The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition Summary and Reviews

The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition
by Michael Good

The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition
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Book Summary Information

Author: Michael Good
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-01
ISBN: 0823224414
Number of pages: 271
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Book Reviews of The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition

Book Review: This is a complicated kind of heroism.
Summary: 4 Stars

One third of this book is standard heroic stuff. A non-Jew in a position of some authority takes steps to create a haven for Jews and -- in the midst of annihilation -- saves a lot of them. You have to find your way to this by navigating the first third of the book, which tells a different story: how to find someone using multiple information sources and documentation, both scattered and (some of it) sequestered. The last third of the book is given over to appendices and afterwords, original documents that only become compelling provided the heroism of the man has taken hold with the reader.

Karl Plagge was a courageous individual in a time and place when individual courage was in short supply. His example, of a person who saw terrible things happening and took the initiative to stop them from happening within his purview to the extent he could, gives a glimmer of hope in the midst of the overwhelming despair of the Holocaust. That he had been a National Socialist very early on in its history is his initial credential as an unlikely hero, but the unfurling of his identity reveals this to be ultimately of little consequence in defining him. Yet Plagge was circumspect to a fault. Were it not for the documentation of his de-Nazification trial, there would be very little to show him revealing himself. One hopes it was not an overwhelming sense of guilt over what he could not do that made the man seem to place so little importance on what he did do (which did and does matter).

Plagge's story does not have the razor's edge of Wallenberg's. Michael Good is not primarily a writer. But all in all this is a compelling new chapter in the story of the Holocaust. Vilna was of as much consequence as Warsaw for the Jews, and its story is not as well known today. And written from the viewpoint of one who only lives thanks to Karl Plagge, this is a book worth reading.

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