The Courage to Care:
Riemer, Jack
BOOKS Celebrating Torn Hashoah' Every year, I face the same dilemma when Yom Hashoah comes. What should I do on this day for remembering the Holocaust? Part of me says: "Forget it!" What good...
...Let Christian children have role models to study in their schools...
...There were not a great many such people...
...What good does it do to perpetuate the evil that occurred...
...But I don't know how...
...Together, they have assembled a collection of interviews and testimonies and first-person accounts by people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust...
...and Sondra Myers New York University, $24.95, 157 pp...
...And therefore, we ought to remember the people in this book and honor them and care for them if they need that...
...How is that she was able to do what more learned, more cultured, more officially religious people were not...
...I think you have a responsibility to yourself to behave decently...
...This book and the film that has been made out of it are both important spiritual documents...
...They talk with diffidence...
...But if I do that, what will it do to my own soul and to my children and what will it accomplish for my neighbors...
...But there were more than we were aware of, and to read their stories is important-as part of the historical record, and for guidance...
...Let Jewish children have these stories to study in our schools, so that all of us may be able to hold onto our faith in the existence of good without which a healthy human life is difficult to maintain...
...What goes through the mind of a woman who does that...
...She was the concierge in an apartment building, hardly the kind of person about whom sagas are composed...
...The people who speak in this book are not used to calling attention to themselves...
...Carol Rittner is a Catholic Sister of Mercy...
...I am tempted to make it a day for indicting-not only the Nazis but the spectators who also share a measure of responsibility for what happened...
...All they did was open doors or give shelter or feed children or keep secrets, but in the midst of so much darkness what they did was luminous...
...What I found most moving was the contrast between the accounts which are told in such a matter-of-fact manner and the snapshots and photographs that appear on the same pages that are so eloquent...
...We ought to focus on these stories and make them a required part of the curriculum in all our schools...
...Jack Riemer me a way of observing Yom Hashoah that I think makes sense...
...There is a Simon Weisenthal and there is someone in the Justice Department who devote their lives to tracking down Nazis who are in hiding in this country or elsewhere...
...I stare at that photograph and I ponder the mystery of this human being, so saintly and so unaware of her saintliness...
...No one can answer that question with certainty...
...We are a people whose tradition includes gratitude as one of its central categories...
...Now this book has appeared and given THE COURAGE TO CARE Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust Edited by Carol Rittner, R.S.M...
...Part of me is afraid that if I retell the story of the atrocities, of the brutalities, of the wanton waste of innocent lives, if I tell my children that a million and a half Jewish children were slaughtered, then I may harm my children's psyches, I may diminish their ability to trust in the sanity of humanity...
...After what I had seen outside that children's home, I could not have done anything else...
...Part of me says: "Remember it...
...Obviously, how could there be...
...For example, there is a snapshot of a woman sitting at a sewing machine...
...We should do this not in order to minimize the catastrophe or to bleach out the horror but because these people deserve to be remembered and because their stories help to restore our faith in the human capacity to be good...
...Candle-lightings, speeches, assemblies seem so weak a way of observing this watershed event in human history...
...And we ought to teach their stories...
...I respect the need for that, but it seems to me that we also need Simon Weisenthals who will track down and discover good people who are living in obscurity as well...
...Now that we have this book, I know what to do next year on Yom Hashoah...
...There are never a host of heroes who are able to carry out extraordinary acts of courage...
...Sondra Myers a national leader in the arts and education...
...I may make them feel that the whole world is out to get them and no one can live a healthy life if he or she feels that way...
...How is it, as Rabbi Harold Schulweis has observed, that we all know the names of Klaus Barbie and Mengele and Eichmann but none of us can remember the names of the people who gave shelter to Anne Frank or took in Abba Kovner or smuggled Jews across the border at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon...
...In the end, we are only left with statements as simple and yet as profound as Marion Pritchard's: "It did not occur to me to do anything other than what I did...
...I am tempted to make of this day a major event in the calendar for I do not want amnesia to occur...
...She is obviously a plain woman and yet she hid people in a broom closet and convinced the Nazis that the family had left...
Vol. 115 • June 1988 • No. 12
