New documentary tells of annual pilgrimage to thank the last surviving Righteous

What is a nice Jewish boy from Finchley doing wearing the gaudiest of acrylic festive jumpers and lugging Christmas trees about in snow-blanketed Poland?The sight of Jonny Daniels loading his candy cane-covered van might seem an odd one, but for the 40-year-old, and his dog Tyson, this is an annual pilgrimage. 

Daniels becomes an unlikely Father Christmas each winter, as he travels 3,000km across Eastern Europe in a race to thank the last remaining souls who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

I first meet him at his apartment on a street once just outside the Warsaw Ghetto. The base of his From the Depths foundation – established after a conversation with Nobel Peace Prize-winning survivor Elie Wiesel – is piled high with enormous individually wrapped hampers, brimming with gifts.

They range from the fortifying (jars of celeriac and cartons of borscht) to the cheering (Christmas baubles and chocolate Santas). Many are practical: magnifying glasses, gloves and hefty bottles of cooking oil. “The heavy stuff,” says Daniels, “that they won’t be able to schlep from the supermarkets themselves”.

The 75 elderly men and women he will visit “all seem to be on the top floor” without a lift, he notes, underlining what he sees as their forgotten state: the heroes of the 20th century often living out their final years in poverty as well as obscurity.

Righteous Among the Nations, or Chasidei Umot HaOlam, is a term that originates in the literature of the Sages – used for non-Jews who supported the Jewish people in their hour of need.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, enshrined the concept in its earliest mission statement when it was founded in 1953. To this day, it states that among its “principal duties is to convey the gratitude of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to Righteous Among the Nations”.

His work is the subject of The Righteous Road Trip, a new documentary that follows him across Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary on his odyssey of thanksgiving.

On a –4C December day, the film crew led by Oscar-winning director Vanessa Roth – and assembled at a fortnight’s notice from the US, Belgium and Austria – squeezes into the modest Warsaw flat of Łucja Jurczak (née Nestorowicz).

Aged 95 at the time of filming, she was just 16 when she took on the Nazis. She had befriended a Jewish girl called Bella before the war but had lost contact. During a visit to Bella’s Polish home town of Międzyrzec Podlaski in 1943, Łucja saw her old friend – on the other side of the ghetto fence.

Bella obtained false papers and sought shelter on the “Aryan” half of the town, just weeks before the ghetto would be liquidated. Łucja shared the secret with her parents. They agreed to hide her, placing their entire family in mortal danger. Łucja aided her escape walking 5km with her under the cover of a storm, as the rest of the neighbourhood sheltered indoors.

“We weren’t afraid of anything anymore,” she recalls, before getting up to check on her cooking.

Łucja, who says half her class was Jewish before the war, concealed Bella in the family grain store. Her brother, Stanisław, then took Bella to Germany, posing as her fiancé, and found her work with a German peasant family where she could be liberated – while Mr and Mrs Nestorowicz continued helping Bella’s parents, who also survived.

What had propelled Łucja to help was having seen a Jewish neighbour, Doba Sztejn, “and her two very beautiful children sent with the first transport” to the extermination camp Treblinka.

“There’s less and less Sprawiedliwi,” she tells me, using the Polish word for the Righteous. “So many people died this year,” she laments, “and I’ll be next”.
More than half of the Righteous Daniels visited – aged between 91 and 101 when filmed in 2022 – are no longer with us. He has been to so many funerals: “I even understand when to sit down and stand up during mass.”

But Łucja was unduly pessimistic; Daniels was able to visit her last Christmas too. “The unifying comment of almost every single one of them is, ‘Thank you for remembering’,” he tells me on a pit stop between Warsaw and Lublin. He is on the way to see 95-year-old Helena Kuśmierz, for what will be the first time that she has ever spoken publicly about her family’s gallantry, after 80 years.

Her uncle was caught hiding their Jewish friends, the Rajs family, for which he and others were murdered by the Nazis. Sara, the Rajses’ daughter, escaped to Helena’s family. Alerted by neighbours, the head of the local Polish police had advised her parents to kill Sara Rajs and dispose of her body, but instead they risked everything to secure her a false identity card and spirit her to another hiding place, ensuring her survival.

The documentary is the brainchild of Justin Cohen, news editor and co-publisher of the Jewish News. He had been aware of Daniels’ work for several years and “became increasingly frustrated that there had been no film made of it”.

So he called Stephen D Smith, co-founder of the UK’s National Holocaust Museum and former executive director of the Steven Spielberg-founded USC Shoah Foundation.

Smith, acting as co-producer, got on the phone to Roth (whose mother Linda had recorded survivor testimonies for the charity in the 1990s).

“She dropped everything,” says Cohen of the documentary’s director, writer and producer. “We talk about the ‘survivor generation’ fast disappearing and this being the last chance to hear their stories. The heroes of the Holocaust are necessarily even older. So I’m glad we got out there in time.”

While the Righteous are often moved to tears by a visit from Daniels, they all shrug off any suggestion that they are in any way special.

Daniels asks Łucja how he can teach his two daughters to be as brave as she was. But she uses the question only as a chance to credit the kindness and wisdom of her parents and schoolteachers.

“You have to explain to the children that this can happen to you tomorrow as well,” she says. “Always have that feeling for another person – help them when they are in need.”

In the film, Daniels notes of Helena to her son: “Every time I say, ‘You’re a hero,’ you’ll see, she just gets up and runs away.”

It is tempting to ask what made these individuals stand out in summoning what Wiesel called the “courage to care” – when all around them entire populations succumbed to tyranny. But perhaps the answer is that they simply did not stop to ponder such questions.

Jadwiga Szczeszak, 97, helped save the lives of brothers Moshe and Chaim Frymel by hiding them under the floorboards. “Sometimes,” she says as she gestures her hands towards thin air, “this courage came out of nowhere”.

• Vanessa Roth won the directing award at the Croatian International Film Festival in July and in August best documentary short at the Burbank International Film Festival.
• The Righteous Road Trip is a Big Year Production, produced in association with From the Depths, 18Reflections, Memory Workers and Jewish News. Philanthropists Eitan Neishlos and Jonathan Zlotolow are also among its executive producers.
• The Righteous Road Trip is now screening worldwide with its theatrical premiere in Los Angeles, CA on Sept 18,  in NYC in October and coming to London for the UK Jewish International Festival on Nov 15. Visit therighteousroadtripfilm.com for all screening information and tickets.