Saints and Liars

November 18, 2024
Historian Dwork (Flight from the Reich) offers a fine-grained chronicle of American relief agencies that assisted refugees in Europe ahead of WWII. Delving into relief workers’ diaries and letters, Dwork showcases the “messiness” of the aid operations—both the “heated personal antipathies and the constant quarreling” that Dwork discovers were endemic to these organizations, and the fact that relief workers succeeded mainly through subterfuge and lawbreaking. Among those she profiles are Martha and Waitstill Sharp, a couple assigned by the Unitarian Service Committee to Prague who engaged in illegal currency exchanges to underwrite the costs of clandestinely moving undocumented refugees, and Laura Margolis, a representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Shanghai who “bent rules and regulations” to obtain supplies for newly arrived Jewish refugees. Dwork’s narrative focuses on how relief workers had to make complex ethical decisions without any guidance other than their own strong inner moral compasses, which may explain why “fractious personalities” were drawn to this work (“Perhaps placid people stayed home,” Dwork speculates). These decisions could sometimes hinge on bias, in Dwork’s assessment; for example, Marjorie McClelland, a Marseille-based social worker who selected refugee children for transport abroad, chose children based on how sympathetic (clean, religiously observant, hardworking) she found their mother. The result is a gripping study of individuals operating in terrible extremis.

Starred review from December 1, 2024

Award-winning Dwork (director of CUNY Ctr. for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity; Holocaust: A History) focuses on the lives of American citizens who travelled all over the world to assist victims of Nazi Germany. This book centers on five committed individuals and couples who risked their own lives to help save others from an unimaginable fate. Spanning the globe, with accounts from Prague, Vilna, Shanghai, Marseille, and Lisbon, these are gripping narratives of relief workers representing Quakerism, Unitarianism, and Judaism, who navigated intricacies, changing policies, and danger to rescue Jewish people from the grip of the Nazis. The stories reflect how luck, immediate decisions, and incredible timing contributed to saving as many people as they did. For example, Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania, against orders, issued transit visas to Japan and thus saved the lives of thousands. VERDICT A beautifully written and gripping narrative with a focus on detail and insight into the people involved.--Jacqueline Parascandola

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2024
A study of American aid workers and their efforts to "move targeted people beyond German reach" in World War II. Dwork, a prolific historian of the Holocaust, turns her attention here to rescue operations and their principals in the desperate effort to secure safe passage for people endangered by the Third Reich--Jews, to be sure, but also leftists, intellectuals, and other opponents of the regime. As Dwork notes, these operatives had numerous motives driving their work: Some sought adventure; several went beyond their brief to save people for reasons of emotional and personal connection, and not necessarily by the book. The theater of humanitarian operations shifted before and during the war: When the Nazis began their occupation of Sudetenland, Jews fled en masse to the Baltic republics; when the Soviets and Germans began to fight there, Shanghai became an important destination; when the U.S. entered the war against Japan, Lisbon became what was called "Europe's sole window to the west." Personalities and ideologies enter the picture in Dwork's account; it's surprising to read of the pitched rivalries among Unitarians and Quakers, who had somewhat different missions: "The Unitarians pursued a militantly prodemocratic political program, proved willing to engage in illegal transactions, and did not blink at covert operations. The Quakers, by contrast, pursued a militantly humanitarian project, embraced pacifist neutrality, and were punctiliously law-abiding." Whatever the differences, both camps enjoyed successes and failures, as did Jewish relief organizations, and all were central in helping refugees negotiate "the obstacle course of affidavits, entry visas, exit visas, transit visas, train tickets, and ship tickets" and offering psychological as well as material support. It's difficult to draw practical lessons for modern humanitarian efforts from Dwork's narrative, save that for the most part the principal players never lost sight of their missions even as they faced increasingly difficult odds in saving even a fraction of the imperiled. A contribution to the literature of humanitarian aid as well as the Holocaust.

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