Book Back Story: Sources, Scenes and Voices … Writing EMISSARY OF THE DOOMED

A guest post by author Ronald Florence

Every non-fiction book has a backstory—the choice of the subject, the vagaries of research, the emergence of an individual or group, the search for authentic voices.  I had encountered the story of the effort to ransom the lives of as many as one million Jews in the Holocaust as a footnote to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, described as a Nazi plot, and called a trick played on naïve Hungarian Zionists, but as I read through the secondary literature, I found myself imagining how members of a rescue organization in Budapest would react to the possibility of saving hundreds of thousands of fellow Jews from the fate that befell the Jewish populations of occupied Europe.  The episode, and the reactions it provoked from the Allies, the Nazis, the Zionists, and relief organizations and lobbies also seemed an opportunity to examine the political complexity of the Holocaust in the midst of the final acts of the world war.  I was especially drawn to the story of a man on the sidelines of history—unemployed, a veteran of prisons,  more comfortable negotiating with petty corrupt German officials than selling the knitwear that was supposed to be his business—finding himself the official emissary of as many as one million Jews with the task of  negotiating a ransom for their freedom.

The search for primary source materials took me to the Central Zionist Archive and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the National Archives in Rockville, Maryland, the Public Record Office (now called The National Archives) in Kew, collections at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park and the Library of Congress, and to specialized archives and libraries in Scotland, Israel, Turkey, and Hungary.   Languages were a challenge.   The written communications of the Hungarians and others involved in the story were mostly in German, but as a second language, often creative in syntax,  liberally salted with coded terms that took unraveling, and with frequent use of words in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish with arbitrary German endings.  As the story became known to Zionists, the Allies, and relief organizations, correspondence, clippings and memos to the files accumulated in agencies and offices.  Because I was interested in attitudes and reactions of bureaucrats and officials who would ultimately decide the fate of the Jews,  I found myself taking notes on (and sometimes photographing)  sarcastic, skeptical, and occasionally sympathetic comments of Allied, Vatican, relief agency, and German officials—exclamation points, multiple question marks, emphatic underlining, and marginal comments (some intended for very limited circulation) that were clues to the evolving private opinions of those who would ultimately make or advise important policy decisions.  

Critical turning points of the story occurred not only in Budapest and Berlin, but in Allied capitals, Istanbul, Aleppo,  Cairo, and on a train crossing the plains of Anatolia. To limn those scenes with a sense of place and to recreate the world the characters making life-and-death decisions saw and heard, I had to visit each place, going through the visual exercise of subtracting modern architecture and city planning and superimposing wartime ambiance.   Thirty-six hours on the Taurus Express from Istanbul to Aleppo, now a one-car Syrian sleeper, was an adventure in travel and in imagining a countryside from the eyes of  an emissary cut off  by the isolation of the same train journey from the crucial news on D-Day.

The real challenge of the story became voices.  As so often is the case, the protagonists of the story were not the ones who wrote the chronicles and correspondence.  They left few documents and photographs behind, and when they later recounted their experiences it was in autobiographical accounts with an agenda that sometimes twisted their reporting.  Contemporaries whose notes and letters provided the most thorough chronicles were often not sympathetic to the protagonists or themselves had axes to grind, which left sources like transcripts of prison interrogations annotated by skeptical interrogators, and reports prepared by aides or officials adamantly opposed to any ransom or rescue of Jews.  I was forced back again and again to the historian’s questions:  “How does this speaker or writer know what he/she claims to know?”  “Why should I believe this document?”  “How do I reconcile conflicting evidence?” 

Some discoveries in the archives ran against what we’ve all learned in a lifetime of movies and textbooks.  The western Allies, the putative good-guys in World War II history, repeatedly and deliberately refused to help save the Jews; the consistent pattern of their refusals, despite their ostensibly good reasons, is hard to defend.  The Nazi bad-guys were not monolithic as they are often portrayed in the movies, but an incredibly complex society, beset by internecine disputes, and with individuals often driven into strange alliances by unsuspected motives.   Ironically, the Nazis and the Zionists shared a belief that there was no future for the Jews in Europe, and a perception of the Jews in Britain and the U.S. controlling policy, with FDR and Churchill in their pockets.

Thanks to the wealth of materials and powerful personalities, the story and voices did emerge, and it’s an exciting tale of men and women rising to an incredible challenge as they raced against the inexorable end of the war.   It’s also a heartbreaking tale of the moral simplicity and political complexity of the Holocaust, with missed opportunities, ostensibly good motives begetting terrible decisions, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of hanging on bureaucratic decisions, political infighting, and misplaced fears.