Dr Stanko Sielski has been posthumously awarded the Righteous among the Nations medal by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre.

Dr Stanko Sielski (1891-1958)

When Germans occupied Zagreb in April 1941, Ustasha took the power and in July 1941 they started capturing Jews. Their first target was Jewish intellectuals, lawyers and physicians.

At the same time the Chief of health services of Bosnia (which was then a part of the Independent State of Croatia), turned to the authorities asking them to send as many medical doctors to Bosnia as possible in order to stop spreading of contagious diseases, especially the endemic syphilis.

One Jewish doctor from Zagreb, Dr Miroslav Schlesinger, heard about it and he saw an opportunity to save his Jewish colleagues. He contacted his friend Dr Ante Vuletić, specialist for contagious diseases and asked him to talk to Ante Pavelić, what dr Vuletić did. He suggested to Pavelić to send Jewish doctors to Bosnia. Some of Pavelić's Ministers were against the idea but in the end it was decided that 169 doctors and their families should go to Banja Luka where already existed the Institute for fight against the endemic syphilis.

Head of the Institute was Dr Stanko Sielski, from the establishment of the Institute until the end of August 1944.

Dr. Stanko Sielski, Croat from Bosnia and Herzegovina, was born in 1891 in Gračanica and he graduated Medicine in Vienna. Almost all of his working years were spent in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was extremely widely educated; he spoke several foreign languages and in his free time he was painting, collecting various items, exploring cultural heritage showing a special interest in popular beliefs, old Turkish and Arabic medical manuscripts, ethnology and archeology.

Dr Sielski played a major role in protection of Jewish doctors and their families. He took care of them in several cases when they left their posts and went to join the partisans and he did not inform the Ustasha authorities about it. On the contrary, he kept them on the list of employees and risked his life by doing so. In 1943 German authorities insisted that all Jewish physicians should be deported to concentration camps. Dr Sielski, together with Dr Vuletić, opposed the German demand saying that Jewish doctors were indispensable considering the epidemic of typhoid and that there was a danger that the German soldiers could be infected, too. This act prevented mass deportation of Jewish doctors.

One of the surviving doctors who lives in Zagreb now, dr Teodor Grüner, testifies that dr Sielski saved his life twice. Dr Grüner was arrested in 1942 and he was liberated from the Ustasha jail only because of Dr. Sielski’s intervention.

On another occasion he helped Dr. Grüner to leave the territory where there was a violent battle between Ustashas and Germans on one side and partisans on the other.

Majority of Jewish doctors and their families who were in Bosnia and Herzegovina survived the war with the help of Dr. Sielski. They went to join the Partisans or to the liberated areas.

At the end of October Dr. Sielski was transferred to Sarajevo to perform the duty of the dean of the newly established university of Medicine. He also dealt with fighting the typhoid fever on the mountain Kozara in 1945.

He died in Zagreb in 1958 while he was 68 and was buried in Zagreb.

On October 7 2014 Yad Vashem recognized Dr. Stanko Sielski as the Righteous among the Nations.