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Preface When I was growing up, my father had regular visits from a long-haired academic from New England named Lewis Dexter. The era was the 1960s, but the way he wore his hair, his small rectangular glasses, and the woolen coats chosen from rummage sales reminded me more of an eighteenth-century scholar. He was plain spoken and given to talking a great deal about his polymath learning. He was also highly indulgent of my juvenile challenges. One of them was to pull out a long, dull book and ask him whether it was really true that he could read anything from cover to cover in under two hours. I never proved him wrong. It was only later that I learned that his family had a large part in my father’s immigrating to this country, a story I knew nothing about. My grandparents had died of tuberculosis, I thought, and for all I knew, my father had hiked over the Austrian Alps to Switzerland like the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. By the time I was in college I knew that Lewis Dexter’s parents —Robert and Elisabeth—had written the affidavit in 1938 for my Jewish father to come to the United States and that they had founded an organization—the Unitarian Service Committee—that had worked in Europe during World War II. I took a class in the history of the Holocaust and read a total of three examples of rescue—the stories of Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler, and the French village of Le Chambon—and wondered if there were more. I wrote my term paper on the American government response to the Holocaust and looked for a description of what the Unitarian Service Committee or any other private American organization had done, but did not find one. Instead, I found just a brief confirmation that the Unitarian and Quaker groups had had a presence in Europe at the time.1 A story of American rescuers did not seem to exist in the literature, I concluded from my not-very-thorough exploration. It seemed that history had forgotten that there were any. After Lewis Dexter died in 1995, an essay he had written in honor of his mother—Elisabeth Anthony Dexter—came to me.2 Elisabeth was the grand-niece of Susan B. Anthony, and Lewis was mainly interested in his mother’s accomplishments as a historian of early American social history. She had published studies of women’s roles in the economies of Colonial America and, even at the end of her life, she was best known for this work.3 Part of Lewis’s paper was a short but intriguing section on his parents’ work with the Unitarian Service Committee, which led me to several thick folders at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. These papers were stamped “Confidential” and “Secret” and sometimes showed the signature of Allen Dulles, the deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services (oSS). The espionage link was exciting but, I suspected, not as interesting as the Dexters’ work with refugees, of which I still knew little. At this time, I also began to learn about the extraordinary work of Varian Fry, the only American—by the end of the twentieth century —to have been honored with the Righteous Among the Nations award by YadVashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. This story was full of adventures—forged passports, paths over the Pyrenees, safe houses in France—and a list of celebrity and less famous clients that stretched beyond two thousand people.4 But when I left the genre of biography and read more deeply in Varian Fry’s correspondence, the Unitarian Service Committee’s name was all over it. Although this chapter in American Unitarian institutional history seemed to have been largely forgotten, clues that remained suggested that the story was very rich. My original interest in this story started in part with my fondness for Lewis Dexter. But it is because of his sister, Harriet, that the Dexters wrote the affidavit that allowed my father to come to the United States and escape a likely death. For Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, my father’s affidavit was the first they ever wrote. If their daughter had not pressed them to help my father to come to the United States, the Dexters may never have had an interest in directly helping refugees, and my father would not have had the opportunity...

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