To Save a Life: STORIES OF HOLOCAUST RESCUE

The Holocaust takes on a riveting immediacy in these true stories of an everyday, understated heroism that saved thousands of Jews from annihilation at the hands of the Third Reich. Combining personal interviews with contemporary and vintage photographs, "To Save a Life" pairs the stories of a handful of rescuers with those of people they saved. Ellen Land-Weber creates a moving, multidimensional picture of the evasive strategies and heart-stopping close calls that filled the years of the Holocaust for both rescuers and rescued. In matter-of-fact tones, the rescuers describe how and why they put their lives on the line to protect Jews from the Nazis, committing daily acts of resistance that ranged from providing hiding places to procuring false passports and papers, from arranging for medical treatment to interceding with the Gestapo for Jews who had been arrested. The rescuees narrate their growing awareness of the tightening circle of Nazi terror, their experiences in hiding, often being shunted from one safehouse to another, and their hair's-breadth separation from friends and family who did not escape. These stories of courage and risk, set in Holland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, represent a great many other stories of rescue that will never be documented. Rescuers came from every walk of life - teachers, students, shopkeepers, factory workers, housewives, farmers - and were quite unexceptional in most ways. However, by their heroic response to the extraordinary circumstances of Nazi control, these individuals helped reduce the devastation of the Holocaust, sometimes by a single person, sometimes more. "On a certain day, I vanished from the earth," one of the rescuees recalls in "To Save a Life". The human courage and determination that orchestrated the disappearance and consequent survival of these near victims of the Holocaust makes for gripping and inspiring reading.