My Brother’s Keeper: Christians Who Risked All to Protect Jewish Targets of the Nazi Holocaust

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. (Oct.)