The Righteous
The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust
Martin Gilbert
D RAWING FROM TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF ORIGINAL RESEARCH , S IR M ARTIN G ILBERT RE-CREATES THE REMARKABLE STORIES OF NON -J EWS WHO RISKED THEIR LIVES TO HELP J EWS DURING THE H OLOCAUST
According to Jewish tradition, Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world. In The Righteous , distinguished historian Sir Martin Gilbert explores the courage of those who, throughout Germany and in every occupied country from Norway to Greece, from the Atlantic to the Baltic, took incredible risks to help Jews whose fate would have been sealed without them. Indeed, many lost their lives for their efforts.
From Greek-Orthodox Princess Alice of Greece, who hid Jews in her home in Athens, to the Ukrainian Uniate Archbishop of Lvov, who hid hundreds of Jews in his churches and monastaries, to Muslims in Bosnia and Albania, to British prisoners-of-war, many risked, and lost, everything to help their fellow man. Those who hid Jews included priests and nuns, nurses and nannies, teachers, neighbors and friends, employees and colleagues, soldiers and diplomats, and, above all, ordinary citizens. These are the stories of those who have received formal recognition by the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.
Praise for Martin Gilberts The First World War
Among the thousands of accounts of the conflict, Gilberts is remarkable, even stunning.
Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe
All the ways Mr. Gilberts The First World War brings the conflict home to people at the end of the twentieth century renders it one of the first books that anyone should read in beginning to try to understand this war and this century.
John Milton Cooper, Jr., The New York Times Book Review (front page)
Praise for Martin Gilberts Churchill: A Life
A masterful work.
Henry Kissinger
The most scholarly study of Churchill in war and peace ever writtenEssential diplomatic history and enlightening personal history.
Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
One of Britains most distinguished historians, S IR M ARTIN G ILBERT was knighted in 1995. Among his many books are The Holocaust, The First World War, The Second World War, Churchill: A Life , and The Boys .
DEDICATED TO
MORDECAI PALDIEL
who has done so much to uncover
and to preserve
the stories of the Righteous
Even in hell, even in that hell called the Holocaust, there was goodness,
there was kindness, and there was love and compassion.
ABRAHAM FOXMAN ,
saved as a child
Illustration Credits
I AM GRATEFUL to the Photo Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington DC, for access to, and permission to reproduce, the sixty-four photographs in this book. Additional acknowledgement for the use of these pictures is due to Gay Block and Malka Drucker, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust (photographs 1, 25, 26, 31, 57), Abraham Foxman (2 and 3), Museum of Jewish Heritage/Centre for Holocaust Studies, and Stanley Berger (4), Helen Wisgardisky Lewin (5), Rose Levin Weinberg (6), Anita Helfgott Ekstein (7, 8), Shalom Foundation: Golda Tencer-Szurmiej Collection (9), Alicija Fajnstejn Weinsberg (10), Zydowski Instytut Historyczny Naukowo-Badawczy (11, 12, 13, 14), Jacky Barkan (15, 16), Annette Lederman Linzer (17), Jacques Leibman (18), Yettanda Stewart (19), Sara Lamhaut Boucart (20), Michel Reynders (21), Thea Rothenstein (22), Rachelle Silberman Goldstein (23), Marguerite Birnbaum (24), Bep Meyer Zion (27, 28), Thomas Stein (29), Nederlands Institut Voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (30), Memoir Juive de Paris (32), Hanne Leibman and Jack Lewin (33), Nelly Trocm Hewett (34), Roger Waksman (35), Nadine Fain Thiberville (36), Gavra Mandil (37), Marion I. Cassirer (38), Babi Yar Society (39), Bernard Geron (40), Alice Slade (41), Lea Kalin (42), Sophie Zajd Berkowitz (43), Ursula Korn Selig (44), Frihedsmuseet, Denmark (45, 46), Hagstromer & Qviberg Fondkommission (47), Eric Saul, of Visas for Life (48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 61), Nina Gladitz Film Produktion (50), Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv (54), Agnes Herzer (56), Yad Vashem Photo Archives (58), Swedish National Archives (59), Thomas Veres (60), Comit International de la Croix Rouge (62), PFG International (63) and Leopold Page Photographic Collection (64).
About the Author
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One of Britains most distinguished historians, S IR M ARTIN G ILBERT was knighted in 1995. Among his many books are The Holocaust, The First World War, The Second World War, Churchill: A Life , and The Boys .
Contents
Maps
Preface
ON 28 OCTOBER 1974, while walking on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, I saw in front of me the end of a procession on its way to one of the citys Christian cemeteries. Surprised that most of the walkers seemed to be Jews, I asked one of them whose funeral it was, and was told it was that of a German Christian, Oskar Schindler, who had helped save the lives of more than fifteen hundred Jews during the Second World War.
Like most of the four hundred people in the procession, the man to whom I spoke was a Jew saved by Schindler. So too was the Polish-born Judge Moshe Bejski, a survivor of the Holocaust, who delivered the funeral oration. Bejski was then active in the search for non-Jews who had saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, to enable them to receive formal recognition as Righteous Among the Nations. This recognition was being given, and continues to be given, by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and archive in Jerusalem, as laid down in the law of the State of Israel.
The concept of Righteous Among the Nationsin Hebrew, hasidei umot haolam is an ancient one in Jewish tradition. Originally those nations were the non-Israelite tribes of Biblical times. During the Passover evening family recitation, according to a post-war tradition, Jews recall Shifra and Puah, the two Egyptian midwives who defied Pharaohs edict to drown the male children of Israel in the Nile, and the daughter of Pharaoh, who violated her fathers decree to drown infants, and who reached out to save Moses. Seeing the new-born Israelite boy for whom death was the sole decreeher own fathers decreeshe took him in his basket from the river and brought him up as her own son. In the Bible she is given no name. The Jewish sages chose a name for her: Batya, daughter of God.
From that moment on Mount Zion in 1974, I began collecting newspaper items about the awards and award ceremonies at Yad Vashem, and spending time in that part of the archive there dedicated to the Righteous. Some of the material in this book derives from my researches at that time.