Saving the Jews Amazing stories of men and women who defied the "final solution"

Based primarily on the files at Yad Vashem, which depict the experiences of righteous gentiles, Saving the Jews is a montage that offers the reader a glimpse of light in an otherwise dark time. Paldiel begins by recounting a few stories dealing with those who protested the antisemitic initiatives of the regime and tried to warn the world of Nazi intentions. Subsequent stories portray how rescuers operated in their daily lives. A special chapter describes the world of hidden children and the posttraumatic effects they suffered. Even though institutional churches did not exhibit heroic moral behavior, individual clergy, as their stories reveal, did. Most intriguing are those stories that recount the cases of those who saved individual Jews, but for various reasons were declined the "righteous" title. The appendixes describe the role played by Jewish rescuers as well as the need to honor them, deal with the unknown righteous, and give a statistical country-by-country breakdown of those honored at Yad Vashem. Even though little analysis is employed, the variety of experiences recounted compels the reader to reflect on the values, attitudes, and patterns of behavior behind moral actions. General and undergraduate collections. D. J. Dietrich; Boston College

Presented here are 47 accounts of Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust, nonJews who have been honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as Righteous Gentiles. Paldiel, director of the Righteous Among the Nations program at Yad Vashem, was rescued (along with his family) by a French priest during the Holocaust; the priest helped them escape from France into Switzerland. Of the 70 people Paldiel chronicles (some accounts involve more than one person, and one story concerns 10 British POWs), Varian Fry is the only recognized hero. Fry, an American, saved thousands of Jews in France by providing them with escape routes and visas and passports--some valid, some false. Among the other men and women documented are a Lithuanian carpenter who hid 12 Jews (and was assassinated by a fellow Lithuanian in 1952), and a Turkish consul general in Rhodes who saved 50 Jews by declaring them to be Turks. This is a perceptive and moving account of little-known individuals who risked their lives and the lives of their loved ones. --George Cohen