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. This book focuses on such "righteous Christians." Tec, herself a Holocaust survivor helped by Christians, vividly recreates through hundreds of cases what it was like to pass and hide among Christians and what it was like to rescue Jews. Limiting her compass to Poland, where anti-Semitism was particularly extreme, the author interviewed dozens of people now living in many lands and also examined a vast array of published accounts and unpublished testimonies yielding case histories of over 500 Polish helpers. As the book preserves for posterity the heroism of such people as Celka, the impoverished governess, and her paralyzed father, who took into their one-room apartment a Jewish child, refused to baptize her without her family's permission, and even fed her before they themselves ate, or Dr. Felix Kabus, who developed and frequently performed an operation that camouflaged circumcision, or the famous anti-Semitic author who wrote publicly about what was happening to the Jews, the book fills a gap in our knowledge of the Holocaust.

A study based largely on interviews with Holocaust survivors, mainly from Poland. Focuses on the role of gender in the individual's ability to withstand the vicissitudes of the Holocaust, at various stages and in various situations - during the early period of Nazi occupation, in the ghettos, on the "Aryan side", in concentration camps, and in the resistance, especially among Soviet partisans. At earlier stages, Jewish men who lost their leading status, and were unable to fulfill traditional male roles, were more prone to break down. Women were more capable of rising to the challenge and aiding their families, friends, and communities; they even took over some male roles. Prewar class differences proved to be more significant for men than for women, both in the Nazi camps and among the partisans. In the ghettos and camps, and on the "Aryan side", women clung to their role as mother. During the Holocaust, women evinced the best feminine qualities - cooperation and mutual care.