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While most of us are content to marvel at the occasional beneficence of man, Oliner has spent his life systematically dissecting the hero. When he was twelve years old, the Nazis came for his family. They were living in a Jewish ghetto in Bobowa, Poland. His own mother had died of tuberculosis five years prior. But his stepmother was there, holding his baby sister, when the Germans pulled up their trucks and starting yelling for the Jews to get out. She met his little-boy eyes. And with the hollow clarity of a woman facing her own execution, she told him to run. “Run away so that you will stay alive!” She gave him a push.

Samuel Oliner ran. He went up to a rooftop and lay there, flat and still in his pajamas, for almost an entire day and night. He saw atrocious scenes no child should see—a child thrown from a window and another stabbed with a bayonet, he says. After the German voices faded, he crept into a house and scavenged for clothing. Then he slipped out of the ghetto and began wandering the streets. From a farmer, he learned that all the Jews in the ghetto had been shot and killed, their bodies shoved into a mass grave and covered with dirt.

And then he was saved. Fate scooped Oliner up and held him close, just as inexplicably as it had abandoned him. He walked to a nearby village and knocked on the door of a peasant woman. He did not know her well, but he knew she had gone to school with his father years ago. Balwina Piecuch fed him, gave him a new name, and taught him the Lord’s Prayer and the Polish catechism. Then she arranged for him to work on a farm several miles away and sent her son to check up on him routinely.

Oliner has lived a long life because of this woman. He eventually came to the United States, fought in Korea, and attended college on the GI Bill. He became a professor at Humboldt State University in California. “I saw and understood the tragedy of evil,” Oliner told me. But heroism…heroism was harder. He has devoted his life to unraveling the mystery this peasant woman presented. Why do some people risk their lives to save strangers while other people just watch?

What Oliner found was subtle. “There is no single explanation for why people act heroically. It’s not absolutely genetic or personality or cultural.” But first, consider what did not matter. Religious conviction didn’t seem to make a difference. In the Oliners’ study, about 90 percent of both rescuers and nonrescuers said they had been affiliated with a religious institution while growing up. (Most were Catholic.) More to the point, both groups reported similar levels of religious intensity among themselves and their parents.

Many individual heroes would disagree. Walter Bailey, the busboy who saved hundreds in the fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, believes his faith filled him with a sense of calm. “I generally feel that a person who knows where they’re going to go when they die is less afraid of death.” Roger Olian, the man who jumped into the Potomac River after the Flight 90 crash, on the other hand, does not have strong religious convictions. His values overlap with religious ideology, but he got them somewhere else, he says—from his family, the military, and any number of other influences.

Politics also do not predict behavior, the Oliner study found. Rescuers and nonrescuers alike were simply not all that concerned with politics. Rescuers were, however, more likely to support democratic, pluralistic ideologies in general.

Despite what so many heroes say, their acts were not simply products of chance, the study concluded. The rescuers were not just in the right place at the right time. People who knew more about what was happening to Jews were not more likely to help. Nor were people who faced less severe risks by helping. Rescuers were not wealthier than nonrescuers, and they hadn’t known more Jews while they were growing up.

But there were important differences. Rescuers tended to have had healthier and closer relationships with their parents. They were