The Book of the Just

The stories of forty unsung heroes of the Holocaust honor the courage of rescuers from the Swiss Red Cross, a Portugese consul who wrote ten thousand visas in three days, a Japanese consul who saved the children of an entire yeshiva, and others.

Tribute is paid to the silent heroes who resisted the Holocaust in dramatic, moving stories recounted by survivors and rescuers in Israel-based freelance reporter Silver's book. Testimonials reveal how non-Jews from every part of Nazi-occupied Europe, including Germany, risked their own liberty and lives to save Jews--as in the case of the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux who paid with his career and fortune for enabling the flight of 10,000 Jews to neutral Spain. Rescues often involved underground networks, bribery, lying, forged papers and even the obscuring of Jewish escapees by the substitution of bodies purchased from corrupt camp guards. Regardless of backgrounds, faiths or political views, and whether they acted as individuals or in groups--or as a whole people, like the Danes, who in 1983 united to spirit away 6000 Jews from the Nazis--all felt the need to assert a common humanity and resist barbarism. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Given the existence of revisionists who deny that the Holocaust happened and the current "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, books on the Holocaust are timely. We need to be reminded that the Holocaust, in all its horror, did indeed take place. This slim volume contains short accounts of gentiles--Christians, Muslims, and a Japanese diplomat--who risked their careers and their lives to save Jews from Hitler's death factories. A Reader's Digest type of approach can work with profoundly significant topics, but not in this instance. The book's format cannot always conceal the nobility of the people it profiles, but its abbreviated, journalistic vignettes fail to satisfy the reader, especially when only part of the pertinent facts of a case can be reconstructed.
- Robert W. Frizzell, Hendrix Coll. Lib., Conway, Ark.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.