Tim DOWLEY. Defying the Holocaust. Ten Courageous Christians Who Supported Jews. London: SPCK, 2020. pp. xv + 243. illus., name & subject index. $14.99, pb. ISBN 978-0-281-08362-6.  Reviewed by Guy Christopher CARTER, St. Peter’s University, Jersey City, NJ 07306 [1992-2002].

This engrossing book is written for the general reader by a general reader, with no pretensions to original scholarship and no challenge to generally accepted notions about the Jewish Holocaust under Nazism and those Christians who attempted to rescue Jews from it, often at the cost of their own lives.  Explicitly not written from the sources, Dowley’s work is innocent of acquaintance with any of the major surveys of the Holocaust available in English.  The conventional wisdom that the Holocaust was preventable or its victims rescuable in greater numbers, ‘the myth of rescue,’ had there only been enough courageous Christians, the usual moral outrage that many Polish rescuers (so blindingly poor because of the German occupation that they could barely feed themselves) actually accepted money or goods from the Jews they hid at the risk of their own lives, and that Pope Pius XII was really not interested in  helping the Italian and foreign Jews of Rome are all repeated here.  The author is aware of a deficiency in sources, expressing his hope that these defects may be corrected in a second edition.  If second editions do still happen, then the author and his future readers might profit from settling down for a good read of the work of Mark Riebling (Church of Spies) or Halik Kochanski (The White Eagle Unbowed).

Dowley bases his profiles of twelve Christian rescuers (Maria Skobtsova, Hugh Grimes & Frederick Collard, Jane Haining, Corrie ten Boom, Elisabeth Abegg, Stanisława Leszczyńska, Bruno Reynders, Hugh O’Flaherty, Erik Perwe & Erik Myrgren and Elsie Tilney) in ten chapters, on one or two published surveys or biographies per chapter, with the exception of the chapter on the Swedish pastors, Perwe and Myrgren, which contains footnote annotations without any bibliography.  His principle of subject selection is inclusion or at least active candidacy for the designation ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Israel’s central Holocaust memorial and museum, Yad Vashem.  That leaves out Dietrich Bonhoeffer and any number of other Christian rescuers of Jews who have definitely been dropped from the running for a memorial tree at Yad Vashem. 

Some of those included in Defying the Holocaust may be new to most readers, as they were to this one.  That is because, more as a matter of taste, Christians actively engaged in proselytizing Jews are usually not discussed in a work on the Holocaust.  Corrie ten Boom does not truly belong to this category.  Her Philojudaic Calvinism consistently subordinated her desire to win Jews to Christ to her veneration of the Jewish people, learned from her father, and her overwhelming compassion and empathy toward the persecuted.  Jane Haining, of the Church of Scotland, on the other hand, just as Anglican priests Hugh Grimes and Frederick Collard, and Free Church Evangelical Elsie Tilney, did all represent the ‘Jewish mission’ of their respective communions, a fact which in no way diminished the heroic compassion they demonstrated toward their charges and fellow prisoners, unto death in the case of Sister Jane.   It may interest readers of these pages to know that none of the Catholic rescuers profiled by Tim Dowley (Blessed Stanisława Leszczyńska, Dom Bruno Reynders, OSB, and Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty) considered it part of their apostolate to convert Jews to Catholicism.