Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Geraldine Gudefin
Guest: Laura Hobson Faure
Episode: Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust
Date: September 12, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation between host Geraldine Gudefin and historian Laura Hobson Faure, whose new book, Who Will Rescue Us?, examines the overlooked stories of Jewish children who fled to France and, in an exceedingly rare case, to America during the Holocaust. Drawing on over a decade of research, Faure explores the transnational functioning of Jewish humanitarian networks, the complexity of rescue, and the child-centered experience of displacement and survival. Through archival work and oral testimonies, Faure reconstructs these children's paths, assesses the historical framing of “rescue,” and presents a nuanced and critical social history.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Book & Research Focus

• Long-Term Project: Faure explains that her book emerged from an 11-year research process, stemming from her previous studies on American and French Jewish communities and their postwar reconstruction.
  • "So thank you, Geraldine. And I have to say this book was not just two years of research. It's a book that I was working on since 2010-11." (02:14)
• Transnational Perspective: Faure's personal bicultural background—American-born, residing in France—influences her uniquely comparative and transnational approach.
• Origins in Archival Curiosity: An offhand archival question about the fate of "Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants" (OSE) children who went to the U.S. spurred her inquiry into underexplored evacuation networks.

2. The Double Displacement: Serial Child Exile

• Two Evacuation Waves: The book reconstructs two interlocked movements:
  • Central European Jewish children fleeing to France (prewar/Kindertransport to France).
  • Some of these children’s later escape from Vichy France to the U.S., in small numbers, after Nazi occupation.
• Minuscule Chances of Survival: Faure foregrounds the staggering odds these children faced:
  • "Only 11% of Jewish children from Europe survived the Holocaust...the two you look at are a tiny minority in what was already a tiny minority." (07:22)
  • "Numbers under 300 children, we're talking about 350 maximum. Right, right. A tiny..." (09:02)
• Importance of Not Over-Romanticizing Rescue: Faure stresses the need to confront not only the rarity of rescue but to analyze the process critically, rather than focus solely on outcomes or “heroes.”
  • "I really want to talk about why looking at rescue critically is important." (09:22)
  • "This book will not look for heroes, but for humans in all their complexity." (21:32)

3. Rescue Efforts: Actors, Motivations, and Messiness

• Networked Rescue: The book rejects a case-study approach in favor of seeing children's fates as results of entangled networks—across borders, faiths, and organizations.
• Key Actors: Rather than simple hero narratives, the book maps the multifaceted roles and motivations of key figures:
  • Louise Weiss: Feminist pacifist leveraging political connections for visas, with complex (sometimes critical) views on Jewishness.
  • Baroness Germaine de Rothschild: Wealthy philanthropist with deep practical engagement and social-worker teams.
  • Andrée Salomon: Alsatian daughter of modest means, active Zionist, migration organizer who refused to flee France herself.
  • Ernst Papanek: Socialist pedagogue whose views on children's agency shaped not only wartime childcare but also Faure's instructional philosophies.
  • "On a personal level, I'm not uninspired by the solidarity, the true solidarity that I see in certain of the people in my study... There are some people who really stand out." (22:21)
• Rescue as Process, Not Result: The “success” of saving even 330 children depended on a tangle of context-specific factors—personalities, bureaucracies, political climates, and timing:
  • "To claim that those children were intentionally saved because there was a genocide going on is in fact historically dishonest..." (19:56)
• France vs. Britain – Why the Numbers Differed:
  • Britain’s Kindertransport saved about 10,000, but the parallel movement in France saw only a few hundred.
  • France, while previously opening doors to Spanish Civil War refugees en masse, failed to do so for Jewish children due to a combination of antisemitism, shifting political priorities, and bureaucratic barriers.
  • "392 is not the same as 10,000. It's a huge difference..." (13:50)

4. The Ethics, Limits, and Methods of Historiography

• Archival Patchwork: Faure describes tracking survivors, building her own database, and triangulating fragmentary international archives (France, U.S., Netherlands, Israel).
  • French sources: decimated/lost due to wartime plunder.
  • American sources: overwhelmingly numerous, but highly dispersed.
  • "The archives are extremely dispersed...the book is doomed to be incomplete." (41:20)
• Oral History & Private Collections: Interviews with survivors were crucial, as well as family-held documents (e.g., photo albums, drawings, social worker files).
  • "Interviewing was really something...a commitment to humans." (36:06)
  • "It was like, where have you been all my life? I've been wanting to tell this story." (36:55)
• Methodological Debate—Children’s Agency, Survivor Testimony, and the Limits of Sources:
  • Ethical challenges in representing testimonies truthfully, especially when dealing with elderly interviewees at the end of their lives.
  • "Keeping that tension alive is part of the larger story of making it more complex..." (47:03)

5. A Child-Centered Social History

• Children as Agents, Not Merely Victims:
  • The book foregrounds the agency—however limited—of children, recognizing their small survival tactics, adaptation mechanisms, and interpersonal networks.
  • Tactical agency (Michel de Certeau): Small acts of resistance, code-switching, lying about backgrounds, strategic bonding.
  • "Children are trying to read codes and please the educators... they're producing this world and many of them are fully committed." (62:00)
• Diaries, Drawings, and Collective Childhood Expression:
  • Children’s artifacts—drawings, diaries, autograph books—are central windows into their experience and community building, rather than only documenting individual trauma.
  • Educators themselves (esp. those shaped by the Spanish Civil War) encouraged creative collective expression and self-administration in children’s homes.
  • "When we think about diaries, we imagine ... this very solitary act ... and you say, no, no, actually, it was the opposite." (49:00)
• Internal Diversity & Tensions:
  • The homes were sites of social friction as well as care: regional, religious, linguistic, and ideological differences led to tensions.
  • Example: Saul Friedlander, a non-Orthodox child, was ostracized in an Orthodox setting.
  • "A social history without conflict doesn't seem to be, in my opinion, a well-done social history." (57:15)

6. The U.S.: Rescue Politics and Trans-Atlantic Networks

• Rescue Politics in America:
  • The rare rescue of 300+ children involved significant rivalry and bureaucratic tension between Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarian groups (Joint Distribution Committee, OSE, Quakers, Eleanor Roosevelt’s committee, etc.).
  • Jewish organizations advocated for older children at risk of internment; American organizations wanted more “mixed sailings” (not exclusively Jewish children), shaped by U.S. antisemitism and public relations anxieties.
  • Some officials (even within Quaker organizations) were openly sympathetic to Vichy authorities, complicating rescue efforts.
  • "The children that were rescued were evacuated as refugee children, not as Jewish children. So we need to be very careful today we make historical claims." (68:30)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Book’s Fundamental Stance:
  "This book will not look for heroes, but for humans in all their complexity."
  —Laura Hobson Faure (21:32)

• On Measuring Survival:
  "Only 11% of Jewish children from Europe survived the Holocaust."
  —Geraldine Gudefin (07:22)

• On Methodological Ethics:
  "Keeping that tension alive is part of the larger story of making it more complex. Right. So questioning how we get the material and how we write about it, how we talk about it, is part of the methodological challenge of doing historical research."
  —Laura Hobson Faure (47:03)

• On Tactical Agency:
  "Strategic action is the action of the powerful...tactical action is the ability of the powerless to have tactics to survive and deal with the strategies of others."
  —Laura Hobson Faure (59:00)

• On Stamped Survival:
  "To save a life is to save an entire world."
  —Laura Hobson Faure (71:04)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |---------|-----------| | Introduction and Context | 01:20 | | Genesis of Project & Background | 03:07 | | The Scope: Double Displacement | 07:22 - 09:22 | | Why So Few Rescued (France vs. UK) | 13:24 | | Critique of Rescue Narratives | 17:30 | | Complexity and “Messiness” of Rescue | 22:21 | | Major Characters and Rescue Motivations | 24:32 | | The Archive Hunt: Methodology | 36:06 - 42:44 | | Ethics of Testimony and Oral History | 44:37 | | Child-Centered Social History | 48:49 - 56:06| | Children's Agency | 58:19 - 63:53 | | U.S. Rescue Networks & Politics | 65:24 | | Final Reflections and Next Projects | 71:52 |

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Tone and Style

Faure speaks with empathy, rigor, and a persistent resistance to simplification. Both she and Gudefin combine scholarly insight with personal engagement, conveying the emotional gravity of the topic, a commitment to ethical representation, and an appreciation for the survival, adaptation, and complexity in the face of catastrophe.

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Conclusion

Laura Hobson Faure’s Who Will Rescue Us? offers a rare, meticulously researched window into the complicated, often paradoxical story of Jewish child rescue in France and America during the Holocaust. By centering both the networks that shaped these rescues and the children’s own perspectives, Faure’s work challenges triumphalist narratives and instead insists on the richness and difficulty—the “messiness”—of humanitarian action in history. For anyone interested not just in what happened, but in how and why, this episode and book are indispensable listening and reading.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Geraldine Godefant. Today I'm thrilled to host Laura Opsan Faure, who holds the chair of Modern Jewish History at Parrien Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris. Faure specializes in French and American Jewish history and today we will discuss her latest book, who Will Rescue the Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America during the Holocaust, which was published by Yale University Press earlier this year. Laura, welcome to the show.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Congratulations.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Heartfelt congratulations on the recent publication and I'm doubly honored because it's actually the second time that I'm interviewing you for the New Books Network. So I'm really, really excited to in some ways carry on the conversation that we had two years ago, but about a slightly different yet very much related topic.

[C]

So thank you, Geraldy. And I have to say this book was not just two years of research. It's a book that I was working on since 2010 11. So about 11 years of research. So please.

[B]

Oh yeah, I appreciate, I appreciate the clarification because someone's taking a long time to finish the book. It is heartwarming to hear that.

[C]

Yes, yes, yes. It was a very, very long research project and I just did multiple things at Once.

[B]

And I think based on the interview, people will understand why it took so long because it was not an easy project. So this is something we'll definitely talk. So I would love for you to start about what led you to this project, maybe your earlier work, and how this research particularly was connected to the work you've done before and how you ended up on this specific topic.

[C]

Okay. So my previous work, I'm very interested in the intersections within the Jewish Diaspora and how Jews faced the challenge or the crises that discrimination, persecution, and the Holocaust provoke. My first major research project was for my doctorate. It was on the reconstruction of French Jewish life and the role played by American Jewish individuals and organizations in the reconstruction of French Jewish life. So that project, which I called a Jewish Marshall Plan, based on a citation from. From the archives, really is exploring the tensions within the Diaspora around the reconstruction of French Jewish life. And to what extent was this an American vision that was put forth by these American organizations and individuals? Or to what extent did French Jews push back and assert their own vision? So this transnational dynamic. So instead of looking at the different branches and these national case studies that the historians like to do, to go back to the roots of Jewish history, which is, by essence, transnational, in that we have to consider the dispersions and diaspora as key and central to this. And so in that perspective, and I also must say that my own life, being American born and raised, but living in France for a significant part of my life now, perhaps I have that bicultural kind of language in my head at all times, where I'm constantly going back and forth between the two cultures and languages. And as a result, that perhaps gave me a kind of a stranger vision of how to view this history. And in a way, I stayed with that because that's just how I view the world. And in my second project, in the course of doing my research, I really wanted to understand, not just to make a shopping list of everything that the American organizations did, but to really understand how it was received by French organizations, French Jewish organizations. And in the process, I spent a lot of time in French Jewish archives, where I had the joy of meeting and becoming friends with Katie Azin, who is the historian of the Oeuvre de Secours Enfants, which is the group that becomes, During World War II, the main Jewish organization that basically other organizations fold and everyone folds into. The OZ is, in a way, the last man standing during the war. And so Katie, as a specialist, as a historian, specialized in this organization, we were having this really interesting conversation. She Said, you know, we still don't know what happened to the children who ended up leaving and going to the US and it was just one sentence that she said in the course of my doctoral research. But that stayed with me and when I received my first position as an associate professor in American Studies, because my work was focused on. On American Jews and French Jews. But this allowed me to enter the academic job market, and I had a wonderful work setting and environment to pursue that research and to look at the question of what happened to the children who were OZ children. So children cared for by oz. I initially thought they were French children and what happened to them when they went to the United States. I knew that there was an evacuation. Katie wrote an article this in 1941-42 to send these children, or at least a small group of about 300 to the United States. What happened to them. So that's what set me up to start looking at children and what became a really, in my opinion, fascinating topic because I kept pulling like a rope, kind of pulling further and then realizing in surprising myself with what I was finding in terms of this group.

[B]

So to kind of build up on what you said, I think it's really important to mention that in the book, you're looking at two separate but very much connected child evacuation schemes. So the first one is those Central European children who went into exile and took refuge in France. And then some of them were later were able to migrate to the US thanks to those rescue efforts after the Nazi invasion of France. So that's really the core of the book, right, that these children who eventually made their way to America experienced what you call this serial exile, this double displacement of having fled their homes to take refuge in France. And then, you know, France under Vichy control was a place that of course, was very dangerous for children. And some of them were able to go. And here I think at the outset, so this is a story of successful rescue. But I think you say earlier in the book, and I think it's really important to kind of start the episode with this, that only 11% of Jewish children from Europe survived the Holocaust. So the majority of Jewish children in Europe were killed during the Holocaust. So this is the two you look at are a tiny minority in what was already a tiny minority. And I think those numbers, I mean, I reread your book like today after reading a few months ago and being confronted to this number again. I mean, it's. It's really staggering. So, and in. And in fact, the children that the Jewish children who made it to the U.S. if I remember correctly, numbers under.

[C]

300 children, we're talking about 350 maximum. Right, right. A tiny.

[B]

And them. Exactly. And of course, I mean, their lives deserve scholarly examination, but it's important to remember that their cases were exceedingly exceptional. Most Jewish children did not share their fate.

[C]

No, no, no. And this is, this is one of the major points of the book. But maybe I really want to talk about why looking at rescue critically is important. But maybe before doing that, I'd like to explain how I ended up working on two evacuations, because this is part of the genesis question of a research project I think is really important to how we conceive of projects and maybe why it's interesting to have this conversation. I started working on the children who, once they arrived in the United States, and as I said, I initially thought they were French kids. And as I was looking at the archives, I was of course, reading the historiography. And reading historiography on children during the Holocaust is something that is important for all scholars. One of the major books, one of the first and major books on this topic is Deborah Dworks, Children with a Star. But there are other books, other inquiries. Beth Cohen has worked extensively on child survivors in the United States. Francoise Ouzon has worked on this. Rebecca Clifford, who is a friend and colleague with whom I maintained a really, really wonderful discussion and. And in a way, intellectual collaboration without. We each wrote our own separate books, but we were really talking about this intensely. And I knew she was writing this beautiful book. And so thinking about how to renew the historiography was important to me. Why would this project, why would I do this project if it wasn't going to renew something? And something that I realized is that when we talk about children during the Holocaust or in the post war period, Joanna Mischlich's beautiful work on children in the post war period. Usually what's happening is that we are talking about individual children and we're using those children as case studies. And something that I wanted to do to renew the historiography here was to link them and to think about them as networks and think about how their networks developed and were created and creating and recreating their social worlds so that we could see them as actors in history. And so this was something that was important to me from the beginnings of the project. I have my notebooks, and looking back, I was surprised to see that already in 2011 or so, right when I started working on this, I was writing networks, networks, networks. I want to look at networks. When I started working on their networks. That's when I start saying, okay, well, when do they meet? When do their networks begin to develop? I'm seeing their American networks. Okay, so how do they meet and what's going on here? And that's when I realized that none of the children were actually French, that they were all either German or Austrian, and that many of their relationships predated their arrival in France. And it actually began in orphanages, either in Berlin or Frankfurt. And that is when I stumbled across this notion of Kindertransport to France. Now, this is. Kindertransport is something that we know, we associate with the United Kingdom, which rescued some 10,000 mostly Jewish children in 1939, right before, you know, on the eve of the war. Right before the war broke out. But this is not something that we associate with France. And so this study is the first peer reviewed study that really mobilizes the archives. And there have been a couple of chapters here and there or small contributions, but this is the book that really ties together the multiple archives on that and is able to show, to the extent possible, because of course, we have an archive problem with this about that evacuation and then to connect it to the efforts to evacuate these children once France was invaded in 1940.

[B]

So I have a big question there, and I'm not sure there's a clear answer to this that doesn't carry us too far. But as we said earlier, the numbers of children who were rescued in France were much lower than what you described in the British case. So how would you explain this difference if you come to a definitive conclusion on this particular question?

[C]

Okay, so. So in terms of maybe, maybe it's good to talk about why it's important to be critical when we talk about rescue. Okay. And to get to this comparative number of looking at Kindertransport to France, we have a lot of discussion right now in Kindertransport circles about lists, about lists of children who, who went to the uk the list that I found in the archives of children who came to France, I am not sure if I can rely on these lists, and I don't, because we know once we look at, once we start studying this question, we know that there are lots of last minute changes and we don't know who really left. We know prospective cases of people who couldn't be put on a list and who in the end don't end up leaving. And so I did not trust the list that I found in the archives and instead I made my own database. And that database has to this day And I don't know how representative my database is, but once I knew a child was for sure in France, I added that child to my database and I came up with about 392 names. 392 is not the same as 10,000. It's a huge difference. The other number, to keep in context is, or in comparison is the number of children that France rescued during the Spanish Civil War and opened its borders to some 10,000 to 20,000 children from Basque country and from Spain who were taken care of. Celia Queren's very important research on this topic should be read. And it's really interesting to put these two questions of child rescue together. So why is it that there was a huge outpouring of solidarity for Spanish children or in the uk, for a group of children that were mostly Jewish, but some were Christian, non Aryan children? Non Aryan, in quotes, of course, because these are Nazi terms. So why is it that France was not more active? And I think that this is a question that the book seeks to answer. And I also am writing against a trend, a recent historiographical trend that is extremely prevalent in France because it's very politically useful to talk about how France rescued its Jewish population. And so this idea that, quote unquote, 75% of French Jews survived the war is. Is something that is useful, and it is a very strong oversimplification, I would say, of the facts. And so what I wanted to do is propose a different way of studying Holocaust rescue where we weren't starting with outcomes. By that, what I mean is that because someone survived the war, they give their testimony. And if we only study Holocaust testimony, we're only then looking at survivors. And as you said in the beginning of our talk, those who survive are actually the exceptions and not the rule. So we're actually completely skewing our vision of what happened during the Holocaust. Now, France had a less extreme Holocaust than Poland, right? The Holocaust in France was different than it was in Poland. And we can understand comparatively the different structures of occupation. And Laurent Jolie's work on that is very important. But if we brag about the number saved, actually what we're doing is distorting historical fact. And, and, and also we're creating a very simple way of writing history. And so what I wanted to do here was show something much more complex, which is to present a very concrete question. So a very. A big problem, which is these children are trapped in Nazi territories. Who sees the problem? Who decides to mobilize? What do they manage to do? And when we Then study this as a, as a process. And we look at the rescue process and what is said and why people are doing what they're doing. What we see is something much more complex. We have Christian helpers, for example. Those individuals might not be helping the children because they want to save Jewish lives. In fact, perception is key. And so I really wanted to focus intensely on the worldviews. How do people's perceptions change over time? How do the aid workers view what they're doing? How does it evolve? Are they alerted or alarmed by Vichy legislations against Jews which are public? This is not hidden. Right. The journal Officiel is publishing the discriminatory measures. To what extent they see this in the camps. The French internment camps in February 1941 have 47,000 individuals in them. 40,000 of them are Jews. So they see that there's this disproportionate thing going on. But to what extent do they connect that to danger and do they perceive these children to be in danger? And so these are the questions I try to explore from the perspective of those who are helping the children in the book to show in the end that yes, 330 lives are saved. But in fact, this is the outcome of many complex factors that happen and emerge. 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[A]

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[C]

Right.

[B]

On the topic of rescue, there's a word that you use in the intro, I think, about how to like your desire to kind of retrieve the messy dimension of rescue. And you also write this book will not look for heroes, but for humans in all their complexity. Which is a sentence that really struck me. And I wonder if maybe we could delve a little bit more into the details, if you could tell us a little bit more about who were those individuals or organizations that were involved in this rescue effort. And to go back to this idea of complexity, where do you see the complexity in their rescue as far as both their motivations are concerned and the actual efforts to rescue the children?

[C]

Okay, so in terms of heroes. Yes. There's a word that really, I think I really prefer. I feel as if the job of historians is to make, is to keep complexity alive. And our job is to show the multiple contexts in which decisions are made and to translate those contexts and those language in those worlds and show how they intersect and evolve. Right. So I feel like that our goal is to not make things more simple, but in fact to show how complex things were in the past and perhaps are today. Okay. So the word hero is something I think, I argue. I mean, that disables our critical apparatus. It disables our ability to actually look critically at individual and actions and how people conceive their place in the world. If we're calling all rescuers heroes, then we're missing a large part of the story. Now, this does not mean that on a personal level, I'm not inspired by the solidarity, the true solidarity that I see in certain of the people in my study. There are some people who really stand out. One of them is Andre Salomon. I can talk more about her. Another is Ernst Papanek, but there are many others. Ernst Jablonsky, the children themselves. I mean, there's a whole cast of characters, I would say, book that I really care deeply about as I write about them and admire. And I would say that Ernest Papanek, who is one of the pedagogues, who was working with the children and who's conceiving a world in which children have an ability to respond to adults and what to do about children who are lying and things like that. As a college professor, I've actually kind of been as inspired by him to just believe my students at all times. So. Yes, okay. Okay. Your grandma died again this semester, so, wow.

[B]

Many rebirth.

[C]

Wow. Amazing. Okay, so. So I. And just to create a space where they can talk and respond. And eventually he says, you know, the worst punishment is the guilt that they apply to themselves. Right. So thinking about these individuals. So. So I'm not uninspired by the people I'm writing about, but when I say messiness, what I mean is that people. An example is the feminist Louise Weiss. Okay, so Louise Weiss, she was a pacifist, she was a feminist. Her mother was from a Jewish family. Her father was from a Protestant family. She could be claimed by Jews or by Protestants in terms of belonging. But what I'm reading from her is a very critical view of Jewish life. And at the same time, she is fighting for refugees in France at a moment where very few people are. And so, which is the 30s, this is the 1930s, this is 38. She's completely against the Munich Agreement. She's a very free woman. She's had affairs, most likely with most of these politicians, at least that's the claim of her. Of her biographer. And it's important to us, in terms of gender history, to understand how women manage to leverage power. And she does so by. By basically, she's on close terms, let's say, with several politicians. And one is. Happens to be Bonnet, Georges Bonnet, who is the Minister of Foreign Affairs. And she basically says, listen, I didn't write about your position at Munich, and in exchange, you're going to help me now get visas for refugees. And so she. This is, of course, what she claims in her writing as well. So we have to take everything with, you know, taking to account the source and who's writing this and who's retelling the past and the flourishes. And she loves to shock her readers and so on. So she's a delicious character to work with, but she's very complex. And she has some remarks that show she has no patience whatsoever for organized Jewish life. She does not understand why the Rothschild family plays a very large role in rescuing these children, why they would want to maintain any form of Judaism for these children once they arrive. And so it's much more complex than just calling Louise Weisz a hero. And yet her solidarity is genuine. And without her role in all of this, I don't know if France would have unblocked the Small number of visas that they unblocked. Right. Another woman is Germain de Rothschild, a baroness. One could frame her as a disinterested philanthropist, but on the contrary, what we see is a very active, active person, deeply engaged in helping. And she has a team of social workers who worked for her throughout the 1930s, who are actually helping individual families. And that team of social worker then goes on to help her staff this organization that she creates called the Committee Israelites Polais Enfants Venant de Robes Central, Dalmanier de Robe Central. And so this committee that she creates, she declares it in January 1939. So just months after the November pogrom of 1938, or Kristallnacht, as we say. So this is people who really responded quickly. Andre Salomon, I'll say a little bit about her. Andre Salomon was, on the contrary, I mean polar opposite in terms of upbringing and wealth. If Germain de Rothschild is doing this from a privileged position. Andre Salomon is the daughter of a seamstress and a butcher from Rue Alsace. Her father died when she was in her teens, and so as a result, her older sisters had to go to Strasbourg to find work. When they went to Strasbourg, they lived in a Jewish girl's home. And that Jewish girls home was run by two women, one whose name was Laure, who ended up receiving young women from Germany from 1933 onwards. And so these women are very traditional. These are very traditional Jewish circles, Francophone circles still, even though Alsace, you know, had been German and then has returned since to France after World War I. And these Jewish circles, but are deeply, deeply aware of German culture, aware of Nazism on the border. So you can cross the border and very easily from Germany. And many of these families also, they're eastward migrations as well. So many people have families on both sides of the border. And so the Jews of Alsace are extremely aware of, perhaps more aware than the Jews in Paris, about what is transpiring in Nazi Germany. Andre Salomon grows up in this. She becomes a Zionist, contrary to the wishes of her family, which is not a Zionist family, but a family that had its therpomies, right?

[B]

France.

[C]

France is their place and this is their country. And she becomes very active in Zionist circles and active starting in the 1930s, when children, I would say youth, so over the age of 18, end up coming to France to work on agricultural settlements en route to Mandatory Palestine. She starts getting active in helping them immigrate to Mandatory Palestine and ends up then becoming kind of a specialist in migrations. A one woman specialist. And when the November program occurs, she manages. And I theorize this is a hypothetical question because Rabbi Rene Herschler was murdered during the war. And so we don't have the archival trace. Obviously he wasn't there to be able to do oral history interviews with him. But based on the archives that his children who survived the Holocaust were able to save, what we see is a very active rabbi and he has a huge number of contacts at the prefecture. He's very well respected locally. And it's very possible that Andre Salomon went with him to find and request visas for a group of 52 children from Frankfurt. The children arrive in December 1938. So very, very quickly, within three weeks of the November program, they had their first group of 52 children there. So what we see is someone who, with her husband, her husband was a chemist. He received a visa, an emergency visa to go to the United States, and they decide to stay put in France and they do not flee. Now, I also think that the role of a historian is not to morally judge people and to say, oh, they're better than the others because they didn't flee. And I don't think so, because Erz Papanek fled because he knew his life was in danger. Okay, so there's no moral high ground to take or weighing which one is better. No, that's kind of simplistic, kind of writing is not at all. I think what we should be doing as historians of Jewish history or of the Holocaust.

[B]

And also it's, I think, as historians, important to remember that we know the end of the story. But they didn't, you know, in 1938, they didn't know what would happen in 1942. They didn't know what the situation would be like in 1944. So, yeah, I think trying to go back in time and think the way that they did, not knowing what would come next is really important. Otherwise we're bound to distort history and the motivations of historical actors.

[C]

Yeah, and Papanek is very different from Solomon. I mean, we have. I mean, so we have these very, very different ideologies in Jewish history. So one of the. We tend to section off Jewish history from Holocaust studies. And I hope in this book to have argued for the need to weave those two fields together, to keep them together, and that understanding the place of someone like Ernst Papanek, who's a socialist, he's not calling himself a Jewish socialist. He's not affiliated with the Bund. He's someone who is A socialist who abandoned his Judaism even though he was born into a Jewish family who did not claim that identity and who, in fact, when he arrived in France and met the Bundes, who were Jewish socialists, felt a strong disconnect. And in fact, their nickname for him was the goy, according to. According to his autobiography. So we see these many, many different Jewish worlds and communities that intersect and collide in a big way in the name of helping these children and also a whole, you know, group of non Jewish actors who are also around them, including the Quakers. And that's a different story. Right.

[B]

And we will get to this. Before we do, I want to talk a little bit about how you put the story together, because I think it's very clear from what you said that there were fragments dispersed in a number of places, and you had to one, find the fragments to put them all together. So could you talk a little bit, a bit more about the archives that you went to and then the other ways in which you got information? Because all of this, like all your research, is not solely based on archives. You also got a lot of documentation from private collections and you conducted oral histories. So, yeah. Can you talk a bit more about how you actually were able to find all those sources and how you made sense of the diversity of sources? And one, I actually really liked it in the book, at the very end, you have a short essay about the methodological challenges that you faced. And one thing you mentioned is that the problem you had for France is that they weren't enough sources available, in part because of the loss of archives, the plunder of archives. And in the US you had. The other issue is there was a plethora of sources, but they were exceedingly dispersed. So tell us about the process of putting it all together.

[C]

Okay. Well, there was a great deal of archival research, as you said, it implied travel, it implied the need for funding. So I definitely feel very grateful to the fact that I was on faculty. So the Sorbonne Nouvelle, my research group at the Sorbonne Nouvelle funded many small research trips. And then now my research group at the University Paris Pantheon Sorbonne has also been extremely supportive. And through those small research trips, one at a time, three days to go to Amsterdam, three days to go to Switzerland, Israel, a little bit of work in Germany, a great deal of work at the U.S. holocaust Memorial Museum. And I thank Ram Coleman, who is the archivist there, who sent me materials after I was back, with whom I had a great intellectual connection on this, because he's also extremely interested in this topic in New York. My poor Friends had to put up with me on their couches, in bed, guest bedrooms where I spent a week at a time. And always short research trips for family reasons. Motherhood is part of this project, perhaps, and that fueling many of the questions showing Children's Agency. We can talk about that. But seeing with my own kids how they responded, how they wrote. I mean, we say that children don't leave written traces under the age of 10. And I have great proof of the contrary. Great proof of the contrary. And so, just like these research trips of putting things together, and then very importantly, a strong commitment to oral history. And that's something that was part of my research from the beginning. Part of it is that I'm trained in qualitative sociology. My BA is in sociology. And I felt like interviewing was really something that. It's absolutely fascinating for me. And also a commitment to humans, I think, of getting to know someone, understanding their life story, taking the time to listen to someone's story, taking the time to record it. I felt as if the people who I was asking these questions had been waiting all of their lives for someone to ask these questions. And so only one or two people refused an interview and because the topic was too difficult for them to talk about. So basically it was like, where have you been all my life? I've been wanting to tell this story. And so showing up and knowing who Ernest Papanek was, who is such an important person in many of the children's accounts, understanding the chronology of the events, understanding just the people involved and sitting there and being an educated listener was something that I think was really fruitful and meaningful. So that helped me gain access to a great number of sources that were not in the archives. And these are private papers. Private papers were very important. The day that Elfride Schloss, I went to see her in San Diego, she was in her 90s, and she had immaculate, immaculate photo albums. And she said, oh, does this interest you? And she took out an envelope. And what it was was a compendium of pages from the Quaker archives that were numbered 1 to 100. And anyone who's worked on this topic a little has seen these, these papers, but they've never been in order and they never. Like, you'll see a letter with a Circle 6 on it, and then you'll see another one with a 13. But she had the one to 100 numbered. And she said, oh, does this interest you? And she saw the look on my face like, yes, an autograph book. And she said, oh, well, this is my autograph book from in the children's homes. Does this interest you? And she said she had been keeping this all of her life with the idea that it had meaning only for her. Right. And so it was like having. Yes, absolutely. It interests me. And so in a way, we have this mutual sense of finding value in something that many people find to be not only unvaluable, but, you know, this cumbersome thing of, oh, she keeps everything. And papers, papers. And so this importance of archives and gender, thinking about gender as well, because many people don't realize that their moms were actually doing important things.

[B]

All those hours spending in the office or three papers, putting them in folders. It is for a reason.

[C]

Yes, it is. Or running child survivor organizations. And so there were some very important papers. I won't name the organization. The sun said, you know, I just threw out everything, you know, so things got thrown out because. Because the. The historical value of. Of. Of. Of what that woman was doing might not have been recognized. So there are losses, there are gaps in the story. In the US, the archives are extremely dispersed. Some archives then folded into other archives and so on. So the book is doomed to be incomplete. There's also the genie of finishing a book, the Daevuk, that comes the second you finish a book. And I was in the last round of proofs, and I saw something and I discovered more archives. Right. So, I mean, in the last round of proofs, it was too late to, you know, I was able to read the archives before I submitted finally. But. But I. It was too late to add them into the book. So that will be, you know, another article to add to this.

[B]

Well, actually, maybe this is your chance to say a few words about this, just to get it out.

[C]

No. No. I mean, no. So it's. It's very interesting. You know, I. What it requires is more research time. But I found some of the paperwork linked to Germain de Rothe Schield's network of social workers and all the work that she was doing with families in Paris. These are looted archives that were, instead of being returned to the Archives national, were returned to or became the property of the Memoir de la Shoah, and remained outside of their catalog to this day. So, so it's very interesting to see, you know, there's a history as. As. As Lisa Moses, left's beautiful book the Archive Thief, shows there's a. Archives have their own history. And so grappling with the history of archives and the history of oral history and Holocaust testimony is, I would say, a really important part of this book as well. So from a methodological point of view.

[B]

On the topic of oral interviews, so you have, you know, all those hours of recordings. Have you have, have you had any discussion with the individuals you interviewed about whether they might want those recordings to be donated to SOM archives? Because now we have your amazing book. But clearly, you know, other historians might ask other questions on those topics and those sources might be, you know, are of great value. And you know, I, I believe wholeheartedly that oral interviews are very important, but all the more so when this is, you know, this, those survivors, they're in old age, this is the lot, These are the last people standing. And so their voice, the fact that you were able to have these discussions in the first place is just so invaluable. So, yeah, I wonder if you have had any discussions with them about, you know, making those interviews public somehow, or at least available to researchers.

[C]

I mean, the difficulty of this project was that people were actually, I mean, they were very keenly aware of the fact that they were not going to maybe see the book because they wouldn't be alive. Right. So one of the women asked me, you know, or she wrote to me this very, you know, very poignant email. She said, I'm not sure if I'm going to be alive to see your book. So here, you know, here's the contact information of my son. And actually she was very correct. She did not survive to see the end of the book, but her son has been very active in reading it and receiving it. So in a way, he knew that this was the mandate that his mother gave him to hear her story and to receive the book. So people were keenly aware of the fact that these were their last days and hours. And that also is a huge moral responsibility. I try to, in times of doubt, because people sometimes over reveal in interviews, when I had kind of a doubt about whether this person would want me to share what they told me, I tried to go back to them and show them what I had written. I didn't do this with everyone. I wasn't able to do it with everyone. And also it would have made the book impossible to finish had I done that with everyone. But there was, you know, a couple of cases where I was able to go back to the person and say, here's what I wrote. Do you, do you allow me to use your name with, associated with what you told me and, and, or do you prefer, you know, a false name, even though that person signed off usually with the, the permission to use their real name. There are moments where I felt like I didn't want to self censor as a historian. And in part of this tricky dance of not self censoring, keeping the scientific rigor, I mean, people can hear. I'm deeply engaged with doing this ethically and deeply attached to the people that I met. But this doesn't mean that I'm completely not pushing back. Let's say if if there's erroneous material in a testimony, for example, or there's a way of looking at things that I disagree with, I'm trying to write that into the story instead of choosing a narrative. So there's tension in the book in terms of the ethics of research. And keeping that tension alive is part of the larger story of making it more complex. Right. So questioning how we get the material and how we write about it, how we talk about it, is part of the methodological challenge of doing historical research.

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[B]

So that actually brings me to the next question, which was about specifically children. Sorry, sources produced by children. Because the way you present the book is as a child centered social history, which I think is very unusual and I think that's definitely one of your main contributions to the historiography. And so you have a variety of Sources that you look at, including diaries and autograph books. And one. I want to talk specifically about one drawing. So in the middle of the book, you have a series of gorgeous photographs and you have a few drawings, and one of them is this. I don't know how old the child is, but it depicts children in what I imagine was the children's home in France, so this refugee home. And there's a drawing of a French flag. And you see, written in both German and French, the words I promise. And it's just really, really striking. And so I wondered, one, how you made sense of those different sources. And two, you mentioned networks, how you connected those individual artifacts to the broader story of this refugee children being part of the community. And one thing that struck me specifically was mention that you made of the collective nature of diary writing, which I found so surprising, because when we think about diaries, we imagine, you know, this very solitary act where you're, you know, isolating yourself from the world and writing, and you say, no, no, actually, it was the opposite. So tell us a bit more about the sources and how you use them throughout the book.

[C]

So, thank you. I mean, thank you for noticing, Jahlene. Thank you for noticing, because these are. These are, I think, the parts of the book that really made me, like, just like kind of like, wow, I was so blown away by these sources, the children's drawings. I mean, there's a great deal of work done on using children's drawings as historical sources. Manon Pignon's work is on that question. And we work together on a book on children in times of conflict that was published in 2023. And so just listening to her talk about, you know, well, how can we analyze these drawings? What can we say about them? Nicholas Stargardt's work on drawings was also extremely important. And so using drawings as sources. So what do we see? What do the children notice? What are the motifs that we see in their work? But also, of course, and for me, this is why I like deep dives as opposed to very broad, broad projects. I really like to make a deep dive to understand the context, the very, very intense context of the educators who are asking the children to produce those sources. So there's a full chapter on the educators and their own backgrounds. Many of them came. I mean, they were literally in Spain during the Civil war, where children's republics were being used on both sides. And so this pedagogical tool, this method of putting children, making children actors of their own lives and environments by making them co administrators to their collective Homes. This is something that already is circulating in left wing circles, but is being used in Spain. And then many of these individuals are coming directly from Spain back to France in 39 and they speak German and they want German speakers in these children's homes. And so they get hired. Even though there is a bit of an ideological mismatch when it comes to those who are funding the homes and, and then those who they're going to do to put in front of the kids. So these educators are schooled in, you know, pedagogy nouvelle, as we say in French. They're very into getting the children to draw and to write about their lives. And this produces some fabulous sources on children's writings. Not all of them. I mean, there's a great deal that I haven't used that I hope to use in the future, but just getting to understand what's going on in that drawing. And then one of the things that I mention is that in the corner of that drawing there's actually the month. And when you notice that there's the month but not the name of the artist, what you see is that the educator, in this case Alfred Bronheur, was writing the month and he's tracking the children's evolution through their art. This is my hypothesis, right. I don't. I see him draw, but I know that it's the same handwriting on each of the drawings and usually. And he never adds a child's name. So this is not about, you know, tracking individual children as a, as kind of like exploring their psychology, their individual psychology. But, but looking at how children over time in this environment can deal with trauma and war. And Brunner ends up publishing his PhD that he defends in 1946, and it comes out in 1946 in book format. And the title of the book is Cesant Fons que nous la guerre. And this is about not only Jewish children, but also children in Spain that he encountered during the Spanish Civil War. And so the kids don't realize that they're being studied. Okay, so this is really interesting. So you see all these different levels and then you see this before and after in that photo, in that drawing. I'm sorry, there's a before and after sequence in the garden. In one they're pushing and they're fighting, and then the next one they're lining up in rows and they're invested in their garden. They're not complaining about working in the garden. So this idea that the child. This does not mean that the child feels better. This means that the Child has learned the codes of the adult world. Right. I mean, it's also like, as historians, what do we choose to see in that drawing? We can't assume that the child is, is all for these methods. What we know is that the child is trying to save themselves. They're trying to get their parents and siblings out of Nazi Germany and they want to send the right message to their educators because many of them fear that they will be sent back if they don't behave or if they're not Jewish enough. I mean, there's a lot of their children are trying to read the codes of this new world in a new society, in a new language. And so they're trying to make sense of things. So what we can show is that children are very keen observers of what adults want to hear and of course, what they want. The educators must be very flattered to see this child pledging allegiance over a French flag and saying, I promise, like I'm making my oath to the Republic. Because they make a children's. And this children's republic, you know, obviously it's a very serious thing for everyone until it falls apart when the world breaks.

[B]

And one thing that's really important because you mentioned ideological conflict between different actors in the book, but also the internal diversity between those refugee children were coming from different parts of Germany, Austria. There are linguistic differences, the regional differences. I forget if he was between the Austrians and the. I forget exactly if they were coming from different cities. But there's some of tension there where people tend to, like the kids, tend to gravitate towards people who come from the same place, of course, but that can end up in tension. And then towards the end of the book, you have this recollection by Saul Friedlander about how he was beaten up by kids who saw him as very much an outsider because he wasn't from an orthodox family. So you have all kinds of tension that play out in the daily life of these children.

[C]

I was looking for that, right. I was looking to understand how they perceived of their worlds. And so, yes, even in my first book, I mean, I think it's much more interesting to read about tensions and conflict. And it shows us the fault lines. Right? What are the fault lines? How do things work? And so a social history without conflict doesn't seem to be, in my opinion, a well done social history. I mean, people don't see the world in the same way. And that's why we're here. We're here to show the different ways in which they see it. And, and, and so looking for that amongst the children. When I say that we need to look for children's agency, it doesn't mean we're going to find it and it doesn't mean that they have a huge amount of power. But it sets us up with a certain number of expectations that the children had their own opinions about what was happening to them and the sources might not let us see those opinions. But if I set up that expectation for myself as a historian, then I'm in a much better place to find those opinions as I read their story.

[B]

But you go even further in the book, because in the book you claim that we have to see the children themselves as agents in their own rescue. So I wonder if you could tell a little bit more about what you mean by this and what kind of survival mechanism, like where do you see, you know, their own role in their rescue efforts?

[C]

Okay, so it's very subtle and I don't want to overestimate Jews power during the Holocaust because that would be revisionist and incorrect. Right. There's a danger to overestimating the power of victims because they are victims of the Holocaust. But an article written by a group of researchers in the U.K. holloway is one of the authors. The first author on the article talks about children's agency and draws from Michel de Certeau's work on action and tactical versus strategic action. And that was theoretically a very useful way of thinking about their agency. De Certull writes that strategic action is the action of the powerful, those who have power to make strategies. And tactical action is the ability of the powerless to have tactics to survive and deal with the strategies of others. And so just this idea that they have tactical agency, that they cannot change the outcome of the war and in fact adults can't either. And, and when the gendarmes show up to arrest children in the children's homes, who has the power? The children themselves can try to run away. Right. But they, you know, face I write this in the book, faced with the crushing nature of state sponsored genocide, right. What do we do? And, and so what we can see are these tiny little maneuvers. So we just had to focus in that is why it's a very detail oriented study because we need that level of detail to see this kind of tiny, tiny action of. For example, something from one of the accounts of a roundup, the first roundup in, in the Shaban home was that one of the child children who was arrested leaned out the window and he dropped his bike key out of the window of the bus that had he was in the bus being taken off. And he released his bike key for his friend to use his bike. And it's just like this moment, I mean, where I think, you know what's going through his head. He. He knew he wasn't coming back anytime soon. He wanted his. He loved his bike. He loved his friend. And. And so you see, there's nothing there that can changed the outcome of his arrest, his deportation. You can think, though, that the children are striving to endear themselves with their caretakers and to make sure that they create a strong bond with their caretakers so that they can be saved. And they're very, very aware of the fact that getting out and getting to the United States is important. And so when the OSA starts evacuating children, the children. Actually, there are accounts by the Oze, and I found them in New York. So they're actually accounts that traveled across the Atlantic where they talk about the fact that the children are. So they're harassing their educators. They want to be selected. They want to be in on this. So Oze decides that they're going to make the process more democratic, and they set up a registry where those children who want to be evacuated can register their names. And they also have families, so assumably Jewish families from, you know, around who are not in the homes, who are also registering their children in these registries. I did not see the registries. I did not see any lists of names in these registries. What I see is the account in New York about the fact that they had to set this up because the children were so vehement about being included in the evacuations. So you see this very active stance, another active thing, you know, evidence for me, that the children are striving to be safe and safe and taking a role in this is lying about their backgrounds. So you have some children, when they arrive in France from Central Europe who are not from Orthodox families, but end up in the Orthodox children's homes. And the only reason why we know that they're not from Orthodox families is because the oral history interview in which they finally admit years and decades later that they actually lied, but they were afraid. Either one was following his mother's advice, and the second woman was afraid that if she explained her messy family history, that, in fact, she might get sent back to Germany. And so she ended up in the Orthodox children's home. And the children learn the prayers and they pass as Orthodox, but in fact, they were. They were not from Orthodox families. And so what you see is that children are trying to read codes and please the educators. Another example is the drawing we just spoke about. But there are many drawings like that where the children are constantly showing. Yes, I'm learning your message. Yes, here it is right back, you know, to you. I'm. I'm producing this world and. And many of them are fully committed to that new vision of a world in which children can call adults by their first name.

[B]

I love this. I actually, it's. As a parent, I have to say, when I read your book, I thought, wow, there's much wisdom to learn from playing those educators that people like me have never heard about. And it's interesting to learn about them in the context of your book. But Papanek especially, and he wasn't the only one I'm thinking about. Oh, there's a very famous Jewish educator. I'm blanking on his name, but yes, they were in Eastern Europe, Central Europe. A number of Jewish educators will really, I think, paved the way for the way in which we understand, like child psychology and education, which is. But that's a whole different topic unto itself.

[C]

But.

[B]

So I have one final question, although there is so much more ground to cover, which is the US story, and I apologize that we don't have much more time for this. But again, it's a good excuse for people to get the book and read the full story. But the question is about how the children may. Some children, not all, of course, were able to come to the US and the different actors were involved in their rescue. And reading the book, I was particularly interested in the tension between Jewish aid workers and American non Jewish aid workers, who. Whose perception of dangers were very different and who saw their efforts in rescuing children quite differently. So I wonder if we could close the conversation with this story.

[C]

Yes. Yes. Okay. So this is a very complex story, and it's a little hard to condense it into one answer. But you see that what happens is that many of the educators, many of the people taking care of the children, end up themselves targeted, and some of them flee and go to the U.S. as I said, Andre Salomon stays behind. And she's there on one end, and on the other end, you see Ernest Papanek in New York. Okay. You also see Germain de Rothschild in New York, and you also see the Baroness Yvonne de Gainsbourg in New York. And so you see that New York ends up becoming a place where these refugees, some more privileged than others, obviously, are able to act to the extent possible. Papa Naik is extremely active in alerting the joint distribution Committee about and this is a continuity with my previous work on the Joint Distribution Committee. He's alerting them, but he's not alone in alerting them. The Rothschild family is also alerting the JDC that they need to take action and to evacuate these children. And the JDC is very actively interested in engaging with a new organization. Eleanor Roosevelt is the honorary president of a new organization that emerges in July 1940. But at the origins, this is a response to Cristal Knight. So the November 1938 pogrom, you see childcare experts starting to meet and talk about the fate of, of what they call German refugee children. Now it's really interesting, this choice of words. And I try to really look at this question. They're politically savvy. They know that anti Semitism is growing in the United States and very, very it's refugees in general are poorly perceived. They're trying to walk this tightrope of responding to a crisis that affects mostly Jewish people and at the same time to not alienate themselves in American public opinion. And so you see these euphemisms and usually the historiography leaves at that that they were politically savvy and they weren't seeing Jews and so on. But when you read closely in the archives, what you see are in fact tensions over who this is really about and when it's exclusively about Jewish children as it becomes very clear that the children who whose parents are willing to part with them are the Jewish parents in French internment camps. And eventually what happens is that the American Friends Service Committee, which is a Quaker organization, is mandated by the U.S. committee for the Care of European Children to do the on the ground work of evacuating the children. Selecting and evacuating. The OZ tries to impose their children and their lists and they want older children to leave France because they know that those older children are going to be at risk of internment. They do not see deportation as a possibility. No one can see deportation and genocide as a possibility. In fact, the concept of genocide doesn't even exist yet. Right. I mean, this is something that people can't fathom what's going to happen next. But what they do know is that internment is extremely dangerous and it does risk death. And so the OZA is trying to push older children and siblings out of the country. The American Quakers, and not all the people who work for the Quakers are Quaker. In fact, that's quite rare that someone who works for them is a Quaker. So we have to be very careful on how we label who's working for them. But the people who work for the Quakers are a very mixed, mixed bag. And you have some individuals who are extremely activist and who see the need to help Jewish populations. And you have others who are very enamored with, in particular the director of the Quakers who is very enamored with Petain and who is very supportive of Vichy and Vichy policies. So it's actually a very complex story and they're in charge. So the Jewish organizations are at the mercy. And once the American Foreign Service Committee realized that this is primarily Jewish children, then the goal becomes making those, those sailings, mixed sailings, quote unquote, which means that they want to include non Jewish children and they start a registry to get children who are not Jewish on those Salines. So what we see is that in fact the children that were rescued were evacuated as refugee children, not as Jewish children. So we need to be very careful today we make historical claims. It's not correct to assign intentions that were not there at the time. So this is part of the complexity. It's a messy game. And the outcomes were that about three hundred and thirty Jewish children were evacuated. That number includes also people who were not selected for the evacuations, but who were able to travel with the group. Okay, so individuals who had affidavits from their family members and were able to leave France. This is a tiny number of people, but today those become entire families and the descent.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

The descendants of the, of those children are now reaching out to me now that they see the book and they're very moved to find their grandparents. Of course, pages of the book, it's an entire. To save a life is to save an entire world. Right?

[B]

Absolutely.

[C]

This is from the.

[B]

Absolutely.

[C]

And, and so we see these entire children who end up creating some of them. Right. Many of them create their own, their own lives and families in the United States. Needs.

[B]

Thank you for this. Really beautiful. And yeah, there's so many more stories and details that people should really discover in this beautiful book. Before we part ways, it's customary to ask our guest what they're working on. So what are you currently working on?

[C]

Okay, I'm working on the beginning of the semester currently. That's a great. We can leave it at that. That is a great answer. No, but there's more on children, more on children and the rise of Holocaust memory. Because I've studied these networks and I see how they evolve over time and I have a long term periodization in the works where I'd like to study them over time over a very long period.

[B]

All right, thank you so much for joining us today. And I also thank our listeners for listening to the conversation. Have a great day, everyone.

[C]

Thank you, Geraldine thank you everyone for listening. And Doug Limu and I always tell.

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