Author(s): Martin Gilbert

Special Orders

Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and Mies Giep: these are names that most of us recognize. What is less well known is the story of the thousands of other ordinary non-Jews all over occupied Europe who similarly risked their own lives and those of their families, and sometimes their whole community, to save Jews from the Nazis. Some of these were civil servants, officials, and diplomats - but many others were ordinary people who had the courage to turn against the general tide of passive collaboration in order to do what seemed right. Martin Gilbert has been collecting their stories for over twenty years, in every occupied country from Norway to Greece, from the Atlantic to the Baltic, and inside the heart of the Third Reich itself. Among those 'righteous gentiles' saving Jewish lives were many Muslims in Bosnia and Albania; the Greek-Orthodox Princess Alice of Greece, Prince Philip's mother, who hid Jews in her home in Athens; the Archbishop of Lvov and his sister, the Mother-Superior of a Ukrainian order, saved hundreds of Jews in churches and monasteries. The whole of the Danish nation, from the King down, were involved in helping all Danish Jews escape. Other heroes include some most unlikely of people, from a Japanese diplomat to the British prisoner of war, bizarrely called Sergeant Coward, who saved dozens of Jews inside the Auschwitz deathcamp itself. The Righteous is a record and special tribute to this more upbeat side to the Holocaust: the thousands of heroic individuals who bravely stood up against the most barbaric genocide in history.