The rescue of Jews in German occupied Western Europe

Abstract

[Introduction]:The questions of why and how non-Jews helped Jews to escape or go into hiding to avoid persecution and deportation during the Nazi period has been a consistently debated element in the wider historiography of the Holocaust ever since 1945. The study of rescue and rescuers were given an added impetus after the creation of Yad Vashem in the early 1950s and the formal honouring people recognized as ‘righteous among the nations’. Research on the Holocaust continues to identify individuals who meet the criteria for the award, and the shelves of bookshops devoted to Holocaust memoirs bear witness to the continuing popularity of the topic with the book-buying public. However, the focus on rescuers as a few righteous and well-motivated individuals who helped, when others were indifferent or positively hostile, has served to create a rather skewed historiography, and one that is in urgent need of reappraisal.