The subject of Christian attitudes towards Europe's Jews is an important one at all times, above all for the years 1933 to 1945 when the Nazi regime with its racist and anti-Jewish ideology and policies ruled first in Germany and then over virtually the whole of continental Europe. Some argue that it was the history and background of Christian anti-Jewishness and antisemitism (the two are different and should always be differentiated) which brought about the eventual Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry during the Second World War. This is a mistaken view since both, by themselves, would never have resulted in such a policy of the wholesale murder of European Jewry just like that. It took the emergence of the historical figure of Adolf Hitler and the special conditions and nature of his Nazi regime to put into effect what, admittedly, many thousands of non-Jews - and most of them could hardly be described as ‘Christian’ in either belief or practice - had been thinking and proposing for many years. Any analysis of the context of Nazi Germany's persecution and then extermination of Russian and European Jewry must first of all contend with the specific nature of the Nazi regime and its use of terror in various forms to control German apd European society before any wholesale condemnation of ‘Christian Europe’ is allowed to pass. But having said this, it is a fact nevertheless that the Nazi extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War took place in what was supposedly a ‘Christian’ environment. This raises, any number of questions about the political and religious beliefs of those ‘willing hands’ who actually put the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ into operation, and even about those others, the majority of Europe's citizens under Nazi occupation, who were aware of or who witnessed what was going on. In turn, these questions relate also to the vexed issue of the so-called ‘rescue’ of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust.

Nechama Tec's book is an attempt to deal with some of these issues by examining aspects of the Christian response in Nazi-occupied Poland to the Nazi campaign against the Jews.