I’m a historian who specializes in the American response to the Holocaust. Growing up, I remember being confused—it seemed like the United States knew nothing about the Nazi persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews—or it knew everything!—but either way, the US didn’t do anything to help. And that didn’t make sense with what I knew about the United States, a country that never speaks with one voice on any issue. And as I dug in, I learned that this is a fascinating, infuriating, nuanced history full of very familiar-sounding struggles over whether and how the country will live up to the ideals we claim for ourselves.
I wrote...
Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
By
Rebecca Erbelding
What is my book about?
Rescue Board is about a United States government agency tasked with trying to rescue and provide relief for the still-surviving Jews of Europe in 1944-1945. Stick with me, I know your eyes glazed over when you read “government agency.” This is not a story of meetings and memos. The truly inspiring people who ran this agency snuck humanitarian aid into Europe, entered into ransom negotiations with the Nazis, opened a refugee camp in upstate New York and brought the only group of refugees outside of the immigration system to live there, recruited famous rescuer Raoul Wallenberg, leaked detailed information about Auschwitz-Birkenau to the American press (resulting in the first use of the word “genocide” in newspapers), bought speedboats and guns for resistance fighters, and sent 300,000 food packages into concentration camps. If you think the US should do more to help victims of genocide, this history might give us the blueprint and inspiration to replicate their efforts today.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941
By
David S. Wyman
Why this book?
Wyman’s later book, The Abandonment of the Jews got all the attention, but Paper Walls, about how immigration to the United States actually worked and how the US government alternately tried and refused to aid Jews desperately attempting to escape increasing Nazi persecution and violence, is my go-to recommendation. If this is your family’s story, or if you want to know why Jews couldn’t just leave, Wyman’s book will explain a lot.
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FDR and the Jews
By
Richard Breitman,
Allan J. Lichtman
Why this book?
Anytime I give a talk, someone asks, “Well, what was really going on with FDR? Why didn’t he do anything?” And the answer to that is always: it’s complicated. But Breitman and Lichtman do a great job explaining how FDR could be both beloved by the Jewish community in the 1930s and 1940s and blamed today for not welcoming Jewish refugees escaping Hitler. And the answer is partly our expectations. We want him to have been a humanitarian, but he was a politician who did some things when he could, but ultimately prioritized recovery from the Great Depression and victory in World War II. You’re going to leave the book more frustrated than when you started, but maybe that’s the answer? It was complicated.
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Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power
By
Andrew Nagorski
Why this book?
The 1930s were the golden age of newspaper reporting. Reporters were celebrities, and most American households subscribed to at least one of more than 2,000 daily newspapers. And the reporters covering Germany were the best of the best, from Edgar Ansel Mowrer, HV Kaltenborn, and William Shirer, to Dorothy Thompson and Sigrid Schultz. Nagorski, a former foreign correspondent himself, brings that expertise to this book, looking at what Germany was like in the 1930s and how American reporters tried to convey the chaos to the public at home. You will want to shout at the reporters—don’t they know what is about to happen!?—but you also won’t be able to stop turning the pages.
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The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between
By
Michael Dobbs
Why this book?
The Unwanted is perhaps the best all-around book explaining the crisis faced by Jewish refugees trying to escape to the United States. Dobbs merges the intimate histories of members of the Jewish community in the small German town of Kippenheim, the work of the US State Department officials in Germany and France, American refugee aid workers, and President Roosevelt. By utilizing both personal and official sources, Dobbs allows all the people he writes about to speak for themselves. It’s beautifully written and heartbreaking, and whatever you think about this history when you start the book, those thoughts will be more nuanced and complicated when you’re finished.
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Why?: Explaining the Holocaust
By
Peter Hayes
Why this book?
To be honest, Hayes’s book has just a chapter on American and world response to the Holocaust (which he calls “Onlookers”) but the book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand this subject. Hayes, a Holocaust studies professor emeritus at Northwestern University, basically took all his lectures to undergrads and put them into this book, explaining why and how the Holocaust happened. It’s an incredibly readable book reflecting the latest scholarship, answering all the most frequently asked questions, and giving you all the context you need to make sense of why the United States—the people and the government—responded the way they did.
