In 1942, Balwina Piecuch, a non-Jewish Polish woman, sheltered 12-yearold Shmulek Oliner from the Nazis, saving the Jewish boy’s life after the Nazis had killed his entire family. Shmulek later emigrated to the United States and is now Samuel Oliner, sociologist and director of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University. Oliner has dedicated his life to understanding the roots of altruistic acts like Balwina’s—“to discover what leads to caring and compassion, to name what gives an individual a sense of social responsibility, and what it means to put the welfare of others alongside one’s own,” he writes in Do Unto Others, his latest book.