Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust - Hardcover

Drucker, Malka; Block, Gay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0841913226 ISBN 13: 9780841913226

Publisher: Holmes & Meier Pub, 1992

Synopsis

Who are the rescuers, the men and women whose gripping personal narratives make up the core of this remarkable book? Why did they risk everything - their livelihoods, their homes, their lives, and even those of their families - to save Jews marked for death during the Holocaust? Are they ordinary people, as they themselves claim, or truly heroic?
Malka Drucker and Gay Block spent three years visiting 105 rescuers from ten countries. Their psychologically revealing interviews and photographs speak directly to us in powerful words and images. Block's full-page color portraits accompany each narrative, inviting us to look at these men and women as they are today, people whose faces resemble our own. Would we act as they did?
In their own words, forty-nine of the rescuers present a vivid picture of their lives before, during, and after the war as they grapple with the question of why they acted with humanity in a time of barbarism - and whether they would do it again. Their stories - infused with the deep memory that engages a terrible past - are unforgettable. Louisa Steenstra relives the Nazis' murder of her husband and of the Jews they were hiding in their attic in the Netherlands; Antonin Kalina of Czechoslovakia relates how he deceived the SS to save 1,300 children in Buchenwald. Others recall how they smuggled Jews out of the ghettos; worked in resistance movements; forged passports and baptismal certificates; hid Jews in cellars, barns, and behind false walls; shared their meager food rations; secretly disposed of waste; and raised Jewish children as their own.
A landmark volume that includes maps, historic photographs from family collections, and a comprehensive introduction by Malka Drucker, Rescuers makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust, of the complex factors that made some people refuse the role of passive bystander, and of the profound psychological and ethical issues that still perplex us. When asked about the prospects for acts of moral courage today, rescuer Liliane Gaffney told the authors: "It's very difficult for a generation raised looking out for Number One to understand it. This is something totally unknown here. But there, if you didn't live for others as well as yourself it wasn't worth living." For Jan Karski, however, the legacy of the rescuers is one of affirmation: "Do not lose hope in humanity." In the end, what is perhaps most striking about the rescuers is their modesty and simple humanness; yet, as Cynthia Ozick concludes in the Prologue, "It is from these undeniably heroic and principled few that we can learn the full resonance of civilization."

About this title

From the Publisher

RESCUERS has been made into a three-part mini-series which airs on Showtime in October 1997, May 1998 and Fall 1998. Produced by Barbra Streisand and Cis Corman, the October film features actresses Elizabeth Perkins and Sela Ward as single women who acted alone to save Jewish lives.

From Library Journal

A welcome addition to Holocaust literature, this work presents a series of 49 personal reminiscences of non-Jewish citizens in various European nations who risked their lives to hide resident Jews from the Nazi horror. Most of those interviewed felt their actions were done out of friendship and for people caught in a web of hatred and anti-Semitism. They did not feel that they were acting heroically but that they were doing what was right. Portraits by Block of each of the rescuers accompany the text. These 49 are representative of the 9,295 rescuers honored at the Yad Vashem in Israel. This is recommended for general readers as well as for college and university libraries.
- Charles Abshire, Mt. Hood Community Coll. Lib., Gresham, Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Holmes & Meier Pub
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0841913226
• ISBN 13: 9780841913226
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220