The Krauses (with the Ship Captain) in 1939
Eleanor and Gilbert Kraus are very likely two of the greatest unsung heroes in American history – at least, in Jewish history. I watched a documentary about their courageous acts (in 1939), which amounted to nothing less than a full-throated display of magnanimity and altruism. Here is their story. I will also include a selection of quotations about magnanimity by noted Holocaust survivors, human rights activists, altruism researchers, and stalwart exemplars of virtue and honor such as Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Viktor Frankl.
The documentary was entitled 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus. Written and directed by Steven Pressman in 2013, and debuting on HBO. It’s really worth a watch. I will try to do it justice in a few hundred words. You will hopefully be able to detect the magnanimity, altruism, love, willingness to risk, and other values of the wise present in their intriguing and harrowing story. It reads like Schindler’s List meets My Story (Alicia Appleman-Jurman’s recounting of surviving the Holocaust).
I will quote liberally from the tried-and-true site, Wikipedia:
“The film tells the story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a Jewish couple from Philadelphia who traveled to Nazi Germany in 1939 and… saved Jewish children in Vienna from likely death in the Holocaust by finding them new homes [with 50 foster parents] in America. …[t]he film is based on the manuscript of a memoir left behind by Eleanor Kraus when she died in 1989. The documentary…was narrated by Mamie Gummer and Alan Alda. Some of those who were rescued were interviewed for the film. Aged from five to fourteen [in 1939], they were senior citizens living in the United States and Israel when the film was made.”
As you can see from the attached picture, it was a Herculean task requiring altruism, magnanimity, bravery, and finesse to line up all the ducks in a row that would be required to leave your work and your two kids, travel to Germany and then Austria, filter through hundreds of potential adoptees to get to 50 healthy ones, get visas, leave 100 parents behind, load them onto a steamship, deal with the sadness and loss and separation, and safely travel the Atlantic for ten days without getting sunk by a U-Boat or hitting an iceberg, finally entering the U.S. through Ellis Island, and put the children into fifty good homes. For no pay and no extrinsic reward. “Because” according to the granddaughter of the Krauses “it was the right thing to do.” Because it was the right thing to do. That just makes my heart sing.
Not the least of which was the fact that the United States was not terribly keen on either Jews or importing more Jews. As this story tells, the U.S. was partly anti-Semitic, partly isolationist, partly in the midst of a Great Depression, and partly secretly arming itself for a coming conflagration. Allowing the immigration of a million or two Jewish people was unthinkable. I’m not terribly proud of that — as an American — and not terribly happy about that — as an ethnic Jew.
Here is how Vox writer Dara Lind describes that dark (ignominious?) chapter in America’s spotty (sordid?) past:
The U.S. (and other countries in the Western Hemisphere) could have saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis. They didn’t. At one point, the US literally turned away a ship of 900 German Jews. Shortly afterward, it rejected a proposal to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to the US for safety.
At the time, the US didn’t know how terrible the Holocaust would become. But Americans did know that Nazis were encouraging vandalism and violence against Jews — many Americans had been alarmed by Kristallnacht in 1938, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued a statement condemning it. But America didn’t feel strongly enough about the mistreatment of Jews to allow them to find a safe harbor in the US.
It is basically the opposite of magnanimity, altruism, goodness, and compassion. It wasn’t like putting Japanese Americans into internment camps. But it was not good.
What in fact is magnanimity? It comes from Latin Magna + animus, meaning “great spiritedness.” Here is how Jesuit priest Joseph Rickaby describes it:
…a certain generosity in ignoring petty annoyances, also in forgetting and forgiving, not taking advantage of your enemy when you have him in your power. But the conception of magnanimity originally laid down by Aristotle,… is honor, which is also the matter of humility. The magnanimous man is defined to be “one who deems himself worthy of great honor, and is so worthy indeed;” a thoroughly good man, exalted in virtue, and therefore deserving also to be exalted in honor. Such a man accepts high honors as his due, makes little account of small compliments …is unmoved by affronts and ignominies put upon him by persons who do not understand him and are incapable of measuring his greatness.
The Wikipedia article about the Krauses was really thin, but this webpage is solid and this is a very complete summary. It aptly features the bald profession, “No one in their right mind would go to Germany right now.” It really did come across as true heroism in the documentary. As though Gilbert Kraus was struck by a lightning bolt of magnanimity and decided that, against the odds, and against everyone’s best advice, getting as many children of the Holocaust as possible stateside was priority number one. Indeed, if magnanimity is your goal, risking your own hide to save fifty children you don’t know truly qualifies. Virtue was probably more common then, but the word common wouldn’t fairly describe it then, either. Not among upper-middle-class lawyers during the Depression.
I think the Krauses should go down in history as two of the best America has ever produced. They were very comfortable and bourgeois; 99,999 other American Jews would never have had the irrepressible urge to attempt this feat of bravery, and most would have buckled and thrown in the towel. If Holocaust survivor and heralded author Elie Wiesel is right and “Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life,” then Gilbert Kraus and to a large degree his wife Eleanor deserve the highest praise and must have felt very proud indeed on their deathbed. To meld humility with such high virtue is the nature of saints, or gods.
How is it that so many wealthy, capitalistic, suburban-dwelling, golf-playing individuals decry the merit of trying to change the world, while at the same time work so hard and are so successful in their particular occupation? What if they dedicated themselves to being magnanimous more so than profitable, how would the world be in twenty years? We need our heroes and leaders down on the field, not lounging in the stands.
Below are about fifty quotations about magnanimity, altruism, bravery, prejudice, love, honor, genocide, and meaning by Holocaust survivors, altruism researchers, and the like. If you would like to find additional quotations, do so by searching this quote search engine.
“It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.” ~ Elie Wiesel
“Magnanimity will not consider the prudence of its motives.” ~ Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ~ Viktor Frankl
“My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.” ~ Primo Levi
“Magnanimity is often lived in quiet, simple ways off the radar screen of most of the world. The person who daily endeavors to be a better spouse, parent, friend, or child of God is truly seeking “greatness of soul.” Indeed, the magnanimous person continuously strives to perfect the virtues in all areas of his life. He is not content with simply being good. He reaches out toward excellence.” ~ Edward P. Sri
“There ain’t nothing but one thing wrong with every one of us, and that’s selfishness.” ~ Will Rogers
“I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn’t stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That’s all there is to it. Really, nothing more.” ~ Oskar Schindler
“Whoever destroys a soul [of Israel], it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life of Israel, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” ~ The Talmud
“What the people want is simple, they want an America as good as its promise.” ~ Barbara Jordan
“Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?” ~ Lillian Hellman
“There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.”
“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.” ~ Anne Frank
“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not weep, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.” ~ Kahlil Gibran
“For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.” ~ Simon Wiesenthal
“Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.” ~ Viktor Frankl
“Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom.” ~ Adlai Stevenson
“Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” ~ Mark Twain
“I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself that I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.” ~ Raoul Wallenberg
“Are we to say to the world – and much more importantly, to each other – that this is the land of the free- except for the Negroes? That we have no second-class citizens – except Negroes? Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.” ~ John F. Kennedy
“The great man is the one who does not lose his originally good child’s heart.” ~ Meng Tzu
“We believe that salvation is to be found in wholesome work in a beloved land. Work will provide our people with the bread of tomorrow, and moreover, with the honor of the tomorrow, the freedom of the tomorrow.” ~ Theodor Herzl
“When the Germans surrendered with their arms raised high, holding a white flag, they weren’t at all how i imagined them: hard, cruel, tall and monstrous with cigars chomped between their lips talking about how they wanted to shoot babies and old people. Instead they were boys like us, teenagers, tired, scared, dirty, and looking almost relieved that their was over, for now, that they can rest their bone-tired bodies in the POW camps.” ~ Mariko Nagai
“America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We are the richest people in the world and they are among the poorest. We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them help—because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.” ~ Martha Gellhorn
“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” ~ Golda Meir
“…altruism does not correspond to the accepted wisdom in Western ethics, in which moral actions are believed to arise from the dominance of reason over the baser passions. For both the heroes [those who risked their safety to save another in trouble] and the rescuers [those who saved Jews from Nazi concentration camps] I interviewed, the decision to risk their lives to help another person appeared spontaneous and simple.” ~ Kristen Renwick Monroe
“Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.” ~ Simon Wiesenthal
“We cannot change what happened anymore. The only thing we can do is to learn from the past and to realize what discrimination and persecution of innocent people means. I believe that it’s everyone’s responsibility to fight prejudice.” ~ Otto Frank
“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” ~ Agnes G. Bojaxhiu (“Mother Teresa”)
“I knew the people who worked for me. When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings.” ~ Oskar Schindler
“We must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might. Segregation is not only inconvenient—that isn’t what makes it wrong. Segregation is not only sociologically untenable—that isn’t what makes it wrong. Segregation is not only politically and economically unsound—that is not what makes it wrong. Ultimately, segregation is morally wrong and sinful. To use the words of a great Jewish philosopher that died a few days ago, Martin Buber, “It is wrong because it substitutes an “I-It” relationship for the “I-Thou” relationship and relegates persons to the status of things.”
“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” ~ Luke 12:48
“Like a green shoot forcing its way up between the concrete slabs of a city sidewalk, evidence of human caring and helping defies this culture’s ambivalence about – if not outright discouragement of – such activity.” ~ Alfie Kohn
“Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, leaders of the anti-slavery movement, and medical missionaries shared at least one common trait: they were morally inclusive. Their moral concern encircled diverse people. One rescuer even faked a pregnancy on behalf of a pregnant hidden Jew – thus including the soon-to-be-born child within the circle of her own children’s identities (Fogelman, 1994).” ~ David G. Meyers and Jean M. Twenge
“You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.” ~ Albert Camus
“There were signs on every street corner saying, “This town is Jew-free. Whoever will help Jew descendants is dead.” So I knew what could happen. But that doesn’t matter; they were human beings. I knew I didn’t have to help [save Jews from the Nazi concentration camps]; I took the responsibility. And I believed so strongly that God put me there, so everything will be fine.” ~ Irene, rescuer of Jews during WW II
“…identity emanates at least in part from genetic factors and early childhood experiences, and develops at such an early age that its basic construction cannot be said to result from an individual’s free choice or will. We may modify our identities later in significant ways, but only at great psychological effort.” ~ Kristen Renwick Monroe
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” ~ Aesop
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ~ Elie Wiesel
“We have no one to go to for help. Not even a church. Anything goes, now that our President Roosevelt signed the order to get rid of us. How can he do this to his own citizens? No lawyer has the courage to defend us. Caucasian friends stay away for fear of being labeled ‘Jap lovers.’ There’s not a more lonely feeling than to be banished by my own country. There’s no place to go.” ~ Kiyo Sato
“Freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day.” ~ Simon Wiesenthal
“But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.” ~ Miep Gies
“Caring is the heart of ethics, and ethical decision-making. It is scarcely possible to be truly ethical and yet unconcerned with the welfare of others. That is because ethics is ultimately about good relations with other people.” ~ Michael S. Josephson
“We need to take our passion and effect real change at the local, state, and federal levels, to help elect progressive leaders, and to stem the tide of division, fear and scapegoating.” ~ George Takei
“This is why I say that the individual’s most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency.” ~ Paul Rusesabagina
“I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!” ~ Anne Frank
“Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.” ~ Albert Einstein
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.” ~ Viktor Frankl
“The Golden Rule enjoins us to take the moral initiative in how we treat others. It urges us to take the high ground no matter what.” ~ Tom Morris
“Unfortunately, I have realized that we cannot completely erase all the evil from the world, but we can change the way we deal with it, we can rise above it and stay strong and true to ourselves.” ~ Zlata Filipovic
“Facts are almost irrelevant to most people. We make decisions based on emotion and then justify them later with whatever facts we can scrounge up in our defense.” ~ Paul Rusesabagina
“I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.” ~ Oskar Schindler
“Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.” ~ Jack Werber
“The world is not divided into altruists and nonaltruists; the potential for altruism exists in all people.” ~ Kristen Renwick Monroe
You are reading quotes about magnanimity on Values of the Wise.com
“There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.” ~ Elie Wiesel
“There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe.” ~ Paul Rusesabagina
“We declare that human rights are for all of us, all the time: whoever we are and wherever we are from; no matter our class, our opinions, our sexual orientation.” ~ Ban Ki-moon
“Spielberg’s film portrays Oskar [my husband] as a hero of this century. That is not true. Neither he nor I were heroes. We were just what we were able to be. In war, we are all souls without a destiny.” ~ Emilie Schindler
“To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee.” ~ William H. Walton
“You help people because you are human and you see that there is a need. There are things in this life you have to do, and you do it.” ~ Bert, rescuer of Jews during WWII
“When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.”
“It would be judicious to act with magnanimity towards a prostrate foe.” ~ Zachary Taylor
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out–because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out–because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.” ~ Martin Niemöller
“Our differences in beliefs do not truly separate us, or elevate us over others. Rather, they highlight the rich tapestry that is humanity.” ~ George Takei
“The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo—maybe 1,000 Jews—was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state-sponsored program, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put into concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people—in American, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?” ~ Elie Wiesel
“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.” ~ Yasutani Roshi
“Our hopes for a more just, safe, and peaceful world can only be achieved when there is universal respect for the inherent dignity and equal rights of all members of the human family.” ~ Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ~ Elie Wiesel
“The other thing you have to understand was that the message crept into our national consciousness very slowly. It did not happen all at once. We did not wake up one morning to hear it pouring out of the radio at full strength. It started with a sneering comment, the casual use of the term “cockroach,” the almost humorous suggestion that Tutsis should be airmailed back to Ethiopia. Stripping the humanity from an entire group of people takes time. It is an attitude that requires cultivation, a series of small steps, daily tending.” ~ Paul Rusesabagina
“You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.” ~ Golda Meir
“Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.”
“Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” ~ Yehuda Bauer
“As the sun makes the ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.” ~ Albert Schweitzer
“These people are the children of slavery. If the race that we belong to owes anything to any human being, or to any power in the universe, they owe it to these black men.”
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. … Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” ~ Nelson Mandela
“Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.” ~ Elie Wiesel
“There were people who had done so much more [compared to my actions while saving Jews from the Nazis]. What I did, that was just very little. I hadn’t really done much, and so I don’t feel … [pauses]. What I did was such a normal thing that I don’t want to be put on a pedestal. It’s not that kind of thing.” ~ Leonie, last name withheld
“What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven’t even happened yet.” ~ Anne Frank
“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.” ~ Simon Wiesenthal
“My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.” ~ Elie Wiesel
I hope you are enjoying quotations about magnanimity and altruism
“I am not a hero. I just did what any decent person would have done.” ~ Miep Gies
“Nations cannot be saved and must not be saved as an afterthought or from considerations of cost-benefit. Unless the moral fire burns within us, the lessons of the Holocaust will never be learned.” ~ Reuven Rivlin
“Despite everything, I believe people are really good at heart.” ~ Anne Frank
“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.” ~ Nelson Mandela
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
“I know of no anti-slavery treatise based on the universal principle of human rights before the 17th-century when the Quakers protested the importation of slaves from Africa.”
Keywords: magnanimity, altruism, love, compassion, justice, peace, nobility, character, virtue, honor, courage
