When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland

By Jackie Kessler

Book Overview

Everyone knows the name of Anne Frank but few people remember anything about the people who sheltered her. Who were the rescuers and what motivated them to risk their lives for persecuted Jews? Clearly such people deserve to be remembered and honored. And clearly an understanding of their motivations may help us cultivate such behavior in our own day.
Focusing on such "righteous Christians," Tec, herself a survivor helped by Poles, vividly recreates what it was like to pass and hide among Christians and what it was like for Poles to rescue Jews. Concentrating on Poland, the Nazi center for Jewish annihilation, Tec amassed a vast array of published accounts, unpublished testimonies, and interviews, yielding case histories of over 500 Polish helpers, preserving for posterity the heroism of such people, and filling a significant gap in our knowledge of the Holocaust.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195051947
• ISBN13: 9780195051940
• Release Date: October 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Polish Rescuers of Jews Examined in Great Detail

This study is very comprehensive, yet Tec acknowledges the possibility of a sampling bias (p. 235). Virtually all Polish Jews who survived the war had been helped by Poles (p. 72), most of whom had been strangers to them (p. 227, 233), and a significant fraction of whom held anti-Semitic beliefs (pp. 61-63; including the hard-core variety: Chapter 6). Emmanuel Ringelblum had supposed that members of the Polish middle class...

Inspirational book fills a gap in Holocaust history

Although there are other books that cover the subject of Christians who helped Jews during the Holocaust, this one filled some gaps that the others didn't - to my mind, anyway. The author, Nechama Tec, looks at people who helped for all the right reasons - and also those who helped in spite of their semitism. She tries to find the "why" behind all the altruism and also explores how class and politics affected the decision...

Truly remarkable book

If you want to discover the the true humanity that lies hidden through all classes of society then this book is the one to read. It views the holocaust from the noble within humanity and helps one to think about what their own responses would be in a similar circumstance. Besides this, the writer is very skilled and a pleasure to read.