Moved by this extract from Georgia's Hunter's book, especially as another thread referring to "the wrong kind of refugee" has just reached its 1000th comment.
Doing the right thing means recognising human need and responding to it with compassion but also with pragmatism. The nuns and peasants Georgia refers to did not just sympathise with the plight of the Jews they encountered, they acted with a clear purpose...and they took a risk, knowing full well what the personal dangers were.
It is sad that today, doing the right thing seems to often be interpreted as helping ourselves rather than helping others in need.
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Doing the right thing, then and now
During World War Two, the heroic acts of a handful of men and women saved the lives of many of author Georgia Hunter's Jewish family members. Seventy years later, their bravery is still inspiring her to do the right thing, and help others in need.
Georgia Hunter
When I was fifteen years old, I discovered that I came from a family of Holocaust survivors. I learned that my grandfather, Eddy Courts as I knew him, was born a Jew in a town in central Poland I’d never heard of, and that for the first thirty-two years of his life, he went by Addy Kurc.
Years later, I'd set off on a mission to unearth and record my grandfather's story. It took nearly a decade, but as I finally understood how, exactly, he and his parents and siblings had managed to survive the Holocaust, I began obsessively imagining myself in my relatives' shoes...what must it have felt like, I wondered, to be Jewish and on the run during the Second World War? Would I have found a way to defy the odds, as they had? Would I have had the strength to carry on day after unforgiving day?
The Kurc family scattered at the start of the war, sometimes across continents; many went for years not knowing if they would ever see each other again. They did everything in their power to track each other down, but mostly they tried to stay alive, which required an endless store of courage, ingenuity, and luck, and which also meant turning to strangers for help: to the ambassador who issued my grandfather an illegal visa to Brazil; to the nun who protected my great-aunt's young daughter by admitting her into her convent; to the Austrian banker who lied about another aunt's religion to save her life, at the risk of his own; to the Polish peasants who kept my great-grandparents in hiding, against the threat of death if caught harboring Jews.
As an American, it's easy to feel at a loss when it comes to the crises unfolding across borders. But then I think of the nuns, the peasants, the businessmen and diplomats who stepped up under no obligation to help my family seventy years ago, who put their lives on the line to save someone else's, and I chide myself for my complacency.
I know little about these people who risked their lives to help my family. Why did they do it? Had a moral boundary been recognised that they couldn't bring themselves to cross? Was it out of pity? Were some desperate for the meager compensation? I'd like to believe that they did it because they knew it was the right thing to do.
Maybe it's the foreboding sense of uncertainty in the current political climate, or maybe it's the countless hours in the last decade I've spent thinking about what it means to be a refugee...whatever the reason, I'm haunted now not only by what the Kurcs endured, but by the fact that around the world today, hundreds of thousands of refugees are, as my family once was, in desperate need of safety, of a place to call home. To whom can they turn for help?
As an American, it's easy to feel at a loss when it comes to the crises unfolding across borders. But then I think of the nuns, the peasants, the businessmen and diplomats who stepped up under no obligation to help my family seventy years ago, who put their lives on the line to save someone else's, and I chide myself for my complacency. And so my resolution for 2017 is to find a way, somehow, to help. To do the right thing.
Georgia's book, We Were the Lucky Ones, is published by Alison & Busby and is available from Amazon now.
By Georgia Hunter
Twitter: @Georgia_Hunter
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