A Review of Martin Gilbert, The Righteous

Jerusalem Post - March 2003

Raul Hilberg once told Claude Lanzmann: “I never asked large questions because I was afraid that I would get small answers.” The opposite is also true: in Hilberg's and in Gilbert's work asking small questions, persistently and compellingly, may yield very large answers. Gilbert presumes that by compiling the facts – and only the facts – and by sticking closely to the surface of testimony the reader may reach larger conclusions.

To his credit, Gilbert never gets carried away nor does he permit the reader to get carried off with these stories of goodness. He emphasizes how rare they were compared to the many who perpetrated, collaborated or were indifferent or to the many more who when pressed simply turned away to protect themselves and abandoned the victims. As he traverses the countries of German-occupation, he reminds the reader of the numbers who were killed and the few who were rescued.

Why did the rescuers help?

The bottom line is really quite simple. The rescuer recognized the Jews as fellow human beings and acted accordingly. Some had personal ties; these Jews or other Jews had been their friends and in some cases relatives. Some held humanistic beliefs that led them to oppose the Nazi aim of annihilation. Some were devout Christians believing that Jews were created in the divine image and that murder is prohibited by their religion. All recognized the Jews as being within their circle of responsibility, their “universe of common obligation” to use the term coined by of sociologist Helen Fein.

One must note how often one reads in these testimonies the words, “he [or she] was a good Christian.” It seems that the Jewish perceptions of Christian behavior is quite at odds with the attempts of some Christian Churches, most especially the Roman Catholic Church to portray Christian behavior in the Holocaust. If we listen to formal Church pronouncements, even the historic apology offered by Pope John Paul II in Jerusalem, individual Christians sinned but the Church itself behaved appropriately. Yet, if we listen to the survivors and the rescuers, individual Christians were true to their religious teachings regarding the sanctity of all human life -- including the Jews -- prohibiting murder -- without excluding the Jews -- and loving God and all creation – all creation without demonizing some categories of human beings. We hear that they believed that Christian institutions failed, individual self-professing Christians were unfaithful to their religion, yet true Christians behaved admirably. Survivors and rescuers seem certain as to what true Christianity required.

My major unease is with the title of the book and the title of the award that the State of Israel and Yad Vashem bestows on the rescuers. “Righteous” is exaggerated language; it tends to mystify more than it clarifies. It more reflects the desperation of the circumstances of the person seeking refuge rather than the “ordinariness” of the humanity displayed by the rescuer. It may be a symptom of our need to mystify the goodness rather than face the fact that for the rescuers offering a place of refuge was “banal,” – to borrow the term that Hannah Arendt made infamous – but to use it in the original sense. Even if the consequences of the action were absolute -- the difference between life and death -- the act itself was regarded by the actors as ordinary, the basic requirements of their own humanity and values.

What we learn in these testimonies is that the rescuers behaved normally, naturally, with human solidarity and human decency as a matter of course. They did not think of themselves as righteous. They thought of themselves as behaving with ordinary decency under the most extraordinary of circumstance. Rescue to them was commonplace, the minimum required of a human being when confronted with another person under desperate circumstance, somewhat akin to the meaning of the Mishnah in Avot that proclaims: “In a place that there is no man, try to be a man.”

The pedagogical consequences of speaking of righteousness are also problematic. It presumes that the act of rescue was extraordinary rather than normative. Few, aside from the devout, aspire to righteousness. Many more aspire to be fundamentally moral human beings and each of us wonders, as Gilbert so aptly asks: What would we do? Would we have the courage, the integrity and the decency to behave properly?

Gilbert has enriched our discussion. He has provided example after example of ordinary decency undertaken under the most extraordinary of circumstances and he has raised, but not answered a profound question: should we speak not of the banality of goodness but of the banal, the common place decency of the rescuers. Is that perhaps not more accurate a description than righteous?

He has left us to ponder how do we teach ourselves and our children to act with such commonplace decency -- no matter what the occasion, what the risk.