Research Catalog

When light pierced the darkness : Christian rescue of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland / Nechama Tec.

Title: When light pierced the darkness : Christian rescue of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland / Nechama Tec.
Author: Tec, Nechama
Publication: New York : Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	DS135.P6 T29 1986	Off-site

Details

Description

xiv, 262 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

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. This book focuses on such "righteous Christians." Tec, herself a Holocaust survivor helped by Christians, vividly recreates through hundreds of cases what it was like to pass and hide among Christians and what it was like to rescue Jews. Limiting her compass to Poland, where anti-Semitism was particularly extreme, the author interviewed dozens of people now living in many lands and also examined a vast array of published accounts and unpublished testimonies yielding case histories of over 500 Polish helpers. As the book preserves for posterity the heroism of such people as Celka, the impoverished governess, and her paralyzed father, who took into their one-room apartment a Jewish child, refused to baptize her without her family's permission, and even fed her before they themselves ate, or Dr. Felix Kabus, who developed and frequently performed an operation that camouflaged circumcision, or the famous anti-Semitic author who wrote publicly about what was happening to the Jews, the book fills a gap in our knowledge of the Holocaust

Subject

Genre/Form

Personal Narrative
History
Personal narratives
Récits personnels.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-253) and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Defying the final solution : moving to the Christian side -- Separating friend from foe : the experience of passing and hiding -- Becoming a rescuer : overcoming social, psychological, and physical barriers -- From warning to long-term shelter : forms of Christian rescue -- The issue of money -- The rare case of the anti-Semitic helper -- The influence of class and politics -- Friendship -- Religion -- A new theory of rescue and rescuers.

ISBN

0195036433
9780195036435
0195051947
9780195051940

LCCN

85007261
9780195051940

OCLC

11971237
SCSB-12126234

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library