The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the Holocaust

Abstract

The winner of the 2005 Robert E. Lane Award for Best Book in Political Psychology, this is the most recent in an established tradition of attempts by Samuel and Pearl Oliner, Nechama Tec, Eva Fogelman and others to identify the motives and capacities that led a very few to rescue Jews in the Holocaust. Kristen Monroe directs the Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality at University of California Irvine and, like the Oliners, she comes to the topic with an established interest in altruism, on which she published a prize-winning study in 1996. More than half the present volume consists of lengthy, verbatim transcripts of conversations with five of the rescuers interviewed by the author. The rescuers themselves had all been recognized by Yad Vashem as ‘Righteous among the Nations’, and the cases vary widely, drawing on experiences in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Denmark and France, though all the subjects were resident in the US at the time of interview. One of them, Jean or John Weidner, is well known, since his group, ‘Dutch-Paris’, rescued 1,000 people including 800 Jews. (At the time of the interview, Weidner rather touchingly was managing a grocery store in Pasadena. He died in 1994.) The interviews are followed by three substantive chapters seeking to explain the rescuers' choices and exploring the implications for understanding moral theory. An appendix outlines the author's belief that interviews and their narrative, if sensitively approached, can act as ‘windows on the minds of others’.