Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany.

During a few days at the end of February and the beginning of March 1943, hundreds of gentile German women gathered in front of the Berlin building where their Jewish husbands were being held. Incredibly, their street protest saved the Jewish men from deportation to the East - to concentration camps and almost certain death.

The women were neither armed nor organized; their power came from the convictions of their hearts and the experience of their daily lives. In a society dedicated to racial separatism and hate, they were devoted partners in what the Nazis considered interracial marriages. Their character and personal histories impelled them to demonstrate for their husbands' release and against the Reich, but their strength and need were not the only reasons they succeeded. One curious, but important reason for the success of the protest was that the Nazis sentimentalized the role of women and the importance of the family. In this respect, the fascist regime depended on the appearance of popular support, and therefore was vulnerable to a collective and obviously passionate protest by German women.

Scarcely taking a step into a concentration camp, Nathan Stoltzfus still manages to chronicle the insidious evil that was Hitler's Germany. Stoltzfus brings great emotional and moral force to bear on the stories he tells as well as to his scrupulous delineation of twenty years of German political history. Without any romanticizing, he shows what the powerful bonds of committed marriage can do even in an unimaginably cruel world. With his clear and caring eye and hard work - Resistance of the Heart, a scholarly book, was at least ten years in the making - Stoltzfus draws lessons about the dynamics of politics and human behavior from this little-known episode of popular protest against the Nazis.

Popularity was essential to Hitler's success. "One cannot rule by force alone," he said. "Force is decisive, but it is equally important to have this psychological something which the animal trainer needs to be master of his beast." "The Nazi regime," Stoltzfus writes, "...translated its race ideology into genocide in interaction with the German people...the regime's ideology might never have developed into genocide had the German people not attained for the regime a social isolation of the Jews, the prerequisite for deportation and mass murder" (my italics). Knowing the degree to which the Nazis succeeded makes reading Stoltzfus's book an experience of increasingly informed apprehension, especially because of the view he gives of the ease with which hate was incited and encouraged. Germans spat on their Jewish neighbors, poured urine on them, and voluntarily informed against them. Step by incremental step, Stoltzfus presents both the growth and consolidation of a murderous and evil society as he outlines the parallel development of a few souls whose humanity grew stronger in opposition to the regime.

The Reich tried to control the configuration of families. In 1935 the Nuremberg laws forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. But by that time most of the women of the Rosenstrasse resistance were already part of Jewish families, and becoming attached to Jewish friends. Some of the women had even married when they did because they knew they would soon be forbidden to do so, though they could not know the horror that was coming.

Most Germans marched with the Reich and, as Stoltzfus says, "found no place to draw the line." But a few others formed loyalties and habits that led to resistance. Charlotte Israel's protectiveness and tender heart contributed to her choice of artistic, crippled Julius as her husband, and the cold bigotry of her family threw into relief the value of his warm and welcoming circle. Wally Grodka, visiting her parents so that she might bring home firewood she and her family badly needed, rejected the advice of her Nazi relatives to divorce her husband - an action that would condemn him to death - and left refusing the gift of fuel for which she had come. These women went from marrying against the majority's wishes to becoming their family's only breadwinner, sharing the hunger and cold thrust upon their Jewish husbands, and then experiencing the grief, terror, and loss of their closest connections. Not all behaved nobly; and the noble ones did not behave nobly all the time. Nevertheless, in the face of terrible danger to themselves, they took life-saving actions because, by then, such conduct seemed to them natural and inevitable. They did, as Charlotte Israel said, that which it was given to them to do. Ultimately that included the street demonstrations in which, though they were terrified, they were careless of risk.

The women of the Rosenstrasse resistance were not saints. They were good people, and they succeeded with the means and power that ordinary people can gain in extraordinary circumstances, if their hearts and minds are ready. This is not to say that everyone who tried to save lives during the time of the Holocaust could succeed. Many people of great courage and exemplary ethics, employing all the strength they could muster, died trying.

Madeline Marget is the author of Life's Blood (Simon and Schuster).