In writing Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland, I returned again and again to a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to “rescue” a child during genocide? The more closely I listened to—and analyzed—the voices of Jewish child survivors, the more this seemingly clear category revealed itself as complex, fragile, and morally unstable.

Rescue was not always a heroic act or activity. It could be a long and painful relationship, shaped by fear, dependency, money, affection, exploitation, and, at times, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. At the same time, older Jewish children hidden by individual non-Jewish Poles were not merely passive recipients of adult decisions and actions. Even in the most extreme genocidal conditions, they acted, observed, calculated, adapted, and struggled to survive.

Children living “above the surface” in local Polish communities often actively supported their rescuers in the daily practice of concealment. They learned – often the hard way – to perform, convincingly and without error, the role of Catholic Polish children. In some cases, boys were required to adopt a double disguise, pretending to be girls—playing with dolls and imitating girlish language and behavior. Their agency was undoubtedly constrained, but it was real, resourceful, and essential to their survival in an often hostile social environment.

One of the central arguments of my book is that we need a new typology of rescue—one that reflects the complexity and diversity of rescuers and moves beyond the simplistic binary of the “good rescuer” (the Righteous) and the non-rescuer, a framework still too dominant in Holocaust education. Such a typology may also be useful for analyzing other cases of genocide and mass violence, where children’s survival often depends on unequal, unstable, and morally ambiguous relationships with adults.

The case of Zofia Boczkowska illustrates what I would call genuine rescue. Zofia and her husband, Stanisław Boczkowski, sheltered Mery Baron, a Jewish girl born in 1937 in Lwów (today Lviv in Ukraine), as well as another Jewish child, Janka Stiglitz. By the time Zofia encountered her, Mery had already endured a series of traumatic experiences, including an attempted drowning by a Ukrainian woman entrusted with her care. Zofia found Mery in a horrifying scene: barefoot, neglected, and forced to dance for the amusement of German soldiers, while nearby Jewish adults were forced to dig their own graves.

Acting with courage and presence of mind, Zofia bribed German gendarme, constructed a false non-Jewish identity for Mery, and brought her into her home. Crucially, rescue in this case did not end with the act of saving Mery’s life. The Boczkowski couple provided her with love,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)