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.