During World War II, US-based agencies – the Unitarian Service Committee, the American Friends Service Committee, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee – tried to provide relief, rescue, resettlement, and refugee aid to anti-fascists, Jews, and other individuals and groups targeted by the Nazis.
Operatives for these organizations, Deborah Dwork (director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, and author of Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, inter alia) reminds us, were heroes, demonstrating “improbable courage and fortitude” and saving untold numbers of lives. In her book Saints and Liars, she presents micro-histories of their activities in Prague, Vilna, Shanghai, Marseilles, and Lisbon.
She emphasizes, in addition to shifting policies and practices, the often decisive impact of chance, timing, uncertainty, human sympathies and biases, staff rivalries, and “the now” of responsibility.
In Prague, we learn, a couple managed to obtain passports, but because Mr. Weller’s middle initial had been incorrectly recorded as Q, officials refused to allow him to go to England.
In Vilna, when Lithuanian authorities limited eligibility for citizenship to individuals who had resided in the city before October 1939, excluding 90% of the Jews who resided there and threatening them with deportation, Moses Beckelman, JDC field representative, persuaded the home office to provide more funds for emigration. His efforts, Dwork points out, enabled thousands of them to flee.
In Lisbon, Elisabeth and Robert Dexter taught clients to destroy correspondence with the USC office address, make telephone calls from a booth, and avoid settings in which they had to show their papers.
Agents on the ground often chose who left and who stayed. JDC officials, Dwork reveals, debated whether to give preference to those with relatives willing to fund them; individuals with valid visas; rabbis and yeshiva students who “were needed in America”; or labor union activists, whose lives were in danger under Soviet occupation. No wonder Beckelman, in an uncharacteristic understatement, described his task as “a headache and perhaps more.”
Quaker leaders of the AFSC acknowledged that Jewish children “were the most needy,” but they believed a “mixed group,” representing “all nationalities and races,” would elicit more public support in the United States.
Meanwhile, in the agency’s Marseille office, Marjorie McClelland, “acting in a terrific rush” to meet the departure of a ship, chose children “after only the most superficial considerations,” who had lost one or both parents, were physically attractive, personable yet obedient, and, if Jewish, not Orthodox. In some instances, she picked kids whose mothers she found sympathetic. McClelland did not weigh in on 23 Spanish children, who, she wrote, “were prettier on the whole” than the Jews, “but I think not so bright.” Above all, although she did not know that the Nazis had ordered genocide, McClelland defined her role as “the formidable Dame Américaine who had the life and death power of deciding whether [a child] could have a future in America or must stay where he was with no future whatever to look forward to.”
Staff's response to change in policy
DWORK DEMONSTRATES that USC, AFSC, and JDC staff also had to respond, often on the fly, to changes in policy by one or more of the Allied or Axis countries.
Vested with JDC authority in Shanghai, which had been occupied by the Japanese since 1937, Laura Margolis had to manage relief to an exodus of foreigners.
After initially allocating quota numbers to refugees, the US State Department, fearing that the Nazis would force Jewish refugees to become spies by threatening relatives who lived in countries occupied by Germany, had ordered consuls to deny visas to anyone in such circumstances. The same ban was applied to applicants with relatives in Italy or the Soviet Union.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, even the trickle dried up – and Margolis turned from emigration back to relief, amid critical shortages of food, medicine, and housing.
In May 1942, the US government forbade any communication with Americans in enemy countries, including Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Margolis soldiered on: If the JDC “is displeased, they can fire me.” Interned by the Japanese in February 1943, she was allowed to leave Shanghai in September. In a final act of defiance, Margolis wrote “facts and figures” about her rescue and relief operation on toilet paper, rolled it up, tucked it into her underpants, and passed inspection.
The day-to-day existence of USC, AFSC, and JDC staff, Dwork emphasizes, was lonely and emotionally draining, as well as dangerous. Female operatives often experienced condescension, misogyny, less pay than their male counterparts, and no pay if they worked with their husbands.
That said, the reward was in the work.
“Traveling to points around the globe,” Dwork writes, spurred by ethics and emotions, “they remained to rescue as many as possible when the victims’ peril turned lethal.” Their work “proved transformative” – for the individuals whom they helped escape unspeakable tyranny, for democracy, and for them as well.
The reviewer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin emeritus professor of American studies at Cornell University.
SAINTS AND LIARS:
THE STORY OF AMERICANS WHO SAVED REFUGEES FROM THE NAZISBy Deborah Dwork
W.W. Norton & Company
288 pages; $29.99