Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children Who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
12–1:15pm
Virtual
Who Will Rescue Us? represents the first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France — and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime.
At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again — but their refuge would all too soon become a trap.
For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies as well as children’s diaries, letters, drawings, songs, poems„ and material from the JDC Archives, Who Will Rescue Us? re-creates their complex journeys, including how some of them eventually found safety in America.
Hobson Faure paints a moving portrait of these children and their escape, uncovering their agency in the flight from Nazism — and knits together the network of the many who aided them along the way.
Laura Hobson Faure is a professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1, where she holds the chair of Modern Jewish history and is a member of the Center for Social History (UMR 8058). Her research focuses on the intersections between French and American Jewish life during the 20th century. She is the author of A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: the American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France (Armand Colin, 2013 in French; Indiana University Press, 2022) which won a National Jewish Book award and Who Will Rescue Us? The Story of the Jewish Children who fled to France and America (Yale University Press, 2025). She also co-edited L’Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants et les populations juives au XXème siècle. Prévenir et Guérir dans un siècle de violences (Armand Colin, 2014) and Enfants en guerre. « Sans famille » dans les conflits du XXème siècle (éditions CNRS, 2023).
This program is co-sponsored by the JDC Archives and the Jewish Book Council.
The JDC Archives houses one of the world’s most significant collections of modern Jewish history. Comprising the organizational records of JDC, the world’s leading Jewish humanitarian organization, the archives’ rich text, photograph, and audio-visual collections document JDC activity in over 90 countries from 1914 to the present. To learn more, please visit https://archives.jdc.org/
Jewish Book Council is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and enriching the community through Jewish literature, strengthening connections to Jewish life and identity, and inspiring conversations between generations of readers. Learn more about its programs and resources here.
