During the late 1930s and early 1940s the Unitarian Church aided in the rescue of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe through its new social action arm, the Unitarian Service Committee. Susan Elizabeth Subak uses family history and intensive archival research to tell the USC's story in Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis.
Susan Elizabeth Subak's Father's Jewish Refugee Story
Most Americans have heard of Unitarian Universalism, the religion formed by the union of the Unitarian Church and the Universalist Church in 1960; while Unitarianism has been around since the early Christian church era, few understand its role in social action. In the 1930s a loose organization of ministers, ministers' wives and others formed what would become the Unitarian Service Committee. The USC joined with other relief organizations to help refugees in Europe, eventually developing a covert human smuggling operation throughout Europe to bring Jews to the U.S., to escape Nazism and Adolph Hitler's "Final Solution."
Subak's father, Hans "Karl" Subak, met Harriet Dexter at a summer boarding camp in England. Harriet Dexter was the daughter of Unitarian minister and American Unitarian Association officer Robert Dexter. Dexter and his wife, Elisabeth, would play a pivotal role in Karl Subak's survival during the early years of the Holocaust and would go on to help found the Unitarian Service Committee.
Unitarian Service Committee Aided Jewish Emigration to the United States
Harriet and Karls' meeting was serendipitous; Susan Subak uses it to set the story of larger world events and how the Dexters came to help create a refugee rescue organization. After the Nuremberg Laws were passed in Germany in 1937, followed by boycotts of Jewish businesses, dismissal of Jewish civil servants and other anti-Semitic government actions, the Subak family feared for their future.
Karl Subak reached out to the only American he knew. Harriet Dexter appealed to her parents. Robert Dexter reached out to the Quaker American Friends Service Committee and then turned to his own Unitarian congregation in Belmont, Mass. to find volunteers to create a Unitarian counterpart. Susan Subak details Dexter's steps in facilitating the creation of this group with an archivist's thoroughness. With help from his wife and Henry Wilder Foote, a Unitarian hymnologist, the three formed the basis for the USC.
American Espionage Activity Among Unitarians in WWII
The same attention to detail that makes Subak's writing riveting at times also creates problems for this book. Subak's access to an enormous volume of declassified government documents gave her so much material that the book could easily have been split into two, one focused on her father's story and the creation of the USC to aid refugees, the other the story of how USC members became involved in espionage activity during WWII. The two stories are inextricably linked, of course, but the book shifts back and forth between these two themes and the volleying interrupts the tone.
The USC, founded in 1940, was by 1944 a government-funded operation, with a small percentage of its income coming from Unitarian contributions. The narratives of near-misses with arrest from German SS officers are absolutely stunning, and in these sections the historical context, the weight of one wrong choice and the power of the narrative transports the reader there.
Major Figures in the Unitarian Service Committee Work in WWII
Major characters in the book make personal choices and sacrifices that would, today, be considered shocking. Waitstill and Martha Sharp, recruited to investigate the refugee situation in Czechoslovakia, repeatedly leave their seven- and three-year-old children for months at a time with friends, while Elisabeth Dexter is described as giving birth without "a doctor, nurse, or anyone else on the scene," due to an unexpected snowstorm. "Elisabeth had let her husband sleep through the night and had presented him with their infant son in the morning." (168)
Her experience sets the stage for her first grandchild's birth, in which Harriet Dexter will likely be alone, and Elisabeth reflects on her own first child's birth, determining that her daughter doesn't need help but that news of the pregnancy would make a good excuse to return to the U.S. to lobby government officials on the USC's behalf.
Subak describes these events, well documented in letters and reports. These people seem so myopic in the pursuit of the cause as to be unreal, untouchable, a bit too principled and perfect.
A heavy endnote section shows how painstakingly Subak conducted her research for Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis, and the Conclusion gives an epilogue into the lives of most of the people she follows throughout the book. The seeds of so many wider initiatives that live on today, such as the USC, child nutrition programs and refugee efforts began in those charisma-driven efforts by a handful of people across different organizations. The legacy and the ripple effects go beyond this tiny group, almost lost to history for all but academics and UU archivists but reclaimed in Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis.
To Buy the Book Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis:
Subak, Susan Elizabeth. Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
Melanie Zoltan - Melanie Zoltan is a former college professor and administrator who has written for About.com, PCWorld, Brain Child, Thomson Gale, and ...
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