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Who Will Rescue Us?

The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust

Laura Hobson Faure

$51.95

Hardback

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English
Yale University Press
13 June 2025
The first account of Jewish children's flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime

At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap.

For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors' testimonies as well as children's diaries, letters, drawings, songs, and poems, Who Will Rescue Us? re-creates their complex journeys, including how some of them eventually found safety in America.

Hobson Faure paints a moving portrait of these children and their escape, uncovering their agency in the flight from Nazism—and knits together the network of the many who aided them along the way.
By:  
Imprint:   Yale University Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 235mm,  Width: 156mm, 
ISBN:   9780300269963
ISBN 10:   030026996X
Pages:   432
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Laura Hobson Faure is professor of modern history and chair of Modern Jewish History at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne. She’s an expert on French-American Jewish history and the author of The “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France.

Reviews for Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust

“Ground-breaking.”—Bruce Thompson, Methodist Recorder “Meticulously researched and warmly empathetic, Who Will Rescue Us? goes straight to the reader’s heart – and stays there.”—Debórah Dwork, author of Saints and Liars “Moving, deeply researched and innovative. . . . Laura Hobson Faure meticulously traces the determined efforts of transnational networks and collectives of relief workers and aid organizations and, most poignantly, Jewish families and children themselves, as they struggled to escape the Holocaust.”—Atina Grossmann, author of After the Nazi Racial State “A compulsive read. Laura Hobson Faure has exploited an impressive array of sources to craft a richly detailed and engaging narrative of Holocaust rescue. By exploring Jewish children’s agency, she sets a high standard for future scholarship in this area.”—Daniel Lee, author of The SS Officer’s Armchair “Laura Hobson Faure has written a detailed history of child refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Who Will Rescue Us? is an engaging and very readable demonstration of the complexity of this important subject.”—Andrea Hammel, author of The Kindertransport: What Really Happened “Beautifully written and deeply moving, Who Will Rescue Us? challenges us to radically rethink what it means to rescue a child. Laura Hobson Faure invites us to set aside assumptions about what makes a ‘heroic’ act, and instead embrace the complex and messy humanity that lies at the heart of rescue endeavours.”—Rebecca Clifford, author of Survivors “I am impressed by the depth and thoroughness of the research in Who Will Rescue Us? and the dramatic force of the writing. This book is an important addition to a field that one might have thought was fully covered. It is especially innovative to have the French and U.S. dimensions of this story treated together.”—Robert O. Paxton, author of Vichy France and The Anatomy of Fascism ""A daring and path-breaking piece of research, which traces the complex networks of rescue and gives agency and a voice back to Jewish children in flight. A powerful challenge to the existing historiography which is also beautifully conceptualised and written.""—Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows


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