Preface The genesis of this book lay in an earlier study undertaken by Paul Bartrop that appeared in 2016. Even while Resisting the Holocaust: Upstanders, Parti- sans, and Survivors was in production, Steve Catalano of Praeger and Padraic (Pat) Carlin of ABC-CLIO contacted him to ask whether he thought any of those he was then profiling could be the subject of a broader, more individu- alized treatment. After a quick review of the many possibilities presenting themselves, the idea of combining three of the resister/rescuers—Mila Racine, Marianne Cohn, and Charlotte Sorkine—into a single work began to take shape. From there, and after much reflection, it became clear that a composite work examining all three could not be composed in isolation from the many others, women and men, with whom they and their organizations interacted. The result is the book you hold in your hand. There was, however, still more to it than that. While it was necessary to learn the intricacies of the environment in which Jewish rescuers of Jews were forced to live during World War II—the murderous dark that was the Holocaust—it was also vitally important to realize that generalizing the expe- rience was an impossibility due to the individuality of each person’s situa- tion. Samantha Lakin’s research was a clear addition to pursuing this task. As she interviewed 61 Jewish children and rescuers who survived the Holo- caust by being smuggled through Jewish rescue networks to safety in Swit- zerland, stories emerged about the individuality of each person’s situation, significant yet among the themes of rescue in the face of the gravest atrocity and genocide—specifically, the Holocaust. Focusing on just a few young women, therefore, provided the authors with the opportunity to show how the Holocaust’s impact could be mitigated through smuggling Jewish children across the border between France and Switzerland. As we show, rescue served as a form of resistance, in which the saving of lives was as much a priority for some people as the defeat of the Nazis and their collaborators.
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