Strangers' compassion that came out of the Holocaust

At least six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi rgime during the course of the Second World War. But amid the horrors of the Holocaust there were individual acts of courage and compassion that shone through the darkness.

Oskar Schindler, whose story inspired Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, is the most recognisable name among those who risked their lives to save people from Hitler's death camps, but there are thousands of others like him.

It is the bravery of these often unsung heroes which forms the basis of a new book by Agnes Grunwald-Spier, The Other Schindlers – Why Some People Chose to Save Jews in the Holocaust.

Agnes, a Justice of the Peace and a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, has lived in Sheffield for the past 20 years. She was born in Budapest to Jewish parents during the Nazi occupation, and says she survived because of one man's actions.

"My mother didn't really talk about what happened. But she did say we lived in the ghetto and that the man in charge of deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz sent all the women with children back home. He could have been a policeman, he could have been a civil servant, I don't know who he was, or what his motives were. All I do know is that if he

hadn't done that, I wouldn't be alive today."

After the war, Agnes and her mother were reunited with her father, who had been sent to a labour camp, and in 1947, they moved to England where they had relatives.

But, traumatised by his wartime experiences, her father committed

suicide when Agnes was 10.

"Even now, all these years later, it makes me incredibly sad and

there's still a huge void in my life."

For many years, Agnes steered clear of the Holocaust because it was a subject she found too painful. But in the mid-1990s, she was on the Sheffield Council committee that brought an Anne Frank exhibition to the city, and she decided to enrol on a Holocaust Studies masters course.

"I was 50 and I had three children who were, on the face of it,

ordinary English children and I didn't know enough to talk to them

about the Holocaust. So I thought it was something I was ready to face."

During her studies, she came across Varian Fry, an American journalist who ran a rescue network in France during the war that helped thousands of Jewish refugees escape the Holocaust. Moved by his story, Agnes began investigating the reasons why people risked their lives to help others, many of whom were complete strangers.

She started her research a decade ago and has collected about 30 stories of rescuers from 10 different countries, which she recounts in her book. So was there a common thread linking them all?

"Some said it was because of their religious faith, some were part of the Resistance and others saved people out of loyalty. In one case, a family hid a Jewish woman in their attic for two-and-a-half years. That was an amazing story because they ran a boarding house and had Nazi officers staying in the house."

In most cases, though, the over-riding motive was compassion.

"Nearly every person I spoke to was very humble about what they had done. There was a French family that lived near Lyon who hid a Jewish couple for three years.

"After the war, they refused to be honoured for what they did because they felt they hadn't done anything special, they just did what anyone else would have done. But if everybody had done that, there wouldn't have been a Holocaust."

Although the consequences for helping Jews were dire, Agnes says

rescuers came from every layer of society, from French peasants to Italian countesses.

"Sociologists have spent an awful lot of time trying to show how you can tell who would be a rescuer and who wouldn't. But from what I've found, and I don't claim to be an expert, it boils down to individuals being compelled to try to help people no matter what the consequences," she says.

"People like to think they would be a rescuer but the chances are, statistically, they would have been a bystander or possibly even a perpetrator. But nobody wants to think of that."

n The Other Schindlers, by Agnes Grunwald-Spier, is published by The History Press, 14.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk P&P is 2.75.