In the midst of the extreme destructiveness of the Holocaust, and despite the passivity of most people in Nazi-occupied Europe and the rest of the world, some risked their lives to save Jews.
It is hard to remember now that for many years after World War II, there was scant public interest in the Holocaust, the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany. Most survivors were too numbed--their experience of horror too fresh, their grief for those who died, who usually included children or parents, too great--to focus the attention of the world on the Holocaust. Maybe the world also needed time and perspective.
This lack of interest extended to those who had saved lives. When I was a first-year graduate student at Stanford University in 1962-63, my friend and professor Perry London was conducting the first study of the rescuers, those Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe who had saved Jewish lives. He completed a small, significant study, but as he was unable to find continued funding, the project had to be terminated. The lack of funds was partly due to insufficient public appreciation of altruism and of this special type of altruism, and partly to the prevailing insistence on rigorous methodology in psychology. The convential wisdom then was that a long-delayed study of the personality of individuals as they had been at the time of rescue could not yield valid information.
Fortunately, in the last decade the study of rescuers was renewed--just in time, before old age and death would make personal interviews of the rescuers and survivors impossible. The Oliners' work is the most extensive, most in-depth study to date, and given the advancing age of the rescuers, it is likely to remain so. What the Oliners learned about rescuers will confirm, importantly extend, and add to previous findings on rescuers and in the study of altruism; a few of their results conflict with or disconfirm the results of past research.
The Oliners asked three essential questions: Was it the circumstances of individuals that resulted in their actions; or was it their personality, their enduring characteristics and values, that led them to rescue? What family background was conducive to that development of rescuers?
Who were studied?
The Oliners created an extensive set of questions based on preliminary interviews and conducted in-depth interviews with rescuers and rescued survivors. Rescued survivors were included partly to establish whether the motivations that rescuers reported corresponded to those the survivors perceived in rescuers. The rescuers were mostly from Poland, Germany, France, and Holland, but a few came from other European countries, and 95 percent of them were identified by Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the Holocaust, as "Righteous among the Nations": persons who saved Jewish lives. Participants were also asked to fill out a questionnaire that included a number of previously used personality tests--values, empathy, self-esteem, social responsibility, a sense of agency. A total of 406 rescuers participated (231 in the whole procedure, 175 provided preliminary information), along with 150 rescued survivors.
To have a basis of comparison allowing them to establish what was unique or different about the rescuers, they also
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