My Brother's Keeper

October 3, 2016
Gragg (By the Hand of Providence: How Faith Shaped the American Revolution) provides an inspiring look at 30 Christian heroes who defied the Nazis at great personal risk and bucked the general tide of indifference and paralysis that overwhelmed almost all bystanders to the Holocaust. Jan Karski, who tried to get F.D.R. to respond to the mass murders of Europe’s Jews, will be familiar to many readers, but most of the people profiled here are not. For example, relatively few will have heard of Feng Shan Ho, a Chinese Christian, who saved over 12,000 Jews. When Ho’s promotion to consul-general at the Chinese embassy in Vienna coincided with increasing reports of Jewish persecution, he issued visas to Austrian and German Jews, allowing them to emigrate to Shanghai. Ho persisted despite opposition by his own government, which wanted to maintain its relationship with Hitler. Ho’s story, like that of the others, merits fuller treatment than it gets here, but Gragg gives a sense of these activists’ mind-boggling bravery, though he does not provide a deep dive into their psychology to explain why they acted when so many did not.

October 15, 2016
A great shame of recent history is the sheer number of citizensincluding Christianswho turned a blind eye to the suffering of their Jewish neighbors during the dark days of WWII. Fortunately, there were some brave souls who took their faith seriously enough to risk their lives for others. It is these heroes who are chronicled in this inspiring book. The book shares 30 stories of people who took seriously the call to lay down their lives in the cause of righteousness. Some of them are people readers might expect to be heroictrained intelligence officers, for examplewhile others are more ordinary folk, like pastors or businessmen. None of them are ordinary, though, in the steps they took to shelter Jews in whatever way they could. Many of the stories have happy endings. But some do not. And that is a poignant reminder of the inspiration these people can offer the reader. An excellent book for anyone interested in the Holocaust or WWII, or just hoping for a glimpse of humanity in dark times.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)