Rescue Of Jews Research Articles

The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust – Poland, Yad-Vashem, Jerusalem 2005

Stosunki polsko-żydowskie podczas drugiej wojny światowej – to temat w szczególny sposób złożony i obciążony emocjami. Nawet jednak w najbardziej zażartej dyskusji dotyczącej tej problematyki strony milkną, gdy przywołane zostaną sylwetki Sprawiedliwych wśród Narodów Świata. Od roku 1963, kiedy Instytut Yad Vashem rozpoczął przyznawanie tytułu Sprawiedliwego wśród Narodów Świata, odznaczenie to otrzymało ponad 20 000 osób. Ponad 5300 spośród nich (dane na koniec 2000 roku) to Polacy. Po tomach prezentujących Sprawiedliwych z Holandii i Francji, staraniem Instytutu Yad Vashem do rąk badaczy i szerokiego kręgu czytelników trafia właśnie dwutomowa encyklopedia poświęcona Polakom uhonorowanym tym zaszczytnym tytułem.Książka w porządku alfabetycznym prezentuje kolejnych Sprawiedliwych, opatrując każde nazwisko (lub kilka nazwisk, w zależności od liczby osób zaangażowanych w konkretny przypadek) rodzajem noty biograficznej. Noty mają charakter narracyjny i ogniskują się na historii ratowania. W krótkich z konieczności zapisach autorzy starali się jak najpełniej ukazać sylwetkę Sprawiedliwego, jego status ekonomiczny, wykształcenie, poglądy i związane z nimi motywacje ratowania, oraz możliwie wiernie przedstawić historię pomocy, wskazać jej przebieg i okoliczności. Wszystkie hasła osobowe Encyklopedii... powstały jedynie w oparciu o akta, jakie każdy Sprawiedliwy posiada w Archiwum Instytutu Yad Vashem. Wiele not opatrzonych jest zdjęciem bohatera. Rozbudowany wstęp o charakterze historyczno-socjologicznym pióra profesora Israela Gutmana, mapa oraz słownik podstawowych pojęć przybliżają nawet zupełnie niezorientowanemu w temacie czytelnikowi złożoność stosunków polsko-żydowskich przed drugą wojną światową oraz przedstawiają mu realia okupowanej Polski, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem reakcji Polaków na Holokaust. Autorzy Encyklopedii... zdecydowali się na prezentację sylwetek Sprawiedliwych, którzy zostali uhonorowani do końca 1999 roku. Jako że Instytut Yad Vashem kontynuuje nadawanie tytułu, spodziewany jest w przyszłości suplement, prezentujący kolejne postaci.

"Keeping very clear of any 'Kuh-Handel'": The British Foreign Office and the Rescue of Jews from Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was set up in spring 1943 on Himmleris orders with the designated purpose of holding Jews who were to be (temporarily) exempted from deportation to the extermination camps in the East so that they could be exchanged for German civilians held abroad. However, the number of Jews for whom Bergen-Belsen actually proved to be the antechamber to freedom was limited. The British Foreign Office bears some responsibility for this. It regarded proposals from Nazi Germany for such exchanges as blackmail, and giving in to it as unacceptable. It also insisted that the most important task of the anti-Hitler-coalition, and best chance for saving Jews from extermination, was a quick and unconditional victory over Nazi Germany. Instead of pushing for serious negotiations to secure the release of as many Jews as possible, the British Foreign Office played for time. It seems highly likely that a larger number of Jews held at Bergen-Belsen could have been saved if the negotiations about exchange had been conducted with a greater sense of urgency.

Resolute heroes: the rescue of jews during the nazi occupation of europe

in 1927, at the age of eighteen, jean kowalyk moved to the ukrainian village of czortowiec, where she worked as a seamstress. when the germans invaded in 1941, they brought to the village forced laborers to build a work camp. jean “watched the cruelty [done to the workers] day after day […] when i saw people being molested, my religious heart whispered to me, ‘do not kill. love others as you love yourself’”. some time later, she heard a knock on her door. when she opened it, solomon berger, a jewish doctor the family knew, was “on his knees”, put his arms around her legs, and “begged for help”. jean let him in and hid him – along with several others – behind a false wall until the end of the war (1).

The Social Psychology of Good and Evil

ARTHUR G. MILLER (ED.): The Social Psychology of Good and Evil. New York: Guilford Publications, 2004, 498 pp., $60.00, ISBN 1-57230-989-X The tragic events of 9/11 dealt a shattering blow to the lives of its and their families as well as to the collective political innocence of the American public. The fear and horror generated by this heretofore unimaginable catastrophe will undoubtedly be embedded in the minds of millions of Americans for many generations to come and, much like the Holocaust, many will continue to search, perhaps fruitlessly, for words and insights adequate to explain how anyone, or any group of individuals, could perpetrate such unspeakable acts of inhumanity. The President and his minions rose to the challenge by choosing to use evangelical rhetoric about evildoers that initially resonated with a public desperate for apprehension and, certainly in many cases, revenge. Yet, when the terms and evildoer began to be used by the President to broad-brush whole countries allegedly representing an axis of evil, it required little reflection to recognize that he was indulging in phantasmagoric excess and, as a result, these moralistic terms were largely, though not entirely, dropped from his political lexicon. Obviously a national crisis of this kind called for something more definitive, objective, and morally nuanced. Thus, it is apt and timely that this book about the nature of good and evil has been recently published. It is a book of eighteen chapters in all, each authored or co-authored by academicians, social psychologists, mostly from major American universities. The first chapter, written by Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford University, makes a cogent case for the transformative power of social situations to induce rather ordinary individuals to inflict pain or harm upon others. In one of his experiments, subjects who could hide behind the shield of anonymity-deindividuation-were more likely to inflict shock upon victims than those who were made to feel uniquely identifiable. In another experiment, using the quotidian streets of the Bronx and PaIo Alto, Zimbardo abandoned used but good-conditioned cars. Within ten minutes the car in the Bronx was vandalized and within two days nothing of value was left to strip. By contrast, the car in PaIo Alto remained unscathed over a period of five days. Zimbardo explains the disparate outcomes on the basis of differences between how much or how little residents care about what happens on their own turf in their respective communities. In one of his most telling and renowned experiments, Zimbardo recruited subjects from the community and university to serve as guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. This experiment was prematurely terminated because the guards soon became overly sadistic and the prisoners showed signs of emotional breakdown. Zimbardo wisely advises that we must, to combat malevolent transformations, learn to appreciate the extent to which ordinary people can be induced into committing evil deeds. The 2nd chapter, written by Ervin Staub, of the University of Massachusetts, explores the origins of helping and harming others. When basic needs are thwarted or frustrated, Staub posits, a sense of well-being is undermined, replaced by an inability to self-soothe and a tendency to engage in harm-doing. As Staub points out, because basic needs are varied and often conflict with one another, a person may do something interpersonally harmful or self-destructive, even though that individual may also harbor the need for physical security. A case in point would be the suicide bomber. Others may act contrary to the need for security by saving lives, as did many rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany. Staub concludes this chapter by recommending that we evaluate the goodness of societies in terms of how well they fulfill basic human needs. In the 3rd chapter of this book, Roy F. Baumeister, of Florida State University and Kathleen D. …

Self, Other, and Moral Obligation

James Mensch has recently claimed that an ethics must at a minimum guard against "the moral collapse that accompanies genocide."1 As a crime not merely against human individuals but against humanity as such, genocide, on Mensch's view, has as its condition that one adopt a standpoint outside humanity. Only from such a standpoint, Mensch argues, can one make the judgment that whole groups of humans should die while others live (2). What makes this ubermenschlich perspective possible, according to Mensch, is the combination of modern science and modern philosophy with its new conception of the self. This conception of the self, which affords the self a perspective both universal and normative (26), finds its culmination in Kant's practical ego as autonomous (6). The Kantian moral agent, emphasizing the universalizability of maxims to the exclusion of the inclinations that characterize particular agents and their situations, is detached from the world in which her actions occur, that is, she is detached from "all the particular conditions-such as sex, age, and social position-that might affect [her] observations" (4). The idea at work in this detachment is to gain "access to what holds independently of the particularities of our situation" (5). On Mensch's view, this so negatively affects the self's observation of and understanding of its circumstances that the self is, as Mensch puts it, "cut off from the resources required to make ethical decisions" (4), and from "the context that is essential to [autonomy's] sense" (7). It is just this feature of the modern, detached, ubermenschlich standpoint that, according to Mensch, allows for the possibility of genocide. We should not, however, conclude that an appropriate view of the self would see it simply as "immersed" in the world. Rescuers of Jews in World War II were called upon not merely to put aside their own interests and desires in favor of the persecuted victims arriving at their doors, but also to put aside the conventions or laws of their own society, conventions or laws that were permissive of such persecution. Those who fail the test of rescue, we might say, have an untermenschlich conception of the self, represented in Mensch's account chiefly by Aristotle and Mill. Those who fail the test of rescue cannot see beyond the individual and local. Such an untermenschlich perspective fails to gain the critical distance necessary for the critique of one's own conception of the good and of the mores, conventions, and laws of one's own society that have shaped that conception. In his critical discussions Mensch criticizes both the ubermenschlich moral theories that fail to appreciate the particularity of agents and their situations and the untermenschlich moral theories that fail to achieve any critical distance from this same particularity. He seeks a middle ground between these perspectives, a ground capable of "preserving the context that permits moral judgment" (8). What is needed, he argues, is a notion of self-separation and self-alterity that provides through the internalized presence of the other a critical perspective from which to judge both one's own desires and actions and those of one's community, while preserving one's situatedness in the human condition. This notion of alterity grounds his positive account of obligation. I have a number of questions about Mensch's middle ground and the phenomenology of obligation he ties to it, but these questions begin from the fact that I believe Mensch's "phenomenological history of ethics" has mischaracterized the extremes. The first part of my essay, therefore, considers and criticizes Mensch's characterizations of the ubermenschlich and untermenschlich selves. The second part considers Mensch's notion of "inherent alterity" (12) as a middle ground between these conceptions, and the third offers an alternative phenomenology of obligation. Recasting the Alternatives Mensch's phenomenological history of ethics identifies two main strands in the tradition. …

Assisting the Leap into the Void. Franz Kaufmann and the Rescue of Jews and "Non-Aryan" Christians

Assisting the Leap into the Void. Franz Kaufmann and the Rescue of Jews and "Non-Aryan" Christians

Pope Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy: Evidence of a Papal Directive?

Pope Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy: Evidence of a Papal Directive?

The Rescue of Jews in Nazi‐Occupied Belgium, France and the Netherlands

The question of why and how gentiles rescued Jews during the Nazi period has been a consistent element in the wider historiography of the Holocaust ever since 1945, not least after the creation of Yad Vashem and the identification and recognition of non‐Jews as “Righteous among the Nations”. Research on the Holocaust has identified, and continues to identify, individuals who meet the criteria laid down for the award, and the shelves of books devoted to memoirs bear witness to its continued popularity with the book‐buying public. However, study of the topic to date has been very narrowly defined, either as sociological enquiry into the nature of altruism, or as the history of a relatively small number of dedicated individuals. This paper attempts to outline the importance of a wider context for the study of rescue under three headings. Firstly, it focuses on the linkages between rescue activities and other forms of resistance during the occupation period. Secondly, it demonstrates the importance of a regional rather than a national approach to the topic. Finally it examines how “rescue” can be seen as having a tradition; for example in the case of Belgium from the experiences of occupation in the First World War, and in the Netherlands from longer‐standing rural social traditions of helping those in need.

Pope Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy: Evidence of a Papal Directive?

Abstract Little evidence supports the notion that Pius XII delivered a directive to members of the Catholic Church to help Jews during the German occupation of Italy, argues the author of this article. That many such men and women did open their doors is well known, and several thousand Jews in Italy were saved as a result. The pope and his advisers knew that many Jews, along with many more non-Jewish fugitives from the Nazis and Fascists, were hiding in religious institutions outside Vatican City, and being sheltered individually in prelates' residences in Vatican City itself. However, they seem not to have been aware of the full extent of the rescue effort, nor to have ordered it initially.

Gender and Holocaust Docudramas: Gentile Heroines in Rescue Films

This article considers the representation of women as rescuers of Jews in Holocaust docudramas from the 1970s to the late 1990s. Though based on historical fact, the cinematic productions in question tend to create good/bad polarities, adhere to the convention of individual character and middle-class feminine propriety as moral coherence, and offer optimistic resolutions which confirm the religious notion that good deeds are appropriately rewarded. The central argument is that the documentary subtext of these productions is structured by a narrative of heroism representing the Holocaust as a disturbance of a fundamentally "good" European social order. This simplistic resolution is underpinned by the androcentric endorsement of female celibacy and monogamous heterosexuality as basic ingredients in what constitutes female morality. Jewish victims in the meantime are stereotyped as helpless, in some cases effeminate embodiments of dependency, religious incoherence, and moral confusion. The result of this sort of representation is an affirmation of Christian faith and European nationalism (Dutch, French) vindicated as it were by the victory of good over evil and by the appropriate rewarding of the "correct' moral choice.

The rescue of Jews from Nazi persecution: A Western European perspective

The rescue of Jews from Nazi persecution: A Western European perspective

The Goodness of Strangers: Help to Escaped Russian Slave Labourers in Occupied Jersey, 1942–1945

Between 1942 and 1945, 5,300 Organisation Todt workers were brought to Jersey to build the defensive fortifications ordered by Hitler. A small number of Russian slave labourers escaped from island camps and were sheltered by Jersey residents until the liberation. The article describes the activities of these helpers and the rudimentary network of safe houses they created, as well as comparing their motives with those of the rescuers of Jews in occupied Europe. It ends by outlining reasons for the neglect of this episode of British wartime history and suggests the adoption of a comparative approach as the best way towards an understanding of the possibilities and limitations of resistance in the Channel Islands.

Symposium on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust in Italy

The articles published in this section of JMIS were given at a symposium held early in 2001 on the role of Pope Pius XII in the rescue of Jews in Italy during the Holocaust. The discussion focuses on recent books on the subject by Susan Zuccotti and Ronald J. Rychlak. In the articles published here the authors and the panelists discuss the historical record (sources, facts and interpretations) and the nature of the obligations of the Papacy and the Catholic Church in the circumstances of the Second World War and the German occupation of Italy after the fall of Fascism.

Representing Rescue: The National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror, the British and the Rescue of Jews from Nazism

From December 1942 to May 1943, the question of an Allied effort to rescue the Jews of Europe would momentarily command the attention of the British Government and the general public. At the centre of attempts to place the issue of rescue on the national agenda were a small group of MPs and Jewish representatives who formed themselves into ‘The National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror’. The relationship between a British Government committed to its policy that relief for all victims lay only with an Allied victory and the endeavours of the Committee illustrates the extent to which the question of ‘rescue’ would lie at the centre of the complex circumstances regarding Britain’s response to the Holocaust.

Altruism and the Endurance of the Good

Egoism is a pervasive trait in modern market societies that encourages people to focus upon their own self-interest above all else. Third-sector organizations, by contrast, are frequently termed “altruistic.” This essay elucidates the meaning of “altruism” as it applies to these organizations. Moral altruism means direct concern for another's well being—whoever that person might be. This study rejects psychological egoism as a meaningful psychological theory, and ethical egoism as a coherent moral position; it discusses empirical studies of altruism in rescuers of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe as proof against the former form of egoism and Kant's moral theory against the latter. The essay then argues that altruism is a form of public action in Hannah Arendt's sense of this term. The essay concludes that third-sector organizations are altruistic insofar as they engage in public action, thereby, treating beneficiaries with respect for their individuality.

The Rescue of Jews in France and Belgium During the Holocaust

(1998). The Rescue of Jews in France and Belgium During the Holocaust. The Journal of Holocaust Education: Vol. 7, No. 1-2, pp. 1-18.

The Rescue of Jews by Non-Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland

(1998). The Rescue of Jews by Non-Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. The Journal of Holocaust Education: Vol. 7, No. 1-2, pp. 19-44.

Milgram für Historiker

Abstract Stanley Milgram was the first who tried to apply the results of his experiment on National Socialism. Historical science has hardly picked up on this subject with the exception of the American historian Christopher Browning. Despite of some serious problems which have occured by transferring the Milgram-experiment onto National Socialism we are convinced that the possibilities Milgram has opened up for contemporary history have not been exhausted yet. In this connection we would like to plead for a stronger distinction of types of perpetrators, taking into account the latest results in criminology. The Milgram-experiment refers methodically to local studies of massacres and genocides. Its application on the bureaucracy of destruction seems particularly promising to us. Also, there should be included the rescuers of jews into the research on perpetrators as a controlling body.

Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust

Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust

Rescue of Jews from Annihilation: Resistance and Responsibility in Nazi-Occupied Denmark

Rescue of Jews from Annihilation: Resistance and Responsibility in Nazi-Occupied Denmark