‘In The Garden Of The Righteous Review: Unsung Heroes Of The Holocaust

In June 1940, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul General in Bordeaux, France, watched from his office window as a flood of Jewish men, women and children flooded the sidewalks. Hitler's army quickly conquered France, and the Jews, stateless under Nazi racial laws, applied to the consulate for visas and freedom of passage to Portugal.

Sosa Mendes struggled with despair. Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira ordered Salazar to reject all these requests and leave the refugees there as targets for Nazi imprisonment and deportation to concentration camps. Sosa Mendez knew that a visa was his only chance of escape, but defying Salazar meant the end of his career and his ability to support his family of 15 children.

His dilemma—following the dictates of conscience and obeying an order at the risk of bodily harm or other danger—is found in the lives of those depicted in In Paradise of the Righteous: Heroes Who Risked Your Lives. Jews in the Holocaust. Sir. Independent historian Horowitz recounts 10 remarkable rescue stories, including one in which 10 British soldiers rescued survivors from a 16-year concentration camp.

All of these saviors have received the Right of Nations title at Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. Among the most famous are Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, but Mr. Horowitz focuses on characters less familiar to most readers. None of them were Jews, but each of them took a great risk to save the Jews. We can learn a lot from their courageous actions.

What motivated them to take action instead of sitting back like everyone else? Religious faith brought compassion. "I'd rather be with God than against God," Sosa Mendes, a devout Catholic, told a crowd of refugees outside his consulate after spending his last weeks in France signing as many visas as possible. Later he issued about 1,575 visas (some say more), which saved many who would otherwise have died in the Holocaust. As punishment, Salazar took away his power and property. Sosa Mendes died penniless, but with these words: Christian teaching is to love your neighbor." I never question my faith.

The belief also fueled the efforts of Archbishop Damasquinos of Athens, "the only leader of the Church in Europe," to "openly condemn the Nazis for the final solution." The archbishop encouraged the faithful of his country to hide the Jews and was actively involved with the police chief of Athens, Angelos Evert, in producing thousands of fake Greek Orthodox baptismal certificates and identity cards. Of the 79,000 Jews in the country before the war, only 5,000 survived the Holocaust; Damaskinos and his network saved a lot.

For European circus owner Adolf Althoff, it was a sense of moral responsibility, not religious belief, that prompted him to help. From 1941 until the end of the war, Jewish circus performer Altoff Irene Danner and her family were part of a traveling troupe of 90 acrobats, clowns, zoologists and others. "I couldn't let them fall into the hands of murderers," Althoff said of Danner and his family. "That would make me a murderer." Despite Gestapo controls throughout Nazi Europe, Althoff would set up temporary shelters behind bales of hay or in homes for families in danger of being lost among circus animals. He was also adept at dissuading Gestapo officers from seeking his company with good drinks and fascinating stories of circus life. Asylums and Althoff himself were in danger of arrest and execution were high-profile concerts. But he did not realize that his behavior was unusual. "I only did my duty and protected the people I was ordered to.

This deep sense of duty to humanity includes the story of Irena Sandler, a Polish Catholic nurse and social worker. Horrified by the widespread disease and severe malnutrition in the Warsaw ghetto, where 400,000 Jews were forcibly rounded up, he organized a team to rescue some 2,500 Jewish children from the streets. Sedation To send to the drainage system in the ears. The gang places the children in new families or in various orphanages, monasteries and other religious institutions and gives them false papers with dubious names. Lackey kept a list of the children's names in a code book so he could one day retrieve their rooms, and confirmed the list's existence by putting it in a milk bottle and burying it in a colleague's backyard.

Laki was captured, tortured and sentenced to death by the Nazis. He was only released at the last moment by a bribe from the prison guard. His wounds, like his sense of morality, remained until the end of his life. He remembers how his father taught him: "If someone is drowning, lend a hand." And I tried to find the Jews.

What these men and women shared was the belief that every human being deserves dignity. Althoff said: “We in the circus do not distinguish between race and religion. It is a timely and eternal motto for all of us.

Mrs. Cole is the author of the memoir After Great Pain: A New Life Is Born.