A Review of Martin Gilbert, The Righteous

Jerusalem Post - March 2003

Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003) pp. 529, $35.00.

Sir Martin Gilbert has honed to near perfection a template of excellence for his historical writings, which he applied in this instance to consider non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, whom he terms righteous.

Gilbert scours the archives attentively recording and transmitting to the reader much of what he has learned, seldom intruding his own voice into the narrative, restraining himself from interpreting the material that he presents, but impressing the reader with his prodigious research and with the full weight of the material that he has gathered.

Gilbert shapes his narratives around an organizing principle. In The Holocaust, his widely respected history of the Holocaust, the organizing principle was chronology as Gilbert took the reader through a year-by-year, almost month-by-month and event-by-event history of the Holocaust as narrated by those who lived the event, perpetrators, bystanders, victims, but primarily survivors. In The Righteous Gilbert's organizing principle is geography as he explores each region of German-occupation and uncovers material relating to those who rescued Jews. 

Only toward the end of the book does he consider rescue not in its geographical region but in its concrete situation – concentration camps and death marches – and only after we have toured each zone of German-occupation and many individual stories does Gilbert consider the phenomena of rescue. Even then, his consideration is slim limited to 11 pages of a 444 pages of narrative and he only suggests an answer as to why some people behaved admirably, at considerable risk to themselves and their families while so many more were either perpetrators or unwilling to assist.

Gilbert's work was made considerably easier by the efforts of Mordecai Paldiel, who heads Yad Vashem's important efforts to honor the “Righteous” and supervises the collection of evidence that is presented to the judicial committee that decides on such honors. The book is dedicated to Paldiel, is both a responsible archivist and a keen researcher. As one who was himself rescued during the Shoah, Paldiel is deeply committed to this task. The records he controls are well organized and he has mastered the collection. In Israel unlike the United States there is no wall of separation between the archivist and the scholar, which sometimes means that archivist are unwilling to yield their treasures until they themselves have published the results. Unlike many archivists, Paldiel is quick to share, well prepared to offer assistance to researchers and is an expert guide to the contents of the Archives.

As a matter of moral principle the State of Israel honors these men and women and plants a tree at Yad Vashem to herald their deeds and to offer the gratitude of the Jewish people.

Yad Vashem has three specific criteria for conferring the honor. The person must have saved a Jewish life at the risk to his or her own life without remuneration or recompense. In short, the act of rescue must be altruistic.

Under Yad Vashem's stringent criteria, some people who rescued Jews are not eligible because they were living in neutral countries or acting with diplomatic protection which insulated them from risk or they accepted payment for their efforts, which made their acts no less urgent but perhaps only a bit less pure. And Yad Vashem applies Jewish criteria for affirming the Jewishness of the person rescued, not the criteria of the German Nuremberg laws of 1935. A Jew is a Jew by the identity they affirm, the religion they practice, the traditions they accept as their own -- and not merely by the accident of their birth to Jewish grandparents. Thus, Yad Vashem has not conferred the honor to date of those who saved practicing Christians, albeit of Jewish origin, defined as Jews by German law. In fairness, Gilbert is more liberal in his interpretation of righteousness, presenting cases in which payment was received and in which non-Jews facing annihilation because of their Jewish ancestry were saved. Thus, his study of the rescuers presents a wider array of possibilities.

As one who has met many survivors and listened to many a story of rescue, I marvel at how widely Gilbert research took him and how intensely he listened to these many stories. He read memoirs, traversed the holdings of archives, listened to individual stories and perused newspapers to explore the phenomena of rescue. He quotes from documents and oral histories, and summarizes stories quickly in the third person so that the direct quote that he employ judiciously has a special poignancy.

Some stories are brief, reduced to one or two lines. For example, Gilbert writes:

In Piotrkowm Mr. Chistman took boys as young as five into his factory. He then quotes two of those who were saved. Chief Rabbi Israel Lau then five and Ben Helfgott, then  twelve, who commented: “He saved our lives.”

Other stories are far more elaborate but in his effort to cover the entire landscape of the German-occupied Europe none offer a depth of understanding. Gilbert covers the well- known stories of Raoul Wallenberg and Pastor Andre Trochme of Le Chambon in France as well as hundreds of less known stories including that of Father Bruno (Henry Reynders) who saved 320 children in Belgium. Relying upon unpublished manuscripts, private letters, journalistic accounts and oral histories Gilbert recounts that the priest came upon his mission accidentally when as a former POW he was assigned to serve as chaplain to the Home of the Blind at Hodbomont whose director used it as a front to rescue Jews and then found homes. In the end Father Bruno he used institutions and camps as well as individual homes to rescue Jews. He returned these children to the Jewish people when Belgium was liberated. The book is filled with stories of such men and women.