It is a special privilege to hand the floor over now to Professor Volbrook. Welcome. Thank you very much for that lovely introduction, Christine. Thank you all for coming tonight, and it's a great honour to be giving the Alfred Viener Memorial Lecture. Alfred Viener, as I'm sure you all know, was an amazing person who made such a contribution to collecting material sources even as the persecution was happening, and with great difficulty for his own family in hiding, himself coming across to London, salvaging what he could from the wreckage of Europe under Nazi domination. And the Vienna Holocaust Library is a fantastic institution today. So I'm very grateful to the Vienna Library and Gresham College for inviting me tonight. Unfortunately, this lecture is only too relevant because, as we have seen, anti-Semitism didn't die with the Holocaust. So many attacks recently, so many anti-Semitic racist slogans and people on the streets of Britain in a way that I never ever thought I would see. It's quite extraordinary, so different from the refuge that seemed to be being given to refugees from Nazi Germany so many decades ago. So I'm hoping that the research that I'm engaged in at the moment, which I should say I'm very grateful to the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and the German Research Council for funding a collaborative project of which this is part. I think this research unfortunately remains only too relevant. What we see in terms of public representations of the Holocaust is a tendency, quite rightly, to focus on the key perpetrators who done it, on the victims increasingly bringing victim voices back into the narrative, and on significant rescuers and resistance figures. And in national myths that were built up after the war, again there are certain sort of common themes that come up: resistance, victimhood, and martyrdom. So that very often the role of members of surrounding societies disappears from sight almost. We do not see what was the significance of ordinary people in terms of either complicity, facilitating the stigmatization, the segregation of Jews, or benefiting from their extermination. The roles of members of surrounding society does not tend to be highlighted. I should say that in films it's very difficult because in films you need a good, strong narrative arc. You need Steven Spielberg doing Schindler's List, you need a redemptive story. And if you get somebody like Claude Bluntmann doing nine hours of just watching, and then occasionally bringing in Polish peasants who were standing there watching, listening to the geese squawking to cover up the screams, or sitting in front of nice houses in the centre of a little town in Poland somewhere that used to be inhabited by Jews. That is problematic. It's difficult to make a dramatic narrative out of that kind of footage. And it's difficult for people to see decades later what their fathers, grandfathers had done. It's difficult in places like Lithuania and Latvia today to go around and say, why do you live in such a nice house? Oh, because my grandfather helped to shoot all the Jews into a pit just outside the village. It's not the kind of answer you expect when you're driving around there. So this role of surrounding societies is really difficult. The national myths are also very difficult. In the GDR, former Communist East Germany, there used to be a joke of the 8,000 resistance fighters in the anti-fascist resistance, at least 80,000 were living in the GDR. Well, this was a nice national myth that exonerated ordinary people. When you start looking more specifically, there is a focus in serious museums, in serious exhibitions, either on the nation as a whole or on individual rescuers. Sometimes, as in the case of the Ulmer family in Markov, they are almost elevated to martyrs who represent the soul of the nation as a whole. The Ulma family were an exceptional family. They saved Jews from two or three families living with them in their little house in a very small place, Markova, and they were betrayed. They were betrayed and denounced and murdered the whole family, the parents, the six children, the baby still in the mother's womb, alongside the Jews who were murdered. They were discovered. And that part of the story is played down in the museum which is presenting them in Poland because that's not such a nice story to talk about the complicity of local Polish society. It's better to pretend they stand for the nation's a whole. So it's really problematic. A further thing that I've found in wandering around quite a lot of Europe looking at museums and representations is what I call the ghettoization of Jewish history. This is a really difficult point, and I'll try and make it as carefully as I can. But basically, it's this many museums are repeating the essentially ethno-nationalist categories of the Nazi period in the way they're representing the nation today. So the couple of examples I've given you here are from Riga. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga portrays ordinary Latvians as victims of Hitler and Stalin, which is true. They were subjected to Stalin and Hitler, there's no doubt about that. But it ghettoises the little bit about the murder, the total extermination of Latvian Jews, in a little sort of side bit of the exhibition, downplays it and puts all the signs into the passive voice. 30,000 Jews were killed here, 8,000 Jews were murdered there. Doesn't say who was doing the murdering, and it certainly doesn't say that an awful lot of ordinary Latvians were involved in identifying Jews or indeed even killing them. So it's really difficult. And then the ghettoization goes further. If you want to learn about the Holocaust in Latvia, you have to go a little way out of the town centre to the Museum of the Jews in Latvia to actually see what was going on and get a better understanding of the details. That is a fairly extreme example. I think there are many areas of Europe where this is not quite so evidently the case, but there is this slight problem of reproducing the ethno-nationalist categories of then. Now, I wanted to try and understand, not so in the current book that I'm writing, and I should say these are what I'm talking about tonight is taken from a book that I haven't yet finished writing, so hopefully you'll be able to think through some of the questions with me when we get to the end of it. I wanted to get away from just looking as we have to do with the Holocaust at perpetration and complicity. We have to understand who did it and who was complicit and why. But I wanted to try and understand why did some people, why were some people able to stand out against it? Why were some people able to stand up to this? Why did some people even risk their own lives, the lives of their families, certainly their well-being and livelihoods, to try and save those who are being persecuted? So coming at it from the other angle. And when you start looking at how this is done, there are a lot of social psychological approaches to rescuers, talking about individual personality characteristics, altruism, for example, or emphasizing courage. Generally, relatively little on context, although they all say context is important, but the focus is on what makes a person altruistic exceptional. When you look at the historiography, there are some fantastic micro studies of particular local areas, and there are some good comparative studies, but they tend to be in one region or another. So Western European comparisons between the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, for example, but not crossing East and West Europe, let alone encompassing the whole of Europe. And so trying to understand the significance of what is it about surrounding societies that makes people more willing to give assistance to fugitives or less willing, we have to look at a broader canvas, I think. So what I'm currently doing, it's building on my book that Christine already mentioned, my recent book on bystand society, in which I identified three key factors that tend to make people keep passive, not intervene on behalf of others. Ignorance, the great German excuse after the war, we never knew anything about it, we knew nothing about that. Indifference, didn't care. Or impotence, couldn't. It's a bit like the playground thing, you know, I didn't do it, I didn't know about it, and I don't care anyway. You know, it's it's a very simple set of explanations. Um but the what I found in exploring changes in German society through the 1930s and 40s is that certain social and political conditions fostered precisely those kinds of behaviours. If Jews are stigmatized under the Nuremberg Laws, if they're segregated and separated through prohibitions on intermarriage, prohibitions on going to the same school, all sorts of ways of kicking Jews out of their professional occupations, having to live in separate places, then you don't any longer know your Jewish neighbours so well. So you don't know what happened to them, and you don't really care about them as much. So ignorance, ignoring, and indifference, not caring, can be created through social and political processes and impotence, obviously, not merely fear of concentration camps, which is something that's been explored a lot, but actually, much more importantly, fear and distrust of your immediate neighbours, your community, not wanting to talk too loudly in the greengrosses in case you'd be denounced. So those things are socially created. And I wanted to look at the opposite in this project, active support. And the opposites, I've given you three C's here: comprehension, compassion, capacity to act, and I'll uh come back to those in a little while. But I just want to give you that as the theoretical background. A very quick um race through some things we have to get out of the way, who helped Jews. Righteous Among the Nations is just a tiny minority, those selfless individuals who did it out of the goodness of their heart. Um, rescue organizations, notable individuals, a lot of work has been done on significant organizations and individuals, some religious institutions, but by no means all. Unfortunately, by and large, the record of the churches across Europe is pretty dismal as far as leadership goes. But we do find convents, monasteries, individual members of the clergy. Also people with strong moral and political beliefs or personal connections, like the wives of Jews who are being deported from Berlin, the Rosenstrasser protest. And more people, I think, offering passing assistance and sympathy. If you read survivor accounts, they're full of moments of compassion where somebody simply smiled or offered some water or a piece of bread, and that could make all the difference. Most people, in my estimation, were motivated by greed, and that is very fickle. I won't dwell on that any further, but move to Jewish survival strategies about which there's a lot more to be said. Or, well, there's a lot to be said about everything here, it's just that I'm going to have to go through very quickly. Jewish survival strategies. I think what I've found most interesting in exploring this is the following Warsaw ghetto uprising is so well known, such a major event, that it is widely known. What really surprised me was how many little ghettos had similar uprisings about which we know very little. I knew about the Benjamin uprising because of my book, A Small Town near Auschwitz, but when I was exploring Volhinia, I was really surprised at how many little uprisings there were with the same strategic pattern, really desperately hard to get weapons into the ghetto, but a strategy of setting fire on purpose to the houses in the ghetto so that people could flee in the smoke and the confusion, and the soldiers guarding them would be confused, wouldn't see what was happening. So Mizok, which I have uh given you an illustration of there, um quite extraordinary. About half of the 1,700 Jews in that ghetto made it out into the woods. Unfortunately, as we know, and this is what I'll come on to, the people who made it out into the woods then didn't survive that long afterwards. But many of you will know those desperately sad photographs, which I haven't put up here. They make they I find them agonizing every time I look at them, but those photographs of naked women lining up, some of them with a toddler on their hip, some of them pregnant, going to be shot in a pit outside Mizok, it's really, really desperately tragic. Um in Tuchin, another nearby town in Volhinia, around 2,000 Jews, as many as two-thirds of the ghetto inhabitants, managed to escape, while two Ukrainian policemen and several Germans died in the fighting. So these were small communities, but with a significant effect. Um I could give you other examples. What then happens is fleeing and evading, not then happens, I mean it also happens at the same time, um, evading actions, as the Germans called them, deportations and death sites, Belgets, which as you know only had two known survivors. There were many people from Lvov, Lviv, Lemberg, depending on when you're talking about it and in what language, who on the train to Belgets jumped off the train, got out of the train. They were known in the Lvov ghetto as jumpers because there were, this was such a frequent occurrence. One person managed to jump two or three times before being finally caught. And the more significant thing, which I want to spend slightly longer on, is hiding and passing under false identities. Because once you are out, what do you do? Do you go underground or do you try and pass as an Aryan, a non-Jew? Difficult decision, very hard to decide which it's better to do. If you don't master the local language perfectly, you can't even try. Many Polish Jews, for example, tried to get themselves deported as a slave worker or forced labourer to Germany because Germans couldn't tell if somebody was speaking Polish with a Jewish accent or not. Psychological questions, the retaliation actions, ten people might be killed if you left your work detail and escaped. Ten people in your work detail might be murdered in retaliation. Did you feel you could really do that to your fellow prisoners? Agonizing decisions about whether you hand over your children, your baby, in the hope that they might survive even if you couldn't. And also uncertainty about what the future held and whether you could survive that long. One estimate about Volhinia says that around a quarter of the 180,000 Jews there, around 47,500 Jews who had lived and been living in Volhinia at the time of the German invasion, tried to save themselves by hiding and fleeing or fleeing. Most of them didn't manage. Jan Grobowski, who's a great historian of the Holocaust in Poland, estimates that somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews in Poland tried to hide or to pass. And of that 200,000 to 300,000, only between 30 and 35,000 survived to the end of the war. And the difference between 30,000, 35,000, and 200 to 300,000, the difference is made up of what did members of the surrounding society do to those Jews who tried to flee, to hide, to pass. So that is the significance of surrounding society in numbers if we look at Poland. Likelihood of success, this is so interesting. It's not simply can you get false ID, can you get forged documents and so on. It's also perfecting an identity. I'll quote you one guy who's written his uh autobiography under the lovely title The Imposter. He says he had to stop wearing glasses, because wearing glasses was associated with being Jewish at the time. But this quote at times also lent me an over-anxious expression. Therefore, I attempted adopting a softer, more indifferent looking gaze that related passively to its surrounding. And while previously I would stride along and make ample use of abrupt hand movements and accept Jewish habit, now I walked at a slow, steady pace and kept my hands as close to my body as possible. I also learned the customary Christian practices, so this is not just learning prayers, but how do you be a Christian all day long in a town, such as habitually crossing myself on passing a church or other holy site. At first, my imitations would be sharp, symmetrical motions. As time passed, and after watching others in action, I realized my error. A Catholic accustomed to crossing himself normally performs half movements without completing them. There was also a fixed procedure in the direction of the movements. Needless to say, I did my best to faithfully emulate these habits. And so it goes on. There's psychological challenges as well. How can you bear not talking to members of your own community? Many autobiographical accounts talk of breaking down. Margot Friedlander, who some of you may have read, eventually gave herself up to the Gestapo because she could bear it no longer, passing under a false identity. She landed up in Theresienstadt and felt relieved to be again among her own community. So this is really very a huge field, and there are innumerable stories. I've mentioned already Naftali Dolfoos. Helen Cotler, I'll just mention briefly here because I think what her story shows, she has a terrible autobiographical account entitled We Lived in a Grave. But her family was the only family from her hometown which survived intact. And it was basically because she knew enough people in the local area, had enough economic and social contacts, and enough material wealth money to be able to keep moving on and to keep paying people. And that pre-war social contacts, economic connections, and material means were really important. But there were so many psychological elements. Nahuma Tech, who you probably all know of from the, I think it's Daniel Craig film on the Bielski Partisan's defiance. She talks a lot about how she had to swallow when people were making anti-Semitic remarks. She had to keep thinking, do I go along with this or do I bridle and start protesting? And even the people who were helping her, who became quite affectionate towards her, very often said, Well, you're not like most Jews, you aren't really a Jew. So they could maintain their anti-Semitic prejudices even while they were getting quite fond of her. That comes across in quite a few accounts. Managed to write a couple of letters to his son, which a peasant kept and then mailed to the son after the war, and then he He says in the second letter, I wander from village to village, from one woods to another, from marshes to marshes. The winter stands at the door, and I'm naked, barefooted, and hungry. I don't know whether I'll be able to survive, probably not. And he unfortunately did not survive, and he is far more typical than the cases that I'm going to go on to talk about. But the three last names there, Sender Appleboyum, Peter Feigel, and Sonia Boris, we will hear more about in a moment. Because what I want to turn to is something really quite incredible. Hospitable communities. Christine knows all about Le Chummont sur Linien, having written about it. Some of these are better known than others, and you've got nice little numbers on the map to show you where they are. This is what I mean about trying to understand the whole of Europe in different ways. These are what I call islands of compassion in a wider sea of hostility. They are exceptional places where large numbers of locals saved large numbers of Jews. And I thought by exploring these exceptional places, we might get a better understanding of what it is about a community that makes it possible, that fosters the spirit of compassion. Comprehension, understanding that inhumanity is wrong. It's not the same thing as knowledge, da von Haben nichts gewusst, we never knew we knew nothing about it. It's not the same as knowing there is a place called Auschwitz where they have gas chambers. It's just knowing that if somebody comes to your door, starving, hungry, miserable, orphaned, you should give him shelter. So an understanding of the need to look after people rather than comprehension in the Nazi ideological sense of Jews are vermin, Jews are dangerous, Jews are world conspirators and all the other things we know about Nazi ideology. Compassion or compunction to act, and we'll see that it's not always compassion. Very often there's compliance with moral codes, norms in a community, which is not necessarily a matter of compassion, but a compunction to act through compliance and a capacity to act because of the particular balance of forces. So I'm going to whiz you very quickly through these five. Le Chambon-Serligne is really beautiful. I loved going there. Peter Feigel, who I mentioned as one of the characters who survived, was helped by Quakers. He was, in fact, at a Quaker summer camp when his parents were deported, and then they assisted him getting to Le Chambon, and later they assisted him further. When he arrived, he was met at the station in the middle of the night by Daniel Crockmay, who put his arms around him and comforted him. He records this. He later was assisted in acquiring false ID, moved to a boarding school. Eventually, a Jewish resistance group assisted him out on the route to Switzerland, where he was finally able to cross the border and get free. What is unique about Le Chambon are several things. First of all, Andre Trocmay, the pastor, gave an incredibly interesting sermon on Sunday on a Sunday in the summer of 1940, saying, and this is a quote from the sermon, that the new regime is trying to lead us to submit to totalitarian ideology. And then he goes on, if they do not manage to subjugate our souls right away, they will at least subjugate our bodies. And then he says very explicitly, it is the duty of all Christians to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences, resist through the weapons of the Spirit. We call upon all our brothers in Christ to ensure that no one agrees to collaborate in this violence. And so his leadership was quite significant. What was really also, I think, significant is that there was a very supportive community culture. And this is a multi-religious community. It's not just the Huguenot Protestant tradition of people keep hamming that up about Le Chombong that it's persecuted Huguenots knows what it feels like. But there were Derbyists, there were Catholics, there were atheists, there are a lot of people. It's a wider community culture. It has an incredible hospitality infrastructure, so houses that had been bed and breakfast for several decades. This is a little mountain refuge. Kids were sent up from the cities below for summer holidays, good food, fresh air, and so on. And crucially, international financial aid and the support of a wide variety of organisations of a lot of different colours. And it was initially in the so-called free zone of southern France. So quite incredible place. Newlander in the Netherlands. Le Chambon has the headline 5,000 people saved 5,000 Jews, not strictly speaking true, but a one-to-one ratio. Newland has the headline 500 locals saved 500 fugitives. So again, a one-to-one ratio. The pictures I've given you here, one of them is a reconstruction of a hiding hole in the ground where Arnold Deweys, one of the main leaders of this, very often hid out and slept in the mud. They've now made it a sort of tourist attraction, although when I went to look at it, there was not a single other tourist in sight for miles around. It's a very much poorer area. It's flat, it's impoverished. Apparently Van Gogh hung out there in the neighbourhood for three weeks in, I think, the late 19th century, I couldn't give you the exact date. And after three weeks painting the area in one of his early phases, he fell prone to Great Depression and left. And I noticed a trip advisor comment when I was giving around at this, saying I would get depressed if I stayed here for three weeks. So it's not, it's not such a beautiful area as Le Chambon. What is extraordinary is again a supportive community culture. People did not denounce neighbours, even if they didn't take in Jews themselves, they did not denounce those that they knew were little outside aid, but strong links to the resistance networks in the Netherlands, which is very important, and I'll come back to that. Villa Emma in Nanantila in Italy. That is not how it looks now. It's completely overgrown and surrounded by other buildings, but that's how it looked, circa 1945. A whole pile of Jewish children who had been trying to make it to Palestine, had got as far as Yugoslavia, didn't get the visas, didn't get the papers, couldn't board the ships, were brought to Italy, were looked after in the Villa Emma. What is interesting about this particular, and there's a lovely, well, it's not lovely, it's a really sad diary by this young teenage girl, Sonia Boris from Berlin, in which she talks about how much she misses her mother, how desperate she is for a postcard, how bad her toothache is, how horrible the dentist is, this is all while they're still in Yugoslavia, but it's really interesting insight in the difficulties of the life of the young people. What is interesting is that when they are suddenly at risk and about to be arrested, the local priest and a local physician organise the um getting the kids out of the villa and getting them hidden by local people. So we're talking about 73 young people plus their leaders hidden for six weeks in the locality. And what is interesting is why were the local people so willing to do this? Partly people in authority, as we've seen in De Chambon, partly that the kids were mostly orphans and objects of sympathy. They were non-threatening, they were not seen as others, they couldn't be cast as dangerous partisans like the Nazis were trying to do with Jews around Europe. And locals sympathized with the German threat and felt that the kids were on the same side. So there was compassion, there was capacity to act. And then the kids were organized to have false ideas get over the border to Switzerland and survived. This is Volhynia again, where we had the ghetto uprisings a moment ago. And what is interesting here is the way in which minority villagers who were in a minority, so not part of the Ukrainian majority around, were more likely to offer help to fugitives. And the Baptists in particular, there were some villagers which were predominantly Baptist, and they could almost be quoted in ways that would go down well in Le Chambon. So one of the survivors, Sender Appleboyum, who was helped both by Poles, Poles, Czechs, and Baptists, all minorities in this area, this Ukrainian area. Appelboim, and I quote him, says that one of the main motives for providing aid to surviving Jews on the part of the farmers in a particular village where he was saved, the very first motive is religious belief, I quote, the influence of the belief of the Subotnikim Baptists that was widespread in the area. Among the other beliefs, they adhered to the book of books, the Bible. I've heard their believers enthusiastically quote sentences and verses from the Bible relating to the future and the exalted role of the Jewish people that the Supreme Providence intended for them. The Subotnikim preached against violence and killing, for brotherhood and friendship among human beings, for simplicity and modesty. That quote could have come from Le Chambon, it comes from Folhinia. And my final of the five islands of compassion is a place called Volos in Greece. Really beautiful area. What is extraordinary about this place is that around 87% of the local Jews survived, which is a total contrast to Salonica, Thessaloniki, where there was only about a 5% survival rate. Lots of reasons for the terrible lack of survival rate in Thessaloniki, first to have deportations under German occupation, volos initially under the easier Italian occupation, only later German. But here again we see two really or three really interesting features. The Greek Orthodox bishop and the chief rabbi cooperating with each other, so two authority figures, one saying to his clergy, help fugitives, one saying to the Jewish congregations, flee, both of them refusing to hand over a list of Jews for deportation to the Germans, and crucially here, the communist partisans, the EAM resistance groups, helping, in practical terms, to take fleeing Jews to peasants in the hills and billeting them in peasant communities. And this is where I think compassion is not necessarily the right word. I think there's a degree of what I would call forcible persuasion going on. When a communist partisan band comes up with some Jews and says, take them, and the peasant said, I've got a wife, I've got 15 children, I've got no money, I've got no food, you take them. You don't argue with the communist partisan. So I think there's a little bit of forcible persuasion going on. This is where I think that the approaches which keep hammering on about individual motivation, what motivated people to help, are missing something because it is community pressure. And sometimes community pressure is saying hand over your Jews, denounce people who are helping, as we saw with the Ulmer family and Markov. And sometimes community pressure is saying save the Jews, look after them. So what do these cases have in common? People with strong views, religious, moral, political values, very often minorities. We see in the Netherlands, incidentally, that Catholic minorities in predominantly Protestant areas and Protestant minorities in predominantly Catholic areas are more likely to look after and help Jews. So there's something about minority status, but that's not sufficient. Key leaders, key figures of authority providing guidance in some way. A supportive or compassionate culture, and the supportive culture can simply be I'm not going to denounce my neighbours. That's where I really can't quite put my finger on why that is the case in some places and not others. And trusted networks pre-existent, like the aid organizations in Le Chambon, or created like Douways in Newlander and in other areas. Very often religious groups have trusted networks through their own community. In some cases where there isn't a religious group, Janice Lipke, for example, in Riga, he creates his own trusted network of people he knows who he feels he can trust. But they differed massively with regard to the points I've put in the other blue thing. Material resources, poverty versus reasonable well-being, topography, forests versus open landscape, and crucially the social and political environments. That photo I've given you there, I always find really horrifying. This is a local auctioneering the possessions of murdered Jews in Lithuania. The Jews of the village have been taken out, shot into a pit, their clothes sometimes splattered with blood, being auctioned off straight afterwards. I find that just really horrific, but that is what I mean about the social and political environment. So let me come to my final section, which I will be briefer about. Capacity to act. Hospitable environments and hostile environments. This looks very um very schematic, but I think it's really vital. Hospitable environments, you can see certain things that they have in common, weak repressive forces. Le Chambon is extraordinary in this regard because it's in initially the Vichy zone, the so-called free zone. When the Germans come in, there is a real puzzle about why they're not more energetic and effective in hunting down Jews. But the local gendarmerie is also pretty either incompetent or doesn't want to be effective. And you find that endless tales of, you know, the gendarmes would stop halfway up the hill to have a drink on the way up because it's hot day and they're on bicycles and you know want a good drink. And while they're in the pub, they talk very loudly about we're going up to the hill, we're going to hunt the Jews, we're going to get all the Jews. And meanwhile, a little kid who overhears it is sent cycling very fast up the hill to warn everyone. So by the time the gendarmes get to the top, all the local Jews have jumped out of the back window of where they've been living and hiding in the forests, and nobody can be found. So there's something very weird going on there. We can't fully explain it. Local resistance movements. This is really incredibly significant. Um, whether or not the local partisan bands are or are not anti-Semitic. Um I will talk about that in a moment, but the networks, strong networks, organizational personal, weak networks, and the community culture, these are really important things. So if I can just go through very quickly the last couple of points under that. The social topography of survival, I'm calling this, the character and aims of occupation regimes make a massive difference. I am not disputing that for one moment. Um, but once we get beyond that point, the attitudes and efficiency of local bureaucrats, local police forces, and others can make all the difference. If we look at Hungary, for example, in 1944, when I first started on this project, a colleague in Amsterdam said to me, what a stupid project. It all depends on the time of the war. If the war had ended in the spring of 1944, the Hungarian Jews would still be alive and everybody would be saying, what a marvellous place that was. But because it went on so much longer, we have 440,000 Jews deported within a matter of months in the summer of 1944, and now everyone has to explain that. Okay, that is a really important point, the time and what the Germans are doing, but beyond that, there's the question of what are the locals doing. The Hungarian Gendarmerie, the Germans actually were very grateful to, they could not believe their luck that the Hungarian gendarmerie had assisted so energetically in the roundups and deportations from most of Hungary. The Polish Blue Police, Jan Grobowski, I've mentioned already, has talked and written and researched very extensively the role of the Polish Blue Police in Jew hunts. The French gendarmerie very, they have quite differing degrees of efficiency in different areas of France, which need explaining. There is regional difference. The partisans, I think, are the really crucial thing I want to raise to attention here because they're very rarely spoken about, and that, it seems to me, makes all the difference in Greece compared to Poland. If you look at the Polish partisan bands in the last year or two of the war, many of them were actually engaged in hunting down and murdering Jews. Whereas if you look at the partisan movements in Greece, many of them were engaged in helping Jews. The numbers again are very difficult to get accurately. The different figures I've got here, between 650 and 1,000 Jews were in the Greek partisan bands. One estimate is that they may be saved 9,000 Jews, the Greek communist partisans. There was a higher percentage of Jews in the partisan bands than the percentage of Jews in the general population. So really quite extraordinary. One of the problems with Greece is that in the civil war that followed the end of the war, the role of communist partisans was really downplayed. They were not acknowledged in memorial culture. And in fact, in Volos, there is no mention of them in the local history museum. You would think that you would praise to the skies this cooperation between the bishop, the rabbi, and the communist partisans, but there's no mention in the local history museum. It's bizarre, it's just absent. So this is really important. And then the likelihood. Interestingly, in Volhynia, the partisans there in that area, there are at least three, probably four different types of partisan bands. The Ukrainians predominantly viciously anti-Semitic, the Ukrainian nationalist partisan bands. The Polish ones, of whom I've given you a photograph, actually very often quite favourable towards at least some Jews, but a bit variable. The communist, Soviet partisans, much more likely to be not so anti-Semitic, although it was again a bit variable. And the robber bandits who were roaming the woods just killing anyone and everything. So it was really complicated in the woods around there. The conditions for rescue, again, this is much more interesting than I realised it was going to be when I started working on this. I've given you a Danish ship there because you've got to have some Jews escaping Denmark on boats, otherwise it wouldn't be complete. But I think what's interesting about Denmark, apart from all the things that are well rehearsed in terms of the German attitudes to Denmark and so on, what I think comes out of that and many other examples is that rescuers tend to have inclusive conceptions of community. It's not necessarily restricted to citizenship or your own group. And this is the one I find really interesting. Actions towards others also express and reflect on your own sense of your own personal and collective identity. So we Danes are people who save Jews. They don't have to be Danish Jews, they can be Jews from elsewhere. We Danes are the kind of people who do that. But the capacity to act varies massively with the region, the political circumstances, the timing, and so on. So my final conclusions, it's not just individual courage, resilience, altruism, and it's certainly not national character. But it's also these many other things that I've been trying to indicate with some examples. The leadership, the networks, the community cultures, and the conditions for action, the local power relations. And also I don't want to leave out of that when I'm looking at these wider factors. I don't want to leave out of it the significance of small gestures, the glass of water, the wink, and the ignoring the fact that you know someone's passing under a false identity, the moment of warning that somebody is coming, you might want to turn your face away and not be seen here. These little gestures come up again and again in survivor accounts, and they also saved many lives. So I think when we we go the full gamut from these islands of compassion, these extraordinary communities, right through to what the individual actually can still do. So I'm sort of hoping we can take some solace out of some of that in relation to this truly ghastly period of history, which depresses me no end when I work on it, but there are some glimmers of hope in it. So thank you very much for your attention.