Edith Stein's murder at Auschwitz is a topic of intense controversy among members of the Jewish and Catholic faiths. Some observers, both Jews and Christians, insist that Stein was sent to the gas chambers because of her Jewish heritage and faith, and that it would be inappropriate to declare her a saint in the Christian religious tradition. Yet, others of both faiths find in Stein a healing symbol for our time of the atrocities committed against Jews in Christian nations during World War II. In this volume, members of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions speak to this deeply divided debate.

Few lives shed more light on the complex relationship between Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust--or provide a more moving portrait of courage--than Oswald Rufeisen's. A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland, Rufeisen worked as translator for the German police--the very people who rounded up and murdered the Jews--and repeatedly risked his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. In this gripping biography, Nechama Tec, a widely acclaimed writer on the Holocaust, recounts Rufeisen's remarkable story.
A youth of seventeen when World War II began, Rufeisen joined the exodus of Poles who fled the approaching German army. Tec vividly describes how Rufeisen used his ability to speak fluent German to pass as half German and half Polish in Mir, where he came to serve as translator and personal secretary to the German in charge of the gendarmerie. As he carried out his duties--reading death sentences to prisoners, swearing in new police officers before a portrait of Hitler--he earned the trust and affection of the German commander, yet lived in constant fear of discovery. He used his position to pass secret information to Jews and Christians about impending "aktions" and to sabatoge Nazi plans. Most notably, he thwarted the annihilation of the Mir ghetto by arming hundreds of doomed Jews and organizing their escape, and saved an entire Belorussian village from destruction. Denounced, Rufeisen escaped and found shelter in a convent, where he converted to Catholicism. Though a pacifist, he spent the rest of the war fighting in a Russian partisan unit.
After the war, Father Daniel (as he is now known) became a priest and a Carmelite monk. Identifying himself as aChristian Jew and an ardent Zionist, he moved to Israel, where he challenged the Law of Return in a case that reached the High Court and attracted international attention. Today he continues to devote himself to bridging the gap between Christians and Jews.
In the Lion's Den offers a stirring portrait of a Jewish rescuer during the Holocaust and its aftermath, illuminating the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and Judaism and Christianity.

Author Richard Hollander was devastated when his parents were killed in an automobile accident in 1986. While rummaging through their attic, he discovered letters from a family he never knew -- his father s mother, three sisters, and their husbands and children. The letters, neatly stacked in a briefcase, were written from Krakow, Poland, between 1939 and 1942. They depict day-to-day life under the most extraordinary pain and stress. At the same time, Richard s father, Joseph Hollander, was fighting the United States government to avoid deportation and death. Richard was astounded to learn that his father saved the lives of many Polish Jews, but -- despite heroic efforts -- could not save his family."

A common perception of Jews during World War II is that they were passive and submissive in the face of German oppression. In Resistance, Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec questions the validity of this widely held assumption, arguing that rather than making empty claims about Jewish passivity or heroics during the Holocaust, a systematic comparison of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance is needed. Using firsthand accounts and interviews, Tec examines the four main settings of the war-ghetto, concentration camp, forest and countryside, and the Aryan world-and describes what life was like for Jews and non-Jews in each. Tec's comparisons show that even when Jewish and non-Jewish groups were in the same place at the same time, each faced vastly different conditions, and opportunities for Jewish resistance were far scarcer and more complicated than for their non-Jewish counterparts. Given the unique Jewish predicament, Tec explains that Jewish resistance had different aims-in particular, Jewish efforts emphasized recovery of dignity and salvation of lives, rather than large-scale thwarting of their oppressors. This illuminating book also explores the larger concept of resistance, often too narrowly equated with armed attempts or too broadly equated with attempts merely to survive. Tec brilliantly argues that resistance is dependent on the oppressed party's intent and the particular nature of the oppression faced. Closely reasoned and eloquently constructed, Resistance reinvigorates the discussion about resistance in World War II.

A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland during WWII, Oswald Rufeisen worked as translator and personal secretary to a Nazi commander of the German police, repeatedly risking his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. A relatively unknown Jewish hero and rescuer at the magnitude of Oskar Schindler, Rufeisen's life and role during the Holocaust is perhaps even more riveting and complex than the man memorialized by Stephen Spielberg in Schindler's List.
Only seventeen years old when WWII began, Rufeisen joined the exodus of Poles who fled the approaching German army. Bright and talented, Rufeisen used his ability to speak fluent German to pass as half German and half Polish in Mir, where he came to serve the German commander in charge of the gendarmerie. As he carried out his duties - reading death sentences to prisoners, swearing in new police officers before a portrait of Hitler - he earned the trust and affection of the German commander, yet lived in constant fear of discovery. He used his position to pass secret information to Jews and Christians about impending "Aktionen" and to sabotage Nazi plans. Most notably, he thwarted the annihilation of the Mir ghetto by arming hundreds of Jews and organizing their escape, and saved an entire Belorussian village from destruction. Eventually discovered and denounced, Rufeisen escaped and found shelter in a convent, where he converted to Catholicism. Though a pacifist, he spent the rest of the war fighting in a Russian partisan unit, similar to the Bielski unit of Tec's Defiance.
After the war, Father Daniel (as he came to be known) became a priest and a Carmelite monk. Identifying himself as a Christian Jew and an ardent Zionist, he moved to Israel, where he challenged the Law of Return in a case that reached the High Court and attracted international attention.
In the Lion's Den, from author Nechama Tec of Defiance and several other astonishing accounts of Jewish survival and rescue during the Holocaust, offers a stirring portrait of a Jewish rescuer during the Holocaust and its aftermath, illuminating the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and Judaism and Christianity.

Everyone knows the name of Anne Frank but few people remember anything about the people who sheltered her. Who were the rescuers and what motivated them to risk their lives for persecuted Jews? Clearly such people deserve to be remembered and honored. And clearly an understanding of their motivations may help us cultivate such behavior in our own day.

Focusing on such "righteous Christians," Tec, herself a survivor helped by Poles, vividly recreates what it was like to pass and hide among Christians and what it was like for Poles to rescue Jews. Concentrating on Poland, the Nazi center for Jewish annihilation, Tec amassed a vast array of published accounts, unpublished testimonies, and interviews, yielding case histories of over 500 Polish helpers, preserving for posterity the heroism of such people, and filling a significant gap in our knowledge of the Holocaust.

Author Richard Hollander was devastated when his parents were killed in an automobile accident in 1986. While rummaging through their attic, he discovered letters from a family he never knew -- his father s mother, three sisters, and their husbands and children. The letters, neatly stacked in a briefcase, were written from Krakow, Poland, between 1939 and 1942. They depict day-to-day life under the most extraordinary pain and stress. At the same time, Richard s father, Joseph Hollander, was fighting the United States government to avoid deportation and death. Richard was astounded to learn that his father saved the lives of many Polish Jews, but -- despite heroic efforts -- could not save his family."

A story of a young Jewish girl's coming of age during the tragic years of the Holocaust.

In this riveting book Nechama Tec offers insights into the differences between the experiences of Jewish women and men during the Holocaust. Her research draws on a variety of sources: wartime diaries, postwar memoirs, a range of archival materials, and most important, direct interviews with Holocaust survivors. Tec reveals how women and men on the road to annihilation developed distinct coping strategies and how mutual cooperation and compassion operated across gender lines.
"Tec is able to paint a more nuanced picture of the realities of Jewish resistance than previous historians. . . . A remarkable and important book."--"Tikkun"
"Tec offers compelling evidence that gender-related analyses add significantly to our understanding of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust."--"Jewish Book World"
"While this is a work of powerful emotionality, it is also a groundbreaking study of how gender is inexplicably bound to history and experience."--"Publishers Weekly "(starred review)

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II.

Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them.

Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis.

Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.