Review by Choice Review
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Dobbs is a project director, The Unwanted examines the fate of the Jews of Kippenheim, a small village on the edge of Germany's Black Forest, under Nazi rule. Dobbs uses the Kippenheimer Jewish community to examine how Nazi efforts to drive the Jews out of the country and, eventually, exterminate them impacted individual families. He shows how the Jews of Kiippenheim became isolated amidst intensifying persecution, and how some were able to secure refuge abroad, whereas others were not. In 1940, the Nazis shipped the community's remnants to a camp in Gurs, France, and Dobbs describes how they were repeatedly whipsawed between Vichy French and American authorities, whose inconsistent and politically motivated decisions regarding their emigration effectively decided each person's fate. Once the Nazis embarked on mass murder, escape was no longer possible and the French cooperated in transporting the remaining Kippenheim Jews to Auschwitz. Well researched and very well written, this timely book provides rich descriptions of people at all levels of the power hierarchy. It also illustrates the resiliency of the community members during their ordeal and how, after the war, survivors rebuilt their lives and grappled with the past. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --William Smaldone, Willamette University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
ON THE MORNING of Nov. 10, 1938, Hedy Wachenheimer rode her bike from her small village of Kippenheim to school in the next village. A Jewish girl of 14, Wachenheimer was accustomed to being ostracized. But that day felt different. On her way to school, she saw that the windows of Jewish businesses had been smashed. As she waited for lessons to begin, the usually gentle principal pointed at her and yelled, "Get out, you dirty Jew!" Kristallnacht was a turning point for the tightknit community of Jewish families who had lived in Kippenheim for five generations. Over the next four years, its 144 Jewish residents suffered dispossession, and the indignities and crimes of their Nazi overlords. In "The Unwanted," Michael Dobbs, a former reporter at The Washington Post, tells the story of the town's Jews as they desperately sought a path to a new life elsewhere. Most hoped to find refuge in the United States. Dobbs weaves the tales of their declining fortunes with a carefully researched account of American attitudes and policies toward Europe's Jewish refugees. American diplomats in Europe tried to grant as many visas as possible while State Department officials threw up roadblocks. As Eleanor Roosevelt tried to influence her wary husband, and humanitarian workers from Jewish organizations attempted to reason with recalcitrant officials, potential escape paths closed off one by one. Relative wealth and connections abroad meant that many Jews from Kippenheim were able to escape to Britain, Canada and the United States. Hedy was sent to Britain on a Kindertransport in May 1940. But the bureaucratic churn of long lines, rerouted ships and missed connections left many stranded. In October 1940, Jews in the southwest German region of Baden, which included Kippenheim, were deported to Vichy France, where they were interned in a muddy, typhous wasteland at Gurs. Of the 6,500 Jews deported, roughly one in four died in French camps; four out of 10 were sent to Auschwitz. Still, several Kippenheimers made it to Marseille and then on to the United States via Morocco. Dobbs never says why he chose Kippenheim as the focus for his investigation, but the town's survivors and their descendants have guarded a trove of documents that allowed him to render their stories in remarkable and poignant detail. Max and Fanny Valfer, for example, had a consular appointment in Marseille scheduled for Dec. 8,1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but now Washington considered Kippenheim Jews like the Valfers to be "enemy aliens." Had their appointment been one day earlier, they might have been able to travel from France to Portugal, where they were booked to sail from Lisbon to America. The Valfers were finally granted visas in August 1942, just weeks after the Germans shifted their policy toward Jews within their sphere from expulsion to extermination. The Valfers were never able to book passage on another ship; instead, they were deported "to the east" in the fall of 1942, and murdered at Auschwitz. Hedy's parents, Hugo and Bella, met the same end. In her final letter to Hedy, Bella wrote: "Continue to be always good and honest, carry your head high and never lose your courage. Don't forget your dear parents." What's most chilling about Dobbs's book is how his account of the early years of World War II echoes our politics today. Xenophobia, isolationism, a fear of destructive infiltrators and an aversion to more war all conspired to keep refugee quotas low, when they were filled at all. Robert Reynolds, a Democratic senator from North Carolina, thundered in a Senate speech that "if I had my way I would today build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of the earth could possibly scale or ascend it." It was sentiments like his that may have kept Franklin Roosevelt from raising immigration quotas and accounted for obstructionist (and anti-Semitic) State Department policies. Until recently, it was considered a truism that American policy toward Europe's Jews constituted an enormous moral failure. Today, as our politicians quibble and send refugees back in the direction they came, one can only wonder what misery awaits the displaced. When current policies and opinions so closely resemble those held during Hitler's early days, one wonders, too, if the moral clarity of "never again" may have been fleeting. In raising those questions, Dobbs's book provides a glimpse of how we may be judged by future generations. ANNA altman is a contributor to The New Yorker and other publications.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Dobbs (Six Months in 1945, 2012) transforms an extremely painful, violent, and devastating event into a narrative of survival, compassion, and perseverance. He takes a case study approach to chronicling how the Jewish population of Kippenheim in southwest Germany attempted to survive, no matter the means, method, or route, the Nazi regime. Dobbs excels at showing the interrelatedness of Kippenheim, Nazi Germany, and the U.S. while maintaining a chronological narrative. While his language can be academic at times, the overall and always timely message is clear and simple: countries must be supported and held accountable as they take in and protect refugees, and we must all learn from the past. Through the stories of various families told from multiple points of view, the reader learns how difficult decisions were made and how, no matter the circumstances, devotion to the survival of family and faith was vital. With a deeply moving conclusion, Dobbs' account is highly recommended for all readers interested in WWII, the politics of hate, genocide, the plight of refugees, and society's responsibilities.--Jennifer Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With chilling accuracy, historian Dobbs (Six Months in 1945) looks at the fates of German Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany by weaving together three narratives: those of the Jewish residents of the village of Kippenheim, that of the larger plight of the Jews in Germany, and the resulting debates over immigration policy in the U.S. In Kippenheim, Dobbs recounts, Jews suddenly found themselves the object of violence on Nov. 10, 1938. They were part of a larger trend of German Jews applying for sanctuary in the U.S., but about 250,000 Germans had applied for U.S. visas by 1939, of whom only 27,370 were admitted every year. In the U.S., President Roosevelt struggled to balance humanitarian efforts with anti-Semitic backlash from his constituents; policy makers considered but declined to raise visa quotas or accept groups of refugee children. Denied asylum, many of Kippenheim's Jewish inhabitants were transported to concentration camps. The author's remarkable archival work, drawing on a wealth of previously neglected material and sources provided by prominent Kippenheimer families, produces a gripping account whose fine details address the enduring question of genocidal hatred. Haunting photographs punctuate the text: a shattered synagogue, German officers deporting a truckful of Kippenheimers, a 1942 hastily scribbled father's final message to a daughter. This is gut-wrenching history. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, IMC/Sagalyn. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dobbs (Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Trumanfrom World War to Cold War, 2012, etc.) follows the trail and the trials of the Jewish population of Kippenheim, a small village near the Black Forest.For decades in this rural area, there was little friction with the locals, and anti-Semitism seemed to be confined to cities and towns. As the author writes, "for many Christian Kippenheimers, antisemitism was more a matter of class resentment than racial hatred.A cultural and psychological gulf developed between the Christian farmers and the Jewish tradesmen." Despite the gulf, there wasn't much violence. However, everything changed with Kristallnacht, a supposed "spontaneous protest" against "murderous" Jews. The senseless roundup and destruction of Jewish men was the signal, to those who were paying attention, that Germany was not safe. In this potent, focused history, Dobbs tells the alternately heart-wrenching and uplifting story of the Kippenheim Jews who entered the tangle of bureaucracy involved in the efforts to obtain visas and flee Germany. Most wished to go to the United States, but there were immigration quotas, and those quotas were filled in 1938, with little hope of expansion. Thankfully, there were those who eventually made it to America, but they were often greeted with xenophobia. In his thorough research, the author discovered many instances of those who bent the rules to helpe.g., tireless organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Rescue Board as well as many brave individualsand he generously shares those stories with readers in the hopes that we will never forget what happened to the thousands of "unwanted" refugees who fled the Nazi killing machine. In her foreword, Sara Bloomfield, the director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, encapsulates the author's project: No amount of studying or writing or memorializing can bring back those who were murdered.But it can help us remember them as people who lived, not just victims who died."A welcome addition to Holocaust literature that remains relevant to our current isolationist times. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
