who will rescue us?: the story of the jewish children who fled to france and america during the holocaust

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.

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.