Reviewed by: Liliane K. Baxter, Weinberg Center for Holocaust Education,
the Breman Jewish Heritage Museum Atlanta, GA, USA
Every day for months on end in a small farming community in Poland, two young Jewish women would meet a battalion of Jewish prisoners returning from their labors and hand them a basket of food purchased from several farmers, so no one would suspect anything. They could see that the prisoners were collapsing from starvation and brutal physical labor and hoped the food would supplement the scant rations. One day, they were caught and both killed.
Male prisoners whose task it was to toss out bodies and luggage from arriving transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau risked immediate death whispering to young teens to lie about their age and say they were 16 when asked. These unsung heroes saved the lives of thousands from immediate death in the crematoriums.
Women working the fields would hide a potato under each breast, risking immediate execution, to bring back desperately needed food to their “camp sisters.” 410 Humanity & Society 41(3)
In ghettos and camps, the organized education of Jewish children continued in hiding. In improvised classes, students learned history, literature, and even English, oftentimes entirely by rote.
On a death march to Theresienstadt, a woman on the inside of a line of five silently nudges the woman on the outside that she will take her place. The coat of the woman on the outside was stained by dysentery, and if it caught the guard’s eye could lead to a beating or worse.
These examples of Jewish altruism and self-help taken from Shostak’s book and my own research represent a central aspect of the Holocaust story that has hardly been identified, memorialized, and studied. Shostak argues that for the last 70 years, the central Holocaust narrative has emphasized the horror and inhumanity perpetrated upon the Jews and omitted or minimized the remarkable Jewish altruism and selfhelp in response. Equally critical to life and death, and worthy of scholarly attention and memorialization, he argues, is the assistance and comfort provided by Jews to Jews during this dreadful time.
The widely disseminated central narrative of the Holocaust, Shostak calls the Horror Story (which he capitalizes), while the hidden, little-known version of the modes of Jewish selflessness and humanity he calls the Help Story (also capitalized). The latter is what Stealth Altruism examines in great depth. Shostak is part of a small but growing movement in Holocaust scholarship that attempts to ameliorate the appalling neglect of the Jewish Help Story. For too long, Holocaust histories, documentaries, curriculums, and museum exhibitions have been about what the Germans did to the Jews, amply illustrated by maps of occupation and images of persecution and humiliation. This model of “Horror Story centrism,” as Shostak calls it, has become deeply embedded in Holocaust representation and discourse.
In his thoroughly researched book, Shostak gives example after example of Jewish prisoners in the ghettos, transports, and camps providing succor and consolation to each other.Drawing on thememoirs of 195 survivors, he identifies countless examples of Jewish “stealth altruism,” which he views as rooted in the innate human impulse to do good combined with Judaic altruistic tenets found in religious texts and demonstrated by revered elders. The people who manifested “stealth altruism” he calls “Carers,” individuals who “attest to the finer possibilities of our species.” He identifies five personality traits of Carers: “sociability, adaptability, resiliency, ethicality, and self-esteem” and attributes these essential qualities to how they were raised.
The avalanche of numbers, documents, and photographs of the cruelty and devastation inflicted on the Jews have eclipsed the abundance of examples of Jewish personal courage, loyalty, and resourcefulness. This neglect has been problematic on a number of levels; not only does it leave the Holocaust story, and Holocaust scholarship, incomplete and inaccurate, but it does a disservice to the Jews themselves, both those who perished and those who lived.
An equal injustice is done to Jewish students who need to hear, and ought to know, that they belong to a courageous and generous people. Instead, they and their non-Jewish friends learn of the multiple German systems of destruction and the various ways Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter.” Is it any wonder that after learning about the Holocaust in class or on a docented tour, students too often raise their hands and ask: “Why didn’t the Jews fight back?” Yes, the Holocaust story impacts greatly on Jewish students’ self-esteem, as Shostak argues.
One can understand the Jewish Help Story being overlooked by mainstream research: the plethora of German documents detailing their part of the story; the horrifying photographs of Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald taken by American and British liberators; the devaluing and making invisible women’s caring behaviors and actions; the encouragement of survivors in postwar depositions and trials to focus on German cruelty; the prurient human fascination with evil; and lastly, that a great many Holocaust diaries, letters, and memoirs, especially those written during or immediately after the war and containing countless and various examples of Jewish solidarity, ingenuity, and altruism were written in Yiddish and thus rarely translated into English.
Colluding with the near-silence around Jewish altruism and rescue is the language itself. Four words, necessary but limiting, have hijacked Holocaust discourse, simplifying behaviors and personalities into “perpetrators” (the Nazis and their collaborators), “bystanders” (non-Jews who saw the persecution but did nothing), “rescuers” (non-Jews who risked their lives to help persecuted Jews), and “victims” (the Jews). In this model, the Jews are identified as victims—passive targets of Nazi torment, helpless victims waiting to be rescued by non-Jews.
But things are slowly changing. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the international center, museum and memorial to the Holocaust, established in 1963 a program that honors non-Jewish rescuers as the Righteous Among the Nations. Finally, in 2011— nearly 50 years later—Yad Vashem has instituted an annual award, the “Jewish Rescuer Citation.” In 2013 (just four years ago!), the new museum included a permanent exhibition devoted to the rescue of Jews by Jews. In my case, I have produced a film through the Weinberg Center for Holocaust Education called
Choosing Hope: Jewish Responses to the Holocaust, which highlights the Four Rs: Jewish resourcefulness, resistance, rescue, and resilience during the Holocaust. The accompanying curriculum has been extremely well received by Jewish students.
Seven decades after the Holocaust, 73 percent of American Jews say remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of being Jewish, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey. Then, balancing the Horror Story with the story of Jewish self-help and altruism becomes a necessity. We agree with Shostak when he quotes survivor and scholar Yoram Lubling that “How we remember, use, document, and teach this period . . .will determine the moral space of our collective future.” Shostak’s book and ideas are a welcome part of this important and timely conversation.