Saints and Liars
Moses Beckelman, Joint Distribution Committee
Marjorie McClelland holds Antoinette Steuer, Joint Distribution Committee
Saints and Liars (W.W. Norton, 2025) is about Americans — Quakers, Unitarians, Jews — who traveled abroad to aid and, step by step, turned to rescuing people targeted by Nazi Germany and other racist states. Who were these intrepid souls who became saints and liars as they sought to save lives? And how did rescue efforts unfold on the ground?
Women figured prominently in these initiatives. Philanthropy and service have long been women's work. But this philanthropy and this service offered unimagined avenues for independent action. The women relished the independence, the freedom from social norms, their overseas assignments offered. And their experiences changed them. Their work was transformative: transformative for those they managed to help, and for them, too.
Zooming in on one city, one year, and one person or couple, each chapter offers a microhistory that plumbs the key role of previously hidden factors — the unpredictable: luck, timing, chance, fortuitous circumstances; and the irrational: human sympathies and antipathies, drives, and desires. Saints and Liars thus prompts us to imagine history as a time as full and rich as our own, and reframes the way we think about, analyze, and write about the past.
Selected by Library Journal as a Stellar Book for 2025. National Jewish Book Award in Nonfiction finalist.
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Jewish Refugees — M.K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Vilnius
Martha Sharp and Child Refugees — Brown University Library
In this remarkable book Debórah Dwork confirms her place as the most profound historian of the Holocaust at work today. Brilliantly weaving together original analysis and piercing insight, she offers a whole new way of conceptualizing the tragedy of the Shoah. It is a truly transformative addition to the existing body of scholarship.
When genocidal dictators blow up the world, extraordinary people rise to the occasion. Debórah Dwork's powerful Saints and Liars depicts the lives of courageous Americans, of various religious denominations, who worked against odds and at great risk rescuing Jewish refugees from the Nazis. An important and timely book.
Dear Tante Elisabeth
Dear Tante Elisabeth: An Extraordinary, Ordinary Christian during the Holocaust draws upon a cache of over 1,000 letters written by Jewish parents to their children and from the children to their parents. Sent through Elisabeth Luz, a middle-aged, middle-class Christian woman in Stäfa, Switzerland, these letters tell much about daily life, and elucidate the complexities of communication, denial, and silence during and after the Nazi years.
