For decades, nobody really talked about them: the thousands of Poles, mostly Catholics, who risked their lives during World War II to save Jewish friends, neighbours and even strangers.

Those discovered by the Germans were executed quickly, often with their entire families. And then, under communism, there was silence.

The Jewish survivors would send letters and gifts in gratitude. But the Polish state ignored them.

The rescuers themselves kept quiet, out of modesty, or shame or fear of anti-Semitism.

Sometimes they worried gift packages from the West would arise the jealousy of neighbours in a period of economic deprivation.

“It wasn’t considered anything to be proud of,” said Ewa Ligia Zdanowicz, an 81-year-old whose parents hid a Jewish teenage girl in their home during the war.

That era is over.

A moving gathering of dozens of the rescuers in Warsaw shows just how much has changed in Poland in the 23 years since communism fell.

Dozens of Polish rescuers were celebrated and dined over a kosher lunch in a Warsaw hotel where Jewish representatives took turns praising them in speeches for their heroism.

The rescuers themselves deny that they are exceptional. With each other, they discuss other things, often their failing health, avoiding memories of executions and other brutality that they witnessed and which still bring them to tears.

“We did what we had to do,” said Halina Szaszkiewicz, 89. “There was nothing heroic about it.”

But the Jewish officials honouring them see it differently.

“You, the righteous of the world, think your behaviour was ordinary, but we all know it was something more than that. It was truly extraordinary,” Stanlee Stahl, the executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, the group that organised the luncheon, told them in a speech.

Those in attendance have all been recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, non-Jews sometimes referred to colloquially as “righteous gentiles”.