ABSTRACT
The very notion of “wellbeing during the Holocaust” is an oxymoron. How can an individual who risks his life and endangers his family—who lives in a chronic state of terror; sacrifices food, shelter, safety, medicine, clothing, money, relationships, physical health, and social status; and is perhaps even subjected to physical torture—experience wellbeing of any kind? This chapter examines a paradoxical theory of wellbeing among Holocaust heroes. Expanding upon the altruism paradox, Holocaust rescue presents an example of paradoxical heroism, in which benefits to the rescuer are hypothesized to have outweighed the everyday life-threatening costs of helping and to have propelled the rescuer to sustain helping over time. Rescuers, compelled to act in concert with their moral identities, empowered themselves to exercise their agency in defiance of genocide on behalf of “Others” in the community who were dependent upon them for survival, prioritizing these Others’ basic survival needs, and, and as result, experienced, paradoxically, self-transcendence and well-being.
