Poll: 31% of Americans would refuse to hide Jews from Nazis

Survey shows men, religious people, homosexuals more inclined to believe they would have risked their lives had they lived during WWII

By ToI Staff 27 September 2015, 4:09 pm 5 Edit

This handout photo provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shows Aleksander Belev, center, facing camera, the Bulgarian Commissioner for Jewish Questions, overseeing the deportation of Macedonian Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Skopje, Yugoslavia, in March 1943. (AP/Central Zionist Archives via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Almost a third of American adults said they would not have hidden Jews in their homes had they lived during the Holocaust, a recent poll found.

The survey of 1,000 US citizens, with a margin of ±3 percent, was conducted by Barna Research as part of a promotion for the digital release of “Return to the Hiding Place,” a film on Christians who saved Jews during WWII.

“Think back to World War II when Jews in Europe were forced into concentration camps and many were killed by the Nazis,” the survey question said, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “If you were living in this time period, would you have risked the possible imprisonment and death of yourself and your family to hide Jews?”

Some 61% said they would, and 31% said they would not. According to a breakdown of the results, men, married people, homosexuals, religious people, and southerners were more likely to say yes than women, singles, heterosexuals, people of no religion, and residents of the northeast.

The survey did not isolate Jewish respondents from non-Jewish respondents due to the sample size.

Film director Peter Spencer linked the survey to current atrocities in Syria and Iraq carried out by the Islamic State.

“Our film raises uncomfortable questions such as, ‘If you are not saving your brothers now when you are not under threat, would you save them when your life was in danger?'” he said. “ISIS is intent on liquidating Christians and Jews just as Hitler was intent on liquidating the Jewish people. We often think of saving strangers as hypothetical, but we are at a moment in history where that call to action is not only literal, it is vital.”