Hermann Wygoda

Hermann Wygoda was a German-born Polish Jew who defied the Nazis in three countries during the Holocaust. He lived in Poland from the beginning of the war in 1939 until 1943 when he moved to Germany. In Poland, he was a smuggler to the Warsaw ghetto and worked at a German border patrol camp. In Germany he was an armed courier, a translator, and a foreman for a German business. At the end of 1943 he escaped to Italy where he worked for a while for a construction company before he was arrested by the Germans as a suspected spy. He escaped from jail and joined the Italian partisans operating northwest of the city of Savona. He became a partisan commander known as "Comandante Enrico" whose forces killed and otherwise harassed German troops and convoys passing through the mountains. By the end of the war he was a division commander over 2,500 troops. After the war he was awarded a Bronze Star medal for valor in combat by U.S. General Mark Clark and then he emigrated to the United States where he established a successful homebuilding business. He died in 1982.