Rescue Board
The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Featured historian in the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust on PBS • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • In this remarkable work of historical reclamation, Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding pieces together years of research and newly uncovered archival materials to tell the dramatic story of America’s little-known efforts to save the Jews of Europe.
“An invaluable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.” —Andrew Nagorski, author of The Nazi Hunters and Hitlerland
“Brilliantly brings to life the gripping, little-known story of [a] transformative moment in American history and the crusading young government lawyers who made it happen.” —Lynne Olson, New York Times bestselling author of Last Hope Island
For more than a decade, a harsh Congressional immigration policy kept most Jewish refugees out of America, even as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In 1944, the United States finally acted. That year, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, and put a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle in charge.
Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, maneuvered food and medicine into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, laundered money, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and sliced red tape to allow Jewish refugees to escape to Palestine.
“A landmark achievement, Rescue Board is the first history of the War Refugee Board. Meticulously researched and poignantly narrated, Rescue Board analyzes policies and practices while never losing sight of the human beings involved: the officials who sought to help and the victims in desperate need. Top-notch history: original and riveting.” —Debórah Dwork, founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, and coauthor of Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Erbelding, an archivist, curator, and historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, sifted through almost 19,000 archival documents to tell the story of the War Refugee Board, created by F.D.R. in January 1944 to help save European Jews. She describes how Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. pushed for the WRB's creation after a long battle against the State Department's anti-refugee policies. Led by Treasury official John Pehle, the WRB placed officials in neutral countries, including Switzerland and Turkey. The board's activities included working to save Jewish Hungarians (who formed by far the largest remaining European Jewish community), paying for thousands of fake French identity cards, and supporting the Czech underground, thus contributing to the partisan liberation of camps in that country. Erbelding's book would benefit from a final summary of the WRB's strengths and weaknesses. Still, this first book-length history of the board marks an important contribution to the history of the Holocaust, particularly as it relates to America's belated but vital efforts to stop it.)
