Righteous and less so

Editorial

The week’s news reminds us of the human capability for great altruism and for less noble qualities.

From the depths of human catastrophe, like the devastation in Haiti, it is human nature to seek out what small light of hope can be found. Stories of human triumph against odds and small miracles of survival amid near-complete adversity nourish the human hunger for optimism.

Amid all of the death in Haiti, new life began. A survivor of the earthquake gave birth to a child in a field hospital hastily constructed by the Israel Defence Forces. From the ashes of disaster, where so many are dead, the manifestation of the greatest hope of all – the birth of a child – was a small reassurance that humanity will continue despite all. The child is to be called Israel.

A single life, in the Jewish tradition, is equivalent to an entire universe, as Irwin Cotler reminded hundreds of Jewish, Swedish and other Vancouverites Sunday at the annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration. Cotler, the Canadian MP and former justice minister who is one of the world’s great legal and moral thinkers, marked the life of one of the great heroes of the 20th century. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary during the Holocaust, secured the escape from the Nazi grip of tens of thousands Jewish souls. As Cotler noted, this one man is credited with saving more lives than any government of the time.

The power of a single life was remembered also this week with the news of the passing of Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who assisted Anne Frank, her sister Margot, her parents and four others to live in hiding in an Amsterdam attic. The woman who risked her own life to prolong that of the Jews in the annex was days short of her 101st birthday. Gies was responsible for finding and preserving the diary of the young girl, which became a cornerstone of Holocaust literature.

From ordinary people who did great things to people of great influence who did too little, the news this week also reminded us of the actions – inactions, rather – of the head of the Catholic church during the Holocaust.

Pope Benedict visited Rome’s Great Synagogue this week, opening again the wound between his office and the Jewish people from the time when his Holocaust-era predecessor Pius XII did so little publicly to defend the Jewish people. Last month Pope Benedict pressed Pius XII forward on the path to sainthood, a controversial move in the face of evidence – or, more accurately, lack of evidence – about Pius’ actions during the Shoah. Pius, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, has been condemned for inaction on behalf of European Jewry during that period.

The current pope correctly points out the many cases of individual Catholic clergy and laypeople who saved lives throughout Europe, each one another example of the potential for ordinary people to achieve extraordinary acts. But Benedict continues to insist that his wartime predecessor did what he could for the Jews of Europe “in a hidden and discreet way.”

So, obviously, did Wallenberg and, by definition, Gies and the thousands of other righteous individuals of that time. But the Vatican, which is in control of the records of its own actions in that period, has been reticent to share the “proof” of Pius’ good deeds.

The evidence, six decades later, is that Wallenberg saved 100,000 souls. Where is the evidence of Pius’ great, but silent, work?

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