The Politics of Humanity

value, we have to turn back to the ways in which such value is generated. The goal
of the practice, even if described only as the saving of human lives, is deeply
complex in its possible meanings. Moreover, the goal of saving human lives exists in
a wider social context, one in which the goal is articulated and defined as valuable.
The goal is such a fragile one, its betrayals so frequent, that it becomes vitally
important to understand how it can come to be valuable and spur people to act on
it. That is, we have to turn back to the reasons why people save other people, and
take motives seriously in a more general sense, that is, the kind of study of
motivations set out in the previous chapter. So it is not a question of finding some
pure humanitarian motive, but rather of drawing together the threads of why a
sense of solidarity can emerge sufficient to call for and generate acts of rescue, that
is, to coalesce into concrete intentions.
This leads us back to the Rescuers of Jews. If a sense of common humanity
makes it important and desirable that Jews be rescued, the rescue of Jews can
plausibly become a humanitarian campaign within which not every individual act
has to be linked back to a pure “humanitarian motive”. To do so would be
unnecessarily demanding, untestable and a misunderstanding of the breadth and
complexity of humanitarianism as a category. Yet, to understand the development
of the view that it is desirable that Jews be rescued under the auspices of a
common humanity, it also seems valuable and important to look at the particular
reasons given by those who did exactly that.
Furthermore, when those reasons are examined, they reveal that a search
for some kind of purity would be fruitless. For Otto: “I also examined myself
whether it wasn't part of showing off, and it was”.^47 When asked, “did you see your
activities with the Resistance as being primarily political or primarily as a result of
your humanitarian instincts?”, he responded “Both. Both. Both."^48 For Knud,
“humanitarian” motivations were inextricably mixed with a strong desire to resist
German aggression at all costs, and the desire to protect Jews as fellow Danes.^49
What is interesting is precisely that the rescuers were very different, “ordinary”
47
48 Monroe, The Hand of Compassion , 91.
49 Ibid., 95.
Ibid., 180.