Black Earth(134)

It is true that many Jewish recollections, especially those recorded long after the war, include rather formulaic statements that their rescuers did not receive material compensation. Such language was needed for people to be recognized by Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial of the Holocaust, as “righteous gentiles,” rescuers of Jews. In order to clear the hurdle of “no material considerations,” Jews who wanted their rescuers to be honored sometimes simplified the story and claimed that no money was involved. Of course, it often was. But the people who rescued Jews, as opposed to those who betrayed or killed them, were almost never making money. Valuables or cash might indeed be exchanged, but not in the normal sense of a contract. There was no state to defend such contracts; indeed, the authorities offered rewards for Jews so that they could be murdered.

Money was important, since it is hard to sustain life without it. But a Jew’s future depended on the individual taking the money, a person who was operating in a radically altered political and economic world. Rather than a normal market, in which individuals have property and determine their value among themselves, this was a dark market. All property relations had been destabilized, almost no one could be sure of their economic future, and some people—the Jews—were not individuals with the right to property and its exchange, but a special sort of human contraband. To have Jews at home in the stateless zones of eastern Europe, in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union, was to risk one’s life; to be willing to hand them over would bring salt or sugar or vodka or money and the end of anxiety and fear. Turning in a Jew meant avoiding the risk of individual and collective punishment.

Within this set of incentives, the economically rational response for a non-Jew approached by a Jew was to promise help, take all of the Jew’s money as quickly as possible, and then turn in the Jew to the police. The economically rational action for someone who knew that someone else was sheltering a Jew was to denounce that person before someone else did to collect the reward and perhaps the property, and to avoid the risk of being denounced oneself as someone who knew about the rescue. It would be comforting to believe that people who brought about the death of Jews were behaving irrationally, but in fact they were often following standard economic rationality. The righteous few were behaving in a way that a norm based upon economic calculations of personal welfare would regard as irrational.

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In the darkest of times and places, a few people rescued Jews for what seems like no earthly reason. These tended to be people who in normal times might seem to take ethical and social norms a bit too literally, and whose fidelity to their expressed principles survived the end of the institutions that supported and defended them.

If these rescuers had anything in common beyond that, it was self-knowledge. When you know yourself there is little to say. This is worth brooding upon as we consider how we, who know ourselves so poorly and have so much to say about ourselves, will respond to the challenges to come.





Conclusion: Our World


In the small photograph that her son keeps in his Warsaw apartment, Wanda J. radiates self-possession, a quality that stood her in good stead during the Second World War and the German occupation of Poland. She lost her husband at war’s end, but saved herself and their two boys. When the Warsaw ghetto was created, she defied German orders and kept her family from resettling there. Denounced as a Jew on the Aryan side of Warsaw, she talked her way out of trouble. She moved her children from place to place, relying upon the help of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. When institutions were obliterated or warped in the aftermath of German invasion, when first the ghetto and then the rest of the city of Warsaw were burned to the ground, what counted, she thought, were the “faultless moral instinct and basic human goodness” of the people who chose to help Jews.

Most of the Jews of Warsaw did go to the ghetto and were murdered at Treblinka. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet Jewish writer working as a journalist in the Red Army who saw and described that place, wrote that “kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being.” Hitler denied that any idea, be it religious, philosophical, or political, justified seeing the other (or loving the other) as oneself. He claimed that conventional forms of ethics were Jewish inventions, and that conventional states would collapse during the racial struggle. Throughout Europe, but to different degrees in different places, German occupation destroyed the institutions that made ideas of reciprocity seem plausible. Where Germans obliterated conventional states, or annihilated Soviet institutions that had just destroyed conventional states, they created the abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nothingness. In this black hole, Jews were murdered. When Jews were saved, it was often thanks to people who could act on behalf of a state or by institutions that could function like a state. When none of the moral illumination of institutions was present, kindness was all that remained, and the pale light of the individual rescuers shone.