Searching for Moral Heroes in Holocaust : Values: Rabbi unlocks a forgotten footnote in Holocaust history-- goodness. He learns thousands risked their lives to save Jews.

Rabbi Harold Schulweis began his search for moral heroes when his children sat down to watch a television special on the Holocaust.

“I had this strange feeling of wanting them to see it,” he recalled in a telephone interview, but “hoping that they would not leave totally despaired and paranoiac.”

For Schulweis, who lives in Oakland, the dilemma was doubly sharp.

“Here I am, preaching from a Judaic point of view that the human being is created in the image of God and emphasizing the reality of goodness,” he recalled thinking, “and I don’t seem to have any empirical evidence of that, especially when the Holocaust is mentioned.”

So Schulweis began in the early 1960s to look for the other side of the Holocaust--the unsung moral heroes of that dark period. And, happily, he found them. Thousands of ordinary people risked their positions and often their lives to save Jews during World War II. They are people such as:

* Hermann Graebe, a German civilian contractor working with the German forces in the Soviet Union, who witnessed firsthand the massacre of Jews. He was so horrified that he requisitioned hundreds of Jews for work details, then got them to safety by reassigning them to a fictional branch office in the Ukraine.

* Aristedes de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul who falsified hundreds of passports to get Jews into Portugal and then was stripped of his position and ridiculed for his actions.

* Alexander and Mila Roslan, a Polish Christian couple, who harbored a Jewish child for three years. The Roslans sold their house and moved frequently to avoid detection by the Nazis. At one point, they used a sofa to smuggle the boy into a hospital for surgery and bribed the surgeon to keep it secret.

* John Henry Weidner, a Seventh-day Adventist of Dutch descent who developed an escape line to the free countries of Switzerland and Spain during World War II. More than 1,100 people, many of them Jews, passed through this route to safety. Weidner was honored by the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers for his work.

“It is clear that we are dealing with a considerable number--not as large as the apathetic, and it’s not as large as the persecutors--but we are now beginning to speak in terms of tens of thousands,” Schulweis said. “And as one remarkable Dutch rescuer told me: ‘You know, rabbi, you talk only about the conspiracy of evil. I have not heard you speak about the conspiracy of goodness. . . . Do you think it could be done without the cooperation of the Dutch policeman and the Dutch grocery and our neighbors?’ ”

During the early years of his search, Schulweis got little support or help. Jews feared the effort to find heroes would turn into a whitewash of the Holocaust, he said. Even Christians did not want to respond.

“Many Christians that I’ve tried to speak to have an understandably difficult time to absorb the Holocaust, because it’s so filled with accusation and condemnation of the failures of priests and ministers. But once they . . . see these Christian heroic personalities, they are then able to recognize that there is no hero without a villain, and they are able to accept the darkness because there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Now the tide is turning: Jews are beginning to re-examine the Holocaust and support Schulweis’ efforts. In 1987, his Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers became a project of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

“I think it signals a certain maturity,” said Bob Goodkind, the foundation’s chairman. “The process is really just beginning, but at the same time I think we are getting a very beautiful reaction.”

The foundation’s board includes Christians as well as Jews and has already raised enough money to begin providing financial aid to more than 100 needy rescuers in Europe and the United States. Many rescuers are in need, Schulweis said, because they’re shunned by their own people and have not had contact from the Jewish community. Rescuers in the U.S., for example, receive $200 a month.

Beyond that, the foundation aims to locate and publicize the stories of rescuers as examples of moral leadership, said David Szonyi, foundation director. Next spring, the foundation plans to host a conference on moral courage.

“I think you need heroes precisely from the so-called ‘enemy’ camp,” Schulweis said. “What has happened, regretfully--for reasons which are, I think, fascinating--is that goodness is buried into at best some footnotes but mostly forgotten.”

For example, he said, the Encyclopedia Judaica dismisses the rescuers of Anne Frank and her family, saying only: “They were kept alive by friendly Gentiles.”

Why this reluctance to acknowledge good? “I have a suspicion that there’s greater challenge and fear in confronting goodness than in confronting evil,” Schulweis said. “Compared to Eichmann, I’m a great guy. But compared to Graebe . . . and all these other people, I have to ask myself the challenging question: Would I unlock my doors and hide a family? It’s a very important lesson for the post-Holocaust world, which has become extremely cynical and very despairing.”

“You have to want to look for goodness,” he added. “And if you don’t want to, you won’t see it. . . . You know, if you look for godliness or divinity, you have to know where to look. And to be able to find it in the midst of a hell, it rekindles one’s faith in the possibilities of goodness.”

In the end, food got so scarce that Aart and Johtje Vos established a rule. No one--neither themselves nor the people they hid from the Nazis--could talk about food except for one hour each day.

In fact, they made a game of that special hour. “Who remembers what a banana is?” Johtje Vos recalled the children being asked. Only the older ones knew the answer.

For 4 1/2 years during World War II, the Voses endured Nazi raids and risked their lives to hide Jews and others.

“I think it was common decency,” said Johtje Vos in a phone interview. Like many rescuers, she refuses to call herself courageous. “You don’t say, ‘Let’s go and rescue some Jews.’ That’s not how it happened. It came to you.” First a little boy and, eventually, many others came. Over the course of the war, 36 people stayed with the couple six months or longer--some for the entire war.

Why did they do it? Vos stressed the strict Christian upbringing that she and her husband received. Rescuers often had strong moral teaching from a particular parent, added Schulweis, who has met or read many rescuers. Typically, they had a history of nonconformity, a humanitarianism that transcended religious or ethnic identity and, usually, some association with Jews.

Beyond that, “it’s just remarkable how different the motivations are,” Schulweis said. “Some will say, ‘I did it because Jesus was a Jew, and these are his people.’ And some will say, ‘I didn’t do anything because, after all, I know that Crucifixion story.’ ”

The Voses, now living in Woodstock, N.Y., did not tell their story for 20 years. But they are talking now, every chance they get, in the hopes that they can influence their grandchildren’s generation.

“What we see in the schools, in the families, is that they don’t get the values that we got,” Vos said. “That’s what we are fighting for. And that will be an antidote for what our children have learned up to now.”