From Booklist
Good, the son of two Holocaust survivors from Vilna, Lithuania, informs us that Karl Plagge, a German army officer, saved his mother and more than 250 other Jews. In September 1991, Good traveled to Vilna, looking for Plagge, who had been in charge of a military vehicle repair unit there from 1941 to 1944. Plagge had died in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1957. As the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis increased in intensity through the 1930s, Plagge experienced increasing guilt about what was happening; in early 1939, Plagge realized the Nazis were pushing the country into another world war. His primary method of resistance against the genocide was to give work permits to Jews, allowing them to save themselves and their families from the aktions that swept the Vilna ghettos. He kept up the guise that he needed these skilled Jewish workers, although many of them were unskilled. This is an exceptional story of one man's bravery and compassion in a world where six million Jews were murdered. George Cohen
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Book Description
"Perhaps in other places only a small amount of determination was lacking in order to prevent or decrease the atrocities. I never felt that this needed special courage. It required only the conviction and strength that anyone can draw from the depth of moral feelings that exists in all humans." --Major Karl Plagge, from a letter written in 1956 On April 11, 2005, in Jerusalem, Karl Plagge will be named a "Righteous Among the Nations" hero by the State of Israel. He joins Oskar Schindler and some three hundred eighty other similarly honored Germans who protected and saved Jews during the Holocaust. While all "Righteous Gentiles" share the stamp of conscience, Karl Plagge’s story is of a unique kind of courage--that of a German army officer who subverted the system of death to save the lives of some 250 Jews in Vilna, Lithuania. One of those he saved was Michael Good’s mother. Karl Plagge first joined, then left, the Nazi Party. In Vilna, whose teeming ghetto held tens of thousands of Jews facing extermination, he found himself in charge of a work camp where military vehicles were repaired. Time after time, he saved Jews from prison and SS death squads, pulling whole families from the ghetto by issuing them work permits as "indispensable" laborers essential to the war effort. In this remarkable journey of discovery, Michael Good fills the missing pages in Karl Plagge’s life. He also reminds us all of the many ways human beings can resist evil. "I guess he was just a decent man," Pearl Good said of the man who saved her life when he didn’t have to. "There are always some people who decide that the horror is not to be." Haunted by his mother’s stories of a mysterious, benevolent officer who commanded her slave labor camp, Michael Good resolved to find out all he could about the enigmatic "Major Plagge." For five years, he wrote hundreds of letters and scoured the Internet to recover, in one hard-earned bit of evidence after another, information about the man whose moral choices saved hundreds of lives. This unforgettable book is the first portrait of a modest man who simply refused to play by the rules. Interviewing camp survivors, opening German files that had been untouched for more than fifty years, and translating newly discovered letters by Plagge, Good weaves an amazing tale.
About the Author
Michael Good is a physician in Durham, Connecticut, where he lives with his wife Susan and two children. This is his first book.
The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Karl Plagge's story is of a unique kind of courage - that of a German army officer who subverted the system of death to save the lives of some 250 Jews in Vilna, Lithuania. One of those he saved was Michael Good's mother." "Haunted by his mother's stories of a mysterious officer who commanded her slave labor camp, Michael Good resolved to find out all he could about the enigmatic "Major Plagge." For five years, he wrote hundreds of letters and scoured the Internet to recover, in one hard-earned bit of evidence after another, information about the man whose moral choices saved hundreds of lives. This book is the first portrait of a modest man who simply refused to play by the rules." In this journey of discovery, Good fills the missing pages in Karl Plagge's story. Insisting to the end that he was never a hero, Plagge said he saved Jews - and others - because "I thought it was my duty."
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
An American doctor's quest for the unlikely Samaritan who saved his family during the Holocaust. "He was better than Schindler." So remarked debut author Good's mother on returning, in 1999, to the dilapidated site of a onetime Nazi motor-repair facility-an HKP, in the German acronym-outside of Vilnius, Lithuania. There, more than a thousand Jewish slave laborers and their families, having been removed from a ghetto that would soon be liquidated, spent the last years of WWII servicing military vehicles bound for the Eastern Front. Conditions in the HKP and its satellite shops were "relatively benign"; the prisoners, Good's grandfather recalled, "slept in beds and were able to wash [them]selves and to cook," and if rations were sometimes short, no one starved. This comparative good treatment was all thanks to the offices of a Major Karl Plagge, who courted severe punishment himself for interfering with the murderous policies of the S.S. With the Germans' westward retreat in 1944, Plagge disappeared. Working from the testimonials of survivors, Good first sought to locate military records but was stymied because access to such documents was restricted. Having recruited the help of German researchers, however, he was finally able to locate transcripts of Plagge's postwar denazification trial, in which Plagge related how he attempted to balance being a good and obedient soldier with being a quiet agent of resistance: "I took the decision," he said, "always to act against Nazi rules and to also give my subordinates the order to act in a very humane manner toward the civilian population"-including Jews. Armed with this evidence, Good petitioned Israel's Yad Vashem commission to grant Plagge thehonorary designation of "righteous among nations," indicating a gentile who had helped Jews at personal risk. Good's request was finally granted in 2002-but not without another trying period of argumentation and presentation of evidence to prove that Plagge truly deserved such recognition. A rewarding tale of redemption in the face of horror, of wide interest.
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