Kristin Monroe interviews several non-Jewish rescuers during the Holocaust to get at their moral psychology and motives in rescuing Jews imperiled by the Nazis. Her extensive notes and transcripts provide an intimate and powerful glance into how rescuers viewed their own actions and how they discerned their own motives. For most “it just seemed the right thing to do.” Monroe's Rousseauian argument is intriguing both in the presentation of the narratives and in her careful, systematic analysis of the moral psychology behind the rescuers' action. She moves in a very different direction than, say, Frantz Fanon's analysis in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) where he sees the emotions of rage and revenge as central to the resistance of the colonized. These two powerful emotions I found to be the primary dynamic behind rescue in the narratives of Jewish resistors and rescuers (Glass, Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Moral Uses of Violence and Will, 2004). The gentile rescuers Monroe interviewed rarely spoke of their anger or rage toward the Germans. Rather, the action of rescue arose through an empathic connection with the victims, for example, Margot: “You have either compassion with these people or you think ‘I couldn't care less when they drop dead’” (p. 20).

Part of the power of this book is the dialectic, the back-and-forth quality, the literal feeling of being in the same room as Monroe and her interviewees. The narratives pull you down into the action and the decision making itself, into the risks associated with the rescuers' moral position. Otto, for example, who was married to a Jew, maintains that if his wife had not been threatened he would not have acted; but then he says, “When it happened [rescue], then I had absolutely a compulsion to do it. The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason” (pp. 90–91), an intuitive, almost instinctual set of actions. But why Otto, Margot, and not others? Why did so few rescue while the vast majority of Germans either acquiesced to the genocide or had an active hand in its many bureaucratic, military, scientific, and academic functions? These questions haunt Monroe's analysis, but in this volume, she focuses on rescuer motives, not the bystanders' unwillingness to act. Here she is concerned with the moral psychology that set the rescuers apart from the “others.”

Otto speaks of the “categorical imperative,” the moral laws, duty, an instinctive sense of what needed to be done. It is almost as if these rescuers embody a voice of sanity, a common humanity, destroyed, culturally and politically, through the madness of collaboration and annihilation; the rescuers' action reminds us that a universal moral realm exists, a common human decency, a benchmark for moral sanity. Much in the rescuer narrative suggests that action, as John puts it, embodied a “natural reaction from the inside” (p. 112). Is Monroe arguing for a moral, psychological version of natural law? Not exactly, although there are moments in the narratives when it appears that the rescuers' moral theory moves in that direction. She asks John, “what did you learn mostly out of this war?” John answers, “principles … some people are born with a better notion of what is right and wrong … there is human nature, and there are principles” (pp. 123, 131).

It was not choice, reason, or religion, Monroe argues, that motivated the action of rescue. The action itself was intimately bound up with identity. To paraphrase: “I am a person who, because of who I am, cannot refuse to act.” The author describes this action as “spontaneous and reflexive.” The actions of rescue, then, “were not considered agonistic moral choices so much as the natural steps” determined by the self's identity and its innate sense of rightness (p. 210). She argues persuasively for the notion that moral behavior derives from an innate moral psychology that is not learned, that is not a function of socialization or religion or reason, but that lies at the very foundation of the nonrational self.

The link between recognition and action is not rational; it is emotional, an argument reminiscent of Rousseau's theory of the first emotion of nature, compassion. Rousseau's “natural man” never thinks about compassion; it is, to use Monroe's words, a “spontaneous and reflexive” action at the sight of the dead and dying. An innate sense of what is right, derived form a natural empathy with the other, the ability to connect with the other's suffering, overwhelms the self with the knowledge that rescue is a categorical necessity. It would be unthinkable to do otherwise. And that sense of rightness is filled with compassion and the natural human capacity to project one's self into the emotional and situational orbit of the suffering other.

Monroe turns to social psychology, particularly work on self-esteem and the continuity of self imagery, “to explore the relationship between identity and moral action” (p. 222). If the rescuers did not act, what would be at risk “was their very sense of self, their core identity.” One had to act, because not to act was unthinkable and a violation of the very foundations of identity. Our self-coherence, the continuity and solidity of our core self, is closely tied up with how we perceive ourselves “at the moment of action” (p. 226). The action of rescue then depends not on character, socialization, or rational choice but on an innate and altruistic grasp of what the situation, defined by suffering, demands immediately. Caring for others was so deeply integrated into the rescuers' “self-concept” that it transformed into “a moral imperative requiring [the rescuers] to take action…. [T]he suffering took on a moral salience” (p. 236). Ethical actions rather than deriving from “conscious choice” emerged from “deep-seated instincts, predispositions and habitual patterns of behavior that are related to our central identity.” This “instinctual moral sense … can be more powerful than any conscious calculus” (p. 241).

Where Monroe resembles Rousseau is that the critical moral issue is not only that we “just feel empathy, concern or sadness at the plight of others” but also that “we take action to help,” or altruism, because we all possess a shared humanity and that by virtue of being human, “all are entitled to decent treatment” (p. 242). It is a “felt relevance … seeing another's need is a critical part of moral salience. But so is the recognition that another's need is of direct concern to me” (p. 248).

Monroe's commitment to basic human values and the universal right to decent treatment is a complex and rich mixture of empirical research and psychological and political analysis. The Hand of Compassion is a compelling and powerful read, a terrific book filled with moving narratives of risk, loss, and sadness, and at the same time, the rescuers' affirmation that all human beings deserve the right to decent treatment. It is an analysis that takes social and political theory out of the text and places the reader in the midst of human suffering and courage. It is also a treatise that shows how important narrative analysis is in understanding critical political, moral, and philosophical concepts.