New Book Brings UUSC's History Alive

When I first started working at UUSC in February, I was intrigued and inspired by the fact that the organization was formed during World War II to help refugees flee the Nazi regime. Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis, a new book by Susan Elisabeth Subak, tells the stories of the people who first started UUSC's human-rights work, introducing us to Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, Charles Joy, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, and Noel and Herta Field. In her words, the stories of these key individuals and their work bring history alive.

As Subak lays out in the introduction, it was a friendship between two young people that helped give birth to the important work of the Unitarian Service Committee (which later became UUSC). In 1937, at an English holiday camp, 19-year-old Harriet Dexter befriended 18-year-old Hans Subak from Vienna. In 1938, as Hitler completed the German annexation of Austria, Hans felt with increasing urgency the need to emigrate. He wrote to Harriet, who convinced her parents, Robert and Elisabeth Dexter, to write the affidavit that enabled Hans, the father of Rescue & Flight's author, to leave Austria for the United States.

And so it began. Those first simple actions would grow into much more. Rescue & Flight details how the Unitarian Service Committee helped hundreds of refugees navigate the channels to safety — both official and underground when necessary — from their outposts in Czechoslovakia, France, and Portugal. It shows the horrifying unwillingness of the U.S. and other governments to help refugees during WWII — the bureaucracy involved in emigrating was nightmarishly byzantine — and to provide any notable support to the activities of the Unitarian Service Committee and related organizations (even while at the same time the U.S. government was enlisting members of those same organizations for espionage).

In the pages of Rescue & Flight, I could see the precursors to UUSC's contemporary approach of responding to the needs of marginalized populations — from setting up a medical and dental clinic in Marseille to organizing kindergarten classes in French internment camps. Noel Field wrote at the time, "'At Rivesaltes, thousands of children are being educated and occupied, physically and mentally, and the spirits of thousands of parents (almost all of these fighters for a better world) are being raised at the sight of it.'"

Subak offers fascinating details — the origins of the flaming chalice symbol (designed by Austrian Jewish refugee artist Hans Deutsch for the Unitarian Service Committee, and which was subsequently adopted by the denomination as the symbol of Unitarian Universalism), narrow escapes as Germany expanded occupation, illegal border crossings, clandestine messengers. The activities of the Unitarian Service Committee in aiding refugees even drew the attention of a Lisbon correspondent of Hitler's own newspaper who wrote an article warning about Charles Joy's work.

What Rescue & Flight really drove home to me, as our current Interim President and CEO Bill Schulz notes in the book's afterword, is the vital importance of telling the personal stories of the work that we do. These stories connect us on a more visceral level to situations that can be hard to process and comprehend; they bring alive the truth and gravity of history and of the present. Stories inspire us to act. We must keep telling them and reading them and sharing them.