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                                                                                ETHICS, Page 65

A Conspiracy of Goodness


Rescuing Jews during World War II took a special kind of heroism:
ordinary human compassion

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.