Description:
As of January, 1999, 16,520 persons from 34 countries had been honored as "Righteous Among the Nations." The designation, bestowed by Yad Vashem, Israel's National Holocaust Memorial, memorializes Gentiles who actively saved Jews during the Holocaust. A tree near the memorial honors each recipient after he or she has met meticulous criteria and passed a series of rigorous screenings. Peter Hellman profiles five of these honorees in his narrative When Courage was Stronger than Fear: Remarkable Stories of Christians who saved Jews from the Holocaust. Hellman, a New York-based journalist, first published Avenue of the Righteous in 1980. Avenue profiled four men and women who successfully saved Jews from the Nazis. This revised, expanded edition of that text, for which Hellman revisited all of his original subjects or their families, adds a fifth profile to the original four, as well as brief epilogues that bring each account to the present. Those profiled include an Italian priest who hid a Jewish family in a vacated convent and a Polish woman who took in and raised an abandoned Jewish infant. Hellman singles out his subjects for their "mingling of humdrum daily duties, quiet acts of moral power," and literally "death-defying" decisions. His five accounts, although somewhat melodramatic, are nevertheless inspirational in their portrayal of selfless individuals who acted with enormous courage at moments of great danger to themselves. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack
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