1 Priests and the Jewish People at the Time of the Holocaust Reflections in Light of the Newest Research Heroism Amid Terror The Marzheuser Lecture, Cincinnati, OH, November 24, 2014 Fr. Paweł Rytel-Andrianik University of Oxford/PUSC (www.pusc.it) email: x.rytel@gmail.com; tweeter: @xrytel The whole lecture can be watched on St. James Project Platform: http://stjamesproject.org/2014/11/25/2014-marzheuser-lecture-video/ One may ask: Has not enough been written about the Holocaust? When you type the word “Holocaust” into amazon.com you see that there are 30,550 hits for book results, movies, and other resources on the subject. Therefore, people sometimes assume that we know everything or almost everything about the Holocaust. It is argued in this lecture that such an assumption is mistaken, and there are many areas of Holocaust studies that should be developed for a holistic and proper education. To this end, an image may be helpful. It is widely known that Swiss cheese has holes (or gaps) which are known as “eyes.” If there are many holes – or “eyes,” it means that it is a good cheese. Swiss cheese without these “eyes” is called “blind.” In scholarship, it is precisely the other way around. If there is a topic of research with these so called “eyes,” or gaps in our knowledge, people who follow this scholarship are “blind,” and they can make wrong assumptions. This Lecture The Marzheuser Lecture has the goal to fill one of the gaps in the Holocaust studies, which is the relationship between Priests and the Jewish People at the time of the Holocaust. In order to proceed in a clear way, the lecture is divided in three parts, namely: 1) Priests and the Jewish People; 2) Bishops and the Jewish People; 3) Pope Pius XII and the Jewish People. This research is based on about 17,000 interviews; 10,000 pages of documents; extensive research in archives, libraries, and museums, especially in the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, which is a center for Holocaust studies. About 70 percent of the collected material was never published in English. 1 1 The material is collected in the Righteous for the World Foundation Archive (RFWA) in Poland.