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Dec

8 2025

JBC with author Debórah Dwork | Saints and Liars

6:30PM - 8:00PM  

Beacon Hebrew Alliance (Conservative) 331 Verplanck Avenue
Beacon, NY

Join Us for a Powerful Conversation on Hope and Humanity - A Historian's Insight: Courage, Refuge, & Resistance in the Holocaust
with acclaimed author
Debórah Dwork

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8th | 6:30 PM
at Beacon Hebrew Alliance
331 Verplanck Avenue | Beacon

Books will be available for purchase at the event.

Debórah Dwork, a leading Holocaust historian and Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the acclaimed author of numerous works including Flight from the Reich, Holocaust, and Auschwitz.

Saints and Liars tells the gripping story of American aid workers - Quakers, Unitarians, and Jews - who risked their lives across five cities to rescue refugees from Nazi persecution during World War II.

Collaboration with:
Jewish Federation of Dutchess County, Beacon Hebrew Alliance, and the Jewish Book Council

Saints and Liars: The Sto­ry of Amer­i­cans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis
Debórah Dwork
Review By Lin­da F. Burghardt – January 6, 2025
Three dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple, three sets of moti­va­tions, and three meth­ods of oper­a­tion, but one goal: to save as many peo­ple dis­placed by World War II as possible.
 
That is the premise of Saints and Liars, which tells the sto­ry of sev­er­al Amer­i­can aid work­ers who per­formed hero­ic deeds to pro­tect refugee com­mu­ni­ties in for­eign coun­tries and bring peo­ple to safety.
 
This slim yet emo­tion­al book focus­es on such efforts in five cities: Mar­seille, Lis­bon, Prague, Vil­na, and Shang­hai. Draw­ing on numer­ous archival sources, award-win­ning author Deb­o­rah Dwork lays out the moral ques­tions the aid work­ers encoun­tered, the chang­ing poli­cies they had to over­come, and the ever-present dan­ger they faced.
 
Still, despite the enor­mous risks and high emo­tion­al costs, the five indi­vid­u­als and cou­ples whose sto­ries dri­ve the nar­ra­tive found ways to save the tar­get­ed refugees from per­se­cu­tion. These refugees were most­ly Jews, but some were non-Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­als, left­ists, and oth­er oppo­nents of the Third Reich.
 
All deployed by US orga­ni­za­tions, the aid work­ers strug­gled with defin­ing how they want­ed to work, and whom they would strive to res­cue. Were they out to help polit­i­cal, intel­lec­tu­al, and artis­tic lead­ers, or did they want to offer human­i­tar­i­an aid even­ly, with­out regard to the sta­tus of the peo­ple being tar­get­ed? Were they will­ing to engage in ille­gal trans­ac­tions? What was the lev­el of dan­ger they were will­ing to face?
 
Three Amer­i­can groups sent aid work­ers over­seas to pro­vide the refugees with relief. They were the Quak­ers, who went to Europe under the aus­pices of the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice; those who got involved through the Uni­tar­i­an Ser­vice Com­mit­tee; and Jew­ish work­ers recruit­ed through the Jew­ish Joint Dis­tri­b­u­tion Com­mit­tee, com­mon­ly known as the Joint. Their grip­ping sto­ries are revealed through research into their let­ters, diaries, and gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, which offer a great deal of detail and many fresh insights.
 
Dwork is a renowned his­to­ri­an and a pro­lif­ic chron­i­cler and inter­preter of the Holo­caust, and this book demon­strates why her rep­u­ta­tion is so stel­lar. In this book, she homes in on two areas that have been under­stud­ied, and some­times entire­ly over­looked, in oth­er vol­umes about the top­ic: luck and dri­ve. Dwork con­tests that under­stand­ing how these two fac­tors oper­at­ed dur­ing the war can help us cre­ate bet­ter inter­ven­tions in today’s world.
 
She also argues that the relief work­ers had a vari­ety of moti­va­tions: some were look­ing for adven­ture, while oth­ers had per­son­al con­nec­tions to peo­ple in trou­ble and want­ed to find them and offer help. Oth­ers still were emo­tion­al­ly involved in the over­all res­cue effort and the war itself. All the aid work­ers were effec­tive in their own way and for their indi­vid­ual rea­sons, though cer­tain rival­ries did devel­op between the Uni­tar­i­ans and the Quak­ers, in par­tic­u­lar. The expla­na­tion of their dif­fer­ing points of view adds a sig­nif­i­cant lev­el of inter­est to the sto­ry. We are dri­ven to eval­u­ate whether the human­i­tar­i­an mis­sion was more valu­able than the polit­i­cal one, or vice versa.
 
In either case, Saints and Liars will appeal to read­ers who believe in the impor­tance of under­stand­ing the Holo­caust and oth­er geno­ci­dal crimes, and to those who appre­ci­ate the val­ue of human­i­tar­i­an aid.
 
Lin­da F. Burghardt is a New York-based jour­nal­ist and author who has con­tributed com­men­tary, break­ing news, and fea­tures to major news­pa­pers across the U.S., in addi­tion to hav­ing three non-fic­tion books pub­lished. She writes fre­quent­ly on Jew­ish top­ics and is now serv­ing as Schol­ar-in-Res­i­dence at the Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al & Tol­er­ance Cen­ter of Nas­sau County.