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Samuel P. Oliner was ten years old when his entire family was murdered by the Nazis in Poland. Thanks to the help of a Polish Christian woman, he found a place to hide through the war—and survive. His experience left him with a profound, lifelong sense of wonder and a question which was the origin of this book.In a time of extreme danger, what led this woman, and a few thousand like her, to risk her own life and the lives of her family to help those who were marked for death—even total strangers—while others stood passively by? To answer that complex and critically important question, Samuel and Pearl Oliner undertook the massive Altruistic Personality Project, which interviewed over 700 rescuers and nonrescuers living in Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy during the Nazi occupation. Drawing on the data from this study, "The Altruistic Personality" explores the experiences and motivations of those uncommon individuals who aided Jews without compensation of any kind—and with full knowledge of the fatal consequences that would befall them if their actions were discovered.
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.