Do not stand idly by while your neighbor's blood is shed, the Bible tells us: Lo ta'amod al dam re'akha. The great revelation of the 20th century might have been humankind's remarkable capacity to disregard this basic moral tenet. Yet "even in situations of seemingly total conformity, there are always some people who refuse to go along," Eyal Press writes in "Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times." What drives the unwilling executioners—those rare creatures brave enough to stand up for what is right in the face of real threat—is the question Mr. Press asks in this valentine to the human spirit.
Yet, as Mr. Press's book demonstrates, the actions of those we've been taught to think of as extraordinary might not be as revolutionary as we think. The book investigates the cases of four people who chose not to be swept up in a common current of evil: A Swiss policeman who showed mercy to Jewish refugees, a Serb who spared the lives of Croats, an Israeli soldier who refuses to commit violence against Palestinians, and a financial adviser who reports her company for selling fraudulent investments. This narrow focus means that the book feels somewhat slight; it is an evocative but ultimately inconclusive treatment of this little-understood subject.
Mr. Press is initially astonished that his subjects are not the rebellious intellectuals he imagined them to be but rather quiet people leading ordinary lives. Although he calls them "nonconformists," he concludes that in important ways they epitomize tradition: Firm believers in the values that undergird a system they hold dear, whether it be a society or a code of professional ethics, they abhor the notion of crime committed in its name. In this way, he writes, they represent "the flip side of the banality of evil"—people who, through choices large or small, open up new possibilities for good.
By Eyal Press
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 196 pages, $24)
They are accidental heroes: "Unexceptional people who took great risks not because they felt drawn to lofty causes but because they were in a position to help someone and did." In 1938, the Swiss police chief Paul Grüninger, defying orders to turn back Jewish refugees, falsified documents that ultimately allowed thousands to cross the border from Austria. He explained his actions by saying that anyone who came into direct contact with these people would have done the same thing: He simply could not resist their face-to-face pleas.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the Nazi system was set up precisely to avoid such proximity. The top-level officials responsible for making policy never had to come into contact with the people who suffered, while the subordinates who had to implement their orders could deflect responsibility, rightly, to their superiors. Mr. Press points out that "proximity can be overcome by indoctrination," but he also notes that Adolf Eichmann was reluctant to shoot Jews at close range.
Psychologists have shown that a bystander is more likely to intervene in a situation if he or she believes others are unaware of it or are not in a position to respond. Grüninger knew that he was the last hope for these refugees. Similarly, as Mr. Press recounts, a Serbian man named Alexander Jevtić saved the lives of Croats during a 1991 massacre in the city of Vukovar by sneaking them into a group of Serbs to be spared. Like Grüninger, Mr. Jevtić describes his choice as a "reflex, an impulsive reaction," guided by his gut rather than ideas about morality and resistance. Indeed, Mr. Press is amusingly chagrined to discover that Mr. Jevtić does not live up to the author's romantic notions of a resister: He's a gruff, burly, not particularly ambitious guy who mostly enjoys watching sports on his giant flat-screen TV. He cares little for what other people think of him and it is precisely this that made him unafraid to buck the system when his conscience called for it.
When the situation shifts to Israel, where Mr. Press's family is originally from (he emigrated to the U.S. as a young child), the ground gets murkier. Here the exemplary man is Avner Wishnitzer, a former soldier in the most elite unit of the Israeli Defense Force who refuses to participate in West Bank actions against Palestinian civilians. The Hebrew expression yafeh nefesh, "beautiful soul," (it is where the title of the book comes from) has a connotation of naïveté, like the English "bleeding heart." Mr. Press finds justification for Mr. Wishnitzer's decision in an Israeli court's ruling that soldiers are required to disobey orders that are illegal—meaning, it seems, contrary to Jewish law.
The problem, of course, is in determining whose interpretation of the law is legitimate. Mr. Press is impatient with a settler who tells him that removing Jews from the settlements is "ethnic cleansing," but he recognizes that the judgment is necessarily subjective. Yet he does not examine the ugly implications of his inclusion of Israel as an evil power to be resisted on a par with Nazi Germany. A similar question of equivalency occurs where Mr. Press justifiably praises the bravery of a Guantánamo Bay whistleblower but fails to acknowledge the potential complexities of the situation.
Those who refuse to stand idly by often suffer greatly for their trouble. Grüninger was fined and denied his retirement benefits; his heroism was recognized only posthumously. Financial adviser Leyla Wydler, the heroine of Mr. Press's final chapter, was fired from her job for daring to raise questions about the stability of suspiciously high-yield certificates of deposit that her employer, the Stanford Group Co., was pushing her to sell (Stanford's investments were later revealed to be a Ponzi scheme). Some of these figures wonder if their individual actions have much power to reverse injustice. Mr. Press argues that "acts of conscience have a way of reverberating." Of course, they can do so only if people know about them; that is the service of this humane and absorbing book.
Ms. Franklin is a senior editor at the New Republic and the author of "A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction" (Oxford).