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Afterword williAm f. Schulz In many ways the story you have just read is a familiar one. Not familiar in its details, for they have never been collected before—and no one who cares anything about the history of the Holocaust, or indeed of human rights, can feel anything but deep gratitude to Susan Elisabeth Subak for retrieving them for us and weaving them into such a compelling narrative. But familiar in other ways, both positive and negative. In a positive sense the heroes of the story are almost mythic in stature. Like Odysseus and so many legendary characters who came after him, they left loved ones behind and set out on a perilous journey filled with potential pitfalls, holding in their hands the very lives of those who had been entrusted to them. What the Sharps, Dexters, Charles Joy,Varian Fry, and all the others did at risk to themselves was extraordinary, and it inevitably provokes in us the perennial question, “Would I have done that?” And indeed, like so many heroes who came before them and since, many of them suffered lasting damage as a result of their heroism, as the last chapter makes clear. How extraordinary too that in an era when women had yet to claim the full measure of their power, so many of the leaders of this drama—Martha Sharp, Elisabeth Dexter, Lotta Hitschmanova, Jo Tempi—were women. At the same time the story reminds us of what a short distance we have come in the past sixty plus years. It is not just that the conflicts among the players sound so familiar. (Why is it, I often asked myself during my years as executive director of Amnesty International USA, that people who are engaged in the most serious life and death issues can be so noble in that pursuit and so petty in their treatment of one another?)1 It is that the fundamental issues with which these characters wrestle are still with us. The most obvious of those issues is the genocide that prompted their engagement in the first place. Since World War II, the world has witnessed five other instances of mass slaughter—in Cambodia, Iraq (against the Kurds), Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Sudan.2 The number of refugees worldwide stands today at 11.5 million with another 26 234 | Afterword million internally displaced within their own countries.3 Asylum seekers fleeing persecution still face enormous skepticism from authorities to whom they seek to make their cases.4 And the proclivity among the rescuers to “play favorites,” to accept more refugees from one country (or class) over another for political reasons rather than on the basis of need, is still commonplace, as witness the fact that any Cuban who reaches U.S. shores is automatically granted entry while Haitians, for example, are inevitably turned back. This is not to say, however, that there has been no progress. Indeed, if any good thing could be said to have emerged from the nightmare our heroes lived through, it was the birth of the notion of universal human rights (as opposed to rights that could be claimed by virtue of one’s citizenship in a particular country). Were it not for the Holocaust, we might never have had the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, with its affirmations that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person,” or the Convention on the Prevention or Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that entered into force in 1951 with its commitment that “persons committing genocide . . . shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”5 Moreover, the proliferation of human rights treaties that emerged in the postwar period sparked the birth of international nongovernmental organizations (ngos) devoted to the monitoring of violations of those treaties, beginning with Amnesty International in 1961. But monitoring, be it by un treaty bodies or independent ngos, is of only limited sufficiency without enforcement. One of the most promising developments of the modern era is that international law and institutions have evolved to a point where impunity for at least the most serious human rights crimes is no longer inevitable. For centuries genocidal leaders could feel great confidence that, absent military defeat by another power, they would almost invariably go unpunished for their deeds. But starting with the War Crimes Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (established by the un in 1993) and for Rwanda (1994), that began...

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