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The Search For Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews
The Search For Major Plagge The Nazi Who Saved Jews Author:Michael Good "Perhaps in other places only a small amount of determination was lacking in order to prevent or decrease the atrocities. I never felt that this needed special courage. It required only the conviction and strength that anyone can draw from the depth of moral feelings that exists in all humans." --Major Karl Plagge, from a letter written in 1956 ... more » On April 11, 2005, in Jerusalem, Karl Plagge will be named a "Righteous Among the Nations" hero by the State of Israel. He joins Oskar Schindler and some three hundred eighty other similarly honored Germans who protected and saved Jews during the Holocaust. While all "Righteous Gentiles" share the stamp of conscience, Karl Plagges story is of a unique kind of courage--that of a German army officer who subverted the system of death to save the lives of some 250 Jews in Vilna, Lithuania. One of those he saved was Michael Goods mother. Karl Plagge first joined, then left, the Nazi Party. In Vilna, whose teeming ghetto held tens of thousands of Jews facing extermination, he found himself in charge of a work camp where military vehicles were repaired. Time after time, he saved Jews from prison and SS death squads, pulling whole families from the ghetto by issuing them work permits as "indispensable" laborers essential to the war effort. In this remarkable journey of discovery, Michael Good fills the missing pages in Karl Plagges life. He also reminds us all of the many ways human beings can resist evil. "I guess he was just a decent man," Pearl Good said of the man who saved her life when he didnt have to. "There are always some people who decide that the horror is not to be." Haunted by his mothers stories of a mysterious, benevolent officer who commanded her slave labor camp, Michael Good resolved to find out all he could about the enigmatic "Major Plagge." For five years, he wrote hundreds of letters and scoured the Internet to recover, in one hard-earned bit of evidence after another, information about the man whose moral choices saved hundreds of lives. This unforgettable book is the first portrait of a modest man who simply refused to play by the rules. Interviewing camp survivors, opening German files that had been untouched for more than fifty years, and translating newly discovered letters by Plagge, Good weaves an amazing tale.« less