Rescuers 4

[This post continues from Rescuers 1, Rescuers 2 and Rescuers 3.]

A third and last query on behalf of the sceptical: Are there, then, no rescuers within my sample who are of that sort who say 'fellow Milanese... fellow Jutlander'? In fact, only one case I have been able to discover perhaps fits here. It is a Dane, unnamed in the source in which I find him, who says, 'The main reason I did it was because I didn't want anybody to hurt my friends, my neighbours, my fellow countrymen, without cause.' Even he makes some additional remarks as well, of seemingly broader scope, but ambiguously so. I mark him down as one for Richard Rorty anyway. This Dane is (if he is) a rare figure in the present company.

It is another case, rather, that captures what seems to be the more general situation with rescuers who refer to their communities. Aart and Johtje Vos gave shelter in their home near Amsterdam to many who needed it, at one time hiding more than thirty Jews as well as a few other people. She, Johtje, says: 'We never talked about Jews [in Holland]. They were all just Dutch, that's all.' And he, Aart, says: 'Holland was like a family and part of that family was in danger. In this case, the Jewish part. The Germans were threatening our family.' This seems clear enough. But there is more. Aart Vos also recounts how one day after a bombing he found a wounded German soldier and helped him back to his camp. Asked by friends how he could bring himself to 'save a German', he replied, 'My wife and I were brought up to have respect for life.' Johtie Vos, relating the same incident elsewhere, puts it that their friends reproached Aart with helping the enemy and that his response to them was, 'No, the moment the man was badly wounded, he was not an enemy anymore but simply a human being in need.'

And, this episode aside, Aart and Johtje Vos, looking beyond themselves and their children, that is, beyond their own family to a wider Dutch 'family', patently look further still. Johtje says that both she and Aart were brought up not to be prejudiced on grounds of 'race, colour, creed, nationality, or whatever... so it came very naturally to us to consider Jews just like us. We thought of them as human beings, just as we were.' Your response in that situation, she also says, depends on 'the result of your upbringing, your character, on your general love for people...' Again: 'We helped people who were in need. Who they were was absolutely immaterial to us. It wasn't that we were especially fond of Jewish people. We felt we wanted to help everybody who was in trouble.' During the war, Aart says, he 'thought it wasn't possible that on this little planet people could do [the sort of things they did] to each other'.

Just as friendship, as we have seen, need not be the only reason of someone who goes to the aid of a friend, so a commitment to compatriots, fellow citizens or other locally specific communities does not have to exclude more general humanitarian concern. With the rescuers the common pattern would seem to be that it did not. And is this so surprising? Mutual loyalty or solidarity within such communities can, it is true, be of an exclusionary sort; or it may sometimes simply relate to matters in which a more extensive identification would not be - for those matters - appropriate. It is also the case, however, that a person who says 'Dutch, just like us', 'fellow Dane' and so forth, may be appealing to a notion of civic equality and reciprocal obligation closely tied, as a matter of historical and cultural fact, to wider egalitarian, humanistic, universalist values. Especially when what is at stake is a matter of life, death or grave suffering, to think, 'Dutch like the rest of us', may only be to think, 'Another person in the Dutch community'. It need not be very different from thinking, 'Fellow human being'. Such, at any rate, commonly was the case with the rescuers. Like Aart and Johtje Vos, those of them who allude to the specificities of community invariably point beyond these as well. Marion Pritchard who had a part in saving more than a hundred Jews says, 'In Holland, the Jews were considered Dutch like everyone else.' She learned tolerance from her father, 'more accepting of all people and their differences than my mother', and was imbued early on 'with a strong conviction that we are our brothers' keepers'. Decisive for Pritchard was the experience of happening to witness Nazis loading, throwing - 'by an arm, a leg, the hair' - young children, taken from a Jewish children's home, on to trucks. 'To watch grown men treat small children that way... I found myself literally crying with rage.' Pritchard's words do not, to me, encourage the inference that it was the 'Dutchness' of these victims that was for her the key thing.

In turn, a certain 'Johan' explains himself so: 'The main reason was because I was a patriot. I was for my country.' He continues: 'The Germans robbed people of their freedom. And when they started taking the Jewish people, that really lit my fire... I really became full of hate because they took innocent people - especially when they took little kids. That was the worst.' This same 'Johan' says he learned from his parents that 'Jews were just people'. His mother would never 'look down' on anyone. 'She would always appreciate what people were worth.' And then John and Bertha Datema recall some of their wartime reactions. John: that 'those people are Dutch, Jewish or not, they are Dutch'; and that 'I had witnessed more human suffering than I could cope with.' And Bertha: 'Every wasted life is another nail in Christ's body. When a child is destroyed, all of us become orphans.' And Helene Jacobs, a German rescuer for whom 'A community which destroys a part of itself on purpose, out of hatred, gives itself up. It degenerates. This happened in our country.' Jacobs explains her own rescue work like this: 'They were people who were in danger and I wanted to help them. It was as simple as that.' And like this: 'I always knew how dangerous it was, but I did it for humanity, and because I was a patriot.'

Who here, once again, can claim to know the exact balance of these rescuers' reasons: between community, country or patriotism on the one hand; and humanity; children; people in danger or trouble or need, on the other? I have now given, in any event, some account of rather more than half of the rescuers in my sample. Considerations both of space and for the patience of the reader deter me from relating, even in the truncated and reduced forms I have had to adopt for the stories I have told, the other stories remaining. But the stories left untold tell just the same story as the stories told. I let the subjects of them, of the ones I cannot tell, pass here finally in brief, anonymous parade.

There are the rescuers who speak of parents. 'My mother was always concerned about everyone else.' 'I remember my mother being a person who always wanted to give from her heart.' 'My mother always reached out to others and she taught all of us to do that, too... I think it's in our blood.' And there are the rescuers who helped save children: one who says, 'I believe in people', and who felt (at the age of forty-two), 'My life is past, but the children... have their life before them'; one who did what she did because 'All men are equal' and for 'no other' reason; one who 'cried when [he] went into the ghetto and... children clamoured after [him]... for help'; one who reflects that 'there are a lot of people who have no faith in human kind... they're only afraid for their own skin and not for yours or his or hers'; one who 'understood what it meant to be a Jew' when a six-year-old fugitive girl said what her family name had been and what it was now; and one who remembers, similarly, the anguish of the child 'who does not know why she cannot use her real name' - and who speaks as well of the preoccupation with justice and injustice that has guided her, the rescuer, all her life.

Then there are those who talk about persecution: like the woman who gives as the reason for her actions that 'they [the Jews] were persecuted not because of what they did but because of the way they were born'; and the woman who says, 'he was a hunted man was all I needed to know'; and the man brought up in the belief 'that it was inadmissible to persecute people because of their race or religion'; and the man for whom the Holocaust started 'in the hearts' of people, for '[a]s soon as you go and say "That Jew!" or whatever, that's where it starts... As soon as you put one race higher than another one...' This last man says also, 'if the moment's there and there's somebody in need, you go help, that's all'. He touches a pervasive theme. The rescuers speak like this: 'to give help to those who are in need'; and 'one has to help all that need it'; and 'I just had to help people who needed help and that was that. I was always ready to help the needy, always.' And the rescuers speak like this: 'the worst off were the Jews. So one had to give help where people were most helpless...'; and 'I had to help. After all, the Jews were the most helpless people'; and 'anyone who needed help had to get it. Jews were in a specially dangerous situation... they had to be helped the most'; and 'My home is open to anyone in danger.'

Such are the things rescuers say. They talk of their 'feeling of justice'; of learning early 'to fight for... justice' and early about 'helping others'; of growing up without anyone making 'a distinction between people of other religions'. They say: 'There is no greater love than sacrificing your own soul for another's soul', and 'I was an old pacifist', and 'I would have helped anyone.' One man says, 'I cannot stand violence.' He says, 'As a child I was taught an individual has human dignity...' Another man says that what he did just had to be done - 'They suffered so much'. One woman says her mother was such an unjust person that she, the daughter, developed a strong sense of justice by reaction. She says, 'I didn't help only Jews. I helped everyone who was being oppressed because of their politics or ideas.' She says, 'all my life I've been for the peaceful coexistence of all people, of all colours and religions'.

It could be that these rescuers are, all of them, mistaken; that they are really wrong about their reasons. Or it could be, on the other hand, that Richard Rorty is wrong about them - about the Righteous among the Nations. [Concluded]