The Unwanted; America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Gene Thorp (maps). xiii, [1], 346, [4] pages. Foreword by Sara Bloomfield. Illustrations. Family Trees, Note on Sources. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads For Henry, with best wishes, Michael Dobbs. Michael Dobbs (born 27 July 1950) is a British-American non-fiction author and journalist. Dobbs was born in Belfast and became a U.S. citizen in 2010. Dobbs spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. He was the first Western reporter to visit the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980; he also covered the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989, the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. He joined The Washington Post in 1980. In Washington, he worked for the Post as a United States Department of State reporter and as a foreign investigative reporter, covering the Dayton peace process. Dobbs is the author of the "Cold War trilogy", a series of books about the climactic moments of the Cold War. His Down with Big Brother: The Fall of The Soviet Empire was a runner-up for the 1997 PEN award for nonfiction. His hour-by-hour study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, was a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times history prize and was named one of five non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post. The final book in the trilogy, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War, describes the division of Europe into American and Soviet spheres of influence after World War II. The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between won the Jewish Book Club Award for Holocaust Studies. It tells the story of Jewish families desperately seeking American visas to escape Nazi Germany during the years leading up to the Holocaust. This was published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A riveting story of Jewish families seeking to escape Nazi Germany. "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....Dobbs's book provides a glimpse of how we may be judged by future generations." --Anna Altman, The New York Times Book Review. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote that "a piece of paper with a stamp on it" was "the difference between life and death." The Unwanted is the intimate account of a small village on the edge of the Black Forest whose Jewish families desperately pursued American visas to flee the Nazis. Battling formidable bureaucratic obstacles, some make it to the United States while others are unable to obtain the necessary documents. Some are murdered in Auschwitz, their applications for American visas still "pending." Drawing on previously unpublished letters, diaries, interviews, and visa records, Michael Dobbs provides an illuminating account of America's response to the refugee crisis of the 1930s and 1940s. He describes the deportation of German Jews to France in October 1940, along with their continuing quest for American visas. And he re-creates the heated debates among U.S. officials over whether or not to admit refugees amid growing concerns about "fifth columnists," at a time when the American public was deeply isolationist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. A Holocaust story that is both German and American, The Unwanted vividly captures the experiences of a small community struggling to survive amid tumultuous world events.