Altruism takes on an additional dimension when it manifests not only in urgent situations but also over the long-term, by repeated and difficult actions that are particularly dangerous for the person or group that hurries to the aid of those whose lives are threatened.
Otto Springer, a German, was living in Prague during the Second World War. He acquired a company whose previous owner was Jewish. He took advantage of his position to save a number of Jews from deportation to concentration camps by providing them with false papers, and by bribing Gestapo officers. He worked with Austrian Resistance networks. He married a Jewish woman in order to protect her and was finally himself arrested and deported. Even as a prisoner, he managed to save hundreds of Jews from death and to escape himself. Afterward, he retired to California where Kristen Monroe met him.1 She describes him as a man overflowing with humanity and enthusiasm, confident while at the same time full of humility. He acknowledged having saved many Jews, but said, “I don’t know whether I’d consider what I did altruistic,” adding that he had a friend who was “an absolutely clear case” of altruism, a man named Kari, who knew that by marrying a Jewish woman, he could protect her. So he asked his friends, “Where is a Jew that I can marry?” There was a woman who had lost her husband and was living alone with her two daughters. Kari married her and everything was fine for a while. But one day the Gestapo came to arrest his wife and one of her daughters. Both were sent to Auschwitz. Kari hid the remaining little girl. A little later, everyone who had married a Jew was forced to divorce, under penalty of being imprisoned. All Kari’s friends pleaded with him to sign divorce papers, since his wife was unfortunately already in Auschwitz. But Kari replied that since the Germans were very detail-oriented, if he divorced, they would examine his file and wouldn’t fail to discover that they had only arrested one of the two daughters and would come looking for the other. Kari thought it his duty to remain married to prevent the Gestapo from finding any trace of the little girl. “He went to the concentration camp even though his wife had already been arrested, just in order to avoid the slight possibility that the child would be discovered. That is a clear case of altruism,” said Otto Springer.
Why had Otto risked his own life to save other people? He wasn’t religious, and didn’t think of himself as especially virtuous (he said jokingly that his morality was just slightly above that of an average American congressman’s). His explanation: “I just got mad. I felt I had to do it. I came across many things that demanded my compassion.… No big deal. Nobody could stand by and do nothing when the Nazis came.” Kristen Monroe comments, “Yet at a deeper level, both Otto and I knew that most people did precisely that: nothing. If everyone had been normal in the way Otto defined the term, then the Holocaust would not have occurred.” At the end of their interviews, Monroe writes:
I knew Otto put me in the presence of something extraordinary, something I had never before witnessed in such intensity and purity. I thought it was altruism. I knew it was real. I did not know if I could understand it myself, let alone explain it satisfactorily to others.
The rescuers all knew that if they were discovered, they risked not only their lives, but also the lives of their families. Their decision was often sparked by an impromptu event, like meeting someone in flight who risked being sent to a death camp. But living up to their commitment required a complex, perilous strategy. Their actions have often remained unacknowledged, and they have never sought to boast about them. In almost every case, far from drawing the slightest advantage from their altruistic behavior, they suffered for a long time from its consequences on their health or their financial and social situation. But none of them regret what they did.
Irene Gut Opdyke is the very embodiment of courage and the purest altruism, in that all her actions were dictated by her invincible determination to save other lives, and at the constant risk of losing her own.2
She was born in a little village in Poland to a Catholic family where love of one’s neighbor was a given. She had a happy childhood, surrounded by her four sisters and loving and attentive parents.
On September 1st, 1939, Poland was partitioned between Germany and the USSR. She was studying to be a nurse in Radom when German bombs razed much of the city. She was suddenly cut off from her family—she wouldn’t see them again for two years. She was seventeen at the time. She fled with a group of combatants and nurses to Lithuania where she was raped by Soviet soldiers, beaten, and left for dead. She woke up in a Russian hospital, her eyes so swollen she couldn’t see anything. She had been saved by a Russian doctor who found her lying unconscious in the snow and took pity on her. Restored to health, she worked for some months in this hospital as a nurse before she was repatriated back to Poland.
In 1941, Irene returned to Radom where her parents had taken refuge; they had lost everything and were trying to survive. That was when Irene witnessed the first roundups and pogroms against the Jews. Forced to work in an assembly line in a munitions factory, she met Major Rügemer, who was head of the factory. Impressed by her mastery of German (Irene speaks four languages fluently: Polish, Russian, German, and Yiddish), he offered her a job in his service, in the German officers’ mess in town.
It was there, at the age of twenty, that she began to save dozens of Jews. She began with a seemingly insignificant gesture that could have cost her life: every day she slipped some provisions under the barbed-wire fence that separated the officers’ mess from the Tarnopol ghetto. Then she got bolder. Responsible for the mess’s laundry, she took advantage of her position to get Jews who were employed in the neighboring work camp out and integrated into the laundry team, where the work was less difficult and where they were better fed.
No one suspected this frail but efficient employee: “In this way, I made my weakness an advantage,” she says.3 She was able to spy on conversations between Major Rügemer and Rokita, the cruel SS commander in charge of exterminating all the Jews in the city of Tarnopol and the western Ukraine. Each time she obtained information about a roundup or reprisals, she passed it on to her Jewish friends. She herself lead people into the forests of Janowka who were trying to flee from the work camps and the ghettos; she hid them behind a dorozka, a horse-drawn cart. “I didn’t ask myself, ‘Should I do it?’ but ‘How will I do it?’ ” she said. “Every step I took in my childhood had led me to this crossroads. I had to follow this path, otherwise I wouldn’t have been myself anymore,” she said later on. Not only did she lead fugitives into the forest, but she regularly brought them provisions and medicine.
In 1943, Germany began to retreat before the onslaught of Stalin’s armies. Major Rügemer decided to move to a villa in Tarnopol. In July 1943, the fearsome Rokita swore to exterminate all the Jews in the region by the end of the month.4 Faced with the urgency of the situation, Irene took unheard-of risks: she hid her friends in an air duct located in the Major’s own bathroom. Then, when everyone was sleeping, she brought them to the new villa requisitioned by Rügemer and put them in the cellar, which she had made ready for them. For over a year, Irene hid eleven people in the villa in which Major Rügemer was living!
One day, the Major came home unexpectedly and discovered Clara and Fanka, two of Irene’s protégées, in the kitchen. Irene unwillingly agreed to become his mistress in order to save her friends’ lives. “The price I had to pay was nothing compared with what was at stake. I had the blessing of God. I was completely sure of the rightness of my actions.” Against all expectations, the Major kept her secret; he even went so far as to spend his evenings in the company of Irene’s two young friends, unaware that his villa’s cellar was still concealing nine other Jews.
In 1944, the Red Army advanced on Tarnopol and Major Rügemer ordered Irene to evacuate the house and make her two friends disappear. As the region was being shelled by Soviet artillery and German patrols were crisscrossing the countryside, Irene led her eleven friends by night into the forest of Janowka, where they joined other escapees who had found refuge there.
In 1945, exhausted by her struggles, malnutrition, and illness, Irene was living in the refugee camp of Hessisch-Lichtenau, in Germany, until a delegation from the United Nations, led by her future husband, William Opdyke, recorded her story and obtained American citizenship for her. In 1949, she emigrated to the United States. In 1956 she got married, and a new life began for her in California. Discussing her past, she concludes:
Yes, it was me, a girl, with nothing but my free will, clutched in my hand like an amber bead.… The war was a series of choices made by many people. Some of those choices were as wicked and shameful to humanity as anything in history. But some of us made other choices. I made mine.
In some cases, entire communities united to save Jews from deportation. This mobilization occurred notably in Denmark and Italy, where some of the population joined together to protect and systematically hide Jewish families. The same was true in France, in isolated regions of the Haute-Loire where Protestant populations were very active in helping a number of Jews to pass into Switzerland. The case of the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon is exemplary. The refugees to reach Chambon were Spanish Republicans who had escaped Franco’s troops. Then came Germans who were fleeing the Nazi regime, followed by young Frenchmen escaping obligatory service under the Vichy government. But by far the most important group was the Jews. It was they who were most in danger and exposed those who hid them to the most risks.
In one way or another, the entire community of this village, itself only numbering 3,300 inhabitants, organized to secretly shelter more than 5,000 Jews over a few years. Under the urging of their minister, André Trocmé, parishioners put all kinds of strategies into play to hide and feed a large number of people, but also to procure false papers for them and lead them to a safe place. In his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, devoted to the rescuers in Chambon, American historian Philip Hallie describes how the events unfolded.9 One winter night in 1940–1941, when she was putting logs into the kitchen oven, Magda Trocmé, the minister’s wife, heard a knock on the door and jumped. When she opened it, she found herself face to face with a trembling woman, obviously terrified and frozen by the snow. That was the first Jew fleeing Nazi persecutions to present herself at the vicarage. In the years to come, hundreds of others would also find refuge there. The woman asked her in a weak, worried voice if she could come in. “Of course, come in, come in,” Magda Trocmé replied.
“For the rest of the Occupation,” writes Hallie, “Magda and the other people of Chambon would learn that, from the refugee’s point of view, closing your door to someone is not just a refusal to help: it’s a way of harming the person. Whatever your reason for not welcoming a refugee, your closed door puts him in danger.”10
All these activities were of course extremely dangerous, and they became even more so as the tide of war turned against the Nazis and they grew more and more pitiless. Philip Hallie reports these statements by Magda Trocmé: “If we had depended on an organization, it wouldn’t have worked. How could a large organization have made decisions about the people crowding around our doors? When the refugees were there, on your doorstep, decisions had to be made right away. Bureaucracy would have prevented many of them from being saved. This way, everyone was free to decide quickly all alone.”11
In his book Un si fragile vernis d’humanité (Such a Fragile Veneer of Humanity), Michel Terestchenko concludes:
The duty to help others was like “second nature” in them, a “lasting disposition.”… Altruistic deeds in favor of the Jews arose spontaneously from the deepest part of their beings like an obligation they could not ignore, one that no doubt bore considerable dangers, but that had nothing sacrificial about it. By acting in this way, they did not renounce their profound being or “self-interests”: quite the contrary, they responded to them in complete conformity and fidelity to themselves.12
After the war, some governments offered financial compensation to rescuers who found themselves in great material difficulty after having protected Jewish families. But almost all of them refused this compensation.13 It should be stressed that many of them were also ostracized by their fellow citizens, both during and after the war. They were sometimes called “Jew-lovers” and their heroism was often the object of sarcasm.
Some of them got married in another country and didn’t even mention to those close to them what they had done.14 “For all the altruists I interviewed,” writes Monroe, “whatever honors they later received—and it is important to remember that, at least for the rescuers, these honors were usually awarded more than thirty years after the altruistic act—were peripheral. For most, they were unexpected; for a surprising number, unwanted. While the majority were pleased by them, they had nothing to do with the intent of, the motive for, the original act of altruism. For no rescuer was the honor ever central.” They all evinced profound satisfaction in having saved lives.
According to Monroe, the sole point in common that emerges from so many testimonies of rescuers is a vision of the world and of others based on an awareness of the interdependence of all beings and their shared humanity.15 This leads to a feeling that everyone deserves to be treated with kindness. “I always thought of Jews as brothers,” confided a German rescuer to the writer Marek Halter.16
For many, people are not fundamentally “good” or “bad,” but rather just individuals who have led different lives. This understanding seems to give altruists great tolerance and a remarkable ability to forgive. As a rescuer explained to Samuel and Pearl Oliner:
The reason is that every man is equal. We all have the right to live. It was plain murder, and I couldn’t stand that. I would help a Mohammedan just as well as a Jew.… It’s like saving somebody who is drowning. You don’t ask them what God they pray to. You just go and save them.… These people just had the right to live like other people.17
As proof of this, the Oliners provide the example of a woman who was part of a group hiding Jewish families. One day, as she and her husband were passing by a German barracks during an air raid, a German soldier came running out with a deep gash in his head—he was losing a lot of blood. Immediately, the husband put him on his bicycle, transported him to the German command post, rang the bell, and left when the door was opened. Later, some of their friends from the Resistance called him a traitor for having “helped the enemy.” The husband replied, “No, the man was seriously wounded, he was no longer an enemy but simply a human being in distress.” This man did not accept being seen as a “hero” for saving Jewish families or as a “traitor” for helping a gravely wounded German soldier.18 When heroic altruists are faced with suffering, labels having to do with nationality, religion, or politics fall away.
Mordecai Paldiel, who was Chairman of the Righteous Among the Nations in Israel, concludes that it is the basic goodness present in each of us that allows us to understand this behavior of unconditional altruism. He writes in the Jerusalem Post:
The more I delve into the deeds of the Righteous among the Nations, the greater my doubts about the validity of the current tendency to magnify those deeds to unreasonable proportions. We are somehow determined to view these benefactors as heroes: hence the search for underlying motives. The Righteous persons, however, consider themselves as anything but heroes, and regard their behavior during the Holocaust as quite normal. How to resolve this enigma?
For centuries we have undergone a brain-washing process by philosophers who emphasized man’s despicable character, highlighting his egotistic and evil disposition at the expense of his other attributes. Wittingly or not, together with Hobbes and Freud, we accept the proposition that man is essentially an aggressive being, bent on destruction, involved principally with himself, and only marginally interested in the needs of others.…
Goodness leaves us gasping, for we refuse to recognize it as a natural human attribute. So off we go on a long search for some hidden motivation, some extraordinary explanation, for such peculiar behavior.…
Instead of attempting to distance ourselves politely from them while at the same time lauding their deeds, would it not be better to rediscover the altruistic potential within us? That occasionally helping one another, even at great discomfort, is part and parcel of our human nature, of our behavioral patterns.…
Let us not search for mysterious explanations of goodness in others, but rather rediscover the mystery of goodness in ourselves.19