Emissary of the Doomed Articles

On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Providence Journal columnist Mark Patinkin offers a thoughtful report on EMISSARY OF THE DOOMED, Ronald Florence's true account of Jewish Hungarian emissary Joseph Brand's noble efforts to save the lives of a million Jews.

Patinkin writes:

If we’re to understand how the Holocaust happened, [Florence] says, it’s too simple to say it was only about evil preying on the innocent. It was also about good nations either too distracted or too mired in political calculations to act out of righteousness.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

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...