In the 980s, Gay Block took photographs of over a hundred non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust in order to save the lives of Jews. Working with the writer Malka Drucker, Block traveled around the United States and Canada and to Europe and Israel to meet these men and women. Though some of them had already been honored for their work by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and archives, others had not had their stories told until Block and Drucker, with the help of the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers in New York, found their way to their doorsteps. These people—who have come to be called Righteous Gentiles or Christian Rescuers or, in deference to the fact that quite a number of them are agnostics or atheists, simply Rescuers—these people came from all kinds of backgrounds, did all kinds of things before, during, and after the war, and are united by what seems in almost all cases to have been an immediate, intuitive decision to do whatever they could to save the lives of Jews. A selection of Block’s photographs is up at the Museum of Modern Art through April `o7. Those and more are included in Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, the book by Block and Drucker that has just been published.¹ At the Modern, the photographs are interspersed with blocks of texts excerpted from the interviews in the book.

Everybody who has read about these rescuers is struck by