Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis

By Debórah Dwork. W.W. Norton & Company, 2025. 256 pages. $29.99/hardcover; $28.49/eBook.

Faced with mass arrests, deportations, and genocide, whom do you save? Do you save the children? Of course, but which children? And what about their parents? Should a cultural or political elite be prioritized or those most intelligent, healthy, or handsome? These decisions would be difficult for any person, and nearly impossible for those of faith and morals.

In Saints and Liars, Debórah Dwork, a highly esteemed scholar and public historian of the Holocaust, takes up these difficult questions by examining American aid agencies operating in various cities during the Second World War. These agencies—all religious in origin—include American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Marseille; Unitarian Service Committee (USC) in Prague and Lisbon; and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Vilna (in Lithuania) and Shanghai.

Instead of taking a detached approach to summarizing the large amount of historical records available for all of these groups, Dwork organizes the book in a way that honors not only the faithful individuals who actually carried out the work but the specific contexts in which they operated. She writes, “Zooming in on one city, one year, and one person or couple, each chapter offers a microhistory that yields a rich picture lost in a larger frame.” An excellent introduction gives an overview of the contents and prepares the reader with relevant background knowledge. Five chapters cover five years chronologically from 1939 to 1943, each one unfolding in one of the five different cities listed above. There are also historical maps and ample period photographs throughout.

Each organization had different moral and strategic goals in offering nourishment, resettlement, clothing, and housing. Dwork charts these organizations’ work to balance clandestine acts to save lives with the strictly “legal” and to balance “civic responsibility” (i.e., Allied espionage) with true political neutrality. These dilemmas—and the Quakers’ acute adherence to law and neutrality—caused friction between Quakers and Unitarians, as Dwork notes, but through such difficulty we also see the distinct moral stance that Friends brought to relief work during the twentieth century.

Dwork explores Quaker relief work through the story of Marjorie and Roswell McClelland, a young Quaker couple directing AFSC’s operations in Marseille in 1942. While Roswell liaised with prisoners of the Les Milles internment camp, Marjorie was given the impossible task of selecting the camp’s “most desirable children” for resettlement in the United States. Heart-wrenching as the posting was, Marjorie eventually rationalized criteria for selection: “the necessity for emigration and the desirability of immigration,” but, as would be true for any aid worker, emotions still subtly influenced her decisions, and she occasionally favored the handsome, docile, or those with sympathetic parents.

In documenting these impossible circumstances, Dwork confronts the historian’s greatest challenge: that of charting the role of the emotional, the irrational, the random “quirk of fate” that saves one life yet condemns another to the death camps. History, Dwork suggests, is presented to us as a black-and-white narrative, one seemingly predetermined by fate and geopolitics. Yet focusing on the unpredictable “transform[s] a story with a predictable outcome into an open-ended tale, vivid and complex.”

Writing this review at the beginning of Trump’s second presidency, Saints and Liars evokes alarm and, perhaps surprisingly, also comfort. The parallels between today’s world and that of 80 years ago are profoundly unsettling: the labeling of individuals as “illegals,” antisemitism, attacks against LGBTQ+ people, and the misogynistic treatment of exceptionally qualified women leaders. Above all, the present moment is one of profound uncertainty.

Yet might we not also find hope in that uncertainty? Within the unpredictable, there lies the potential for unbidden goodness. Salvation is not predetermined through long-term planning, logic, and rationality, but may come instead from personal connections, trust, and aid from unlikely allies. And this potential for unbidden good also resides within us.

Early within Saints and Liars, Dwork proposes decisiveness as the trait that many aid workers had in common. While “placid people stayed home” in the United States, for key aid workers, “[e]very moment was the now of responsibility, the now of decision,” and they courageously acted upon the belief that refugees embody our collective hope for a better future. In emphasizing this fact, Saints and Liars is both an evocative historical study and a pressing moral imperative urging us to act, even amid great uncertainty.

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Trevor Brandt, a member of Chicago’s Fifty-seventh Street Meeting, is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago and managing editor of Americana Insights, a nonprofit publication dedicated to early American folk art.