IN recent years historians and others concerned with a greater understanding of the Holocaust have given increasing attention to the rescue attempts on behalf of Jews made by thousands of men and women in countries under German occupation. It is only natural that in the decades immediately following World War II the betrayal of Europe's Jews in all its shocking manifestations should be a primary focus of research and reflection. Yet from the 1950s onward, there has also been an effort to document as fully as possible the activities of those who, whether members of organized resistance groups or private individuals, put themselves at risk to protect Jewish refugees or fellow citizens.
The Israeli Holocaust memorial organization Yad Vashem collects survivors' testimony about the people who aided them and honors those people as "Righteous Gentiles," planting trees in their name at its site in Jerusalem. In addition to this, a growing number of more detailed personal accounts of rescue have been published.
The photographer and artist Ellen Land-Weber has collected detailed testimonies by a group of 17 Jewish and non-Jewish survivors in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Poland. She has added photographs and background information on the wartime situation in each of the three countries to arrive at a lucid and moving account of the moral and practical complexities of rescue work. At the same time, To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue can be read as portraits of people who, when faced with the threat of capture and death a the hands of their persecutors, often acted with extraordinary courage and resourcefulness.
The accounts make gripping reading. In the Netherlands, Bert Bochove and his wife, Annie, continued to hide Jewish refugees in their house near Amsterdam even after the Gestapo searched it several times. During the course of the war they hid a total of 26 Jews. During the "Hunger Winter" of 1944-45, when the majority of the Dutch population could barely feed itself and cases of starvation were common, Bochove went on a dangerous expedition to find enough food to feed his secret guests. He was returning home with a truckload of seed potatoes when he and his driver found themselves on a flooding bridge. Hearing a group of German soldiers nearby, Bochove and the driver fooled a sergeant into believing they were driving for the German Wehrmacht and enlisted the soldiers' aid in getting the truck across the bridge: "So all the fellows got behind the truck to push, and we stayed inside and kept our feet dry."
Non-Jews weren't the only ones who acted as rescuers. Mirjam Waterman chose to forgo her chance of escape to look after a group of young Jewish refugees, most of them from Germany, who were preparing to emigrate to Palestine at the time of the German invasion of Holland in 1940. She worked with the legendary Dutch resistance fighter Joop Westerweel in setting up a network of hiding places for Jewish children all across the country and in providing the children with food coupons and false "Aryan" identity cards. Waterman was eventually betrayed and sent to Bergen-Belsen, which she survived. Joop Westerweel was shot by the Gestapo in 1944.
A Czech-Jewish couple, Anna and Jerry Chlup, took care of the injured Polish Jew Herman Feder, who had survived a succession of concentration camps and was on a train headed for yet another when the resistance group to which Jerry Chlup belonged blew up the tracks, allowing Feder to escape. Anna Chlup tells of using cottage cheese for medicinal purposes when Feder was hiding in her house with a broken arm and wounded leg: "Cottage cheese was a luxury, and the farmers wouldn't sell it. ... But people knew we had him at home and now when I asked the farmers, they gave it to me. And we couldn't eat any!"
In Poland, Sara Rozen met her non-Jewish husband when, fleeing a German search team, she jumped out a window and landed in John Damski's arms. During the remainder of the war, Damski used all his talents to protect her and her family, moving them from address to address, providing them with forged papers and procuring a false wedding certificate stating that "Christine" (Sara) was his wife. The couple survived three days in the midst of the Warsaw uprising, during which John used a cloth wet with his own urine to keep Sara's hair from catching fire in the inferno raging in the city.
Land-Weber's short commentaries give clear background on the circumstances Jews and their protectors had to contend with in their respective countries. For example, Holland, unlike other European countries, was under a civil rather than a military occupation, which meant the Dutch were more directly exposed to the brutality of the Gestapo. The Dutch section of the book also shows that the story of Anne Frank, which came to stand for the experience of European Jews in general, was in fact highly anomalous: Most Dutch Jews did not go into hiding in Amsterdam but rather fled the cities, which were most intensively policed. The photographs -- both historical and recent -- of Land-Weber's subjects and of locations related to their stories provide eloquent illustration: There are photos of the Dutch Jewish physicist Bram Pais after his doctoral-degree defense in June 1941, five days before the date set by German authorities as the last when Jews would be permitted to receive doctoral degrees. He is smiling broadly.
To Save a Life is a book that anyone interested in the history of the World War II should know about. But it is more about the human capacity for selfless action and about memory than about history in any narrow sense. It should be read by a far wider audience, by anyone willing to entertain the possibility of hope.
Alissa Leigh is a graduate student in English and creative writing at the University of Houston.