Under Hitler’s domination in Eastern Europe, conditions were created in which citizens of occupied countries were encouraged to turn against their fellow citizens and abandon them both legally and morally as neighbors. While many non-Jews chose silence and safety as bystanders during the Holocaust, a heroic few obeyed the greatest of the commandments: to love thy neighbor. During a period in history when it seemed as though the whole world had abandoned the Jews of Eastern Europe, courageous individuals stepped forward and risked their own lives as well as the lives of family members to shelter and rescue Jews during the Holocaust. In an era marked by apathy and complicity, these rescuers present a portrait of moral courage in their response to the Holocaust. Their sense of justice and profound goodness led these individuals to reject Hitler’s “Final Solution” and work towards the restoration of human dignity. Most were ordinary citizens who went to extraordinary lengths merely to do what they believed was right. Some rescuers hid Jews in attics or cellars or behind false walls within their homes, sharing their meager food rations with their Jewish “guests” in hiding. Other rescuers helped transport Jews to the safety of neutral countries via an underground railroad of sorts that trafficked in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi deportation. There were rescuers who used their positions, political connections, or diplomatic ties to issue transit visas, false documents, or citizenship papers in order to smuggle Jews out of ghettos and occupied areas. There were even those who raised Jewish children as their own or hid them in schools and churches to protect them from Nazi genocide. Each of these rescuers is honored as a “Righteous Gentile” at Yad Vashem in Israel. These non-Jews have earned the distinction hasidei umot haolam or the “righteous among the nations,” a title derived from the Talmud to describe those who risk their own lives to save the lives of others. The Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations is a monument erected at Yad Vashem to these non-Jewish rescuers who have earned a special place in Jewish history as well. The avenue is lined by carob trees—each tree planted as a living tribute to individual courage and sacrifice. There is a Talmud directive that states, “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” Thus, through their courage and conscience during the Holocaust, these “Righteous Gentiles” preserved humanity and honored the sanctity of all human life. When the Nazis occupied Holland in 1940, many Dutch citizens risked their lives to shelter Jews, hiding them in their attics, cellars, and homes. In Haarlem, Holland, the ten Boom family witnessed Jewish persecution and the round-up of Dutch Jews destined for deportation to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. Devout Christians, the ten Boom family responded to these organized anti-Semitic measures by providing a hiding place in their home for Jewish refugees. The ten Boom family ran a clock and watch repair shop on Barteljorisstraat within their home, which they called the Béjé. Casper ten Boom was a watchmaker, and he encouraged his daughter Corrie to learn the family trade. Corrie ten Boom lived in the combination family home and workshop with her father and older sister Betsie. Throughout the Nazi occupation, the Béjé became a center for underground activities by accommodating Jews in danger of arrest and deportation by the Gestapo. These Jewish refugees lived in hiding in the Béjé for varying periods of time until they could be smuggled to safety via the Dutch underground. By providing this safe haven and trafficking in human cargo, Corrie and her family risked their own lives. Their non-violent resistance against the Nazis was an act of faith. Deeply religious, the ten Boom family felt they were called by their love for God and their Christian duty to help their fellow human beings in need; thus their faith led them to shelter and rescue Jews. The family was betrayed, and the Gestapo raided the Béjé on February 21, 1944. Corrie, her father, her sister Betsy, and 33 other family members and friends were arrested during the raid. However, the Gestapo did not discover the secret room nor the Jews in hiding there, who escaped detection for several days and later managed to leave the Béjé and reach safety. The ten Boom family was deported to concentration camps where both Corrie’s father and sister died. Remarkably, amidst the horrors of camp life, Corrie continued to witness her Christian faith and worked tirelessly to help and comfort other prisoners. In January 1945, she was freed, apparently through an administrative error. When World War II ended, Corrie traveled around the world, visiting numerous countries to testify to God’s love and to bring his message of brotherhood and compassion to those in need. The excerpts that follow profile the extraordinary life of Corrie ten Boom and other altruistic rescuers. The first selections are taken from Corrie ten Boom’s memoir The Hiding Place and testify to the courage of this quiet Christian spinster whose life was transformed by her response to those in need during the Holocaust. The concluding excerpt, “Links in a Chain,” explores the altruistic personality during this dark period in history and the motivation required for such ethical responses to Hitler’s regime. During the Holocaust, Corrie ten Boom—as well as all “Righteous Gentiles”—bore witness that the small voice of conscience and compassion could still be heard over the Nazi cacophony of racist rhetoric and oppression. They did, indeed, follow the commandment to love thy neighbor. The following excerpts have been taken from:
THE HIDING PLACE By Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill.
Copyright © 1971 by Corrie ten Boom and John and Elizabeth Sherrill. Reprinted with permission of Chosen Books.
From: Chapter 6 “The Secret Room”
And one morning soon afterward the first customer in the shop was a small thin-bearded man named Smit. Father took his jeweler’s glass from his eye. If there was one thing he loved better than making a new acquaintance, it was discovering a link with an old one.
“Smit,” he said eagerly. “I know several Smits in Amsterdam. Are you by any chance related to the family who—
“Father,” I interrupted, “this is the man I told you about. He’s come to, ah, inspect the house.”
“A building inspector? Then you must be the Smit with offices in the Grote Hout Straat. I wonder that I haven’t—
“Father!” I pleaded, “he’s not a building inspector, and his name is not Smit.”
“Not Smit?”
Together Mr. Smit and I attempted to explain, but Father simply could not understand a person’s being called by a name not his own. As I led Mr. Smit into the back hail we heard him musing to himself, “I once knew a Smit on Koning Straat. . .”
Mr. Smit examined and approved the hiding place for ration cards beneath the bottom step. He also pronounced acceptable the warning system we had worked out. This was a triangle-shaped wooden sign advertising “Alpina Watches” which I had placed in the dining room window. As long as the sign was in place, it was safe to enter.
But when I showed him a cubby hole behind the corner cupboard in the dining room, he shook his head. Some ancient redesigning of the house had left a crawl space in that corner and we’d been secreting jewelry, silver coins, and other valuables there since the start of the occupation. Not only the rabbi had brought us his library but other Jewish families had brought their treasures to the Beje for safekeeping. The space was large enough that we had believed a person could crawl in there if necessary, but Mr. Smit dismissed it without a second glance.
“First place they’d look. Don’t bother to change it though. It’s only silver. We’re interested in saving people, not things.”
He started up the narrow corkscrew stairs, and as he mounted so did his spirits. He paused in delight at the odd-placed landings, pounded on the crooked walls, and laughed aloud as the floor levels of the two old houses continued out of phase.
“What an impossibility!” he said in an awestruck voice. “What an improbable, unbelievable, unpredictable impossibility! Miss ten Boom, if all houses were constructed like this one, you would see before you a less worried man.”
At last, at the very top of the stairs, he entered my room and gave a little cry of delight. “This is it!” he exclaimed.
“You want your hiding place as high as possible,” he went on eagerly. “Gives you the best chance to reach it while the search is on below.” He leaned out the window, craning his thin neck, the little faun’s beard pointing this way and that.
“But . . . this is my bedroom. . .”
Mr. Smit paid no attention. He was already measuring. He moved the heavy, wobbly old wardrobe away from the wall with surprising ease and pulled my bed into the center of the room. “This is where the false wall will go!” Excitedly he drew out a pencil and drew a line along the floor thirty inches from the back wall. He stood up and gazed at it moodily.
“That’s as big as I dare,” he said. “It will take a cot mattress, though. Oh yes. Easily!”
I tried again to protest, but Mr. Smit had forgotten I existed. Over the next few days he and his workmen were in and out of our house constantly. They never knocked. At each visit each man carried in something. Tools in a folded newspaper. A few bricks in a briefcase. “Wood!” he exclaimed when I ventured to wonder if a wooden wall would not be easier to build. “Wood sounds hollow. Hear it in a minute. No, no. Brick’s the only thing for false walls.”
After the wall was up, the plasterer came, then the carpenter, finally the painter. Six days after he had begun, Mr. Smit called Father, Betsie, and me to see.
We stood in the doorway and gaped. The smell of fresh paint was everywhere. But surely nothing in this room was newly painted! All four walls had that streaked and grimy look that old rooms got in coal- burning Haarlem. The ancient molding ran unbroken around the ceiling, chipped and peeling here and there, obviously undisturbed for a hundred and fifty years. Old water stains streaked the back wall, a wall that even I who had lived half a century in this room, could scarcely believe was not the original, but set back a precious two-and-a-half feet from the true wall of the building.
Built-in bookshelves ran along this false wall, old, sagging shelves whose blistered wood bore the same water stains as the wall behind them. Down in the far left-hand corner, beneath the bottom shelf, a sliding panel, two feet high and two wide, opened into the secret room.
Mr. Smit stooped and silently pulled this panel up. On hands and knees Betsie and I crawled into the narrow room behind it. Once inside we could stand up, sit, or even stretch out one at a time on the single mattress. A concealed vent, cunningly let into the real wall, allowed air to enter from outside.
“Keep a water jug there,” said Mr. Smit, crawling in behind us. “Change the water once a week. Hardtack and vitamins keep indefinitely. Anytime there is anyone in the house whose presence is unofficial, all possessions except the clothes actually on his back must be stored in here.”
Dropping to our knees again we crawled single file out into my bedroom. “Move back into this room,” he told me. “Everything exactly as before.”
With his fist he struck the wall above the bookshelves.
“The Gestapo could search for a year,” he said. “They’ll never find this one.”
From: Chapter 7 “Eusie”
And so the work grew. As each new need arose, a new answer was found, too. Through Pickwick, for example, we met the man at the central telephone exchange whose department handled orders to connect and disconnect lines. With a little rewiring and juggling of numbers, he soon had our instrument in operation.
What a day it was when the old wall phone in the rear hall jangled joyously for the first time in three years! And how we needed it! For by now there were eighty Dutchmen—elderly women and middle-aged men along with our teenagers—working in “God’s underground” as we sometimes laughingly called ourselves. Most of these people never saw one another; we kept face-to-face contacts as few as possible. But all knew the Beje. It was headquarters, the center of a spreading web: the knot where all threads crossed.
But if the telephone was a boon, it was also a fresh risk—as was each added worker and connection. We set the phone’s ring as low as we could and still hear it; but who might happen to be passing through the hail when it rang?
For that matter how long would curious eyes up and down the street continue to believe that one small watch shop was quite as busy as it appeared? It was true that repair work was in demand: plenty of legitimate customers still passed in and out. But there was altogether too much coming and going, especially in the early evening. The curfew was now 7:00 P.M., which in spring and summer left no nighttime hours at all in which workers could move legally through the streets.
It was an hour and a half before that time on the first of June, 1943, and I was thinking of all this as I sat impatiently behind my workbench. Six workers still not back and so many loose ends to tie up before 7:00. For one thing, being the first of the month, Fred Koornstra should be arriving with the new ration cards. The hundred cards which had seemed such an extravagant request a year ago were now far too few for our needs and Fred was only one of our suppliers, some of the stolen cards coming from as far away as Delft. How long can we go on this way? I wondered. How long can we continue to count on this strange protection?
My thoughts were interrupted by the side-entrance bell. Betsie and I reached it at the same instant. In the alley stood a young Jewish woman cradling a tiny blanketed bundle in her arms. Behind her I recognized an intern from the maternity hospital.
The baby, he told us in the hallway, had come prematurely. He had kept mother and child in the hospital longer than permitted already because she had nowhere else to go.
Betsie held out her arms for the baby and at that moment Fred Koornstra opened the door from the shop. He blinked a moment at seeing people in the hail, then turned with great deliberation to the meter on the wall. The young doctor, seeing what he took to be an actual meter-man, turned as white as his own collar. I longed to reassure both him and Fred, but knew that the fewer of the group who knew one another the safer it was for all. The poor intern gulped a hasty goodbye while Betsie and I got mother and baby up to the dining room and closed the door on Fred and his work.
Betsie poured a bowl of the soup she had cooked for supper from a much-boiled bone. The baby began a thin high wail; I rocked it while the mother ate. Here was a new danger, a tiny fugitive too young to know the folly of making a noise. We had had many Jewish children over a night or several nights at the Beje and even the youngest had developed the uncanny silence of small hunted things. But at two weeks this one had yet to discover how unwelcoming was its world: we would need a place for them far removed from other houses.
And the very next morning into the shop walked the perfect solution. He was a clergyman friend of ours, pastor in a small town outside of Haarlem, and his home was set back from the street in a large wooded park.
“Good morning, Pastor,” I said, the pieces of the puzzle falling together in my mind. “Can we help you?”
I looked at the watch he had brought in for repair. It required a very hard-to-find spare part. “But for you, Pastor, we will do our very best. And now I have something I want to confess.”
The pastor’s eyes clouded. “Confess?”
I drew him out the back door of the shop and up the stairs to the dining room.
“I confess that I too am searching for something.” The pastor’s face was now wrinkled with a frown. “Would you be willing to take a Jewish mother and her baby into your home? They will almost certainly be arrested otherwise.”
Color drained from the man’s face. He took a step back from me. “Miss ten Boom! I do hope you’re not involved with any of this illegal concealment and undercover business. It’s just not safe! Think of your father! And your sister—she’s never been strong!”
On impulse I told the pastor to wait and ran upstairs. Betsie had put the newcomers in Willem’s old room, the farthest from windows on the street. I asked the mother’s permission to borrow the infant: the little thing weighed hardly anything in my arms.
Back in the dining room I pulled back the coverlet from the baby’s face.
There was a long silence. The man bent forward, his hand in spite of himself reaching for the tiny fist curled round the blanket. For a moment I saw compassion and fear struggle in his face. Then he straightened. “No. Definitely not. We could lose our lives for that Jewish child!”
Unseen by either of us, Father had appeared in the doorway. “Give the child to me, Corrie,” he said.
Father held the baby close, his white beard brushing its cheek, looking into the little face with eyes as blue and innocent as the baby’s own. At last he looked up at the pastor. “You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”
The pastor turned sharply on his heels and walked out of the room.
So we had to accept a bad solution to our problem. On the edge of Haarlem was a truck farm which hid refugees for short periods of time. It was not a good location, since the Gestapo had been there already. But there was nowhere else available on short notice. Two workers took the woman and child there that afternoon.
A few weeks later we heard that the farm had been raided. When the Gestapo came to the barn where the woman was hidden, not the baby but the mother began to shriek with hysteria. She, the baby, and her protectors were all taken.
From: Chapter 9 “The Raid”
In my fevered dream a buzzer kept ringing. On and on it went. Why wouldn’t it stop? Feet were running, voices whispering. “Hurry! Hurry!”
I sat bolt upright. People were running past my bed. I turned just in time to see Thea’s heels disappear through the low door. Meta was behind her, then Henk.
But—I hadn’t planned a drill for today! Who in the world—unless—unless it wasn’t a drill. Eusie dashed past me, white-faced, his pipe rattling in the ashtray that he carried in shaking hands.
And at last it penetrated my numbed brain that the emergency had come. One, two, three people already in the secret room; four as Eusie’s black shoes and scarlet socks disappeared. But Mary—where was Mary? The old woman appeared in the bedroom door, mouth open, gasping for air. I sprang from my bed and half-pulled, half-shoved her across the room.
I was sliding the secret panel down behind her when a slim white-haired man burst into the room. I recognized him from Pickwick’s, someone high in the national Resistance. I’d had no idea he was in the house. He dived after Mary. Five, six. Yes, that was right with Leendert away.
The man’s legs vanished and I dropped the panel down and leapt back into bed. Below I heard doors slamming, heavy footsteps on the stairs. But it was another sound that turned my blood to water: the strangling, grating rasp of Mary’s breathing.
“Lord Jesus!” I prayed. “You have the power to heal! Heal Mary now!”
And then my eye fell on the briefcase, stuffed with names and addresses. I snatched it up, yanked up the sliding door again, flung the case inside, shoved the door down and pushed my prison bag up against it. I had just reached the bed again when the bedroom door flew open.
“What’s your name?”
I sat up slowly and—I hoped—sleepily.
“What?”
“Your name!”
“Cornelia ten Boom.” The man was tall and heavy-set with a strange, pale face. He wore an ordinary blue business suit. He turned and shouted down the stairs, “We’ve got one more up here, Willemse.”
He turned back to me. “Get up! Get dressed!”
As I crawled out from under the covers, the man took a slip of paper from his pocket and consulted it. “So you’re the ring leader!” He looked at me with new interest. “Tell me now, where are you hiding the Jews?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man laughed. “And you don’t know anything about an underground ring, either. We’ll see about that!”
He had not taken his eyes off me, so I began to pull on my clothes over my pajamas, ears straining for a sound from the secret room.
“Let me see your papers!”
I pulled out the little sack that I wore around my neck. When I took out my identification folder, a roll of bills fell out with it. The man stooped, snatched up the money from the floor, and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he took my papers and looked at them. For a moment the room was silent. Mary Itallie’s wheeze—why wasn’t I hearing it?
The man threw the papers back at me. “Hurry up!”
But he was not in half the hurry I was to get away from that room. I buttoned my sweater all wrong in my haste and stuffed my feet into my shoes without bothering to tie them. Then I was about to reach for my prison bag.
Wait.
It stood where I had shoved it in my panic: directly in front of the secret panel. If I were to reach down under the shelf to get it now, with this man watching my every move, might not his attention be attracted to the last place on earth I wanted him to look?
It was the hardest thing I had ever done to turn and walk out of that room, leaving the bag behind.
I stumbled down the stairs, my knees shaking as much from fear as from flu. A uniformed soldier was stationed in front of Tante Jans’s rooms; the door was shut. I wondered if the prayer meeting had ended, if Willem and Nollie and Peter had got away. Or were they all still in there? How many innocent people might be involved?
The man behind me gave me a little push and I hurried on down the stairs to the dining room. Father, Betsie, and Toos were sitting on chairs pulled back against the wall. Beside them sat three underground workers who must have arrived since I had gone upstairs. On the floor beneath the window, broken in three pieces, lay the “Alpina” sign. Someone had managed to knock it from the sill.
A second Gestapo agent in plain clothes was pawing eagerly through a pile of silver rijksdaalders and jewelry heaped on the dining room table. It was the cache from the space behind the corner cupboard: it had been indeed the first place they looked.
“Here’s the other one listed at the address,” said the man who had brought me down. “My information says she’s the leader of the whole outfit.”
The man at the table, the one called Willemse, glanced at me, then turned back to the loot in front of him. “You know what to do, Kapteyn.”
Kapteyn seized me by the elbow and shoved me ahead of him down the remaining five steps and into the rear of the shop. Another soldier in uniform stood guard just inside this door. Kapteyn prodded me through to the front room and pushed me against the wall.
“Where are the Jews?”
“There aren’t any Jews here.”
The man struck me hard across the face.
“Where do you hide the ration cards?”
“I don’t know what you’re—
Kapteyn hit me again. I staggered up against the astronomical clock. Before I could recover he slapped me again, then again, and again, stinging blows that jerked my head backward.
“Where are the Jews?”
Another blow.
“Where is your secret room?”
I tasted blood in my mouth. My head spun, my ears rang—I was losing consciousness. “Lord Jesus,” I cried out, “protect me!”
Kapteyn’s hand stopped in midair.
“If you say that name again I’ll kill you!”
But instead his arm slowly dropped to his side. “If you won’t talk, that skinny one will.”
I stumbled ahead of him up the stairs. He pushed me into one of the chairs against the dining room wall. Through a blur I saw him lead Betsie from the room.
From: Chapter 10 “Scheveningen”
It was perhaps a week later that my cell door opened and a prison trusty tossed a package wrapped in brown paper onto the floor. I picked it up, hefted it, turned it over and over. The wrapping paper had been torn open and carelessly retied, but even through the disarray I could spot Noffie’s loving touch. I sat on the cot and opened it.
There, familiar and welcoming as a visit from home, was the light blue embroidered sweater. As I put it on I seemed to feel Nollie’s arms circling my shoulders. Also inside the package were cookies and vitamins, needle and thread, and a bright red towel. How Nollie understood the gray color-hunger of prison! She had even wrapped the cookies in gay red cellophane.
I was biting into the first one when an inspiration came to me. I dragged the cot out from the wail to stand under the naked overhead bulb. Climbing on it I fashioned a lampshade with the paper: a cheery red glow at once suffused the bleak little room.
I was rewrapping the cookies in the brown outer paper when my eyes fell on the address written in Nollie’s careful hand, slanting upward toward the postage stamp. But—Nollie’s handwriting did not slant . . . . The stamp! Hadn’t a message once come to the Beje under a stamp, penciled in the tiny square beneath? Laughing at my own overwrought imagination I moistened the paper in the basin water and worked the stamp gently free.
Words! There was definitely writing there—but so tiny I had to climb again onto the cot and hold the paper close to the shaded bulb.
“All the watches in your closet are safe.”
Safe. Then—then Eusie, and Henk, and Mary, and—they’d got out of the secret room! They’d escaped’ They were free!
I burst into racking sobs, then heard heavy footsteps bearing down the corridor. Hastily I jumped down from the cot and shoved it back to the wall. The pass-through clattered open.
‘What’s the commotion in here!”
“It’s nothing. I—won’t do it again.”
The slot in the door snapped shut. How had they managed it? How had they got past the soldiers? Never mind, dear Lord. You were there, and that was all that mattered.
The cell door opened to let in a German officer followed by the head matron herself. My eyes ran hungrily over the well-pressed uniform with its rows of brilliant-colored battle ribbons.
“Miss ten Boom,” the officer began in excellent Dutch. “I have a few questions I believe you can help me with.”
The matron was carrying a small stool which she leapt to set down for the officer. I stared at her. Was this obsequious creature the terrible-voiced terror of the women’s wing?
The officer sat down, motioning me to take the cot. There was something in that gesture that belonged to the world outside the prison. As he took out a small notebook and began to read names from it I was suddenly conscious of my rumpled clothes, my long, ragged fingernails.
To my relief I honestly did not know any of the names he read—now I understood the wisdom of the ubiquitous “Mr. Smit.” The officer stood up. “Will you be feeling well enough to come for your hearing soon?”
Again that ordinary human manner. “Yes—I—I hope so.” The officer stepped out into the hail, the matron bobbing and scurrying after him with the stool.
It was the third of May; I was sitting on my cot sewing. Since Nollie’s package had been delivered I had a wonderful new occupation: one by one I was pulling the threads from the red towel and with them embroidering bright figures on the pajamas that I had only recently stopped wearing beneath my clothes. A window with ruffled curtains. A flower with an impossible number of petals and leaves. I had just started work on the head of a cat over the right pocket when the food shelf in the door banged open and shut with a single motion.
And there on the floor of the cell lay a letter.
I dropped the pajamas and sprang forward. Nol.lie’s writing. Why should my hand tremble as I picked it up?
The letter had been opened by the censors—held by them too: the postmark was over a week old. But it was a letter, a letter from home—the very first one! Why this sudden fear?
I unfolded the paper. “Corrie, can you be very brave?”
No! No, I couldn’t be brave! I forced my eyes to read on.
“I have news that is very hard to write you. Father survived his arrest by only ten days. He is now with the Lord . . . .
I stood with the paper between my hands so long that the daily shaft of sunlight entered the cell and fell upon it. Father . . . Father . . . the letter glittered in the criss-cross light as I read the rest. Nollie had no details, not how or where he had died, not even where he was buried.
Footsteps were passing on the coconut matting. I ran to the door and pressed my face to the closed pass through. “Please! Oh please!”
The steps stopped. The shelf dropped open. “What’s the matter?”
“Please! I’ve had bad news—oh please, don’t go away!”
“Wait a minute.” The footsteps retreated, then returned with a jangle of keys. The cell door opened.
“Here.” The young woman handed me a pill with a glass of water. “It’s a sedative.”
“This letter just came,” I explained. “It says that my father—it says my father has died.”
The girl stared at me. “Your father!” she said in astonished tones.
I realized how very old and decrepit I must look to this young person. She stood in the doorway a while, obviously embarrassed at my tears. “Whatever happens,” she said at last, “you brought it on yourself by breaking the laws!”
Dear Jesus, I whispered as the door slammed and her footsteps died away, how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are here. To think that Father sees You now, face to face! To think that he and Mama are together again, walking those bright streets . . . .
I pulled the cot from the wall and below the calendar scratched another date:
March 9, 1944 Father, Released.
The following excerpts have been taken from:
FACING HISTORY AND OURSELVES: HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR By Margot Stern Strom Copyright © 1994 by Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
From: “Links in a Chain” In their book The Altruistic Personality, Samuel and Pearl Oliner quote Johan, a Dutch teenager who rescued Jews. “My father said the world is one big chain. One little part breaks and the chain is broken and it won’t work anymore.” The Oliners went on to observe, “Rescuers did not simply happen on opportunities for rescue; they actively created, sought, or recognized them where others did not. Their participation was not determined by circumstances but their own personal qualities. Chance sometimes provided rescuers like Johan with an opportunity to help, but it was the values learned from their parents which prompted and sustained their involvement. The experiences of Marion Pritchard, a graduate student in 1940—the year the Germans invaded the Netherlands—confirms the Oliners’ view that the decision to rescue was a conscious choice. One morning in 1942, as she was riding her bicycle to school, she passed a home for Jewish children. What she observed that day changed her life. The Germans were loading the children, who ranged in age from babies to eight-year-olds, on trucks. They were upset, and crying. When they did not move fast enough the Nazis picked them up, by an arm, a leg, the hair, and threw them into the trucks. To watch grown men treat small children that way—I could not believe my eyes. I found myself literally crying with rage. Two women coming down the street tried to interfere physically. The Germans heaved them into the truck, too. I just sat there on my bicycle, and that was the moment I decided that if there was anything I could do to thwart such atrocities, I would do it. Some of my friends had similar experiences, and about ten of us, including two Jewish students who decided they did not want to go into hiding, organized very informally for this purpose. We obtained Aryan identity cards for the Jewish students, who, of course, were taking more of a risk than we were. They knew many people who were looking to onderduiken, “disappear,” as Anne Frank and her family were to do. We located hiding places, helped people move there, provided food, clothing, and ration cards, and sometimes moral support and relief for the host families. We registered newborn Jewish babies as gentiles . . . . and provided medical care when possible. The decision to rescue Jews had great consequences. Pritchard described what happened when she hid a man with three children. The father, the two boys, and the baby girl moved in and we managed to survive the next two years, until the end of the war. Friends helped take up the floorboards, under the rug, and build a hiding place in case of raids. These did occur with increasing frequency, and one night we had a very narrow escape. Four Germans, accompanied by a Dutch Nazi policeman came and searched the house. They did not find the hiding place, but they had learned from experience that sometimes it paid to go back to a house they had already searched, because by then the hidden Jews might have come out of the hiding place. The baby had started to cry, so I let the children out. Then the Dutch policeman came back alone. I had a small revolver that a friend had given me, but I had never planned to use it. I felt I had no choice except to kill him. I would do it again, under the same circumstances, but it still bothers me, and I still feel that there “should” have been another way. If anybody had really tried to find out how and where he disappeared, they could have, but the general attitude was that there was one less traitor to worry about. A local undertaker helped dispose of the body, he put it in a coffin with a legitimate body in it. I hope the dead man’s family would have approved. Was I scared? Of course the answer is “yes.” Especially after I had been imprisoned and released. Then were times that the fear got the better of me, and I did not do something that I could have. I would rationalize the inaction, feeling it might endanger others, or that I should not run a risk, because what would happen to the three children I was now responsible for, if something happened to me, but I knew when I was rationalizing. Answer the following paragraph in one well written persuasive paragraph. Be sure to cite evidence from the passages in this packet.
During a period in history when it seemed as though the whole world had abandoned the Jews of Eastern Europe, courageous individuals stepped forward and risked their own lives as well as the lives of family members to shelter and rescue Jews during the Holocaust. In an era marked by apathy and complicity, these rescuers present a portrait of moral courage in their response to the Holocaust. What can be learned from these rescuers? ______