Description
According to Jewish tradition, “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world.? Non-Jews who helped save Jewish lives during World War II are designated Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust archive in Jerusalem. In The Righteous, distinguished historian Sir Martin Gilbert, through extensive interviews, explores the courage of those who throughout Germany and in every occupied country from Norway to Greece, from the Atlantic to the Baltic?took incredible risks to help Jews whose fate would have been sealed without them. Indeed, many lost their lives for their efforts. Those who hid Jews included priests, nurses, teachers, neighbours and friends, employees and colleagues, soldiers and diplomats, and, above all, ordinary citizens. From Greek Orthodox Princess Alice of Greece, who hid Jews in her home in Athens, to the Ukrainian Uniate Archbishop of Lvov, who hid hundreds of Jews in his churches and monasteries, to Muslims in Bosnia and Albania, many risked, and lost, everything to help their fellow man. (January 2003)
About the author
MARTIN GILBERT is the author of more than seventy books and a leading historian of the modern world.
Gilbert was born in London in 1936. He was sent to Canada at the age of three-and-a-half in an effort to escape the war, but returned home soon thereafter. He graduated from Oxford in 1960 and wrote his first book, called The Appeasers. In 1961, after a year of research and writing, Gilbert was asked to join a team of researchers working for Winston Churchill. At the age of 25, he was formally inducted into the team, doing all of his own research. Gilbert became known as Churchill’s official biographer and has remained so ever since. He is a fellow of Merton College at Oxford and has written numerous books—some on Churchill, such as his multivolume treatise called Churchill, some on the Holocaust (Surviving the Holocaust), and some on the war itself (The Second World War). He continues to write on the struggles of Jews during the war and the histories of this world, from culture to culture.
In 1995 he was knighted “for services to British history and international relations” and in 1999 he was awarded a Doctorate of Literature by the University of Oxford for the totality of his published work. He now divides his time between London, Ontario, and London, England.