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During World War II, French villagers offered safe harbor to countless strangers - mostly children - as they fled for their lives. The same place offers refuge to migrants today. Why?
In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a fluke of history, or something more? Anthropologist Maggie Paxson, certainties shaken by years of studying strife, arrives on the Plateau to explore this phenomenon: What are the traits that make a group choose selflessness?
In this beautiful, wind-blown place, Paxson discovers a tradition of offering refuge that dates back centuries. But it is the story of a distant relative that provides the beacon for which she has been searching. Restless and idealistic, Daniel Trocmé had found a life of meaning and purpose--or it found him--sheltering a group of children on the Plateau, until the Holocaust came for him, too. Paxson's journey into past and present turns up new answers, new questions, and a renewed faith in the possibilities for us all, in an age when global conflict has set millions adrift. Riveting, multilayered, and intensely personal, The Plateau is a deeply inspiring journey into the central conundrum of our time.
Chapter 1
Unanswered
I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me.
—Daniel 7:15
Let's just say that suddenly you are a social scientist and you want to study peace. That is, you want to understand what makes for a peaceful society. Let's say that, for years in your work in various parts of the world, you've been surrounded by evidence of violence and war. From individual people, you've heard about beatings and arrests and murders and rapes; you've heard about deportations and black-masked men demanding people's food or their lives. You've heard about family violence and village violence and state violence. You've heard these stories from old women with loose, liquid tears; from young men with arms full of prison tattoos.
There were men on horseback calling the boys to war, and long black cars arriving to steal people away in the dead of night; girls who'd wandered the landscape, insane after sexual violations; there was the ...
Paxson's personal reflections sometimes turn outward into sweeping and confusing assertions about humanity when it seems they might have more naturally continued inward into analysis of her own struggles. For example, she expresses concern about the "moral hazard" of identifying as a member of any group before identifying as human, stating that "the oneness of humanity is an absolute truth." It seems important to acknowledge, alongside this statement, that groups in power have often used people's religious and ethnic identities as reason to treat them inhumanely...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Righteous Among the Nations refers to non-Jewish people who have been honored by Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Memorial Center in Israel, for putting their lives at risk to help Jews at the time of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem set up a commission in 1963 to establish the criteria for the award and examine cases to determine recipients of the title. Since then, Yad Vashem has given the title of Righteous to over 27,000 individuals from over 50 countries. The Israeli government grants honorary citizenship to the Righteous, and organizations such as the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous offer assistance to surviving Righteous who experience economic hardship.
Yad Vashem names individuals as Righteous who meet four requirements:
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