The KTA is delighted to welcome Professor Laura Hobson Faure who will speak about her new book Who Will Rescue Us? The Story of the Jewish Children Who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust. Professor Hobson Faure tells an insightful and well detailed story of the lesser-known and less well documented plight of Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Europe who fled to France during the Holocaust.
On the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While close to 10,000 escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap.
Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies as well as children’s diaries, letters, drawings, songs, and poems, Who Will Rescue Us? re-creates their complex journeys, including how some of them eventually found safety in America. Hobson Faure paints a moving portrait of these children and their escape, uncovering their agency in the flight from Nazism—and knits together the network of the many who aided them along the way.
Laura Hobson Faure is a professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1, where she holds the chair of Modern Jewish history and is a member of the Center for Social History (UMR 8058). Her research focuses on the intersections between French and American Jewish life during the 20th century.
Vivette Porges, KT2 and the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor who was sent to France and whose drawings are in the book, will facilitate.
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