Explore how ordinary people made powerful choices to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
Essential questions
- What did it mean to be a rescuer during the Holocaust, and what made those choices so remarkable given the risks involved?
- What do scholars and historians tell us about who the rescuers were, and what, if anything, did they have in common?
- How do the choices made by rescuers during the Holocaust connect to the concept of upstander behavior, and what do their stories ask of us today?
Big ideas
- Rescue as Repeated Choice: Rescuers were not defined by a single heroic moment. Rescue required repeated decisions to keep helping at enormous personal cost.
- The Range of Rescuers: Rescuers came from every background: diplomats, farmers, social workers, ministers, journalists, and ordinary villagers. Research has not found one personality or belief system that predicted who would help — but it has found patterns worth examining.
- The Spectrum of Moral Response: The Holocaust produced perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. Understanding what separated them, and what conditions made rescue more or less likely, is one of the most important questions this history raises.