The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the Holocaust

Extract

The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the Holocaust. By Kristin Renwick Monroe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 392p. $29.95.

Kristin Monroe interviews several non-Jewish rescuers during the Holocaust to get at their moral psychology and motives in rescuing Jews imperiled by the Nazis. Her extensive notes and transcripts provide an intimate and powerful glance into how rescuers viewed their own actions and how they discerned their own motives. For most “it just seemed the right thing to do.” Monroe's Rousseauian argument is intriguing both in the presentation of the narratives and in her careful, systematic analysis of the moral psychology behind the rescuers' action. She moves in a very different direction than, say, Frantz Fanon's analysis in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) where he sees the emotions of rage and revenge as central to the resistance of the colonized. These two powerful emotions I found to be the primary dynamic behind rescue in the narratives of Jewish resistors and rescuers (Glass, Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Moral Uses of Violence and Will, 2004). The gentile rescuers Monroe interviewed rarely spoke of their anger or rage toward the Germans. Rather, the action of rescue arose through an empathic connection with the victims, for example, Margot: “You have either compassion with these people or you think ‘I couldn't care less when they drop dead’” (p. 20).