Download Raoul Wallenberg – Symbol or Mystery? Conference in Stockholm, 18

Raoul Wallenberg – Symbol or Mystery? Conference in Stockholm, 18-19 October, 2012
Susanne Beer: “The courage to care - who became a rescuer?
Since the 1980s research on rescue has been increasing and the amount of publications is growing
from year to year. However, books that try to analyze the rescuers as a group are still scarce. I found
no more than 22 studies that confronted the question of what made a rescuer. The results of these
studies are unfortunately not consistent; some even contradict each other.
However, there is one point that has been confirmed by most publications; it is the fact that the
group of rescuers is extremely varied. We can find diplomats as well as blue-collar workers, left-wing
resisters as well as right-wing nationalist and priests as well as prostitutes. Therefore the answer to
the question of who became a rescuer is, at least from a sociological point of view, quite clear:
basically anybody could become a rescuer. There was no particular milieu or social class that was
more inclined to help than another. So should we just stop looking for shared characteristics of
rescuers and restrict ourselves to the representation of individual cases? My answer is no, we
shouldn’t! What we should stop, however, is searching for a single explanation of an “ideal type” of
rescuer. Instead it is necessary to shed light on the different tracks that people took to become
rescuers.
Let me briefly illustrate this argument: Imagine a trip with the metro system that represents the
biographical life-course of a person. During World War II there was one stop that people could take
to become rescuers. However, relatively few people got off there. Most remained seated. In
Germany for instance, we know that no more than 0.3% of the whole population decided to leave
the train. However, to get off at the “rescue station”, does not imply that all rescuers took the same
metro-lines to get there. This is what I believe needs to be considered in more detail.
My own analysis of 50 civilian rescuers in the Third Reich indicates that one “track” consisted in longstanding friendship or kinship with Jews. This type of rescuer had profound knowledge of the
increasingly harsh measures against Jews. Most of them supported the persecuted already in the
mid-1930s, many years before the mass murder would start. When deportations eventually began,
those rescuers were well prepared, since they had already been practicing solidary behavior for a
couple of years.
A completely different track, however, was taken by rescuers who had never developed contact with
Jews and who became spontaneously active during the 1940s. This sub-group is quite a fascinating
one and I would like to give you an example to make it more tangible. This is a picture of Auguste
Leissner. When the Nazis came to power, she was a 40 year old commercial employee and more or
less indifferent towards the NS government. According to her memoirs, she had no time for politics,
since she was working so hard. Moreover, she was well off and thought in the beginning that Hitler
was ok. When asked what she felt when she saw anti-Semitic persecutions, she said that, “You can’t
feel anything as an individual, since you are powerless.”
Nothing indicated that Auguste Leissner would become a rescuer. But in the summer of 1943, she did
just that. It was her boss, Mr. Kranz, who asked her to hide a young Jewish girl. Here is how she
remembers his request: “One fine day, it was said, “Now then, Mrs. Leissner, you have to take in a
Jewish girl, too.” I thought, “Oh my God!” Well, at first I didn’t want to, and then he became terribly
furious. That’s how things happen, isn’t it? We all depend on each other at some point, right? And
thus I engaged in it. In the beginning, when I heard that I was supposed to do it, I was frightened: ‘Oh
my god’, I thought. But then it didn’t matter anymore; come what may. I didn’t want to leave Mr.
Kranz in the lurch.” Eventually, Leissner agreed to take care of the girl that she ended up hiding until
the end of the war. Her story is not an exception.
About two thirds of all rescuers became active only after having been asked for help. In these cases,
the role of the demanding person was crucial. Often it was not the victim them-self, but a mediator
who asked for help – a person that could rely on social expectations and peer pressure. The most
effective of these mediators transformed into downright “rescue entrepreneurs”. Their strength was
to string together various kinds of actors with multiple motivations: those who were keen to help,
those who were rather hesitant like Auguste Leissner, but also delinquents with contacts to the black
markets and corrupt officials within the Nazi bureaucracy.
Jewish refugees had to rely on these diverse co-helpers in order to survive, no matter if co-helpers
had noble motivations or not. A study of Historian Nechama Tec about Polish rescuers is quite
instructive in this regard; according to Tec, non-paid helpers often intervened for short term support,
like mediation or food delivery, while it was paid helpers (by the way often less-educated, poor
peasants) who accepted to hide Jews over longer periods of time and thus assumed the highest risks.
This leads me to my last argument, which deals with the grey-zones of power and resistance. The
rescue efforts involved a couple of dilemmas and moral problems that rescuers had to resolve.
Sometimes it was necessary to trespass the laws, to tell lies to fellow human beings, to steal food or
to bribe authorities. That’s what political scientist Kristen Monroe called the “moral regression” of
rescuers. The same phenomenon has been observed by sociologist Michael Gross. He noticed that
the most effective forms of help had been sustained by the actors that he qualified as the less moral
competent. This led him to the provocative statement that “enlightened moral reasoners are often
long on moral indignation but short on political action.” This argument might be exaggerated but, in
any case, it reminds us not to idealize rescuers as a group. And to keep in mind that “the” rescuers
took various “metro-lines” before getting off at the same station.