This incredible book has been called "a stirring chapter to documented Jewish resistance to the Holocaust." Wilhelm Bachner has been called "the Jewish Schindler" because of his heroics in saving hundreds of Jewish families from almost certain annihilation in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939. The authors interviewed Bachner in 1983, and did extensive historical research.
Why, during the Holocaust, did some ordinary people risk their lives and the lives of their families to help others--even total strangers--while others stood passively by? Samuel Oliner, a Holocaust survivor who has interviewed more than 700 European rescuers and nonrescuers, provides some surprising answers in this compelling work.
Narrow escapes defines Samuel Oliner's life in more ways than one. Not only is he a Holocaust survivor who barely eluded the genocidal "Final Solution" that Nazi Germany unleashed on the European Jews during the Second World War, but Oliner is also a ground-breaking Holocaust scholar who has focused attention on the rescuers - small in number but immensely significant nonetheless - who risked their lives to give Jews narrow life-saving escapes during those dark times. Oliner's personal experience of the Holocaust produced memories that have never left him. Oliner's significant epilogue in this new edition both updates his story and and helps to show how his narrow escape led to a remarkable career.
A passing motorist stops to help the passengers of a car that has crashed into an embankment. A hospice volunteer begins her shift in hospital ward caring for people with AIDS. A Vietnam chopper pilot stops the brutal execution of innocent civilians at Mylai by American soldiers. A firefighter responds to a routine call. All of these people are considered heroes, but what motivates such brave and altruistic acts, whether by trained professionals or just ordinary people? In Do Unto Others , Holocaust survivor and sociologist Samuel Oliner explores what gives an individual a sense of social responsibility, what leads to the development of care and compassion, and what it means to put the welfare of others ahead of one's own. Having been saved himself from the Nazis at age 16 as the result of one non-Jewish family's altruism, Oliner has made a lifelong study of the nature of altruism. Weaving together moving personal testimony and years of observation, Oliner makes sense of the factors that elicit altruistic behavior - exceptional acts by ordinary people in ordinary times.