Paulo Vinzenz & Olga

Paulo, Olga Paulo, Vinzenz Italian-born Vinzenz Paulo (b. 1883) and his Hungarian-born wife, Olga (b. 1898), lived before the war in Winniki, a small town in eastern Galicia, some 7 kilometers east of Lwow. Both regarded themselves as ethnic Germans and sent their children to study at the local German school. After experiencing various vicissitudes during the first period of the Soviet occupation of eastern Galicia, they returned home in the wake of the German invasion in summer 1941. At the beginning of 1942, the Paulos were asked by Charlotte Eisenberg, a Jewish woman known to them from before the war, to take her in together with her two daughters, Soniuta and Nina. Later they also took in the ten-year-old daughter of a murdered Polish Jewish attorney, Barbara Bürger (whose real name was Irena Rogoza). All four fugitives occupied a single room in the house, which had an emergency exit. The Paulos maintained them until the entry of the Russians in the summer of 1944. They refused to evacuate to the West with the retreating German army, because this would have exposed the existence of their Jewish wards. On May 22, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Olga and Vinzenz Paulo as Righteous Among the Nations.