The Witness-Scholars of the Holocaust and Their Righteous Rescue Narratives (late 1970s – early 1990s)

This dissertation analyzes narratives of rescue during the Holocaust that coalesced between the late 1970s and early 1990s. During this time, Holocaust discourse moved beyond a narrow focus on the perpetrators and survivors of concentration camps and killing centers, as scholars and writers began to incorporate a more diverse range of experiences in their work. Amidst this transition, the subfield of “rescue studies” developed in a complicated negotiation across geographic, religious, and cultural boundaries, between the people who constructed the subfield and their prospective audiences. “Righteous rescue” was one of the first analytical tools that elicited a range of lessons from the Holocaust, beyond sheer evil and destruction. The rise of narratives of righteous rescue reflected the efforts of individual scholars and survivors to develop new frameworks and storytelling devices in order to wrest some meaning, or at least some sort of order, from the catastrophe. The focus of this dissertation is on four people whose works constituted the core of the early righteous rescue discourse: Philip Hallie, Nechama Tec, Samuel Oliner, and Mordecai Paldiel. All four were scholars of the Holocaust whose research was closely connected to their wartime experiences. Trained in Philosophy, Sociology, and Religion, they introduced tools from their respective fields to understand what they called “goodness.” In the process, they both expanded the scope of Holocaust remembrance and revised theories and practices in their home disciplines. While investigating other people’s rescue stories, they identified themselves as witnesses of goodness, testifying to their own experiences of rescue during the Holocaust. The moral core of the righteous rescue narratives raises questions about the ethics of examining rescue. All four witness-scholars placed storytelling at the center of their writing, emphasizing the power of real stories in shaping collective memories of the past. This method contributed to the stratification of righteous rescue literature, as the author, narrator, and character each spoke in a different voice. At the same time, the process of turning personal stories into moral tales tested the authors’ ability to respect the witnesses’ self-understanding while translating their experiences into universal lessons. Situating these questions about the ethics of storytelling at the forefront of analysis, this dissertation traces the evolution of the four witness-scholars’ righteous rescue literature through changing chronological, national, and international contexts. Loosely connected, their narrative trajectories point to the multiple ways in which the scholars’ personal experiences during the Holocaust intertwined with their research in the living present.

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