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

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.

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)

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)

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 |

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.

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.