His father, Zbigniew, “did what was tradition – normal and natural. He said it was human responsibility. He did not say he was a hero.”

Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum, respectfully disagreed, and last week, conferred posthumous Righteous Among the Nations status on Zbigniew Zakrzewski and Irma Uranyi for having risked their lives to rescue Jews during World War II.

They now enter the rarefied company of nearly 23,000 other non-Jews from 44 countries who have been so honoured by Yad Vashem and the Israeli government.

Starker-Saxe, from King City, Ont., and Marek Zakrzewski, who lives in Vancouver, were presented with certificates and specially struck medals by Israel’s consul general in Toronto, Amir Gissin, and the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem.

Also on hand for the moving ceremony in Toronto was Yacov Fliegmann, flown in from Israel by El Al airlines, who was rescued in wartime Budapest by Irma Uranyi.

In the fall of 1944, following the murder of his father, Fliegmann, then 13, arrived in Budapest from Transylvania with his mother and seven-year-old sister, Yehudit. One day, his mother went out to search for food without wearing the yellow Star of David. She never returned.

Yacov placed his sister in an orphanage, where he soon joined her. But he fled when an order came for all Jewish boys aged 12 and over to be rounded up for forced labour in Germany. After a few days dodging authorities on the bombed-out streets, Yacov found refuge in a building managed by Irma Uranyi, where she lived with her mother and daughter. Irma’s husband, a convert to Judaism, had been sent to a forced labour camp.

Irma fed and sheltered Yacov until Budapest’s liberation in January 1945 by Soviet troops. She died in 1993, humble and taciturn to the end, said her granddaughter.

Meanwhile, Zbigniew Zakrzewski was honoured as Righteous for having saved the life of Brunia Rubinovitch, who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto at the age of 10 after her parents were murdered there. She made her way to the home of her parents’ non-Jewish friends, the Wolskis, who were worried for her safety because the neighbours knew Brunia was Jewish.

Brunia was shuttled to a relative of the Wolskis, who in turn sent the girl to another relative, Zbigniew Zakrzewski, an upper-class Pole whose uncle had been Poland’s prime minister after World War I, and his son, Marek. Zbigniew prepared Aryan papers for Brunia, gave her a Christian name and registered her at a Catholic school.

Zbigniew looked after Brunia as though she was his own daughter, and she regarded him as a devoted father.

But at war’s end, Zbigniew was arrested by the Soviet secret police for his membership in an underground resistance movement against both the Nazis and Communists. He was sentenced to death.

Brunia, by now 14, wrote an impassioned letter to the president of Poland, begging for mercy for her saviour (the letter was read aloud by a student at Milton District High School. About 20 students who study the Holocaust attended the ceremony).

The president was unmoved, and in March, 1947, Zbigniew Zakrzewski was executed in a jail in Lodz. His burial site is still unknown.

Brunia made her way to Israel, but was unable to travel to Toronto to witness the honouring of her rescuer.