A Conspiracy of Goodness

By Christine Gorman

Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Mengele -- these are the familiar faces of evil from World War II. Architects of a genocidal collapse of the human soul, they remind everyone that indifference to the suffering of others is perhaps the most pervasive law of nature. And yet, 50 years later, some less familiar faces are beginning to emerge from the terrible history of the Holocaust. They belong to the handful of ordinary people who not only saw the horror around them but also risked their lives out of compassion for its victims: those under Nazi rule who dared to hide Jews in their houses and apartments and on their farms. According to Samuel and Pearl Oliner, researchers from Humboldt State University in California who conducted an eight-year study of altruism, these protectors may have saved 500,000 lives.

Why did they refuse to hide behind the mask of the innocent bystander donned by so many of their fellow citizens in Germany, Poland, France and elsewhere? That question sent an unlikely pair of friends, photographer Gay Block and children's book writer Malka Drucker, on a three-year journey to photograph and interview 105 rescuers from 10 countries. The often surprising answers are chronicled in their book, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust (Holmes & Meier; $29.95 soft cover), and in a photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which runs until April 7.

Again and again, the rescuers protest that what they did was natural and even quite ordinary. "We didn't think about it," says Johtje Vos, 82, who with her late husband Aart saved dozens of Jews in Laren, Holland. "You started off storing a suitcase for a friend, and before you knew it, you were in over your head. We did what any human being would have done."

History, sadly, does not bear out that claim. Throughout the Nazi occupation, cases of citizens rescuing Jews were the exception, not the rule. And denunciation in those cruel times seemed much more common. The rescuers know that, of course. But by insisting on the banality of their heroism, they have launched a powerful challenge to our jaded moral notions of the status quo. To single them out as unusual suggests, in effect, that there was something abnormal about them. On the other hand, to treat them as ordinary human beings is to argue that altruism is accessible to anyone -- saints and sinners alike. "It tells you that you don't have to be Mother Teresa," Drucker says. "You don't have to be a better person than you already are in order to do good." Turning protectors into paragons would let the rest of humanity off the hook.

The rescuers have not escaped controversy. Their very existence has been denied by some Jews who feared that the horror of the Holocaust might be whitewashed by acknowledging their presence. On the other hand, some rescuers have received hate mail and death threats for their long-ago roles in sheltering Jews. Yet Block notes that most people are strongly receptive to the rescuers' stories. "There is a hunger for examples of goodness," she says. "People want to find out that we can learn from goodness and not from evil."

"When you look at the rescuers as a large group, you cannot put them into any of the categories that you are used to," says Nechama Tec, professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and author of When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. They include both rich and poor, educated and barely literate, believers and atheists. "But on closer examination you see a series of interrelated characteristics," she notes. She found, for example, that many of the rescuers were individualists. "Most of us do what society demands at the moment. But because the rescuers were not as constrained by the expectations of the group, they were better able to act on their own."

In addition, Tec found that many of the rescuers had a history of doing good deeds before the war -- some visiting people in the hospital, others collecting books for poor students, still others taking care of stray animals. "They just got into the habit of doing good," she says. "If they hadn't perceived that pattern as natural, they might have been paralyzed into inaction." At the same time, most of them never planned to be rescuers. They found themselves responding to a need first and the danger second. Many shared a sense of universalism. "They saw the Jews not as Jews but as persecuted human beings," the sociologist says. In her research, Tec, who was herself sheltered in Poland, found that only 10% of the rescuers had confined their help to friends they had known before the war.

Perhaps most astounding of all, the majority of the rescuers believe that the gift of goodness can be passed on. "It is like flowers growing in a certain soil," says Helena Melnyczuk, 71, who with her brother Orest, 67, and their father sheltered Jews in their house, across the street from a Ukrainian police station. "It is natural in every human being, but it must be nourished and cultivated." For that lesson alone, the rescuers deserve the world's gratitude.