It was with reluctance that I went to New York last year for the first conference of people who, as children, survived the Holocaust in hiding. These were the children of miracles. They survived when the overwhelming majority of European Jews were killed by Nazi Germany, at times aided by collaborationist governments that handed over their Jewish populations for extermination. Their survival was a manifestation of the human capacity for goodness even in the darkest of times.

Perhaps my reluctance to attend this conference stemmed from an unwillingness to revisit the dark times of my own wartime experience. All my professional life I have studied, as a psychologist, what leads individuals and groups to be caring and helpful, or to turn against and harm others. Until recently, however, I paid little attention to the origins in my own childhood of this lifelong concern with the roots of cruelty and kindness, and of my desire to do what little I can to help create a more caring world.

I was a young Jewish child in Hungary at the time of the Holocaust. When the Nazis began to deport Jews from Budapest, a wonderful Christian woman hid me and my sister with a Christian family. She returned us to our mother after a while, when we received “letters of protection,” and we survived in a “protected house” until Soviet troops liberated the city.