Saints & Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis

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. (Jan.)