[Over the next few days I'll be posting here, as a short series, an excerpt from chapter 1 of my book Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind. The excerpt in question looks at the reasons given by those who took risks to save endangered Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe for doing what they did. The background to it is that Richard Rorty once suggested - though it's a view from which he has retreated - that the reasons of the rescuers would have been particularist ones (to save a friend or colleague or compatriot) rather than any more generalizing, humanist concern. I argued against this that the evidence pointed decisively the other way - that virtually all the rescuers gave reasons of a universalist kind.
I post this excerpt from the argument partly as a footnote to my recent discussion with Ophelia, and partly just because there is enough cause, now as always, to focus on people like these and their beliefs. Footnote references have been omitted.]
I have not... interviewed any of the people about to make an appearance here. I have only read of them. Nevertheless, if from the literature I have managed to consult one leaves aside a certain volume of quotation not attributed to specific individuals, a sample of several dozen rescuers can be assembled, all of them identified by name, who tell something of their stories and something of their reasons. Obviously, this assembly is not governed by any scientific sampling method. I tread, possibly, on thin ice. But I venture to say all the same that, unless by a freak chance an altogether odd collection of rescuers has been thrown before me, the naive hypothesis [that a 'universalistic attitude' was general amongst rescuers] looks pretty good. I will go further. It is not very easy to find people - from some eighty of them - who say the sort of thing, or at any rate just the sort of thing, that Rorty surmises rescuers usually said.
Here are Arnold Douwes and Seine Otten, two close friends interviewed together. They were part of a network of people in the town of Nieuwlande in the Netherlands, who provided shelter to hundreds of Jews. Otten recalls his wife's saying, 'we should try to save as many as we can'. In fact, she and he hid fifty Jews in all during the period of the Nazi occupation. Douwes, though not himself Jewish, was arrested early on for wearing the yellow star. His role in rescue activity came to include attending to the many needs of Jews in hiding - for food, money, false papers and so on - and searching the countryside to find people willing to take them in. 'It wasn't a question', he says, 'of why we acted. The question is why things weren't done by others. You could do nothing else; it's as simple as that. It was obvious. When you see injustice done you do something against it. When you see people being persecuted, and I didn't care whether they were Jews or Eskimos or Catholics or whatever, they were persecuted people and you had to help them.'
Here is John Weidner. A Dutch businessman working in France during the war, he helped escort hundreds of Jews to safety in Switzerland, travelling on skis across the mountains. Involved in the same rescue organization, his sister was caught and killed by the Nazis. Weidner himself was tortured, suffering a permanent impairment of his speech. On one occasion, at the station in Lyon, he witnessed an SS officer crushing the head of a Jewish infant under his boot. Weidner says that what the Nazis did went against everything he was taught to believe; they 'had no respect for [the] human dignity' of the Jews. A Seventh-Day Adventist, he speaks of 'his concept of love and compassion', of the need 'to have a heart open to the suffering of others'. He says: 'I hope God will know I did the best I could to help people.'
Such sentiments are not unusual in my quasi-sample of rescuers, they are typical. Eva Anielska, a Polish woman, a socialist and member of Zegota - the underground Council of Aid to Jews that was active in Poland from late 1942 on - helped save many people, most of them strangers. 'One saw the Jew', she says, 'not as a Jew, but as a persecuted human being, desperately struggling for life and in need of help... a persecuted, humiliated human being...' Jorgen Kieler was a member of the Danish Resistance Movement. Ascribing to the Danish people 'a traditional humanistic attitude to life', he says: 'National independence and democracy were our common goals, but the persecution of the Jews added a new and overwhelming dimension to the fight against Hitler: human rights. Our responsibility toward and our respect for the individual human being became the primary goals of the struggle.' Kieler mentions also the German official, Georg Duckwitz. Duckwitz was at the time shipping attaché at the German legation in Copenhagen. He warned his Danish contacts when the deportation of the Jews was about to begin, so making a decisive contribution to the collective rescue that followed. When the risk he had taken was later pointed out to him, he responded, 'Everyone should see himself in the situation in which he, too, like his fellow man, might find himself.'
Bill and Margaret Bouwma sheltered on their farm in turn a woman, a teenage girl who was murdered by Dutch Nazis when she was out one day on her own, and then another girl. Induced by a question from the woman to ponder just why he was doing what he was, Bill Bouwma answered: because he was brought up always to help the weak; because he knew what it felt like to be the underdog; because his faith taught him to open his door to the homeless, the refugee - and, more simply, because a voice inside him said he had to do it, otherwise he would no longer be himself. Margaret Bouwma told one of the girls, 'It's not that we are friends of the Jews or their enemies. It is our human duty to open our home... and our hearts to anyone who suffers.' Another Dutch couple, Rudy and Betty de Vries, hid a family of three not previously known to them and then others as well in the home above their butcher shop; and Rudy was involved more generally in underground and rescue activity. Betty felt at times overwhelmed by the extra work, but convinced herself 'that it was a very small price to pay for saving three lives'. Rudy reports a sympathetic encounter with a German soldier in the shop. He says that many 'failed to see the man in their enemy', but 'Jews or Germans - it made no difference to me, as long as I could see them as human beings.' When first approached to shelter people, he hesitated only a moment; he had been taught as a child to distinguish between justice and injustice. 'My faith', he says, 'commands... me to love my fellow man, without exclusions.'
One repeatedly comes across instances, in fact, of Perry London's sort of rescuer: people who cite a strong parental influence in speaking about the help they gave. A German engineer, Hermann Graebe - known also for some terrible, heart-breaking testimony concerning an episode he witnessed during the mass shooting of the Jews of Dubno - saved the lives of dozens of Jews working under his management in eastern Poland. 'I believe that my mother's influence on me when I was a child has a lot to do with it... She told me... that I should not take advantage of other people's vulnerability... She said, "Take people as they come - not by profession, not by religion, but by what they are as persons."' Mihael Mihaelov, a Bulgarian, tells that both his parents were of very generous disposition. Mihaelov hid property for many Jews and brought food to them in the labour camps. He had seen Germans beating Jews and breaking their bones. 'I don't know exactly why I helped. It's just the kind of person I am. When I see someone who needs help I help them, and my whole family is like that.' In the town of Topusko on the Bosnian border in Yugoslavia, Ivan Vranetic helped and hid many Jews fleeing from the Nazis. The first of them was a man who approached him in desperate straits: 'He had no shoes, nothing, and when he started to tell me his story I had to help him. I think it must be in my upbringing...' Vranetic says that his father 'liked people no matter what religion they were' and his mother was a good woman; 'we were brought up to love humankind'.
I interject now a first sceptical question on behalf of anyone who is wary vis-à-vis my naive hypothesis. The question might go like this: as what is here documented so far are the explanations put forward by rescuers many years after the events to which their explanations relate, how good a guide can these be to their motives at the time? How indicative is what they say now of what they felt, what really moved them, then?
There are a number of things one can offer in response to this question. First, since what I report these rescuers as saying is what rescuers seem to say, not just here or there, but quite generally and consistently, is it not likely to tell us something about what they actually felt at the time? Or must we rather suppose on the part of all these people a systematic - a common - misconstrual of their own reasons? Second, what they now say quite generally and consistently seems likely on the face of it to be as good a guide to their reasons as anything imputed to them on the basis merely of a current philosophical commitment. Third, one can try also to discover what was said by such people then. The evidence I have been able to gather about this suggests it might not have been all that different from what they say now.
[Rescuers 2 is here.]