ABSTRACT

Whosoever preserves one life is as though he has preserved the entire world. Inscription, borrowed from the Talmud, on the medallion bestowed by Yad Vashem to The Righteous

Among the Nations (cited in Bauminger, 1983, p. 12)

Genocide, defined as “the co-ordinated and planned annihilation of a national, religious, or racial group by a variety of actions aimed at foundations essential to the survival of the group” (Lemkin & Power, 2005), has emerged as a weapon of choice by the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL). In June 2014, ISIS, with the help of local Sunni tribes, killed at least 1,700 Shiite unarmed Iraqi Air Force cadets. Ali Hussein Kadhim miraculously survived. After clawing his way to the top of a pile of dead bodies, he escaped to the river. Thereafter, two Sunni families took him in and risked their lives to feed, clothe and shelter him, until he was able to reach the town of Al Alam. There, Sunni tribal Sheikh Khamis al-Jubouri, who had been operating an underground railroad-like system that successfully rescued at least 40 escaped Shiite soldiers, provided false identification, shelter for two weeks, and transportation to Erbil, where Ali safely reunited with his baby son and daughter (Arrango, 2014). “Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said 15-year-old “F,” one of 40,000

Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar where over 5000 people were massacred in August 2014, who was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his twenties (Callimachi, 2015). Despite the unbelievable cruelty of ISIS, Callimachi reports, “There were a couple of instances of people within the Islamic State who showed kindness or who helped these women escape or put together some of the key logistics needed for escape” (Allen, 2015). Yazidi businessman Osman Hassan Ali posed as a buyer and successfully smuggled out numerous Yazidi women and girls. After nearly a year in captivity, these young girls who were rescued were far more fortunate than the 3,144 girls still being held as “sabayas,” or slaves, today (Callimachi, 2015). Assuming that the aid undertaken was without expectation of reward, the heroic actions of

Sheikh Khamis al-Jubouri, Osman Hassan and the morally courageous Sunni Iraqi families who risked almost certain death by ISIS, parallel those of the Gentile rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust who defied Hitler and the Nazi regime’s efforts to render the world Judenrein (literally, “purified of Jews”). While the vast majority living in Nazi-occupied territory during the Second World War were passive bystanders, a minute handful of heroic individuals-even the highest estimate of which represents only approximately one half of 1 percent of the non-Jewish population (Oliner & Oliner, 1988)—“risked his or her life, freedom and safety, in order to

rescue one or several Jews from the threat of death or deportation to death camps without exacting in advance monetary compensation” (Gutman, 2003). Despite repeated avowals by policy makers and civilians alike to “Never Again” allow the

atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jewish people to be repeated, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed no end to the proliferation of genocide resulting in 262 million deaths since 1900 (Staub, 2011) and, contributing currently to a staggering 60 million refugees worldwide. Given the global crisis in which we find ourselves today, it is morally imperative that we urgently persist in our efforts to both understand and undertake heroic altruism. Thus it is vital that we examine heroic altruism during the Holocaust, with the goal of translating moral exemplarity into the moral norm over time, lest we allow history to continue to repeat itself. January 27, 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration

camp where nearly one million Jews were starved, tortured, and killed in the Nazi gas chambers. Most of the survivors are now in their nineties and few are expected to live to see the 75th anniversary. The same holds true for most Gentile rescuers of Jews who are also quite elderly (e.g., Sir Nicholas Winton, British rescuer of 669 children, died on July 1, 2015 at 106 years old), and few opportunities remain to learn from and bear witness to their heroism. While scores of rescue narratives have been amassed and examined to understand who these people were and why they risked their lives to help while the vast majority remained bystanders in the face of evil, only a few systematic studies of rescue during the Holocaust have been undertaken. Subsequent to the end of the Second World War, the focus of social psychological research

centered on understanding the vicissitudes of authoritarianism and evil (Adorno, FrenkelBrunswick, Levinson & Sanford, 1950; Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo, Banks, Haney, & Jaffe, 1973). In 1963, nearly twenty years after the Second World War, the founding of The Institute for Righteous Acts by the late Rabbi Harold Schulweis to “search out and conduct interviews with the rescuers, probing the motivation for their acts” (Baron, 1985-1986, p. 241) prompted the first systematic studies of Holocaust rescue (London, 1970). These early naturalistic studies had several limitations including small sample sizes, the absence of control groups, and few, if any, psychometrically reliable and valid instruments (Gordon, 1984; Wolfson, 1975). Nonetheless, they provide some insight into factors impacting the decision to participate in Holocaust rescue. To date, the largest systematic study of rescue during the Holocaust was the Oliners’

“Altruistic Personality Project” (1988). The Oliners interviewed a sample of 700 Holocaust-era rescuers and non-rescuers and used quantitative analyses to arrive at several meaningful conclusions, which are discussed further below. Subsequently, Midlarsky (1985) examined correlates of Holocaust rescue among a sample of 80 verified rescuers and 73 bystanders, building upon the Oliners’ pioneering study by (1) including subjects who had not yet been honored for their heroism; (2) deepening the focus on the dispositions of participants; (3) utilizing more psychometrically valid and reliable instruments to assess constructs predicated on the findings of numerous laboratory studies on altruism; and (4) including a comparison group of 43 demographically similar pre-war immigrants who emigrated to the United States and Canada prior to the onset of the Second World War. Using Midlarsky’s data-set, a robust series of secondary analyses were conducted by Ganz (1993), Midlarsky, Fagin-Jones and Corley (2005), and Fagin-Jones and Midlarsky (2007). These studies examined the relationship between rescue and family upbringing, prosocial and proactive personality characteristics, and the relative importance of positive personality traits examined in the context of potentially important situational and demographic factors, respectively. Before going further into depth about the factors underpinning rescue during the Holocaust,

a brief discussion of where this phenomenon resides in the literature on heroism is warranted. The advent of the positive psychology movement that evolved in direct response to the overwhelming focus on pathology within the field of psychology brought with it a renewed

focus on character strengths and virtues that highlight the maximization of human potential and happiness (Peterson and Seligman, 2004; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Consequently, perhaps in response to increasing incidences of global violence, terrorism and genocide, heroism has been one area of inquiry receiving a recent surge in attention. An example of the shift away from the examination of evil in favor of understanding the basis

of good can be seen in the work of Philip Zimbardo whose classic Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo et al., 1973) revealed how ordinary college students, under certain conditions, conformed with role expectations as prison guards, adopting authoritarian attitudes and behaviors toward the “prisoners.” More recently, Franco, Blau and Zimbardo (2011), positing a common underlying “core concept” of heroism, aimed to systematically differentiate the constructs of heroism and altruism, and conducted a study in which participants were asked to determine whether an act of helping was either heroic or altruistic. In so doing, three problems arise. First, Hawley (2014) alerts us to the tendency among psychologists to conflate terms and to

use imprecise language when defining and examining prosocial behavior. She refers to the “jingle fallacy” or the common error of labeling different psychological, behavioral, or theoretical constructs, such as using the terms “altruistic” and “prosocial” interchangeably. Imprecision, she contends, can “impede effective communication, cloud a domain, or perturb paths of connection,” (p. 44) and, “will quickly control-often in unrecognized ways-the way we think,” (Block, 1995, p. 211). Hence when attempts are made to operationally define a broad construct such as “heroism,”

it is important that language and concepts are distinct. This distinction becomes blurred in the positing of the core concept of heroism by Franco et al. (2011) who operationally define heroism as a social activity: (a) in service to others in need; (b) engaged in voluntarily; (c) with recognition of possible risks/costs; (d) in which the actor is willing to accept anticipated sacrifice, and (e) without external gain anticipated at the time of the act. While arguing that heroism and altruism represent a “fundamentally different class of

behaviors,” (p. 6), paradoxically, their operational definition of heroism in fact, subsumes the construct of altruism, in its inclusion criteria that helping must be undertaken voluntarily, is motivated without expectation of reward and includes the potential for sacrifice. A proposed operational definition of heroism that includes voluntary, intentional, motivational, and potentially sacrificial aspects of behavior is predicated upon the construct of altruism, not distinguished from it. Fundamentally, altruism refers to voluntary behavior that is intended to benefit another at

personal cost motivated without expectation of reward (Batson et al., 2002). Some theorists add that the behavior can stem from internalized values (Eisenberg, 1991) or a strong moral identity (Eisenberg, Shea, Carlo & Knight, 1991). Expectations of reward, reciprocation, or self-interest are not motives of altruistic behavior (Batson, 2011). Indeed, the honor of hasidei umot ha-olam, or “The Righteous Among the Nations” proposed by Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Society established in Jerusalem in 1953, requires verification of helping that included great personal risk and altruistic motives:

1 Active involvement of the rescuer in saving one or several Jews from the threat of death or deportation to death camps.