Conscience & courage

In all of the abundant literature on the Holocaust, little attention has been paid to those people who, at great risk to themselves and their families, helped Jews escape the Nazis. Conscience & Courage is about these people.

Here are the stories of such little-known individuals as Stefania Podgorska Burzminska, a Polish teenager who hid thirteen Jews in her home; Alexander Roslan, a dealer in the black market who kept uprooting his family to shelter three Jewish children in his care; as well as more heralded individuals such as Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and Miep Gies. But Conscience & Courage is not a retelling of the stories of these brave people, it is an examination of why they did what they did.

Using her knowledge of psychology, particularly the various studies of altruism, Eva Fogelman shows how external conditions and internal motivations led them to rescue people, as well as how rescuing affected them psychologically, both during and after the war.

Many people chose to rescue for moral reasons; others were concerned professionals who because of their work had the skills or tools to help; and yet others were children who from an early age were involved in the rescuing activities of their parents. All of these people put concerns for their own survival in the background and took responsibility for the well-being of others. In doing so they were forced to create a "rescuer self" that could do whatever was necessary in order to survive.

Conscience & Courage analyzes the lives of these courageous people in an effort to determine why these particular individuals chose - and were able - to act.