A family connection to the Holocaust and a desire to meet people willing to risk their lives to save others has resulted in a book by Mark Klempner '97, "The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage."

The book, recently published by Pilgrim Press, began as a research project during Klempner's senior year as an English major at Cornell in 1996-97.

Klempner will talk about the rescuers he met and play audio excerpts of their first-person accounts of the Dutch resistance during World War II in a presentation sponsored by Cornell Hillel on April 27 at 7 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall's Kaufmann Auditorium.

"I didn't want to write a scholarly book about the rescuers," Klempner said by telephone from his home in Costa Rica. "I wanted it to be more personal -- sharing their stories and what it meant to me to hear them."

The subject has held a deep fascination for Klempner; his father had fled Poland in 1939, one week before the Nazis invaded.

With a grant from Cornell's Institute for European Studies and assistance from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and the Israeli embassy in The Hague, Klempner spent six weeks in Amsterdam during his senior year compiling more than 100 hours of interviews with 25 Dutch rescuers. He also scanned their photo albums and did archival research.

"When I came back from Holland, I was so blown away by meeting these people that I knew I had to write a book about them," he said.

He even turned down a Fulbright scholarship for a folklore project in Newfoundland so he could focus on the Dutch rescuers. After Cornell he was accepted into a folklore master's degree program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 2000, Klempner's "writing mentor" at Cornell, James McConkey, professor emeritus of English, invited him to live in his Trumansburg farmhouse while he wrote the book abut wartime Holland. He stayed with the McConkeys until his marriage to Cara Siano in June 2001. "By that time I had a good draft of the book, and my wife and I decided to move to Costa Rica," Klempner said

The book consists of 10 rescuers' stories, compiled after a decade of additional interviews conducted in person and by phone, mail and e-mail. One of the most heart wrenching, Klempner said, is about Vos, a Jewish rescuer skilled at falsifying documents. At one point, "he cut off contact with the resistance because the Nazis had him at the top of their most-wanted list," he said. Vos was eventually convinced to resume helping but was soon captured.

"The Gestapo tortured him, and he wouldn't tell them what they wanted," Klempner said. "They held a Jewish baby in front of him and said, 'If you don't tell us, you're not going to like what we do to this baby.' They broke one of the baby's legs. Vos kind of collapsed and had a nervous breakdown. He lost his ability to withhold information."

After the war, Vos was held as a war criminal for collaborating with the Nazis. When he appeared at his trial, at which he was acquitted, he had been so badly beaten he could barely walk. During the Holocaust, Vos recalled, all Jewish people were treated in this way. "Now I get a chance to see how they were treated. This is the price I had to pay."