Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

If evil is banal, than surely good must be extraordinary. Rochat and Modigliani argue otherwise, noting the lack of outstanding qualities among the vast majority of Holocaust rescuers who risked their lives to help Jews and how often they spoke less of their heroic conduct than the disjointed world in which they found themselves, an upside-down universe where acting “normal” would have required violating everything they believed. “It is obvious that the attitude I took could not fail to cause strangeness,” wrote the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes of his irreverent conduct. “However, it should be noted that everything was strange at the time. My attitude was, in fact, a result of the totally abnormal and insuperable circumstances.”