Stories Of Deliverance: Speaking With Men and Women Who Rescured Jews From the Holocaust` [Paperback]

The Talmud presents the idea of the existence of the Just?righteous people in each generation who save the world from destruction. Halter, who has founded an international committee for a negotiated peace in the Middle East and has published award-winning fiction and nonfiction on Jewish themes (e.g., Memory of Abraham, 1985), employs this idea to highlight his conversations with non-Jewish rescuers in Nazi Germany. Initially published in French in 1995, these conversations are the basis for Halter's film, Tzedek: The Righteous, and include individuals from over 45 countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While the conversations are revealing in their examination of the subjects' motivations, they are often disjointed, and Halter's chatter is distracting; it is hard to discern whether the book is really about the Just or the theory of the Just. Still, few books on the Holocaust focus solely on the rescuers. Recommended for most larger public libraries and Jewish and Holocaust collections.?Jenny Presnell, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Thirty-six brief, often moving profiles of individuals who, usually at great personal risk, saved Jews from the Nazi juggernaut of death, from a noted French Jewish novelist (The Book of Abraham, 1986, etc.) and human-rights activist. Halter himself escaped the Warsaw Ghetto as a small boy with the help of two Polish Catholics. For this volume he traveled to 14 countries to interview other rescuers. He discovered such little-known stories as that of Berthold Beitz, who set up a protective factory (like Oskar Schindler's) employing Jews in Rumania under the auspices of the Krupp armaments empire, and Giorgio Perlasca, the ``Italian Wallenberg,'' who, by feigning to be the Spanish ambassador in Budapest in late 1944, rescued several thousand Hungarian Jews. The rescuers make some revealing observations about their life-saving work and its motivations and implications. A man involved in the mass ferrying of Danish Jews to Sweden in October 1943, for example, makes the remarkable statement that the Danes ``owe a debt of gratitude to the Jews for . . . they obligated us, by letting us save them, and in so doing, safeguarding our self-respect.'' Unfortunately, Halter has a tendency to cut short his stories so as to indulge in the Gallic penchant for meditation on Big Philosophical Questions. Thus, he wonders rather pointlessly, ``will we be able to find enough Just people in the whole world to prevent the worst ones from being totally victorious?'' Halter also seems unfamiliar with the extensive work on rescuers done by a host of American scholars, including Philip Hallie, Malka Drucker, and Eva Fogelman. And he is careless with certain facts, stating wrongly, for instance, that the captain of the ill-fated refugee ship St. Louis grounded the vessel off the coast of England. Despite these flaws, Halter's stories and interviews should touch readers--and help them expand their range of moral activism both in extremis and in day-to-day life. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

When Marek Halter was five years old, he and his family fled the Warsaw Ghetto in the hope of fighting for the freedom of Poland. When his family was caught with hundreds of others at Malkinia and told to separate into Poles and Jews, Marek was saved by a Pole who pulled him under a wagon; he and his family escaped by running through open fields amidst the shots of German guns. A split second decision by a Catholic Pole saved Marek's life and the family continued on to Moscow. In 1994, Marek Halter began his search for the men and women who risked their own lives to save the live of Jews during World War II. He begins his journey in his childhood home of Warsaw, from which he has been away for over 40 years. By interviewing Jewish survivors of the holocaust, Halter developed a list of what he calls the "Good and Just" - the people who, according to the Talmud, must exist in each generation in order to save the world from destruction. Our protagonists range from simple peasants on the Polish border to Willy Brandt, the ex-Chancellor of Germany, to a Japanese Consul who disobeyed his government. Eventually, his journey leads him through the Netherlands, Sweden, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Japan, Tunisia - 14 countries in all. Halter was looking for personal stories with happy endings and the people who made those endings possible. Written as a series of conversations with the heroes and those they rescued, interspersed with the author's own memories, "Stories of Deliverance" offers glimpses of the hope and strength we find even in the darkest of times of our history. Halter uses this collection to convince us of two things: that there will always be good people in the world who will give us hope and sustain us in times of oppression; and to warn us that it is only with the memories of good deeds that we will be able to adequately deal with evil.