Righteous or Not

My work in bringing to light stories of the rescue of Jews was a personal odyssey that greatly affected my own thinking about human nature at a deep level. I found out that goodness is a human attribute affecting people from many walks of life, social standing and educational background. That most people, whatever their characteristic modes of behavior under normal conditions, in times when the laws of humanity are challenged and defied, some people find within themselves the capacity and strength to rise above their human-given flaws and act in unpredictable ways to keep aloft the flame humanity; and this by getting involved in the effort to make possible others to survive, whose lives are threatened through no fault of their own. The thousands of rescue stories collected by Yad Vashem is proof of that praiseworthy human disposition. My 24 years of dedicated work at Yad Vashem, that I continued in the following years in lectures and writings, on a topic that shows man at his best, at a time when events also demonstrated man at his worst, has helped me to further ponder the mystery of human behavior at a very deep level. While “the jury is still out” on this topic, the fact that thousands of persons decided to put their life on the line to help others, in many cases strangers to themselves, places in question the widely held opinion that human behavior is guided solely by the Darwinian notion of “survival of the fittest.” The altruistic disposition of goodness toward fellow man, as displayed by the many who rescued Jews, awaits a greater acceptance as an equally intrinsic human behavior stimulus, together with the other more self-centered modes of behavior.