The Righteous: the unsung heroes of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert

Holocaust tales lack a moral message

In March 1943, a Jewish woman was about to be deported from Utrecht when she saw a nurse enter her railway carriage. Without hesitation, she gave the nurse her baby and asked her to smuggle him to safety. The nurse handed him to a policeman she knew through the Resistance. The policeman handed him to a taxi driver who knew a courier in The Hague. Thus a chain of "righteous gentiles" saved a single child who would otherwise have perished in the Holocaust.

Throughout Nazi Europe, Martin Gilbert makes clear, tens of thousands of Jews were saved by such "rescuers" – from illiterate peasants to the mother of the Duke of Edinburgh – willing to take great risks. Jews were hidden in zoos, tombs, piles of potatoes or in a convent library. Others were disguised as monks, sheltered in homes for the blind, or offered jobs as circus elephant walkers. In Holland, two Nazi administrators calmly accepted women's claims that they had been repeatedly unfaithful to Jewish husbands so as to grant their children a less tainted status.

Martin Gilbert brings together some remarkable stories of courage and ingenuity. One woman stole ID cards at social events and, when a Gestapo officer came to interrogate her, boldly asked: "Did not I see you looting a Persian rug out of the Mendelssohns' apartment the other day?" If children they were sheltering looked obviously Jewish, the Franciscan Sisters of Warsaw would pretend they had been injured and bandage their faces. Perhaps most extraordinary, a British PoW in a slave labour camp devised a corpses-for-chocolate scheme which allowed him to protect Jews by giving them safe new identities.

Yet despite powerful material, The Righteous is a deeply unsatisfactory book. Gilbert brings together several hundred stories, arranges them geographically and provides only minimal links. The result reads like a bald list of unconnected episodes. We get much gush about the "true noble souls of the human race" but too little sense of flesh-and-blood individuals.

Even stranger is the near-complete absence of analysis. Some people are intensely critical of European failure to offer greater help to Jews. Yet "rescues" often required several people to play an active role and several more to turn a blind eye. They were vulnerable to a traitor or minor act of self-betrayal (one woman in hiding was "outed" as a Jew for cooking the wrong dumplings). Given all this, and the sheer scale of Nazi terror and propaganda, one might argue that the number of successful "rescues" was impressive.

Gilbert mentions this debate but adds nothing. He offers no views on Christian responsibility for the Holocaust beyond the obvious: that some clerics and believers persecuted Jews and some protected them. He says virtually nothing about how his subject might feed into wider controversies about altruism and "human nature". Many of the basic facts about the "righteous" are set out here; anyone who wants to understand their significance must look elsewhere.

The reviewer is editor of the 'Jewish Quarterly'