Too Little, and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America's Response to the Holocaust ed. by Rafael Medoff (review)

On January 22, 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the "Executive Order 9417 Establishing a War Refugee Board." Like other pieces of legislation then and now, the establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB) was not the result of a self-starting, heartfelt desire of the American government to aid Jews during the Second World War but rather the result of personal investment in a cause, professional organization, media pressure, political horse-trading, and Congressional jockeying. Two and a half months earlier, on November 9, 1943, the fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, three congressmen, Senator Guy Gillette and Representatives Will Rogers, Jr. and Joseph B. Baldwin, introduced a resolution with bipartisan support to Congress, calling on the president to create an agency that would act immediately to save the remaining European Jews.

At the time, there were significant forces within the United States and Britain that opposed such a measure, with claims ranging from duplication of effort to the fear of flooding countries with Jewish refugees. Both the House and Senate were to vote on the resolution on January 24, 1944, but two days earlier the American president pre-empted the vote by establishing the WRB, which was charged with rescuing the "victims of enemy oppression" and offering them "all possible relief and assistance consistent with successful prosecution of the war (ix). Various groups and individuals have been credited by historians for helping to force Roosevelt's hand in this matter. These range from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. who, on January 13, 1944, presented the president with a memorandum outlining the repeated steps that the State Department had taken in order to prevent rescue and assistance to European Jews during the war, to the "Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe," headed by Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) and a group of Palestinian nationals in the United States who kept the rescue issue alive through a widespread and blatant media campaign throughout that period.

The essays collected in Too Little, and Almost Too Late describe and analyze various facets of the WRB's activities and America's response to the Holocaust. Following editor Rafael Medoff's intensive description of the genesis of the WRB and a summary of its activities and accomplishments written by the late historian David S. Wyman, who almost 35 years ago first documented the politics behind the WRB's establishment and its accomplishments, the book continues with a number of interview with leaders and emissaries of the WRB and six additional articles focusing on different aspects of American wartime rescue policy and its aftermath: Laurel Leff on the WRB information campaigns; Medoff on the WRB and the failure to bomb Auschwitz; Shoren Lowenstein on the rescue to Oswego; Medoff and Bat-Ami Zucker on presidential adviser Sam Rosenman's clash with the WRB; Karen Sutton on the WRB and the Va'ad ha-Hatzala; and Arieh J. Kochavi on the American policy toward war criminals. The book concludes with an excellent afterword written by Monty Noam Penkower, succinctly summarizing the historiography surrounding the WRB, and four appendices providing the texts of the major documents mentioned in the book.

The choice of articles raises a number of questions. Two of the six are reprints of well-known articles, one of which, Kochavi's, does not even deal with the WRB. Other articles contain a number of inaccuracies, such as the statement that the Va'ad ha-Hatzala sent parcels to Polish Jews during the initial months after its establishment, an activity which never took place as this was a period when they were solely concerned with rescuing rabbis and yeshiva students. One also feels the lacuna of an article focusing primarily on the Bergson Group and its efforts connected to the establishment and activities of the WRB.

But these points are negligible for anyone interested in the history...