When Courage Was Stronger Than Fear: Remarkable Stories of Christians Who Saved Jews from the Holocaust [Paperback]

Peter Hellman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

In this expanded, updated edition of Avenue of the Righteous, accessible, compelling profiles depict lives of courage and bravery, heartbreak and hope, and reaffirm our highest ideals.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As of January, 1999, 16,520 persons from 34 countries had been honored as "Righteous Among the Nations." The designation, bestowed by Yad Vashem, Israel's National Holocaust Memorial, memorializes Gentiles who actively saved Jews during the Holocaust. A tree near the memorial honors each recipient after he or she has met meticulous criteria and passed a series of rigorous screenings. Peter Hellman profiles five of these honorees in his narrative When Courage was Stronger than Fear: Remarkable Stories of Christians who saved Jews from the Holocaust.

Hellman, a New York-based journalist, first published Avenue of the Righteous in 1980. Avenue profiled four men and women who successfully saved Jews from the Nazis. This revised, expanded edition of that text, for which Hellman revisited all of his original subjects or their families, adds a fifth profile to the original four, as well as brief epilogues that bring each account to the present. Those profiled include an Italian priest who hid a Jewish family in a vacated convent and a Polish woman who took in and raised an abandoned Jewish infant. Hellman singles out his subjects for their "mingling of humdrum daily duties, quiet acts of moral power," and literally "death-defying" decisions. His five accounts, although somewhat melodramatic, are nevertheless inspirational in their portrayal of selfless individuals who acted with enormous courage at moments of great danger to themselves. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack

Review

...the book is worth reading just for the compelling story of Leokadia Jaromirska and the Jewish baby she named Bogusia. -- The New York Times Book Review

...wonderfully written, deeply felt, radiant with the moral beauty it portrays. -- Terrence Des Pres, author of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps

Exciting reading and lasting significance. -- Los Angeles Times

This Holocaust book is compulsive reading. -- Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Paperback: 362 pages
• Publisher: Marlowe & Co; 2 Sub edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569246637
• ISBN-13: 978-1569246634
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #485,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for High School Students., June 29, 1999

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[e-mail] (Miami, Florida USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Courage Was Stronger Than Fear: Remarkable Stories of Christians Who Saved Jews from the Holocaust (Paperback)

As a teacher of European History, I must recommend this book whole-heartily to all students of the Holocaust. Peter Hellman does an outstanding job in portraying the unsung heroes of World War II. That not all Christians turned their backs on the Jews of Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Especially good for students in areas of low concentration of Jews, because it looks at the acts of bravery from an aspect of people helping people, and that can be relayed to all peoples and races.